Today I had the privilege of going on a tour of the West Wing. A guy who I graduated with (Riley) who works in the West Wing and hooked up a tour. It was pretty awesome. Here are some details.

First of all, when you walk into the door that I did, you are immediately struck by all of the pictures of the president on the wall, all of which are very recent. As soon as I walked in, there were giant pictures of the president with Supreme Court nominee John Roberts. I was astonished because it had happened so recently. Apparently they move pictures into the front of the White House and rotate them back as time goes on. It's a pretty cool effect.

As soon as we got past the pictures we were walking up the stairs and White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan walks down some stairs past us and said hi. I later saw him giving a tour himself, which was odd. Why would the Press Secretary be giving tours? I figured it had to be a family member or perhaps a big time GOP donor.

We then went out to the Rose Garden, which was really nice. It's a lot quieter than I ever imagined it would be. You could see where Marine One lands, where they hold press conferences, etc. Riley then told us about how he proposed to his fiancé in the Rose Garden. I asked if he had to get permission to do it and he told us how he had to get clearance from his boss, who cleared it with the grounds director, who cleared it with the Secret Service, etc. Pretty crazy. Imagine if he hadn't and the Secret Service flipped out and clobbered him. It would be like a Ben Stiller movie.

Soon after, we saw the Cabinet Room and the Roosevelt Room. The Cabinet Room was pretty much what I expected; it didn't look much different than it does on TV. One interesting fact about the Cabinet Room is that the cabinet members have their own personal chairs, which have their names engraved on them. At the end of a term cabinet members have the option of buying their chair. Riley didn't know how much each chair cost to buy, but suspected it was a lot. The Roosevelt room as brighter than I imagined, which was common of the whole West Wing. I suppose that the TV show turns down the lighting to make it more dramatic.

After that it was on to the Oval Office. We were told that each president has the Oval Office tailored to his tastes. Bush has a southwestern style rug in there, which is sandy and gold. It wasn't the blue that I expected. It of course had the president's seal on it, but on the outer edge it had lone stars on it, giving it a Texas touch.

We then went to the press room, which was smaller and dirtier than I imagined. There were newspapers and garbage everywhere. Also interesting were the seats, which were rumored to have come from an old Air Force One. This was one of the few places where we were allowed to snap pictures (see above). I was surprised that they let us play on the podium. I started giving mock press conference statements about the reauthorization of No Child Left Behind and about how I "wouldn't get into commenting about that". That was fun.

Lastly it was on to see the door to the Situation Room. As I walked up to the door, the phone next to it rang and it freaked me out, but it stopped after one ring. I saw shadows moving under the door, but nobody came out of the room.

That's about it. I couldn't go to the residence or East Wing because that's where the president was. Ah well.

Riley explained that there were three major differences from the real West Wing and the West Wing TV show. First of all was the lighting, which I mentioned earlier. Second was the lack of people. There isn't anywhere to fit a ton of people, which is how the show presents the office. The overwhelming majority (about 90%) of people are in the Old Executive Office Building. Lastly, the roles that the characters take on in the show encompass multiple titles. For example, Josh Lyman is the Deputy Chief of Staff and somehow also in charge of all legislative affairs.

The Washington Post has online layout of the West Wing, if you're interested. Actually, I'll post it up here in case they take it down.

1: Linda Gambatesa, Deputy Assistant to the President for Management, Administration and Oval Office Operations
2: Personal Secretary and Personal Aide to the President
3: Scott McClellan, Assistant to the President and White House Press Secretary
4: Pamela Stevens, Assistant Press Secretary
5: Erin Healy, Assistant Press Secretary
6: Steve Hadley, Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Advisor
7: Condoleezza Rice, Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs
8: Richard B. Cheney, Vice President
9: Jonathan Burks, Special Assistant to the President for Policy and Veronica Vargas Stidvent, Special Assistant to the President for Policy
10: Joseph Hagin, Assistant to the President and Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations
11: Harriet Miers, Assistant to the President and Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy
12: Andrew H. Card, Assistant to the President and Chief of Staff
13: Dan Bartlett, Assistant to the President for Communications
14: Mike Gerson, Assistant to the President for Speechwriting
15: David Hobbs, Assistant to the President for Legislative Affairs
16: Eric Pelletier, Deputy Assistant to the President for Legislative Affairs
17: Steve Friedman, Assistant to the President for Economic Policy
18: Keith Hennessey, Deputy Assistant to the President for Economic Policy
19: Suzy DeFrancis, Deputy Assistant to the President for Communications
20: Dina Powell, Assistant to the President for Presidential Personnel
21: David Leitch, Deputy Counsel to the President
22: Margaret Spellings, Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy
23: Kristen Silverberg, Deputy Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy
24: Karl Rove, Senior Advisor to the President
25: Israel Hernandez, Deputy Assistant to the President and Assistant to the Senior Advisor
26: Alberto Gonzales, Counsel to the President

