My dearest L:
Wherever you are, know that my heart resides with you. I gave it to you all those years ago when I promised to love you for the rest of my life.
Stay safe. Be happy.
I love you,
Me
Hot Classrooms: Students Struggle to Learn Amid Heat Waves, Lack of AC
Miseducation is a column that chronicles what it’s like to be a student in the modern United States.
Molly Mus, a physics and biology teacher at a Boston public school, says she has been dealing with boiling temperatures in her classroom the last few years — and not just because of her students’ science experiments. Mus’s school building has no ventilation. So her classroom, which has no central air or ceiling fan, has felt scorching due to recent unprecedented heat waves in the area. The district is asking teachers to keep their windows open to mitigate the spread of COVID, but when Mus put a box fan in her classroom window, she says it simply blew hot air around the room.
“Honestly, some students simply do not come to class at all once it starts getting unbearable in the school building,” Mus told Teen Vogue. “Attendance drops dramatically once our building gets hot, and being on the top floor with no air-conditioning is not enticing to anyone wanting to learn science.”
https://www.teenvogue.com/story/hot-classrooms-student-learning
My dearest children:
Yes, it’s hot. Yes, it can be unpleasant and hard to focus when it’s hot.
But education is a privilege not afforded to many. For some, the conditions under which they must study are significantly less than ideal. However, they are grateful for the opportunity to learn. We could learn a thing or two from the “have-nots” and their attitude of gratefulness.
For the “haves”, life can often be about what isn’t, what they don’t have, etc. How unfortunate! Think about it: you have all these luxuries in life, yet you bitch about what more you want but don’t have? For example, you have a house to live in and a car to take you places, but you bitch about wanting a bigger house and better car? What spoil-sports we can be sometimes! Stop!
Try not to bitch about things in life. How does it help? If you bitch about the heat, does it make you feel any cooler, or simply more uncomfortable because you’re focusing on every aspect of the oppressive heat?
Try focusing on the task at hand instead. If your focus is good, once you get into the zone, everything else fades away and only the task in front of you matter. I promise. (Focus is a skill; the more you practice it, the better you’ll get.)
My friend Nicole used to mock me for working through lunch and forgetting to eat. She’d say, “That’s a special kind of stupid.” Yes, in a way, it is. Be that as it may, when I’m focused on my work, everything fades into the background and neither hunger nor thirst nor other discomfort registers. Since I skip breakfast for most of my work life, it’s when I finally stop to take a break from work that I realize how famished I am. Then, I eat.
The same is true today as I engage in intermittent fasting. When I first started, noontime hunger pangs used to bother me. Now, my body has adapted and hunger pangs barely register. I simply work through lunch, or exercise, or whatever. (Of course, it helps that I have zero appetite because our entire family has been broken up into 5 separate households, and I have neither you kids nor Ms. L.)
Life is full of unpleasantries. If we sit around and mope or wait for the perfect conditions to start our tasks, we’d never get anything done. Perfect conditions rarely, if ever, exist. Make do with what you have, do your best, and move one.
It’s definitely been an extremely tough year, to bookend a an extremely tough decade, but — if nothing else — it leaves me with few distractions. All my waking moments — of which there are many as I have returned to my habit of sleeping only a few hours each night — are spent on efforts to expose the corrupt scums who destroyed our once happy family. When those who are supposed to be the law abuse under color of authority and engage in criminal misconduct, we have few options but to expose them.
When a man had nothing left to lose, he fears nothing.
My fight for you and our family continues.
All my love, always and forever,
Dad
P.S., I leave you with this from my favorite web site:
How to Stop the Culture of Complaining in Schools
Fourth-grade teacher Owen Griffith offers practical ways to turn schools and classrooms into no-complaint zones.
BY OWEN GRIFFITH | NOVEMBER 4, 2016
Wherever we look in our schools, we can find complaining: in classrooms, hallways, offices, and teachers’ lounges. Participating in such talk is easy because there is a lot “wrong” in our schools, but this kind of dialogue is destructive and often spreads quickly.
