Many things:

1. There are immense, stupid lines for the portapotties. DO NOT wait in line for these. Go pee on a tree. Listening to the National Anthem and then the countdown for the race while looking at 20 people in front of you getting ready to pee sucks.

2. Practice drinking while running. I had never done it before. It’s much harder than it looks.

3. Don’t get sick the Friday before a race. Don’t pull a groin the Thursday before a race. Be annoyed that you have legitimate excuses for a cruddy time but that you still have a CRUDDY TIME.

4. Everyone has lots of advice. Listen to your own body. For example, I had gotten accustomed to running every other day and I took a week off before the race. My body felt out of practice. Also, my stretching routine (ha!) occurs after I run, so when I didn’t run, I didn’t stretch. I think I would have been better served running my normal schedule this week.

5. I didn’t lie about my time to get into the second corral. I honestly thought I could run a faster time. That being said, I will always overestimate now because the crowd thing was tough to take.

I don’t know exactly why my last 5k sucked. I couldn’t run any faster and I couldn’t accelerate (I tried once and felt the cramps waiting for me). Did I need to get some calories into me? Did I overexert myself in the early part of the race? Had I not trained enough? Was it simply too humid for long runs? I want to do another one to figure this out.

5k: 24:09
10k: 48:37
10 mile: 1:19
Total time: 1:46:37
Pace: 8:07

We worked yesterday on our goals for the year. My two goals (as a teacher) for the year:

1. Carefully and closely documenting the work with students in ways that will allow others to use and draw upon it and allow me to improve my practice.

3. Publicly finishing projects together. I want to make sure that each of the projects has as an authentic conclusion with as large an impact as possible.

Faked my way through the door; could have used a jig or corner clamps but didn’t. Dug through the trash doors to find mismatched brass hinges. Found a knob that we mistakenly bought for kitchen cabinets long ago.

We’re going to do this with the sophomores. I went into the basement, found an old plant stand of my father’s, pulled whatever scrap wood I could find, and knocked together this prototype.

Punchlist:
1. Need to caulk all the way around.
2. Need to do something clever with the roof part.
(both of these have to do with waterproofing, which will be a huge design challenge. Flat roof? Not so smart…)
3. Need to stain the same color as the plant stand.
4. Need to figure out second floor and signage. Either a simple A-Frame roof or some funky triangle.
5. Need to figure out what to do about the door.

I hold no rights to this letter or photograph. But I wanted to have it somewhere that I could find it and then share with my students.

Beautiful…

I wonder whether there will ever be enough tranquility under modern circumstances to allow our contemporary Wordsworth to recollect anything. I feel that art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos. A stillness that characterizes prayer, too, and the eye of the storm. I think that art has something to do with an arrest of attention in the midst of distraction.

Saul Bellow

Review of the book also excellent…

This one is everywhere. It has a deep single root that can be difficult to pull.

After extensive research (looking at google for 2-3 minutes), I believe this is Purslane. Apparently it’s edible! Considering that this weed is everywhere — the raised beds, the sidewalk, the tree pits — that might kind of good news…

Particularly liked this quote:

America is two countries now—the country of its narrative and the country of its numbers, with the latter sitting in judgment of the former. In the stories we tell ourselves, we are nearly always too good: too soft on criminals, too easy on terrorists, too lenient with immigrants, too kind to animals. In the stories told by our numbers, we imprison, we drone, we deport, and we euthanize with an easy conscience and an avenging zeal.

Full article here

Tim Judah, writing on Ukraine, but with a line that seems to be true of much modern life and politics:

“To borrow a phrase from the name of the book by Samantha Power, Ukraine is the new problem from hell, and it is not going away so that everyone else can have an easier life in which they don’t have to make hard, risky, and unpleasant decisions.”

Replace Ukraine with poverty, inequality, crime, Gaza…take your pick.

Update: running this morning after posting and remembered this front cover from The Onion.

As a teacher educator, I had the troubling experience last night when my students and I looked over the Common Core Standards and the PA State Standards together. It was the opposite of the glorious moments when someone reads or encounters something for the first time; instead it was a “we have to actually pay attention to this stuff? Really?” moment…

I went looking to collect the smart things I’ve read about standards and will continue to add them to this entry…

Joanne Yatvin (hero of the minority report, a scathing dissent on the NRP) going point by point through the ELA standards.

Mercedes Schneider has done the legwork on who is paying for the CCS in several lengthy and well-documented blog posts.

Diane Ravitch’s speech here is very well-done and does offer significant context for the CCS. Still, (this remains unforgivable.)