Unbust a Move

Dialogue in the Timmins living room during the new Young MC-accompanied Verizon commercial:

Jordan: What are you doing?

Me: I'm busting a move.

Jordan: Well, stop it. You look like a spastic turtle.

Brett: Jordan, once a move has been busted, you can't unbust it.

In Support of Southeast Polk's Ag Department

The following is an email I sent out to my colleagues today in support of Southeast Polk High School's Agricultural Education program. I truly believe that our ag ed program is what education should be all about.


To my 8th grade colleagues,

With your Advisory materials this week, you received a letter from Southeast Polk FFA President Brett Timmins about the ag ed presentation this Friday during Advisory. I would like to encourage you to promote this presentation to your students because of how beneficial FFA and agricultural education have been for Brett.

Brett signed up for an ag class and joined FFA as a freshman mainly so she could show in the Iowa State Fair FFA swine show, but she got much more from her Southeast Polk ag experience than just the opportunity to show her pigs. FFA has taught her invaluable leadership, interpersonal, speaking and critical thinking skills. She has become a better student and a more confident young woman through her classes, through FFA competitions, and through experiences like the FFA National Convention and the Washington Leadership Conference. She has learned a lot about not only agricultural economics, but also her own personal finances through her supervised agricultural experiences (SAE).

Over winter break, Brett received her acceptance letter from Iowa State University (yes, I know, but it's OK), where she is going to become an ag teacher and FFA adviser. I couldn't be prouder than I am as the father of a Cyclone (no, seriously, I mean it), and I couldn't be more grateful to Matt Eddy  and the Southeast Polk ag ed program for what they have done for my daughter.

It's Always Something

"Well, Jane, it just goes to show you: It's always something. If it's not one thing, it's another."

--Gilda Radner as Roseanne Rosannadanna

Gilda could have been talking about the Timmins family in the last few days. It sure seems like a lot of things have decided to pile on us at once.

The first "one thing" happened Wednesday afternoon. Barb called me at school because she had received a call from the school nurse telling her that Jordan had been in her office for the last hour, and was suffering from a mysterious pain on her right side. When I picked her up, the nurse said she thought Jordan may have strained something in her rib cage. A trip to the Mercy East Medical Center gave us a much different and entirely unexpected diagnosis: Jordan has shingles. By the time we filled a prescription for Valtrex and Tylenol with codeine at the Target pharmacy, Jordan reported that she felt like someone was "stabbing me in the side with a bayonet." 

I stayed home with her the following morning, then went  to school because Barb would be home during the afternoon. After school, one of our sows was in labor with our first litter of pigs of the year. After giving her a shot of oxytocin, I ended up pulling the first pig. He was huge, far bigger than a normal-sized piglet and too large for the sow's cervix. He was also the last pig she would deliver. She managed to move the second pig up the birth canal far enough that I could easily reach into her and get my fingers around the pig's head. Unfortunately, the head is the only part of it I could I could move past the cervix, as its shoulders prevented me from moving it any further. After working on it for close to five hours, trying every idea that Barb, my dad and I could think of, the sow and I were both exhausted. We decided to let her rest, hope that somehow she managed to deliver the pig by morning, and if she didn't, call the vet to see what he could do.

Friday morning arrived with the pig still lodged inside of the sow, and Doc Hormann didn't have any better luck with it than I did. He gave us two options: deliver the pigs by C-section, or let the sow re-absorb the pigs that were still inside of her. He recommended the latter. The sow never got very big during her pregnancy, and she didn't appear to have enough pigs in her to warrant the expense and risk of surgery. We took his recommendation, so for the first time since the Timmins farm started farrowing pigs over 30 years ago, we have a pig who is an only child. The sow is getting 20 cc's of antibiotics a day for the next five days in hopes of fighting any sickness caused by the now dead fetuses inside of her and any infections she may get from our unsuccessful efforts to get the second pig out.

It was a crazy couple of days, but things are starting to calm down, as they always do. Jordan is still hurting from the shingles, and the sow is still hurting from her trauma. However, the second litter came this morning (although I'm not sure if one pig can be correctly called a litter, so maybe this morning's pigs are the first). This sow has 12 strong, healthy pigs nursing on her, and we're feeling much better about the swine business. Now if we can get Jordan through the shingles, all will be well with the world, at least until our next Roseanne Rosannadanna experience.

The Waiting

Don't wait for it to happen. Don't even want it to happen. Just watch what does happen. 

--Sean Connery as Jim Malone in The Untouchables

One of my favorite Facebook jokes is to reply "That's always the hardest part" anytime I see anyone post "is waiting" as his or her status. I'm sure most people would think posting the same Tom Petty reference over and over would become tedious, but it amuses me every time I do it.

That may be in part because there is some truth to those words. Waiting is hard. The anticipation of something good can often lead to an expectational build-up that reality has trouble competing with, while the knowledge of an impending problem or pain can often be worse than the actual situation associated with it. 

We're experiencing that right now with the pigs. Our first sow was due to have her litter on Monday and, as of 5:00 this evening, was still conspicuously pigless, as were the other three sows shut up in the farrowing house with her. We were really hoping for her to start yesterday, when the snow day would have made taking care of the new babies convenient, then we predicted that she would have them last night after the temperature dropped and the trip to the barn would have involved braving sub-zero windchill factors. (Swine gestation is approximately 114 days, which can be translated to 3 months, 3 weeks, 3 days, 3 a.m. and 3 below.)

