Sacramento Pics

Click below for the pics:

http://www.prez2012.com/sacramento2/sacramento2.html.

And if you're feeling nostalgic, here are the pics from my original trip last summer:

http://www.prez2012.com/sacramento/sacramento.html.

Mr. Evans Returns to Sacramento

I'm writing to you from an actual suite at the Embassy Suites Hotel - Riverfront Promenade in Sacramento. I'm pretty sure I've stayed at an Embassy Suites before, but never, interestingly, in an actual suite. At least, I think this is what counts as a suite, as opposed to a room. You come in, and it's like a separate little living room area, than you walk through a short hallway and into the bedroom. I have an outstanding view of the American River just outside my window, as well as what I think is called the Tower Bridge (a little bridge over the river that is painted gold).

I have two TVs, two beds, two chocolates (which are already digesting in my stomach), a sofa, an armchair, four additional chairs, a ceiling fan, and free internet access. What more can a teacher/aspiring politico want?

I'm here as a guest of CABE, the California Association for Bilingual Education, as part of a legislative advocacy push. In about 15 minutes, we're meeting downstairs for dinner and a meeting of all the CABE chapter presidents (as I am not a chapter president and have only been a member for about one month, how I managed to get myself invited to this thing, I'm still not quite sure). Tomorrow we'll be meeting with various legislators and/or education policy legislative aides to promote CABE's legislative agenda. How exciting!

So I actually took another day off from school - that makes 3 days this year! Yikes... But considering that in my previous 6 years of teaching I've only taken maybe 4 days off, I don't feel so bad.

More to come!

It's a start

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Well, You Don't Know Me

There's something magical about riding your bike for 2 hours and a total distance of 30 miles in 50 degree bay area spring weather, your butt alternating between feeling like you've just been sodomized with a broom handle and feeling absolutely numb, and all the while your crotch feels like it's on fire. Yes, very magical.

I'm not even kidding. Even with the pain, I know that in the end (ha, "the end") I'm going to make it to the finish, which in this case is up just three more hills to the crest of Cañada College where, with my riding partner and good buddy JLO, we whoop and holler at our accomplishment and then speed down the road to his house, where we eagerly down a beer, some taquitos, and some ice cream (so much for all the health benefits of cycling).

Almost a month ago I purchased a new road bike, a Trek 1500, in anticipation of a 100 mile ride I'll be doing in Tahoe this June. Since then, I've put about 130 miles on it (only 130? well, two of those four weeks I was busy eating pie and sleeping), 80 in the last four days alone.

Here are some other things you probably don't know about me:
* Every time I make spaghetti, I pour the sauce into the pan and there's inevitably some left over. I don't have the patience to just hold it upside down for a while, and shaking it just gets sauce everywhere, so I screw the top back on and place it upside down on my stove, thinking gravity will do its job and I'll get that extra spoonful or so of sauce later. But I always, ALWAYS, forget to retrieve the extra sauce, at least until I see it on my stove the next morning and laugh at myself because I did it AGAIN.

* When I'm driving, I bite down inbetween signs and lamp posts and people and other random objects on the sides of the road. I imagine a giant blade descending from the side of my car that immediately slams down and pops back up, all controlled by the movement of my teeth. I've been doing this since I was a kid.

* I used to be obsessed with the number 5, which is still, by the way, my lucky number. For a period of a couple years, off and on when I was a teenager, I had to do everything five times. For example, when I blinked, I felt compelled to do it five times, imagining making the pattern that is the #5 on a die. First the upper left dot, then the upper right, then the lower left, then the lower right, and finally the dot in the middle. And yeah, when I did the car blade thing, I had to do it in multiples of 5.

* There are a lot of things I would do for a Klondike bar.

* Sharks are my favorite animal. You probably don't know this because you don't frequently visit my classroom. I have about 10 different plastic sharks resting on my classroom TV. I've got a whale shark, tiger shark, great white shark, goblin shark, leopard shark, etc. Even a megalodon, the now extinct super shark that's estimated to have been about the size of a school bus. I have a hammerhead shark on my keychain. I've got shark posters that I've bought and that have been made for me by students. I also own two shark tooth necklaces.

* There's a hockey puck in my freezer.

