FAQ - Q&A
Q. When can I come in for tutoring?
Q. "School is so weak; Why do we have to know this stuff?"
Q. Tell me something about Mr. R…
Q. Do we have to carry our textbook every day?
Q. Why do all this site's pages have the word bull in the URL?
Scroll down for answers….
_________________________________________________________________________________
Q. When can I come in for tutoring?
In '23-'24 the first tutoring suggestion will always be WIN. BUT IF YOU SET IT UP WITH ME BEFOREHAND (i.e. make an appointment) I can be here in the morning before any quiz, quarter test or final exam, or any other appointment times we agree upon. [NOTE: ON MOST DAYS I'm usually available both before school (8:45 to 9-ish?) and after (until 5:00-5:30)] If you simply drop in before school you MAY find me here, but you're just as likely to encounter my locked door as I might be out-n-about, maybe trying to get copies made. You can guarantee yourself my full attention by making an appointment!]
___________________________________________________________________________________
Q. "School is so weak. Why do we have to know this stuff?"
A. OH. OH. LET ME COUNT THE WAYS:
Q. Tell me something about Mr. R…
A. I am a dynamic figure, often seen scaling walls and crushing ice. I have been known to remodel train stations on my lunch breaks, making them more efficient in the area of heat retention. I translate ethnic slurs for Cuban refugees. I write award-winning operas. I manage time efficiently.
Occasionally, I tread water for three days in a row.
I woo women with my sensuous and godlike trombone playing. I can pilot bicycles up severe inclines with unflagging speed, and I cook Thirty-Minute Brownies in twenty minutes. I am an expert in stucco, a veteran in love, and an outlaw in Peru.
Using only a garden hoe and a large glass of water, I once single-handedly defended a small village in the Amazon Basin from a horde of ferocious army ants. I play bluegrass cello. I was scouted by the Mets. I am the subject of numerous documentaries and tele-movies. When I'm bored, I build large suspension bridges in my yard. I enjoy urban hang gliding. On Wednesdays, after school, I repair electrical appliances free of charge.
I am an abstract artist, a concrete analyst, and a ruthless bookie. Critics worldwide swoon over my original line of corduroy evening wear.
I don't perspire.
I am a private citizen, yet I receive fan mail. I have been caller number nine and have won the weekend passes. Last summer I toured New Jersey with a traveling centrifugal force demonstration. I bat .400. My deft floral arrangements have earned me fame in international botany circles.
Children trust me.
I can hurl tennis rackets at small moving objects with deadly accuracy. I once read Paradise Lost, Moby-Dick, and David Copperfield in one day and still had time to refurbish an entire dining room set that evening. I know the exact location of every food item in the supermarket. I have performed covert operations for the CIA. I sleep once a week; when I do sleep, I sleep in a chair. While on vacation in Canada, I successfully negotiated with a group of terrorists who had seized a small bakery.
The laws of physics do not apply to me.
I balance, I weave, I dodge, I frolic, and my bills are all paid. On weekends, to let off steam, I participate in full-contact origami. Years ago I discovered the meaning of life but forgot to write it down. I have made extraordinary four-course meals using only a mouli and a toaster oven. I breed prizewinning clams. I have won bullfights in San Juan, cliff-diving competitions in Sri Lanka, and spelling bees at the Kremlin. I have played Hamlet, I have performed open-heart surgery, and I have spoken with Elvis.
...but I have not yet gone to college.
(Kidding of course. As some of you might know, that was a piece called "3A Essay" by Hugh Gallagher with which he, as a high school senior, won a national essay contest, and did indeed submit with his college applications!) [via Google] [audio version]
IN TRUTH: I was born about two hours after Christmas in 1964 and have worked in one branch of education or other since graduating from Va Tech in 1986. I taught biology at Northwest High from July 2008 to June 2011. (I taught Physical Science here a long l o n g time ago, from January to June 1993, then my first daughter was born so I left teaching and became a stay-home dad, and remained one for eight more years and one more daughter. I jumped back into full time teaching at Southwest Middle in 2001, where I taught 8th grade science until June 2008, when I was traded to Northwest for cash and some draft picks.)
I've been married since 1988, have two daughters as I mentioned, and in my spare time, such as it is, I am a relentless and incurable read-a-holic: The New Yorker, some of what has come to be known as "hard" sci-fi (Greg Bear, Neal Stephenson, etc.), a lot of literary and postmodern fiction (whatever postmodern means this week; David Foster Wallace, Richard Powers, Sergio De La Pava, among so many others), a TON of science writing (Malcolm Gladwell, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, John McPhee, Mary Roach, Carl Sagan, etc.), comedians on Twitter/IG/TT, several blogs: I really can't feed my head enough.
