Cyber Monday Musings

Today’s post is a glorified sales pitch.  ‘Tis the season, after all.  If you want to get to the punchline, head over to my SubscribeStar page and subscribe for $1/month to unlock all of my SubscribeStar Saturday posts.  For $5/month, you get fresh doodles every Sunday, as well as other random bonuses.  The most recent $5 post included an MP3 of an original composition from Electrock Retrospective, Volume I: Dance Party.  More goodies to come!

Well, the glorious Thanksgiving Week is over.  The blog Didact’s Reach opened today’s post with the observation that this Monday is “doubly terrible”—after four or five days of heavy eating, sleeping, and shopping, nobody wants to be back at the grind.

This morning officially kicks off the busiest two weeks of the school year for yours portly:  a middle school drama production gets into tech rehearsals (and opens) this week, and our big, over-the-top Christmas concert is ten school days away—yikes!  That’s why I call Thanksgiving “the eye of the storm”—the brief calm before the craziness of December hits.  As the tech guy and music teacher at my little school, it’s an unusually busy season.  My online course hits their exam this week, too, so those grades are coming due.

But that’s all tedium that will get done one way or the other.  As for today, it’s Cyber Monday!

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Rationing and Abundance

Today’s post is a SubscribeStar Saturday exclusive.  To read the full post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.  For a full rundown of everything your subscription gets, click here.

Thanksgiving and related observations have been a running theme this week.  Thanksgiving reminds us of how much abundance we truly have.  It’s hard not to recognize when there are tables full of fattening, succulent dishes, enough to rival the feasts of medieval kings.

In spite of that marvelous abundance, however, rationing is still very much a reality.  The inescapable fact of economics—indeed, the whole purpose of the field—is that there are only so many resources to go around, and societies struggle to figure out how best to allocate those resources.

This problem is particularly true when it comes to our most valuable resource:  time.

To read the rest of this post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.

Giving Thanks (and a Sales Pitch)

Thanksgiving Break starts today!  For those of you that don’t work in education, here’s hoping you can enjoy some time off tomorrow and Friday.

I have some exciting, timely news:  my SubscribeStar page hit five subscribers yesterday!  That’s a huge deal, because SubscribeStar requires their “Stars” to have five subscribers before subscriptions automatically renew on a monthly basis.  So, a BIG “Thank You” to my five plucky subscribers.

For those of you interested in subscribing, here’s my Thanksgiving pitcheach Saturday, I post a fresh post for $1/month and up subscribers.  It’s an insanely good value—the price of a large specialty pizza per year—and I write some juicy stuff that I can’t put on the main site.

If you want to get generous and go for $5/month, I’ve recently launched “Sunday Doodles.”  I throw up a couple of my wacky, absurd, grotesque doodles each Sunday, usually with a brief explanation about when/where I doodled them.  Here’s a sample:

Sunday Doodles III, 24 November 2019 - Thanksgiving!.jpg

The SubscribeStar page includes around thirty-five posts at present, with probably thirty of those being essays.  Like this blog, I use that page to write about all kinds of topics, including:

…and, of course, candy apples.

Also, every Fourth of July week is MAGAWeek, which is a week of exclusives only for subscribers.

Now that I’ve turned giving thanks into a lurid bid for your hard-earned cash, let me close by saying that I am, indeed, truly thankful to all of my readers.  Blogging daily this past year has been a challenge at times, but it’s also been a blast.  I’m incredibly thankful for those of you who read the site, and for the great new blogosphere buddies I’ve met along the way.

Thank you for your support, and have a Happy Thanksgiving!

—TPP

Thanksgiving Week!

It’s Thanksgiving Week!  November is flying by; Halloween Week (and Halloween!) seem like yesterday.  Yesterday was a crisp, autumnal day, a brief respite of warmth before cold weather returned to South Carolina this morning.

As a teacher, one of my favorite “weeks” of the school year is this one.  I put “weeks” in quotation marks because, from a teaching perspective, this isn’t truly a “week,” or even a “short week” (four days, such as the Labor Day holiday early in the academic year).  Instead, it’s two days of either cramming in tests and material, or of laconically drifting into the glorious Thanksgiving Break.

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SubscribeStar Saturday: Reflections on Private Education

Today’s post is a SubscribeStar Saturday exclusive.  To read the full post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.

It’s been a long, tough week, especially as some of the ideas from the faculty culture session from a recent teachers’ conference have been percolating in my mind.  The relentless exhaustion of the week took its toll, and has me reflecting on what contributes to making teaching difficult at times.

To read the rest of this post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.

TBT: Why the Hate for Space Force?

An unintended theme of the blog this week has been space, with two posts on our galaxy and our place in it (read “Galaxy Quest” and “Galaxy Quest II“).  One of the first posts I wrote on the blog urged the United States to expand into space.

