Fine dining my bottom

So last Friday Sharkette and I went on a date after many months of no restaurant visits. We decided to check out the restaurant at the airport that we’ve heard so much about and try their Italian-American fare. Though the interior was nice, I found several things lacking. Maybe it’s because I’ve watched one too many Kitchen Nightmares with Gordon Ramsay, but some things are just so common that you should just know that you don’t do that in a restaurant.

First, if somebody orders a slice of pie for dessert, it would be nice if you told them it was frozen when they bite into it! I don’t know if it was supposed to have been served cold, or they forgot to defrost it, but Sharkette doesn’t dig ice pie.

Secondly, if you are going to be a waitress, try to look at least a little interested in your patrons. I know we might not be the most interesting people in the world, but we are paying for your tip so please show us some frakking courtesy!

Thirdly, though the adage, “if you got time to lean, you have time to clean,” is wonderful, please don’t do that when you still have diners eating! How annoying would it be if I invited you over for dinner and I vacuumed the dining room while you ate??? Seriously!

Fourthly, I know there is only an hour left before the restaurant closes, but you could you please not have the entire staff sitting at another table gabbing away??? I could hear everything they were saying, and I didn’t much care for their conversation. It’s bad enough having to listen to other diners, but I certainly don’t want to hear from the wait staff as well.

That said, the prime rib was outstanding and your fries were excellent. The bread sticks were to die for.

Turn and face the strain…

I just got some rather unsettling news at work which might affect me a great deal. The utterly capable and lovely woman whom I admire and respect and consider to be the best boss I’ve ever had, just announced that she’s resigning. This will be her last year as Head Mistress/principal of the school. She’s taken a job at an advertising and media company, which is apparently her field of expertise and what she studied in school. I’m not sure how she ended up becoming a school administrator but she’s been doing that job excellently for the last six years.

This is compounded by the fact that both of our assistant principals will soon be unavailable. One of them recently adopted a little girl and left for a year’s leave of absence a few months ago. The wife of the other one is having a baby in August, so he too will be taking some paternity leave. And we’re all left wondering who’s going to run the ship.

Once the initial shock wore off I began to realize that one of the people chosen to fill the gap will most likely be me. They’ve been grooming me for administrative work for the last three months. About a month before Maria left for her maternity leave I started working in the front office one day a week. It has since increased to three days a week and basically whenever I’m needed. It’s typical office work: answering the phone, taking messages, sending emails, helping students with administrative needs, signing for packages, etc. I’ve done this kind work before and I enjoy it, plus I’m very organized and have a great phone voice.

I don’t think they’d ask me to step in and become the Head Mistress/Principal (rektor in Swedish), but I have a feeling they’ll ask me to become an assistant principal. I’m good at organizing and running projects, but the possibility of becoming a school administrator has never occurred to me. I’ve always been a teacher and I’ve always for the most part hated school administrators and I’m not sure if I really want to become one.

This promotion would mean an increase in hours and responsibility, as well as a substantial raise. Would it be worth it, though? I really love being a teacher. Just a teacher. Both of our assistant principals are also teachers, though, so I know I’d still have lessons. This would also mean I would have to get really good at Swedish really fast.

Anyway, no one’s mentioned anything about who is taking over for whom yet, but there’s supposed to be a meeting about it tomorrow afternoon. I’ll sure be sorry to see my boss go. I think she just got sick of working under the dreaded Big Boss. Of course this means that if they try to kick me upstairs then I’ll be working under him, although I won’t see him everyday since he lives and works in Stockholm.

Maybe I shouldn’t be counting my chickens before they hatch, but during my recent employee evaluation the Big Boss said they wanted to give me a full time contract and increase my responsibility even more next year.

So that’s that.

Not everyone is a winner, you know…

Author’s Note: This is something I wrote a little under a year ago. It was originally posted as a note on Facebook and then as a post on my personal blog.

One of my former English-teaching jobs involved working with small children. They were very little (most under the age of five) so the job primarily consisted of playing games and singing songs in English. Like any job there were good and bad things about it. The kids were mostly very sweet and cute. However, I had a colleague who drove me nuts. We used to play these little games with the kids and naturally there would be one winner, which is the point of playing any game, right?

Despite this universal truth, she would always smile at them and say, “That’s okay. Everyone’s a winner!” This always bothered me because there was in fact only one winner. He won because he was the best. Saying that everyone’s a winner totally diminishes the achievement of the kid who actually won the game. It’s unrealistic, dishonest and unfair, and it sets kids up for disappointment later on in life.

