Reasons I Haven’t Responded to Any of Your Emails November 10, 2011

Reasons I Haven’t Responded to Any of Your Emails

By Hemant Mehta
November 10, 2011
  • Parent-Teacher conferences last night, today all day, and tonight.

  • Weekly Speech Team/Forensics tournaments… and almost-daily practices. (But the kids are sooooo freaking talented.)

  • Foundation Beyond Belief board meeting last weekend (Lots of amazing ideas came from it, though… can’t wait to share them all with you soon!)

  • *cough cough hack snot asthma wheeze*

  • Grandfather’s 90th (!!!) birthday party. One day, I will steal his genes.

  • Weekly classes I’m taking as I work toward becoming a “Nationally Board Certified” teacher… a title that the Powers That Be *might* bestow on you only after you submit 329042 pages explaining how you improve students’ math scores with everything you do, videotape 30 minutes’ worth of classes, submit another 329841 pages analyzing those videos, assess students’ work in the classroom, submit more pages explaining how your comments on their work helped them get better at life, take six hours of exams covering all the major high school math subjects, and (I assume) much begging and groveling.

…

So if I haven’t gotten back to you in the past couple of weeks, that’s why.

But there’s a long weekend coming up! The goal is to achieve Inbox Zero by Sunday night. Pray for me.

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  • Anonymous

    “Pray for me.”

    Make me.

    🙂

  • Don’t forget to list the prolific output you produce for this website.

    Oh, and one quarter of your genes are your grandfather’s genes, so hopefully you got his longevity. I wish I had one eighth of your energy.

  • So I’m assuming this means you’re still going through the “applications” for a position here at Friendly Atheist? If so, that’s good news. I was afraid you gave up on it all. 😛

  • Yep. Haven’t had time to look at any of them yet. Will do that soon!

  • **bowing before your greatness** Highschool Math Teacher? *thinking I’ll drop you a note when my twins start advancing past what “Helping Mommy Cook” will teach.
    Much Luck & Stamina Magically Transmitted to you via the web 😉
    (or just go to think geek dot com and browse the Caffiene link)
    Carri

  • Mattincinci

    when i gave my teacher a bunch of reasons why i didnt do homework she just looked at me and said “no excuses mr.”

  • Anonymous

    You do realize that according to the available data, knowing that people are praying for you might actually make things worse ?

    Oh wait, that’s only if you were irrational. My bad 😉

    Good luck with everything.

  • Brian Westley

    I know!  Everyone email your prayers to Hemant!  That’s bound to help!

  • Marcie

    Good luck getting Nationally Board Certified!!

  • Seriously, I have NO idea how you manage to teach and blog. I mean, sure, teachers get their “free time”, too, but back when I was student teaching, if I wasn’t teaching then I was helping with the drama program. If I wasn’t doing that, I was grading. If I wasn’t doing that, then I was planning.

    And if I wasn’t doing any of the above, you can bet your ass that I wasn’t atheist-blogging; I was atheist SLEEPING.

  • I looked into that Nationally Certified thingy myself, but for an Art teacher it wasn’t worth it.    I still wonder if it was as wacky as the Art PRAXIS exam.  There was a question about what you would use rabbit hide glue for.  In a K-12 setting?  To make students cry or go “eeeewwwww!”

  • Sleeping! Dammit, I knew I forgot to do something…

  • Atoswald

    Off topic, I know, but did anyone notice the ridiculous ad on the petition for religious equality from catholic advocate? Since when is it religious freedom to force one’s views onto others? Are all religious people bug nuts crazy, or are they just fitted with blinders at an early age?

  • Hemant, there is no need to pray for you.

    Yahweh, the Greatest God has you covered.

  • Chakolate

    Does ‘nationally certified’ mean you’re certified in a particular subject?  It’s always irked me (to put it mildly) that once a teacher is certified, he/she can teach any subject, even if they know nothing about it. 

  • Kevin_Of_Bangor

    How do I pray for a God?

  • It’d be a certification specifically for high school math

  • Reality Based Community

    Hi Hemant,

    Not to add to your workload, but please look at the comments on your recent post about a monkey “experiment”. The experiment you described never happened, a retraction is in order:

    http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2011/11/10/reasons-i-havent-responded-to-any-of-your-emails/#disqus_thread

  • I’ve updated the post. Now please stop hijacking different threads. I saw this the first 32042 times you told me about it. I’ve been too busy to fix it. Now it’s fixed.

  • Reality Based Community

    I apologize for posting in multiple threads. I recognize you’re busy and so I wanted to make sure that this did not slip past you. I was making sure that I got your attention for good reason: you have atheists sharing a story about a made up scientific study as if it were real. The post was shared 564 times on facebook alone. And this has not changed, it’s not “fixed.”

    First, the update you posted is unclear. You write: “Commenters point out the study may not be credible, so take it with a
    grain of salt. Even if it’s not true, I think there’s still a useful
    moral to this story.”

    The problem with this update is that the first sentence implies that there is actually a study, but that there might be flaws with it. It fails to make clear that there is no study. Either produce a citation for a study that matches the description or admit that it’s made up.  And if you do find a citation, that’s great. I’m overreacting. But such clean cut, perfectly clear results smell incredibly fishy. If this were a student’s paper I would write “citation?” in the margin. This is research paper writing 101 and what I found so disturbing about the original post; you never actually provide a citation to a peer reviewed journal article or book and neither do the posts you link to. While I recognize that a blog post is not a piece of academic writing, whenever you write about scientific experiments you venture into the academy where you cannot cite Psychology Today. More to the point: as a reader you should never trust a description of an experiment that does not provide a citation to a peer-reviewed publication of the experiment’s findings.

    Second, even if your update had clearly stated that the story is made up and that there never was such a study, it would still be inadequate. No one reads an update on a three day old post. And ordinarily that’s no problem, but again: you have atheists sharing a made up scientific study as if it were real. Indeed, at least 564 of your readers shared it with their friends. You have a responsibility to your readers to correct the record in a place where they will actually read it: in a new post.

    Finally, I want to thank you for all the work that you do. You run an amazing site that I thoroughly enjoy reading. Please keep up the good work.

  • This could get you a job at New Trier High School in prestigious Winnetka!

  • Eric S.

    The GF got board certified last year.  High school math.  It was quite the undertaking.  And quite the big deal.  Good luck.

  • Capt’n John

    I taught for 30 years and I have been retired for 20 years. As I read about your problems I realized that the more time changes the more the problems stay the same.