Teaching is wonderful. Grading, not so much. And sleep, though not overrated, is kind of inconvenient.

I haven’t given up
On the Sunday thing
But school started
We all went back to work this week
And that’s
A different story.

Featured Grownups offered the writing prompt: What makes you so special? The impetus behind it was a query about what is the greatest problem plaguing Americans’ psyches. The consensus among psychologists is that this most prominent malady is malignant self-love, or in a singular term, narcissism.

I would not say I’m a narcissist. To whatever extent I love myself, it’s not malignant. It’s not harming myself or others. At the same time, I don’t think I have a lack of self-love. (I mean the emotional and not physical variety, if you’re thinking like that). I do think I’m special, and I’m happy to tell you why.

For one thing, I’m intelligent. I mean, I’m really smart. Mensa material, even. I have a photographic memory and a mind like a steel trap. I retain facts both useful and useless. I wield a prodigious vocabulary. I seek to boldly split infinitives as they’ve never been split before, knowing exactly what that means. I can tell why “swimming” is a gerund, and why the correct spelling is y’all, not ya’ll.

But in the pursuit of true specialness, I decided to use this vast cerebral power for the good of humanity, and become a teacher. Even more special, I teach middle school. Anyone who has a 12-14-year-old child, or who knows a 12-14-year-old child, or has been a 12-14-year-old child, knows how especially special middle school teachers are.

But most special of all is the fact I’m a father. Now listen. There are millions of fathers– it doesn’t take anything special to become one, as anyone familiar with the process knows– but I did not become a father in the usual manner. I married into four children, one with special needs, and then adopted the oldest, instantly becoming legal father of a teenage daughter. That’s special.

I’m also a special writer, a special blogger, a special sports fan. You name it, I’m special at it. I wrote this post especially to tell you how special I am. I could go on, but then I would be narcissistic– a quality which, apparently, is not so special.

Here’s an update on the experiment. So I promised to post every Sunday. I’ve succeeded so far, but these past couple of weeks, I find myself typing this within an hour or two of midnight, my eyes drooping, my brain heavy only with the promise of slumber. I know some would say, don’t force yourself to post then, but you don’t understand. If I don’t, I’ll never keep this up. Once I while I do have something important to express. It may not be every Sunday, but my habits are such that I’ll never persist without a deadline and a schedule.

For those who read two weeks ago about how I worried if I’d ever be truly responsible– well, I still have those concerns, but I’m feeling a bit better about it. Maria came through her surgery in much less time than anticipated, which was good, although I felt apprehensive for a moment when I saw the surgeon approaching us in the waiting room much earlier that we expected to see her. For a fleeting moment I feared something must have gone wrong, but as it turns out, the fusion inside her abdomen was much less severe than had been feared, so it didn’t take as long to separate. She spent two nights in the hospital and then came home, and has been recovering slowly but surely every day since. She goes to the doctor for her follow-up appointment Thursday, and fully expects to get her to sign off on permission for her to go back to work the following Monday, the 17th.

Meanwhile, it’s been kind of quiet. Only the teenager has been home; the three youngest are staying with their dad or shuttling to his mother. They all caught chicken pox and have been fighting off colds or sinus infections as well, and obviously being ill, they can’t be home with their mother in a weakened state, not regarding the fact that it makes it a bit too hectic here when she needs to rest We’re looking at them coming home Friday.

Tomorrow I am going to school, as in my school, my classroom. Our official report date is Thursday, but I always start early, because I just don’t focus all that well, and I need extra time to really get “in the mode.” First day with students is the 20th. Our kids start the day before that. They are in a new school district this year since we moved, and it’s going to be a new adventure for everyone. I bought their supplies today, most of them anyway, bouncing between OfficeMax and Big Lots. One small perk of teaching is these office supply stores give teachers discounts on occasion, and I have a strange fetish for office supplies, so they enable my behavior.

As I start to reflect ahead on the new year, and consider what I’ve examined in the graduate course I’m taking, which is entitled “Diversity in Education,” I think about what’s wrong with American public education, and what’s right with it as well. Here I am in my very first course working toward my M.Ed., and I’m taking an Incomplete. I’ve never done that before in my long postsecondary career, but I’ve had to devote time to taking care of my wife, particularly her days in the hospital, but now at home as well– and I don’t regret any of it for a moment– and, although frankly, I have had some time here at home since it’s been quieter than usual, I’m just not able to focus like I need to right now. The good news is that the program doesn’t follow semesters but rather half-semesters, eight-week sessions, so while I won’t start a new course the week of the 24th, and instead will focus on finishing the work for the class I’m currently taking. I’ll still get to start a new class in mid-October.

