Big Bear was a lot of fun. Stacie, myself, Andrew, and Sarah all went up with some crazy girl scout leaders for a fun weekend. We didn’t do a whole lot, mainly slept, read, played catch, and ate. Stacie and I bought baseball gloves before we left and practiced our catch, it was fun. I think going to the outdoors can really boost your sanity and remind you what an awesome planet we live on.

Today I started new teacher training that lasts all week. It’s a cool opportunity to gear up for the new school year and meet some of the other new teachers I’ll be teaching with. A lot of it are concepts I learned in my credential program, but they are very good refresher courses.

After new teacher training Andrew helped me move even more stuff to our place, specifically a china cabinet from my mom’s house and a bed from Stacie’s mom’s house. Whoa, that’s a lot of apostrephes. The china cabinet belonged to my Grandma, and it looks pretty nice in our dining room. It should be a great place to put some nicer dishes, and we can use all the cabinet space we can get. I had also ordered a door from Lowes, but they’re retarded and got it wrong for a 2ND time! I got my money back and decided I’ll look elsewhere.

Stacie started college school today, I start next week, and in a couple weeks we both start school work. This will probably be a long semester since we’re both taking classes, but I look forward to the challenges ahead. Oh, so I had a cool idea. What do you think about me buying a cool domain name like www.mathparty.org and putting a blog like this on it with the daily homework? Wouldn’t that be cool? My students could come check their homework for the day, and I could post test and quiz reminders, that kind of stuff. I think it would be fun.

Tonight I had a great discussion with Paddy about speaking in absolutes, and indeed how dangerous that can be. Speaking in absolutes often assumes a VAST amount of knowledge that the speaker can in no way prove. What the person should be doing is generalizing. Here are some excerpts from various conversations (edited for length):

paddy: more detail is allways more mesmorizing
nathan: not always
nathan: take poetry for example
nathan: most poetry takes only a few lines to say what it wants. but according to your logic, a poem that is 9412840124 pages long would always be better
nathan: or a 4120482048 min long description of a sunset would be better than a 10 min description
paddy: ok
nathan: every baseball player owns a baseball glove
nathan: that’s an absolute. i said EVERY baseball player owns a baseball glove
paddy: ok
nathan: while it sounds correct…..for me to know that, I would then have to account for every baseball player in existence and prove that they have a baseball glove, something I haven’t done
nathan: it’s one thing to say “all christians are good people” (an absolute) and to say “most christians are good people” (a generalization)

Kevin actually said a lot more than that, but if he wants to post what he said he can. Here’s what my sister had to say:

denise: we’re cognitively programmed to generalize-
denise: we absolutely cannot prevent ourselves from generalizing
denise: exactly-wisdom has everything to do with applying generalizations-ie when do they or do they not work in specific instances
denise: cognitively speaking, we are very bad at dealing with many details at once-generalizations are shortcuts for helping us make sense of life

Unfortunately I think Paddy took me to mean that absolutes are NEVER right (which is an absolute in itself, and already wrong).

nathan: absolutes aren’t always dangerous. for example, there is one blue cup on my desk. that’s an absolute that is entirely true haha
amy: you should tell him that
amy: haha

Food for thought. Eat up!