Continuing my series on destinations to visit in and around the Mississippi Delta, today we're visiting the Leroy Percy State Park. The park was known for its gator population, so I had to check it out.

The first thing I saw at the park was a small palm tree, which was quite a surprise. I hadn't seen a palm tree in the Delta ever. I don't know how the thing survives.

When you come to the lake, this is the first thing you see. Totally exciting, but misleading, at least in March. I went all up and down the lake looking for gators. I figured they'd be up where nobody was bothering them, but I didn't see a single one, not in the lake anyway.

That sucker in the back is the best it got. I at least wanted to see it move, but even that didn't happen.

The park did have other animals, in it, though. I moved some logs in the forest and found this frog and some huge beetles. There were geese and things too.

For the day I went, the park was pretty dead. But, I bet the place is cool in the summer. I started talking to some locals about the alleged alligators in the lake and they assured me that they were there. They said that during the summer they come right up to the sides of boats looking for handouts. That information, along with the frogs and beetles that I found, suggest that it could be a pretty cool park in warmer months. Check it out if you get a chance.

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I've decided that with the advent of easy-to-use web video, I'm going to start a movie Friday for all those hard working folks out there who want a good laugh on Friday. This Friday is Weird Al's new video "White and Nerdy". Is it appropriate that I'm using "White and Nerdy" for the first Movie Friday on my blog? Probably, but whatever. I haven't thought a Weird Al song/video was funny in years and this one's pretty good.

Unfortunately, you can't see that what he's buying is the Star Wars Christmas Special.

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As I've said a couple of times, I'm still going through and writing stories from my second year of teaching that have yet to be told. I didn't have time to write them during the year, but they need to be shared, and this is one such story. In fact, it might be my teaching story that is second only to the 'booty' story.

I knew this particular student from the year prior to my second year because he would always talk to me after school. Since I knew him, I requested that he be in my class. Gotta pack the room with favorable students, right? Once in my class, it became clear that the student displayed a strong case of childhood gender nonconformity. Studies show that children showing "extreme" childhood gender nonconformity usually grow up to be gay. This particular student could very well be one of those cases.

At sixth grade, you'd be surprised how flamboyant in mannerisms a student can be. I would often joke with people visiting my classroom, "See if you can pick out my gay student." It didn't take them long, and nobody ever picked the wrong student. Interestingly, I once paid close attention to his reaction to a choir teacher who was extremely flamboyant. The student sat up straight when he saw the choir teacher and his eyes didn't break contact with him while most other students put their heads in their hands from boredom, etc.

Knowing this didn't affect how I approached issues of equality and tolerance, but certainly made me much more vigilant militant about it. Not that it did a ton of good. Kids are always mean and would find new, creative euphemisms for being gay that would elude me for a good while.

I wanted to do more than force the class into tolerance. I wanted to talk to my student one-on-one about being gay and that being OK. But doing so presented a number of problems because I couldn't just tell him it's OK that he's gay. First of all, despite spending hours of every day with this student, who am I really to be a definitive judge of his orientation -- especially when he barely has a grasp on the concept of gayness? It might offend him, scare him, depress him, or a number of other terrible things. Second, I could hear him going home and saying, "Mr. Hughes said I was gay, but that it's ok." As if that wouldn't cause a major problem or anything...

So, I had to go about it discretely, and here is how I did it at our final conference on the last day of the year:

Me: Over the course of the year I've noticed that you're a little different than other boys, _______. Do you think you're a little different than other boys?
Student: Hmmm. Maybe. Yeah.
Me: Can you think of how you're different than other boys?
Student: I dunno... I guess I'm not as athletic as they are.
Me: What about things you like? Can you think of things you like that other boys your age don't generally like?
Student: Hmmm. I'm not really sure.
Me: What about dancing? You really like dancing.
Student: Yeah, I guess I do.
Me: You also really like fashion... and you gossip a lot. Do you think that's a little different?
Student: Yeah, I guess so.
Me: Well, _______, I just wanted to tell you that just because you like different things than most boys your age, you aren't any better or worse than anybody else -- no matter what anybody ever tells you. Some people like some things, and other people like other things in life. No matter what it is, each person is just as important as the next, no matter what.
Student: Hmmm. OK.

