I officially graduated from my DFP orientation today. I can now work on preparing lessons pretty much full-time until classes start on August 9, except I have one more all-day DF orientation thing to go to on Thursday... And now you're asking DFP, DF, WTF??? Or else you've already gotten bored and clicked over to Go Fug Yourself to find out what fashion atrocity Sienna Miller is currently perpertrating (sample quote from one of today's entries on the site: "The makers of Kate Mara's dress would like to apologize to Ms. Mara, to the fans, and to the fine people at the premiere of Stardust: The Movie With Tons Of Famous People In It Like Michelle Pfeiffer and Robert DeNiro, Yet Which Somehow I Had No Idea Was Even Being Made.") Anywho, the military loves loves loves abbreviations. So DF stands for Department of the Faculty, DFP is Department of the Faculty - Physics, the U.S. Air Force Academy is USAFA, which is pronounced you-soff-a, if I go to a conference, I'm going TDY, and I have no idea what that means, and so on and so forth. So what happened today was that I finished by physics deparment orientation, but I still have one more general faculty orientation thing to go to this week. Most of the orientation stuff has centered on the learning focused approach to teaching that is being pushed across the Academy. Learning focus is a teaching technique that, tautologically, focuses on what students are learning rather than on what teachers are teaching. It seems obvious, but most traditional college teaching has been based on the assumption that students are just dump trucks waiting for teachers to shovel knowledge into them. Under that assumption, anything the teacher writes on the board is new knowledge for the student. But recent studies have shown that students don't learn that way. Just because something gets written on the board doesn't mean that students know it. Learning focus says that you have to actively engage the students in the learning process. Prompt them to arrive at knowledge rather than feeding it to them, motivate them to want to learn rather than just have them sit zombified in class just because their major or a general education requirement says they have to be there. There are also some other aspects that are a bit more difficult for me to see. One of the things is that you have to form a trust relationship with students, which in itself is fairly noncontroversial. In order to have a good learning environment, you have to trust students and they have to trust you. But one aspect of the trust relationship, at least according to one of the books we had to read, is that we should try to avoid forcing students to do work by grading them on it. So, if we want students to read the textbook, we shouldn't have a graded quiz every few days to make sure they are keeping up with their reading. We should trust that they are doing the reading. But the thing is, I've been a student, and no matter how exciting or stimulating the class is, I'm not reading that stinking textbook. I still hate reading textbooks, even when I understand what they're talking about. So I don't know if I can ever see that happening - motivating students to read their text just through trusting and inspiring them. But who knows, maybe I'm more inspiring than I know.

The Thing Called Love, River Phoenix's last movie (I think, Wikipedia says it was one of his last roles), also starring Sandra Bullock and Samantha Mathis, who is totally off the radar now but gets a blue ribbon for awesomeness if for no other reason than her role in Pump Up the Volume, is an amazing underrated movie about up-and-coming country music stars and about Dermot Mulroney constantly getting screwed over, both movie-worthy subjects in my book. Anyway, from that movie came one of my favorite songs, "Blame It On Your Lyin Cheatin Cold Dead-Beatin Two-Timing Double-Dealin Me-Mistreating Lovin Heart", known more often by it's short name "Blame It On Your Heart". Below is the movie version of the song, and below that is the real version of the song, by Patty Loveless.

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I've spent most of July alternating between being exhausted at work and being a lazy bum at home. As I write, I have a load of laundry waiting to be unloaded from the dryer, and I have absolutely no intention of getting off my ass tonight and doing it. But before I became a lazy lump on the couch, I did a full moon hike at the end of June. The hike was arranged through a mountain-climbing website I visit, 14ers.com. The woman organizing the hike, Charla, was planning on doing the full-moon hike on the Mt. Belford/Mt. Oxford combo, but she herself was planning on climbing Mt. Elbert, the tallest mountain in Colorado, on the morning before the full moon hike. I emailed her and asked if I could climb Elbert with her, and she said sure. Another guy, Lou, was also going to join us. So we all three climbed Mt. Elbert on the morning of June 30. Unfortunately, Charla got really ill climbing Elbert, so she couldn't do the full moon hike. Lou and I were so tired from climbing that morning that we only did the Belford part of the Belford/Oxford combo, but I wasn't too disappointed. You can read my trip report about the Mt. Elbert climb here, and you can see my pictures from the two climbs here.

