Chin up: The futile quest for the presidential fitness award

On the way home tonight, I walked past the restaurant that's about half a block from our building. Construction scaffolding stands in front of all the buildings along the row. Tonight, for about the third or fourth time in the last two months, I walked past a guy performing gymnastics on one of the scaffolding bars. It's been a few different men. Tonight's participant was about 35. Muscular. Goatee. Black sweatpants.

Like the others, he did his best Mary Lou Retton routine, swinging along a higher bar before gracefully dropping to a lower one. The judges all gave him 9.0, except for the Russian who handed out a 7.2, much to Al Trautwig's dismay. The guy tonight took a break from the low-wire theatrics to work on his pull-ups. He eased up and down, all the while making eye contact with pedestrians, especially a couple of females. Forget picking up women at a bar, online or in a church. Why woo with words when you can awe them with feats of strength on construction equipment? The gymnastics are impressive, though at this stage in his life where's he going with the skills? While male Olympic gymnasts are older than their 15-year-old female counterparts, he's way past his prime. Perhaps he could be used in a large-scale robbery, at a Vegas casino or a Boston bank, someplace with a laser-secured vault that requires a trustworthy man who's good with a gun and knows how to keep his mouth shut while sneaking into small spaces.

While I'm not entirely sure what this man gets out of his current exploits, I have no doubt that he won a Presidential Physical Fitness Award when he was 11 years old. Every school kid remembers taking the fitness test, striving for that mystical 85th percentile. The 85th percentile. A magical phrase. Percentiles held such power as a kid, whether it was in the Iowa Basics or the presidential fitness test. I envied the kids who achieved this award. A Medal of Honor wouldn't have impressed me as much at that age.

Sit-ups, pull-ups, distance run, sit-and-reach and the maddening shuttle run. Those were the events. Until about fifth grade, I dominated in nearly all of the events. Through fourth grade I was one of the fastest kids in our class, chasing down the slow-moving targets during tag. I managed a respectable number of chin-ups and always cruised through the sit-ups. Then something happened. I lost speed. I lost strength. My flexibility stopped improving and never got any better after that. I no longer had a shot at earning the president's praise for my physical fitness.

The shuttle run seemed like the most unfair event. Our little gym's floor tormented runners, as if an ice rink resided beneath the shoddy wood surface. It was impossible to stop to pick up the little bricks before turning around and speeding toward the other one. That's one excuse I used, anyway.

But chin-ups remained the most humiliating event, from the time I was 12 until the day I turned 18. In a shuttle run, no one can really see just how slow you are. You're talking tenths of a second. Sit-and-reach? Who cares? Everyone - except future cross country stars - hates the mile run. But chin-ups, they're you're out in the open, exposed, dangling from the bar, kicking, grunting, groaning, straining, fighting, weeping, quitting. How long would you hang there before finally giving up? A minute? Two? Occasionally I got away with one pull-up, by doing the jump-up-and-count-that-as-one-and-hope-the-teacher-doesn't-notice trick. The snickers echoed through the gym as your body swayed and your arms shook from the strain. You weren't just disappointing yourself and your parents. You were letting down the president. You were letting down your country. I remember one year they changed it so your palms were no longer facing you, making it even tougher.

An 11-year-old boy is supposed to be able to do six chin-ups. What's the point? What's this measuring? What's the shuttle run measuring, other than shoe traction? Why didn't the president make free throw shooting part of the challenge, or track the speed of a 12-year-old's tennis serve?

I didn't get any stronger in high school, at least not in categories that could be measured with a chart. I had the upper-body strength of a patient who's spent two months in a hospital bed. Only the muscular and light thrived, along with anyone in the wrestling program. An average kid with an average physique didn't stand a chance.

In high school we had a kid who could do like a dozen chin-ups, but on each one he slithered up to the bar, his long red hair wiggling back and forth. It remains the most unique style I've ever seen, not that I've witnessed many chin-up competitions since high school graduation. It was a snake technique and for all I know the president eventually banned it. At first we all laughed, but he quickly earned our respect, especially those of us who remained in the hanging group. Who the hell were we to laugh at anyone?

The fitness challenge isn't just for children. Adults can torture themselves, too. There's apparently an adult fitness competition, but it looks like chin-ups are not part of it. Sit-ups remain, and you can do push-ups to measure strength. Too bad about the chin-ups. It'd be a great way to relive some childhood memories. Find a construction site, round up some local teens who can gawk and verbally mock you, and put on an ill-fitting shirt that rides up as you hang helplessly in the air while your pale stomach dangles over your shorts.

Go for that 85th percentile. Do it for your health. Damn it, do it for your country.

You are what you were as a first-grader. Act accordingly

Bad news for anyone older than 7.

Think back to first grade. Remember sitting passively in your desk as the bully who was held back a grade grabbed your hair and yanked while the teacher did nothing? You're probably sitting passively in your cubicle today - 20, 30, 40 years later - as the office moron bullies you into finishing a project he was supposed to complete two days ago.

