Balance demands and create rhythm.

The only consistent man is a dead one, so I've heard.

Consistency

So I've been talking to my kids about being consistent, about how being consistent is an important skill for being successful in school.

I'm tired, about to go to bed, but I'm writing this blog to be consistent. I want to be able to say I "blogged" every night, all week long.

For you readers (all 1 of you) good with innuendo, you'll know what I'm thinking.

my first blog rant

I expect absolute respect, all the time, from my students. Some parents act like that expectation is unreasonable.

The same is true for coaching. My players are not my students, but they are students at my school. What we expect from them at school is the same I expect from them on the court. And yet somehow some of our 7th and 8th graders get the impression that the second the 3:00 bell rings, those expectations no longer apply. Of course, it doesn't help that many students in our middle school are allowed to get away with disrespect and no worth ethic day after day. It only makes sense that being with me is like running into a brick wall for them, their ingrained habits creating dissonance with my expectations.

What really chaps my hide, if you will, is when parents support their own kids' disrespect, disruptive behaviors, and irrational decisions with excuses. The reason their kid isn't doing well isn't because they don't get their homework done or because they don't study or because they have no parental supervision at home. No no no... I'M the reason, of course. It's because I don't like their kid, it's because I'm too strict, it's because I don't like Latinos, etc. This is real stuff I've heard from the parents of a few really struggling students.

Of course, the great, GREAT majority of parents are as supportive as can be. Those few parents, though... it's not a stretch to figure out why their kids are the way they are.

We could so win this thing

My friend Mark (yes, of the world famous Manasseworld.com) and I are entering the Yahoo! IM competition. There are several rounds of competition where we'll be judged by "qualified" people on whether or not our IMs are interesting. What makes someone qualified to judge something like that?

Anyway, if we make it to the finals, we have to IM for 3 hours a night for 6 days in full view of millions of, well, viewers. I'm sure THAT will mesh well with my work schedule. If people find us interesting, we could end up winning a trip to Hawaii (incidentally, the birthplace of The Casual Critics as well as the Smooth Operator).

On the application, we had to write about our hobbies, 5 adjectives our friends would use to describe us, 5 things we'd want to have on a desert island (Amber Brkich!), and a <100 word essay on why we're a "great IMer." So we're in the mix. Will the folks at Yahoo! realize what a gold mine two guys like us are? We could singlehandedly (doublehandedly?) change the Internet as we know it.

Just imagine.... we're in the finals, millions of people are watching us IM each other. The 3 T's (tanned, toned, tantalizing) could become part of our national lexicon. This is our year!

Getting my hands dirty

Nothing makes me feel more like a man than when I fix something on my car. Well, I suppose I could think of a few other things. But in today's case, I changed a brake light that was out. My ingenuity was quite remarkable. I had been told by one of my students that one of the brake lights was out, but I didn't know which one. How to tell without asking my eBay wheel-selling neighbors? I thought for a moment and came up with an idea: wedge a shovel inbetween the brake pedal and the seat. Pure genious.

Sure enough, the right tail light was out. By now it was getting pretty dark outside, so I had to grab my flashlight. Outside in the heat of the night, flashlight in hand, working on my car, getting my hands dirty with the grease and grime of my 20 year old car. My dad would be proud. Have you ever changed any of the tail lights on an '84 Camaro? It ain't easy.

This experience reminded me of my experience in Guatemala when we struck a boulder in the road on the way home, bending the wheel and thus causing all the air inside the tire to escape. As we (we being myself, three children, and a few women) waited on the side of the road for Sergio, the family's patriarch, to come and change the tire, I kept suggesting that I could change the tire myself. As the only man in the group, I felt it was my duty to, well, do something. But the ladies kept insisting that we should wait for Sergio, that he was the expert on the minivan. Lo and behold, a minister pulls over. Do we need some help? he inquires. They didn't turn HIS offer down. And of course all the ladies ooh and aah as he changes the tire. He's the hero, and I just stand sheepishly on the side of the road. As the story gets recounted later that night during dinner, the women include me in the story, saying "The nice man stopped and changed the tire for us. And Sergio (an 11 year old boy) and Darron helped out by getting the spare tire out of the back." Yeah, I helped get the spare tire.

And so it begins...

My first blog. How nice.

What is a blog? The word blog comes from the words "web log." It's not the most beautiful word ever invented, that's for sure.