Everything I Needed to Know, I Learned From the Rocky Movies

“It’s not how hard you hit, but how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward.”  - Rocky

If you have not seen Rocky, stop reading and go put it on right this minute. It’s a great movie. It won the Oscar for Best Picture in 1976. If you’re not on your feet cheering at the end, someone ought to take your pulse because you clearly have no heart. Like most sequels, the Rocky movies got sillier and sillier as time went on but, the last one, “Rocky Balboa” is pretty good, especially in the life-lessons department. 

I’m a huge fan of the Rocky movies, even if I do acknowledge their shortcomings from a purely cinematic perspective. That’s what I’m writing about today. Life lessons from the Rocky movies. Stop giggling, I’m completely serious. If you watch the movies, you’ll see what I mean.

Define success on your own terms

In the first movie, Rocky’s goal was to go the distance with the heavyweight champion. No one had ever done it and that was all Rocky needed to accomplish to feel successful. By the end of the movie, he has achieved his goal and, despite what others might think, that was all that mattered to Rocky.

Set ambitious goals for yourself. Goals that you will feel great achieving. They don’t have to be what everyone else thinks should be your goal. It’s personal - define your own measure of success.

Perseverance

Don’t give up. Sports movies are great for perseverance lessons. It might sound old-fashoned, but there’s a lot to be said for stick-to-itiveness. Rocky never gave up, even when the odds were stacked against him. He never gave up, even when fighting a clearly superior opponent. He never gave up, even when that superior fighter was beating him nearly senseless.

Don't get distracted 

Rocky let himself get distracted and it cost him dearly. In retrospect, he saw that he didn’t train with focus, didn’t commit himself 100% to the task at hand and learned from that mistake.

This high-speed, high-tech life throws distractions at you faster than you can text “I’m bz, catch ^ l8r.” Don’t let things, especially stupid things, get in the way of important things. Do your homework, get your reading done, write that paper a week before it’s due (and then keep improving it with the time you have left) instead of writing it at 10 p.m. the night before it’s due.

The basics are the basics

Rocky was not a great fighter but what he did, he did well. He’s wasn’t flashy, he just knew what to do with the basic skills he had. You have to know how to do the basics really well before you can take on higher-level stuff. Education is circular - you see the same content again and again but each time it’s at a deeper level. 

Learn your multiplication tables well and you’ll have a much easier time with higher levels of math. The same goes with every subject. Learn to write a clear, succinct paragraph and all future writing assignments instantly become easier. Struggle with paragraph structure and a five-page paper becomes a nightmare of unparalleled proportions.

Take the hits and keep moving forward

There’s a great scene in “Rocky Balboa” that’s worth watching. Rocky talks about taking responsibility for your life. He tells his son that life is going to hit you hard and you have to keep moving forward. In Rocky’s view, the measure of self worth is how successful you are in dealing with the setbacks you will face as you move though life.

There you have it: A nickel's worth of philosophy based on a series of movies about a fictional fighter from Philadelphia. As silly as they can be, the Rocky movies are full of good life lessons even if you’re not a prize fighter.

Critical Thinking is Critical

You may have heard Mrs. Minaker and I use the term “critical thinking” from time to time.  Improving your critical thinking skills is actually one of our goals for this school year. 

Critical thinking is what you do when you take all the stuff you’ve learned, roll it all together and think through a question or problem. 

One definition of critical thinking says:

Critical thinking involves problem solving, decision making, rationality, rational thinking, reasoning, knowledge, intelligence and also a moral component such as reflective thinking. Critical thinkers, therefore, need to have reached a level of maturity in their development, possess a certain attitude as well as a set of taught skills.

At this point, you’re not very good at critical thinking. 

It’s not your fault. You’re young, you’re just learning how to think about things in an analytical way. For the past five to seven years, you’ve been asked to regurgitate information that you have learned. You are very good at that. 

But, in the coming years you’re going to be asked to do less remembering of facts and more interpreting of what those facts mean.

