Stupendous, Indeed

Not content to sulk my way into the new school year, I invited my brother's family over for dinner tonight. They were just returning from a week at the beach, and so the timing was perfect, especially since Riley and Treat are off to college tomorrow and Thursday, Bill has business in Buffalo on Tuesday, and Heidi, Emily, and I will be in the library at school at 8 AM sharp tomorrow. Only Isabel and Sonic will be left to this life of leisure.

We had a really fun time, and a fun menu, too-- my dad's family recipe of tomato sausage sliders, served with fennel slaw, sliced tomatoes, and pickled peppers, delicious corn on the cob, and kale salad. We washed it all down with cold beer and followed it up with a South Jersey style peach and blueberry crisp and a variety of homemade ice cream, including a new one, cherry cordial.

We were definitely missing the other five of our family, but even so, I can honestly say that the evening took all the sting out of having to set the alarm in the morning.

Yeah, it Is

We're partial to Life is Good merchandise in our household. Each of has several T's, we also own pajama bottoms, water bottles, dog collars, pool toys, and a tire cover that bear that eponymous slogan. Oh, over the years there have been cynics among our friends wondering where the Life is Crap gear might be found, or criticizing the motto for being overly simplistic, or too optimistic, or just plain wrong. "They're just so bossy," someone once said to me. "I feel pressured to be happy whenever I see their shirts."

As for us, we take it as a reminder, an intentional way of looking at things, even when doing what we like and liking what we do seems impossible. Plus, they sell really comfy stuff.

Today, on our way out of the market, a young girl of perhaps 11 or 12 read Heidi's shirt. "Life is Good?" she asked. "It should say life is great! No! Life is awesome!"

We nodded and laughed and then parted ways as we turned to the parking lot. She popped up a moment later a few cars down from us. "Life is... STUPENDOUS!" she called.

"You're right about that!" I answered, glad for the extra reinforcement.

Buzz Kill

"Hey, did you see they caught a couple of sharks down at Point Lookout?" my friend Mary asked me yesterday.

I hadn't heard the news, so I whipped out my smartphone to discover the details. Two 8-foot bull sharks had indeed been caught just a few hundred yards from where we spent that idyllic day last Wednesday.

According to Wikipedia, the bull shark is known for its aggressive nature, predilection for warm shallow water, and presence in brackish and freshwater systems including estuaries and rivers.

And I was worried about the jelly fish!

Of the First Kind

I've been so busy complaining lately, (which according to an all-day meeting I attended today, is like a rocking chair: it gives you something to do, but you don't really get anywhere,  hmmmm... maybe I'll write about patronizing platitudes sometime) that I haven't had a chance to tell about the very strange experience I had the other night.

I was sitting on the couch around 9 PM, and the sky outside my window was dark; the days have grown noticeably shorter in the last month. I happened to look up, and I noticed an orange light in the sky. I really didn't think too much about it, because we live very close to both Reagan Airport and the Pentagon, so we have all manner of planes and helicopters flying over our house all the time.

However, there was something about this thing that was arresting. It may have been the way it was moving: slowly, so that at first I assumed it was a helicopter, but there was no noise, even though it seemed pretty close by. I shrugged it off since the windows were closed, but I couldn't stop watching the thing. Finally I went out on the deck to get a better look.

"Heidi! Get out here!" I cried. The sky was lit by four identical orange orbs, silently hovering just above the eastern horizon. As we watched, they began to glide slowly up and away, and then disappeared into the clouds.

We looked at each other. "What the hell was that?"

I dashed to my computer, confident that others, too, had seen these things and there would soon be many reports and an explanation to follow, but there was nothing. As I waited for the news to catch up with me, I searched the phrase "Weird orange..."  

lights in the sky? Google suggested, and I clicked to find out what it was.

It turns out that many people all over the world have reported seeing (and photographed and video recorded) lights seemingly identical to ours in numbers from 1 to 20, but there has never been any official military or government acknowledgement of any of these sightings or accounts, and no one knows what they are.

NO ONE KNOWS WHAT THEY ARE!!

C'mon! That's ridiculous.

Evidently, though, nobody else around here saw these lights the other night, or if they did, they have not detailed it in a way that I have been able to find on the internet, so I am reporting it here.

The truth is out there.

(Would somebody mind sending it my way?)

Professional Discourtesy

As I mentioned yesterday, our district is adopting a new grade book application. This one is designed to be seamlessly integrated with our student information system, which on the surface seems to be handy and, with any luck, labor-saving for those of us working directly with students. In order to prepare for the big roll out, teachers were required to enroll either in a face to face training or an online course to introduce us to our new tool.

