The rest of my life. It’s such an odd phrase. But having turned 60 years old, I have to really start considering that what time I have left is limited. My dad died at 65, my mom at 72; both had cancer. Three of my 4 grandparents had cancer. One died at 53 two at 69, and one at 85. Just looking at the math, I may not have a whole lot of time left. So how do I use it? Retirement didn’t stick. I was bored silly. I was so bored, that one month, I wrote a novel. 60,000 words in a month. And I was still bored. Every morning I would do all the puzzles that the New York Times had to offer then I would write all day. It still didn’t give me the mental stimulation that I needed.
Since going back to teaching full time I have found the stimulation that I was looking for. Last year, however, was not ideal. I was teaching students who had failed algebra up to five times. They were not exactly inspired to learn. My ego told me I could make a difference in their lives and for a very few I was successful. But it was frustrating beyond words to meet such resistance from students who didn’t feel they could improve their lives. When the opportunity came to return to teaching middle school I jumped at it. I am a middle school teacher. Have been given the chance to return to Pierre Moran Middle School, well that was just icing on the cake.
I never stopped learning new things. That’s one of the things I can be proud of in my life. In trying to develop a yearlong escape room, more or less. I’ve found tools that have helped me immensely in being productive: ChatGPT and Canva. If I had had these tools while I was working on Solution Squad, my life would have been so much easier. The ability to create learning materials based on my comic stories has been made incredibly easier. I can now produce posters worksheets buttons everything at the touch of a button using Canva. ChatGPT helps me to align my work with Indiana math standards which have changed in the past two years. Who knows why they keep changing things the way they do? But they do and I just have to play along.
One of the mistakes I made when working on Solution Squad was thinking that all math teachers had the same ability that I do to be able to find math in every single instance of any subject. It was such a niche project that the crossover between math teachers and comic book lovers was too small to make it financially viable. So, I’m not trying to do that anymore. The work that I’m doing now is purely for my benefit. People may admire my creativity but I’m not doing it for the masses or to make money. I’m doing it for me. I want to see if I can be the quality teacher that I was 10 years ago.
My wife often says that I have to have a project. I always have to have something long term that I’m working on to keep myself occupied. Now that I have the tools available to me that I wish I’d always had, I’m going to make the class the best I possibly can. I’m going to use graphic novels, comic books, and popular culture and I’m going to make a math class that kids will remember.
The big question is, how long can I keep this up? If I enjoy it? Indefinitely. In seven years, I can collect Social Security at my full retirement age I don’t feel like my health will stop me but possibly my hearing will be the issue. I already have trouble hearing people in conversation and have to read lips in addition to having hearing aids, so I guess I’ll let that determine when I’m done. But I would honestly enjoy teaching for the rest of my life if the kids match my creative energy like the middle school kids in my past did.
I’m returning after a 10-year absence to Pierre Moran Middle School in Elkhart Indiana. I’ll be teaching 7th grade and possibly an eighth grade class and I’m really looking forward to being back with 12, 13, and 14-year olds that’s really where I belong. I’ll be honest I really haven’t felt like much of a teacher in the 10 years since I was pulled from Pierre Moran mid-year to join the staff at Northside Middle School completely against my will. I had spent 18 1/2 years at Pierre Moran and I had already had the children of some of my children. I was part of the community. I was a leader. I had been on virtually every committee that the school had and chaired most of them at one time or another. The hows and whys of it don’t matter anymore; the important thing is that I’m back.
You wouldn’t think that at age 60 that I had anything to prove. But I do–to myself. When I left Pierre Moran 10 years ago I was at the top of my game. I was the best teacher I had ever been. Everything was rolling in the right direction and it’s never been the same since. I want to see if I can get back to that level of expertise and skill and I want to do more. I want to be the example that other people follow. With that in mind I came up with a crazy idea to create a fictional school within a school a superhero school if you will and the students in my classes will be superheroes in training. Using ChatGPT to provide graphics and Canva to provide the ability to present, I’m going to introduce my students a new way of immersing in a fictional world while learning math at the same time. I’m not sure it’s ever been done before but I’m going to do it. Here’s my first presentation.
