Stutzfamily blog thingie

My homeroom class was so excited about today’s date that they requested to stay an extra minute after class ended to watch the clock count down to the time noted. We all started cheering and applauding when the time hit 11:11, and eleven seconds later the crowd really went wild. I guess you could say we turned it up to 11, right?

High fives all around, and lots of big smiles on the way out.

I love teaching middle school!

Remember that old knock knock joke about apples? While that one ends with “Orange” as the punchline fruit, I mention “Lemon” since I am making reference to the computer rather than the fruit. And really, the only reason I do is because I am on a steep learning curve.

See, we are just coming into a brand new one-to-one computing environment, but this time the computers are Apples (at least at the upper school). I haven’t used Macintosh machines since I was an undergraduate at Northwestern (this was back when you carried around all your info and documents on floppy disks – no external media or cloud computing for us, thank you very much), so I am feeling a bit behind the times on this campus.

Folder management, look, and organization is really funky on these machines, as is this whole “Finder” thing. And there is no way to automatically “full size” an application window – using those little red, yellow, and green dots don’t really do that – and even when you close an application by clicking on the red button, it is still open until you actually go up to the file menu and shut it down. And all my cool applications that I knew how to work on the PC – they’re not even made for the Mac. But the second-most annoying thing is the lack of a delete key. Oh sure, there is a button that says “delete,” but that button lies. It is really just a plain old “backspace” key.

And the number one frustrating thing? No right click. As any long-time PC user can attest, the lack of a right click function is a killer (and yes, I know you can push down with two fingers, spin around three times, spit on the shadow of a barn owl on the first full moon of any given month and achieve the same result on a Mac, but I choose not to start down that path to the dark side).

So it is a darn good thing that I like to hit the bars. See, the best thing about going out to happy hour with teachers is that you often pick up hugely important bytes (ha ha) of information. Out at a bar called “Satu Lagi” (literally “One More” in Bahasa Indonesian), one of my new colleagues showed me how to set my mouse pad to register a right click. Now I can open links in new tabs, save pictures, and do all (most) of the things that I could on the PC.

And I do have to admit – the battery life is pretty darn good on this thing. It makes it easy to rock out while typing on the side of the pool. With a beer in hand. Sorta like I’m doing now. Ahhh, maybe these Macs aren’t so bad after all…

One of the tough things about teaching is saying “goodbye” at the end of each year. Even if we see the kids after summer, they will no longer be ‘ours’ and we (usually) don’t have another opportunity to interact with them in the classroom.

This process is doubly difficult in our international setting, because we are often also saying “goodbye” for the foreseeable future – not just the summer vacation – due to the transient nature of students and teachers. Our family is no exception to this series of routines, and this year it is our turn to bid farewell to everyone with whom we’ve worked, played, socialized, and interacted over the past 4 years.

Recognizing the need for a sense of closure, our school always has a goodbye assembly at the end of each term (since many families choose either the winter or summer break times to move). One of the cool things that takes place is a student says goodbye to each teacher with a little speech in front of the student body. I really appreciated the thought and effort that went into this talk, put on by my adopted niece (long story), and thought I’d share it here:

In my three years at ASB, Mr. Stutz has been my best friend’s dad, my teacher for a year, my volleyball coach for three years, and always a cause for my laughter. Mr. Stutz is amazing in the way that he’s incredibly funny – funky music, pranking students and all, as well as a great volleyball coach (who just so happens to demand 20 pushups for every missed serve). He’s contributed his time to show me and other students that he cares about us, is encouraging, and knows how to make a good joke to make us laugh…or even a bad joke…but either way the end result is laughter – whether it’s with him or at him it doesn’t really matter. Go Mr. Stutz!

So another year, another Mathcounts.

Unfortunately this time around, we didn’t have any schools come in for the tournament, but we still had a good in-house competition.

The kids worked hard – well, at least on the tests. I’m thinking that many of the practices during the year were more of an excuse to get free popcorn than to study math

But they were tearing their hair out on the tougher problems and put on a fantastic show for the elementary students who came to watch the countdown round.

Of course, I think the highlight of the weekend was seeing the kids’ expressions when we pulled out the team t-shirts: they absolutely loved them! And it was also funny to see the reactions on the many adults’ faces (cough* Susan *cough) who don’t understand what they say.

Dave, on the other hand, is so cool as a middle school teacher that he came up with the slogan and thinks it is a pretty darn good one for a math team:

(ask a middle schooler if you need a translation…)