Remember how shy you were in first grade when the new girl in school tried talking to you? Remember how she looked at you when you couldn't put two words together? Even then she knew you were something of a loser. She probably pegged you as a paste-eater. You're probably something of a shut-in today, afraid to meet new people. When a woman does talk to you while you guys stand in line at the grocery store, she's immediately turned off by your awkwardness. She assumes you still live in a dark basement in your parents' house and spend your time reading books about serial killers.

A new study came out that seems to show "personality traits observed in children as young as first graders are a strong predictor of adult behavior." The study's author, Christopher Nave, said, "This speaks to the importance of understanding personality because it does follow us wherever we go across time and contexts." And surely young Christopher was a blast to hang out with as a first-grader.

Many people ridicule these types of studies - "THIS IS WHAT OUR MONEY IS SPENT ON?? GODDAMN GOVERNMENT!" - but I love them. I also, for the most part, believe the findings. To be fair, this study - from the 1960s - studied children in Hawaii. Maybe the results would be different on the mainland, with kids who receive less sun.

It's odd reading some of the Yahoo! comments. Not any stranger than most Internet comments, except the posters are lacking in irony even more than normal. They ridicule the study and make bizarre political analogies while using racist language and bad spelling. They say there's no way the findings could be true, then add with pride that they've never been afraid to speak their mind, even as a kid, and that their temper always got them into trouble with teachers who didn't like to hear the truth. In other words, remember the jerk who tried beating up on the kid from Cambodia in first grade and always struggled to spell any word that had more than two letters? He's probably ranting today about Mexicans while posting poorly worded missives on message boards.

I remember a fair amount of things from first grade. Books we read, filmstrips we watched, field trips we took. I remember one of the kids slamming a door so hard it broke the glass in the window. He was always in trouble in first grade; shortly after I graduated from college, I read a story about him getting arrested for beating someone up. Probably broke a glass door during the brawl.

Back then my teacher and classmates thought I was pretty quiet but fairly witty. I loved reading. I loved basketball. I wanted my teacher to like me. Not much has changed. In first grade I longed for a girl named Leah who had moved away after Kindergarten. That's changed. I stopped thinking about her in 10th grade, 11th at the latest.

I liked making my friends laugh back then but didn't want to be the center of attention. Or, I didn't want to be the acknowledged center of attention. It's the same thing today. I'd rather throw in a comment at the end of someone's long-winded story than tell an amusing anecdote that takes five minutes.

I loathed the idea of getting in trouble with an authority figure, but always wanted to entertain my friends.

One day the whole class sat on the floor, listening to the teacher read us a story. I kept whispering wisecracks to two of my friends, Willie and Travis. Only they could hear me. I provided running commentary on the story and the teacher's reading performance; I was a 6-year-old precursor to Mystery Science Theater 3000. And god, was I funny! Or at least that's what I thought. Fortunately, so did my friends, who kept chuckling throughout the story. Finally the teacher stopped reading. She looked up and found the offenders. She chastised my friends. She disciplined them with the type of punishment that's probably not allowed these days, unless the teacher is eager to be the defendant in a lawsuit.

Travis and Willie had to sit underneath desks for an extended period. Odd. It was like putting them in a cage without bars. Like a pair of mob rats eager to sell out their boss, both Willie and Travis told the teacher I made the comments that made them laugh that made them interrupt her reading. I dreaded sitting under one of those desks. They looked so miserable, defeated. And they just took the punishment. Mrs. Matuska called me to her desk. Unsmiling, she asked me if the accusations were true. Had I made them laugh?

"No," I said.

"I didn't think so," she replied.

I was the good kid.

A few years ago I went to church back in Janesville with my parents. Louise came with. As we stood there, next to my forever-faithful folks and the other good Catholics of St. Ann's, I tried making comments that would make Louise giggle. I wanted to hear her snort while the priest recited Eucharistic Prayer Number...Three. I sort of succeeded, but not entirely. In a perfect world, I suppose the priest would have stopped the ceremony. In front of everyone, he would have told her to sit in the confessional to recite 100 Our Father's. He would have asked me if I made her laugh. And I would have said...

Professors: Ease up on chemistry and math students

Did you know that English majors are smarter than chemistry majors? And education majors are brighter than math majors? It's true, at least according to GPAs.

A recent study by Wake Forest University analyzed grade point averages at an unnamed liberal arts school. The five majors that had the lowest GPAs were chemistry (2.78), math (2.90), economics (2.95), psychology (2.98) and biology (3.02). The five highest GPAs came from education majors (3.36), language (3.34), English (3.33), music (3.30) and religion (3.22).

The study reports that students get discouraged early by the tough grades in those majors and drop out for ones that offer the chance for higher GPAs. So people are debating whether professors should perhaps ease up on the grading in those disciplines, since the world needs more scientists, engineers and mathematicians. If the students can get through the early courses, maybe they'll stick with it for four years.

