Shyzer.com

During my senior year of high school, I took a few AP classes, which were advanced classes where you took a giant test at the end of the year and depending on your score, earned college credit. I didn’t know it at the time, but these AP classes ended up enabling me to go to Australia my senior year of college since I didn’t need a full semester of classes to graduate then. So suffice to say, AP classes = awesomness.

One of the bad things, however, was that at the time, there was a huge surge of AP classes being offered on a trial basis. The state was trying to further advance the opportunities offered to students, which I give them full credit for, so they almost doubled the numbed of available AP courses from the basics like Calculus, English, and US History to include new ones, such as most foreign languages, Government, and one I ended up taking, Psychology.

My AP Psychology teacher was great. She wasn’t that much older than us and loved to joke around and converse with us as equals, not as kids. She even ended up having us over at her house for a giant water balloon fight / pizza party at the end of the year, which was well above and beyond the call of duty. However, when it came to the actual class and subject material of psychology…well, she left a little to be desired. She was a recent college grad with a degree in Interior Design and had only recently started teaching, yet here she was “teaching” us psychology, which basically amounted to her reading out of the book and trying to stay one chapter ahead of us.

And yet she was one of my better “non-qualified” teachers I had throughout the years.

There’s something inherently wrong with much of the education system these days. With exception to a few small things, we are essentially teaching our children in the same method and style as our grandparents were taught, despite changes in society and technology (Hi there computers! Is that a TV over there in the corner? Dry erase markers smell funny!), while at the same time expecting our teachers to stay one step ahead of the curve. Yet the curve keeps winding around a different corner faster and faster each year and you can’t go a week without tripping over an article in The New York Times about the plight of finding qualified, much less warm bodies, to teach.

Nothing stands out more than when you have a technological inept middle aged woman teaching kids how to use a computer. We understand that in every aspect, children learn complicated tasks faster than adults. Why do you think there’s been such a big push to teach kids a foreign language at a young age? Because they’re much more likelier to pick it up in the 1st grade than in the 12th! So then why do we have teachers leading kids at a snail’s pace simply because the teacher is having a hard time learning and understand HTML, PHP, new ways to Google search, new computer parts, etc. etc. Almost every computer class I’ve always been in, I’ve outsmarted the teacher by a mile, which is more the norm than the exception.

Simply put, we have done a horrible job at keeping our educational system up with both progress and expectations.

We’ve put too much of an emphasis on finding “qualified” teachers; people who have the complete package (ie, know every subject well enough to actually teach it with some sort of authority) and who also have the passion and desire to teach. The faster we come to the conclusion that there’s not nearly enough of these people out there as we would hope, the better our children and our schools will be.

The main school I’ve subbed at for the past year has begun to try and address this problem. Despite being an elementary school, where traditionally kids only have one teacher throughout the year, they’ve instead adopted a more middle/high school approach where kids have multiple teachers, no matter what the grade level. Each teacher gets a specific subject to “master.” Usually this is something they excel at and have a great track record of teaching successfully and in exchange, they drop a subject they are weak in or don’t want to teach. Thus, each student has it’s main teacher, say Mrs. Smith, who teaches them everything except for one subject, say English. When it comes time for English, they kids pack up and head over to Mrs. Bell’s class since she is the English whiz and Mrs. Smith gets to teach math to Mrs. Bell’s class.

This might seem pretty basic, but it’s the first school I’ve seen do it. No other school in the area does it and I know none of the schools where I grew up did this either. It greatly enhances certain areas of importance, though. The students are all guaranteed to be taught at least two subjects where the teachers absolutely know their stuff, while at the same time have their main teacher’s glaring weakness nullified. Is this the solution? Not entirely, but it’s certainly a move in the right direction.

This still doesn’t address the greater issue at hand, which is that save for a few small differences, kids today are taught in much the same manner as our grandparents were. Students are given textbooks at the beginning of the year and for the most part, all of their learning is pulled from that, despite the many studies and books (I highly recommend the one to your right) that have been written that show how faulty the majority of textbooks are. Knowledge, just like everything else these days, seems to shift and change with every new sunrise. Hell, Pluto isn’t even a planet anymore! My very excellent mother just served us nine…um….damn. It’s for this reason alone that we need to shift away from teaching materials that take months or years to update to material that takes days to be updated. Put it this way: whoever creates a full array of teaching materials that can be downloaded straight onto the computers in a classroom and who can market it in a way that makes people realize that teaching from computers is the way of the future is going to be filthy rich.