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Yay, I'm back writing on my poor neglected blog. I just finished doing three practice lessons this week in front of the physics department faculty. And even though they were very nice to me, it was still hellish to have to go through. It's one thing to teach 18- and 19-year-old kids who think you're the smartest person on Earth, and it's another thing to "teach" 30- and 40-year-old professors whose main job is to examine your lecture for every flaw, which will be pointed out to you immediately afterwards. Anyway, like I said, they were very nice to me and had many more good things to say than bad, so I stressed myself out way more than I should have about the practice lectures.

I went to my friend Bob's wedding last weekend in Uniontown, PA, about an hour outside of Pittsburgh. I had just the awesomest time. I break-danced, which is never a good idea, but what're you gonna do? This is about the fourth or fifth wedding in the last two years in which I've been a groomsman, and people keep telling me that weddings are the perfect places to meet hot bridesmaids. It's never worked out that way for me, but I actually had a pretty good time with the bridesmaid I escorted. She's married and has a little boy, who I had a ball playing with before the wedding, so nothing extracurricular happened, but she's a teacher too, a kindergarten teacher, so we talked about that, and other stuff. And then the brothers of Bob's now-wife, Carolyn, hung out with me and my friends both nights I was there, and they were pretty fun, so we all had a good time. When I got home, I realized I completely forgot to bring my present for Bob and Carolyn to the wedding. I know Bob reads this blog, so ummm, the present's in the mail. Sorry about that. I also realized when I unpacked that I somehow lost a dress shirt that I had worn to the rehearsal dinner. On a completely unrelated subject, did I mention that I downed a few alcoholic drinks during the weekend? Anyway, the lost dress shirt is a BIG PROBLEM, because I have to dress up for my new job, and I have very few dressy clothes, so I'm going to have to go out tomorrow and buy a dress shirt to replace the one I lost. I despise clothes shopping. But it's only one shirt, so I think I'll survive. They played the Electric Slide at the wedding, and I totally worked it. The DJ even extended the song because we were kicking so much ass. Later on they played another group dance song, but I had no clue how to do that. You had to cha-cha and step left and step right and well I didn't even try. One song they didn't play was Madonna's "Cherish", but it does happen to be a completely great song, and also a completely great video, not the least because Madonna prances around in the video wearing a clingy, soaking wet little black dress and rolling around on the beach and in the surf while looking smoking hot, and she's trying to save a little girl mermaid or something as well. It's all artistic and black-and-white and stuff. Did I mention that Madonna is smoking hot in the video? Anyway, here it is, enjoy!

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You've probably noticed that I'm long overdue for a new entry. I apologize for that. As I'm writing, I've just returned from my morning orientation meeting for new instructors at the Air Force Academy, and I have just barely over an hour to eat lunch before my afternoon meetings start up. My day is pretty much filled from 8AM-4:30PM with meetings and other orientation activities, and we're also given homework each night as well. So by the time I get home I just want to crash and do nothing. I was really hoping to get some pretty thorough descriptions of my Peru trip written out on this blog, if for no other reason than I'm going to be forgetting a lot of things about the trip myself before long, so it'd be nice to go back and read about it now and then. I'm still planning on writing about my trip, but right now it's hard to find the time. I also climbed a couple 14ers, Mt. Elbert and Mt. Belford, on the weekend of June 30, so sooner or later I'll post some pictures from that. And I'm planning on climbing another 14er, either Mt. Evans or Grays/Torreys, this weekend. So, I've got plenty to write about, it's just a matter of finding the time and energy to write.