Thankfully I never had to take a chemistry class in college. A roommate took organic chemistry, which was regarded as perhaps the toughest course at St. John's. The roomie and his somewhat odd chemistry buddies - who appeared to have sniffed too much butane - gathered each week for marathon study sessions while I spent time playing Tecmo and writing my 10-page papers a day before the due date. I felt bad for them, even if a few of the guys gave off an uncomfortable vibe. They seemed like the type of people who might one day have the New York Times publish their poorly punctuated manifesto.

Another roomie took high-level math classes. He spent eight hours working on a single proof, absurd problems that left him drained but ultimately proud when he solved them. I'd go play basketball with the other roommate and we'd leave Mike at his desk, his head buried in his hands. When we'd return two hours later, he'd be in the same position. We'd leave for dinner and come back an hour later, only to find him still seated, still holding his head in his hands. It was no way to live. Still, the guy owns his own company today, so the hard work paid off, even though I don't think he makes much use now of his ability to solve 10-hour math problems.

I thrived in math through elementary school. I dominated in the flash-card multiplication game. Things started going bad in about eighth grade, which was about the time I decided to be a reporter when I grew up. State regulations were the only reason I took any more math classes.

At Worthington, I took calculus and trigonometry, the victim of a transfer coordinator at St. John's who insisted I had to take those classes before leaving community college. Each day I went into the classroom thinking, "This is the day I'm going to really listen. This is the day I will figure out what trigonometry is all about." And each day I stared at the board in disbelief, struggling to understand a professor whose fourth language was English. The night before my trig final, I spent all night studying, trying to cram in 10 weeks of information. The plan failed.

Once I finally arrived at St. John's, I learned I could take a math theory class and I spent a semester breezing through it, writing papers about famous mathematicians. That still didn't make up for the suffering I endured taking calculus and trigonometry, nor did it provide relief for the professors who graded my exams in those two classes. I didn't test well in those courses - in the finals or during the semester. Professors probably carried my exams over to their colleague's office so they could mock my answers while mourning for the future of the country.

"Can you believe this kid didn't know how to obtain a positive coterminal angle? God. And just look at how he tried to prove the law of sines. Look at it."

I majored in communications at St. John's, which included the journalism courses. It's not listed as being among the easiest majors for GPAs, which I find a bit surprising. I took several challenging classes at St. John's and had a couple of brilliant professors who were also hard-asses when it came to grading papers and tests. But overall it wasn't the most difficult of majors.

St. John's requires students to take a couple of religion classes. I breezed through one of mine, bored the entire semester. But the other one challenged me every day and actually made me interested in the Old Testament. The professor graduated from the Harvard Divinity School and was probably the second most-brilliant person I ever encountered in school. His passion inspired all the students, even atheists and agnostics. I say second most-brilliant because the smartest person I saw in school was one of the students in that theology class, a guy named Phil. Each day Phil sat in his chair, long legs stretched out in front of him, goofy hat on his head. He majored in theology. He battled the professor, debating theories and facts. The arguments usually sailed over the heads of everyone else in the class, but they still fascinated us. If Jesus had walked into class one day and heard Phil talk, he would have pulled up a seat and thought, "Now that's something I never thought about." Phil was probably a genius, even if, like other religion majors, he likely benefited from grade inflation.

By the time I turned 14, I knew I didn't have a future as a scientist, a chemist or an engineer. My college grades only reaffirmed that belief. But for those wide-eyed nerdy students who enter those disciplines only to find themselves crushed by impossible tests and low grades, I express my sympathy. I urge them to stick with it. Grades aren't everything. Besides, if the really smart people invade English, education, journalism, and language classes, all they're going to do is ruin the curve for the rest of us.

I paid someone $50 to write this post - AND LOVED THE RESULT!

Our company seeks experienced writers to complete college and university level essays, research papers, book reports and business plans. The job can be done from home or other remote location. The orders are completed and sent over the Internet. ...Most of our part-time writers receive from $500 to $1,500 per month. Our full-time writers receive about $1,500-$2,500 per month.

Interested? Apply here. I like to think that at one point in my life I was probably one of the top research paper writers - artists - in the university system. I liked the research and loved the writing. Just as importantly, research papers meant no math problems, no formulas or proofs. No science experiments conducted with burners and goggles, no interpreting the results. When people in the mid-1990s wrote about Americans falling behind the rest of the civilized world in math and science proficiency, they could have published a picture of my face as I stared at the board in my trigonometry class, confusion and fear mixing with an occasional tear.

But papers, I could write papers. No matter the topic, from the Exxon Valdez catastrophe to Pat Buchanan's speech at the 1992 Republican convention, I could write 5,000 words and come out the other side with an A and a written compliment from the professor. I loved classes that had few exams, unless those tests involved writing essays for the final.