As of this writing, the waiting continues. Hopefully, when the pigging starts, everything will be nice and easy for the sows, and the waiting really will have been the hardest part.

Rob 2.0

Time may change me, but I can't trace time.

--David Bowie

"Changes"

Teaching Computer Applications is my second teaching career. As I usually tell my students sometime during the first week of class, I am really an English teacher. That's what my degree from the University of Iowa and my teaching license say, anyway. It's what I taught for the first 10 years of my career, starting at Stuart-Menlo High School where I was the English department for grades 10-12 for a year, then at Valley High School in West Des Moines for five years, and finally for four years at Southeast Polk Junior High.

When I had an opportunity to switch to computers, I jumped at it. I was ready for something new and different, and to be honest, the subject matter in junior high English classes isn't nearly as interesting as Creative Writing and Modern American Lit, my favorite classes to teach at Valley.

Strangely enough, even though I like the subject matter of high school English better than junior high English, I learned that I enjoyed teaching seventh graders more than teaching high school students. Junior high students, especially seventh graders, still have an innocence about them, even when they are acting like hormones with feet. I can't imagine walking into a class of juniors wearing the headphones from their computers, pretending to be airline pilots, but I have done just that with my seventh graders.

From time to time, someone will ask me if I will ever go back to teaching English. The answer is maybe, but if I do, it will be as a high school teacher. For now, however, I'm having fun spending my day with seventh graders, so I don't plan on making that change anytime in the near future.

Snow Days

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep. 

--Robert Frost

"Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening"

Brett's been discouraged lately by the thought that we might get through this school year without any snow days. She's a senior, so she wouldn't have to make them up at the end of the school year, and she is convinced that the stars or fate or karma or the Channel 13 First Alert Weather Team has conspired with Mother Nature to make sure that she puts in every single day of class on this year's Southeast Polk calendar.

It's funny how different people react to snow days. I'm sure for many, snow days are a pain, an obstacle to whatever work needs to be done. I know I have colleagues who hate them, since every day we take off for weather from November through April has to be made up at the end of May, or even the beginning of June if we have enough of them. I can understand their objections. At face value, it does seem better to be out of school on a warm, sunny spring day than when the hounds of winter are howling outside.

Still, I love snow days. At our house, they tend to be lazy, relaxing days when we hang out in our pajamas, watch movies and play games together. Snow days bring with them the aroma of chili or chicken noodle soup in the crock pot, and the comfort of an afternoon nap in the recliner. So often, our lives seem incredibly rushed during the week as we go from school and work to chores to other activities. Snow days are the opposite: things seem to go in slow-motion as we slow down and enjoy as a family the fact that the weather is more powerful than the Google calendar.

So tomorrow morning, when my alarm goes off at 5:30, I will start my day off like I'm sure many of my students will, by turning on the TV and checking the messages on my phone in hopes of seeing those magical words: Southeast Polk Closed.

Don't Stop Believing

A couple of years ago, I bought a guitar. I had always wanted to learn to play, but for a variety of reasons had never put much effort into it. But when one of our band teachers switched over to teaching Fine Arts and then asked if I wanted to come to his classroom once or twice a week for lessons, I decided it was time.

In the two years since, I've learned enough chords to sing quite a few of my favorite songs, one of which (Barenaked Ladies "If I Had a Million Dollars") I even managed to turn into an Excel project that I kicked off by playing and singing it for my seventh grade computer students.

Even so, no one is going to accuse me of being a good guitarist. And that's all right, because it's not necessary to excel at everything you enjoy. I look at a lot of things I enjoyed as a kid, and I sometimes wonder if we have sucked all of the joy out of them by making competition more important than enjoyment.

On an annual basis, I have a discussion with a dancer who insists that dance is a sport. (Disclaimer: dance is not an activity I participated in as a kid. Ask any poor girl who was unlucky enough to be my partner when I was with the Old Gold Singers at Iowa, and she will tell you that I never had a single dance lesson growing up.) When I say that dance isn't a sport, the dancer is inevitably offended and launches into an explanation of how physically demanding dance is. This is how the conversation always happens. Then I explain that I'm not saying that dance is not a sport as a put-down; it's not a sport because dance is art. Personally, and I say this as a sports-lover whose mental health is determined far too much by the success level of the Iowa Hawkeye football team every fall, I believe that labeling dance as a sport is demeaning to dance.

The same goes for music. I love to sing, and I sing well, but any instrument involving much finger coordination has always confounded me. Still, I strum a few simple chords on my guitar, and sing songs recorded by some of the most amazing musicians to ever record: the Beatles, the Stones, Barenaked Ladies, Tom Petty, and so on. And later this month, depending on what song we choose, I may play guitar while singing for a faculty garage band at a junior high talent show. There's a Journey song that the kids get as excited about at school dances now as they did when the band first recorded it back in the 80s, and the rhythm guitar part consists of simple power chords. I've always wanted to front a rock band, and while this won't exactly be Madison Square Garden, I'm still excited.

Don't stop believing, baby!