I know, it’s incredibly controversial. My artist friends have been up in arms for a few years now over AI. It’s robbing them of their livelihoods, and they are right to worry so.
Confession: I stopped drawing two years ago because of it. I’m truly a frustrated artist. I knew a long time ago that I would never be as good as I wanted to be. I saw the writing on the wall that it would quickly surpass anything I could do. And I was right.
I’ve seen the arguments. It takes money out of the hands of artists. There’s no skill to it. If you use it, your ability to do the things that it does will erode. Well, that’s okay. What I’ve discovered so far puts the lie to that. A month of so back, my gaming buddies and I were chatting about its use. I was about to start running a new Star Trek Adventures game, we were starting all new characters. Just for fun, I thought, let’s see what 1966 Charlton Heston would look like in a Star Trek Uniform. I have to tell you, it didn’t do a bad job. Now, was this something I was likely to commission from an artist friend. No. No way ever.
Now, I quickly discovered that ChatGPT does not like to do the correct insignia on its Star Trek renderings, so I used my skills with Photoshop to Clone tool away the patch on his shirt and replace it with a photograph of the actual command insignia. Since I didn’t ask for a background I was free to place him wherever I wanted him.
I put him in front of a control console on my starship, the USS Nautilus, and interior set that I paid a whole lot for. Now, I don’t want to hang this photo up. I just needed it for NPC reference in a game. And if ChatGPT can give it to me and I can complete it in 15 minutes, then sign me up.
I used it to create backgrounds for my two Bill Krause-designed Challenger-class starships. This is also something I would never pay anyone to do. And I paid $400 for my two digital models, thank you very much.
USS Nautilus approaches a tropical planet
So, yeah, while I’m using it for art, I am still paying artists for their work, but where else am I going to find a thousand backgrounds to put my ships on to my specifications?
The real kicker though, came when I was in a professional development meeting on June 6. We were learning how to make our home pages in Canvas and I asked the tech person how to word wrap around my photo image in my introduction. She quickly said, “Canvas doesn’t do that. But we can have ChatGPT write the HTML code for doing it and use its HTML editor to make that happen. And we did just that. Everyone, I have no intention of learning how to code HTML. This was a great tool to use and it never even occurred to me to use it for anything but playing around with photos and Star Trek stuff.
Then when someone suggested writing test questions with it, I had to admit, I didn’t know it could do that. But oh, yes. Here’s what I gave it:
Write a multiple choice question using Indiana Academic Standard 7.RP.2 with a Star Trek Original Series theme.
ChatGPT said:
Sure! Here’s a multiple choice question aligned with Indiana Academic Standard 7.RP.2 (Recognize and represent proportional relationships between quantities), with a Star Trek: The Original Series theme:
Indiana Academic Standard 7.RP.2 – Multiple Choice Question Theme: Star Trek – The Original Series
While exploring a distant planet, Captain Kirk notes that the amount of dilithium crystals mined is proportional to the time spent mining. In one mission, 15 kilograms of dilithium were mined in 3 hours.
If the crew continues mining at the same rate, how many kilograms of dilithium can they expect to mine in 8 hours?
A) 35 kg B) 40 kg C) 45 kg D) 50 kg
Correct Answer: B) 40 kg (Explanation: 15 kg / 3 hr = 5 kg/hr. 5 kg/hr × 8 hr = 40 kg)
Now, I don’t know about you, but my day is made. BUT–Is Captain Kirk really the right one to note the speed at which dilithium crystals are being mined? No. That’s where my brain kicks in. No, it would be Scotty. So, I will make the adustment.
While exploring a distant planet, Chief Engineer Scott notes that the amount of dilithium crystals mined is proportional to the time spent mining. In one mission, 15 kilograms of dilithium were mined in 3 hours.
