Sunday Blend

 

I remember back in the day when I was still teaching at Sandpoint High School, it was probably a journalism student---maybe named Tucker---who alerted me to the fact that "the deer are watching you." 

I think the reminder may have been repeated a few times during those days.  Whatever the case, it stuck with me. 

I often think about where the deer may be while they are watching me, but yesterday I knew for a fact. 

Mama Deer was standing right outside our living room window at the bird feeder. 

She wasn't watching all the time, and she even allowed me to tap emphatically on the window without her doing a 180 and prancing away. 

There were sunflower seeds to be consumed, so she had to take a little time out of watching to fill her tummy. 

Anyway, she was mighty close when I snapped this shot---just a window between her and me.

 

No, my camera lens is not dirty.  

Hard to see with the naked eye, but the mirrors in Roxane's arena might be coated with some residue  when horses go trotting or galloping by. 

Yesterday CB and I walked around the arena, which is filled with big mirrors.

I figured that the more time I spend walking him and allowing him to get used to seeing himself in the mirrors, the less distraction it will be for Laurie when she rides him. 

Besides, it was great exercise for me as I added to my Fitbit steps.  

And, CB is definitely a nice pal to hang out with. 

An Education Miracle?

by Sarah Mervosh

in today's New York Times Morning Newsletter

In 2013, Mississippi changed the way reading is taught, embracing the science of reading.” 

Teachers use sound-it-out instruction, known as phonics, and other direct methods, like the explicit teaching of vocabulary. Editor's note:  Hmm. Why does this sound familiar to people my age?

Around the same time, it also raised academic standards and started giving every school a letter grade.

But the state hasn’t simply demanded proficiency, as under No Child Left Behind, which set an unattainable goal of having every child in America be proficient in reading and math. 

Instead, Mississippi has emphasized student growth toward proficiency. Schools get credit when students improve — and double credit for the improvement of their lowest-scoring students. That means every school, rich or poor, has an incentive to help everyone.

The state also approves a list of curriculums, used by most districts. This is not always the case in other states, where decisions are often left up to individual school districts.

And the state doesn’t just punish schools that are struggling, another difference from No Child Left Behind. It also takes a proactive role in helping them.

Take the state’s literacy coaches: They are sent into the elementary schools that have the lowest reading scores each year, with a mission to teach teachers, not children. 

On my visit, I was surprised to find that teachers seemed to love it. That is probably because coaches are there to mentor, not to tattle on bad teachers.

Other states have tried to copy Mississippi, mostly by focusing on the science of reading. But people involved in Mississippi’s turnaround told me it was nearly impossible to cherry-pick strategies and expect results.

“You’ve got to do that and that and that,” said Carey Wright, Mississippi’s state superintendent from 2013 to 2022. “And you have also got to do it year in and year out.”

One criticism of Mississippi’s approach is that it revolves around standardized testing.

I visited the elementary school in Hazlehurst, a rural area south of Jackson where more than half of children live in poverty. Students there take tests every two weeks, a greater frequency than even the state recommends.

There was also plenty of joy. I saw preschoolers sounding out letters into toy telephones, and second graders coaching one another on how to sound out words like “disappointment.” 

One 10-year-old named Johnny told me about the satisfaction he feels from learning: “If I make a bad grade but I’m going up, it’s like a staircase.”

A big question now is whether Mississippi can keep going in the face of declining test scores nationally. 

At Hazlehurst, scores have climbed to 35 percent of students reading on grade level, compared with 12 percent a decade ago.

No miracle, but real progress.

📗📘📙📚📕📖

Bridie and I walked through the woods south of the house this morning. 

We apparently were not alone.  

Fresh coon tracks headed from west to east. 

I love raccoons but hope that this coon, and any friends, doesn't discover the bird-feeding area.

Wise and Comforting Thoughts in Uncomfortable Times 

by Dick Ragland

Dick Ragland graduated from Sandpoint High School in 1962, the same year as my brother Mike. 

A little math will tell you that Dick is 80 something. 

In the past year he has logged "roughly 47,000 air miles since leaving Medellin, Colombia."  These travels have taken him to around 15 countries in North and South America, Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Europe. 

I don't know Dick's entire story, but I do know that I have followed him in his travels via Facebook and that he truly inspires me, not only in what he has done for a man his age but also for his ability to put together wise words into wise sentences. 

You'll see an example of the latter in Dick's post (below) from this morning.

Thank you, Dick, for your thoughts and for allowing me to share them.  

Lately I’ve been noticing how tired the world feels.

So many people — all over, not just in one place — are worn down, confused, stressed, and wondering if things will ever feel lighter again.