Which leads me to my next point. Why are we so reluctant to use technology in the classroom? (And crappy PowerPoint presentations don’t count.) I’ve already written about how kids these days have changed, even when compared only to my generation. This is a technology driven society now, one where you can’t take a piss without a computer in the toilet thanking you for your deposit and so kindly flushing it away for you. So then why is it that when I walk into a classroom, I see only a few computers in the corner that are only used as rewards for good behavior or finishing an assignment fast?

And cost shouldn’t be an obstacle. The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) Project has the chance to revolutionize the way we approach education, not just here in America, but throughout the world in general. But even without that project, computers have fallen in price so dramatically that I could go out and buy a $300 computer that would rival the brand spanking new one I bought for $1500 six years ago. The technology for wireless internet throughout a school is not only already here, but easily installable, affordable, and maintainable. If I can rig up my entire household to receive Internet no matter where I am for under $100, schools could easily do it for under a grand. This isn’t rocket science we’re talking about here, it’s adults who are apprehensive to changing and adopting with new technology.

We need to rethink the way we’re teaching kids and we need to do it fast. Otherwise, we’re doing a disservice to our children, not ourselves.

Like I said yesterday, schools up here in Virginia have been closed since Monday. When you factor in that they’ll also be closed this coming Monday for President’s Day, you realize that the Gooblings were recently handed a 7-day weekend. And so far, they’ve each spent 98% of their time off indoors either on the computer or in front of a TV.

I hate to sound like an old codger lamenting about the “good ‘ole days,” but it’s easy for me to see how childhood has changed in the last 10 to 15 years. I was part of the last group of kids who grew up without some form of technology pervading my every waking moment. And this is coming from a guy whose dad bought an NES before anybody else on the block - just as much for him as it was for me. The same went for just about every other technology breakthrough over the 90s. Personal computer, big screen TV, high speed (56k BABY!) internet, you name it, we most likely were the first in the neighborhood to get it.

And yet even still, the majority of my childhood memories are void of complex technology or machinery. In elementary school, I didn’t touch a computer until 4th grade, and that was to play Math Blasters in Horizons class. After school was spent watching an hour of cartoons on FOX (who else remembers when Nickelodeon didn’t have any Nick Toons and Cartoon Network didn’t exist!? Just me? Okay…) before walking down the street to Michael Mace’s house to hang out. I do remember playing my fair share of Battle Toads, Ninja Turtles, and Zelda at his place, but even more of my memories from that early on in life are of me on my bike, racing around the neighborhood with my dog, just looking for something to do. Well, that, and playing in the woods where I found a dog bone and was convinced it was an Indian burial ground. In fact, that was my greatest asset as a kid. My imagination. God, the hours spent playing outdoors or with my Ninja Turtles or Ghostbuster toy gun. I may have played alone a lot as a kid, but I never felt alone after I let my mind run wild for a little bit.

By the end of elementary school and throughout middle school, my main after school activity was calling Chong to see if he wanted to “Play.” For us, Playing consisted of walking around and trying to entertain ourselves. Sometimes we’d find a house being built to Play in. Other times we spent our Play time chopping down trees in the woods in order to make a bridge over a 10 inch creek. Or even more often, Playing meant wandering around in people’s yards, down the nearby streets, along the abandoned railroad tracks, simply looking for something interesting and using our imagination whenever we found it. Yeah, we were older, but using our mind as a source of entertainment was still our key toy.

Sure, we played SNES and Genesis whenever we felt like it, but I can’t seem to remember playing video games for more than a few hours at a time, if that. They just weren’t that entertaining! You can only play so much Madden ‘94 before you realize that it sucks. And I’m not trying to make it seem like I didn’t play video games as a kid. I played a lot. But only in relation to other kids back then! Before, I may have been a video game master, but compared to kids nowadays, I would be the kid who couldn’t figure out how reload his gun on Halo. In all honesty, I’d say only about 50% of my free time before hitting high school was spent either watching TV or playing video games.

I’d put the Goobling’s at about 90%, minimum.