TV? Not a lot frankly. Occasionally some SNL, Firefly (which was my go-to Friday video choice when I taught Astro), John Oliver, NOVA, Archer, Sherlock Holmes (Downey/Law, sure, but especially Cumberbatch/Freeman) and any stand-up comedy I can find (Patton Oswalt, Key & Peele, Amy Schumer, John Mulaney, Maria Bamford, Anthony Jeselnik, ancient Bill Hicks and Richard Pryor and George Carlin routines...etc. etc. etc.)
If it's warmer than 55 degrees outside, I'll get a 5-7 mile walk in, and I do that usually 3x a week. I do yoga occasionally, and eat right (meaning of course, Chick-fil-A, Krispy Kreme & Papa John's), play guitar, blog about music and books, write fastidiously (you may have noticed), look at stars and planets with my telescope and at airplanes with my binoculars, get drawn and quartered by my chess apps, and listen to just about every kind of music you can name.
_________________________________________________________________________________
Q. Do we have to carry our textbook every day?
A. Checking out a textbook is OPTIONAL; you will not be issued a book unless you request it from me in class! (Of course I recommend it for the rare occasions you chatted with friends or played on your phone during the class time I gave you to complete an assignment...but again: up to you! ;-) )
_________________________________________________________________________________
Q. Why does every page on this site have the word bull in the URL?
It's a little convoluted, but here goes:
• When I create a list of things I prefer to use bullet points (the big dots) instead of dashes or hyphens.
• I want bullet points highlighting the page names in the Navigation Pane (the list of page links at the top of that big red strip running up the left side of every page.)
• To see bullet points in the Navigation Pane I must include them in each page's title.
• Weebly (or its parent company, Square) creates a page's URL by simply converting its title into a URL.
• A bullet point is not an html character so it won't work in a URL.
• Weebly substitutes the word bull for a bullet point when it creates a page's URL from its name.
_________________________________________________________________________________
Q. When can I come in for tutoring?
Q. "School is so weak; Why do we have to know this stuff?"
Q. Tell me something about Mr. R…
Q. Do we have to carry our textbook every day?
Q. Why do all this site's pages have the word bull in the URL?
Scroll down for answers….
_________________________________________________________________________________
Q. When can I come in for tutoring?
In '23-'24 the first tutoring suggestion will always be WIN. BUT IF YOU SET IT UP WITH ME BEFOREHAND (i.e. make an appointment) I can be here in the morning before any quiz, quarter test or final exam, or any other appointment times we agree upon. [NOTE: ON MOST DAYS I'm usually available both before school (8:45 to 9-ish?) and after (until 5:00-5:30)] If you simply drop in before school you MAY find me here, but you're just as likely to encounter my locked door as I might be out-n-about, maybe trying to get copies made. You can guarantee yourself my full attention by making an appointment!]
___________________________________________________________________________________
Q. "School is so weak. Why do we have to know this stuff?"
A. OH. OH. LET ME COUNT THE WAYS:
- IT'S THE LAW. The immediate and obvious reason is because the State of Nawth Kerlonna insists that you learn it.
- MORE POST-HIGH SCHOOL OPTIONS. This probably should have been reason #1. In the future you are going to try to convince many people that you are responsible enough do the job you want them to pay you to do for them. If your grades are good, you won't have to try too hard to do that; academic performance is an excellent predictor of personal responsibility and reliability. Employers do not want to hire employees who are not responsible. Get straight As and you can often pick and choose where you want to work, or where you want to go to college. If you're really sharp some colleges will even GIVE YOU MONEY to go there! Get Cs or Ds and your choices rapidly diminish in quantity and quality.
