You would think academics would bother to look up the definition of "Reciprocity."

If they did they would find it defined as 'mutually interchangeable.'  For decades there has been a national organization called NASDTEC who have a mission to help make teaching credentials reciprocal between states.  I honestly don't think they have gotten anywhere, and it seems like things are worse than when they started.

If there is actually a state with true reciprocity where you can mail them a copy of your credential from one state and a few weeks later you get a credential back from theirs' with no further stipulations please let me know.  Nope, every state thinks there specific requirements and tests are better than everybody elses, and with the exception of having to redo your degree again, you pretty much have to start back at square one.

There are several different content knowledge tests, and seems more and more states are coming up with their own.  So if you passed the Math CSET test in California it counts for nothing in Washington state where you would have to take their own specific test called the WEST.  Different states also have different tests relating to local history, civil rights, english language learners, pedagogy and so forth.  The tests cost 100s of dollars and obviously take a good deal of time to study for.

States will have different tiers of credentials, you can get the first one good for a year but have to perhaps pass the tests I mentioned and maybe take a class or two before they will move you up to the next step credential.  Experience rarely counts for anything, every now and then you might be able skip a test if your former employers fill out specific forms and mail them to the new state.

I jumped through all the hoops twice already, when moving from WA to AZ and CA.  I was only in Arizona for two years and didn't pursue the next tier credential up after I left, so that credential has long since expired and I would have to start all over again I imagine if I ever went back there.  Now with a probable move next year I recently started the process for a whole new state.  It will take months but I will try and keep you up to date with the new nonsense I will face.

In recent years I think NCLB and a general lack of jobs have prevented any states from streamlining their process.  However if there is ever a teacher shortage again, that will probably provide motivation enough to actual provide the reciprocity they claim to provide.  But maybe not, since I imagine ETS has some powerful lobbyists.

I want Randi's Million

Hope all is well.  One post a year is my goal now.  From 2007 through to my last post on the subject in July of 2009, I talked quite a bit about the declining real estate market.  Month after month we heard we were at the bottom, and month after month I repeated it was nonsense.  Well just as I predicted back then, we didn't hit bottom until the end of 2011/1st half of 2012.  Now I wish I would have taken advantage of my psychic abilities financially a bit better on the way down, by shorting the relevant stocks and so forth, but now that the housing market is back on an upward trajectory, I'm happy to report that although my psychic abilities probably won't qualify me for the JREF million dollar prize, we did buy a property with cash a year and a half ago in May 2012, that on paper at least has already gone up in value by at least 33%  So if you were one of the rare folks who read this blog back then maybe you got lucky as well, and this page wasn't a complete waste of time and space.  That's all, see you next year.

This Skeptic's Diet Evolution

Just like clockwork, a new post here every 6 months!  This time I have been dragged out of my slumber because I thought it might be beneficial to some to discuss my diet history and how and why I did a 180 shift on what I eat during the past few years.

As a hardcore skeptic and fan of science it took me a long time to believe that the nutritional information that is promoted by practically all the mainstream medical associations, govt health organizations and most writers in scientific journalism is total nonsense, not supported by the evidence and often is making people sicker.

The story of my journey from tofu to bacon is a long one, but please give it a chance and please follow up with your own research, hopefully I can motivate you to figure out a healthy diet that will work for you and that you can stick to for life.

Growing up as a kid my parents were not far removed from vegetarian,  they were into chicken, seafood on occasion, but virtually no red meat, occasional chili or hamburger.  Can't remember ever having steak or bacon, they were not fans of eating eggs at all.  Started everyday with a bowl of cereal, usually had a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for lunch.  But I wasn't allowed cereal in which sugar was listed in the first three ingredients and my sandwich was made from whole wheat bread, so it could have been worse.

So as a kid it seems you can handle quite a bit of crap in your system and I went along just fine, I was always a bit overweight however.  When I got to be a teen I was a hippie in training and began to hang out in circles where vegetarianism was the only way to go.  So while I was still at home I didn't want to make my own food so I didn't go veg 100% but I was already sowing the seeds.  When I went off to college and started making my own food I cut out meat completely.  I did it for a few reasons I suppose, I thought it would help me with my weight, it was pretty cheap, and I thought it would get me in with the hippie chicks.

So at about 20 years old I started a vegetarian diet.  Now I was by no means one of these health-food co-op type vegetarians eating wheatgerm and whole grains and cooking up fresh vegetable dishes and so forth.  Starches became the mainstay for me for the next several years.  My dinner might be a box of macaroni and cheese, top ramen, hamburger helper without the hamburger.  Tons of pasta, frozen dinners, nachos, pizza, just lots of stuff that I now wouldn't touch with a barge poll.