That’s why we do so many word problems in Math. That’s why Mrs. Minaker is always asking you about why characters do what they do in stories or what you would do in their place. We're trying to get you thinking.

We keep telling you, as you scale the educational mountain it gets harder. Going forward you’re going to be asked to do the hardest thing...think.

Better strap on your crampons and thinking caps, you’re gonna need both.

Do Kids Even Own Bikes Anymore?

I was thinking about my first day at Wickford Junior High School, now known as Wickford Middle School, the other day.

I can distinctly remember riding my bike to school and locking it up in the bike rack at the rear of the school. There was nothing unusual about riding my bike except that I had ridden to school and stopped there. It was my new school. I had ridden past it hundreds of times. I had a brand new chain and lock to keep it safe while I was in class. Honestly, I probably used that lock five times and then never again. My bike was never stolen. It was a safer time than now.

I rode my bike all over town. I did my (very long) paper route on that bike, with two large baskets hung over the rear wheel. I rode to friends homes and, sometimes, riding my bike was just for fun with no particular destination in mind.

Once, along with a group of friends, I rode my bike from Wickford to Jamestown so we could explore Fort Wetherill together. That trip included a ride over the Jamestown bridge and was probably 25 miles round trip.

I know no parent would ever allow such an adventure today, but things were different when I was a kid. I had a lot more freedom and life was perceived as being safer. My Mom’s biggest worry was that I’d get hit by a car, not abducted by some psycho.

I never hear my students mention having or riding a bike. Do kids even own bikes anymore?

Going 100% Until the Last Day

According to my calculations, once we return from spring vacation, we have about 29 teaching days left. That number is net of a week of standardized testing and does not account for visits to The Whistler House, library or other random schedule changes.

Twenty-nine days of teaching. That’s not a lot of time, and we have a lot to cover.

I’m starting to get the feeling that some of you, my students, have begun to mentally check out. Some of you are sitting in class, politely listening but your mind is on the excitement of summer or a new school next year. 

Don’t get me wrong, you have all worked hard all year, but I think some of you feel the year is winding down and you can stop working hard.

You are wrong.

To paraphrase former Red Sox manager, Terry Francona, “The year doesn’t wind down, it ends abruptly.”

We’re going 100% until the last day. 

There will be no goof-off days, no down-time, no wasted opportunities. We have a lot of ground to cover and not much time.

Starting today at 2:30, you’re on vacation. Of course, all of you will have a vacation assignment that will be due when we return on April 28^th.

Come back prepared to work and work hard. It’s not over until it’s over.

Have a nice vacation. :)

Your Brain’s Not Done Yet

If you’re in middle school, you are considered an adolescent. 

According to Mirriam-Webster, adolescence means:

“The state or process of growing up”

You’re still a kid, but on your way to growing up. Psychologists have a somewhat different view. They see things in terms of development, particularly development of the brain. Here’s what Psychology Today has to say about adolescence:

“Adolescence describes the teenage years between 13 and 19 and can be considered the transitional stage from childhood to adulthood. However, the physical and psychological changes that occur in adolescence can start earlier, during the preteen or "tween" years (ages 9-12). Adolescence can be a time of both disorientation and discovery. The transitional period can bring up issues of independence and self-identity. During this time, peer groups and external appearance tend to increase in importance.”

Suffice it to say, there’s a lot going on in your brain. It’s still developing and forming. It won’t really be considered “done” until you’re into your mid twenties. 

Until then, you’re going to be more likely to act without considering the repercussions, you’re more likely to put more stock in your friend’s opinions than your parents, and being part of a group will be of paramount importance. 

It’s the acting without fully considering what happens next or what could happen that worries me. Let’s face it - adolescents, and teenagers in particular, do a lot of dumb things. They take risks and don’t consider the consequences.

What’s the number one cause of death for adolescents? 

Unintentional injury.

Car accidents, skateboard accidents, skating accidents and drowning, just to name a few of the top sources of unintentional injury.