- QUALITY OF LIFE/HAPPINESS/PEACE OF MIND. This probably should have been reason #1. An immutable fact of life, also known as the Law Of The Jungle: the less educated you are, the more likely you are to fall prey to people who want to separate you from your money, your dignity, or even in extreme cases, your life. Not knowing stuff CAN be fatal, but usually it's not of course. Most of the time it's just aggravating. For instance: When someone tells you that wearing magnetic insoles when you jog is good for your feet - and a steal at $19.99, but you must act now!! - and if you know that you have iron in your blood's hemoglobin but don't know that when an iron atom is embedded in a hemoglobin molecule it's not ferromagnetic, then you might think magnetic insoles are a great idea for your running shoes. AND, if you aren't aware of the biomechanics (i.e. physics) involved in adding that kind of weight to a running shoe and what it can do to your knees, hips and ankles...again, you might think it's a great idea. But if they do, and you do, and you DO, BUT you are, then you won't. See? :-)
[Click on my MYTHBUSTING page at left and visit the links about "2012" and "Ear-Candling." Just two more of the millions of reasons to pay attention in school.] - KNOWLEDGEABLE PARENTS ARE LESS DEPENDENT ON THE KNOWLEDGE OF OTHERS. Very similar to reason #3, and probably should have been reason #1. Gonna have kids? Most people do whether they want to or not. (Ha ha, right? No, seriously.) Be able to help your kids with THEIR homework by doing yours now.
- EXPOSURE TO COOL STUFF. This probably should have been reason #1. I mean, if you know at age five what you want to do with your life, cool; study THAT. Thing is, school is where many if not most people, in one respect or another, get a taste for something they decide to focus on later. Take me for example. Here are the things I love to read about, write about, or do in my latter 50s: Science (astronomy, human anatomy & genetics of course, oceanography, some geology, some physics) teaching, traveling, reading, writing, playing chess, listening to lots of music, playing guitar, aviation, computers, soccer. That's five kinds of science plus ten other things. Of those fifteen, only five -- airplanes, chess, computers, oceanography and traveling-- are interests I fully acquired AFTER high school. All the others were either acquired or greatly enhanced as a result of either some high school class, or some high school friend. And I was actually in a 12th grade anatomy class when I realized that teaching was so cool for someone with my personality and interests that I HAD to end up trying it at least once. Turns out that for someone of my disposition, it's the coolest job in the world!
- JAY WALKING. I don't watch night time talk shows in general, or the Tonight Show in particular, but I have seen this bit from back in the Jay Leno era, and it makes me cringe every time. I know the odds that you will A) be in southern California, and B) bump into a Tonight Show camera crew are long indeed. MOST LIKELY you'll be put on the spot while playing a trivia game with family/friends, When that happens do you really want to be the one who, when someone sticks a microphone in your face (or holds up a Trivial Pursuit card) and says "Can you name one country in Europe?" screams "IDAHO!"
- THIS VIDEO is an instructive example of why you need to "learn this stuff." (And to answer the good lady's question "What the heck is in our water supply?" ... it's "prodominatly" dihydrogen monoxide of course.) DON'T EVER FORGET: "Everywhere we look, the visible spectrum……….is rainbows."
- Or this famous example from a QVC broadcast. (Good Lord...)
- THIS LAST ONE. NO ONE EVER MENTIONS THIS. It usually comes up in my class on big (i.e. long) test days. You SHOULD recognize it from ANY class, though, really. One of the best things your formal education can provide (if you let it) is an ability to handle boredom. MIND-NUMBING, SOUL-CRUSHING BOREDOM IS AN INESCAPABLE PART OF ALMOST EVERY SINGLE DAY OF YOUR LIFE WHEN YOU LIVE IN A SOCIETY THAT IS PROSPEROUS ENOUGH TO HAVE ELIMINATED VIRTUALLY ALL OF ITS MONSTERS. (You think I'm kidding. I am absolutely not kidding.) And if you leave school either ignorant of that fact or unable to deal with it, you're going to behave as if it's the world's fault that you're bored and no one is going to want to be around you. (Why on long test days? Because you often have to sit there doing not one single thing until time expires. That's when you find out who can and can't deal with boredom.)
Q. Tell me something about Mr. R…
A. I am a dynamic figure, often seen scaling walls and crushing ice. I have been known to remodel train stations on my lunch breaks, making them more efficient in the area of heat retention. I translate ethnic slurs for Cuban refugees. I write award-winning operas. I manage time efficiently.
Occasionally, I tread water for three days in a row.
I woo women with my sensuous and godlike trombone playing. I can pilot bicycles up severe inclines with unflagging speed, and I cook Thirty-Minute Brownies in twenty minutes. I am an expert in stucco, a veteran in love, and an outlaw in Peru.
Using only a garden hoe and a large glass of water, I once single-handedly defended a small village in the Amazon Basin from a horde of ferocious army ants. I play bluegrass cello. I was scouted by the Mets. I am the subject of numerous documentaries and tele-movies. When I'm bored, I build large suspension bridges in my yard. I enjoy urban hang gliding. On Wednesdays, after school, I repair electrical appliances free of charge.
