So… it’s been a while. My apologies reader, one of the things i worried about when i started this blog was that i would drop the ball, that the thing would get pushed off the priority list, and well thats basically what happened. However, its a new year so i’m going to give this another shot.
First a quick update:
So last i posted it was the middle of april. Quite a bit has happened since then. I was informed that i didn’t get re-hired at TCHS, in fact a quarter of our staff was not asked back. This sort of took the wind out my sails as i had wanted to take what i had learned in the last year and apply it, use it to making class better for my students in the 08-09 school year. If i ended up moving schools or grade levels, i felt like my effectiveness would be diminished. Thankfully, 2 MONTHS later, i was able to get re-hired at the high school as a math teacher. As it happened i would end up teaching physical science again anyway! More on hiring and admin in the district later- suffice it to say it can be quite a comedy.
The summer was great, i went camping in the BWCA for a week with my dad and some friends. I spent a month and a half in Lincoln, NE. I know a professor there i had worked for, during a summer 3 years ago. I got in touch with him in the spring and asked him if there were any short-term projects he could use a post-undergrad-but-not-yet-grad student on. To my delight, he had some projects that i could help with. I ended up working on aspects of a problem i had gotten familiar with when i was there before, mostly a class of interesting math problems. That was the summer.
It’s the middle of the 1st semester already, wow! School is different, the main thing being we changed to a block schedule. I teach two 90 min blocks of 9th grade physical science and one block of upper classman in pre-calc. Its a great mix of younger kids and older kids and the most of the kids are great. There are a few knuckle-heads, but there are also some super kids, kids that inspire, kids that you don’t want to let down.
The year is off to a good start. Theres already been some epic adventures, lots of hiking in the badlands- turns out theres a really great place right in Wanblee. Teaching, planning, grading, old friends and new. I think it’s going to be a good year.
more soon..
A buddy of mine in college had that poster on the wall in his dorm room. I’d always got a kick out of it (no disrespect to the dead) but before becoming a teacher had never witnessed a situation so accurately represented by that picture as the feeling you get when a classroom devolves.
Some days class Hindenburgs on you, you might be bracing for it, you might not be expecting it. In either case, shit happens. Sometimes in retrospect, your plans for the day seem to make about as much sense as having a smoking room on blimp made out of a giant sack of extremely flammable gas(its true), but more often its a lack of planning rather than bad planning. Thankfully, tomorrow is another day to do better and to create better (air-tight you might say 
) lessons.
I don’t know that much about politics, and feel i should really do my homework in preparation for the upcoming election, but can’t seem to scratch out time to do much. I find all the information a bit overwhelming, and can get cynical about the process, but i have poked around and thought i should share a few tidbits that i’ve come across related to politics in South Dakota.
Lets start at the beginning: The word ‘politics’ is derived from the word ‘poly’, meaning ‘many’, and the word ‘ticks’, meaning ‘blood sucking parasites’. As compelling a definition that is, its actually just a quote of the day credited to Larry Hardiman, although it does do a good job of informing you about my attitude about politics at times
Anyway, what i actually learned.. So if you haven’t gathered, South Dakota, the happiness is a warm gun state, is quite a conservative place. When i started looking into this post, i decided to do a little research (thank you interweb and wikipedia) and figure out just how red it is. Let me preface this by saying that i don’t have much (hardly any) knowledge about political history and how the parties and their platforms have evolved, but i do know that it is a lot more complicated than red=republican=conservative, blue=democrat=liberal. Maybe this post could start some discussion.
Anyyyyyway, South Dakota became a state in 1889. Since then, from what i could find, it has voted Republican for every presidential election except for 5: most recently SD went democrat (Johnson) in 1964. Interestingly, that was one of the most lopsided presidential elections ever, with Johnson carrying 44 states, and getting 61.1 % of the popular vote, the highest percentage of the popular vote a candidate has ever gotten. Before that, SD went democrat for Franklin Roosevelt, in 1932 and 1936. These were desperate times and again these were some 2 of the most lopsided races in history. In 1932 Roosevelt grabbed 42 of 48 states, and in 1936 Roosevelt won all but Maine and Vermont, getting 60.8% of the popular vote, numbers hard to imagine today with the extremely close races we’ve had the last few times around. In 1912, SD didn’t go Republican but they did go for Teddy Roosevelt’s Progressive (Bull Moose) party. Roosevelt had founded his third party after failing to get the Republican party nomination. In any case this was a republican-esque party and also a very strange election, interestingly and also depressing, the last election where a third party came in second in the electoral college. The only other time SD didn’t vote republican was shortly after it’s statehood in 1896; SD went for Democrat William Jennings Bryan. Bryan carried most all of the rural states in that election.