So is that bad? Do I think their “generation” is failing at something? No, it’s simply a fact I’ve noticed. It simply make me wonder what their memories are going to be of when they get to be my age. I don’t see how they can be anything beyond video games, computers chats, and disappointing TV shows. I can’t help but feel like they’re missing out on something that I was fortunate enough to experience, something which is gone from kid’s lives forever.

I’m sure my grandparents said the same thing when TV entered my parent’s lives. And the same was probably said a generation earlier when radios began popping up into homes across the country. That doesn’t change the fact that they were right. Things did change and it’s the elder people who see it happening because they remember what it was like “before.” Are either generation better off or worse because of the change? I doubt it, but it’s still hard to watch it happen.

During a week long snow storm, God…I probably would have spent only enough time indoors to eat, sleep, and cure my extremities from frostbite. The Gooblings haven’t even desired to touch the snow. I can’t even think of a moment beyond dinner time when any of them haven’t been in front of a computer, TV, or video game. Literally. No forts have been built. No surprise snowball attacks have been made. No giant snowballs have been rolled into the size of a small car and placed in the middle of a road at the bottom of a hill for a pickup truck to slam into, which caused the driver to chase after us….

I wonder what my kids will say when my grandchildren’s generation welcomes the invention of internal brain computers or automated chore & homework completing robots or something along those lines. I bet they’ll lament over the days when their games were only played on TVs instead of in full life virtual reality rooms, which totally made them better and more hardcore. They’ll recall when Google searches were inaccurate at best and how information on the Internet only seemed to be organized or sorted until you actually wanted to find something and couldn’t no matter how hard you tried. Or even how they had to hide their porn stash in C:/My Documents/Important Files/Saved029/Computer Logs instead of downloading them directly into their brains, which…well I think my grandchildren will have the advantage there.

But my kid’s will be right. Just like I am. Just like everyone before me was.

We all have missed out on something previous generations had. But such is the nature of change.

It’s kind of humorous, a bit puzzling, and largely disappointing to watch people like Rep. Virgil Goode of Virginia and conservative talk show host Dennis Prager continually denounce newly elected Rep. Keith Ellison for choosing to swear upon a Quran in place of a Bible during his oath of office. Upon learning of Ellison’s decision to use the Muslim holy text at his ceremony, Prager issued a statement claiming “insofar as a member of Congress taking an oath to serve America and uphold its values is concerned, America is interested in only one book, the Bible. If you are incapable of taking an oath on that book, don’t serve in Congress.”

Of course, at first glance, one might cast Prager’s comments aside as the ramblings of some loony talk show host. Yet faster than you could call for a jihad, Prager suddenly found an ally in Congressman Virgil Goode, who penned a letter denouncing illegal immigration and stating “if American citizens don’t wake up and adopt (my) position on immigration there will likely be many more Muslims elected to office and demanding the use of the Quran.” Both fools men have now found even more supporters, some of which are calling for a new law requiring all officials to use the Holy Bible during their swearing in. Apparently those people hate that little annoyance known as Article VI of the Constitution.

Of course, Goode seems to ignore the fact that Ellison was born and raised in Detroit, a city that has always been right here in America, no matter how hard we wish the opposite. Yet what’s even more jarring is how so many people seem to be motivated by fear more than anything else these days.

You didn’t hear any uproar when Rep. Debbie Wasserman of Florida used a Hebrew Bible without the New Testament two years ago. Nor did anybody make a peep when a Catholic Missal was used when Lyndon B. Johnson assumed the Presidency. All was quiet when President John Quincy Adams used a legal book in honor of his background in law or when President Theodore Roosevelt and Herbert Hoover both swore upon no text at all. President Franklin Pierce went so far as to decline any sworn oath whatsoever and instead simply affirmed his oath and nobody batted an eyelash or gave it a second thought.

Yet when the nation’s first Muslim elected to Congress decides to use a Quran, the zealots on the religious right pull out the guns and start firing across the bow of USS Tolerance. In fact, seeing as how all members are sworn in earlier at a different session before pulling out the Bibles for a ceremony designed for maximum publicity, this debate is essentially moot. Yet people like Prager have for some reason adopted a stance of never letting an opportunity pass where they can remind Americans that we were attacked by Muslims on 9/11 and then scaring them into agreeing with whatever retarded goal they have.

