Our Horrible Little Dog!

[Updated today, 2023/06/2.]

Presently we have two dogs: a 90-pound 'boxador', a boxer crossed with a Chocolate Lab; and a 30-pound sort of terrier mutt.  The larger dog is a perfect gentleman: he doesn't go through any doors until he has been given an explicit invitation.  The smaller dog does what he pretty well pleases.  This report is about the smaller dog, a sort of canine hooligan.

They both unfortunately beg at the dining table.  We're not sure who introduced them to the concept, but at every meal, there they are, looking as though they haven't eaten for months.  Once we've taken our empty plates to the sink, the larger dog may look sadly at whatever is still in the dishes on the table.  The smaller dog gets up on his hindlegs, and strains towards the dishes.  If one of them is within his reach, I would guess that he would drag it off the table and have his way with it.

The older dog, now about 12 years old, is prone to urinary accidents, so we urge him to go out and do his business every few hours.  The little rascal is happy to fly out with his bigger comrade, but he goes to the back gates and barks.  He barks at everything: people walking by, a dog in a yard a quarter mile away, passing cars, the dog next door, and even stationary, inanimate objects, like cars, or the house across the street.  The older boy rarely ever barks.  But if junior barks in a particularly urgent way, he is tricked into joining him in a bark.

I get the impression that their eyesight is not very good.  But nor is their hearing fantastic.  My stepson has a pickup to whose engine sound they are particularly attuned.  Even before he's turned into our alley on his way back from some errand, they're seated at the back door, tails wagging.  At least, they used to; nowadays, they get excited even if another pickup goes along the street.  Conclusion: their discrimination of sounds is getting worse.

We used to take them, at one time, to this nice local park, located in a little island, where they could run around off their leashes, chasing imaginary rabbits and squirrels.  But as their barking hobby has grown in importance, we're not inclined to make the effort to take them out; all it will do is make a public nuisance for everyone who lives in the vicinity of that park.  The senior (larger) dog is not a huge problem, but the little one most definitely is.  Mind you, he is really, really cute, and we often can't resist letting him do what he wants.  But our civic responsibility comes first, and we find ourselves depriving both dogs from having much fun.

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Music That I'm Rediscovering

[I will provide links for these that point to recordings on YouTube later; I'm writing this on my phone, which isn't  'smart' enough to make it easy to paste URLs.]

The first is the finale of Bach's A minor solo violin concerto, BWV 1041.  This is a lovely piece of music, which is a favorite of violinists; all of its movements are at least excellent.  I heard the final movement recently, on the radio or somewhere, and now I'm obsessed with it!  It is sort of a jig, though it is in (compound) triple time.  I think other finales in Bach are also in compound triple time, though I could be wrong.  Some years ago, I bought a record of a couple of Bach violin concertos played by Viktoria Mullova, who was a Russian violinist touring Europe with her own little string ensemble at that time.  Now she is settled somewhere in Europe, and was married to a prominent conductor, until he died.  She was a pioneer of the 'One instrument per part' movement of the late Eighties and Nineties, and which is the dominant paradigm now.

Another favorite of mine, of which I have been reminded recently, is the Dance of the Cygnets (or ducklings) from Swan Lake, by Tchaikovsky.  If you ever saw it danced, with four dancers with linked arms, it is an unforgettable sight, and the music will remind you of it every time!  My Dad got us a Little Golden Record of it when I was just about 5 or 6 (which was a very long time ago), and at that time I had seen no ballets at all, but I loved the music anyway!  The instrumentation is mostly woodwinds, with the double-reeds prominent (oboes and bassoons).  The strings enter in the middle section, with flutes adding a little shine.

Back to Bach for the next one: the opening chorus of the Cantata "What God has done is rightly done," BWV 26.  This piece was transcribed by William Walton for his ballet The Wise Virgins, where he orchestrates it far more richly.  Just as in the finale I described at the top, this piece also has a wonderful bass line that dances all by itself!  In the clips available on YouTube, if you watch the cellists and the double-bassist (usually only one), you see them practically dancing with their instruments.

Finally, a Waltz in C Sharp minor, by Chopin.  I don't know the opus numbers of the little Chopin I'm familiar with, so I'll have to make clear which Valse I mean by providing a link later.  (This is how Art Linkletter got his name.)

Did I Love Teaching?

A lot of the time, I found myself teaching topics I loved, to a mix of (1) students who did not want to learn the stuff---or did not want to have it presented the way I was presenting it, and (2) students who were happy with the material, and mostly OK with the presentation.  Some of the time I tried to 'sell' the material to the entire class; some of the time I focused on those who were enjoying the lesson, basically writing off the dissatisfied ones.

I tried to be creative with the exams I gave; I made sure that they believed that I wanted to know what they knew, as opposed to what they didn't know.  I worked hard to make sure that all of them could answer a core of questions correctly, so that I did not have to grade out of, say, 40 points, and then add sixty to their score!  (There are teachers who do that.). I think this was the most creative contribution I made for all my years of teaching---it shows just how much testing was emphasized in my classrooms, in contrast to the present-day departure from that philosophy.  But in my book, taking an interesting test is a learning experience.

One course that I enjoyed teaching---for the most part---with every sort of student, people who hated the subject, and those who loved it, was Geometry.  Only students who were pre-service (going into the teaching profession) were expected to take this course, but word got around that it was an easy course, and other sorts of (non-teacher) types got onto my roster, and I let them, hoping they would learn to love mathematics.  You might not expect this, but I was weak in what we call synthetic geometry, which is building up geometric proofs by constructing additional lines and circles, in contrast to analytical geometry, which I had concentrated on everyone I had graduated from high school, where you calculate properties using Cartesian coordinates.  So we were all discovering the logical structure of geometry together, in the early years of my teaching.

So, to summarize: with a topic that I liked, with eager students, and where I had some latitude regarding the curriculum, I was in heaven.  In all other cases, teaching was somewhat of a chore.

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