My skills peaked during my senior year at St. John's, when nearly every class I took required research papers instead of exams. The summer before that final year at SJU, I bought a word processor, the type of machine a collector might pay a buck for at a garage sale today, something to show the kids: "Look at what people used to write on!" In my last two semesters of college, I sat in front of that word processor for hundreds of hours, fueled by Dr Pepper and Zevon, typing away on projects that seemed to take hundreds of hours to print.

I often saved the writing for the two nights before the project was due, bringing together the mountain of information I'd found during my research and spinning it into a coherent paper. Thankfully, I even found a math class that allowed me to utilize these skills. After flaming out my first two years in trigonometry and calculus - an academic adviser provided horrifically wrong information about math requirements - I discovered Math Theory at St. John's. We solved a few problems here and there. Mostly we wrote essays about great mathematicians and the problems that vexed them for hundreds of years. I didn't understand their arguments or how they came up with their solutions, but I could write a biography about them or summarize their struggles.

All that bragging aside, I would return to the world of airport wheelchair attendants before I'd become a writer who types up term papers or book reports for college kids desperate for a 10-page submission on the effects of Brown v. Board of Education. Ghostwriting a book for a former Major League Baseball player who was once a heroin addict would be one thing; doing that same thing for a freshman who is too lazy to research or too incompetent to write is completely different.

Yet obviously the countless companies that offer up these services have a big pool of talent at their disposal. Especially in today's publishing world, many writers will take what they can get, even if the credit for the 12-page paper about the Battle of the Bulge will go to a business major who spent Friday night slipping roofies to co-eds.

Premiumwriting.com, which posted the ad above, makes sure that the work of its writers is not plagiarized, so students can safely assume that the paper that's not their own hasn't been stolen from an unknown third party. The company does have its morals, after all. In fact, the company announced on December 16 of this past year, "Our engineers have upgraded the anti-plagiarism engine used to check completed projects. From now on all written assignments will be tested by the world's most respected anti-plagiarism resource." Again, it's all about the ethics. Plagiarism is not allowed, but please hurry up with that five-page essay on Anne Frank's diary, we need to get it emailed to the college kid by Wednesday.

Obviously, having to work for this company would be a blow to the self-esteem for many writers, though that's probably cushioned by the money that helps pay the rent and buy groceries. But how about the engineers who have put their education and genius to work coming up with an anti-plagiarism "engine." It's a noble mission, except for the fact a company that sells term papers and book reports to college kids for fees is using the creation. It's like a scientist who worked on a nuclear power plant turning around and helping a terrorist construct a nuke.

Here's a site that rates some of the top term paper-writing websites out there, so that the customer can do the proper research before hiring someone to write a paper. Seems like a lot of work to do for someone who's searching for a way out of research.

Capitalism lives on the site, but irony has died. In a note to students, using the type of wording you might normally read on a website warning about email scams and Nigerian princes, the site states, "If a site is charging more or less than the prices that are mentioned here then BEWARE as you are being cheated."

You can't con a conman, and you can't cheat a cheater.

Other warnings: "Learn about things that can lead you to unimaginable and disastrous results."

Disastrous, sure. Unimaginable? Is it that hard to imagine what might happen if a professor discovered a student bought a book report online? This lack of imagination might be part of the original problem for the students.

The site also says, "Never underestimate your teacher (They have various tricks for checking authenticity of the research done.)"

Those tricky teachers and their conniving ways of recognizing work that's been stolen.

The site ranks the top three places for students to buy papers. In higher education, it's the third most-prestigious ranking, coming in just ahead of U.S. News and World Report's Best College Rankings, but still behind Playboy's Top Party Schools for 2009. A man who may or may not be named James writes, "Top term papers guide sure is a life saver. Thanks to your editors, I am always able to get the paper that I am looking for. You are doing a great job." It sounds like a statement written by a robot or an ad representative. No word on whether James wrote the sentence himself or paid $10 for a pre-written testimonial.

So who grabbed the top spot in Top Term Paper Sites' annual rankings? Perfect Term Papers.

In the introduction, the site welcomes the lazy and intoxicated: "As if a job and social life are not enough to drive you insane while you try to pass college! Add to this the burden of term papers, which are sometimes designed to make you tear your hair out in frustration."

Who can the website help? If a student identifies with any of these problems, Perfect Term Papers - which brags that it does provides simply perfect term papers (in case it wasn't obvious before) - is there to help:

"How difficult is it to begin writing term paper/research paper when an evening out is equally important. How difficult is it to turn in research paper tomorrow morning when you might drop-dead the next minute due to exhaustion."*

* Should a student trust a site that has a glaring typo in its warnings? A research paper, it should read. A research paper. Plus, drop-dead wouldn't need a hyphen. My application for Perfect Term Papers is now sailing through cyberspace.

Perhaps owing to the difficult economic times confronting the country, Perfect Term Papers has revised its rates for March 2010. If you need a paper the next morning, it's going to be $34.95 per page, while it's only $7.95 per page if you need it a week from now.

