I Love You All!

Happy Valentine's Day, dear readers of my blog!

This picture is our yearly tradition. Take a look at years past...

2010:

2009:

2008:

2007:

2006:

This and That

Stream of consciousness post:

Peace is nursing as I type this. On my right boob. Which makes it hard to use the mouse. Nursing while on the computer works much better when she is on the left boob.

Tomorrow is Valentine's Day. I have a picture I'm going to post. We're going to get a heart shaped pizza from Papa Murphy's for supper for the family.

She's off now.

I like Shelfari. Click here to see what books I've been reading. (I like books.)

I watched this movie called Phoebe in Wonderland last night. It was really good.

Here is a list of movies I watched over and over and over again when I was a kid, in order of times viewed:

1) Girls Just Want to Have Fun
2) Just One of the Guys
3) Stand By Me
4) Savannah Smiles
5) Heavenly Bodies

John Taylor Gatto Talk

I wanted to type up some notes about the John Taylor Gatto talk the other night. It was kind of boring at times, but it was good. He likes to talk and would often go off on tangents. He told about one class he talked to for six hours because nobody told him to stick to the script.

He looked a lot older than I was expecting. I guess I only knew him from a picture on the cover of his book, A Different Kind of Teacher: Solving the Crisis of American Schooling, which was published 8 years ago. He's 75 years old, has diabetes, and is a Roman Catholic.

Here are some more notes:

1) There is no correlation between standardized test scores and intelligence/being a success later in life. Hundreds of attempts have failed to find any value in testing and this has been kept from the public.

2) This is something our culture doesn't want students to know, because then they can't control students. He was giving a talk to high school students in New York and was telling them this, when, 10 minutes later, cops came in and told him that if he didn't leave the school immediately, they would arrest him. The teachers apparently called the superintendent, who called the cops to have him removed so kids wouldn't hear any more. (He writes about stuff like this more in his book Weapons of Mass Instruction, which I haven't read yet.)

3) He said that National Merit Scholars commit suicide more than any other group because they are used to privilege within this group, but is then met with a world that doesn't care about their achievement.

4) He talked about how Henry Ford marginalized the Jews (read: The Dearborn Newspaper) and that Adolf Hitler had a giant poster of him because of this. (I forget how this was connected to anything. It was probably a tangent. I think it had something to do with our universal forced schooling originated in Germany.)

5) Darwin's The Descent of Man talks about how 90% of the population is evolutionary trash and that they should be weeded out or we'll all evolve backwards. After the publication of this book, the emergence of country clubs shot up by the hundreds, as well as elite colleges.

6) There are three places that jobs come from: 1) The government creating jobs, 2) Giant corporations, and 3) Creating your own job.

So, that was the gist of it, kind of, sort of, but probably, not really. There was really a lot of stuff that he went into which somehow connects everything that I cliff-noted here.

After the talk, I mulled around him with some other Gatto groupies, who were asking him questions. I was too shy to ask him anything (as per my usual agenda), but it was neat being in his presence.

Here is the talk:

John Taylor Gatto

I'm going to listen to John Taylor Gatto talk tonight. One of my dreams come true.

Dating My Husband

On October 1, 2010, I went on a real date with my husband. It was nice and fun and we both felt like we were teenagers again. Somewhere along the road of marriage and life and (most blameworthy) children, we have gotten out of the habit of going out on dates with each other. But after that one date, we were both left with the realization that we NEED to get out and do stuff like this more often. For the sake of our marriage. For the sake of our lives. For the sake of each other.

That is why Moorhead seemed so appealing... because my mom lives there and could watch the kids once in awhile.

So, now I'm trying to come up with ideas to create that kind of life here.

I've looked into what a teenage babysitter would cost (and by "looked into" I mean that I posted a facebook poll about it), and found out that they are much more expensive than I ever would have though. I think that my upbringing (growing up in a super-small, rural town) and not making very much money as an adult (I never really had a real "real" job. Vernon taught at a Catholic school for less than $20,000 a year before going back to school to become a chiropractor... where he then got around $22,000 in student loans for living expenses) has kind of stunted my thinking regarding money in this modern-day metro world that I'm currently living in.

But, anyway, my facebook poll (with 40 or so responses) revealed that people are paying around $7-$10 for a young teenage babysitter. (I got paid around $1 an hour when I was that age.) The only response that seemed reasonable to me was from a friend who still lives in the super-small rural town that I grew up in. She pays $2.

So, hiring a babysitter might be something on the horizon, but, obviously, not now (as I sit here typing in a room that we are living in rent-free from Vernon's brother).

John Taylor Gatto is going to be in town giving a talk at Macalester College on Friday night. I'm going to go to it, of course (why would I miss it?)... but this is really, really something that I would like to go to with Vernon (and he would like to go as well... I even got him to read Dumbing Us Down last year). But it seems like too much trouble/effort trying to arrange childcare for our kids.

Today, out of curiosity, I posted another question asking: How many times in a month do you and your spouse go out on a date?

The results: Most people said zero. (Some said one or two, only a few said more than that.)

A lot of people mentioned that they stay in for date nights with their spouse. Vern and I tried that last spring, but it just isn't the same. There is something about getting out and exploring the external world together that is kind of fun and magical and necessary (for us, anyway).

I would like to do more of it.

(Oh, my silly mother... living all the way in Moorhead. Why does she go and do things like that?)