We get it. A handful of Muslims attacked our nation over five years ago. That doesn’t mean we have to sink to their level and become just as close minded as those few individuals were. There’s a reason black people don’t hold every white person responsible for hate crimes committed by members of the KKK. It’s because they understand that just because a small group of idiots hate blacks, that doesn’t mean that all white men and women hate blacks as well! They are able to make what’s called an intelligent assumption - just because a small group of people looks or act a certain way, that does not mean the entire race or sect does so as well.

The day we let fear of the different and unknown rule our lives is the day we stop being American. In fact, we not only would sink beneath our own morals, but would sink beneath those who Prager and Goode are so deathly afraid of. Countries like Iran, who have some of the most narrow minded views on foreign policy in the world (ie, death to Israel!!) still allow Jews to serve in their government. Morris Motamed, a Jewish member, has served in the Iranian parliament for years without having to swear upon the Quran. In fact, when quized as to why this was allowed, Tehran University professor Hossein Bashiriyeh explained that “an oath taken with a holy book other than one’s own cannot be religiousl and morally ‘binding.’…in effect, it will amount to not taking an oath at all.” You know you’re in bad shape when officials in a country like Iran are making more than sense that your own.

One of the many lessons I’ve learned from studying history is that America’s strength has nothing to do with our (somewhat) Christian heritage, but in our respect for individual choice, freedom, and rule of law. People like Prager and Goode would benefit greatly from remembering that.

While partaking in my daily ritual of scouring the internet for pointless crap in between halfway completing two more worthwhile tasks, I stumbled across an article about the lost art of serendipity and how today’s youth no longer discover new things on their own. Yet for some reason, the only thing my mind could focus on was the sound of Grandpa Simpson’s voice screaming, “MAAAAAAAATTLOOOOOOCK!”

It doesn’t take long to get a visual representation of the author, William McKeen. On the downswing of middle age. The world around him seems a bit too unfamiliar, too alien. And man, did he enjoy the good ole’ days a hell of a lot better than now.

One of the best ways to poorly argue that today’s generation is too cut & dry, too filtered, and too focused is to employ the tactic McKeen seems to enjoy - Quickly define your age so as to turn off younger readers and then proudly proclaim, “In my day, we used to waste time! Lot’s of it! On purpose! For fun! You kids suck!”

I used to be in agreement with people like McKeen. I thought we were losing a valuable art in our daily lives, one of uncovering and finding items we enjoyed without having to be told about them. I thought the only decent way to discover the true gems in life was to find them the old fashion way - without technology. I didn’t even think it was possible to find anything worthwhile in the giant goop we call the Internets. And then I realized how blatantly wrong that concept was.

Battlestar Galactica. Mitch Hedberg. Watership Down. Angela. Stan whenever he has a site. David Gray. DMZ. Box Car Racer. Heather Armstrong. Imogen Heap. Techno. Doc. The Postal Service. Firefly. The Stand.

All artists, authors, creators, books, movies, and countless more I never would have discovered for myself without technology.

Just because people now a days don’t waste their time flipping through newspapers or wandering the stacks of a library doesn’t mean they aren’t discovering unexpected treasures throughout their day. McKeen truly shows his age when he talks about how easy it is to find things on the Internet, how personal and custom tailored our information is, and how much time technology saves us. I guess my only question is this:

Really? It’s easy to find things on the Internet? Have you ever used Google? Name the last time you were looking for something specific and found it within 2 minutes. Chances are you had to wade through a lot of crap before you finally found what you were looking for, whether it be a recipe for a certain souffle or a funny op-ed your favorite comedian wrote a few years back. I’d even be willing to bet that occasionally, you unintentionally watched a video of a new comic or read an article by an unknown blogger while on your quest. And you enjoyed it. Maybe even enjoyed it so much as to start a second, separate search to find more pieces created by them.

Gee wiz, don’t look now, but that sounds awfully similar to that “lost art” McKeen seems to be lamenting over.

Time saving and technology are not two (okay, three) words that I put together very often. American’s spend more than an average of two hours a day on-line just at work alone. And what do you think people are doing during those two hours? Reading the few news articles of the day that interest them? Watching our favorite funny videos over and over each day? Listening to the same songs by our favorite bands, whether they be old school Beatles or somebody new like The Killers? Give me a break.

