MrJsn

I'm at a crossroad in my life. I've been teaching for nearly 20 years now and the accumulated stress of this job is starting to show up in my physical health. Not to mention, for the most part, the job itself is pretty egregious. The pressures of administrative initiatives that seem pointless at the time but are regarded as imperative, only to be replaced a few years later with the new purportedly better initiative that is equally impractical and ineffective. This leads to excessive and unessential paperwork that consumes the limited time that teachers do have during the day to work on other things, like preparing more engaging lessons for their students. In addition, there seems to be a cultural resentment towards teachers that can likely be traced back to individual negative experiences in education from our own early lives, myself included. I can understand the public opinion that our system is broken, but as teachers, we are removed from the decision making processes that l...

I've been experimenting with making music lately. For decades I have wanted to be a professional musician. I never really tried to "make it". I more or less dreamed about making it, but never really tried to do the stuff required of me to actually make it. In fairness, I have been trying to make it as a father for the last 20 years and so my focus was on trying to provide a stable income. In addition, my wife was disabled in 2005 with a traumatic brain injury and doesn't work as a result, so my hands have been full. So this about a month ago I set out on a journey to really go for it. I set out to make an album in time for my 47th birthday. This date is a bit arbitrary, but if I am being truthful, we were invited to a wedding that is set to happen two days after my birthday this year. At this wedding, I will be seeing a lot of people that are childhood friends and really close family friends. What I didn't want to do is show up with nothing to report. I didn't...

It’s summer on the East Coast, which means small waves and warm water temps. We have had a somewhat surprising July in the respect that we did have waist to chest high swell for a couple of weeks earlier in the month. Even more surprising is the fact that I've ended up body surfing more than stand up surfing during this time. Currently I only have one car, so any surfboard that I bring to the beach has to go on the roof racks. This time of year, my family usually wants to go to the beach too. So basically, if I go to the beach with my family and the waves suck, I now have to deal with dragging the surfboard around. My daughter is to blame for all of this though. She had a friend who had a body surfing hand board. I remember seeing old school versions being made out of ply wood like materials, but this was a new take on it. She ended up getting one for her birthday. Then I used her board, wanted one too and then got one for myself. I already had swim fins, just like my daughter did,...