It used to be when a child did poorly in school her parents would go straight to her and say, “These grades are terrible!” Nowadays, when a child does poorly in school her parents go straight to her teacher and say, “These grades are terrible!”

Not that there aren’t any bad teachers. Of course there are, just as there are bad examples from every profession. However, I wonder if it ever occurred to the parents that maybe their kid is just a bad student. I know a thing or two about being a bad student because I used to be one. Then again, I had very low self-esteem, so when I got bad grades I assumed it was because I (and not my teacher) was useless. No amount of attempted bribery or bolstering of my nonexistent self-esteem was going to improve my performance in school.

Then one day I realized that I’d better get off my ass and get some decent grades, so that’s what I did. At first I did it mainly to keep my parents from yelling at me, but after a while I figured out that I was actually a good student and I did it for me.

While I strongly believe in encouraging young people to do the best they can, I also believe that it’s ultimately up to them. They choose whether to do well or bad in school, and while we can encourage or even intimidate, their performance in school is their responsibility. The young people of today aren’t being taught self-reliance and accountability. Many of them are little narcissists who have been led to believe they are “special” and therefore entitled to “the best.”

However, we seem to have forgotten to tell them about having to work really hard in order to get it, about taking charge of their own lives, about having to get it themselves if they really want it, and about them not being entitled to anything.

Remember that if everyone is a winner that means that everyone is also a loser.

Those who can teach…

Simply loved this button so I had to share it!

WOTD: hyper-parent

Today’s word is an adjective-noun combination that describes a certain type of parent who takes more than a healthy interest in his or her child’s education and life. The overall subject of generations and the differences between them is the topic of tomorrow’s writing exam, so we’ve been discussing it a lot in lessons. This hyper-parenting phenomenon is associated with the parents of the current generation, sometimes called Generation Y, the ‘Net Generation, or the Millennial Generation.

Many of these parents were latchkey kids. They were left to look after themselves and didn’t see very much of their own parents since they were at work most of the time. Thus today’s parents have swung the parenting pendulum. Basically they want to make sure that their own children are nurtured and given the attention that they lacked as Generation X/latchkey kids.

Of course it’s only natural and healthy for parents to want to nurture their kids. However, making up for their own experiences is not the only reason for this over-parenting. They understand that we live in a very competitive world and they’re willing to do just about anything to give their child the competitive edge, even to the point of doing their child’s homework for them. They seem to be afraid to let their child make his or own mistakes and learn from them. In some of the more extreme examples of hyper-parenting, some parents even go so far as having their otherwise healthy and normal kids injected with growth hormones to increase their height. They’re even willing to pay for plastic surgery.

In the U.S. these hyper-parents are also known as “helicopter parents,” constantly hovering around their kids and overseeing every detail of their lives. In Scandinavia, they are called “curling parents,” seen as frantically sweeping the “ice” in front of their kids. In Japan, there are “education mothers” who have dedicated their entire lives to steering their kids through the education system.

I have mixed feelings about this, since I was one of those latchkey kids, but I didn’t feel particularly neglected or under-parented. I had a key to the house from about the age of ten and I quickly learned to look after myself. Generation X kids are in general quite self-reliant and adaptable self-starters, and as a consequence we tend to work better on our own rather than in groups or teams. This can put us at somewhat of a disadvantage since most employers are looking for so-called team players in the workplace.

My parents divorced when I was a tiny child of four years old. I lived with my mother and occasionally visited with my father. The rest of the time we communicated via old school letters on paper and phone calls. Curiously, he seemed to take no interest whatsoever in how my brother and I were doing in school. It used to drive my mom crazy how he never once asked how school was going for us. While my mother took as active a roll as she could (helping with homework and science projects, without actually doing them for us) my father simply did not care.

It would have been nice if he did, but alas…

As a teacher I have to deal with these hyper-parents all the time. I just wish that they’d allow their kids to screw up a little now and then, and learn from the experience. Kids are pretty resilient. Hell, I screwed up all the time but turned out okay.

WOTD: tumultuous

I seem to be posting a lot of adjectives lately, but I suppose that’s because I tend to choose words that match whatever major or minor current events that are taking place. The word tumultuous is defined as “full of tumult or riotousness; marked by disturbance and uproar.” What with the recent death of Osama bin Laden and the conflicts in Libya, and Egypt, and Tunisia, we live very tumultuous times, indeed.