We surf at random, blindly, having no idea what the next click might hold. Sites like Break and College Humor are massively successful because we know that each day, new and unexpected items are going to be uploaded to them. They might be funny, they might be stupid, or they might be one of the greatest things we’ve ever seen, read, or heard. But one thing is certain. There will be at least something we’ve never seen before and that excites us. We know we’re getting something fresh, something new, something we might even love.

There’s a reason people don’t spend an hour a day pouring through their local paper or strolling through the library or going to the bookstore instead of using Amazon and it’s because we’ve got shit to do. Like work. Like play. Like experiencing life.

Or maybe more like spending an hour watching the Top 25 videos on YouTube or reading the most Digg-ed articles of the week.

Either way, don’t blame technology for the “lost arts” of wasting time or serendipity. Neither are going away any time soon. If anything, technology has only enhanced them both and allows us to pursue them as much we want.

Seriously, I used to adore him. A self-made man in politic who speaks not only the truth, but his mind, is quite appealing to most people, regardless of their political affiliation.

Now? Not so much love anymore. It’s amusing to me how misinformed some of the nation’s leading legislatures can be about important topics. For as we all know, the Internet is just a series of tubes.

If a customer walks into Wal Mart and starts shouting slanderous comments against Paris Hilton, would Wal Mart be held responsible? Ok, maybe trashing Paris wouldn’t disturb anybody into action, but you get the point. The same goes for blog comments. Some websites can get hundreds of comments per post with multiple posts daily. Holding the authors responsible for a third parties’ views on a subject is not only idiotic, it’s unrealistic.

Over the course of my travels, I’ve acquired a taste for many things foreign. Argentinean steaks, Swiss chocolate, Australian friends (and beer!)

And dollar coins.

Nothing is easier to use than the dollar coin. How many times have you been denied a packet of Cheetos from the vending machine because your dollar bill was too wrinkled? How about trying to buy a train ticket from the auto dispenser only to kick the machine in disgust as the train rolled off towards town without you? And who can forget those oh-so-fun washing machines and parking meters that refuse to take anything not in metallic form?! The dollar coin would eliminate all those problems as they are easier and quicker to use, which I can attest to from experience. For when the free bus is about to head back to campus and you’re trying to buy a case of Old, nothing is easier than feeling for that extra dollar coin in your pocket and paying with time to spare.

You don’t look convinced. I can see the Americanism in your eye, that look of “Oh no, it’s weird and foreign! Get it away!!” Okay, let’s start even smaller then. Don’t worry about all those other crazy foreign ideas, like the dollar coin or the metric system or even the absurd thought of abolishing capital punishment. Let’s get even smaller.

Let’s get rid of the penny.

It’s useless. It’s antiquated. And it’s costing you money. That’s right, a single penny now costs 1.4 cents to produce. Gee, makes sense to me to keep it around then! 99% of the machines I described earlier refuse to even accept pennies. Hell, the penny is the only monetary form that people are so desperate to get rid of, that they happily drop them off in the “Take A Penny, Leave A Penny” dishes at their favorite Kwik-E-Mart. If we seriously proposed eliminating the penny, we wouldn’t even have to fight the Abraham Lincoln lobbyists seeing as how Lincoln isn’t just on the penny, but on the $5 as well. I’m not joking here, most ex-Presidents have “supporters” who still work to keep their memories around, as absurd as it sounds.

So we all agree now that the penny is a pointless and needless item in our lives, right? Fantastic.

Then allow me a moment to speak to my favorite Shyzerian: the federal government.

Guys, please don’t screw this up. Those past dollar coins you’ve produced have sucked to a level I didn’t even know existed, even for you guys. You must have spent millions of dollars in advertising for those Sacagawea coins back in 2000 and then you proceeded to mint a grand total of 12 to toss out into circulation. Fine, you might have actually put out more than that, but I can’t tell you the number of times I had store clerks look at them and wonder if they were even real tender. And those Susan B. Anthony coins were an even bigger hit the year before! Let me tell you, nothing screams “Buy these new shoes!” like a frowning, angry feminist! So come on, let’s get this right. Quit making the dollars gigantic. Quit making the dollars the size of a quarter. Pick a size just a little bigger, make it slightly heavier, slap on a few dead white guys, and call it a day. Let me worry about convincing the American public.

