These were 40 feet tall on the north side of my drive. I had tree spaded in some spruce 15 feet north of these and needed to take the gnarly dirty cedar’s down. The cedars had been planted 30 years ago between some 60 year old Ponderosas before I owned the property. I have 200 acres of hilly pasture so believe me, I know how to deal with cedars.
OT Retirement
- Thread starter TampaBaySkers
- Start date
I agree, but if student teaching was done much sooner, most teaching majors would switch majors.
I am one of those who have complained about coaching and have stepped up to take over the following year. It was great.
Is your issue with parents not staying the **** out in general or more so HOW they approach their concerns?
I tend to not have any issues with it personally, not recently.
The issues that seem to be the ones that cause problems are more about not staying the **** out.
How they approach, I don't have an issue if they are upset or angry. I totally understand that "Mama Bear" concept, so I tend to treat that with grace. Parents can often times be very mad at their kid, worn out, tired and have tried everything...and sometimes that frustration spills over in an "angry" email or phone call. I get that, it happens.
Now, when it came to coaching, I had a 24 hour rule. No contacting me or my staff until 24 hours after the game. Tended to give parents a chance to cool off.
Of course that did not mean they could not contact us about injuries.
I hope someone does that for me. I would love to just watch my kids and work with them 1 on 1 outside of practice after dealing with those brats all season.
Coaching a sport when you no longer want to coach it is brutal. Each practice seems like an eternity. You dread each game. You just want the season over.
I coached football for 20+ years and I had 1 season like that. Long story short, about a week before the season started the HC was gone and I got "promoted", I hated it, I hated the asst coaches that forced their way on the staff for that season. It sucked.
Don't get me wrong, having a good coach so I don't have to put in that time (I have 5 kids) is nice. But at the same time, I did have fun running things my way.
I was coaching 7, 8, 9 year olds so at that age they're not little turds yet. I'm sure when they older, before high school age, you're dealing with more bad attitudes (potentially).
I'm talking 3rd graders. Arguing they want to stay in the game. Squirting each other with water bottles in a game. One kid refused to move down on the bench so my next sub could sit next to me and then when I told him move or don't play the rest of the game, he cried for like 10 minutes and refused to go back in, while his dad sat next to him on the end of bench and consoled him. Then the dad was talking **** about me over that. And I was coaching by myself that tournament because the other coach was sick so I didn't have time to deal with their nonsense.
That's just a taste.
God isn't that the truth. Drive by your local Nebraska faculty parking lot and compare the number of pickup trucks to Pruises.
I know some big bearded burly guys who drive a Prius to work. Actually one drives a vw bug.
I love all you teachers. I teach 3rd grade and I've been in the profession for a minute. With all that's gone on to vilify us in the last three years after being looked on with gratitude during the pandemic, I'm out when my son graduates high school. I'll have 25 years in, and that will be plenty. I'm tired of communicating concerns to parents about behaviors, defiance, and language and watching those parents just cross their fingers to hope everything will be alright some day.
Yikes. That sucks. That dad definitely didn't help.
I haven't had to coach basketball (thank goodness), but for 3rd & 4th grade football I had very little issues. Currently doing 7u rec baseball. They get a lot more grace when it comes to focus, but fortunately zero attitude problems.
Mostly it's a blast if you like kids. They just want to play with their friends & have fun.
Seeing them get excited over a good play is totally worth it.
Parents have made it way too serious. Many expect their 9-10 year old to play the game like 17-18 year olds would. God forbid a kid strikes out or grounds out at first.
Last edited:
I’m only 42 but my wife and were talking about this the other day. I have a cush computer job and can do basically whatever I want so it’s like do I really need to stop when I’m 57 to golf or travel?
I probably won’t. I might as well keep making a good salary to work a couple days a week and still have time for the fun things in life as well as have health insurance coverage.
Your point about ag land prices is both a blessing and a curse. Everyone likes to point at the politicians and what they are or aren’t doing for rural America but the primary thing killing rural American is rural america cashing out to fund retirement or move to the city.