Going forward, you’re to going act impulsively - but try to stop for a second and consider what could happen. What’s the downside if things go wrong? You want to have fun but you want to grow up too, right?

Wear your seat belts, don’t ride in a car where the driver is texting and driving (and in the future, don’t text and drive), and wear a life vest in a boat.

When Mom or Dad yells at you to put your helmut on - put your helmut on. 

Your brain’s not done yet - it needs extra protection, often from you. Give it the best chance possible to grow, develop and become something fantastic.

Lunch Boxes Are Not What They Used To Be

Lunch boxes are not what they used to be.

Now they are utilitarian while once they were a status symbol. If you had the right lunch box, you were instantly one of the cool kids. 

Back in the day, lunch boxes said something about who you were, what you liked and how you wanted to be perceived by others. 

It was critical that you go to the store with Mom to pick out just the right one. You never, never, never.....ever let your mother pick one out for you. It’d be the plaid design or Scooby-Doo, or some dumb kid’s design. 

Trust me, even as a child you had to take charge of this purchase and insist on just the right one. It didn’t matter that Mom was paying, you were in charge or you paid a huge social price for it all year long.

If you were a boy, an action hero was always a good choice. No matter what, it had to be cool - bonus points if it came with a built-in decoder device. It had to be something that no one would make fun of like Rat Patrol, The Green Hornet, Superman or Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (all popular TV shows boys liked when I was in middle school.)

Girls could get away with a Disney themed box or The Partridge Family lunch box. The teen-idol thing was tricky - just because you thought Bobby Sherman was super cool in August, doesn't mean you would still think so in February, and there was no way Mom was going to buy you another lunch box in the middle of a school year.

In my era, your lunchbox made a statement.

Now, it just keeps your lunch cold.

A Good Night To Look Up

There are two very good reasons to look up tonight and tomorrow morning.

First, Mars is making it’s closest approach to Earth since 2008. Because of the elliptical nature of the orbits of planets three and four sometimes they approach pretty closely - in planetary terms. 

Tonight, Mars will be just 57 million miles from Earth. 

If you actually do look up at the night sky, you’ll see the moon with a bright star just below it. That star is Spica, the brightest star in the constellation Virgo. Just so you know, Spica is a double star pair - two stars orbiting each other. 

Just above the moon is Mars. It’s noticeably red and, through binoculars shows as a red disk rather than a red point.

Second, tomorrow morning, the full moon will pass through Earth’s shadow. This is known as a lunar eclipse. It will be visible in our area after starting about 1:20am and entering totality about about 3:46am. 

Yes, that’s pretty early, but how often do you get to see an eclipse?

Keep your fingers crossed for clear skies.

Sleep On it

I didn’t post yesterday because I had a family event to attend in Rhode Island. I didn’t return home until a few minutes after midnight. It was way too late to think about writing a post, I was exhausted and went right to bed.

But, I knew what I wanted to write about. I thought about it while driving home last night. You probably won’t be surprised what I was thinking about after working all day, then driving two hours, attending a two-hour church service and then driving home for two hours. 

I was thinking about sleep.

I happen to know quite a bit about sleep and, trust me, it’s a critical part of learning and, no, I’m not talking about dozing off in class.

In my room, that will only get an eraser tossed at your sleepy head.

When’s the best time to study if you want to retain the information for the long term?

Just before sleeping. 

If you study and then sleep, the brain reorganizes where the information is stored. The brain moves it from short-term memory to long-term memory. 

That last minute cram session for a big test on the ride to school might help a little bit on the test - or it might not - but,  no matter what, you probably won’t recall the information in two weeks.

Remember what I’ve said about learning? I’d rather you get a 70 on a quiz and remember the information for the rest of your life, than get a 100 and forget it all in two weeks.

So, one trick to learning something forever?

Sleep on it.

Fun With Science

We try to have fun as we learn about Science at The Hellenic American Academy:



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_tmdl_CQt8U&feature=youtu.be

Connecting The Dots...

It has been a blessing and a curse for me. 