You can thank me later, preferably with many Zachary Taylor and Franklin Pierce coins.

One of the hardest things for a substitute teacher is gaining credibility and authority over the students. That’s a no-brainer that most people will agree with, especially once they think back to their younger years of terrorizing their teacher’s replacements whenever they were fortunate to have one. But the next hardest obstacle to overcome, one that is almost just as hard as the first in my opinion, is figuring out and cutting through all the red tape.

My experience in teaching is much different compared to a full time teacher. They have to deal with the same kids, problems, requirements, parents, and God knows what else for 180 days with only a short three month break before the cycle starts all over again. I’m sure it can be hard setting up a well oiled machine that both works smoothly and handles all the demands placed upon the teacher. But for me, my job is much different and at first glance, can seem almost comically easy.

I don’t have to worry about “teaching”. Making sure the students know everything that they need to know by the end of the year is nowhere near my job description. I don’t have to worry about bad parents, failing students, or office politics. In fact, for the most part, I’m a glorified babysitter. Watch over the kids, make sure they don’t get hurt, and try to keep a little order to the whole process.

That doesn’t mean it’s incredibly easy though. From the moment the kids walk in the door, I have about 5 minutes to set the tone. It doesn’t matter what age group you’re watching over, they all generally act the same in the first few minutes. Most of the students hang back, eyeing you suspiciously, while a small handful of the bolder students test the waters. It’s so painfully obvious, it’s almost funny. Yet each and every time, if you show any signs of weakness, the kids will pounce like ferocious hyenas. Don’t even let them smell blood and you’re fine. But God help you if you have a poor poker face.

But like I said, this is normal anywhere and for me it’s actually not that bad. Having used with my siblings and their friends such parental tactics as screaming outside a Baskin Robbins, “Anybody who isn’t touching my arms by the count of ten gets kicked in the balls,” I’m not one to being afraid of quickly dropping the Punishment Hammer.

No, for me, the hard part is getting through all the bullshit that most teachers have in place. I call it the Teaching Gristle. Weird punishment and reward systems, homework folders, lunch counts, planning period duties, and countless more. It’s the kind of crap that basically turns each classroom into a mini-bureaucracy of confusion and frustration for anybody who doesn’t know the system. And I hate every bit of it. For me, it slows things down to a crawl. One of the first things I do when whenever I get into a classroom is scan the lesson plans left for me and underline any unique (ie, absurd) requirements by the teacher. I understand these might be helpful tools over the course of a year, but expecting an outsider to pick them all up and execute them to perfection is downright naive and foolish.

This past week I had the pleasure of teaching the same 4th grade class for three days straight in a school where I’ve taught the majority of my time over the past year. When I ran into some of the fellow teachers I knew and told him who I subbing for, they all reacted as if they’d just smelled a violent fart and offered words of condolences. Simply put, there were a few kids in the class who were well known hellions.

The first day was certainly “fun” and typical of other days. I spent most of it listening to the kids tell me how I was doing things “wrong” and wasting time trying to figure out which basket to put which stack of papers in and which order to teach what lesson in and which kid had what weekly duty. By the end of the first day, I was ragged and the thought of doing it twice again was as appealing as a root canal. The next morning, I decided to switch things up a little and implement Goob’s Method O’ Teaching.

Out were all the little things that clutter up my day. The old method of punishment was to have some sort of weird sound level scale and then drop a marble into a can every time they were too loud, which deducted one minute off recess for the entire class per marble. The Goob Punishment Method was to simply discipline the blatant wrongdoers and to discipline them hard. The first time I shouted, “Mark, that’s five minutes off recess for making everybody over there laugh. Do it again and I’ll take off another five,” the entire class hushed up in awe and stayed that way much longer than they ever did when I dropped a marble. Likewise, the old method of rewards was to give them a monopoly dollar, which they could exchange for prizes at the end of the week. While this method wasn’t too bad in my mind, it was far too hard keeping up with what task earned what amount of dollars and thus I nixed it in addition to the antiquated “weekly helpers” method and thus the Goob Reward Method was born. Little Sarah, who always sat quietly and did her work on time, got to be the line leader. I didn’t give a care in the world that she had been it last week and that it was now Joey’s turn. When Joey’s losing 10 minutes off recess every day, I don’t see why he should get to take a turn in the weekly rotation of “fun” jobs. What’s that I hear? The students protesting loudly at the new changes? A quick threat that if the shouting doesn’t stop within 10 seconds, everybody loses a chunk of recess hushed them up quickly.