According to Top Term Paper sites, Perfect Term Papers gets approximately 18,000 hits a day and scores a perfect 10 in customer rating. In addition, they have no instances of plagiarism. Perhaps their engineers have also built the perfect anti-plagiarism engine. Every paper is custom-written. That's the type of personal touch that so many people say is missing in today's cutthroat business world.

Perfect Term Papers provides a sample of its work, a short paper on Quintilian, who is "known as one of the gigantic of rhetoric and is measured by some to be the foremost educational reformer." The entire sample is so bizarrely written that it made me briefly wonder if the entire website wasn't a parody ("gigantic of rhetoric?"). The site uses as its sample piece a research paper that is so poorly written that an average high school freshman would demand his money back. Another line from the paper: "But from the start, Quintilian demonstrates that he is concerned with young children, although he expects to attain them through their teachers, tutors, and parents." I'm not sure what that line means, though it sounds less like a description of a famous reformer and more like a plot for a movie about human trafficking.

"His present work is a twelve-volume behemoth not the kind of text with which one student of rhetoric can without problems settle down."

"Yet, in this fraction of the work the illustration are so pertinent and the style so distinguished and yet sweet that the contemporary reader, whose preliminary interest in rhetoric is of requisite faint, is carried along with much less exhaustion than is essential to master most part of the rhetorical writings of Aristotle and Cicero (McCall, 1989)."

Whoa. Again, perhaps this is an elaborate joke from the leaders of Perfect Term Papers, an example of the type of humor they might use when writing a paper for a kid doing research on the famous satirists of the 20th century. Who talks like that, and, more importantly, who writes like that? If a student submitted a paper with those sentences, even the teachers who aren't tricky might become suspicious. And this is the sample the site put up for the public to see. They looked through some of the papers written by the veteran team and said, "There, that one on Quintilian that Jonathan wrote a while back. That was good stuff. Let's put that as our sample to draw students in. Most of them will be drunk when they email us so they'll read it through blurry eyes and won't notice the haphazard sentence structure and missing punctuation." Which ones did they reject as samples?

And this is the No. 1 term paper site on the web, an indictment of the industry and the Internet. If you're going to build an unethical business, at least be good at it. I think Madoff said that.

Delightfully, a disgruntled cheat filed a ripoff report about Perfect Term Papers (she was apparently unaware of the perfect customer rating doled out by Top Term Papers). As I wrote, irony is dead in the world of purchased term papers.

I see something of an opening here. Maybe I can get a part-time business going, butt in on the competition. It's been nearly 13 years since I wrote a research paper, but I think it would all come back to me. Get myself a team of writers and some disgruntled engineers and I could be competing with the big boys. My rates will be fair. The work will be good, but not too good (no need to alarm tricky teachers). All I have to do is shred my last bit of dignity and lose all of my self-esteem. I'll start doing drugs, of course. Somewhere out there is a college student who procrastinated too long or drank too much. They should be able to hand in a paper they're proud of, even if they're unaware of who wrote it or what's even in it.

Watch out, Perfect Term Papers, there's a new kid on the block. Or, as Perfect Term Papers might write it, There's a behemoth not the kind of website with which one student of history can without difficulty settle down. Yet, in this business of the work the words are so pertinent and the style so distinguished and so sweet that the contemporary reader or requisite faint will seek to buy the papers that are rhetorically like the writings of Aristotle and Socrates.

Am I hired?

The good thing about dangerous blizzards

On Wednesday morning thousands of Minnesota schoolkids will wake up and hear two of the most magical words in their vocabulary: snow day.

Two months after getting the first big snowfall of the year, the state will receive another winter blast, though Minnesotans can't complain too much since people were golfing just last week. But the clubs can be put away now for the next three or four months. Break out the shovels. And the promises to someday move out of the damned state to someplace warm. As much as a foot of snow could fall in the southern part of the state. Strong winds will combine with the snow to create whiteout conditions. Authorities recommend no travel.

It's fairly standard stuff for the state, but if you're in school, getting a hand from Mother Nature never gets old, even if the long winters sometimes do. As a kid, you don't really appreciate just how dangerous a snowstorm can be, at least until getting a driver's license. You don't care about the treacherous commute workers face. All you want to hear is more news about "blowing snow" and its first-cousin, "dangerous drifting." A foot of snow is nice, but not necessarily a school closer. It's usually all about the wind. Two inches can fall but can shut down a school, depending on the wind. Very rarely that wind led to a "cold day," when temperatures and wind chills became so brutal that schools throughout the state closed, occasionally by government decree.

But snow days ruled. Today of course the Internet provides the minute-by-minute updates on school closings. When I was in school we relied primarily on the radio, specifically WCCO, also known as the Good Neighbor. And when the morning anchors delivered news of a late start or a cancellation, they really were being good neighbors, as if they somehow had control over the school names they mechanically recited.

They read them alphabetically, meaning we had to wait a bit before they'd get to the Js. My stomach started churning around the Cs. By the time the announcer had barreled through the Fs, I'd started in with the prayers.

