Happy New Year to all those who read this blog. Thanks for reading, thanks for commenting, thanks for spending some time with me.

Have a wonderful 2007. These years are starting to sound like "the future."

David Warlick tagged me with the latest blog meme… and hey, since I’m taking a bit of a break from education related entries, this is a perfect time to let people five things they may not have known about me.

1) I never thought I’d be a high school basketball coach. The closest thing to organized basketball I’ve ever played was college intramurals. I was a huge basketball fan, and I was a broadcaster in high school and college, but I didn’t think I knew enough to ever coach. But when I got to Beacon, the girls basketball coach needed someone to help out, and I knew just enough to be helpful. I was the assistant coach that year, and the head coach for the next eight. For a long time, the one thing that I thought could make me leave Beacon was a college coaching job. And even now, I know I’m not done coaching yet, even if I’m not doing it right now. In a perfect world, I’ll find the time to keep a hand in coaching at SLA for the next few dozen years, and then when I retire, I’ll find a local Division III team that needs a coach.

2) I own a Beatles "butcher cover." When I was in high school, I was a huge Beatles fan, and an older cousin gave me a ton of her old albums. I could see the famous (o.k. — famous for Beatle freaks) "shadow" on the cover of Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, and I started to peel back the cover to reveal the real cover underneath.

3) I think Casablanca is the perfect movie. Bogart was the quintessential film-noir hero, Ingrid Bergman was beautiful, you’ve got a great story and there has never been better bad guys than the Germans in WWII. And I was lucky enough to see it on the big screen in re-release on my 21st birthday. I also consider Astral Weeks by Van Morrison to be the perfect album. I listen to it at least once a week. (And he was 19 when he made it. Unbelievable.) And I have no idea what the perfect book is. But I’m happy to keep reading as much as I can in an attempt to find it. (Latest attempt — Education and the Cult of Efficiency by Raymond Callahan.)

4) I can’t eat yogurt. I want to. I really want to like yogurt. It’s fast. It’s good for you. It’s great for breakfast when you’re dieting…. But I cannot make myself eat it. I’ve tried a dozen times.

5) My worst subject in high school was Spanish, and I was a jerk in a lot of my Spanish classes to the point where I apologized to Madame deJager, the French teacher who I shared a classroom with my first year teaching. She was a brilliant teacher, and I saw too many students being the same kind of jerk in her class as I was in high school. I apologized to her on behalf of all of my high school Spanish teachers. I really think teaching high school foreign language in America is a really rough job, and I wish I knew a way to revalue language learning, because it’s more important than it is made out to be in most high schools. Interestingly, my second worst subject was English — which, of course, ended up being my major in college and being the subject I taught for nine years. I was never all that good at doing the kind of work that many high school English teachers asked for. But I loved literature and read everything I could find, and my favorite teacher in high school, my 11th grade English teacher Mr. Wilson, said to me, "What better way to spend four years than reading great books and then going to class and talking about them." I agreed.

6) I had what I consider to be one of the most fun and fulfilling "minor league" Ultimate careers I could ever have had. I played at College Nationals in 1991, in Co-Ed Nationals in 1998 and 2000, and I coached in High School Nationals three times. If I could find the time and energy to get back into training and find a way to get to the Masters Division Nationals, I would have coached or played in every National championship division except the top Men’s Division. There was a time when I was bitter I didn’t get the chance to make Men’s Division Nationals, but I know too many really good Ultimate players that never got to go to Nationals in any division, and I’ve played and coached in three. I’ve also torn my left ACL, torn my right meniscus, had surgery on my right ankle, separated my right shoulder, had surgery on my left hand and pulled more muscles and hamstrings than I can count. And I loved being a competitive Ultimate player. Training, competing, and finding something that I loved that never came easily… all of it was a joy. I still remember getting to Nationals in 1991, and David Grossberg making all of us get down with our face in the grass, just so we could feel the turf and get psyched to play in a tournament that we had worked so hard for. I learned more about myself — about sacrifice, humility, about learning from failure, about trust and friendship — on the Ultimate fields than anywhere else.

And I’ll tag SLA-er Marcie Hull, GHS Principal Kim Moritz, DesignShare’s Christian Long, new (somewhat) blogger and math teacher Dan Meyer, and the Savvy Technologist Tim Wilson.