The Year at a Glance-A Meme

The opening sentences from my first blog post each month in 2006.
I "caught" this from Unwellness.
It makes the year seem so short. And it's a fair snapshot of what I blathered about in 2006. Work, The Weather, Travel, The Past.

JAN First day back at school after the holidays...D+
FEB If you're going to feel plowed under anyway, you may as well have a snowstorm.
MAR I was really into The Lives of the Saints in my early adolescence.
APR The picture above is of many thousand year old cliff dwellings at Bandelier National Monument, NM.
MAY I would rather delete by hand the stupid generic advertising and anonymous comment posts, that land on occasion on my blog, than put people through the maddening task of typing nonsense security words.
JUN Leftover Stories to Tell is a tribute to the late, depressed, anxious, dyslexic and brilliant Spalding Gray.
JUL I'm liking the new head of BCS.
AUG There's been a lot of complaining about the heat this week prompting questions of "What do you hate more, NY summers or NY winters?
SEP It is cooler this morning but the sky is exactly the same as it was that day.(9/11)
OCT I could tell you about the dinner party I hosted to raise money for the school, you know, What was my menu? Who were my guests?
NOV Steve Earle played his first Brooklyn gig ever on Wednesday night, at SouthPaw.
DEC I've often felt the school year starts as a slow torturous climb up a sheer precipice, its summit reached sometime Thanksgiving week. The rest of the year is a hurtling bumpy slide down the other side. (ok, 2 sentences in this case)

Walkathon Plus

There was a piece in the Times (Arts section) yesterday about Will Self, a Brit author. He's here to promote his new work, "The Book of Dave," which sounds intriguing and wacky, but you'll need to read about that yourself.
What was even more intriguing and wacky was the fact that he walked to Manhattan from Kennedy Airport (6 hours) and this is a normal course of events for him.
Here's a bit from the article:

Smoking is Mr. Self’s only remaining vice. He used to be a prodigious drinker and drug-taker, famous for late-night altercations, not always coherent public appearances and marathon hours at trendy spots like the Groucho Club. During Britain’s general election of 1997, he set a new standard for journalistic infamy by getting himself bounced off John Major's campaign plane for snorting heroin in the bathroom.

But Mr. Self has been clean for eight years or so, and some of the energy he used to expend on carousing now goes into epic hikes, sometimes as long as 100 miles — from London, say, into the Lea Valley and through the Epping Forest to north Essex.

Sounds like our kind of guy, right?

That Time of Year Again

I've often felt the school year starts as a slow torturous climb up a sheer precipice, its summit reached sometime Thanksgiving week. The rest of the year is a hurtling bumpy slide down the other side. (I watched The Mission last night and that over-the-waterfall scene is definitely pertinent here) and I don't have to check my calendar to know that the ass over teakettle descent has begun.
There is no hope of controlling the fall at this point. You just have to protect your most vulnerable parts and hope you can stand up when you reach the bottom, sometime before the fourth of July.
My view was once again upheld during the hilarious post TG faculty meeting. To those of you who were there, if you weren't suppressing the urge to either hyperventilate or shove your head through a window and scream for air you must have already drown because it was a classic example of how out of any one's control things get right about now.
After the waves of auction project planning and winter concert logistics crashed repeatedly on our heads we'd hardly caught our breath before we were pulled out to deep water by progress report deadlines and style sheets, and conference write-ups that were due last week.
We were treading water (though weakly) when we hit a patch of rocks and rough water. We would, it was announced, from now on, be known as a nut sensitive school. (Well OK, that seems prudent) Peanuts and sesame seeds were singled out as the chief pariahs, "tree nuts" were getting a pass, at least for a while. So we'll be getting our deputy nut police badges any day now and you know that also means no more ordering in cold noodles with sesame sauce? (What! Do you mean we can't eat what we want? Oh the humanity!)
The final item on the meeting agenda was "snacks." A benign subject, right? Apparently not. The triscuits, graham crackers, pretzels and veggie booty that have fortified our charges through the mid-morning blahs would now be supplemented by fresh food prepared by parents and brought into school, say, once a week. The brouhaha that ensued? Well, you'd thing the Hemlock Society had been contracted to take over the food service at Burpie Cow Wow.
And another thing, animal crackers would be no more as they contain the dreaded substance -trans fat.
"Whoa! that's all my kids eat!" came a plaintive cry from a far corner of the room. (So she'll need to hoard the last of the supply.) but wait, where can she store the stash? Such agonizing problems!
The extreme hardship of having to deal with strange food items being introduced into the classrooms and what of the self esteem of those children whose clueless parents bring in unpopular offerings? It's hard enough dealing with the weeping and gnashing of teeth when broken graham crackers are all that's left. And that veggie booty? Kids don't like it the way they like animal crackers. The teachers are eating it all up. You can see the telltale green flecks between their teeth.
There we all were, hurtling towards the falls, hardly able to keep our heads above water. It was as if we had been unexpectedly attacked by a school of ravenous fish (looking for a special snack, no doubt). The only reason most of us made it back to shore that night is that the fish were momentarily confused because a number of us were not sweet, some of us were cracked or broken and others had green flecks on their booties.

