How I Spend This Day Of Summer Vacation

Gotta love adapting cliches for titles of posts.

I am taking a two day workshop "How to Think Like Da Vinci" from USF. During the course of the day, we had to come up with 100 questions.

I tried to be snarky and asked, "What can one do to survive a zombie apocalypse?" I also tried to be profound and asked, "What practice that is accepted now will future generations view in the same way that we view slavery?" I released my inner curmudgeon and asked, "Why soccer?" I even went for the counter-factual, "What would have happened if the South has successfully seceded?" (I hope I get bonus points for alliteration.) That counter-factual question led to another: "What would Da Vinci have been able to do with computer technology?"

Imagine my chagrin when I clicked on Bob Mercer's blog and found a profound and practical question that I had never considered. Mercer reports that South Dakota has only 479 millionaires and asks, "What would need to be done to have 10 times that many by 2020?"

I think that I'll turn in 101 questions; What's the format for citing a political blog?

Summer By The Numbers

Students show up on Thursday, so I thought I'd review my summer.  I also thought I would try to quantify things instead of merely assert them.  Here is a dirty dozen description of my summer.

0 Days I slept in until 10 am (I feel cheated.)

1 Trip to visit my mother

1 Family gathering with my wife's side of the family

1 Week spent coaching at National Forensic League National Debate Tournament.

1 Week spent lecturing at South Dakota State University Debate Camp

3 Afternoon naps. (I feel cheated.)

19 Times I concluded Colin Cowherd wants to become the Rush Limbaugh of sports talk radio.

31 Days in July that were too hot and humid.

63 Hours spent reading books or comics (I feel cheated.)

179 Blog posts.

433 Hours planning changes or worrying about not being ready for the first day of school.

1297 Hours looking at a computer screen. (I would have gotten out more but July was too hot and humid.)

Getting Ready: What I Learned during Summer Vacation, Part 1

The letter came last week, the one that welcomes teachers back to a new school year and announces the meeting schedule.

I am not ready; I don't want to go back. I didn't accomplish anything, nor did I refresh myself in any meaningful way; so I decided to assign myself a short series of essays about the summer to see if I can find something to build on to have a productive school year and avoid having the same problems in the future. It's a variation of the cliche essay "How I Spent My Summer Vacation."

The first thing that I learned is that I, like everyone else, am a creature of habit who repeats mistakes. This isn't the first summer that I've wasted. I have wasted more time this summer than I have in past summers, but that waste is really a difference of degree not a substantive change in habit.

The second thing that I learned is that time matters. I can't get the months back. They are irretrievably gone. I have always known that wasting time is costly, but now that I'm older with an AARP card with all rights and privileges that membership, the fact that wasted time is indeed lost time has become frightening.

The logical conclusion is that I must change. I remember a Linda Ellerbee commentary on NBC Overnight a long, long time ago. She claimed that the real time of new beginnings was September, the start of the new school year, not December. I hope she's right, but that hope brings me to the last thing that I learned this summer. I'm not sure that I know how to change. I guess I'm going through the ennui that makes rich guys buy motorcycles and marry trophy wives. Maybe they buy trophy wives too; I'm not a rich guy, so I don't know.

I think that's what I learned. I have a few additions to "My Summer Vacation" assignment that I want to get to, but none of them fit here, so I'll save them for another post. For right now, I've got to get ready for the new school year. I probably should see if Ellerbee is right and try to make September the time of new beginnings instead of waiting for December.