Lower Press Office
* Claire Buchan, Deputy Assistant to the President and Deputy Press Secretary
* Trent Duffy, Deputy Assistant to the President and Deputy Press Secretary
* Josh Deckard, Assistant Press Secretary

West Wing Basement
* Melissa Bennett, Special Assistant to the President for Appointments and Scheduling
* Brett Kavanaugh, Assistant to the President and Staff Secretary
* Karin Torgerson, Special Assistant to the President and Associate Staff Secretary
* Eric Draper, Director of Photography
* Paul Morse, Deputy Director of Photography
* Gen. John Gordon, Assistant to the President for Homeland Security
* Dr. Richard Falkenrath, Deputy Assistant to the President and Deputy Homeland Security Advisor
* Brian Montgomery, Deputy Assistant to the President and Cabinet Secretary
* Colleen Litkenhaus, Special Assistant to the President for Management and Administration

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People often ask me why my room is so hot in winter and why I can't stand the cold. I conversely wonder why people don't like warm weather. Today and yesterday is a perfect example of why I deal best with warm temperatures. Here is yesterday's national temperature map:

The news has been dominated with stories about how there would be record temperatures in 200 cities across the nation. CNN is really playing it up. Right now their front page headline is: "Deadly heat lingers over parts of U.S."

I for one am enjoying it a lot. I suppose this is my just desserts for all the New Yorkers who scoff at how cold I get in the winter because now they are all whining about one two little days of heat. So -- I want to show all the whiners what a hot summer is really like, as I've been told all about the cold numerous times.

Above are the seasonal temperatures for Palm Desert, CA, my hometown. You can see that on average the temperature in PD is 110 degrees in parts of July and August. The high yesterday that had so many people complaining in DC was 100 degrees, with a heat index of 110. Well, congratulations. You got a small taste of what it's like for two months of the year where I grew up! But, like I said, 110 is the average. There are a good number of days each year where it's 120 degrees. Try that weather for two months, you pansies. Some of you are probably thinking, "Well, that's a dry heat! We have humidity!" Slow down, chump. The desert has humidity at times and has been getting more and more humid each year. Besides that, humidity just makes you sweat more. 120 degrees is really, really hot, humidity or not.

I thought I would also share a story of what I consider to be a real "heat wave". It took place on July 28, 1995 -- ten years ago tomorrow. I was in Palm Desert and the temperature got so hot one afternoon that all power went out due to the fact that air conditioners were sucking more power out of the energy grid than it could provide. That afternoon temperatures varied across the desert. Some places put them at 126 degrees, others all the way up to 128. Either way, it was hotter than it had ever been, and nobody had air conditioning. You can see this day on the graph above, by the way. It's the highest spike. I was told to keep our fridge closed so that our food wouldn't go bad after I attempted to cool down using it. After that, I went out to the pool, which was nice for a while. But soon it too heated up considerably and didn't offer much relief. The power stayed off for over an hour, maybe two. Once you sit for two hours in a desert with a temperature of 126+ degrees with no air conditioning, I'll listen to you whine about a "heat wave".

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Throughout the past year I've posted some of my worst and funniest stories from teaching. I figured it's appropriate for me to give the year some kind of closure. Granted, this post is long overdue. I left Mississippi a month and a half ago and in less than a month I should already have new teacher stories to post for the new school year.

Here first are some pictures I snapped from graduation night. I'm not a fan of calling it 'graduation' night, because I think the word 'graduation' should be reserved for high school and college. It leaves the importance of graduating high school and college where it should be instead of diluting it. Nonetheless, we had a graduation-like ceremony at Carrie Stern Elementary. Some type of ceremony is appropriate because these kids are going on to middle school and entering a new phase of life.

Just a note: The auditorium at our school doesn't have air conditioning, which I completely forgot about and wore a full suit. By the time I broke down and decided I couldn't bear it, I took off my coat and my assistant principal pointed out all the splotches of sweat on my shirt. I looked like Al Gore giving one of his angry speeches where he sweats profusely. So I had to keep the jacket on and literally sweat it out.

A lot of people have read my teaching stories over the year and say to me, "I was thinking about Teach For America, but now I'm hesitant. Would you do it all over again if you knew what you know now?"

The answer to that question is, "Of course!" The question in my head still remains: If not me, then who? Qualified teachers don't want to go down to the Mississippi Delta and the Delta loses as a result. If I, or you, don't go, then who will? Furthermore, I knew before applying that if I did TFA, it was going to be one of the hardest things I ever did. If you don't expect that, you shouldn't apply. I got exactly what I expected, but I also got what I expected in that the experience yielded its rewards, too.

