03 July 2025

Pool Rules


Years ago, I vacationed with my wife and three young daughters at a fine hotel in the mountains of New Hampshire. The place caters to the winter sports clientele and has lots of free hot chocolate and coffee.  It also has both an indoor pool and a heated outdoor pool with a gigantic attached hot tub. Like most hotel pools the establishment also displayed their affinity for signage. When I counted I totalled seventy-three safety rules between the two pools. 

I have long been fascinated with pool signs. I became a lifeguard just after my sixteenth birthday and worked around pools, on and off, for the next ten years. Swimming pools inside and out are festooned with signs on all of their walls. Small signs, big signs, sometimes the same sign on every wall.  And when you begin to look carefully they make very little sense.

One of my favorite themes is graphic descriptions of what you can’t do with your body. On one sign, “14.  Spitting, blowing of nose, urinating or defecating into the pool or onto the deck, improper public displays of affection, and profanity are PROHIBITED.”

Most of the rules take this form. Little parallel structure within the rule or from rule to rule and a low bar for what belongs together. Why don’t public displays of affection have their own rule?  If they are codifying that one cannot poop into the pool or on the deck, what about the grass around the pool? Does capitalizing prohibited change much?

The other characteristic of pool rules is that they often are long. Rule 14, above, above comes from a list of thirty at the Gurney Park Pool in New York. new year’s eve at an indoor/outdoor pool complex that had 75 distinct rules.  The point of all of these rules seems to be to cover everything that could possibly go wrong.  But in trying to do that, lists are created that don’t hang together around any kind of central theme and often the posted rules are not the real rules.  Our local pool in Concord, New Hampshire just put up brand new pool signs with fifteen rules.  They include the typical fare, no diving, no open sores, shower before going into the pool, etc.  But the biggest rule that lifeguards are told to enforce is no pool toys. Why didn’t they put the rule that they care most about on the new signs?

In addition to missing rules it is often the case that the posted rules aren’t the rules at all.  When we went to the pool for New Year’s there were many signs about no alcohol at the pool.  But the lifeguards themselves handed out red cups to those swimmers that were drinking out of cans or bottles.


05 April 2025

Top Gun -- Maverick

Imagine if you had never seen a movie. You are invited to see one and your host brings you to wonderful theatre for a showing to Top Gun-Maverick.

Those of you who have seen movies understand all of the history involved with a Tom Cruise movie. Scientology, couch jumping, etc.

But...in this thought experiment the person has never seen a movie.

I appreciate The Old Man and the Sea -- I understand it's greatness. 



17 January 2024

Day 11

 Day 11 Fixing Up Assessment


I did the comment only grading over the weekend. Handed it back and asked them to fix what I had noted.


I had mixed results with this and I think it was because along with the comments I included a grade for each of the four sections of the test. This caused some students to say, “I’m OK with that grade,” and not address the comments that I had made. 


This makes me reflect on a conversation that I have been having with Kaileen and other school leaders about whether students in the 14-18 age range can conceptualize the idea that practice is important and that they need to work on reacting to feedback. That is the real world skill they will need.


Day 10

 Day 10 Sept. 27, 2023 Assessment Day


This was assessment day. They don’t call it a test anymore. As I passed out the test I realized that I hadn’t given a test to a group of my own students since the 2011-2012 school year. When I taught in 2020-2021 it was the pandemic so the experience was completely alien. There weren’t traditional tests that year because it made no sense.


It made no sense on a human level. Putting kids who are in a daily state of low level panic through a test—whether timed or not. 


It also gave us the freedom to stop giving tests. With the upheaval of how we were even getting kids into the school parents did not care at all if their students were taking tests or not.


Day 9

 Day 9


One unexpected aspect of a return to teaching is doors. I’m not exactly sure why we are so assiduous about locking doors in the science wing but every door is locked and closed all of the time. It could be due to some bad break ins that the school had back in 2018-2019 or it could be pandemic related but I don’t know.


For someone coming from a more office-like environment the amount of doors to unlock and go through really threw me off for the first couple of days. It was accentuated by the temperatures and the gross sweatiness of my hands trying to extract my keys from my pockets. But on the way to get in the building I swipe my key card. Use key to open classroom door, key for copy room door, key open storage room, key open adjoining storage room, key open chemical storage room, key open the other classroom, I teach in, then key open the door inside of that classroom to get other materials, go back to the classroom where I teach first and key open that door.


This repeats throughout the day.


Day 8

 Day 8 September 23, 2023


Plate tectonics day and more with S and P waves. I led the students through the plate tectonics questionnaire from the book I used and then I had them get the same information from a 20 minute video that I was hoping would be a good double up. But it was way too hard and I think it just led to confusion.


In my period 7 class there are two students who can’t read beyond grade 2. I worked to organize the rolling cart.