Spring is (Almost) Here
March 2022
The weather is getting warmer here in Phoenix, although it never got too cold in the first place. We had one week of cold weather at the end of February, but that was about it. That was our winter: one week in February where you could see your breath in the mornings.
I looked up the official starting day of spring and learned there are two different ways of measuring the change of the seasons. By the weather and by the stars.
Meteorologists gauge the seasons by the temperature changes in a region. Split up the year into four equal chunks of time, better to compare year-over-year. According to meteorologists, spring began on March 1. That’s when, on average, temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere begin to transition from cold to hot.
According to the stars, spring will begin this year on March 20, because that’s the vernal equinox — when the sun is directly over the equator at high noon and when daytime hours are exactly equal to nighttime hours. The vernal equinox doesn’t necessarily fall on the same day each year.
Google agrees with the astronomers, and so do most calendars.
I was about to write about the demise of Spring Training baseball, but lo and behold, the Major Leaguers came to an agreement to play ball.
This newsletter issue will be relatively short, because I’ve just concluded my spring break and I’m bracing myself for a hectic fourth quarter. If there’s one way I’ve survived year-after-year in the profession of teaching, it’s because I use my breaks to rest. Apologies to Gov. Ducey’s efforts to build an academic summer camp, but if I don’t decompress over the summer, I won’t be effective through the school year.
Downtown Phoenix. Mural by @janegoat.
Links and News
Bob Dylan played a concert at the Arizona Federal Theatre in Phoenix earlier this month. Wendy and I were in attendance. At 80 years old, Dylan obviously isn’t the same performer as he used to be, but his band is excellent, his voice was strong, and the energy at the show was really great. Here’s a Dylan playlist on my Spotify — just a few of my favorites, including several he played at the concert.
Robots delivering food on the University of Arizona campus were canceled, recently, because the operating company had connections to Russia. One of the first ever issues of Cholla Express dealt with the problem of robot deliveries, but I didn’t anticipate the problem of geopolitics and war.
A few months ago I was featured on KTAR’s radio show Think Tank with Mike O'Neil. Here’s a link to that episode. Toward the beginning of the show is a six-minute recording of my thoughts on the condition of teaching in Arizona. In my segment, I recap the main ideas of my post on the teacher shortage, including a few additional thoughts. As the state legislature starts churning out new ideas, it’s important to consider that teachers are currently overburdened in their jobs. If you want better educational outcomes for Arizona’s youth, you should want to reduce the workload so that teachers can focus on teaching. I don’t support any legislation that adds work to the plate of overstretched teachers, and I don’t support any policy that uses our school grading system as a determining factor for anything.
Substack has an app, now, for Apple devices. They're still designing the Android version. This is awesome, because email inboxes can feel cluttered, which can distract from the reading experience. With the Substack app, readers will have access to all of their Substack newsletters in one clean place.
Arizona Agenda, the state’s preeminent Substack newsletter, shared their quarter two updates, which is worth a read if you’re interested in the business model of local newsletters.