So I was thrilled, understandably, when President Trump announced the creation of Space Force.  What a brilliant idea—and one that the ten-year old boy in me celebrated right away.  Diligent readers will know that I voted for Newt Gingrich in the 2012 South Carolina Republican Party, and donated $100 to his campaign after he promised to put a colony on the moonby the end of my second term.”

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Galaxy Quest

Our universe is massive—the adverb “unfathomably” usually modifies that descriptor.  It’s an apt adverb—we can’t conceive—fathom—how vast it is.

That said, we manage to possess some picture of our galaxy, the Milky Way, and our neighboring galaxies, even though we will likely never visit them, much less probe them.  So how do we know what the Milky Way looks like, when we’re in it?

Once again, Quora comes to the rescue.  There’s no way to photograph the Milky Way from the outside looking in, because we haven’t put any probes out that far (the pictures of galaxies we see is usually the Andromeda Galaxy, a spiral galaxy like our own).  Voyager 1, which was launched in 1977, exited the Solar System in 2011; astronomically speaking, that’s like getting to the end of the block on your way to the edge of the country.

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Lazy Sunday XXXV: Corporate Grind

Starting today, subscribers to my SubscribeStar page at the $5 level or higher will get an exclusive weekly doodle.  Just another perk of subscribing!

It’s been a very busy Sunday, the exact opposite of lazy. My little school hosts open houses for prospective parents and students about twice a year on Sunday afternoons, and as the go-to tech guy, I have slightly more to prepare than some of the other faculties.

I also play piano in my church on most Sunday mornings now (which I enjoy), and I play with a local jazz big band, which practices on Sunday afternoons (which I also enjoy).  Add it all up, and it made for a busy day.

So, with all that going on, not only is this Lazy Sunday late, it’s also focused on professional life—specifically, the rat race, the nine-to-five, the grind:

  • Meetings are (Usually) a Waste of Time” – One way I know that I’m getting old is that I’ve developed my own “best practices” for meetings.  I’ve sat through tons of pointless, lengthy meetings (and pointlessly lengthy ones), so I’ve come up approaches I attempt to stick to with meetings I run:  keep ’em short, limit it to two or three agenda items, and come in organized.
  • Phone it in Friday IV: Conferencing” – I despise meetings, but I love conferences—if they’re done well.  Just as there are best practices for meetings, there are best practices for conferences:  offer relevant sessions, keep the entire conference short in length, and have some decent food and coffee, appropriate for the length and nature of the conference.  A good conference is an opportunity to learn, network, and re-energize.
  • SubscribeStar Saturday: Culture Matters” – Culture matters!  That was the point of an excellent presentation I attended at the conference that occasioned the post above.  The presentation was specifically about the importance of growing and maintaining a healthy faculty culture, which largely means being thankful for faculty efforts, giving them the option to say no, and preventing burnout.  Read the whole thing with a subscription of just $1 a month!

That’s it!  A short, late Lazy Sunday after a decidedly busy Sabbath.

–TPP

Other Lazy Sunday Installments:

SubscribeStar Saturday: Culture Matters

Today’s post is a SubscribeStar Saturday exclusive.  To read the full post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.

An additional appeal, and an update:  starting tomorrow (Sunday, 10 November 2019), I’ll begin posting a Sunday Doodle for $5 and up subscribers.  I am a prolific doodler (yikes!), and, on the recommendation of my younger brother, I’m going to upload one or two every Sunday, but only to my SubscribeStar page.

The additional appeal:  I need one more subscriber to ensure that subscribers enjoy auto-renewal each month.  SubscribeStar requires five subscribers to enable auto-renewal as an anti-fraud measure.  If you or someone you know would be interested in a subscription, please forward them this link:  https://www.subscribestar.com/the-portly-politico.

Thank you for your support!

—TPP

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Phone it in Friday IV: Conferencing

It’s been a very busy week, and with a slew of lessons and some open mic nighting yesterday—plus an early start this morning—I was unable to get a post written last night to go live this morning.  Further, I attended a teachers’ conference in a city about 90 minutes from my school, so I was unable to sneak in any surreptitious blogging amid sessions.

For tomorrow’s SubscribeStar Saturday post, I’m going to write more about one of the conference sessions I attended, which was about the importance of faculty culture to the functioning of an independent school.  I think it holds within it some important lessons about culture more broadly, and is worth discussing in more detail.

For this evening, though, my time is quite limited, so I thought I would share some general reflections on today’s conference.  I’m scooting off to a very cold pressbox for the evening, from which I’ll be announcing a playoff football game, and getting some hastily-rehearsed singers out onto the field for a brief Veterans’ Day presentation.  When the head of your Board of Directors wants something, he gets it.

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