Tropical Storm Barry Making Landfall - Personal thoughts on bad teachers...

Tropical Storm Barry is currently making landfall along the Mexican coast. Rains will be spreading inland from Veracruz to Tampico to the north. Heavy rains will spread inland along with Barry.  Just another day in the tropics in June for that region...as his happens often in June. A small tropical storm or  minimal hurricane forms down in the Bay of Campeche and kicks west inland into Mexico. Sometimes they move more to the NW or even NNW briefly and it becomes a crap shoot as to whether or not it will make landfall north of the border. Sometimes the rains get caught up in the upper atmospheric flow and move into our Desert SW and other times they don't.  It forms, it's named and we track. Yup, it's that simple. Pretty in it's simplicity almost spinning around as it punches in ...very slowly.



The wave out in the Atlantic is actually in the Caribbean near the Dominican Republic, but it's moisture is being sheared off far to the North because of the strong upper level winds dipping down into the heart of the Caribbean.  A good visual is up no on www.spaghettimodels.com.



Wind is the product of a hurricane and yet, oddly, wind is also the enemy of a hurricane trying to form. If there is too much wind it blows the tops off of the thunderheads that are trying to climb and stack themselves just so. Strong shear (often from a strong upper level low) zooms down and blows the thunderstorms apart and stops the spin from spinning. So, they need quiet calm sort of conditions with a nice little high forming aloft to get their act together and they become the wild wind that owns the ocean. That simple.

As always this is seen best on the Water Vapor Loop.

http://www.ssd.noaa.gov/goes/east/natl/flash-wv.html <--- click="" color="" if="" link="" nice="" on="" p="" the="" version="" you="">


You almost wonder how Van Gogh knew what hurricanes look like from outer space as they are forming :)



Isn't that beautiful? Suns and sars and rivers of wind up in the sky trying to form nighttime hurricanes.

Until the Upper Level Low dies out in the Caribbean and the one in the Atlantic stops diving the tropics will be quiet awhile. Nice.. my cousin and his wife I refer to as my "sister-in-law" are going on a cruise soon and I want them to have fun. We were raised like siblings so she feels like my sister-in-law more than a cousin. And, they deserve a nice cruise. A week to ten days and all bets are off, and possibly just a week. The models don't see anything and until them I am watching upper level lows swirl out there with intermittent tropical waves trying to get their act together, but being blown apart by the big bad upper level low wolfs :)

On a personal note it should be known that I am an extremely "nice" person, almost pathetically Pollyanna like at times always trying to see the good in someone. I rarely "dislike" anyone strongly... trust me it takes a lot. And, at the same time I am very perceptive and intuitive so I often see things I don't like and I try to focus on the good and ignore the bad. Sometimes you meet someone you cannot do that with and you find yourself disliking immensely for "no apparent reason" other than things he said that were MEAN and COLD and he had a attitude that he could say or do anything and had a detached sort of quietly hidden sneer when making students lives miserable. I've taught before and one thing I have noticed sadly in the teacher's lunchroom is that some teachers enjoy the total control they have over their students the way a spider has their victim in their web...in their sights. Most teachers are hard working, very focused and obsessed with helping their students "get it" and "get ahead" and then you have the others.

When my kids went to the Hebrew Academy on Miami Beach I got to know a teacher who also taught as an adjunct professor at Touro College in Miami briefly and a bad, cold feeling would wash over me and I knew this man was bad news.. not just a bad teacher. He told me with an almost angry superior tone that none of the students in his class were "particularly bright" which I thought was a strong statement about a very smart class of students he had known less than a month. It stood out odd and I've been to a lot of parent teacher classes in my life ...trust me. A fast judgement about a very smart, quick group of students. And, in small private schools a class is often VERY SMALL so if you can't teach a VERY SMALL class you got to wonder why a guy with such a "great resume" fails constantly in his job. I've worked in academia and the "great resume" line or "curriculum vitae" comment is usually the kiss of death because it means some insecure dean or principal wants to attach his self-worth to the academic resume of some teacher who is usually kissing their butts and making the students and parent's lives miserable. I also noticed over time he was frequently not there on Mondays at both school, obviously taking constant long vacations thinking no one would notice and hoping whatever stays in ?? Vegas maybe?? stays in Vegas ... to quote a commercial.