Conclusion: SD is a solidly conservative state, fair enough. However, i would argue/speculate that there is a pretty big difference between SD conservatives and the Religiously minded conservatives that have been so ripe for exploitation and vital to Republican success in the last two presidential elections. I think SD republicans are more of a libertarian variety, they want the government to leave them alone and they don’t want as much to impose a moral agenda on the rest of us or have one imposed on themselves.
It’s interesting, there are a few anomalies. One is that although SD has voted overwhelmingly for Republican presidents, we have also voted for a lot of democratic representatives to congress. SD is home to former Senate Minority leader and Majority leader Tom Daschle, and has had a lot of democratic representatives to congress. Currently we have Johnson and Herseth, both Democrats, and Thune, a Republican. The prevailing simple explanation is that although South Dakotans prefer to have federal leadership with Republican ideologies, they also prefer, as a sink of a state that draws a lot from the federal government, to have representatives who are more socialist minded, and can procure funds for the state.
Another interesting anomaly are the reservations. So if you look at the 2004 election, SD was overwhelmingly red, going for Bush 60% over Kerry 38%. However if you look at a map by county, it looks like this:
(Thanks CNN) Now notice those dark blue counties- The one in the south central part of the state is Todd county, the Rosebud Reservation, where I teach. That county went overwhelmingly Kerry (72%) over Bush (25%). The county a couple to the west of there is Shannon county, Where the Pine Ridge reservation is. It was even more lopsided there, 85% Kerry to 13% Bush, Wow! In fact if we look at a map that shows the reservations in South Dakota:
The pink areas are the reservations, and as you can see there is quite a correspondence. At the very least it shows you how the reservations are quite different than the rest of the state. As far as i understand, the reservations tend to vote democrat because they’re so dependent on federal money and so connected to welfare programs.
Another interesting thing about following politics in a small state like South Dakota is that while you may think your vote is worth less, it’s also worth more. This happens because the states population is so small. A state cannot have fewer than 2 senators and a rep to the House, but if all the representatives were alloted solely by population, states like SD would have even less than that. As a result, voters in South Dakota and other small states actually vote for ‘more’ of an electoral vote than voters in populous states.
To illustrate: in the 2004 presidential election, in SD there were something like 388,000 votes cast for 3 electoral votes, thats 7.7 x 10^-6 electors per voter, compared to MA where 2,912,000 votes were cast for 12 electoral votes, thats 4.1 x 10^-6 electors per vote. Dividing the two, that means, SD voters vote for 1.87, times as many electors as Massachusetts voters. Conclusion, SD voters get almost twice the representation in the electoral college than voters in Massachusetts. So thats neat, its cool to be a voter is SD!, until you stop to consider that most all of these small population states are very rural and conservative and this little curiosity helped to elect G W Bush.
And thats about it- I wish i would have gotten this post out earlier while there were still more primary races to follow, but there it is, thats most everything i could think of regarding the pecularities of following the presidential election in SD.One last thing: before the 2004 presidential election i had stumbled on a website that i really liked. It’s an independent site so it isn’t cluttered by all the advertisements or affiliated with any media corporations. Also, the site is very data-oriented which i enjoy, as i feel there isn’t a lot of fluff or speculation. The person behind the site does an excellent job of analyzing how the numerical data and trends in the vote talk to each other. Basically its quality and you should check it out:
If you don’t have a google homepage, you should make one. It’s super neat: there are all kinds of gadgets you can add, you can put the weather, movies playing in the area (or neighboring counties, haha), links to your news sites that update when they update, comics, all kinds of stuff. One of the tabs i have on mine is a page of science websites. I ran across this article on there the other day.
http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2008/03/03/blogging-social-health.html
It isn’t an in depth article, but it refers to some new research that suggests that blogging has psychological benefits, helping those who do it feel more socially connected and part of a community.