Looking back on it now I don't know what the hell I was thinking. I never got thin, but I didn't get that much fatter either for many years.  I never had any real big health problems, just kind of lacked energy most of the time.  Maybe it was because I loved cheese so much and that I ate it with everything is what saved me from collapsing on a daily basis.  I sputtered along, I figured I was healthy because when I wasn't a veg, the only meat I ever really ate was red meat anyway.  I was never a huge fan of chicken and still to this day chemicals in seafood make me sick to my stomach, I've always hated it.

So fast forward 10 years or so, when I got to be 30 my weight slowly but surely started to creep up.  I didn't want to admit it for many years though.  My diet hadn't really changed much, it perhaps even got worse.  When I lived in AZ, nearly 10 years ago now, everyday when I got home from work I had the same thing, nachos.  I would throw a bunch of corn chips on a pan, throw some cheese on it, threw some beans on it, topped it off with some Jalapenos.  Breakfast would be Grape-Nuts, frozen bean burritos for lunch and maybe I would have rigatoni with tomato sauce to top it all off as a midnight snack.

So when I got a checkup probably in 2004 the doctor said I was obese which was my first wakeup call.  At that time the Atkins Diet was sort of sweeping the nation.  I had friends on it, but I thought it sounded nuts and just paid it no mind.  I did however decide that since one of my goals of the vegetarian diet, to keep my weight down, wasn't working, it might be time to reconsider what I'm eating.

So after about 15 years of being a veg I started introducing a little meat back into my diet about 2005.  But other than that it was still a starch based diet.  Now sweets and sugar were never really my vice and I never ate that much of those at any point but I did intentionally try to cut them back. I always drank a fair amount of beer as well through my 20s and early 30s and I decided that should be restricted as well. But even after a few years of my new diet I was still huge and getting huger.  I have never really cared too much about my looks but the health issue was just really starting to nag at me.

Moving forward again to 2009.  The changes I made and continue with today all started with watching the film Fathead by Tom Naughton.  I literally completely changed my diet the next day before I had even read anything further on the benefits of a low-carb diet.  At first it was sort of baby steps, I ate all that sort of fake low-carb junk food like Dreamfields pasta and so forth.  Sort of like when I first became a veg I ate lots of fake hamburgers and crap like that.  But once I committed fully to just eating real food and going cold turkey on sugars and starches, probably about two years ago now, the weight just began to melt away.

I started to do tons of research, reading books by Gary Taubes, Michael Eades, Jonathon Bailor, to name a few and tons of online blogs and research analysis.  I learned that irrespective of the weight issue that some of us face when we eat sugars and starches, health-wise they are terrible for us. The foods like meat, eggs, butter that we have been told are bad for us are perfectly healthy.  There is no one size fits all diet for everybody, and people react differently to different foods, but for those of us who have a tendency to get fat, by and large we got there because of eating sugars and starches.  I don't want to summarize all the evidence, that is something for you to look at on your own, start with Taubes book perhaps and see what you think.  As a skeptic I was shocked by some of the things that pass for science in the nutrition field.  It caused me to re-evaluate my love affair with science a bit when I saw how easily money and politics can manipulate the outcomes.

Start with cutting out sugar since it is the worst offender.  After a few months a piece of fruit will taste really sweet to you. After a short while sweets will not only not tempt you, they will just not taste good to you at all.  You have to settle into something that you can stick with forever, if you can go as extreme as me and completely cut out sugars and starches, except for the occasional fruit, you will get there faster.  But if you can't maintain it and you just end up quitting there is no point to have started it in the first place.  Since I still puke whenever I so much as look at seafood, I supplement with Salmon Oil, Fish Oil and Kelp vitamins since I think that is helpful if you are eating only red meat and chicken.  But I'm still learning all the time as well, and while I won't rule out further evolution of my diet, I know so much more information now that I can't ever see a possible reason to go back on the diet I grew up on.

I'm on this campaign because I really am pissed off that so many people are fat and are getting sick who don't need to be, simply because they are getting the wrong advice.  Once you get the right advice, it's all on you and it's out of my hands, but I wasn't able to sleep tonight until I at least got this all off my chest.  Good Luck.

The Golden Letter

Since nobody reads this blog anymore it is a good place to vent my anger regarding a crucial letter I needed that took me the better part of a year to get.

Let me run down the story for you. Since I knew my preliminary CA multiple-subject credential needed renewing/clearing by the end of December 2011 I started this whole process in May. The CTC told me that since I already had 2 years of out of state experience in Arizona nearly a decade ago, I needed to send them satisfactory performance evaluations from those two years (Which thankfully, I had managed to hang on to) and the following :

All you would need to do to apply based on the new regulations is to verify two or more years of full-time out-of-state (OOS) teaching experience. This is done by an original letter on school district letterhead. It must clearly state your employment was full-time and provide the dates of said employment. The letter must be signed by the district office such as Superintendent, Assistant Superintendent, Director of HR or Personnel or their designee. It is not a recommendation letter nor should it be signed by the principal.