We had some tumultuousness at work yesterday, apparently. I was off sick but heard all about it today. The generally-hated Big Boss had come down from Stockholm again for an open house evening at the school. After being asked by the Big Boss to participate in the open house, a colleague who teaches Social Science subjects responded angrily and vehemently that there was no way she was going to put in any extra hours for a man who obviously despised Social Science teachers. And here I thought he merely hated English teachers.

She then stormed out of the building. Oh deary me…

Anyway, I was pretty surprised to hear about this because the colleague in question is someone who is normally very laid back and cheerful. She’s a nice and fun-to-be-around person, not confrontational or prone to angry outbursts at all. Yet I know very well how the Big Boss’s contemptuous indifference can really get to you. After a while, you just find yourself saying, “Oh, what’s the fucking use?” It’ll be interesting to see what come of this.

Bye for now…

The Keyboard Commando

How to blog successfully

Old School blogging starts at an early age!

If I had a penny for every time somebody asked me: “Shark, how do you become a successful blogger?” I’d be a successful blogger! The truth of the matter is that there’s no real formula for success except a lot of patience and hard work. Sure, you could become an instant hit on the internet, like Charlie Sheen’s Twitter account, but those kind of success stories are few and far between.

My observation on how to become a successful blogger is as follows:

CONTENT, CONTENT AND MORE CONTENT. Like a real estate agent espousing the famous quip, “location, location, location,” so too does a blogger need content, content, and content. I should add “relevant” to the front of that. Most successful blogs on the internet have interesting content, whether that be a political pundit writing about the coming collapse of Medicare, or somebody taking pictures of famous celebrities and using Microsoft Paint to draw funny faces on them; either way, these blogs are visited because people enjoy the content.

POST EVERY DAY. There’s nothing worse than visiting an interesting blog and seeing that it hasn’t been updated since 2007 or something like that. This is a real tragedy if the blogger’s archive contains golden nuggets of wisdom and social commentary. It almost makes you mad to find a brilliant mind that stopped producing. Granted, the blogger might have died, but if he or she just stopped updating their blog, I wish they would either post something to that effect, or just delete their blog altogether. That reminds me, I have several blogs I need to delete, my bad.

HAVE MULTIPLE CONTRIBUTORS. The reason why this blog is destined for success, I hope, is the fact that we have a variety of contributors with differing thoughts, styles, and opinions. In fact, if you came to this blog and didn’t notice that we were different people, you’d think the blogger had a multiple personality disorder or at least ADD or OCD. What other person would write about Texas Tater Twisters one day and post poetry about a well the next? Having multiple contributors also ensures that the content is varied, and takes the stress off one person having to post every day. It really is hard coming up with fresh things, and with multiple contributors I can take a breather knowing that somebody will post and keep the blog rolling. It’s very comforting to know that.

VISIT OTHER BLOGS. A successful blogger is a voracious reader of other blogs. Reading what other people are writing about helps you to formulate ideas of your own. This is particularly useful if you are suffering from writer’s block. When visiting other people’s blogs it’s also important to leave commentary. It’s not only polite, but the blogger gets a real sense of accomplishment from knowing that somebody actually took the time to read what they had posted. Leaving commentary also means that some people might read your comment and click on your link back to your blog. I don’t know how many times I’ve found a great blog just by reading the excellent commentary left on somebody’s blog and following the commentator back to their blog.

BE PROACTIVE. This follows what I previously posted about commentary. Be out there in cyberspace, join forums, link clubs, chat, post and be proactive. Nobody is going to find your blog unless you make yourself heard, or you utilize excellent tag lines or eye-catching topic titles. Twitter is also a great place to get new followers fast, but be prepared for a possible spam storm or an information overload.

Thanks for reading and good luck with your blog!

Going to the doctor in Sweden…

There are different ways of getting medical treatment in Sweden. First of all you can call and make appointment with a certain doctor or nurse practitioner, which usually works out just fine for non-emergency stuff. Most of the time there are appointments available the same day or the next day to see a normal GP or NP. Getting an appointment with a specialist takes longer of course (and you have to be referred) but Sweden is certainly not unique in that regard.

However, if you need to see a doctor the same day, and there aren’t any appointments available, you have two options. Option number one is to do what I did this morning and have your name added to the drop-in list. This is like having an appointment without having an appointment. I called my local vårdcentral (medical clinic) this morning and asked if there we’re any appointments after lunch because I needed to see a doctor as soon as possible about these pollen allergies. The person on the phone said there weren’t any appointments, but that they had drop-in hours until noon. Otherwise I’d have to wait until tomorrow. I’d said I’d rather not so she added my name to the list. This meant that they could expect to see me sometime between the time I hung up the phone (around 9:30) and 12. I left work at ten and got the the doctor’s office around 10:30.