At the college where I worked he had a class of 3 students to teach and he told a quiet, nervous student in the first week of classes to "find a tutor for this class otherwise you won't pass" and walked away from him as if he was talking to a rock not a person.   As a librarian it sort of killed me to see him take his method of teaching to the college level where this student deserved more from a professor that should have been able to get to one of three students. He didn't care.. he was just sleep walking through his jobs and recommending insistently that parents hire his friend who was a good tutor to help their kids get through his class. Nice racket if you ask me... I mean in a private school you are paying sometimes up to $27,000 a year for a teacher to teach your child and you would think one teacher could get to a small class of less than 20 students..if that many. Many of the parents are on big, huge generous scholarships yet paying way more than in public school with no other options such as "can we move him into another class" as that teacher is the ONLY teacher teaching THAT class. My daughter, a very bright girl, had him TWO years and had to make up the work... the material..and the class on her own and she did so quietly and moved on to college and the rest of her life. I complained and I found out others had complained, the powers that be liked him in both places. The college dropped him, less for his inadequacy than for his constantly disappearing from a Friday or Monday class...

Yesterday I found out he was arrested for having child porn on his computers and other various problems of the legal kind.

http://www.wsvn.com/news/articles/local/21010936571121/former-teacher-arrested-for-child-pornography/

I smiled. Smiled not because he made my kids lives miserable in his class...that happens everywhere. Students and teachers don't connect and mine more than most have a tendency every year to have one teacher they insist they cannot learn from and I am sure if you are still reading this you are smiling knowing it's not just my kids. One teacher who is cruising along on his credentials and doing more to impress the powers that be than the students and the parents by doing a good solid job teaching. The problem with schools are that the good students almost always do well and the ones who don't but are nervous will do anything to try to get a passing class and some students just shut down unable to "get it " and can sense a mean, cruel streak in a teacher who acts holier than thou and smarter than them and feels he can get away with anything because of his Curriculum Vitae. I always wondered when the proverbial shit would hit the fan with him, because you know that old saying "you can fool some of the people some of the time" is so true.

One day he didn't show up for work at the Academy, students thought maybe he was suddenly sick. There was no official word forthcoming and he was replaced and the students felt nothing. They moved on with a new teacher (something which has happened before) and they went up to the rooftop and felt the wind from the ocean a block away. They made dates to hang out at Lincoln Road and watch a movie or get ice cream and went on with life.

Reminds me of that song from "A Chorus Line" ... "I Felt Nothing"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ob4ZmHKbD28

It was said he was a brilliant teacher by his lawyer and flawed.. True, he was flawed because he felt superior to his students and felt he had a good gig going on where he worked not so hard.. did something on the side that was apparent and showed up riding on his credentials in a school that was way better than him with students much better than him who deserved more. It's a good school, always has been and been around over 60 years... it's had it's ups and downs and it's a great school.. glad my kids went there. Personally, am very sorry they had to deal with this man.. I'm sorry I ever had to deal with him.. and life goes on.

He was not very smart... because if he was he would know eventually everyone gets caught and secrets come out and you are paid to TEACH and you are paid not to tell parents to "get a tutor" and you should never think you are smarter than everyone else.. cause somewhere...someone is smarter than you.

AND.................I'm writing this because as a parent of MANY students.. if you have a teacher like this teaching your child and you have any power at all... do everything possible to keep them away from your child because if you SENSE something wrong, deep down in the bottom of your heart.. you are probably right.

Time will always tell.. sometimes though the timing doesn't work out well for your child.

Something to think on in this tropically sort of quiet day as Barry moves inland in Mexico.

I'm smiling because hopefully no other student in the near future will have to deal with his form of smugness and quiet form of abuse of power over the students in his class. It's just a class... but to students sometimes that class and that grade means everything to them.

Besos Bobbi

http://miami.cbslocal.com/2013/06/19/fmr-private-school-teacher-charged-with-child-porn-possession/