The tension increased as the announcer breezed through each letter, meticulously listing the schools that were an hour late, then those that had a two-hour late start. Finally the highlight of the show: the cancellations. It was like listening to election results over a radio, only with more at stake. The tension increased depending on how little homework a student did the night before. Betting on a snow day could be dangerous.

The tension increased because another school in the state - Paynesville - sounded exactly like Janesville, so if you somehow missed the order and just caught the "esville part" there was always a question about whether it was us or the lucky kids in central Minnesota. Then you had to wait for the announcer to read the entire list again before hearing the good or bad news.

For a time, our school superintendent had a reputation as being the toughest administrator in the state. He made Bud Grant look like a pansy. As the legend went, he'd drive outside of town and into the country to see just how bad the roads had become. If he didn't go into the ditch, we had school. Didn't matter if every other school in the state had called it off, we'd be trudging in, trying to learn through the haze of bitterness. We took it personally, as if he enjoyed sending us out into the harsh winter day. We probably had as many snow days as anyone else, but when we got one we felt like we'd truly earned it.

We did seem to have an inordinately high number of one-hour-late starts, which are nothing but cruel teases. Might as well just send the kids in at the normal time. An hour late? What's that give you? Can't go back to bed, unless it's for maybe a 30-hour nap. The school day is still going to drag on.

Whenever official word of a full-blown cancellation came over the airwaves, a whole range of options opened up. A snow day felt like two regular days off. We were like death row inmates granted a last-minute reprieve. The only question now, how to utilize this freedom? Snowball wars? Of course, provided the snow wasn't too fluffy. Sledding and snowmobiling were near-certainties. In our house, I'd put up a Nerf hoop on the sliding glass door and we'd hold hours-long dunking contests and one-on-one tournaments. We flourished. Snow days often became more productive for students than many school days.

In high school the options increased. Senior year, a snow day led to an epic football game in the yard of a friend who lived on a farm. Emotions ran high as the wind chill plummeted. The only thing missing was some old-school NFL Films music and a John Facenda narration. Controversy erupted when we discovered one of the players, my friend Mike, wore an illegal boot that gave him a decided advantage when running in the snow. What's an illegal boot? It's decidedly lighter than the monstrosities on our feet, which would have served us well on Mount Everest, providing him traction and the chance for more speed. He denied the charge then and still does today. The proof was in our slipping and sliding while he thrived and ran carefree through the snow, like a young Jerry Rice. I'd like to say there were no hard feelings over the boots or the game, but since I still remember that day nearly 17 years later, that would be a lie.

The only downfall to snow days is if a school accumulates too many of them. That leads to having to make them up at the end of the year. But in the midst of a snow day, no one thinks about what's going to take place six months later. It's all about the here and now.

By the end of the snow day, only one question really matters to students. Is this storm bad enough for the rarest of events: back-to-back snow days?

I don't miss Minnesota winters. But how I miss those snow days.

Do schools still show Mulligan Stew?

Last night, for about the 198th time, I watched part of Can't Buy Me Love.



Best-known as the movie that kicked off the career of Patrick Dempsey, henceforth known as McDreamy, the film also starred Amanda Peterson as the hot girl geeky Ronald seduces - buys - with one thousand dollars. Peterson shines in the movie, bringing the right blend of snobbiness, empathy and '80s hair. She seemed destined for stardom, or at least a career in late-night Cinemax movies. Instead, she stopped making movies in 1995 and she's so unknown in Hollywood these days that her Wikipedia page doesn't even have a picture.

Remarkably, the first time I saw this movie was in high school. Not in social studies class as a case study in how nerds and jocks can eventually all come together, and not in any art class as an example of 1980s filmwork. No, it was in science class. It served no real educational purpose, other than to entertain. It succeeded and also inspired a love of the movie in me, so in that way it was an extremely effective teaching ploy.

Many school movies left an impression, some for good reasons, others for, well, other reasons.



Mulligan Stew. We watched this in third grade. Sponsored by the 4-H Council, Mulligan Stew featured five kids who were in a band called, appropriately, The Stews. The kids went on adventures and taught people the benefits of a balanced diet and good digestion. These kids must have been big hits at parties.



Mind-altering substances might have played a prominent role in the creation of the show. Whoever directed the episodes seems to have been tripping out during production, or intended for the nutritional information to be absorbed only by those who are high. The song I remember the Fab Five singing was "Goulash, Garbanzo Beans and Guacamole," a catchy tune that subliminally planted the idea in my head that I would forever dislike those foods, probably not what the lyricists were after.