Why do people complain so much in the first place? An honest answer is that it feels good to complain and blame someone or something else when things are not going our way. Complaining takes the responsibility off of us and, according to researchers, often engenders the comforting response we crave when we fail or are disappointed.
This is not to say that there isn’t a time for complaining. Quite often we might be dealing with injustice or unfairness in our schools that give us good reason to complain. But complaining should not be the end goal; rather, it should serve as an impetus to rally others to help us change an unfair situation.
However, there are times when no matter our circumstances, we get into a funk or always look to the dark side of life—and this gets telegraphed to others through our complaints. Stuck in a rut of complaining, we often hold the belief that we don’t need to change anything about ourselves. Worse, we remain stuck and spread our toxic attitude to others, sapping our motivation to change and making the problems seem even more difficult than they are.
Gratitude is an antidote to complaining as it enables us to change and reframe the way we look at and interact with the world. Instead of focusing on the negative aspects of education, we replace this destructive viewpoint with gratitude and find the positive things about teaching. When we flip our own attitudes, we can also change the culture of our classrooms, which elevates students’ attitudes and increases learning and engagement. Fueling our teaching, gratitude can propel us into a positive flow in the classroom and spark our passion about education.
If your school has been invaded by the pernicious virus of complaining, here are three simple gratitude practices to encourage staff members and students to spread the antidote of positivity.
1. Create a no-complaint zone
To promote a positive culture among teachers, make the faculty lounge an area of “No Negativity.” If a teacher starts complaining or talking negatively about someone who isn’t in the room, gently remind them in a neutral tone, “It is not fair to speak about that person when they cannot defend themselves.”
This ground rule for the teachers’ lounge creates a safe and supportive environment. Teachers may comment that they feel they’ve become more aware of how much they were complaining about others and they may start to change their behavior. With this ground rule in place, gossiping, as well as complaining, can be greatly curtailed.
To further counter the negativity in the faculty lounge, one interesting idea is to put up a gratitude board where staff can write messages of gratitude to each other. Teachers can utilize this creative tool by taking the time to write a quick gratitude note about a colleague on the board. When educators actually see their gratitude posted on the board, positive changes in attitude and behavior are more likely to follow. In fact, this gratitude can be contagious and start to spread throughout the school.
In classrooms, we can dialogue with students about complaining and how it contributes to negative attitudes. We can also ask them for ideas about keeping complaints out of the classroom. One powerful rule that has emerged in our classroom is that no one (including the teacher) is allowed to complain. If someone does complain, they are asked to say three things they are grateful for.
At this point, we can even delve a little deeper into “why” we are grateful for these things. For example, instead of saying, “Thank you for my friends,” we could say, “Thank you for my friend Mike who helped me through a rough time last week.” With this activity, gratitude may again replace the pessimism generated by complaining as we are “re-programming” our negative bias.
2. Break the habit with a “Complaint Bracelet”
Unfortunately, some days it is easy to slip back into old habits and complain. One helpful tool to try to get back on track is to wear a complaint bracelet on our right wrist. If we notice we are complaining, we have to take it off and put it on our left wrist for the rest of the day and restart the process the next day. If we go three weeks without complaining, we can be freer of this harmful habit just by bringing complaining into our conscious awareness.
In reality, it may take more than three weeks to successfully learn a new habit. Nevertheless, it is a novel way to redirect our behavior. Don’t be afraid to ask students to create an exercise to try to curtail complaints.
In addition, we can “recalibrate” our perspective with gratitude daily. In our routine, like when we drive into the school parking lot or every time we walk into the classroom, we can simply take a few moments to reflect on our outlook, attempting to recalibrate our attitude about our students and the teaching profession, looking for gratitude.
For students, we can start each class with a few deep breaths and ask them to mindfully ponder a few things they are grateful for as it pertains to their learning. This will help establish a positive perspective to take through the day’s events and keep us from slipping back into the habit of complaining.
