Back To Square One (Kinda)

Well, the post-graduation euphoria was fun for about the 5 days that it lasted. I applied and got accepted to my graduate program before I was done with undergrad, so my progress bar that read 100% that filled me with the predictable pride and joy was quickly replaced by the gravity that it absolutely doesn’t matter anymore. I don’t get credit for that in this new program; I’m just another person with 0% on his progress bar. Again. I’m not nearly as intimidated now as I was when taking my undergrad seriously, but it was still jarring to see that 0% staring at me, daring me to do something about it. I just got done with the first week of my initial class, and it’s as hard as advertised and I have to write a bunch and blah, blah, blah who cares, really.

I got to go home and see Rachel for New Years, and that’s way more fun to write about. It felt so good to just hang out with my wife and do nothing in particular again. She took our dog into the airport with his service vest (Fun California Fact: People aren’t legally allowed to question why you need a service pet, nor are they allowed to ask for verification, so just buy him/her a fake vest from Amazon and take him everywhere. Not saying that we do that…but it definitely can be done.), and he had the nerve to give me the cold shoulder when he saw me! It lasted for a solid 12 seconds, but still! Gut-wrenching 12 seconds.

It felt amazing to feel our son kick the hell out of Rachel and go to her doctor appointments and feel like I’m actively participating in this whole process. We watched a Kings game on the laptop one night and our son literally kicked the laptop off Rachel’s stomach. He isn’t even born yet and already knows that the Kings aren’t worth watching. Smart kid. The only lame part of the trip was that my main circle of friends have all moved away, and I couldn’t catch any of them in town. It really drove home how much everything has changed in a year. I wouldn’t trade it for anything in the world, but it’s still strange to process sometimes.

Rachel, Diego (in her belly), and I. 

Oh yeah, we went to French Laundry! French Laundry. French. Fucking. Laundry. It was the first and likely only time that I thought taking food pictures in dim lighting would just be an insult to the food. The experience would have been incredible on its own, but we also got to take a tour of the kitchen and got a menu that was autographed by the head chef that I’m really tempted to frame and place on a wall. My tastebuds will never be the same, and it’s something that I would recommend for everyone, even if it’s just once. Rachel paid the tab since it was her graduation present for me, but it also doubled as a booby trap for me to pick up tabs for the obscenely expensive restaurants in Europe. She thinks she’s slick.

Of course, I had to leave again and I had to see Rachel cry because of me again and my dog is mad at me again and the whole thing sucked again and I’m counting down to see her from zero again. But it’s ok. We’re going to have our baby 8 weeks (?!?!?!??!?) from today, and that’s basically all that matters at this point.

 

How I’d Change the School System

The school system as currently constructed is terrible and only works for me personally because I’m good at standardized tests that are biased against me. I rarely learned anything substantial there, and the vast majority of my secondary education was a waste of time. I’ve had the goal of opening a school for underserved children for some time and I thought about what I would teach them, but I never committed to put my plan on paper until recently. My last class assignment asked me to give details of how my ideal school would look, and although I couldn’t really get in depth with my vision (I won’t complain about only having to write 750 words, but how am I supposed to really get going with this topic?), I think that the following is a pretty good skeleton for how I would like to design my school:

Ideally, my school would serve children from kindergarten through 8th grade. I would prefer to teach that age group, as opposed to high schoolers because teaching them these ideas early in life gives them a better chance to be molded. I would also like to primarily cater to children from underserved communities, which are disproportionately Black and Latino.  I would also have the school being low cost (specifically a small percentage of their income) so those families can afford it. Underserved communities are especially important to reach because they are constantly marginalized by the world around them, and that damages their psyches in unquantifiable ways over the course of a lifetime. Being able to fight that constant marginalization they receive from their environment on a daily basis would be invaluable to them. I think that the attitude of our current school system reflects the attitude of our nation, namely that it is clearly catered to White men, and although they now welcome all different colors and creeds, they are in no rush to cater to them. I would teach them about their own history and read them literature from their own, Black and Latino, people. I think this is important because it gives a sense that those people are important in the same way that most people think that Shakespeare is important, since his works are universally taught at public schools. Creating a school that is focused on the needs of underserved children would protect them from being marginalized even further by the educational system as is.