The Wave. A teacher attempts to show his class what it was like to live under the Nazis. He eventually creates a movement called The Wave. Soon enough the students display their inner SS by creating their own salute and roughing up students who don't go along with the program. A few students speak up about the dangers of this new organization, which is creating chaos not seen in a school since members of the Future Farmers of America wore their manure-caked boots to class. Finally, the teacher plays his trump card. He tells his acne-ridden minions that the national Wave leader will speak to them. The Brownshirt-wannabes gather in the auditorium, eager to meet their leader. Eventually the leader appears on the screen...and it's Adolf Hitler. The shocked students finally realize their cute little project had grown completely out of control. And, like in all after-school specials, they learn their lesson, strip off their Wave gear and go back to being unhappy - but less dangerous - teenagers. We watched this in Social Studies class, and of all the movies teachers showed us back in the '80s and 1990s, this is one that I hope is still shown.



I remember the shock when Hitler's image appeared on that screen. A charismatic teacher today could probably replicate this experiment without much trouble, as teens - despite being more advanced in many ways - are still probably as pliable as ever. The movement might need a new name, as today the Wave sparks memories of large groups of bored fans rising as one section by section in stadiums across the country. Not a very intimidating name.



Que Pasa USA. This was a bilingual comedy from the late 1970s that our Spanish teacher played for us in Spanish 3. On the show, the characters spoke Spanish and English, which mimicked our classroom as the teacher often insisted we had to speak Spanish in normal conversation. A sometimes frustrating experience, it forced us to actually learn Spanish, a radical concept. The show carries that '70s, One-Day-At-A-Time/Jeffersons/Good Times look and vibe. Seventeen years later, I remember very little Spanish, a sad fact that reflects on my laziness and not on the lessons of Que Pasa USA, which did the best it could to influence Americans who are hostile to learning any other language.

Cipher in the Snow. Based on a story written by a teacher, Brigham Young University produced this movie in the 1970s, we watched it in the 1980s and it haunts those who saw it into the first decade of the 21st Century. The cipher in the story is Cliff Evans, a young boy who loves frogs but is disliked by all. Actually, it's even worse. Instead of being disliked, he's unknown. Young Cliff walks off the bus, collapses into the snow and dies. A teacher - Cliff's favorite, even though the teacher barely remembers him - sets out to learn about the boy's life and discovers the kid had a hellacious life that included a horrible stepfather. The teacher finds that no one even knew the youngster, or took the time to get to know him. Basically, the kid died of loneliness. Sad and depressing, the movie pounds viewers over the head with its message that we need to protect the most vulnerable kids, work against bullying, and take an interest in all students, especially those few care about.

Youtube didn't have any clips for the movie, except for this one, which is "the classic LDS film Cipher in the Snow as a murder mystery."

Even in the Internet age, young Cliff gets no love.



EDIT: I forgot one of the classic school movies, perhaps because of trauma. My sister Lisa mentioned Faces of Death, which several Death Ed classes watched at Janesville(Waldorf-Pemberton) High School. Yes, Death Ed, which wasn't a how-to but did let us write the obituaries of friends. In addition, one of the highlights was the screening of Faces of Death. Banned in 40 countries! And that wasn't just a marketing ploy, though that was part of it. The kind of movie you'd carry out of a video store in a brown paper bag, Faces of Death features fake and real death scenes of humans and animals, just the kind of programming 17-year-olds deserve to see. We only watched the original in class. If you believe the critics, that was for the best, as, according to Wikipedia, each sequel "had a lower production quality than the last."

Archery in our classrooms

Back in school - specifically, in grades 7-10 - I dreaded the end of basketball season. Being a basketball junkie, most of the reasons related to the sport and the disappointment that came with any season that ended with our team not making it to the state tournament.

But beyond that, the end of basketball season meant the beginning of archery.

Tonight I got into a brief argument with Louise and my parents about whether archery has any place in physical education classes. My stance is firm: No. They saw why it made sense, with Louise going as far as making the somewhat dubious claim that, "It stretches and strengthens the chest muscles, with that pulling action, so it's definitely good for a physical education class." Even her amateurish pantomime of said action did nothing to convince me. Typing strengthens the fingers. Doesn't mean it should be part of phy ed.

However, my arguments and beliefs actually have little to do with any concerns about education value. The scars from the humiliation I endured in the archery portion of our phy ed classes linger, each memory of those days piercing me like...well, hell, an arrow.

When the basketball season at Janesville ended each season, the archery targets came out, ready to be abused by dozens of teenagers eager to release some pent-up frustration. The targets remained dormant during basketball season, so the week after both the boys and girls teams had been eliminated, the large targets appeared from the caves where they'd been kept, along with the bows and arrows.

Most kids rejoiced. This was a highlight of gym class. Many of the students hunted. To them, stringing a bow and firing an arrow across the gym was second-nature, as easy as running a lap around the basketball court. As they eyed the target, they could picture a deer in their sights. The boys - and girls - in class all effortlessly struck the mark, often drilling bullseye after bullseye, or, in the case of the phy ed class, balloon after balloon they placed on the targets.

I didn't hunt. I didn't fish. That wasn't the norm for kids from Minnesota, but I never thought I was missing out on anything. However, that meant that I had no experience with the equipment. I went in blind. And dumb.