3. Challenge students with “The Complaint Challenge”
Start by asking students: “Can you go all day without complaining?” Have them carry around a 3 x 5-inch card and write down any instance when they complain or even feel like complaining. Then, instruct them to write a gratitude statement or something positive on the other side of the index card. For many students, this action develops a new awareness they may utilize their entire lives as they cultivate the ability to choose a positive attitude in any situation.
For example, one student noted that he complained every night and never really thought about how often he said, “I hate doing my homework!” But then, as this experiment progressed, he turned this statement into a gratitude statement and wrote, “I am grateful I get to learn by doing my homework. It will help me get a good job someday.”
Another student wrote that she did not like setting the table every night at dinner. When she flipped that to a gratitude statement, she started saying, “I get to eat dinner with a loving family and I am thankful for that.”
As this experiment moves forward, if students feel the complaints coming back, have them pull out the index card and read the gratitude.
Whenever possible, students and staff alike should try to turn our complaints into statements of gratitude. When we string together a few days without complaining and instead focus on what we’re grateful for, we might notice other positive things going on, like our relationships improving and feeling more energy to put into teaching. We may even find we are enjoying life—and school—a little more.
Owen M. Griffith is a teacher, writer, educational consultant, and blogger, residing with his wife and son in North Georgia. He earned a Master’s Degree in Educational Leadership. Owen’s work has appeared on Huffington Post and Edutopia. His first book, Gratitude: A Way of Teaching, was published in March, 2016. Check out his blog at or author page. Follow him on twitter @owenmgriffith.
https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/how_to_stop_the_culture_of_complaining_in_schools
For the Love of God, Stop Microwaving Plastic
A study of baby-food containers shows that microwaving plastic releases millions upon millions of polymer bits.
AT THE START of his third year of graduate school, Kazi Albab Hussain became a father. As a new dad and a PhD student studying environmental nanotechnology, plastic was on his mind. The year before, scientists had discovered that plastic baby bottles shed millions of particles into formula, which infants end up swallowing (while also sucking on plastic bottle nipples). “At that time,” Hussain says, “I was purchasing many baby foods, and I was seeing that, even in baby foods, there are a lot of plastics.”
Hussain wanted to know how much was being released from the kinds of containers he’d been buying. So he went to the grocery store, picked up some baby food, and brought the empty containers back to his lab at the University of Nebraska—Lincoln. In a study published in June in Environmental Science & Technology, Hussain and his colleagues reported that, when microwaved, these containers released millions of bits of plastic, called microplastics, and even tinier nanoplastics.
Plastics are complex cocktails of long chains of carbon, called polymers, mixed in with chemical additives, small molecules that help mold the polymers into their final shape and imbue them with resistance to oxidation, UV exposure, and other wear and tear. Microwaving delivers a double whammy: heat and hydrolysis, a chemical reaction through which bonds are broken by water molecules. All of these can cause a container to crack and shed tiny bits of itself as microplastics, nanoplastics, and leachates, toxic chemical components of the plastic.
The human health effects of plastic exposure are unclear, but scientists have suspected for years that they aren’t good. First, these particles are sneaky. Once they enter the body they coat themselves with proteins, slipping past the immune system incognito, “like Trojan horses,” says Trinity College Dublin chemistry professor John Boland, who was not involved in this study. Microplastics also collect a complex community of microbes, called the plastisphere, and transport them into the body.
Our kidneys remove waste, placing them on the front lines of exposure to contaminants. They are OK at filtering out the relatively larger microplastics, so we probably excrete a lot of those. But nanoplastics are small enough to slip across cell membranes and “make their way to places they shouldn’t,” Boland says.
“Microplastics are like plastic roughage: They get in, and they get expelled,” he adds. “But it’s quite likely that nanoplastics can be very toxic.”
Once they’ve snuck past the body’s defense systems, “the chemicals used in plastics hack hormones,” says Leonardo Trasande, a professor at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine and the director of the Center for the Investigation of Environmental Hazards. Hormones are signaling molecules underlying basically everything the body does, so these chemicals, called endocrine disruptors, have the potential to mess with everything from metabolism to sexual development and fertility.