I started blogging to allow friends and family to keep tabs if they wanted and to more or less document my time teaching. Now, although i don’t have a lot of personal evidence, i would agree that blogging seems to have additional benefits. I feel like it can be sort of a space for venting but also a place to explore ideas. I think it can be nice to flesh out an idea enough to be able to write about it that you might otherwise not have probed, and i think thats beneficial.
I’ve also chatted with my roommate Darius who has been blogging too and we agreed that we do feel like part of a community (we recently linked up SD teacher blogs). Considering how isolating being out on the prairie can be, i do feel like this blogging business can be a nice opportunity to stay connected. Comments?
On Saturday, the much anticipated bread-off finally happened. The idea had been born at the Kyle love party and Anna and i had been exchanging bread pun smack talk for the last 2 weeks. The Bread-0ff became one part of a literal smorgasbord of activities involving soup, bread and beverages. It was a ton of fun and also made me think of a science topic.
Anna made French bread and i made beer bread. It’s interesting because these are two entirely different leavening mechanisms representative of probably the two most common ways to make bread rise. French bread uses yeast as leavening. Beer bread is a ‘quick bread’ or ‘soda bread’ like banana bread that rises because of a chemical reaction.
Bread leavened with yeast is more difficult to make. Yeast is a fungus, (interestingly Saccharomyces cerevisiae (thanks Russ) the same yeast used to make beer) and as such you sort of need to feed and care for it to get it to come out and play and make the bread rise before you bake it to death. This involves mixing the ingredients together including the yeast and a little sugar if theres not enough carbohydrates in the flour it can feed on. As the yeast feeds on the sugar it puts out carbon dioxide and these little bubbles of gas are what cause the bread to rise. You let the bread rise, then punch it down and let it rise again, this gives the bread more flavor and texture. Interestingly, there is protein, gluten, in the flour that allows the bread to be elastic and hold its shape. If you don’t use bread flour, it doesn’t have as much of that protein, and as a result if you try and make bread with all purpose flour it will probably end up denser than you’d like it to.
Beer bread is sort of a trick play as it’s a quick bread, taking only an hour or so, while yeast leavened bread takes probably 3 or more hours. Beer bread works differently, rather than fungi, its a chemical reaction, not too unlike the baking-soda vinegar volcano you think of from middle school science fairs, except its baking powder and beer and it makes bread instead. The beer is slightly acidic and the baking powder has sodium bicarbonate (baking soda) in it. When the acid and base react this also forms carbon dioxide gas. This is what causes a soda bread to rise.
Anyway, people were feeling the beer bread and voted it the winner. I’ve had good luck with it so i though i should share the recipe. Check out:
http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Whole-Wheat-Beer-Bread/Detail.aspx
Its super easy and I only tweak it slightly:
I do one cup white flour, one cup wheat, and one cup rye. Also, instead of the brown sugar, i use about 1/2 brown sugar, 1/2 molasses. As for the beer, i just use a can of humble miller light, but would imagine using different, more flavorful beer could be really good too. Thats half the fun of it- just messing around with the recipe. Oh, and also pouring a can of beer into something you’re going to eat.
Also, a side note.. All recipes http://allrecipies.com/ is pretty awesome. The recipes are reviewed so you can find good recipes fast and there are also about a million recipes to choose from.
Filed under: Not School
So this last weekend was well, glorious. The short story is this: a bunch of us built and raced a Cool Runnings ( you know the movie about a Jamaican bobsled team) themed outhouse in Nemo SD. For the full story, complete with excellently selected pictures and grade-A writing, check out Boyce’s blog:
http://boyce.blogspot.com/2008/02/feel-rhythm-feel-rhyme.html
I am a firm believer that its important/excellent to derive joy from the simple things in life, the footnotes in your day that lead to some story. There is such tremendous texture and beauty in the world, if we stop to take a moment to appreciate it. I feel like if you can see that, you can’t help but smile. An example of this arrived in a five lb bag of oranges i picked up from the shopping center in Mission.
As you can see from the picture, the orange has a pronounced lighter stripe that runs from navel to stem.
I was curious about how this came to be so i investigated a bit. I followed the usual protocol and consulted the google gods but couldn’t find anything that really seemed to explain it. Darius knew something about it and asked his dad who’s a botanist. He replied that: “the cell that gave rise to that piece or stripe mutated”, but that was all. I tracked down my uncle Carl, who’s a plant geneticist and asked him about it. He expanded a bit: “There are viral infections, and spontaneous genetic lesions that could cause such a thing, but usually the streak is not so uniformly shaped, and I was having a hard time imagining how that pattern from end to end would form give the cell division patterns of the rind of the fruit. I imagine it only affects the rind, and not the segment of the fruit underneath.”