I Have Seen The Future

I haven't really seen the future but I did spend the better part of last week with my head in the clouds. New Paltz, NY is in the mountains and The Mohonk Mountain House is probably the highest point in that town. And if the altitude wasn't enough to make this sea-level New Yorker light-headed, the subject matter of the conference was.
On our first night we were put into small groups and given this task:
"You have two years until the bird flu hits. The schools will be closed down. Plan how your school will continue to function with most of your students and staff quarantined in their homes or escaped to safer environments."
Doesn't it sound like the opportunity of a lifetime? – to jettison everything extraneous and bull-sh*tty and distill what we do down to it's essence, which is, I think, teaching kids to figure out what they want to know and then learn how to learn it themselves.
I am convinced that the best we can do for kids is to get them thinking, talking, reading, and writing Oh and I also still believe in times tables. Kids should understand basic math concepts and do simple math in their heads (yes, I think you are better off knowing how to add, subtract, multiply and divide without having to rely on machines or even paper and pencil)
I have nothing against machines. The machines we have today will change education as much as printed books changed learning in the late fifteenth century.
The computer has changed my life.
The first generation Internet, when it went mainstream, and referred to now as Web 1.0, was a huge collection of documents and web sites. You needed some programming skills to post to it and you needed some Boolean logic skills to extract meaning from it. You remember what it was like – the directory-model search engines, Alta Vista, Yahoo, Lycos, were not exactly user friendly but intriguing and cool, nevertheless.
Then Google came along, with it's relevancy-based search engine. Since the late nineties Google searches have been fine-tuned by the sheer volume of users. Its PageRank algorithm causes the most connected-to pages to rise to the top aided by the unseen metatags.
The current phase of Internet development is referred to as Web 2.0. and it was made possible by Google's search advances along with the widespread availabilty of high-speed connectivity and inexpensive fast-processor computers.
Web 2.0 is characterized by its interactiveness. The classic example is the "mash-up," the mixing of data from various sources – like Google Earth, where you can plot restaurants or hotels into a satellite map.
It is also free. Web 2.0 is all about participation and democracy. It is blogs and wikis and flikr and opinions on Amazon and shared bookmarks on de.licio.us and ratings in travel websites and playlists in iTunes and Skype and Wikipedia and on and on.
The Times ran a front page story today on the dawn of Web 3.0 – the next iteration of the Web. It will harness the power of the "social computing" sites like the ones I mentioned above – full of facts and opinions and music and pictures and video and collaborative thought. Web 3.0 will not simply connect the dots from one site to another it will do things out of that scary Spielberg movie with the robot children. It will use the content that we all have created to make it possible for us to be "understood" by our computers. You will be able to type in, "I need to find a critically-aclaimed book, fiction, where the main character develops super powers after a natural disaster." Or, "I want a hip hotel in Budapest for $100 a night - next week." Or, "I need to find the cure for bird flu." It will know what you want and find it for you - fast.
So will this be the standard in two years when I have to keep my students learning when they are stuck home in the pandemic?
Jeez, they might never need to come back to school.

The Technology Boondoggle

I have been at a technology conference this week.
There are so many blogs, chats, photo streams, del.icio.us links and general content created around this conference that it is pointless for me to write anything except that it really was worthwhile as I am dead tired and should be asleep.
But I can give you the links and chat you up next time you see me.
(Ask me about Pageflakes or see if I can adequately explain Web 2.0)

Think Blue!

YES!

Think Pink

Steve Earle played his first Brooklyn gig ever on Wednesday night, at SouthPaw. The opening acts were Tim Easton and Allison Moorer (his wife) and Laura Cantrell (who lives in Brookyln and performed her first “proper gig” since giving birth five months ago.)

It was a very late night for me (a school night) I didn’t get to bed until 2:00 AM. It was totally worth it. They were all good and Steve Earle was in great form.
His theme was the upcoming election, the sorry state of politics in the USA and his general anti-war themes. Earle is a real connoisseur of historical blue grass and a self-proclaimed student of all things Civil War. This drove the performance and gave it weight. I was instantly transported backwards in time to the nineteen sixties and I loved it.
Some audience members walked out in a huff, though, when Earle started down this road,
“I hate it when Bush says we were attacked on September 11 because they hate our freedom. That’s not why we were attacked on September 11. We were attacked because we are friends of the House of Saud and friends of Israel.”
(Since this is Park Slope I’m thinking that offense was not taken to the Saud piece of that statement)
Tonight Danny Kalb is playing at Barbés. He’s really quite an old man now but I remember him playing with The Blues Project (which he founded) in the sixties. Live at The Café Au Go Go was one of the first LPs we bought once we owned a real stereo.
I’m on a sixties roll and I’m fine with that.