Olio

I'm especially fond of this word as it is the name of my college's yearbook, The Olio.  The word is not part of "margarine," as in "oleomargarine" ("oleo").  Olio means "a miscellaneous collection of things."  That's what this blog post will be.

I am reminded this AM of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner, specifically, the lines, "Water, water everyone and all the boards did shrink.  Water, water everywhere nor any drop to drink."  Last night's rain really taxed our already water-logged yards, rivers, lakes, etc.  On a run at the state park earlier this week, the river was already (before last night's deluge) over the boat launches.  Docks on the lake across the street are underwater.  Our backyard, already soggy and able to be mowed only twice so far this spring, has standing water.  The next door neighbor's yard is half under water, worse than I've ever seen it.  And the major road heading out of our subdivision was flooded over for only the second time I remember in 33 years.  Back in April, Michael was worried if our yard would dry out in time for his graduation open house.  I scoffed, noting it was April and eight weeks from his shindig.  Hmmm......  Maybe he knew something.

This is the first spring/summer I'm not coaching or helping to coach a baseball team in 11 or 12 years.  I tried to figure how many "seasons" I've coached baseball (not to mention football, basketball, gym hockey, or even pillow polo!).  As close as I can figure, it's about 42 or 43 years.  That includes the 10 years or so at the high school and my kids' and grandkids' teams.  Some years I coached two teams simultaneously and at least two years had three teams on my plate in the same season.  This year Michael wanted to play, but we couldn't find a local team and half-heartedly tried to create our own.  Five or six was the most players we could recruit.  So now we just go take BP for fun.

I re-read (for the third or fourth time) the book Teaching:  What We Do.  It's a book of about a dozen essays by Amherst professors.  It was written in the '90 and about half of the inclusions are from my professors.  I have said this a lot in the past--this book should be required reading for all aspiring teachers.  It includes thoughts about teaching and learning, drawing up lesson plans, specific subject/discipline matter, formulating assignments and tests, etc.  One of my English professors was also a student at Amherst, of course, long before I was there.  He wrote about "sometimes impossible questions about thinking, meaning, knowing......"  I'm pretty sure most students, surely me, when given such assignments didn't realize that "In English, as in life, it's by arriving at our borders that we discover ourselves."  My physics professor wrote of devising first assignment questions that "set the values" for physics and the course.  This is something I do in all of my history courses, regardless of specifics, that is American or World or Michigan, Ancient or Modern.  I try to set the "rules" of history, including types of sources and their reliability/trustworthiness, bias/prejudice, "guessing" as in gaps in knowledge, etc.

More of an aside than anything, one of the older professors, also an Amherst graduate, wrote, "I'm strongly prejudiced against the notion that education at Amherst has improved over the past few decades."  He cites the old vs the new curricula.  He sees a weakness in the new curriculum, as a sort of "pluralism" that tries to be everything to everyone.  Defending the old curriculum, under attack in recent decades before being changed, a curriculum derided as "boot camp," he cites, "Nobody has ever suggested that the US Marines are not well-trained."  Indeed.

Over the years I've heard people claim they are "social liberals, but fiscal conservatives."  And I was reminded of this twice in recent weeks.  That, being "social liberals but fiscal conservatives," has puzzled me.  How can that be?  Don't "social liberal" policies require tons and tons of money?  How does that mesh with "fiscal conservatism?"  Maybe I'm missing something.  Or do people make such claims merely because they heard that phrase and thought that it makes them seem more caring or more intelligent?  (And, of course, claiming to care is far more important than doing anything to prove it.)  Perhaps, though, I just don't understand.

In the past week I've read of two or three attempts, at the state and federal levels, to ban former legislators (US members of Congress, members of the state legislature) from becoming lobbyists upon leaving their legislative bodies.  Apparently this has drawn bi-partisan support.  But aren't there problems with this, including infringement upon First Amendment rights?  Just as important, if such lobbying (by former legislative colleagues) is so nefarious, if such bipartisan legislators find such lobbying so repulsive, why don't  they ignore it?  Why don't they refuse to deal with these lobbyists?  Although the posturing seems obvious, I can think of a number of reasons they don't unilaterally, personally write such lobbyists out of their own pictures.  Heh Heh......