The debacles began in seventh grade and continued through sophomore year. Improvement should have come through osmosis or repetition, but it never did. The mental block was as imposing as the physical ones.

During those days of archery, I finally understood what some of my classmates felt every other week of the school year, when phy ed class was a living nightmare, an hour to dread. Humiliation was assured. The only question was in what form would it be and who would be the instigator? Maybe it'd be the star wrestler drilling them in the head with a rubber ball during dodge ball. Maybe it'd be the class bully hammering them into the boards - aka bleachers - during floor hockey.

But during archery, even those kids thrived. They transformed from nerd to William Tell, with a touch of Robin Hood, their bottomless pit of fear and despair replaced by endless confidence and even arrogance.

Every other week of the year I savored gym class. Ping pong, dodge ball, basketball, wiffle ball or kickball. Loved them all. Archery leveled the playing field, and my self-esteem.

During the classes, we'd walk into the gym and perform in our regular clothes, no need to change into gym outfits (and this is a sport?). We went off in groups. The first ones to fire had to string the bows, as learning this skill was a necessary part of the class and surely something that would benefit us later in life as well, no matter how inane it seemed at the time. Just like algebra.

My plan involved lingering outside the gym until the other students picked up the bows. That way I didn't have to string. Sometimes that failed. On those occasions I fumbled around with the weapon, haplessly trying to pull the string into the proper notch. My arms twisted and an onlooker would have had only a vague idea about what I was trying to accomplish. Years later I'd endure similar frustration while trying to put on a tie or change a tire.

The teacher didn't let anyone fire until all were ready. Children who can barely walk and can't talk can string a bow. For many Minnesotans, it's practically instinctual. I could not.

This meant all eyes turned to me, standing there entangled in the poorly constructed bow, as if I had introduced weapons into a game of Twister. Finally the teacher would take pity. With a shake of the head, he would walk over and do it for me. As he fiddled with the apparatus, he probably wondered how low of a grade he could give for this quarter, and what in the hell had happened to my manliness?

When "Fury" was finally ready, the teacher told everyone to fire away. And how they fired. The sound of an arrow releasing and whistling across the gym before finding its target really is a cool sound. Pfffit. My bow didn't make that sound. In fact, the only sound emanating from my bow and arrow came when the arrow hit the floor, followed by a low-decibel curse word. Every time I pulled back to fire, the arrow became dislodged. It either dangled pathetically in the front while I held onto the back end, or dropped to the floor like an oversized pencil falling in class. Anyone who saw it snickered.

"God, this bow sucks," I'd say. "Anyone else get a defective bow? How old are these things? They could at least give us some decent equipment. Jesus."

No one else had a faulty bow.

I'd pick it up, recalibrate, and relaunch.

To the ground the arrow went. By this time the marksmen in the class were finishing up the last of their five arrows, while I still struggled to fire my first one. When I saw that no one was watching, I'd sometimes take to throwing the arrows down to the other end.

I threw the arrows down to the other end.

It sounds absurd, because it was. I wasn't proud of it then and I'm even less proud of it now. But at that moment I had no pride, or shame.

Occasionally one of my arrows did escape from its prison. Instead of taking a direct line to the target, though, the arrow veered frighteningly off course, like a botched North Korean missile falling into the sea. Fortunately no one got hurt. I watched in awe as the arrow flew 20, 30, 40 feet into the air and toward the windows on the other side of the gym. If I had been an ancient English warrior firing my arrows at an enemy standing 150 feet away - perhaps with an arrow that's in flames - my shot would have been perfect. In a phy ed class, in jeans and a sweatshirt, with a target 30 feet away, it was simply a disaster that managed to avoid turning into a tragedy. I sometimes feared becoming the first person to shoot an arrow horizontally and into a classmate, or downward and into my foot. Surely the teacher and other school officials would have removed me after such an incident. That removal would have been the only positive thing to come out of all my days in archery.

If my cousin and best friend Matt was standing by me, I could sometimes talk him into grabbing a handful of arrows for his own use. He was happy to do this. He hunted. He knew how to string a bow, load it, aim, and fire.

We shot the entire hour, well-trained archers ready for the hunt or the Sheriff of Nottingham. And for 60 minutes I kept missing. In four years I probably hit the target four times.

The torment I endured in archery beginning in seventh grade actually had roots in sixth grade. That year I participated in a spelling bee, a natural fit for me and an event I anticipated with great excitement. My tournament ended just a few rounds in.

The word that tripped me up? Not chiaroscurist, or demarche, or prospicienc.

Instead they got me with archery. Or, as I spelled it, archerey. It was an unforgivable misspelling, as embarrassing to me as it probably was to my mom and dad in attendance. It's the type of word the judge gives to a kid he's trying to help ease through to the next round, as if he's throwing the competition for the student. Instead I added an extra e before the y, followed by cries of why?

That should have been my most humiliating encounter with archery, the word or the activity. It wasn't, and for that I have no one to blame but myself, a dubious curriculum and a basketball team that never quite made it to state during my school years.