Podcasts

So, a few people have downloaded the podcast of my performance at Reflections Café late last year, and a few people have requested more. Only, they’re not very clear about what they want to hear. Some of the requests come from former students, and one from a colleague.

I’m asking, therefore, for a series of comments listing themes or topics you’d like to see me cover in a podcast.

The comments button should be just under this line.

Weekend

    I went up to New Hampshire yesterday for the funeral/memorial service of ‘s father. It was a nice ceremony. did a lovely eulogy for her father, which helped reset some of her thinking about him over the last years and began to tell a new story about him. It was lovely to see that process in action, given all the hard work she’s done to make peace with him over the years.

    Thursday after I got home from cleaning up from the cancelled fencing match, I climbed onto the couch and fell asleep. had come to be one of the directors, and I felt bad about sending him home without ref’ing a match, but he was OK with it, given the snow. I was exhausted. In fact, I’ve been exhausted most evenings this week. I’ve come home from work and crashed on the couch pretty thoroughly. Last night was no exception. I slept on the couch from around 6:30 until 8:00pm, and then again from 8:30 or 8:45pm until almost midnight. And then I slept like a rock from midnight until 6:00am this morning.

    Got up this morning, put a load of laundry in the washing machine, and then sat down to write a half-dozen comments. Finished writing all my teacher comments, and then edited a few more. That task is out of the way for at least a few days, anyway. Now I get to write exams.

    I’m in charge of the ski program today, money and season passes and all. It’s not a bad duty: ride up on the bus, keep the kids in line, give them their lunch money and passes, and then ride home again at 4:00. I’ve also got church duty, but I don’t think I’m preaching today — double-checking, I’m not. Halelujiah!

    Hey, ! What are the chances I can bring 15 kids to your museum on Tuesday?

Fencing Match Cancelled

Six out of six, cancelled. Do you think the universes are trying to tell me something?

is OK, though, so everything’s copacetic. He was a great director.

Home Fencing Match

Tonight is my team’s first home fencing match.

All of them before this have been cancelled. However, this one so far is still on, and I’m both excited and nervous. It’s a scary thing, running a match for the first time. I’ve done it for my own teams, but never for a group like this before. It’s gonna be good. I hope.

Be well, all.

February New Moon Sonnet

Hail, bright crescent: earth sleeps inside white shell,
while diamond shingles both river and lake,
although hammerbeaks of woodpeckers tell
how insects and sees must begin to wake.
Snowmelt in rivulets churns slush to mud,
freezes at nightfall, as pure potential.
Red robin sings from the black birch’s bud;
ice-locked pond yearns to become torrential,
when cracks carry rainfall and heat to heart.
Warm days brightly sparkle, cold nights twinkle;
wrens build nests more engineering than art.
Snow sharply defines land’s every wrinkle,
yet sunset through branches begins to blur,
as beech births brachets, and elms start to spur.

This is four or five days late; my apologies for the delay. I was out walking yesterday evening, and the moon kind of surprised me for the first time in a while. I knew, intellectually, that moondark was last Friday/Saturday, but I hadn’t expected the moon to be quite so large, quite so quick. After two and a half years of writing these sonnets, it was nice to be surprised by the moon again. She sneaks up on you, and changes the way you look at the world, every time.

Eve of the Roman Tridies

Tonight is the Eve of Feralia, a festival in honor of the dead.

Thursday is the Charistia, a festival in honor of making peace with neighbors.

Friday is the Terminalia, the festival in honor of year’s end, and the rethinking of boundaries.

I invite you to do with this information as best suits your needs, your love and your will.

One Word meme?

from , from , by way of

Please leave a one-word comment that you think best describes me.
It can only be one word.
No more.

Then, if you are so inclined, please copy & paste this in your journal so that I may leave a word for/about you…

In other news, ‘s dad is not well and likely to pass this weekend. Please go pay your respects to her and give her support in this trying time. The snow has her stuck at home alone, and she could use the comments and good wishes.

Shrimp Étouffée Recipe

Ingredients

1 cup onion, finely chopped
1 cup celery, finely chopped
1/2 cup green onions with tops, finely chopped
4 tablespoons chopped shallots
2 cloves garlic, mashed
1 stick butter
2 tablespoons flour
2 cups chicken stock
1/2 cup Rotel® tomatoes*
salt, to taste
1 teaspoon fresh-ground black pepper
cayenne pepper, dash
1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce
2 pounds crawfish meat, langostinos, or shrimp
cornstarch for thickening (if necessary)

Directions

In a Dutch oven sauté onion, celery, green onions, shallots and garlic in butter. Cook until vegetables are soft but not brown. Stir in flour and cook until light brown, stirring constantly. Gradually add chicken stock, stirring constantly with wooden spoon. Add tomatoes and simmer for 10 minutes.

