JuicyLesson 267: Starting off with Music from Bob Dylan & Mark Knopfler and Some Photos From Ontario … Fear and Loathing at a Private School; Some Anecdotal Evidence …

Starting off with some live music from Bob Dylan and Mark Knopfler [“Don’t Fall Apart On Me Tonight”], as well as some photos taken in Ganonoque last Sunday, after Lee recovered, after the oil, in other words. [For further info on this, please view Sunday’s JuicyLesson, #264.]

Try to catch the words of the Dylan-Knopfler collaborative effort which, I must say, is good but ends quite abruptly. I wasn’t ready for it, the end, that is, the livin’ end.

The photos of the Camaros were meant to compare my remote control Camaro with a real one.

Even though my finger appears in both of the following shots, I have decided to include them anyway because they are an excellent representation of what Lee, my wonderful partner, is all about.

A friend and ex-student was communicating with another on a social media site. What was said – and I’ve spent quite a bit of time trying to find the exact message so as to be able to re-produce it here and have so far not been successful – but the gist of the query posed related to what I was going to write about once the World Cup ended with three options, one of which has slipped my mind, never to re-surface.

One of the remaining options concerned my possibly focussing on someone’s beard, a joke proposal to get a chuckle which it didn’t by the way, while the third choice was “Bialik gossip”.

That got me thinking. As I’m sure some of you know I am in the process of writing a memoir-type autobiography tentatively for the moment titled “Aim with your heart; shoot with your mind”. Considering the fact that I have spent upwards of 54 years in the classroom as both a student and a teacher, school as an institution, that is as a frequent and recurring pattern of behaviour, explains how and why school and my experiences in it as a teacher must be central to any book about me and “Aim with your heart; shoot with your mind” most assuredly is just that, a book about me.

The central reason I am writing this book is to show teachers and those thinking of entering the teaching profession how one can remain him/her self and be an excellent teacher to boot. ., also integral to my reason for getting this manuscript together is to entertain my readers and provoke thought among them as well, and what better way to do that than with what I would prefer to call “anecdotal evidence” which it is, rather than pure, unmitigated gossip.

I use stories to illustrate my ideas concerning what it takes to be a great – I’m saying great here, not good or very good or very, very good, none of those, but I am talking about greatness here, how to be a great teacher.

When I say passion is important, I may and do, in fact, recount a couple of stories demonstrating and driving home my point. If I say the school is basically a zoo, what better way to evidence that than with anecdotes, not heresay, but anecdotal support garnered by me first-hand, over my years in the teaching profession, which anecdotes support the perception that Bialik is populated, by more than what I believe to be a healthy percentage of what I would call “japped out spoiled brats”.

My plan right now but that could change – today or yesterday was supposed to be about the finale of the World Cup and I haven’t even gotten around to that yet – so what I am saying in the here and now is that my plan for Thursday’s JuicyLesson is to tell a story from my days at the Jewish private school where I ended up spending twenty-four years. Originally, I wrote the up-coming story a short while ago, intending to include it as part of my book. On second thought, although Thuraday’s anecdote does belong in my book, I’m not so sure about using it beyond employing it as the basis for our next JuicyLesson so we’ll just have to see.

One more thing about my book before moving on. The bottom line is this: it should be ready for publication in about 12 months or less. As you can imagine my Juicies take a lot of time to produce, time that I will have to put into writing my book once my daily JuicyLessons end in less than two months. I don’t have the time or, truthfully speaking, the inclination, to spend my precious time writing almost exclusively which means that the dual projects of writing a blog and a book simultaneously would leave me small opportunity to do or to focus on accomplishing anything else.

So once I finish my JuicyLessons on September 9th, I’ll have more of a chance to work on completing my memoirs. My editor, John, put it this way: I could write two good books, publishing one now and one later or I could actually write one great book which would mean an additional twelve months working to complete the manuscript I already have. I choose option #2 which means that all those of you out there who were expecting and/or looking forward to reading a book by me will just have to wait a while longer, only a small wait in the general scheme of things.

Over and Peace.

Out.