(His lackluster responses and facial expressions indicate that it's not exactly getting through to him, so I have to go at it from a different angle)

Me: ________, have you ever met anybody who is a lot like you, who likes the same kinds of things you do?
Student: (thinks for a minute) I don't think so. Hmmm... no I don't think I have.
Me: Well, when you grow up, or get a little older, I bet that you will meet people who are just like you. Even though you don't know anybody who likes a lot of the things that you like, you'll meet some similar people some day.
Student: (somewhat excited) Really?
Me: Yeah.
Student: (thinks for a minute and then gets very excited) Wait a minute... are you one of those people, Mr. Hughes?
Me: Uhhhh... well... I'm an adult and uhhh... adults like different things than kids do... so it's not really important what I like. What's important is that you know that you're just as special as everybody else, no matter what things you like. And, someday you'll meet someone who is just like you. Will you remember that?
Student: Sure.
Me: OK. I'm proud of you, _______. Good luck next year.
Student: Thanks, Mr. Hughes!

I had to quickly figure out a way to not say, "No, I don't like that stuff." So I just confused him and got back on point.

Maybe he kind of understood, maybe not. I can only hope that when and if he figures out that he is gay, he thinks back on the conversation and it makes more sense to him. Maybe it will be some positive reinforcement in a not so gay friendly area. Anybody remember the anti-gay marriage amendment from 2004?

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Do you think you could eat a Chipotle burrito, a Five Guys burger, a bowl of chilli, and a falafel all in the course of 13 hours? My friends think they can and are on a mission to do just that today. They've got a blog that chronicles their adventures in "heart-stopping goodness". Check it often for hilarious and/or disgusting updates.

Despite making a late arrival, I hit their Chipotle stop with them. I unfortunately won't be able to complete the Quadrella, due in most part to the nagging LSAT. But hopefully I'll catch them later tonight at one or more of their stops.

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As mentioned on the previous entry, it turned out that the Red Roof Inn in Charlottesville didn’t offer continental breakfast. So, I had to wake up and figure out how I was going to feed 15 people. I thought about the White Spot, but I doubted they’d be able to get their act together for breakfast that quickly. They’re really efficient between the hours of midnight and 4:00 AM. I have doubts about breakfast. So, I went to Little John’s and got a menu. I took it back to the kids and parents to get orders. I went down to LJ’s and got a giant order of breakfast and brought it back. Everybody seemed content.

It was clear that since the will in parents to go do anything had died, we would not make it to Monticello. That wasn’t going to stop me, though. Everybody got their stuff packed up and Brianna and I took the kids to Professor Lynn Sanders’s Racial Politics class. The topic was majority black congressional districts. The plan was to have them meet their congressman, who represents a majority black congressional district one day, and then take them to a class about it. Unfortunately the lecture was pretty text heavy, and some of my kids squirmed in the desks for the lecture, but a few of my kids really got into it. At the end they met Professor Sanders and asked her questions about her lecture. One boy asked, "What is gerrymandering?" Another asked, "Who is was the Frymer guy you kept talking about?" I was so proud of them.

We walked back to the hotel to find the parents. Before going to lunch Brianna and I took all of the suitcases down to the train station because the parents didn’t want to deal with their cases. Now that was a fun cab ride: me, Brianna, and 25+ suitcases.

When Brianna and I got back, we took a walk down to UVA with everybody. I showed everybody the Lawn and they were really impressed with the beauty of the place. The parents thought it was nice, but were more interested in finding a place to sit. So, I dropped them off at the Main Lounge in Newcomb Hall (the room with the piano, for all the Wahoos out there). So, we left the parents, save one, and went around for a few hours.

We walked by Brown College first, so I was happy to point to where I spent two of my years in college and say, "I lived there!" Luckily, none of the Brown weirdos came out. We then walked through the engineering school and I explained all the different branches of engineering, hoping to plant seeds in the brains of the math and science oriented students. We then came to the football field, which they all of course liked.

Many of them said they had to go to the bathroom, so we stopped at the Aquatic and Fitness Center. Once they were done with the bathroom, we had an impromptu learning experience. We passed the pools and they all wanted to go see them, so we did. I’m not sure what fascinated them so much with the pools, but they watched the swimmers practicing for a good 20 minutes.

We made our way back to Central Grounds, where we passed the Environmental Science building. I explained that JFK’s brothers went to law school in that building. We passed the amphitheater and they didn’t understand why there weren’t more shows besides Tom DeLuca’s hypnosis show. I had no good answer for them, because I don’t know why there aren’t more.

We finally came back to the Lawn where the kids just played for a while. It was interesting to watch the different kids in their different stages of development. The lesser-developed boys dug rocks up while the more-developed boys talked with the girls. The girls all have hormones going at that age, so there weren’t any doing anything else.