Update: Uh yeah, so some people may say that this terrible 8AM-4:30PM schedule I'm talking about is what the rest of America calls a normal 8-hour workday. So I should point out that what exhausts me isn't the hours so much as the fact that I am required to be doing something every single minute of the workday. I've spent the past decade at jobs with very flexible work schedules, so when I'm now suddenly thrust into a workday in which I have no time to myself, I feel like 8 hours of work feels more like 12 hours, and then it's even worse when I get home and I've got homework still to do. Anyway, orientation lasts for a few more weeks, and then my time is my own again.

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Days 1-3 of my Peru Trip:

A few weeks before my trip, I got an email from GAP Adventures giving me the final details of what I needed to know before I left. One of the things that was included in the email was a link to a forum on the GAP website where you can, I don't know, talk about trip stuff. I like Internet forums about as much as I like waking up in the morning, which is to say not at all, so I avoided the link until the week before my trip. But then I figured what's the harm in checking it out. And sure enough, there were posts from people going on the Project Choquequirao trip with me. The main thing I noticed was that everyone posting seemed to be female. And here's the part where I should make a joke like, "All women and one man-- ME! Now those are the kind of odds I like, if you know what I mean. And I think you do. Hubba Hubba." But I'm not going to make those jokes... um, except for that one. In fact, let's just get this out of the way right now. It turns out there were 8 women and 2 men (including myself) on the trip, which is not atypical, apparently, since women tend to feel safer on group trips rather than by themselves in foreign countries, for good reason. And while I made plenty of "Hubba Hubba" type joking remarks with the girls, I honestly wasn't looking for or interested in romance, since the whole romance thing was one of the things I was taking a vacation from. So if you're looking for a story involving whispered sweet nothings and heaving bosoms and me unleashing my imprisoned pecs from the cruel trappings of a tight T-shirt, that ain't gonna happen here. But anyway, I posted on the forum, and then exchanged emails with some of the people coming on the trip, and most of them were pretty much like me-- late 20s, early 30s, single, at some kind of transition period in their lives. So, it was nice that in a lot of ways we were in similar situations.

My flight was arriving in Lima pretty late, around 11 PM, but I was still going to try to meet two of the women, Margaret and Vel, for drinks that night. The rest of the people, as far as we knew, were coming in the next day. But my flight got delayed two hours in Atlanta, and I didn't get into Lima until 1 in the morning. I had to wake up at 3:30 the morning before in Colorado Springs, so it was turning out to be an incredibly long day for me. I stumbled around the Lima airport with my incredibly heavy bags, changed some U.S. currency to Peruvian soles, and found a taxi to take me to my hotel. The taxi driver didn't speak English, but I had the address of the hotel written on a piece of paper, which was all that he needed. We got to the hotel, and I tipped the taxi driver 10 soles, which is about 3 bucks. I found out the next day at the meeting with our group leader that pretty much every one who interacts with you in Peru, from taxi drivers to bellhops to waiters to bathroom attendants, is supposed to be tipped, although 10 soles was overly generous for the taxi driver. Anyway, I stumbled into the hotel and got my room key. Margaret was supposed to leave a note for me telling me where they went for drinks, but the person at the desk didn't mention anything about a note, and I was going to sleep note or no note, so I didn't care much. The bellhop took my bags up, and I tried in my half-asleep state to explain to him in Spanglish that all I had were 50 and 100 soles notes, so I didn't have any change to tip him with. The bellhop picked up my gist and said that that was OK, he could make change for me. I think I ended up giving him 5 soles.