After checking in and paying for the appointment, I sat down and waited. And waited. Aaaand waited. There was a full waiting room today so I knew it would be a while. I was wishing I had my Kindle with me, but rather than amuse myself with the small selection of out-of-date magazines, I sat quietly and casually listened to the coughs and moans and complaints of other patients waiting for same-day but not necessarily emergency treatment.

Finally, after waiting for about an hour and a half my name was called, and I was taken to an examination room where I was left for another ten minutes: “The doctor will be with you shortly.” Why do that always do that?

The doctor came in and I told her about how I’d been up all last night and unable to breathe while lying down, and that my eyes and throat were so itchy it was driving me crazy. The two different allergy tablets I had bought last week weren’t helping at all. No, she said, it doesn’t matter how many of those you take, taking more won’t increase their efficacy. She prescribed me some stronger tablets and some eye drops for pollen allergy suffers. I asked about cortisone injections, since that was recommended to me earlier today, but she informed me that they no longer give those injections. (I wonder why not…) They do give cortisone tablets, though, to people who have it really bad. She said to try the tablets and eye drops for a week and then if I was still suffering, she’d prescribe the cortisone. The conversation I had with her lasted no longer than 5 minutes. I then spent another 15 minutes in the pharmacy waiting to pick up my prescriptions.

All in all, the whole process, from the time I checked in to the time I paid for the medicine, took about two hours. This is not bad at all, especially when one considers the second must-see-a-doctor-today option. Of course I mean the so-called emergency room. If you have to go to the ER, then don’t make any plans for the rest of the day. Or night. And you might want to clear tomorrow as well.

And it will cost you three times as much and you’ll end up waiting three times as long as going to the vårdcentral. Thankfully, I’ve had to visit the ER only once since I’ve been living in Sweden, but it was a genuine medical emergency. I was having an allergic reaction to a medication I’d been prescribed, and the person on the ask-a-nurse hotline told me to go to the emergency room immediately. She asked if I needed an ambulance as well, but the hospital was only a short bus ride away so I said I could make it on my own. When I got there I talked to the intake staff who took down my information and gave me some medicines to stabilize me. Then they sent me to the waiting room, where I believe I waited for at least four hours. By the time I got to see a doctor I was feeling pretty much fine, but they wanted to keep me overnight for observation anyway. This was because stopping my medication suddenly (the one I was allergic to) could bring on a seizure.

Everything worked out just fine, by the way. No seizures. Even the nurses knew there was nothing wrong with me. They delivered my medicine in the morning but said I could get up and get my own breakfast off the cart. No problem, I thought. Let them take care of the people who really are ill.

America: The Greatest Show in the World

We Americans love a good show. Little do we know that we are actually part of the show now. Other people from around the world are watching our slow decline into a Third World nation. While we are busy arguing about the “big issues” like abortion, gay marriage, and evolution; our roads are being unpaved, we are becoming poorer, and more stupid. As the old Carl Sagan remarked in his book, Cosmos, we have more astrologists and psychics than astronomers. And why wouldn’t we, after all, astronomy requires serious thinking? Better to go with the gut feeling of an astrologist.

Just look at your newspaper, one-third of the newspaper is comprised of the sports pages these days! In fact, there’s more sports coverage than foreign news coverage! A whole page is devoted to a home run, while a suicide bomber in Afghanistan killing two Marines gets a paragraph. Charlie Sheen’s Truth Tour gets more exposure than a top general in Iraq discussing rebuilding efforts. The sad thing is we don’t realize that this is happening to us. And if we do, we don’t seem to care as long as the circus continues and we are “pacified” with cheap trinkets from China or entertainment in the form of Snooki. Never mind that Snooki got more money for giving a talk at Rutgers University than Nobel-Fucking-Prize-Winning-and-I-Got-A-Damned-Pulitzer-Too Toni Morrison! How the hell did that happen?

Richard Hofstadter wrote a book entitled Anti-Intellectualism in American Life back in 1963. If you haven’t read this book, I highly suggest you pick it up at your local public library. That’s if you still have a public library! In his book, Hofstadter laments the poor state of the American intellectual, and how he must contend with a rising tide of stupidity coming from his fellow countrymen. That’s a paraphrase of course, and a pretty dumbed down version of things, but hopefully it’s easy enough for people to understand.

Anyhow, I’m off to plan my vacation trip to the Creation Museum, and maybe I’ll swing by Dollywood as well.