Although I understand the importance of testing and other assessments of knowledge retention, I think the concept of creating ideas is even more vital for children and adults alike. I would create this sort of creative environment by encouraging them to constantly ask questions and teaching them how to approach and solve difficult problems. I would also organize business and marketing contests for the children, which would encourage them to use their massive imaginations to create and execute an innovative plan at an early age. I would also ideally give them time and daily opportunities to just think of different ideas, since I believe that the brain is a muscle that needs constant exercise like any other part of the body. I would ensure that the classes were small, so students would not only get specialized attention intellectually, but emotionally as well.

I would make the environment as fun as possible, since everyone learns and retains more when they’re having fun, and children are no exception. I would make the classrooms very tech friendly, since the world isn’t going backwards in terms of advancing. I would also put a heavy emphasis on physical activity and learning in places other than the classroom. I would give as many chances as possible to encourage hands-on learning, since that’s a great way to retain information that is often underutilized. I would discourage conventional lectures where the teacher talks at the students for an entire class while the students are expected to take notes silently. From personal experience, not only did that make my experience miserable, but I didn’t actually learn anything with that method. It literally provided no benefit except, perhaps, for the teacher to feel like he was truly in charge. Another necessity for my ideal school is the ability to give children a chance to explore creative passions, whether it’s music, arts, sports or academia. I think that the children knowing that their passions are embraced and encouraged will create an environment that is conducive to learning and personal  growth.

What do you guys think? Am I missing important parts? Are there already people working on these types of schools?I feel like this would be my small contribution to the world, so I’d really like to get it right.

The Duggars and Glass Houses

I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t enjoy reading about Josh Duggar getting caught in the crossfire of the massive Ashley Madison leak (if you have no idea what I’m talking about, the link is here). I have no problem with people’s personal beliefs (although the Duggar’s beliefs are archaic, sexist, homophobic, exploitive and abusive on multiple levels) and I have no problem with people expressing their beliefs publicly, but what I don’t enjoy hearing is how everyone’s viewpoint is wrong except for theirs. This goes for everything, whether it’s something as simple as your favorite player or sport, or something not so simple, like your belief system and how it influences the way you see a planet of human beings.

There are a litany of opinions where Josh Duggar and I wouldn’t see eye to eye. Probably too many to list here. But the difference between us is that I’d shrug and say, “that’s how he chooses to live his life,” while he’d say, “that heathen is going to burn in hell and I’m going to love it hahahahahaha!” I’m not a fan of that. There are varying degrees of that mindset on every social media outlet available. Someone gives out an opinion that goes against the common grain, and they get hung at the proverbial twitter stake and people say all kinds of terrible things to and/or about them because everyone on that site is supposed to have the same ideals or something.

You know the best reason to at least feign some empathy for views that are different from yours? Because that lack of empathy creates enemies. Quickly. Those enemies will literally look for anything to pick you apart, especially if your views are accompanied with a moral or spiritual high horse. Basically, if you’re going to be publicly pious, you’d better be squeaky clean too. And man, Josh Duggar is pretty far from squeaky clean. It takes a tremendous amount of effort to explain away fondling your own sisters as a youth and getting people to accept it somehow (a pretty incredible feat), but how do you explain being on (and paying for) a site that is expressly made for cheating on your wife? There isn’t even any plausible deniability there. You can at least say that someone hacked your Twitter account. Or maybe you were being fake flirty with an old friend in a Facebook message. Either way, I’m pretty sure that people would not have combed over 3 million profiles looking for his specific name if, you know, he wasn’t such a prick about his beliefs.

And in a way, I get it. People need likes and retweets and comments and validation and all kinds of other stuff so their content spreads. Being polarizing or shocking is the fastest path there, by a mile. Having a nuanced view on much of anything online will get you nods that you’ll never see and not much else. Part of the reason those people have a reality show in the first place is because people mistake boorishness, ignorance and intolerance with “showing conviction in their beliefs.” And if you’re already down that road, you might as well double down. And you know what happens? People get behind them, regardless of how dead wrong they may be. The Duggar diehards will justify him actively trying to cheat on his wife for two years just like they justified the incest that he tried to commit as a teenager.

I can’t believe that I even got sucked into focusing on a Mormon family with 19 kids. They have 19 kids. They suckered a nation of human beings to expect rational beliefs from a pair of humans who spawned 19 more of themselves and thought it was okay. They’re crazy. We’re crazy for devoting this much attention to them.