As for what I mentioned in the first sentence of that last paragraph– all these deep thoughts about the state of education, well, they’re going to have to wait until next time. I usually want to write something more topical and complex than this post, but sometimes you have to just write the daily life stuff. Thanks for reading and I hope to see you “out there.”

I guarantee you I am not the first person to use this title. Put it in quotes and Google it. It’s true though, much as I would prefer not to confront it. We (as in the USA) are a culture of cheaters.

The most glaring example in our society is the sport affectionately known as our national pasttime, baseball. Major League Baseball has been plagued by evidence of players using what are collectively called “performance-enhancing drugs” or PEDs. Most people equate PEDs with anabolic steroids, but the category can include HGH (human growth hormone) and other substances. MLB only started testing for steroid use in 2003, which was well after records had been smashed repeatedly from the late 1990s to that point. Evidence of use became so abundant that the period of the 1990s and first half of this decade have come to be known as “The Steroid Era.”

So basically there are two groups: those who are believed to have been using PEDs before 2003, whom can only be judged by preponderance of evidence against them, and then from 2003 on, those who have actually tested positive. After 2003, there was a list compiled of those players which had tested positive in the initial round of testing. There are 104 names on that list.

This spring, before the beginning of the season, the most prominent name on the list was “leaked”: Alex Rodriguez. A-Rod didn’t deny it, but gave a half-hearted apology in which he admitted to wrongdoing but then qualified by saying it “was, you know, kind of the culture back then.” Then Manny Ramirez was suspended for a postive test result. He didn’t protest it, apologized weakly– mainly to his teammates– served his 50-game suspension, and then came back, to thunderous applause in his home park in LA, and boos elsewhere.

Last week a report came out that both Manny and first baseman David Ortiz, who still plays for Boston, were on “the list” from 2003. This knowledge casts the World Series championships in 2004 & 2007 won by the Red Sox in a different light. Some say these titles are now tainted. Are they?

I say no. It’s totally wrong that these two players, and likely others on the team we don’t yet know about, were cheating by using PEDs. However, the sad truth of the matter is that they were hardly the only ones. The pervasiveness of the problem may never be fully known. Jose Canseco, one of the most blantant “juicers,” wrote a book after retiring that exposed the names of several players he claimed to know used. He contends that the majority of baseball players– more than half– used PEDs at one point or another during this “era.” We have reached a point where there are no players who can safely be assumed to be “clean”– everyone who has played in the majors over the past 20 years is implicated, guilty by association. It was the classic excuse of “everyone is doing it.” It wasn’t hyperbole when A-Rod said “it was kind of the culture back then,” although that doesn’t make it one bit more right.

Bottom line, since every team had players who were cheating in this way, in a twisted sense, the playing field was leveled. The titles aren’t tainted. because the Red Sox didn’t win them purely because they were cheating. They simply were the best cheaters those two years.

So what does all this say about our culture on a societal scale? What does it say that fans have hardly stopped buying tickets to games, buying team merchandise, watching on TV? That Ramirez is still loudly cheered in Los Angeles, just as Barry Bonds was cheered in San Francisco to the end of his time there?

It says that despite all the hue and cry over how horrible cheating in the game is, it’s all talk, an act. Baseball fans, and Americans in general, don’t really care. They want to sound like they care because they know that’s the moral high ground, but in truth, we’re all cheaters.

Kids start cheating in school, everything from copying each other’s homework, to using cheat sheets on tests, and plagiarizing essays from the Web. They do it because they see adults do it. People cut corners. They do what they can get away with to get ahead. They don’t tell the whole truth if part of that truth would deter their advancement. They pad their resumes. They fudge their timesheets. They claim damages that didn’t happen for insurance payments. They claim exemptions and deductions they don’t have on their tax returns. They cheat to get ahead or make someone else fall behind. They cheat for the pseudo-noble cause that others have an inherent and unfair advantage over them and cheating is the only way to catch up. They cheat on their significant others. They cheat because everyone cheats and if they don’t, they’ll have no chance to compete.

Why? Why have we developed and perpetuate this culture of cheating? The primary rationale that comes to my mind is the American cult of individualism. We believe, perhaps more strongly than any other society on earth, in the value and importance of the individual. Individual rights trump all others, including those of any group, class, school, company, or government. The upshot is that each of us believes, consciously or not, that he or she is entitled to everything and if anyone or anything gets in our way, well, we have the right to do whatever it may take to eliminate the offensive disruptor.

to be continued…