He was right- when i cut it open, the stripe was only in the rind and didn’t even match up with any of the individual segments underneath. In any case i thought it was kind of interesting, neat huh?
So yesterday, we were to have our first day of class this week on account of inservice on Monday and parent-teacher conferences on Tuesday. I got up around 6:45 as per usual and set about working up a couple things i needed to get wrapped up for class for the day. I put my PBJ in my bag, had tied my tie, and was pretty much good to go aside from a cup of tea. Darius comes upstairs- 2 hour late start, he’s just heard from his head teacher. At this point i feel like the gods have smiled upon us as i can take a nap for at least an hour and am really pretty excited about that prospect.
I putzed around trying to get my school computer to work- good grief i HATE macs. The worst thing about them is that when they don’t work, which is quite frequently in my experience, they don’t just not work, they mock you about it, icons bounce, colored pinwheels twirl, as if to say “not only am i not working, but i enjoy infuriating you, *giggle”. Give me the blue-screen of death! But i digress…
So i drifted off, and was woken up by screaming. I was pissed- wtf?, but then i realized the reason for the screaming. School was canceled. It was really great. It was blissful, sort of like if you were to wake up at the age of 10 and discover that today was not tuesday jan 23, middle o’ the school week, but in fact Christmas morning. We spent the rest of the day taking it easy, making food, some friends came over in the evening for dinner; it was nice.
Oh and the sun came out by about 1pm funny how that works isn’t it?
First order of business i think is to give some background about my situation and how the last few months have gone. I sent an email update out to family and friends so i thought i’d just post some of that info here.
I graduated from the University of St. Thomas this past spring with degrees in Physics and Electrical Engineering. It was a ton of fun. Most of my last year was spent working on a bike trail monitoring system. The idea was that it would be a device that when mounted next to a trail, would count the people on the trail and figure out what they were doing: riding a bike, rollerblading, running, etc. It ended up turning into a 2 year project ( i.e. we didn’t finish it), but I learned a lot about image processing in the course of our part, which was interesting- linear algebra is pretty amazing. I got to know some really great folks at UST over my few years there and many of you are receiving this email.
I got quite a kick out of learning about physics and engineering, but was looking to do something different before jumping into grad school- i’m seriously considering school in physics at UW Madison. After getting a taste of what working as an engineer might be like, i decided i’d like to do something different, maybe some sort of service, so i applied to a program called Teach For America. The premise of the organization is basically that recent college grads, even if they didn’t study education can be good teachers and fill a need for qualified teachers in low income areas. The idea sort of resonated with me after learning that SD was one of the placement sites. TFA has sites all over the country, many in big urban areas like NY and New Orleans, but also on some reservations in South Dakota. The idea also sounded cool to me because of the opportunity to try and get some students fired up about science- theres not enough kids interested in science and technical fields these days.
I applied and was admitted and decided to give it a go. I got placed in SD, where i was hoping, and spent the summer in training in Houston TX. That was quite an interesting experience, although Houston is sort of a sweaty big place that i really have little desire to return to. I learned a lot there, mostly that i still have a lot to learn.
I am now in my placement for the the next couple of years. I’m teaching 9th grade physical science and upperclassman physics at Todd County High School: http://www.tcsdk12.org/TCHS/TCHS/Welcome.html Go Falcons! in Mission SD on the Rosebud reservation. Rosebud is home to the Sicangu Lakota people. (They are sometimes referred to as Sioux, but that name is a pejorative gift of French trappers.) Todd county and Shannon county, where the SD TFA corps are teaching, are two of the poorest counties in the US. It’s a sort of desolately beautiful place; much of it is badlands, not exactly the most productive land, but it’s where the federal government decided the reservations would be. The Lakota people have a long history of oppression and tragedy here, but also amazing strength. Many Native leaders that you’ve heard of, like Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull, were Lakota. The Lakota language is also still spoken. Although most people on the rez don’t speak it fluently, there are many who do and there is a definite push to revive the language. I see it in my school- the advisor for the drum group is in the room next to me, and there are courses here you wouldn’t see at an average high school, like Lakota language.
