Looking at Houses in Bend

I've been spending a lot of time online looking at houses and jobs in Bend. I think it would be kind of fun to be a realtor; you'd get to go into people's homes and see how they live. Basically I'm a snoop. I'm the kind of person when I come to your home and use the bathroom, I look in the medicine cabinet. This is how I found out that one of my acquaintance's husband was using Viagra. I thought she looked a little harried.

I also think looking at homes keeps me motivated. Yesterday it was sunny and 60 degrees, today it's cold and so far we've accumulated seven inches of snow. The only word for snow in April is sad, very, very sad. I know in Bend it is sunny and there is green grass and tulips and daffodils are starting to come up. Here there is white, white and more white. No self-respecting vegetation is even thinking of coming up.

Ian and I finally finished reading the Iliad and the Odyssey. I'm  very confused as to why teachers still insist on this book. First of all, who can pronounce the names. Secondly, who can spell the names. I always tried to convince my high school students that they would need this information (whatever information we happened to be learning at the time.) but I'm fairly certain that, unless Ian goes on Jeopardy, he won't need any of the information to be found in these two books, or novels, or epics or whatever THEY are calling them.

I read the entire two "books" out loud to him. Towards the middle I started just reading the first sentence in each paragraph and moving on to the next and so on and so on. We took the test and he got a 92%, which shows you that two-thirds of this book was entirely unnecessary. When he was little and I read to him in bed, I'd sometimes try to get by with the above method. This was because I was either tired  and wanted to go to bed or I was tired of reading the book twelve times in one night. This method never worked then; Ian would stop me and say, "That's not how it goes." He never did that with the Iliad. Of course, he had never read it before, but I also think that even though I left out most of the book and many times my skipping entire paragraphs made no sense, he didn't really care. This was not the kind of adventure book he liked.

Sometimes I think the VIPs who create curriculum just say things like, "Well, we need to include The Odyssey," and no one in the room says "Why? That's a stupid book." We educators seem to think that certain authors, books, etc. are sacrilegious and MUST be included in any educated person's reading list. I say we get rid of Faulkner (who has no idea what a comma is), James Joyce (plain boring and again with the weird names), and most of Shakespeare except for the ones that have bloody battles and incest and murderous women.

We should replace them with books like "Holes," which has two evil villains, male and female, lizards who can kill you, mystery, desert and, if you watch the movie, a great theme song. "Hatchet" is another one - the kid almost drowns in a lake, the airplane pilot dies, he gets attacked by a moose and has to eat turtle eggs, seriously, what kid doesn't like a story like this? Or any of the "Diary of a Wimpy Kid," series - you have a dorky seventh grader, an even dorkier friend, an obnoxious older and younger brother, lots of gross body jokes and inept teachers.

If I was a textbook designer these are the kinds of books I'd include in a reading text. If anyone was interested in Shakespeare or Salinger or Emily Dickinson and her whiny poems I'd direct them to the Internet. I mean, isn't the Internet where you go to find completely useless information?