A lot of TFA teachers have one grand story about a single child to explain to others why they "Teach For America". I don't have one of those stories, at least not yet. What I do have is a slew of small stories that compose my first year of teaching, which I think would be an appropriate closer for the year.

One of my female students came to my class this past year with the idea that math was a subject for boys. Girls weren't good at math, she told me. As soon as I pushed her a little bit and got her to believe in herself, she championed the subject. She ended the year with one of the most competitive math grades.

My kids rated Animal Farm as their #2 favorite book at the end of the year, second only to The Outsiders. By the end of the book, they were extremely interested because they could see the parallel between it and Soviet history, on which I gave them a quick, but substantial, primer. Some of them even made inferences on their own about George Orwell's broader message on totalitarianism and despotism. The most heartening thing about it was on the last day of school when we were watching the Animal Farm movie from the 1990s. The kids were engaged because they'd all read it. During the movie, one of my lower-level readers says to her friends, "Man I woulda thought this movie was just a booty movie about some dumb animals, but now it's interesting!" A couple students liked Orwell so much that they voluntarily began reading 1984 at the end of the year. One student liked it so much that she finished it in a weekend.

A student who had been hostile to me invited me to one of his basketball games, which I happily attended. After I showed him that I was more than an aloof teacher, he trusted me and became a leader in the class. His sister also invited me to her games and they were always happy to see me come.

By the end of the year students started reading without my asking. When they had down time, opened a book and started reading for pleasure. It took all year, but it happened.

All through the year students would notoriously mess up my name. Another sixth grade teacher at Stern was named Ms. Heard. Students would start saying her name, abruptly realize their mistake, and finish with the end of my last name. The result was that I became known as "Mr. Hurrrs". I also got, "Hi, Mr. Huge!" a lot. Students (and one teacher) would always confuse me and Mr. Gardner all the time because we were two white, male teachers of comparable height.

It took literally the entire year, but by the end I finally had one particular student's trust. By about November, I think I can accurately say that I had zero credit with the child. He threatened to "stick me in the eye" once when he was angry and I was having to write referrals on nearly a daily basis. Months after changing my approach and trying to get him to trust me and show him that I cared about him, he was finally on my side. More than anything, reaching him on a behavioral level was the biggest gain we made, but I think that has the potential for a huge positive consequence later on. This is the same student that said he would sell drugs instead of stay in school to the security guard. One of the ways I did this was by throwing him a surprise birthday party, which I highly doubt anybody had ever done for him. I had my class and other school personnel close to the student waiting in the library while I scolded him over something minor and got him mad and worked up. I brought him in the library to "see the assistant principal" and everybody yelled, "Surprise!" After cooling down for a minute, he was extremely humbled, which I rarely saw with him.

Another girl in my class struggled with math all year, but made her way up to a B after a ton of hard work. She was ecstatic when she found out that she earned a B. I don't think I had ever seen her so happy about something.

At one of my kids' birthday parties I brought in a Playstation 2 and told them that I'd give them a load of "academic points" if they could beat me at Tony Hawk, knowing full well that they couldn't possibly beat me. The kids talked for days about how they were all going to school me. They didn't think I played video games because of how serious a teacher I always am. The birthday party came, I hooked it up, and one by one they struck out. The very closest any of them came was 10,000 points to my 80,000.

Most of my kids had a firm grasp on basic Newtonian mechanics after we did the physics section of science. Pretty decent, for sixth graders.

I adapted the public speaking course that I took in college for my classroom. Although it was rushed at the end of the year, kids came out of their shells and became comfortable with speaking in front of the crowd. They also learned quickly how to show respect for a person speaking in front of a crowd and how to behave when someone is speaking to them. Perhaps it's because they would now have to be one of the people in front of the class and they can empathize when someone else -- like a teacher -- is speaking. I plan on doing a lot of that next year.

Perhaps the most important thing of all was seeing my student gains. On average, my class gained 2.1 grade levels in language, 1.6 grade levels in math, and 1.1 grade levels in reading. Despite my efforts to improve reading in a huge way, I fell a little short. Not that I did poorly (i.e. less than 1.0 years of growth), but I really wanted to see at least 1.5 levels of growth in reading.

There's also of course 6th grade rap lyrics, dealing with corporal punishment, racial politics on the playground, promoting religious tolerance, local colloquialisms, writing to colleges, being made-over, and being a booty teacher.

Most of the students involved in all these stories are pictured above.

All of these things are why I'm teaching for America.

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A couple of days ago I made a post about a badly gerrymandered state house district in Mississippi. Continuing my project at work, I had to do the same kind of state house district to county mapping for Virginia. I needed to find out which districts represent Norfolk, VA* and found the following map:

I couldn't see a district for the dark pink district, which was part of Norfolk. After a second, I realized that the Eastern Shore of Virginia was the same color, but thought there was no way that it was the same district. After all, there is like 15 miles of water separating the two pieces of land. Surely that can't be a legal state house district.