We then went back to pick up the parents and caught the trolley to the Downtown Mall. We all got pizza and I chilled with Ian for a few minutes. From here, we went to the train station, got on and headed home. Except for getting stuck ten miles outside of Atlanta for two hours, everything went off without a hitch and I was finally home twenty four hours later. I had two days of my spring break left. Everybody else came back well rested and I was beat.

And so ends this six part series on our trip to DC. Despite the fact that I'm neither teaching nor in Mississippi, Delta to DC will go on. My friends Sanja and Jeanette are taking the project over this year. Best of luck to them and their students on their trip.

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Earlier this week Facebook unveiled its News Feed feature, which publishes updates to you about all your friends' public Facebook doings. Some of the updates are rather mundane, like “Geoff Harcourt removed LA Confidential from his favorite movies". Whooptie doo, right? Others are more exciting, like “Ryan Hughes and Ian Amelkin are no longer friends", “Matt Starr added Flavor of Love to his favorite TV shows", or a notice about newly posted photos of your friends getting crazy in New Orleans.

The point is that it’s a stream of updates from all of your friends’ public doings on Facebook. That has, for some reason, upset hundreds of thousands of Facebook users. These masses have joined Facebook groups that lash out against Facebook and encourage people to shut down their Facebook accounts. News outlets quickly picked up the story; even Time did.

On a side note, does anybody else see the inherent hypocrisy (and hilarity therein) of people using Facebook to talk about how much Facebook sucks?

That aside, I can’t understand the backlash against the News Feed. Granted, Facebook should have incorporated privacy settings for users’ feeds, which they since have. Even still, the feeds published only the things you publicly do on Facebook – things that people could easily find out about anyway. I think the nay sayers are under some kind of delusion that leaving comments on others’ walls while inebriated is private, or that nobody would be able to read on their profile that they joined a Facebook group for swingers, etc.

All the News Feed is doing is taking all these things and presenting them in a neat way to a user’s friends – people who could read about it anyway. If you take a step back and think about it, it’s a pretty robust tool that’s really just another step toward more fully digitizing our lives.

Like it or not, it’s a forceful trend. People now live or die by email, must have their Blackberries at all times, write blogs on their happenings, and keep profiles on Facebook or Myspace to keep in touch. The News Feed is simply a new way to digitally interact with people.

Some people find the digitalization convenient and fun. Others abhor digitalization of real world interactions because of its inherent superficiality. The same people who shudder at the phrase, “Did you read about that on my blog?" are in for more of the same with the News Feed. Can you already hear someone say, “I broke up with Jim last week. Didn’t you see it on News Feed?" I can.

Like News Feed or hate it for this reason. Don’t hate it because it invades your privacy – you’re the one who put out information about yourself in the first place.

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This was our final day in DC and it ended up not being the best. The night prior I inadvertently created some tensions between myself and a few of the parent chaperones that came along. The biggest problem was that the trip was much too fast-paced for them; they weren’t use to the pace of city life. Their frustration and sometimes confusion with the fast-paced nature of Metro trains and city life in general got directed at me, I think.

That frustration got exponentially worse each day because I had a schedule that optimized our time and required a decent amount of walking, which was another problem. I hadn’t realized that walking would have posed the problem that it did, but I should have stepped back to think about how in Greenville people never just go walking to places. By this day the parents were pretty upset with me, and their demands for a slower-paced day made us too late for our last chance to see the inside of the Capitol.

We had five hours left in the city before our train ride, which meant we had time for one activity before visiting their Congressman. We basically all chose the Air and Space Museum because the zoo would require a lot of walking and it would be cold out.

The Air and Space Museum was a pretty good time. It gave me lots of opportunities to talk about a lot of the science concepts we had studied in class.

One thing that some kids really enjoyed and made others bored out of their minds was the presentation on the International Space Station. The presenter called students from our class up several times for the show.

We then made the half-mile walk to Congressman Bennie Thompson’s office, which was apparently too much for some of the parents. When we got into his office, we were informed that the congressman wasn’t in his office at the moment, but that we could speak with one of his aides. The aide that we spoke with was actually pretty interesting and a good role-model for the kids. He talked about growing up in the Delta and what he did to get involved with politics. As we were having our chat with him, in came Bennie Thompson. The students and the parents enjoyed meeting him very much. He told us about what he was doing to fight eco terrorism and other projects related to rural Mississippi.