Add salt, pepper, cayenne and Worcestershire to taste. This should be spicy. If the crawfish meat has been frozen, rinse lightly and drain to remove extra salt. Add crawfish/shrimp/other to étouffée mixture and cook over low heat for 15 minutes.

Serve over basmati or jasmine rice, or Carolina rice. Serves 6-8.

* replace with spicy salsa with jalapeño peppers if Rotel are not available.

Web 2.0 Tools

lj user Dokuritsu pointed me to this video from an anthropology professor at KSU: YouTube – Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us It’s a stylish, elegant video with kinda cool background music, demonstrating how a variety of new Internet tools — tags, mashups, search, browse, XML and RSS — are changing both what the Web does, and what we do with it, and how we’re possibly becoming new people as a result. There’s a lot of background materials from anthropology and ethnography websites, because of the creator’s specific purpose, but this seems anti-Prime Directive, in the sense that this video is a creative act which seems specifically designed to change the cultural attitudes of its creators. It got to me, as well, that the video is licensed under Creative Commons rules. It seems more powerful, in a sense, that this elegant work was created with the express purpose of releasing it — letting go of copyright.

One of the related links on YouTube was this video: YouTube – Web 2.0, which allegedly is supposed to teach teachers how to make use of Web 2.0 for educational purposes using the entry on Web 2.0 from Wikipedia. This one seems more pedestrian than the first video, but it is still useful for understanding what is going on.

And then there are these Self-Replicating Repairing Robots, which are sort of creepy. Given that I don’t see hands putting the pieces on those little blocks, I don’t know whether this is stop-motion photography or not. Having seen these videos all on the same day, I think there’s an important connection here. I’m just not sure what it is.

I’m still considering this guy my hero: Sir Ken Robinson (on TED Talks) He’s absolutely right, that there needs to be more creativity in what I teach, and how I teach. There’s a tremendous amount of talent and skill in the world which is being tremendously squandered. I see it in my students, who know how to play guitar and sing and play video games, and I have no idea how to teach them to be creative, while still requiring them to write and read every night.

There’s also Wade Davis (on TED Talks), talking about the Ethnosphere (his definition is “the sum total of all thoughts and dreams, myths, ideas, inspirations, intuitions brought into being by the human imagination since the dawn of consciousness.” He’s amazing, too. I happen to agree with a lot of what he says… I just don’t know how to teach what he’s talking about in this school. But the massive die-off of languages he speaks of, the tremendous cultural wealth of the planet, is dying under the pressures of technology. Will Web 2.0 save it? How? When?

Of course, there’s the old Hollywood way of doing things, such these folks who created a Pop Star created a reasonably believable pop sensation out of practically nothing.

It seems that the Internet is revolutionizing communications in a way that no technology since Gutenberg had done. That it would start a Renaissance, and by extension a Reformation (and likely a counter-reformation). It’s uncovering frauds, in the same way that Martin Luther exposed the hypocrisies of Archbishop Otto. It’s raising up new stars who have mastered new tools, in the same way that the Van Ecyks made use of the new oil paints. And it’s presenting new risks that no one could have imagined even fifty years ago. One could argue that the pressures on nation-states today exist because people want to be connected in these ways, even as they fear these new connections. We’re seeing the acceleration of a conflict between proponents of new technologies and proponents of the old ways of doing business/government/technology/science/life.(Here I reference Steve Job’s article from earlier today, “Thoughts on Music”.)

But all of this means that education is going to have to change. At the moment, we structure schools, as Ken Robinson says, with maths and sciences at the top, Language and Literature and history in the middle, the arts at the bottom. But it’s not working. Kids are bored in school because school, as it exists now, was designed in the 1800s to teach factory workers; and before that it was designed to find priests for the cathedrals, and chancellors for the royal bureaucracies. Is something like DiscoverySchool the answer? Maybe Curriki or Wikispaces or FundingFactory is the answer… but somehow I don’t think so.

And of course, my school is spending huge amounts of money to block porn sites and Facebook and MySpace, and AIM, and other kinds of web-services. We block a lot of them from blogging (assuming they even know what it is), and we don’t encourage them to contribute to wikis or other collaborative tools (which might make teaching them editing skills easier).

How do you design a new kind of school? How do you create School 3.0, to take advantage of Web 2.0?

(Crossposted to my .Mac website).

Everybody’s doing it, why can’t we?

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