I am an abstract artist, a concrete analyst, and a ruthless bookie. Critics worldwide swoon over my original line of corduroy evening wear.
I don't perspire.
I am a private citizen, yet I receive fan mail. I have been caller number nine and have won the weekend passes. Last summer I toured New Jersey with a traveling centrifugal force demonstration. I bat .400. My deft floral arrangements have earned me fame in international botany circles.
Children trust me.
I can hurl tennis rackets at small moving objects with deadly accuracy. I once read Paradise Lost, Moby-Dick, and David Copperfield in one day and still had time to refurbish an entire dining room set that evening. I know the exact location of every food item in the supermarket. I have performed covert operations for the CIA. I sleep once a week; when I do sleep, I sleep in a chair. While on vacation in Canada, I successfully negotiated with a group of terrorists who had seized a small bakery.
The laws of physics do not apply to me.
I balance, I weave, I dodge, I frolic, and my bills are all paid. On weekends, to let off steam, I participate in full-contact origami. Years ago I discovered the meaning of life but forgot to write it down. I have made extraordinary four-course meals using only a mouli and a toaster oven. I breed prizewinning clams. I have won bullfights in San Juan, cliff-diving competitions in Sri Lanka, and spelling bees at the Kremlin. I have played Hamlet, I have performed open-heart surgery, and I have spoken with Elvis.
...but I have not yet gone to college.
(Kidding of course. As some of you might know, that was a piece called "3A Essay" by Hugh Gallagher with which he, as a high school senior, won a national essay contest, and did indeed submit with his college applications!) [via Google] [audio version]
IN TRUTH: I was born about two hours after Christmas in 1964 and have worked in one branch of education or other since graduating from Va Tech in 1986. I taught biology at Northwest High from July 2008 to June 2011. (I taught Physical Science here a long l o n g time ago, from January to June 1993, then my first daughter was born so I left teaching and became a stay-home dad, and remained one for eight more years and one more daughter. I jumped back into full time teaching at Southwest Middle in 2001, where I taught 8th grade science until June 2008, when I was traded to Northwest for cash and some draft picks.)
I've been married since 1988, have two daughters as I mentioned, and in my spare time, such as it is, I am a relentless and incurable read-a-holic: The New Yorker, some of what has come to be known as "hard" sci-fi (Greg Bear, Neal Stephenson, etc.), a lot of literary and postmodern fiction (whatever postmodern means this week; David Foster Wallace, Richard Powers, Sergio De La Pava, among so many others), a TON of science writing (Malcolm Gladwell, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, John McPhee, Mary Roach, Carl Sagan, etc.), comedians on Twitter/IG/TT, several blogs: I really can't feed my head enough.
TV? Not a lot frankly. Occasionally some SNL, Firefly (which was my go-to Friday video choice when I taught Astro), John Oliver, NOVA, Archer, Sherlock Holmes (Downey/Law, sure, but especially Cumberbatch/Freeman) and any stand-up comedy I can find (Patton Oswalt, Key & Peele, Amy Schumer, John Mulaney, Maria Bamford, Anthony Jeselnik, ancient Bill Hicks and Richard Pryor and George Carlin routines...etc. etc. etc.)
If it's warmer than 55 degrees outside, I'll get a 5-7 mile walk in, and I do that usually 3x a week. I do yoga occasionally, and eat right (meaning of course, Chick-fil-A, Krispy Kreme & Papa John's), play guitar, blog about music and books, write fastidiously (you may have noticed), look at stars and planets with my telescope and at airplanes with my binoculars, get drawn and quartered by my chess apps, and listen to just about every kind of music you can name.
_________________________________________________________________________________
Q. Do we have to carry our textbook every day?
A. Checking out a textbook is OPTIONAL; you will not be issued a book unless you request it from me in class! (Of course I recommend it for the rare occasions you chatted with friends or played on your phone during the class time I gave you to complete an assignment...but again: up to you! ;-) )
_________________________________________________________________________________
Q. Why does every page on this site have the word bull in the URL?
It's a little convoluted, but here goes:
• When I create a list of things I prefer to use bullet points (the big dots) instead of dashes or hyphens.
• I want bullet points highlighting the page names in the Navigation Pane (the list of page links at the top of that big red strip running up the left side of every page.)
• To see bullet points in the Navigation Pane I must include them in each page's title.
• Weebly (or its parent company, Square) creates a page's URL by simply converting its title into a URL.
• A bullet point is not an html character so it won't work in a URL.
• Weebly substitutes the word bull for a bullet point when it creates a page's URL from its name.
_________________________________________________________________________________