Then it was back to Union Station and off to Charlottesville, VA. We got to Union Station and I sent the kids and the parents down to the food court, knowing that they had to be done quickly because we had a train to catch in less than thirty minutes. I, meanwhile, went to talk to Amtrak about our group seating and the man informed me that I needed to get my group and get to him immediately. I knew that one way or another, any shred of credit I had with the parents would be gone after this, but I had no real choice. I ran and urgently told them that we had to get to our train as soon as possible. Everybody hurried and we got to the train, but the parents were pissed. I tried to explain what happened, but it did no good. Then we sat on the tracks for upwards of an hour doing nothing and I looked like an idiot.

When we got to Charlottesville we had to carry our luggage up a ton of stairs to get to the street and then catch the free trolley to our hotel –two things that parents were not enthusiastic about. When we finally got to the Red Roof Inn, it turned out that they didn’t have an extra roll-out bed for Brianna, which upset her a ton. All the adults were officially mad at me. On top of that, there was no continental breakfast, which had been advertised when I booked the rooms. Awesome.

As it turned out, there was thankfully an extra roll-away bed for Brianna. One crisis averted, only six more to fix. I tried talking to the parents, but they responded with such vitriol that I just left them well alone and went to sleep on the floor of my room.

The operation the next day with the parents was basically to sit them down for hours while we took the kids around in Charlottesville. In other words, the parents had completely stopped participating in the trip out of protest or anger.

The question you might now be asking is: what would you have done differently, Ryan? The answer to that is that I would have done nothing differently as far as planning and executing the trip. That aspect of the trip was as best it could be. Sure, there were some scheduling problems that couldn’t be accounted for, but I jammed as much educational enrichment as I could into the trip.

What I would have done differently would have been to take teachers instead of parents. Teachers would likely have been able to keep up. Plus, they’d be more helpful in managing kids than some of the parents that came. If a parent really wanted to go, I’d strongly emphasize how much walking would be involved and hopefully scare them off. Some of the parents on my trip were expecting a vacation, as opposed to a field trip. Making a clear delineation would be key. Other student groups in the Delta employ this strategy, more or less. After I had done the trip I heard that other groups had similar problems with parents and decided to opt out of having parent chaperones. I wish I had been given that advice earlier.

Tomorrow: Racial Politics, Tour of Grounds, and Back to Greenville

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As I write this entry, I am sitting in the middle of Tropical Depression Ernesto, which is hardly blog-worthy. More interesting right now is Hurricane John, which is about to tear up Cabo San Lucas and other parts of Baja California. Hurricane John got me thinking about whether or not a tropical cyclone could make its way up the coast and strike San Diego or Los Angeles.

The answer, it turns out, is yes -- it's already happened. I found this incredibly interesting report by Christopher Landsea, Ph.D. He did research into a very strong storm that hit California in 1858 using weather data collected by the US Army. You can see on his map above that the hurricane likely brushed against the coast from San Diego all the way up to Los Angeles.

It's not every year that such a hurricane could make it up to California, but certain conditions do allow it, as documented in Landsea's report. Higher sea surface temperatures and a conducive atmosphere are what likely allowed a category 1 storm reach Southern California. What caused those higher temperatures? El Niño. Landsea concludes:

Many years with tropical cyclone remnants reaching the southwest United States are El Niño years. During these years sea surface temperatures rise along the western coast of Mexico and the United States, thus, allowing tropical cyclones heading toward the region to maintain intensity longer than usual. Corals from the tropical Pacific indicate that 1858 was a warmer year than either 1857 or 1859, but there is no firm historical documentation of an El Niño event that year.

[...]

The implication of this current work is that a hurricane has directly impacted southern California in recorded history and, under the right circumstances, will again hit the region. One recent system had the potential to duplicate the track and impact of the 1858 hurricane. Hurricane Linda of 1997, during a strong El Niño event was forecast by the National Hurricane Center for a couple of advisories to make landfall near San Diego as a minimal hurricane or strong tropical storm. Fortunately, this storm weakened and turned back to the open Pacific Ocean without impacting land.

I looked up some sea surface temperatures for 1999, a non-El Niño year, and 1997, one of the strongest El Niño years. When you compare the sea surface temperatures going up and down Baja California during the El Niño year, you can see that the water would be much warmer, and thus more able to support a hurricane. Although sea surface temperatures of 26.5 degrees Celcius are required to sustain a hurricane, it's certainly not inconceivable that a very strong storm like Hurricane John could form south of Mexico and maintain its intensity long enough to batter Southern California with hurricane force winds.

Making the scenario of a hurricane landfall in Southern California even more probable is the rise in sea surface temperatures, most likely caused by global warming.

Posted by at 6:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)