So that seems easy enough yes? So I emailed the superintendent of the tiny district where I worked in Arizona with this request, and this exact description. It was the same woman I had dealt with on a daily basis when I taught there. All I needed was basically a letter with a total of two sentences in it on district letterhead. Well my email was ignored.

So the next step, I called several times every few days for a while and was repeatedly told the superintendent was not available.

Ok the next step, I sent this same request with all the details in the mail with an SASE in it and spoonfed her as best I could to tell her what I needed. This was still June so I wasn't panicking yet.

With the summer and the school being closed most of the time I just sort of let it slide, and then decided to apply the pressure again in September. Calling every few days, finally getting through to the superintendent one time. She told me she had got the information but hadn't read it yet. I ran it all down for her, gave her my address, phone, email everything if she had any more questions. A week later or so I checked back and she said she didn't have my address to send it to me. I patiently gave it to her.

Then in October after all this I finally got the letter I needed in the mail. I looked through it, it was missing one of the things that needed to be on it. It didn't say anywhere on it that I was full-time. This after I had specifically told her it needed to be there. Well at this point I figured I had put in so much work, that the letter was close enough and the state would probably take it, perhaps they would call her if they needed more information. So I sent it off, not knowing that the stress hadn't even begun.

Then early December, shortly after we got a new kid and I had my arm's full with that, I got a letter back from CTC saying that my application was incomplete because the letter did not state 'full-time' on it, and that I had 60 days to send them a corrected letter or my application would be rejected. So it was coming up on the winter break for the school and I wanted to get this done with. I called them several times, stating what had happened. After asking for my address again for about the 4th time they just managed to get the letter off before they went on vacation on 12/16.

So Monday December 18th I got the new revised letter. On this new letter, I double checked it, and it now says full-time, thank goodness for that. But after reading through it more, I see that my name is spelled wrong on it, and they have the wrong dates that I worked there! So I give a call that day, and I reach straight to the superintendent. She says that the office is closed, she's the only one there and the letter is on the secretary's computer and she can't access it for two weeks. She says she will see if the secretary can come in special during the break to fix it.

Well needless to say, nothing happens until everybody gets back from the break in January. I give a call when they get back and ask the secretary about it, she hadn't been told anything about it by the superintendent of course, she apologizes and says she will get it off straight away. She tells me to email to her directly what should be in the letter again and my address. So I compose the entire letter for her and email it to her. I also asked her to reply when she has sent it off since I'm on a tight schedule and my current credential already expired on 12/31/11. I get no response so I call the next day, she said she didn't have my address and emailed me saying that. Well I hadn't got anything from here, and I had already sent or dictated my address to them at least 6 times since this started.

So in an attempt to end this story. I finally got the letter a week later. No errors, had everything in it that needed to be there. I sent it off to CTC and yesterday my credential was finally cleared. So thank goodness I never have to talk to anybody in that office ever again. Just imagine if the letter needed 3 sentences in it, that would of taken another few months.

The Miracle is that is is finally over.

For what it is worth, here are my thoughts on Season 4 of Torchwood.

As you may or may not know, I created the once popular Torchwood.TV blog the day the announcement for the Doctor WHO spinoff was announced. I walked away from that blog after season 2 since I really didn't like the show. Looking back, seasons 1 & 2 were masterpieces in comparison to Miracle Day.

I probably would have quit watching s04 after the first few episodes if I didn't have the prior connection with the show and hadn't loved the premise. I always liked the existential themes about death that Torchwood featured and this series was all about life and death. The premise however was completely wasted by the shoddy writing, disjointed plot, huge loopholes and undeveloped characters.

The acting for the most part was fine, the look of the show wasn't a problem, it was all let down by the story and scripts. It quickly turned into a big mess. Right away it was obvious they were going to try to appeal to the American market with long emotional melodramatic scenes which I probably could have accepted if the character development and themes were written properly.

If it would have been 5 episodes total, it could have stood a chance, but even then the finale didn't really pay off. This huge triad of powerful families who are able to wipe their name completely off the internet and infiltrate the CIA only bother to protect the center of their big operation with a chain-link fence which can be beaten with a pair of wire cutters?

The only thing that could have saved it would have been a complete re-write. Make the plot more efficient, scrap a lot of the unresolved and under-developed sub-plots. Last but not least, develop the core characters better and work on a better ending. Torchwood has hopefully now completely run it's course. To misquote Casablanca, "We'll always have Children of Earth." The show had one great season, that is more than some. It's time to leave.