If the crew continues mining at the same rate, how many kilograms of dilithium can they expect to mine in 8 hours?
A) 35 kg B) 40 kg C) 45 kg D) 50 kg
Now I have a decent question, and it took a fraction of the time it would have taken me to come up with something similar.
So, will my art skills atrophe? I don’t honestly care. I’m not doing this for money anymore. I’m more interested in making my workflow more efficient. My other skills, like using Photoshop, are getting a real workout. Especially when I want to see what Alan Rickman would look like as a Vulcan doctor. I fixed the insignia, the eyebrows, and I placed him in another set that I paid to have designed.
I know, all of my artist friends are dead set against it. I don’t blame any of you. But how AI is going to help me is immeasurable. I don’t care about six-fingered hands. What I do care about are things like I did yesterday. “Write a diagnostic multiple choice quiz with four questions from each of the five domains of the 6th grade Indiana math standards.”
Done.
I looked it over and it was solid work. If there were any poorly worded questions or questions that didn’t measure what I wanted to know, I could tweak them, but I didn’t need to.
“Write the quiz in Spanish.”
Done.
Then ChatGPT asked me if I wanted a printable PDF or if I wanted it in digital format. I chose digital format. Then I asked to make it for Canvas. It not only put the quizzes into digital format, but also gave me step-by-step instructions on how to upload it directly into my Canvas course.
So, in less than ten minutes, I had quizzes in Engish and Spanish uploaded into Canvas and ready to be assigned. Care to guess how long all of that would have taken me to do manually? Especially the translation? Hours.
Now, the debate can begin. Is it fair to rely on AI to do our jobs? Of course not. But I am a trained professional wth 38 years of classroom experience. I know good questions from bad ones. I also know if something is built to tell me what I need to know or not. I don’t rely on AI to do everything. I am going to use it to do the grunt work that I could pay an assistant to do.
I used it recently to write Ebay descriptions for comics and action figures that I put up to sell. I had to be very descriptive in my prompts. And I am going to say this, and you can argue with me all day long. It is an art form (and maybe a science) to construct a prompt to make the AI do what you want it to do. I have had many false starts because I wasn’t precise enough in my language when creating prompts. I’ve gotten a lot better at it now that I understand what it does and does not do well.
Does anyone remember the episode of Star Trek The Next Generation where Geordi gets tired of Data beating all the Sherlock Holmes mysteries on the holodeck and instructs the computer to create a unique Sherlock Holmes mystery with an adversary who is capable of defeating Data? This is how we got the Moriarty villain. You have to choose your words carefully.
But that’s not the only time that we’ve seen how AI works in our popular culture. When Tony Stark interacts wtih Jarvis or Friday in all the Iron Man and Avengers movies, that’s exactly what he’s doing. I recently had that same experience.
I started working on Heroes of STEAM again recently and uploaded the rules into ChatGPT. It gave me feedback on the gamel and how it was appropriate for the audience. I had the AI create two characters using my ruleset, and then had it simulated a battle between the two characters. It gave me a readout of the mock battle, all the moves, the damage done and the damage mitigated, and told me who the winner was. It even asked me if I wanted it to give the characters names. They weren’t bad, to be fair. I did note that it wasn’t having the characters move on the map at all. They just stod next to each other and slugged it out. I then added the strategy of moving to a distance where the character’s best attack would work. That generated an entirely different result. Then I had it create five characters and did a free-for-all fight. Last one standing wins. I ran that simulation ten times and found that the character whose main trait was mobility, the ability to dodge and move, was winning nearly every time. I asked ChatGPT how I could modify the stat to even things out a bit, and it gave me a potential solution. I made that change and reran the simulation ten times again. It changed, but now favored a different attribute.
I did this back-and-forth for about three hours, running hundreds of simulated battles using my rules. And now Heroes of STEAM is a much better product. The time and effort that it would have required to playtest hundreds of games was reduced to about 1% of what it would have been.