“Babies are at greater risk from those contaminants than full-grown people,” Hussain says. So to test how much plastic babies are exposed to, Hussain’s team chose three baby-food containers available at a local grocery store: two polypropylene jars labeled “microwave-safe” according to US Food and Drug Administration regulations, and one reusable food pouch made of an unknown plastic.
They replaced the original contents of each container with two different liquids: deionized water and acetic acid. Respectively, these simulate watery foods like yogurt and acidic foods like oranges.
They then followed FDA guidelines to simulate three everyday scenarios using all three containers: storing food at room temperature, storing it in the refrigerator, and leaving it out in a hot room. They also microwaved the two polypropylene jars containers for three minutes on high. Then, for each container, they freeze-dried the remaining liquid and extracted the particles left behind.
For both kinds of fluids and polypropylene containers, the most microplastics and nanoplastics—up to 4.2 million and 1.2 billion particles per square centimeter of plastic, respectively—were shed during microwaving, relative to the other storage conditions they tested.
In general, they found that hotter storage temperatures cause more plastic particles to leak into food. For example, one polypropylene container released over 400,000 more microplastics per square centimeter after being left in a hot room than after being stored in a refrigerator (which still caused nearly 50,000 microplastics and 11.5 million nanoplastics per square centimeter to shed into the stored fluid). “I got terrified seeing the amount of microplastics under the microscope,” Hussain says.
https://www.wired.com/story/for-the-love-of-god-stop-microwaving-plastic/
My dearest children:
Once upon a time, society’s mantra was “Knowledge is power.” It is a wise sentiment offered by a wise man: Sir Francis Bacon. See, e.g., https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/francis-bacon/; and, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Francis-Bacon-Viscount-Saint-Alban.
Today, there are those who would have you believe knowledge can be a dangerous thing, and they should be the keeper of knowledge, deciding for the rest of us what we should read, what ideas we should be exposed to, etc. One common example that had gained much traction these days is the banning of books from libraries and schools. They couch their arguments for book bans in terms of the protection of our children … as if some how parents are imbeciles and cannot determine for themselves what their children should read.
Beware those who would have them do the thinking for you. They NEVER have your best interests at heart. EVER.
Censorship benefits the censors. Always.
As I’ve long told you, our intellect is our greatest gift, tool, and weapon. Nurture it. Hone it. Sharpen it. Nourish it with quality material. It’s okay to take breaks and indulge in lighter fares like Ludlum novels or Harry Potter fantasies from time to time, but do try to maintain a steady diet the classics and the most recent discoveries or understanding as explained by reputable organizations or authors.
With few exceptions, avoid blogs and posts by everyman like the plague. By all means, use them for entertainment value, but not for substantive knowledge — again, unless the individual is learned and well-vetted by his/her peers IN THE PROFESSION.
Let me give you one example of this danger that lurks out there in the ethernet. I met a fellow. He’s a nice enough fellow and we get along just fine. But he is more of a fair-weather friend and not someone I turn to for any critical thinking or substantive conversation. Let me explain. The gentleman has a high school education and is an artist and martial artist. Despite my having a law degree, being licensed to practice law, and having been a practicing attorney for decades, and despite my having worked in both the legislative as well as judiciary branches of government, this fellow once tried to lecture me on the law, the differences between laws and policies, etc. He was wrong on almost all counts, yet he went on to find great success on social media where his legions of followers give him thousands of dollars each month to share with them his insights and knowledge.
Scary. Truly scary. It is the blind leading the blind, but not realizing they are blind.
Beware.
Love, always and forever,
Dad
May your special day be special and memorable. Hopefully, you are enjoying the fruits of my labor from years past as shared with/taken by your mother. I am only sorry I am not there to celebrate your day and have been unable to do so for the past 10 years.
Someday, I hope to make it up to you when our story is told and our names cleared.
All my love, always and forever,
Dad
shoshandjaialai 