I see it especially in people who are brave enough to say it out loud. And I get it. I really do. 

Life can pile up in ways that make you feel alone even when you’re surrounded by others.

I just want to say this, simply and without pretending to have answers:

You are not weak for feeling this way. You are not broken. And you are not alone.

Most of us are carrying more than we let on. We’re all trying to make sense of things, one day at a time, often without a map. 

Sometimes the best we can do is keep showing up, keep breathing, keep choosing small acts of care — for ourselves and for each other.

If you’re struggling right now, I see you.

If you’re tired, that makes sense.

If you feel like you’ve lost your footing, you’re not the only one.

We’re all in this together, even when it doesn’t feel like it. 

And sometimes just knowing that someone else understands can make the load a little lighter.

💜💛💚💙💓

Saturday Slight

Pretty foggy out there this morning, and as daylight comes, the fog is even more noticeable. 

I'm guessing that when it lifts, we'll have a nice day ahead. 

Bill is heading into Spokane to watch a Lady ZAGS game.  The dogs and I will hang out at home, and I may spend some time with the horses. 

It's nice to have a break in the weather clean-up that has dominated this past week. 

Barbara and Laurie Tibbs, Dolly Crum, Marianne Love. Doug Crum

Five retired educators met for lunch in Bonners Ferry yesterday. 

Two drove over from Libby, while three sisters among the educators drove from Sandpoint.

Common denominator:  horses. 

Dolly and Doug Crum spent their teaching careers in Libby, both specializing in physical education and coaching.  Doug coached wrestling. 

If I recall correctly, Dolly even served as athletic director at Libby High School.  Doug was a wrestling coach.

She also arranged for me to visit her high school and the Libby library when I was still doing author events for my books.  

Dolly has been a horse lover her entire life, so you can imagine that she and Barbara and Laurie have plenty in common. 

It was a fun visit, especially for me because I had not had seen the Crums for a number of years.  

We met at Kootenai River Brewing Co., where the food was great as usual.

Twas definitely a welcome January getaway for all involved. 

💚💙💜  

 

 Yesterday, we did talk about horses and ZAGS and Internet scams AND getting older.  A common problem united us on the "getting older" topic. 

In fact, in both cars, as they were headed to Bonners Ferry, the occupants lamented the problem of getting down to perform a task and then figuring out how the heck to get up again. 

It seems to be a universal dilemma after we reach a certain age. 

At least, we're still figuring out rising-up solutions on our own and not yet to the point of being props for the TV ad, "I've fallen and I can't get up." 

I'm sure our time will come. 

💙💜💛💚

Considering the above topic, I zeroed in on the following paragraphs in the New York Times newsletter earlier today. 

 

The older we get, the more comfortable and calcified we get in our preferences and quirks. 

We like things the way we like them — the thermostat at 68 and not a degree warmer, the aisle seat, steak medium-rare but closer to medium, don’t talk to me until I’ve had my coffee. 

This self-knowledge is comforting, and central to forming an identity, but it’s also limiting. 

We are used to controlling our environments, to minimizing variables so that we can avoid discomfort.

“No hothouse-flowering,” I’ll silently admonish myself when I notice I’m making my life smaller because of some arcane preference, behaving like an exotic plant that needs too much coddling. 

Usually it has something to do with my physical comfort — if my levels of hunger, body temperature, caffeination and restedness are not calibrated, I might be grumpy, I might decline a social invitation. 

Our grip on our preferences can be so tight that our lives constrict around it.

Wonder if any of these trends look familiar to anyone out there.  I'll raise my hand to "aisle seats" and to the somewhat related tendency of operating the thermostat. 

In our house, it's a dueling event  

I turn it up.  Bill turns it down.

In both cases, there are never witnesses to the respective acts.  

It's a unspoken finger conversation we have every day, and I have a feeling that conversation may never end until we do. 

So, just curious about the absolutes that rule your lives. 

Some hay-field trails.  

I've kept them open after each snow, and it's so nice for walking the dogs. 

Guess that's enough of today's mutterings.  

Have a wonderful Saturday.  

I know I will because I'll have the thermostat all to myself for most of the day. 😇😉

It's Friday, Maybe

 

Every once in a while I have to remind myself what day of the week it is.

The holidays and the days ZAGS games are played and Annie's comings and goings have tended to confuse my mental calendar. 

It used to be that ZAGS games would be played pretty regularly on Tuesdays, Thursdays or Saturdays. 

Nowadays, they might happen on a Sunday afternoon or a Monday or a Friday. 

When they start halfway into our beauty-rest hours, that really gets crazy. 

Those of us who have been programmed to these set schedules get thrown into chaos whenever that schedule varies. 