People can argue against AI all day long, but I’m going to tell you this; I’m not going back. It’s a whole new world now. It’s scary, but there’s no way this tool is going back in the box.
I remember when the first computer gradebook was released and my mentor teacher urged me to use it. It took me far longer to input the grades than it took me to calculate them mentally from my hand-written gradebook. I told him then that when the technology saves me time, I will start using it.
A little over ten years ago, when I was turning 50, I was teaching a one-semester elective class called Math Problem Solving. I was basically free to do anything I wanted within teaching the Indiana Academic Standards for 7th grade. And the main standard that I focused on was a big one.
“7.C.6: Use proportional relationships to solve ratio and percent problems with multiple operations (e.g. simple interest, tax, markups, markdowns, gratuities, conversions within and across measurement systems, and percent increase and decrease).”
Considering there’s another math standard for simply adding integers, this one was simply immense and covered a wide variety of problems to solve. So, we did a little trip down memory lane. I wanted to explore what was then 50 years ago, the year 1964. With a little Google-Fu, I pulled up some fun and relatable items besides myself that made their first appearance that year: The Ford Mustang, GI Joe, Rankin/Bass’s Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, the James Bond movie, Goldfinger, and much more. We looked at McDonald’s price boards from that year and calculated the rate of inflation to present day. Then we compared it to prices of other things like gasoline, bread, ground beef, and milk. We looked at wages, home prices car prices, everything we could find data for. And we compared. Oh, did we compare. We talked about the differences in the rates of inflation for different items and we theorized the reasons behind them.
Then, for a final project on the unit, I posed to my students a question: If you could go back in time to 1964, with a large American Tourister Bob Hope suitcase full of clothes and $50,000 in 1964 cash, and could spend a week there, what would you do, and what would you bring back to the present with you if you were limited to what could be contained in your suitcase?
One of the first students to hear the directions blurted out, “I want to go to Disney World.” I said, “Sorry, you can’t.” When they asked why not, I knew I had them hooked. I told them they’d have to look it up. They quickly discovered that Disney World didn’t open until 1971! They went wild over this project. Many of them bought stocks and some bought rare comic books, baseball cards, and various other money-making items. This was to be expected. Many of them had seen Back to the Future II. But the ones who hit me right in the feelings were the ones who wanted to go see The Beatles in concert; I had them find where the Fab Four were playing the day they were leaving (exactly 50 years ago the day the received the assignment); it was the ones who wanted to visit the grandparents who died before they were born. I had them ask their parents where they lived at the time. And my goodness, some wanted to save Martin Luther King, Jr. I asked them to find out where he was speaking that day. This was one time that iPads and the Internet won the day.
The breadth of this writing project stunned me. I had never seen imagination sparked like this in a math class. Sure, I expected them to find things that would secure them financially for the future, but to read about their additional adventures seeking rare experiences just restored my faith in the power of children, even adolescents. It showed me their character. And it showed me just what could be done when a teacher isn’t bound by covering a specific standard on a particular page in a lock-stepped curriculum.
Every few years, events in my life come to a head and a paradigm shift occurs. I take a step away from social media, gather my thoughts, and take a new start at life. Today, it happens again.
I’m going back to teaching full-time. I interviewed for an open math position yesterday, and it’s mine. Most likely, I’ll start next week.
The author, doing what he does best
No, Hell hasn’t frozen over, but this is something I need to do for my family. My wife wants to retire so she can start collecting the pension she’s been owed for the past two years. She’s not done teaching either, and will try to get her job back after being separated from the school corporation for 30 days. It’s not well known that in Indiana, due to the teacher shortage, you can teach full-time while still collecting your pension. But there’s no guarantee that she’d get her old job back, and someone in our family needs to carry health insurance for us in case that doesn’t work out. And that’s me.
