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I watch Gilmore Girls. There. The dirty little secret is out. In fact it is on right now. What would motivate me to divulge this bit of D.O.M.-dom?

In the show tonight they mention a tradition of rubbing the toe on a statue of Dwight Woolsey. I checked on line and found that this is a very recent tradition. According to http://www.yalealumnimagazine.com/issues/98_03/talltales.html:

One of the most striking testaments to the mythmaking powers of tour guides is Theodore Dwight Woolsey’s toe. Some time in the last ten years, someone invented a “tradition” of rubbing the toe of the Woolsey statue on the Old Campus for luck, explaining that students employ this practice before exams. Similar traditions exist at many other institutions, but it’s difficult to find an alumnus over the age of 30 who has ever heard about President Woolsey’s toe. Nevertheless, tour guides spread the story diligently, inviting visitors to give it a try themselves. As a result, the statue, the rest of which is a dull gray-green, has a left toe that has been rubbed shiny, and the story seems for all practical purposes as old as the statue itself.

This struck me as odd because my Alma Mater, Eastern Kentucky University, Has a much longer tradition of rubbing the toe on a statue of Daniel Boone. According to http://www.library.eku.edu/collections/sca/boone.htm that statue was placed there in 1967. I first went to Eastern in 1977 and it was already an old tradition then. I have to assume it started soon after the old boy was placed there. (I didn’t research those “similar traditions at other institutions.” Some of them probably date back even further.) Those Yale posers! They even rub Woolsey’s LEFT toe, the same one is forward on Daniel and bears the polish of all those wishes for luck on exams. Or just to get lucky….

I’ve been working on National Board Certification for the last two years. We got our most recent scores on Friday the 19th and I was disappointed to find that I still don’t have enough points. I have one more year to rewrite and resubmit (and repay for) some of the sections. My first reaction is that I know I can do this, but part of me wants to just drop it and move on to other pursuits.

I do have encouragement from a couple coworkers to keep going and if I get certified it should mean more that it did not come easily to me. Some of the procedures are rather tedious though, and I don’t handle tedium well.

Tangential rant: A couple guys that I play racquetball with are eye doctors. To maintain their license they have to earn credits through classes and seminars. We teachers have to do that too. But here is a description of one of the ways they can earn some of those points: They go to a ski resort in Colorado. They attend lectures 7-9AM and 4-6PM. The lectures are often given by college professors. The rest of the time they are on their own to ski or whatever. A couple weeks later they get the exam in the mail. They go over any notes they took and call each other on the phone and help each other answer all the test questions. Then they mail it in.

I know that it isn’t easy to become a doctor of any sort and it’s not easy to maintain a practice. I can tell you that being a teacher is no picnic either and we don’t get any ski-weekend seminars to maintain our certificates….

This photo is from my nephew, Adam, who is currently in South Korea on a Fulbright Scholarship. He has a few very surreal images in his most recent album. His caption for this one: “Before you ask, No Dad, there’s nothing under the skirt.”

A former student of mine was a guest in a math class for Teach-In at our school yesterday. He stopped by to say hello afterwards. I have to admit that, while I recognized his name, I don’t really remember him well and would not have recognized him as a former student. (It was over a dozen years ago….)

I figure I have had over 3,000 students in my classes over the years and had less direct contact with several thousand more. I’ll never remember them all. In fact, I sometimes see students in the hallway and know that they were in one of my classes just last year but not be able to recall their name right away. I’m sorry.

The following numbers are from an OCPS publication. Orange County Public Schools is the 5th largest school district in Florida and is now the 12th largest out of more than 16,000 in the nation. The school system owns 4,503 acres acres of property. We have over 174,000 students in 155 schools. Students in Orange County schools come from 230 countries and speak 165 languages and dialects. There are 20,550 full time employees and over 3500 part time. More than 35% of OCPS teachers have advenced degrees. The operating budget for the district is over $1.1 billion.

The numbers that really blow me away are the diversity of our students. Can you even name 230 countries or 165 languages and dialects? This population is far more diverse than where I grew up. And that’s one of the things that keeps it interesting….

Sculpture in Louisville’s Riverfront Park that looks rather alien.

I’ve thrown together a web site for my Tai Chi class. I just used a template to get something up quickly. And I snapped a few photos yesterday to put up there. I did a little research on documented health benefits — there is a lot more anecdotal than clinical, but that’s gradually changing.

I’ve been studying with Master Chang for over two years. He’s really amazing — 77 years old and teaching because he really likes it.

http://WinterParkTaiChi.com/

I was reminded yesterday of an episode of Charlie Rose (that I saw on one of the hurricane days when I was home and had electricity). He was interviewing Muhammad Yunus, founder of the Grameen Bank. I’ve added his book, _Banker to the Poor_, to my list for my next trip to the bookstore.

The following is from a profile on the Grameen web site:

Tbc terrible man-made famine of 1974, which by some estimates killed 1.5 million Bangladeshis, changed his life for ever. “While people were dying of hunger on the streets, I was teaching elegant theories of economics. I started hating myself for the arrogance of pretending I had answers. We university professors were all so intelligent, but we knew absolutely nothing about the poverty surrounding us. Why did people who worked 12 hours a day, seven days a week, not have enough food to eat? I decided that the poor themselves would be my teachers. I began to study them and question them on their lives.”

Yunus spent most of 1975 and 1976 leading his students on field trips to the nearby village of Jobra. It was easy to see the problem, but what was the solution? He introduced improved rice-farming techniques and established a farmers’ cooperative to irrigate during the dry season. Soon he realised that targeting farmers was not helping the truly destitute underclass — the landless, assetless, rural poor.

Then he made his big discovery. One day, interviewing a woman who made bamboo stools, he learnt that, because she had no capital of her own, she had to borrow the equivalent of 15p to buy raw bamboo for each stool made. After repaying the middleman, she kept only a lp profit margin. With the help of his graduate students, he discovered 42 other villagers in the same predicament.

“Their poverty was not a personal problem due to laziness or lack of intelligence, but a structural one: lack of capital. The existing system made it certain that the poor could not save a penny and could not invest in bettering themselves. Some money-lenders set interest rates as high as 10 per cent a month, some 10 per cent a week. So, no matter how hard these people worked, they would never raise themselves above subsistence level. What was needed was to link their work to capital to allow them to amass an economic cushion and earn a ready income.”

And so the idea of credit for the landless was born. Yunus’s first approach was to reach into his pocket and lend each of the 42 women the equivalent of A317 [about $27]. He set no interest rate and no repayment date: “I didn’t think of myself as a banker, but as the liberator of 42 families.”

That humble beginning grew the Grameen Bank that according to http://www.grameen-info.org/bank/index.html

As of July, 2004, it has 3.7 million borrowers, 96 percent of whom are women. With 1267 branches, GB provides services in 46,000 villages, covering more than 68 percent of the total villages in Bangladesh.