And, with Annie, sometimes she leaves to go back to Seattle on a Sunday; rarely on a Saturday. 

When Bill took her back to the airport on a Saturday after Christmas, it didn't matter.  I was firmly in Sunday mode and then had to do my Sunday all over again the next day.   

Those changes throw us off with ease. Besides, when one retires, every day is a Saturday, right? 

While on this subject, I'm going to tell you a story today about a basketball game in the past week (on a Saturday) that really disordered my mind. 

Happily, I discovered later that younger minds have had the same experience.

Willie's Bulldogs went to Wenatchee on Jan. 1 for a three-day tournament. 

We were able to stream the games, thanks to Hudl.com. 

The Bulldogs won their first game, which was against Sequim that Thursday afternoon.

On Friday, they didn't do so well against Cheney.  That was kinda okay because my friend Marian, a Blackhawk alum, was happy. 

On the final tournament day--a Saturday--I had my laptop all ready in the morning and tuned in to the Hudl link for the afternoon game against Wenatchee. 

I use the laptop so I can put it on top of Bridie's crate and Bill can watch the game too. 

Game time came.  As had happened every prior day, there seemed to be some stupid glitch getting into the live action. 

So, I pulled out my phone, clicked on the link and kept it going while trying to figure out the problem on the laptop.  There was no figuring to be done.  I never could get into the stream for the Wenatchee-Sandpoint game. 

So, I gave up in disgust and continued to watch the game on my phone, occasionally announcing the score to Bill.   The Bulldogs were doing very well throughout each quarter. 

As soon as the game ended, I proudly posted the score and news of the victory on Facebook. 

A few minutes after that, Daily Bee sports reporter Max Oswald, diplomatically corrected my score (56-40) to 51-39, adding "great win." 

Upon seeing that, I wondered how my score could be so far off and finally rationalized that it was due to the small screen on my phone. 

As is typical for me, the mistake with the score gnawed at me occasionally for the next few days, but that's as far as it went UNTIL I read Max's account of the game in the Daily Bee a few days later. 

What I read was stunning because he wrote that the Bulldogs had recovered from a dramatic deficit at the beginning of the game. 

No way, I thought.  They led the entire time. 

I eventually commented to Bill while handing him the paper that Max's report in no way resembled the game I had watched. 

While mulling this over, I again wondered why my score had differed so much from Max's. 

A lightbulb flashed through my troubled mind.  I acted upon it almost immediately, checking past scores for the Bulldogs.  

Mystery solved.  

I had watched the wrong game---the entire wrong game.  That Saturday afternoon I had once again watched the Sandpoint-Sequim game, which had been played on Thursday.  The final score was 56-40. 

The moral of this story is that if you stream via Hudl, be careful what you're watching.  Hudl keeps all past games in their entirety and you can watch them any ol' time.  

If you hit the wrong button, you'll see live action, but you'd better look closer.  You won't hear much commentary unless the announcer's voice comes through clearly, which is not always the case. 

As Annie says, "I always look for Willie" to make sure she has the right game.  I do the same, but Willie was in the game on Saturday just like he was in the game on Thursday. 

What perpetuated the problem was context. I had been trying to get the laptop version to work for a few minutes at the beginning of the game before finally relying on the phone. I had missed anything that would have given me a clue.  

Plus, the gyms---they're in Wenatchee, and there was nothing I would recognize in the setting to tell me something was amiss. 

So, in the end in my living room, Sandpoint played Sequim twice last week and ironically won by the same score in each game.

After reading the Daily Bee story, I confessed my stupidity to Max who must have thought I was totally crazy when I posted the wrong score.  Lucky for me the Bulldogs won that game, even if I had the wrong score. 

I forwarded my written confession to Max on to my daughter-in-law Debbie, who quickly eased my mind that I may not be ready yet for the looney bin.

"I get it," she said, explaining a Hudl experience she had had earlier in the season.  

That evening Debbie had been relaying scores to me because I wasn't aware the game was being streamed.   She also made some comments on the play-by-play that didn't quite match what we see in usual Bulldog play.  

When I hadn't heard from her for a while and was curious about the final score, she confessed to me:  she finally realized she had been watching the Junior Varsity game all along. 

 Gotta be careful if you stream with Hudl. 

Of course, we know that in the current world anything goes when it comes to seeing what we see and hearing what we hear. 

What looks like our garbage may be another person's treasure in the new reality. It's all in the perspective. 

So, maybe I'm totally in fashion watching the wrong game and reporting the wrong score. 

What day is it anyway?

Happy _________?

  

I'll confess that I nodded off through part of this but was definitely watching the right game.