I’m interested in too many things. 

A teacher once said to me, “You’re so lucky to be interested in everything.”

For me, it often didn’t feel like I was very lucky at all. 

Yes, I know a little about an awful lot of things - from reading mostly - but I was never one who developed a passion for a single topic. Some people love music and become musicians, others love chemistry and become chemists; whatever it is, it’s their passion and it defines them to some degree.

I think life would have been easier had I fallen in love with just one thing and made it my life’s work. But, I was interested in so many things I could never choose what to focus on in the long term. I did some of this, a little of that, drifting into new professions and abandoning old ones. I had no clear path and, frankly, I was a little jealous of those who did, of the people who figured out what they love, and spent a lifetime doing it.

But, I am reminded by what Steve Jobs said in his Stanford Commencement address:

“Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards 10 years later.”

I never expected to be a teacher but now, when I look back at the dots, I can see that I’m where I should be. If I had become a teacher 25 years ago,  I probably wouldn't have been ready. Now, after years of seemingly unconnected experiences, it all comes together for me.

I am in exactly the right place, at exactly the right time, doing exactly what I should be doing.

A Complete and Utter Meltdown

I know I was in middle school but can’t recall what grade. I could walk into the school and into the room where it happened. I can’t recall the teacher’s name but she was in her thirties. For the sake of the story, I’ll call her Mrs. Clooney. My memory is clear on some aspects of the event and foggy on others,  but this is how I remember the incident...

We were in Mrs. Clooney’s room. She taught English. The desks were arranged in groups of four. 

If you think of the room as a large rectangle with windows along the top side and two doors on the ends of the lower side, you’ll have a pretty good idea of how the room was set up.  The chalkboard covered the length of the right hand wall in the front of the class. My group was in the back of the room in the lower left corner near one of the doors and Mrs. Clooney’s desk was in the opposite corner near the windows and chalkboard. 

Someone in my group, a boy whose name I also cannot recall, brought his workbook up to Mrs. Clooney and after a few seconds, her tone and volume changed in a noticeable and alarming way. She was upset and getting more so by the sentence.  Everyone in the room stopped, looked at, then stared at Mrs. Clooney in disbelief.

She was getting more and more wound up. Mrs. Clooney was standing now, yelling and pointing fingers at the students when my friend retreated to our group of desks in the back.

“What happened? What did you say to her?” I asked.

“I don’t know. Nothing. She just started yelling,” he stammered.

By this time, every other class on the hall could hear her. She was standing in front of her desk, red-faced, yelling and waving her arms frantically.

She was having a complete and utter meltdown. A total loss of control. All rational thought replaced by shear hysteria.

We saw other teachers peeking in the doors, seemingly confused and afraid to enter. Finally, the principal came in and took gently took Mrs. Clooney by the arm and lead her away.

We never saw her again.

Disclaimer: My friends from middle school tell me I’m not remembering the end of this story completely accurately - that she did come back and she was fine. That’s not how I remember it, and, frankly, it makes a better story the way I tell it.

Block Island's U-boat

This is a shortened version of an article I wrote for a magazine a few years ago:

Midway between the low hump of Block Island and a rocky point called Judith, lie the remnants of the final skirmish of World War II's Battle of the Atlantic. 

Sixty-nine years ago, in early May 1945, the paths of an ambitious German Submarine Captain and the worn-out, rusty hulk of a coastal collier crossed. Now, both rest on the sandy bottom of the Atlantic near the Rhode Island coast.

The submarine, U-853 was commissioned into the German Imperial Navy in June, 1943. She was a long-range type IXC submarine, 252 feet long and 23 feet in diameter and carried a crew of 55 men.

The pressure hull of the U-Boat was shaped like a large, iron cigar. Saddle tanks for fuel and ballast lined her sides. All this was encased in a streamlined, steel envelope and topped by a wooden deck.

At 6-foot-10,  Helmut Fromsdorf was exceedingly tall for the U-Boat service. Inspired by men who had destroyed great tons of allied shipping, he volunteered immediately after graduating high school. 