After some research, it turned out that the two pieces of land were in fact the same district. I couldn't believe that it was legal to make districts span across water unless an island were involved. I suppose that technically, it is contiguous, since the Chesapeake bay is part of Virginia. But seriously, how can legislators draw that district in good faith?

*ODU MUN trip, anybody?

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Today at work I was mapping state house and senate districts to counties or congressional districts of certain states. I was going through Mississippi house districts and I found what I think is the worst case of gerrymandering that I've ever seen:

Rachel, who is from Mississippi and very into Mississippi politics, tells me this plan came about because the state didn't get a plan together fast enough and the Justice Department intervened.

The above district is congruent because it's held together by a road or something very small (see the arrow). It might even be considered worse than the North Carolina 12th Congressional District.

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People have told me how much the old logo sucked (the wordwall backdrop with the font that nobody liked). I tried for something new. I don't think I'm settled on it quite yet. If you've got suggestions, please post them. What would go better in the background? What font should I use and with what effects?

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I'm planning on taking my kids on a trip to DC next March -- instead of the mindless trip to St. Louis that ordinarily happens. Not like my principal will allow a St. Louis trip to happen again, but that's another story. Anyhow, I threw together an itenerary today. I'm trying to mix the days with educational events and something fun. If you can make any other suggestions (remember -- I have sixth graders), please post them.

Saturday, March 11

Depart Greenville at 6:00 AM
Arrive in Meridian, MS at 10:00 AM
Depart Meridian, MS by train at 11:20 AM

Sunday, March 12

Arrive in Charlottesville, VA at 7:00 AM
Check in to Hotel at 7:30 AM
Leave for Monticello at 9:00 AM
Lunch at the Colonial Tavern at 12:00 PM
Leave for Ice Rink 1:00 PM
Leave for UVA at 3:00 PM

• Guided Tour (by UGuides)
• Library Tour
• Cav Daily Tour (w/ Elliott Haspel)
• Ultimate Frisbee on the Lawn
• Donor Reception (?)
• Dinner at Little John’s

Monday, March 13

Depart Charlottesville for DC at 7:00 AM
Arrive in DC at 9:00 AM
Check in to Hotel at 9:30 AM
Tour Capitol at 10:00 AM
Eat Lunch in the Capitol at 12:00 PM
Meet with a public official or attend an event at 1:00 PM (Obama?)
American History Museum at 2:00 PM
Dinner and a movie at Union Station at 5:00 PM

Tuesday, March 14

Leave to tour the monuments at 8:00 AM
Natural History Museum at 11:00 AM
Arlington National Cemetery at 2:00 PM
College Basketball Game (GW, GTown?) 5:00 PM

Wednesday, March 15

National Air & Space Museum at 10:00 AM
Eat Lunch at Air and Space Museum
Pre-Season Nationals Game at 1:05 PM
Dinner near White House at 5:00 PM
White House / West Wing tour at 6:30 PM

Thursday, March 16

Depart for DC Zoo 9:00 AM
Lunch at the Zoo at 12:00 PM
International Spy Museum at 1:00 PM
Dinner at Union Station 5:00 PM
Depart Washington, DC at 6:40 PM

Friday, March 17th

Arrive in Meridian, MS at 2:40 PM
Arrive in Greenville at 5:00 PM

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Can you can see what is wrong with the following description of Duke Ellington's house?

• The private home of composer Edward "Duke" Ellington is located on a residential street in the nearby historic Shaw neighborhood, home to respectable and hard-working middle class African Americans in the early 1900s.

Yes, that's right. Duke Ellington was fortunate enough to live among the "respectable and hard-working middle class" black population of the early 1900s. That in no way suggests that the other (and much, much larger) segment of the black population was in any way less respectable and hard working. Not at all. Gag me.

This is the kind of subtle gaffe that you'd expect to see on the Council of Conservative Citizens website. I would not expect to have found this on the Washington, DC Convention and Tourism Corporation website.

How terrible.

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Ok. I got a new logo designed. I don't know how settled I am with it, but I think it's pretty good. I'm curious to know what everybody else thinks. The photos on the bottom are put up there at random each time you visit the site. I took 86 115 pictures that I've accumulated through the years and made them available for the logo. If I have a picture of you stored, there is a good chance that you are included somewhere in the stash of them.

The idea was to create a montage of sorts that picks from different periods of my life. I take pictures of people and places and then randomly juxtappose them for the effect. I plan to keep adding to it. If you have a picture that you'd like added, send it to me: ryan@ryanchughes.com.

If you want to cycle through the photos, you can easily do it with this script instead of the main page. Just keep reloading the script.

Post your thoughts!

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