About (Minority) Student Athletes…

Rachel was in huge trouble with her classmates this week. Got called insensitive and inflexible and all sorts of other professionally mean things. I know I mentioned that she’s doing a Master’s program (because she’s Superwoman), but I never mentioned her major. She’s trying to be a teacher. The question came up as to whether to give a failing student athlete a passing grade if he needed one for the 2.0 GPA required to get an athletic scholarship at a university. The class almost unanimously said yes. Rachel was the exception.

The reasons that other members of the class gave to justify handing out a passing grade weren’t very satisfying either, the worst of them being, “the poor hard working black kid just can’t handle traditional tests and writing assessments, so just give him an easier alternative test.” This made my blood boil, but not from the typical “I’m a hard working, average guy and I don’t get breaks like the dumb jocks” standpoint. The vibe was very much one where minorities weren’t expected to be as smart as their peers, and athletics is the only place they could possibly excel, which is born from every stereotype that’s been fed to us for eternity. There was very much an expectation that minority athletes just couldn’t cut it in any field that required using their brains, so instead of wasting time trying to get them to apply themselves, they would just pawn them off to someone else.

Rachel has unique experiences from dealing with college athletes. She has coached at UC-Santa Barbara, and she’s had to tutor student athletes who have been passed along using the “let the struggling black kid be someone else’s burden” approach. It’s ugly. They’re borderline illiterate. They submit papers that wouldn’t pass 9th grade English courses, much less university classes. And you know what? That’s not really their fault; it’s an institutional problem.

For those unaware, the job of teachers has changed drastically since the ambitious sounding, but silly No Child Left Behind act passed. Teachers have always been evaluated on how well students learn their coursework, but now, since much of the learning is evaluated with standardized, pressurized testing, much of the context of how much a child has improved over the course of a year is gone, and that puts them in a really tough situation. It’s easy enough to say that the satisfaction of knowing that a child improved a great deal even if it didn’t show on the test should be good enough from a safe distance, but teachers get fired if children don’t perform well on these tests. It turns into a situation where it pits their own livelihood against the academic progress of a student, and it’s human nature to choose self-preservation, even if the more noble option would be to help the child at all costs.

This quandary is complicated even further when the child is gifted athletically and has to make a certain GPA limit. Not only do they have the pressure of risking their own jobs because a certain student is having a rough time in their classes, but they also have coaches, athletic directors and sometimes even the local community breathing down their neck because they can’t make their only hope of a state championship academically ineligible.

Institutionally, I think that much of the issue comes down to society’s prevailing thoughts about minorities in general. We’re still seen as a one dimensional commodity who are really good at entertaining, whether it’s through athletics, music and the like, but not much else. To them, pushing us academically is basically a waste of time, unless we are obviously gifted mentally. As a result, when an athletically gifted minority struggles in the classroom at an early age, he is passed along when he should be held back, tutored and mentally nurtured while the stakes are still low. The problem only worsens exponentially as he falls further behind and loses more confidence in himself and is continually fed bullshit by peers and coaches saying that the ball that he’s carrying or dribbling is his meal ticket. The further he falls behind, the less prepared he is for the real world that inevitably hits him when he’s one of the 98% of people who don’t develop into pro athletes. And where are those people who passed him along and sang his praises while downplaying the importance of school when he’s just a regular guy wholly unprepared for real life because ensuring that he could read beyond a 4th grade level was too much of an inconvenience? Gone, that’s where.

I say all of that to say that I totally agree with Rachel, and the teachers (namely, the frighteningly large majority of the future educators in Rachel’s class) who feel otherwise either don’t understand the implications of what they’re doing or they don’t care, in which case they should find another line of work. I can rattle off studies about how home environments and income affect a child’s learning curve upon entering school, but my point is that we have to stop enabling and encouraging our minority children to put all of their figurative eggs in one fucking basket. As educators, we (I say “we” because I’m pursing education as well) can’t succumb to the pressure of passing children along when they clearly need help at their current level, blindly hoping that someone else will help him. Helping them early not only sets them up for future success in terms of plainly having the academic base to learn at the next grade, but it also instills confidence in them. They learn that skills can be honed and improved, even if they don’t come naturally. They also learn that teachers actually do care about them enough to ensure their future success, although it may come with the minor setback of summer school or repeating an early grade. In my opinion, that’s what teaching is about. Rachel’s classmates can suck it.