I’ll be the first to admit I run a tight ship, no matter what environment I’m in. When it comes to rules, I expect them to be followed and only once you’ve proven that you can do so will I start to give some leeway. Until then, I find it almost stupid to give away rewards for no other reason than “you haven’t had a turn yet.” Show me you deserve the turn and you’ll get one. Until then, Sarah or Billy or Drew can be the line leaders over and over and over again.

It wasn’t just the discipline and reward areas though. I shaved off the excess fat from anywhere I could. Instead of hunting for the correct basket under a mound of papers and books, I paper clipped whatever the kids turned in and left a post it note identifying the stack. Instead of going around individually checking the contents of each homework folder, I made them pull out their assignments and turn them in so that I could check them during a planning period. Those all might not seem like much, but when you’re forced to divert your attention for two or three minutes to try and figure out what the little things in a lesson plan are instructing you to do, much less do them, the kids can go from well behaved angels to blood thirsty savages.

Like I said, these are all good and well for somebody who has to lord over these kids for an entire year. But please, I implore any full time teachers out there, if you want to make sure things go smoothly while you’re gone, give your sub some leeway and slice off as much Teaching Gristle as possible.

As Friday came to a close, I realized how quickly the past two days had gone compared to the first. The fact that almost every kid in the class, even the ones I’d had to discipline over and over, were telling me that if their teacher was ever absent again, they wanted me to come back only proved that what I’d done hadn’t been a mistake. As a sub, whenever you can cut that extra crap, you’ve got extra time. If you in turn invest that time back into the students in the form of direct attention and teaching, it pays off handsomely and you’ll enjoy “teaching” much more.

I have ideas. Lots of ‘em. I’ve got a notebook right here full of ideas for products, websites, journeys, books, Mariners lineups, etc.

One such idea that I’ve had recently has centered abound the whole consumer created media wave that’s been sweeping the Internet for the past few years now. I’m of course talking about podcasts, vlogs (video blogs, where instead of typing out a post like this, the author records himself speaking it into a camcorder and just uploads the movie) It’s finally reached the point where the “fad” label can be taken off and instead we can look at this section of the Internet market as something that is here to stay, whether we know and understand it or not. (in fact, here’s a good article about it with some great sites at the bottom.)

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past year, you know about sites like YouTube. Based on traffic (20+ million visitors monthly) and downloads (100 million videos daily), YouTube has been pegged as somewhere between the 15th and 25th most trafficked site on the net and it only takes a few minutes or surfing around on their site to realize why. It’s a virtual landmine of entertainment and enjoyment. Want to watch a video of a kid hitting another kid in the crotch? No problem. How about a funny SNL or Daily Show clip? They’ve got ya covered. And if watching Chinese adolescents lip-synch to Backstreet Boys, you’re in luck. And it’s all for free, watchable in a matter of seconds and easily shared amongst friends, blogs, and other websites.

Now, business model aside for a moment (How in the hell is YouTube making money and covering the cost of streaming 30+ million videos monthly?! Simply from ads? I don’t buy that for one second. So far, they seem to have relied on investments, the latest being $15 million dollars this month. But once they use that to blow through bandwidth over the course of a few months, they’re right back where they started. I don’t see where they are getting their profit from.), legal questions soon pop up. Who owns these videos? Surely NBC and Comedy Central do not profit from the SNL and Daily Show clips on YouTube, so what’s in it for them? Not a thing and as such, YouTube says they honor such requests to delete copyrighted material. But to put it plainly, they don’t. Try it out for yourself, do a search for Daily Show or Family Guy or any other funny show out there. THOUSANDS of videos will pop up in the results from those respective shows. But these are large, multi-billion dollar companies, they can absorb the blow until the legal questions can be settled.

But what about you and me?