The next day I slept in till noon. When I finally got up, I went down to the desk to check to see if there were any notes for me. There weren't. Then I checked to see what room Margaret was staying in. I was going to give her a call and see if she and Vel wanted to go out for lunch with me. But they had nobody staying there under Margaret's name. I didn't know Vel's last name, so I couldn't get them to check for her. They also asked me if I was supposed to check out today. No, I'm staying one more night I said. **Foreshadowing alert** Ahem, so I went out to lunch by myself. After lunch, I walked around the neighborhood, Miraflores, for a while, and got back to the hotel around 3. I read my book, Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day for about an hour, and then I got tired again so I took a nap. At 6, my room phone rang. It was the front desk, and they said I had to be at a meeting at another hotel for my tour group. I had to leave now. RIGHT NOW, the front desk person said. I'm still half asleep. 5 minutes give me? I asked. Yes, 5 minutes, right now, she said. Well OK. So I hurried up and threw my stuff in my bag and ran downstairs. The front desk person called me a taxi, and I went to the other hotel to meet with the rest of my tour group.

What had happened was that because I had arrived a day earlier than the tour started, GAP had to book me in a different hotel for the first night; there was no room in the hotel where we were to meet up with the rest of the group. And I had misunderstood the instructions that I was supposed to change hotels after the first night. And my original hotel, the one I stayed in the first night, was supposed to give me a welcome letter from GAP which explained this. So, basically, I was confused and the hotel dropped the ball. I ended up running upstairs to where our group was meeting with bags flung over every arm and the whole group applauding, since they had been waiting for me for a while, I'm guessing, and many of them knew from my emails before the trip that this was my first time outside the U.S., so they were likely worried that I had taken a wrong turn on my way to lunch and ended up being a gringo in the wrong neighborhood. Anyway, that wasn't the case of course, but it didn't matter since I was there. I sat down and met everyone. I won't go through all their names here, but I will mention that our group leader was Martin, an incredibly nice, patient German guy. Margaret and Vel were both there and had successfully done the whole changing hotels thing that I completely flubbed. Also, there was one other guy there, Dean, which made me a little disappointed. Not because of the whole Hubba Hubba reason, but because I would have to share a room, since they pair up guys and girls in rooms, and if I was the only guy, I think I would have gotten a single. Dean turned out to be a blast, though, so it was well worth sharing a room. At the meeting, we discussed our plans for the next few days. The next morning, we were going to be flying out to Cusco, the ancient capitol of the Incan empire and starting point for modern-day hikes to Machu Picchu. We would have a free day in Cusco after we landed, and then we would spend the next two days at a drop-in center for Cusco street children (we found out later that none of the children actually live on the streets, but all of them come from very poor families and they usually have to spend many hours a day working to make money for their families).

So, the next day we flew out to Cusco. When we got there and after we checked in to our hotel, Martin took us to the main city square, where a street celebration was taking place. We asked Martin what the celebration was for, and he told us that there's always a celebration for something going on. Or a protest. But basically, there's always people in the street doing stuff. The city square was surrounded by old Spanish churches and touristy restaurants with balconies and a statue right in the middle. The dancers in the celebration were everywhere, and at one point I had to jump out of the way so I wouldn't get run over by them. We walked around the square for a while and had lunch. After lunch, Margaret, Dean, Carrie, Anna, and I decided to just walk around the whole town, or as much as we could explore before dinner. We ended up in a back alleyway that went up, up, and up some more. We kept on following it up as far as it would go, figuring that we would end up some place interesting and/or some place with a wonderful view of the whole city. We were far from the touristy section of the city, and we were surrounded on both sides by dingy houses and little hole-in-the-wall businesses. We were the only gringoes in sight, but it wasn't scary. I should point out here that I was never actually scared of getting mugged, pickpocketed, or anything else the whole time I was in Peru. The street vendors were pushy, but otherwise the locals were all very nice or left you alone. Also, I was almost always with a group of people when I walked around. Anyway, the alley eventually led to a dirt road, and we followed the dirt road up for a little while, but it didn't seem to go anywhere promising, so we stopped and took some pictures and walked back to the hotel.

Update: You can see all of my Peru pictures here and here.

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