Mission is a metropolis of about 800 people, and is a city center for the rez, with the high school and some other bigger services like a family dollar, hardware store and an actual radio shack. If the measure of a city is if you can purchase an avocodo at the grocery store, then well mission is pretty awesome. It even has a pizza place. The nearest big city is in NE, Valentine, pop. 3000, about 1/2 hour south.
The SD corps is the smallest of all the TFA corps, there are about 50 corps members, 25 per year, spread over a pretty huge geographical area, two reservations in two different time zones. One great aspect of the situation is that you can really get a chance to know some of those folks, as well as the folks that you work with. In other regions there are hundreds of corps members and you never really get a chance to know them. The sense of community is pretty tight, it’s nice. As for me, i live with two other ’07 corps members. Darius is from VA and Reid is from Milwaukee. If it wasn’t for them, i’d have gone crazy quite a while ago.
I’ve seen some interesting events already. There is a tremendous amount of cultural richness here. One situation that i think is a pretty good microcosm of many of the things going on on the rez was the Rosebud fair. Rosebud fair happens right at the beginning of the school year. Many students don’t actually show up to school until after Rosebud fair. It’s a giant pow-wow, rodeo, and carnival. At the center is the circular pow-wow ground, with bleachers and all that. Around the outside are the vendors selling stuff like jewelry and indian tacos, farther yet is the fair rides and all that. Theres a grand entrance where all the dancers dance into the arena. Veterans lead the way. Theres grass dancers (which are supposed to emulate pheasants i think: it looks really interesting), there are traditional dancers, fancy dancers, shawl dancers, jingle dancers, dancers of all ages. Its an amazing sight, all the plumes and color and of course the drum going and singing.
Its interesting because at the center is the drum and the pow-wow, the beating heart of the culture and then all around it is all the crap. Among the vendors selling traditional crafts and food are vendors selling gang stuff, shirts with tu-pac or al pacino from scarface, hats with dollar signs on them, bling. It really has nothing to do with the kids, but they still sell the stuff; it’s strange. Around the fair is where the drinking is. I think its a good model for many of the problems on the rez. At the center is this amazing culture and resilience and beauty and around the outside is all this crap that has kind bogged the people down. Many of the student don’t know their culture, don’t feel connected to it so they end up lost, looking for something and what many of them embrace is gang culture.
Another event that sticks out in my memory was bar triathalon in Vetal. Its not a town, its not even a crossroads, because there is no intersection, its more like a wide spot with a few trees and a Bar. It’s one of the closest bars to Mission, being about 40 miles due west. Anyway, a few weeks ago they hosted a bar triathlon: pool, darts and a mini-golf course set up in the bar. It was a riot. It was a nice opportunity to hang out with some of our buddies from pine ridge and well play bar mini golf. Theres plenty of fun to be had in rural SD.
What does an average day look like? The high school is right near my house which is nice as i can walk to school. I teach 5 sections of 9th grade physical science, (intro high school science), half basic physics, half basic chem. I also teach 1 class of physics geared toward upperclassmen. Its a lot like any other school, but there are some immediate differences, some good, some bad. We’re a public school, but we don’t do the pledge in the morning, there is a song from the drum group, which is really cool. It definitely starts the day off differently than the standard “We pledge ale blah, blah,blah.” Lakota culture has a presence in school and i think thats really a big part of solution to overcoming some of the problems here. There are also some differences from an average high school that are real problems. Looking over my books for the first couple weeks of 2nd quarter, my students are averaging about 60% attendance, yikes!
One other thing, i don’t like to toot my own horn, but i got some nerd publicity, woo! SPS, the society of physics students did a write-up of some of their members who were doing TFA, including me. You can check it out here:
http://www.aip.org/education/sps/news/2007/teach_for_america.htm
Also, if anyone should prefer corresponding via snail mail, my address is
Zach Simmons
PO Box 1064
Mission, SD 57555
Please distribute this blog address to anyone i missed.
I hope this finds you all well,
zach
Hi, So i guess i’ll cave and start a blog. This journal will document my teaching experiences and hopefully provide an efficient way for friends and family to keep tabs on me. The other aim is for this journal to give a sense of what this experience is like, should others be interested in doing something similar. Cheers, z