The reason vlogs, podcasts, and random consumer created media in general is so popular is because anybody can do it. There’s no reason for Seth McFarland to make a funny vlog when he can instead he can be paid millions to make a funny episode of The Family Guy. The same goes for Jon Stewart making a satirical podcast when instead he is paid to do so on cable TV. But you and I don’t have the luxury of being paid for our funny and unique ideas, so in the old days, that meant tough shit for us. But now, we can simply go ahead and create whatever videos, songs, or other media our little heart’s desire, upload it to the Internet, and viola!

But how are we supposed to get people to see our media? That’s where YouTube and other services step in, offering us to upload it to their websites. The catch is that almost every website that offers such a service has a little clause in their TOS stating that they own any uploaded material. So that means that YouTube can simply sit around, let all of its content be created by the users, and then profit from it without sharing.

Fair? Hardly.

Sure, I might be happy at first simply with getting more eyeballs on my content. If I made a vlog here and only got 10 people to see it versus uploading it to YouTube and getting 10,000, then it’s a no-brainer. But after I’ve built my fan base, then what? Shouldn’t I get at least some of the pie for doing all the work? And if I somehow find a way to get people to pay for my content, what if others go and upload it anyways to YouTube, thus allowing freeloaders to skirt around the issue. And you think YouTube actually gives a care who uploaded the video? Think again.

What the Internet needs is for some sort of universal payment method that will allow users to conveniently pay only a few cents for things like video views and podcasts. Creators could sign up for the service and host their videos, podcasts, etc only through them. The service would then in turn allow users to pay a small, small fee to access the media. That’s the type of service that needs to be created and yet for some reason, nobody has done so yet.

For the sake of argument, let’s pretend such a service was started tomorrow named Shyzicorp. If I have 20,000 people viewing my vlog (which might sound like a lot, but I could sit here and rattle off a twenty page list of people who have such followings, many of which get double, triple, or more in viewership, myself being a huge fan of one or two in particular) and I get them to spend a mere penny a pop, that’s a $200 right there. If Shyzicorp splits the profits with me 50/50, I’m making $100 per episode.

Most of these are created and updated daily or semi-daily, so let’s pretend I make a new video three times a week. That’s $15,600 a year and while it might not sound like much, remember this is a side project (ie, disposable extra income on top of your normal job) and that many, many people are already doing for free. If content creators were to have 100,000 daily viewers and they created a new clip every weekday, they’d be pulling in $2500 per week, after Shyzicorp’s equal cut, and thus would be making $130,000 a year. With that type of income, who needs a day job?

Some might ask if users would actually pay for content, but think about that for a second. As a user, I’d be paying a penny per episode and thus over the course of a year, I’d be paying $1.56. For half the price of a coffee at Starbucks, I could support my favorite vlogger or podcaster for an entire year. If people will pay a buck a song on iTunes, I promise you Shyzicorp could get people to pay a few bucks a year for their favorite sites and content.

You could even make content like “Ask A Ninja” and other exceptional material three or five cents since it’s only updated weekly or so. I’d pay a nickel for Ask A Ninja. Heck, I’d pay a dime to listen to TWiT. With the numbers they claim to have, at a dime a download, that’d be over 31 grand an episode, per week.

Just make it easy to pay a few cents and “viral” becomes “Viable.”

The payment method could even be simplified to the point where a user pays $5.00 and gets 500 viewable credits so that they don’t have to through the payment method every time they wanted to watch something. You could operate under the method where once a user pays for something, they can watch it however many times they wanted. Or you could even license the content so that once it’s paid for, it’s viewable for, say, a week. After that, they have to drop yet another penny to watch it again, thus making the archives of the content continue to generate money.

You could embed short, 15-second advertisements at the start or end of each video. Viewers could either watch / listen to them or maybe pay $5-10 per year to have access to ad-free content. There are countless other options here as well.

What I’m getting at is that companies like YouTube and Myspace currently are blowing through bandwidth, making little to no profit, and sharing none whatsoever of what they actually make with the content creators. There are a few sites, like Revver, that simply stick ads at the end of videos and pay the content creator a few cents each time the ad is clicked, but that’s just a single rung on the ladder up from YouTube and the such.

I can promise you this. If Shyzicorp burst onto the scene tomorrow with an easy, quick, and cheap website/program and offered vlogers and podcasters half the cut of whatever was earned on a pay-per-view license, 90% of the market would shift to them.

And at a base rate of a penny a pop, you’d have absolutely no trouble getting the users to follow.