Technically, people can get the training next week when we're contractually back to work, but that pre-service week is pretty busy, and so we were encouraged to do this over the summer, strongly encouraged, because they couldn't require us since they weren't paying us. Having a plan to meet this requirement was one of the things we had to do before we could "check out" at the end of the year in June. My plan was to take the online course, and I put my plan off until today.

To be honest? It's miraculous that I did it this far (4 days) in advance of the deadline, but I was putting something else off, and this seemed like a good way to do it.

Unfortunately, the class was excruciating. There were 13 modules, each with step-by-step directions and a video which was actually a narration of those same directions. There were four 2-question quizzes and a 7-question final test at the end. There was no hands on practice or other practical application and my brain was numb 30 seconds into it.

Perhaps if I could have accessed my new grade book, or a new grade book and played around with it a bit, these lessons would have seemed more meaningful. It was yet another example of adult learners being bludgeoned by some of the worst practices in education. Why do we do that to ourselves? It seems comparable to doctors treating each other with leeches. Oh wait, they don't do that. They use their best technology and efforts on their colleagues.

Don't worry. I aced the class, probably because mind-numbing and rigor rarely go hand in hand.

AND, I'll be sure to make that comment available in the public portal. (If not, you can always just FOIA it.)

Back to the Future

I so appreciate my friend, Ruby Justice, taking the time to read and comment on my writing here. In her last reply, she agreed with my concerns about the headlong embrace of technology in education and she ended her post with, I see a return of paper gradebooks in the future , too! ;-)

Winky face noted, I started to reply to that comment specifically, but then I realized that there was more to my thoughts than a sentence or two.

When I first started teaching 20 years ago, there were some computers in the school, mostly in labs, and mostly used for word processing, math practice, or social studies simulations. The internet as we know it was in its infancy-- it would be a couple years before I had a dial-up modem and an AOL account at home, and after that, I helped introduce such connectivity to my school by writing a grant for my classroom.

Still, it was several more years before they gave us all "teacher work stations," and for that time, my grade book was vinyl-covered and spiral bound. Each student's name was handwritten in the column on the far left, as was each assignment vertically across the top. Grades were entered in the light green grid before assignments were handed back, and in those days, it took hours with a pencil and a calculator to figure out quarterly grades for 90 kids. That chore alone put the "work" in teacher work day.

As such, I embraced the introduction of grade book software. In addition to the hours it saved at the end of the quarter, it was really productive to know how kids were doing as we went along, and printing progress reports with lists of missing assignments was a useful way to communicate with students and their parents. Sure, there could be some confusion, particularly between home and school-- not being present in the classroom meant, understandably, that parents did not always understand what was missing or why a particular grade was what it was. Most teachers were more than happy to explain, however, and the electronic grade book became an accepted tool. Personally, I used to say that these reports were like snapshots-- they were, by their nature, likely to change, or have changed already, over time as more assignments were completed and assessed.

Soon, we were sending home bi-weekly progress reports, in addition to our mid-quarter, quarterly, and annual grades, which was helpful for some students and their families, and therefore in my opinion worth the extra work. Two years ago, we implemented a system where we uploaded our grades every week, affording that much more access to any interested stakeholders.

Of course, we were aware then that many school districts had taken the next step-- making the teachers' grade books accessible, live, to students and parents, and instead of feeling inconvenienced by preparing weekly reports, most of my colleagues felt lucky that that was the extent of access to our records. I think there was a consensus that live access was a bad idea, not because we had anything to hide, but rather because any snapshot can be, at best, unflattering, or at worst, misconstrued.

This year we have a new web-based grade book, and it looks like it's going to allow live access. I'll let you know how it goes, but as of now? I'm in the market for something vinyl-bound, maybe with light green pages.

Should We talk about This?

I've been thinking a lot about screen time lately. A new book outlines the dangers of such a commonplace stimulating entity to any of us, but particularly to children. It seems that such a regular intense experience can become addictive.

No shit.

It also seems that the quick cuts from image to image and topic to topic may contribute to the rise of attentional issues we see in our citizens, both child and adult.

Again, is anybody really surprised?

As an educator, I have definitely exploited the engagement and convenience that technology offers. I have successfully structured assignments intentionally mindful of those qualities. In the last few years, I have received some push back, though, from families who would like to limit their children's screen time. I have responded to them just as I have accommodated households without internet access-- by offering minimum requirements that can be met at school.

My assignments are usually limited to some sort of prompt and then the opportunity to share responses and reply to peers. In the last few years, my students' enthusiasm for such tasks has been on the wane, even as their parents' protests have grown. The kids want even more bells and whistles while their parents wonder what's wrong with good old pencil and paper.

My prediction? This will be a pivotal issue for human beings. Our technology is changing us, but exactly how so and to what end remains to be seen.