First day of blog school!

This is my first blog and I feel a little nervous, just like the first day of real school. Even after teaching for over 40 years, I always have first day jitters. It's the same here, I want day one to be really good. I taught history, and so one of the very first things I always did was to ask: what if I gave you an assignment for next week, to write your own history. What would you do? Where would you get information? And, how would I know if what you said was true?
Well, obviously, I wouldn't. And so it goes for so much of written "history" - it's a story.

This blog is also a story, of some of my adventures, some of my teaching moments, and just some of my thoughts. My students made up names for stories I told them - I always called them "off the subject",  so in the abbreviated text language of today, I choose "OTS" to describe them.

OTS #1: It's about 60 on it's way to 75 here in southern California today, but back at our home in Maine, it is -8 degrees right now. Have you ever thought about how weather affects your life? Today, at 5:35AM, I dove into the pool along with others from my masters team. We had a long Monday morning workout, really great way to start the week. It was crisp walking back into the locker room, but every day in winter, when I know what the weather is like in colder climes, I feel very lucky.

I heard about the bombing at one of Moscow's airports, killing at least 31 people, injuring over 100. I remember when I started teaching, in the 60's, reporting the "body counts" to my students every Monday morning - from the war in Vietnam. Some weeks, there were, maybe, 268; other weeks, there were, about 421: American soldiers. I did mention that the number of Vietnamese deaths were not reported.  The average age of the American soldiers killed was 19 years old. But then, one weekend, maybe in March, 1967, there was a Delta Airlines plane crash outside of New Orleans. The plane  carried the entire high school class from a small town, somewhere in the midwest  and there were no survivors. They were going to Mardi Gras as a senior class trip. My students at that time, 9th graders in a public high school in New York, were horrified. I immediately asked why this was different than the body count tally from Vietnam.  We went on to discuss that and subsequently, I have often told that story. Students react differently, but there's no question it makes all of us think about what and why it is different.

 This was during my first year teaching. This is my first day blogging. Stay tuned.