My Wife is an Easy Preggo…For Now

I have a confession to make: I thought the pregnancy process with Rachel would be an absolute nightmare. Thought I would be looking forward to texts of continued morning sickness, wild hormone swings, and general agony for everyone involved. She gets random cravings (she was ready to kill for salmon the other day) and she already has a maternity clothing wardrobe, but other than that, it’s been pretty normal, run of the mill stuff. Maybe she’s too busy impersonating Superwoman to notice. She’s taking an 18 month Master’s program in 12 months while working full-time and carrying a little human inside her while her husband is hundreds of miles away blogging for total strangers. Not exactly ideal, but she’s handling everything about as well as I could have hoped.

Well, the first couple of weeks were pretty rough. We were both in shock that the stars aligned well enough for me to knock her up in the five day window that we had during our honeymoon. Once that feeling subsided, it was quickly replaced by the realization that this could not possibly have be timed any worse. This is just terrible, hilariously bad timing for us to have a child. It totally changed the trajectory of our plans and turned a regular deployment into logistics hell. As of now, we’ll have to take an 8 hour flight to another continent with a poodle and a two month old, not to mention being shells of ourselves by then. We’ve had to worry about the following issues since Rachel got pregnant:

1)       Find out how early we can get our flight plan since we need to book Spencer (our poodle) on the flight.

2)      How do we get the baby on your orders so he/she is included in travel plans?

3)      Will they provide the baby and your wife with a government passport to PCS or do we need to get a civilian one for baby?

4)      What are German car seat regulations and what car seats can we buy that will fit them?

5)      How much is base child care at Ramstein, how long is the wait, and how early can we get on the waiting list?

6)      How long is base housing list and how early can we get on that list?  Can we put on our application that there will be a child living there before the child is actually born?

7)      Complete visa applications for Shawn, Rachel  (and Baby, if necessary).

8)      Do we need European Tax ID numbers if we work on base?  What if I work off base?  Do we still file taxes in California?

I mean…

Ugh.

We’re not the first humans to travel with a newborn in tow, so we’ll figure it out, but gosh, that’s a ton of etceteras that appeared out of nowhere.

Anyway, after a few days of panicking over how the hell we could possibly survive this pregnancy in one piece, we chalked it up to normal fears that most couples have and regained our composure, which is easy to say in hindsight, but we were not trying to hear that at the time. Don’t tell that to people while they’re going through that, even if it’s absolutely true 95% of the time. It’s their damn child. They’re not going to be rational. Just listen and be there for them and let them cry and get their feelings out and probably cry some more.

Yes, it kills me to not be there, even if there are worse things than not getting woken up at 4am to make trips to Safeway. I don’t even know if she would do that to me. Yes she would. I hate her. The first trimester is supposed to be the most difficult, and she’s about 2/3 through it without any hitches, so hopefully it continues that way. I don’t really hate her. She’s the greatest.

A Bit About Me

This probably should have been the first post. I forgot that I’m not plugging this to a Twitter or Facebook audience that’s been familiar with me for the last few years, so I basically did the equivalent of starting a book with page 80. And yes, a lot of this info is in the introduction of my blog, but nobody reads that stuff. I can’t blame you guys. I don’t read them either. I’d like to see if I can build a reader base strictly from WordPress, and exactly one human (my wife) has read my first post in 12 hours, so I’m off to a roaring start!

My name is Shawn Gregoire. I’m in the Air Force. I’m very much into sports, helping children, and gratuitously offering my opinion on various subjects and issues. I have a wife. Her name is Rachel. We’ve been married for a year. She’s carrying my seed. She’s totally out of my league. It’s ok.

I’m on a deployment for a year, so I have free time to do stuff like this, especially since I don’t tweet anymore. Rachel and I will be moving to Europe with a newborn  and poodle ten months from now. I think this transition is a worthy subject to write about, and this will be quite funny to look back on years from now, provided that they aren’t deleted from sheer embarrassment.

I can’t describe my writing style. I just write with the hopes of getting better. I can’t describe my personal qualities. In fact, don’t trust people who can describe their personal qualities. All that stuff is subjective. I used to tweet really often. The page is still up (@shawnintheflesh), but all the tweets are gone. I used to be quite the polarizing figure on there, but I stopped because being mean to strangers got old.

I appreciate feedback, especially from people who write better than I do. I’ll start strolling around for blogs to read and maybe I’ll even get humans who aren’t my wife to read my posts. Starting from scratch sucks. Oh well. I’ve started a lot of cool things from scratch lately, like kids. It’ll be fun as long as I don’t quit doing this in three weeks like I did my promising hoops blog. We shall see. Welcome!

My email is greshawn12@gmail.com.