I’ve enjoyed my retirement time, goofing off every day while making far more than I’m worth as a substitute teacher. But last fall when I got COVID, I lost $1400 in salary by missing only four days of work. It occurred to us, what if I’m hospitalized? What if I get really sick? Then my non-pension income just vanishes. Magi is eligible for early Social Security, so in the same circumstance, she could have two incomes. But mine would be limited to my pension, which doesn’t cover the bills. If I teach four more years, while Sera is in school, I’ll be 63 and therefore eligible for early Social Security as well.
But the truth is, I’m also a bit bored. I banged out a 60,000-word novel in November during NaNoWriMo. My writing partner and I have spent two months editing it and rewriting parts, and the parts that need the least editing and rewriting are the parts where the male lead teaches. “Write what you know,” they always say. I know how to teach. It’s what I spent 31 years doing in the classroom, and I truthfully miss it. I’ve been tutoring online right along, and the kids I’ve substituted for have come to me for math help frequently. The other day I subbed for a math teacher, and the kids were solving linear equations by substitution. Despite the teacher leaving a video of instruction on how to do it, I explained it better in person and helped a great many of them with the assignment. It’s a wonderful feeling; one of the best.
This change in perspective is also fueled by the idea that I’m only 59. Normal retirement age (for full Social Security) is 67. Early retirement has made me feel older than I actually am. This may be my childhood trauma talking, but I don’t feel like I deserve to be retired yet.
With our daughter headed to Purdue in the fall and her nightly absence due to the advent of Robotics competition season, the reality of empty nest syndrome hit us like the proverbial ton of bricks. What are we going to do? Where are we going to live? Do we need a two-story, four-bedroom house for two old people? So, we’re making plans to pile up as much money as we can while renovating our 24-year-old house so we can head south for the winter, so to speak. And looking around the house at the sheer amount of stuff that doesn’t need to travel with us is daunting.
And after dabbling in running roleplaying games and restoring old Mego action figures, I finally figured out what I want to be when I grow up, and I want to be a writer. I’m a natural storyteller (as anyone who knows me will tell you) and I’d like to spend my golden years doing that. So, my goals for the next four years are set. I’ll take stock then and figure out what comes after.
I set up at my buddies’ local toy and comics show yesterday. It was the first time I brought any Megos out for sale, to go with the Hallmark ornaments I’ve been selling for a friend.
Sales were light as the traffic was pretty limited due to the inclement weather. But I think this model might be workable. I had a couple of people stop by the table, and instantly smiled and fell into reminiscence about their Mego figures. One even told me that he had a few that were broken. I told them I could fix them and we exchanged numbers. Another dealer asked me, after he saw what I had out, if old, broken Megos had any value. I said, “They do to me.” He even had them with him but not on display. He got them out and we worked out a deal.
Now, this might look like a pile of junk to most people, but to me, it’s a gold mine. I mean, yes, some of it is junk. But the Captain America, Aquaman, and Conan were decent, despite Conan missing part of his leg. And let me tell you, whoever owned these toys as a kid must have been as mean as Sid Harris in Toy Story, because they weren’t broken at the knee joints like most Megos break, but they were broken below the knees, where it’s nothing but solid plastic. That takes some serious torque. But after a bit, I was able to harvest fresh vintage knee pins from each one. So, another great reason to do little shows in the area!
Another dealer was working on his own collection and had his Dukes of Hazzard Megos with him. They were in need of repair and I told him I could help him out. I said that next time, I would just bring my spares and tool boxes with me and repair stuff right at the show! I think that would be cool to do. If it becomes known that I do on-the-spot repairs at shows, people will bring business to me!
But the best bit of the day came when my good friend Bruce Nelson just suddenly appeared in front of me. Bruce is a special kind of friend. He drove all the way from Indianapolis just to see me at the show!
I met Bruce at the first C2E2 convention I did with Solution Squad, and he encouraged me to apply for the Lilly Endowment Teacher Creativity Fellowship, which I did, and received! We’ve been friends ever since.