I think corporate farming is the most to blame. Whether it was Ted Turner years ago, China, the Amish (yes, the Amish) or your local land baron, these guys are driving up prices to a point where it's out of reach for most people. Tough to blame the sellers-- most people are going to sell to the highest bidder.
I also wanted to point out I agree with the folks about health insurance. My mom works with a bunch of docs at UNMC and they don’t generally fully retire until their 70s so they can keep their coverage. Those docs have more money at least salary wise than 90% of people.
If rural america wants to live they can’t sell. The parents either need money to make retirement better or even feasible and the kids often want to leave or have already left and don’t need a multi million dollar farm.
A few decades of that and it’s pretty easy to see why rural America is a shell of itself. I suppose a good backup option is to sell cheaper to a kid at ISU that will farm the land than some corporation, but like you said that’s probably a level of charitable that even most rural residents won’t take to keep the lifestyle going.
It’s tough to blame anyone in a market transaction. If I want your farm and I have the ability to give you ten million for it (and perhaps I have to to beat the other bidders), I’m not generally concerned with the fact that puts the new price per acre far above what a young farmer could pay.
A lot of people look at Trump as this big hard right super conservative guy but he’s actually not. He’s done more to move the GOP leftward than any politician on either side of the aisle in basically a century.
Ever since the new deal was launched in the thirties it has been a primary leg of conservative politics to label it communism, privatize it at the very minimum, and eliminate it if you can.
Trump came along in 2016 and said no no no we’re not about that anymore I’m not going to mess with the entitlement programs. So in one fell swoop the GOP position went from these are communist programs that’s corrupt the moral fiber of working Americans and have hundreds of trillions in unfunded liabilities that will ruin the nation to “our boy says it’s all good”.
He has basically repeated that stance for 2024 although other lifelong conservative politicians did start repeating the old warnings which Trump and the working class MAGA base is basically telling them to F off.
So I generally agree that at least in the near term while MAGA is a thing the GOP will probably be forced to go along with any schemes to save entitlements.
You aren’t talking about what the numbers are, but what the numbers would be if people had your priorities.
Because there’s a cap, high earners skew the numbers less than they would but the numbers are still skewed. Not many poor people are putting in 23k when median income before tax is like 50-60k.
However true it is it keeps floating around that only about ten percent of people are in the market at all, but how that number is arrived at I’ve never bothered to look. Whatever that number is it’s almost certainly not mostly poor people in that category.
Seems like we could have fixed this up years ago. But I think even your South Dakota gov noem waited until it was a problem before anything came up in legislation.
My brothers made fun of me for years for sticking with the USG. Sure they make more than me, but it was just recently my youngest brother finally admitted that the pension I get will be pretty nice and even though he has a good bit of money he’s going to have to use it wisely to match what I’ll get in passive income for essentially free.
Different strokes for different folks. I still have the option of getting out and making big private money when my kids go to college if I want to.
The problem has really only surfaced since COVID in South Dakota and the sale of ag land to Chinese shell buyers accelerated this past year prompting legislation as quickly as their legislative bodies could get it done. FWIW Pillen is my governor.
Yeah, that pension is such a big deal. I know a lot of super unhappy teachers that want to quit but they also have "just 10 years left" so of course they are going to stick it out.
With that said, I did just have a friend quit teaching at a nice school teaching art. Had about 12-15 years in but just could not do it anymore.
Had another friend quit being a gym teacher with 10 years in.
Assuming the US even has an election in November, no doubt, the other side is gonna toss the piece of **** out of there now and nominate someone like Big Mike to oppose DJT. At 8% in the polls, nobody is gonna vote for that asshat in office.
Absolutely a lot of smart people feel no election is in the offing. For a lot of legitimate reasons, too.
Since the latter part of this thread has some almost political opinions, I would hope the moderator, if he feels it violates the spirit of the board, would just delete the political comments but leave the rest of the thread intact because it contains a LOT of good, informative content that some may benefit from.
Last edited:
Which reasons - as this is the first I’ve heard of it? Admittedly, I’m not in the smart club.
I'd give you some reasons, but first I gotta see if the moderator is gonna put the kabosh on the whole political spin.