* Woodrow Wilson used to be my favorite President, but he's been replaced by John Adams. I admired Wilson for his pluck in going over the head of Congress to persuade the American people that membership in the League of Nations would be to our benefit. But without John Adams, our country never would have made it. Thanks to him, we were able to secure money from the Dutch to finance the Revolutionary War, money that, if we hadn't received it, would have doomed the revolution to failure.

I could go on, but I won't. It's time for this blog to come to an end. So, how about it readers? I've told you some things you didn't know about me. What do I not know about you?

Don Imus - Why We Care

Unless you've been completely disconnected from all forms of the media over the last week, you probably know that radio talk show host Don Imus, whose show reaches several hundred thousand listeners a day through syndication and a live TV broadcast on MSNBC, ignited a firestorm with his comments about the Rutgers women's basketball team. He called the members of the team, which is 80% black, "nappy headed hos."

As a result, he was at first suspended for two weeks without pay. Then, as the story found legs and wouldn't go away and morally superior heavy hitters like Al Sharpton (who has said and then later apologized for homophobic and anti-white rhetoric) and Jesse Jackson (who has said and later apologized for anti-Jewish rhetoric and also cheated on his wife and had a kid with the mistress) jumped in, he was dumped by MSNBC and finally fired completely by CBS which dropped his radio show that reaches a little over a million listeners a week. He was fired, they said, because what bothered them most was the effect words like his have on young women of color all over the country. But really it was because a bunch of the show's sponsors had pulled out and, well, money talks.

Why was this such a big story? It wasn't because his words did a lot of damage. Were the women of the Rutgers basketball team somehow greatly injured by what he said? Granted, the words probably stung more because they had just lost the championship game and they were getting kicked while they were down, but these are intelligent women with bright futures ahead of them. The words of some insensitive white guy didn't damage or endanger that.

I think it was such a big deal because on the whole the American people do have a sense that the idea of the U.S. as a land of equal opportunity for everyone as long as they're willing to work hard is something of a myth. They know that things aren't quite right in this country, and slamming Don Imus helps make them feel like they're doing something about it. Don Imus saying what he said is not responsible for the fact that more black men are in prison than in college. He's not responsible for Latinos having the lowest college participation rate of any ethnic group. Guys like him are not the reason that my students are so isolated culturally, linguistically, and economically. But those are all things that are hard to address. The solutions require a multi-lateral approach and a great deal of thought, energy, and cooperation. It's much easier to call for the ouster of a talk radio host and feel like you're doing something to help make this country live up to its promise than it is to go after the real problems of racism and poverty.

GarfieldSpace, Issue 4

Issue 4 came out this week - you can get it directly here or right click and save the file from the http://www.prez2012.com/garfieldspace directory.

If you have any trouble viewing it, please let me know!

GarfieldSpace is slowly starting to have an impact. For example, after the last issue had an opinion piece on getting rid of uniforms, parents brought up the issue at a site council meeting. Another article on Spirit Days prompted 5th grade students to organize a petition for spirit days. They gathered over 300 signatures of support. Of course, the administration hasn't responded yet, but it's a start.

This is the United States?

Three words - oh, my, God! Or maybe one - omigod!

And no pun intended at the time, but now it actually seems kinda witty. So let's pretend it was intended.

As a result of living in California, particularly the San Francisco Bay Area, I think I have a very skewed view of what the "typical American" is like. I find the information below to be outrageously shocking. Perhaps I should move to Canada...

from http://www.crooksandliars.com/2007/04/02/evolution-fares-poorly-in-newsweek-poll:

The latest Newsweek poll included a variety of interesting questions about Americans and religious matters, including the not-surprising fact that 91% of the public say they believe in God and almost as many (87%) say they identify with a specific religion. But perhaps more importantly, Newsweek also asked poll respondents about modern biology.

Nearly half (48%) of the public rejects the scientific theory of evolution; one-third (34%) of college graduates say they accept the Biblical account of creation as fact. 73% of Evangelical Protestants say they believe that God created humans in their present form within the last 10,000 years; 39% of non-Evangelical Protestants and 41% of Catholics agree with that view.

These poll results come just a few months after an international study was conducted to measure which countries were the most accepting on evolutionary biology. Of the 34 countries involved, the United States ranked 33rd. Only Turkey ranked lower.