By ◆ Juppie on Friday, January 22, 2010 @ 9:16 PM


It's supposed to be a play on the title of a movie, No Country for Old Men. Not sure if you caught the reference, though. (I haven't seen the movie either.)

The old man in particular is my father. (No offense intended to him, but he is getting on in his age.) My math teacher sends newsletters to the parents of his students about what he's been teaching, and lets them know about upcoming tests. My dad had stopped receiving the newsletters, so I brought a piece of paper to the teacher with the information needed for him to resume sending emails.

My father's memory and concentration seems to be off, because he didn't write his email address properly (missed three letters of it) and the teacher told me, "This email doesn't work." It's kind of sad that my dad doesn't even know his own email. (It's true that I sometimes forget my passwords, but that's because I keep so many of them.)

I wonder if anyone really writes letters anymore. I mean, my parents said they used to send Christmas cards, years back, but they don't any longer. (In fact, they don't really send Christmas e-cards either, which could mean they are losing their holiday spirit or are just getting lazy.) I remember when I was younger sometimes we would have a pen pal activity - each person would write a short letter to a person in another school that they were paired up with. I remember that it was a lot of fun...But we usually only exchanged one or two letters, and that's about it. It'd be much better if we could send them actively all year long. It might help improve our letter writing skills and it would be fun.

Today, my history teacher started talking about how us students aren't taking the opportunities that are given to us to sharpen our skills. He said that many kids are members of social networking sites and use instant messengers, but often they use chatspeak and don't bother to capitalize or punctuate properly. When they do add punctuation, it's probably a bunch of exclamation points. My teacher said that he had practiced typing and gotten really fast at it. But here we have plenty of chances to practice what with the time we spend on the computer, and yet we don't take it. (Reminds of this quote: "Opportunity comes knocking more than once. You just have to ready for it." I think it was in an old school planner)

I spent time in two different history teachers' classrooms recently - my regular history teacher, and another one who I've never had before. The reason is the rain...My PE teacher decided he would teach us about the cons of smoking, alcohol, and drugs while the weather was bad. We would go to that teacher's room (let's call him Mr. T) since it was his prep period (each teacher has one period where they don't teach, but are supposed to be making preparations for class or grading tests). Mr. T seemed to eat a lot of the kind of food called Cup Noodles.

Today my PE teacher left two minutes early, leaving us in the "care" of Mr. T, because he needed to go to the classroom for the next PE class (he uses a different classroom each period since the teachers have different prep periods). Mr. T decided to ask us what we had learned during our time of having PE inside.

Student: I learned that D talks a lot. (D stands for a different student's name)
Mr. T: You didn't know that before?
You know what's really amazing? D talks so much, but none of what comes out of his mouth has any meaning. The ratio of how much he speaks to how much of it is important is staggering.

Mr. T had brought in some food today, as well, in Whole Foods bags. Someone said they had seen cake and pizza. "What happened to your diet, Mr. T?" piped up D. (I did hear that Mr. T wanted to lose weight...) Mr. T said, "Hey, I'm fairly skinny, right?" (Well, I suppose beauty is in the eye of the beholder. But he ought not to have that attitude. Otherwise, the pounds will pile up again.)

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