Fromsdorf took command of the U-853 the first of November, 1944. By that time, he may have been frustrated by his career in the Kriegsmarine. Instead of sending Allied ships to the seafloor, he'd spent the bulk of his naval career as second-in-command on mundane weather reporting missions.  Now, with his own boat, he'd have his chance. 

Fromsdorf's boat was assigned a patrol area from Halifax, Nova Scotia to New York.

****

The Black Point, a small coal hauler, was making the run from Virginia to Boston in the late afternoon of May 5th, 1945. It was the end of a clear, cool New England day. The sea was calm.

The ship was 369 feet long and had been built 27 years before in Camden, NJ. She was old and worn out.  If not for the war's insatiable demand for ships, she most likely would have been scrapped long before 1945.

Fromsdorf's submarine was lurking in the shallows just off Block Island. At about 5:40 pm he fired at least one torpedo. 

The torpedo slammed into the starboard side of the Black Point blasting forty feet off the stern just above the keel. A dozen men who were in the after part of the ship disappeared forever.

Fromsdorf and his crew didn't know it, but just a few miles away, behind the silhouette of Block Island, four American warships, submarine hunters, were heading North to the Boston Navy Yard. 

The destroyer escort Atherton, destroyer Amick and Frigate Moberly, the first ships on the scene, began searching for the submarine.  They set up a line and began to methodically sift through the sea. Later, Amick was called away for escort duty and the destroyer Ericson arrived to command the hunt and attacks.

Fromsdorf must have been worried. He was being hunted by three sub hunters in shallow water. He was facing impossible odds. The submarine was attacked repeatedly between 8:15 p.m. and 9:00 p.m. The American warships continued hunting, criss crossing the area for hours dropping depth charges and launching hedgehogs into the green sea.

A quote from the action report: 

"All projectiles exploded. A short time after, large quantities of oil, pieces of broken wood, life jacket, mattress, oil, impregnated cork and air bubbles were seen in the area. The oil and air bubbles were coming up to the surface as from a spring."

The pressure hull had given way. The cold sea rushed in. Fromsdorf and his men were dead. Those not killed outright by the explosions, drowned. 

****

Today, the submarine is in poor condition. The steel shell that encased the pressure hull and fuel tanks is gone, a victim of rust and marine growth. The ship bears little resemblance the sleek shark she once was. A clutter of hydraulic lines and piping cover the top of the pressure hull. The conning town is draped by an anchor chain left by the Navy in 1945.

Inside, everything that could be removed by scavenging scuba divers has been taken. Gauges, controls, labels, tags, hatches, and the ship's radio have been cut and pried off the bulkheads. The floor of the boat is layered in sand and silt. Divers have methodically sifted thorough this material pulling out serving china, pistols, helmets, watches, an empty cognac bottle, and other personal gear.

U-853 is a novelty for the divers who visit her. But once inside, they can not help but think of the 55 men who brought her across the Atlantic to the New England coast – the men who stay, when the divers return to the surface off Block Island.

The Book is Always Better

A great many books have be adapted to the silver screen but the process is not easy and the results are often sub par. 

In my experience, the movies always seem like shallow summaries of great books.

I can’t provide an informed opinion about a lot of these adaptations because, for many of them, I have not personally read the book and/or seen the movie - usually it’s one or the other.  So, I turned to the web to see what other people feel are the best and the worst movies based on a book. 

According to the New York Post, the movies that have best made the leap from paper to silver screen include:

Harry Potter;

The Shining;

The Lord of the Rings;

The Wizard of Oz;

The Princess Bride, 

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo;

The Perks of Being a Wallflower;

The Notebook.

The stories better left on paper - in other words, the bad movies based on books include:

Twilight;

The Great Gatsby;

The Time Traveler’s Wife;

Water for Elephants;

Eat, Pray, Love;

The Lovely Bones;

The Da Vinci Code.

Your thoughts?