Selfie

There were five minutes left before lunch when a small group of students gathered around my desk. They were finished their work and excitedly looking at some of the writing challenge prizes that they might win next week. They were also examining the interesting doodads I have. They love my word a day calendar, my twenty year egg, my Zen wishes box.

I was paying a little less attention to them, perhaps than I should, caught up as I was, in monitoring and commenting on their classmates' fiction pieces in progress. I heard a roar of laughter and then a guilty giggle. "We took a selfie with your phone!" one student immediately confessed. "Sorry."

Yes, my phone, too, had been sitting on my desk, and no, it wasn't locked.

My first reaction was to be annoyed, very annoyed. "Give me that!" I demanded. They handed me the phone. I looked at the screen.

How could anyone stay mad at that? What an epic portrait of exuberance!

Also-- how did that even happen without my noticing?

AND, they promised it would never happen again.

The Romance

"It just makes me so sad," a friend of mine said yesterday. She had just finished a story about her sister who had confided that she was no longer in love with her husband; she wasn't really unhappy, and she had no plans to leave, she simply accepted that the passion was gone.

Certainly relationships change over time, and of course it can be worrisome. Just this evening Heidi came downstairs in the outfit she plans to wear to school tomorrow. "How does this look?" she asked. 

I glanced up from the cutting board. "Great!" I assured her.

"What would you think if you didn't know me?" she asked. It is a question I have answered many times before.

"Well, the blue in your sweater really makes your eyes pop," I answered, "so I would think, who is that with those pretty blue eyes and that great smile?"

"What would you do to get me?" she said.

I didn't hesitate. "I would find you the perfect dog, cook you all the vegan food you wanted, make fresh juice every morning, and pack your lunch every day," I replied.

She hugged me. "That would do it!" 

Auotbiography of a Student

When she wakes up in the morning, she is excited to go to class, mainly because she will spend the day with her friends. Lunch and the other breaks are definitely her favorite part of the day. In class, she is alert when she knows she might be called on and could probably answer a few questions correctly, and she participates good-naturedly in the group activities, but she is somewhat distracted by what she has to do once she leaves for the afternoon. To be honest? Next week most of the content covered will be a hazy memory.

Careful, It Bites

I heard a fascinating piece on the radio this morning about using statistics to help find missing aircrafts. Of course it was part of the flight 340 coverage, but the specific case they cited was the 2009 Air France plane that disappeared in the South Atlantic. It seems that using Bayes' Theorem, a statistical model that can compute a likely outcome when there are many competing variables (like where a missing plane might be), can be helpful.

Coincidentally, I also read an article today about a company that plans to use the data gleaned by tracking kids' responses to computer programs to develop a complete educational profile and action plan for every student. Education happens to be today the most data-mineable industry by far,” says their CEO in this video. "Every single thing in education is correlated to something else."

No doubt, they, too plan to use some iteration of Bayes' ideas to develop their automated response to students' needs. To many, that approach may sound ideal, but Arnold Barnett, a statistician at MIT, included this disclaimer in the radio piece this morning, "Bayes Theorem can't find the plane, period. It can, at best, change the odds."

And in fact, when they applied the theorem to the Air France flight five years ago, they "eliminated huge swaths of ocean floor because nobody heard a signal from the plane's black boxes. But it turned out, against the odds, both of the black boxes were damaged." It took two years to find that plane.

In the words of Colleen Keller, the mathematician working on that case, "Sometimes the probabilities will turn around and bite you."

Look out kids!

Heaven Forbid

"How come the fourth quarter is so much longer than all the others?" a student asked me today when I mentioned that we would be officially three-quarters of the way through our school year in less than a week.

"It's not," I explained, "but we do have spring break in a few weeks, and that adds a little time."

"Really?" She looked at me quizzically. "Isn't it, like, four months?"

"No!" the whole class cried.

"It's not four full months, " I told her as her peers practically writhed in agony at the very thought. "We have just a week in March, then April, May, and part of June."

"Oh," she shrugged, "I thought we went to July."

Daughters of Triton

I recently read that, in what seems to be a trend these days, Sofia Coppola will direct a live-action version of The Little Mermaid. It is rumored to be closer to the original Hans Christian Anderson story, and so much darker than the 1989 Disney cartoon. A screen writer is quoted as saying, it is so beautiful and exquisite and painful, so we absolutely have to have the original ending.

Twenty odd years ago I found myself on a spacious front porch in suburbia with my brother, sister, and our cousin, Sandy. All the outdoor furniture had been pushed aside and a fisher-price cassette player stood at attention on the top step, as we did too. Sandy's 7-year-old daughter, Jennifer, was about to perform an interpretive roller skate routine to the soundtrack of The Little Mermaid.

It was a very expressive performance, and once I got the giggles out, it kind of made me consider the movie in a new light. Personally, I did not find the story of Ariel very moving, but it was plain that Jennifer felt differently. If that resonance was representative of her generation, I'm sure the new, grown-up, movie will be a big hit.

Jennifer is a successful consultant these days, having earned her MBA from Wharton a couple of years ago, but you better believe that doesn't stop us from teasing her about the goofy stuff she did when she was a kid. That little skate show, so beautiful and exquisite and painful, is right at the top of the list.

'Cause that's what cousins are for.

Sunrise, Sunset

We took advantage of the springtime temperatures today to go for a walk. The National Mall and Tidal Basin were packed with like-minded folks, so on a whim I headed over to Haines Point, even though I hadn't been there in years.

IS this the pathway that I walked on?
Is this the place I rode my bike?

It was easy enough to find parking over near the NPS headquarters, although a golf ball from the public course across the way landed just a few yards from our car as we pulled in. We walked a short way over to the one-way road that horseshoes around the point and then crossed to the water.

I don't remember growing older.
When did it?

There was a clear high tide line in the grass leading down to the sidewalk that leads along the river. Obviously the point had been flooded over the winter. The cement of the walk way was in terrible condition. Huge gaps revealed the rebar and yawning holes beneath. Even so, there were quite a few other people strolling and fishing.

When did it get to be so broken?
When was it ever such a hike?

As we picked our way along the uneven trail, I was anxious to get to the end of the point, even though I knew The Awakening was long gone. Despite the beautiful weather and cheerful company, it started to seem like we would never get there. Finally we spied a playground and picnic area with lots of families enjoying the first real evening of spring. There the path turned back toward town, and we followed it back to our car as the sun sank lower in the western sky to our lefts.

Sunrise, sunset
Sunrise, sunset
Swiftly flow the days