I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!

http://nbcsports.msnbc.com/id/36825542/ns/sports-olympic_sports/

Visiting team

I'm in Middletown, CT today visiting Wesleyan University. We got up here too late to really see the town. I applied here back in the day, but got waitlisted and ultimately rejected. I probably would have been happier (or at least less miserable) here than where I actually went, but in retrospect I doubt it would have made any substantial difference in my life.

We're staying in a very nice little hotel which I like because it isn't a chain. Ever since I heard that Stevie Wonder liked to stay at Holiday Inns because, as a blind person, he liked knowing that every room was identical, I've become averse to chains. I use them only when it's either necessary or when a chain acquires an idiosyncratic hotel and puts their name on it.

Even when I was traveling a lot on business I tried to do this. My favorite places I stayed were the Victorian Inn in Colorado Springs, which was a very nice bed and breakfast, and the Executive Inn in Owensboro, KY. I could, and probably should, write more than a little about my experiences in Owensboro, the 3rd largest city in Kentucky. They had a regionally famous barbecue place, Moonlight Barbecue I think. Their featured item was barbecued mutton. I never saw any sheep around Owensboro, even on the farms, so I kept asking why mutton. Nobody knew. They had a good division II basketball team there where I saw a guy who had a good NBA career play in college.

I liked the Executive Inn because they had rooms with Murphy Beds. Murphy Beds, for those who have never experienced them, are beds that fold up into the wall when you are not using them. In cartoons, they are prone to trapping unsuspecting folk who don't operate them correctly between them and the wall. From my experience, they're pretty harmless. The rooms are funny though because they have to leave space in the middle for the room for the bed to fold down, so all the furniture is arrayed along the edges of the room and when it's folded up into the wall there's a ring of furniture around a big empty space.

You can actually open the window in this room. Almost makes you feel kind of human.

The Global War on Fun continues

A friend sent me this schedule that they got from an actual school in the Philadelphia area. Somebody needs to take the entire baby boom generation and give them a proverbial dope-slap.

Senior Prom Schedule

Saturday, Month Date, Downtown Hotel

Senior parents: Here are some general details on this year's senior prom. Please contact Principal if you have any questions or concerns. 5:30 pm  Arrive at school to drop off bags for Post-Prom Party5:30-6:30 pm  Families are invited to take pictures of their seniors, friends and faculty.6:30 pm  Bus departs for the Prom at Hotel7:00-11:00 pm  Seniors at Hotel for dinner and dancing. A professional photographer will be present; payment is made at the prom.11:45 pm  Students arrive at the Designated Location via bus for the after-prom.5:00 am  Students depart Designated Location by bus.5:30 am  Students arrive at school.

I know, I know, we want to avoid drinking and drugs and DUI. And at what point are we going to trust the kids? When they're in college? Are you serious? I'm sure I'm in the minority, but I find this personally offensive.

Tweet this

Want another reason why baseball is the best sport? Nobody on the field has a whistle.

Live blogging ATT conference (finally updated at 3:00 pm)

I'm in the outer burbs today, attending the culminating "celebration" of the Awesome Teaching Techniques (not its real name) program. We've spent a lot of time and energy on the program, most of which has been engaged in trying to accomplish the goals of the program without participating in the program itself. The goal of the thing is to bring, to use their parlance, "21st Century Tools" into schools and into the classrooms.

The scene here resembles nothing so much as a science fair, with tables set up with decorated posterboards and computers. Will check back in soon.

Update 1
The science fair aspect of this has actually been kind of fun. Walking around and seeing what other schools and teachers are doing is kind of fun. For the most part, though, I've mostly walked around talking to people I already knew. Our table has gotten a lot of attention, because we had a nice-looking poster and a blue tablecloth. The table next to us is from a school for deaf children and one of the people is signing everything that gets said, and the schools are playing pass the microphone and introducing themselves. Everybody works at a school and the people in their group haves names and teach something and everyone is very happy to be here. We just gave ourselves a round of applause.

Now come the speakers, whose main goal seems to be to get people to sign up for another year of the program. We have an agenda, my favorite item being "Unconference Breakouts." If part of the goal is to make people look at the agenda and say "Huh?" they've succeeded. Oh, and later we're going to "leverage the wisdom of the crowd."

Update 2

There's a woman presenting now who finds herself very funny. Nobody else is laughing. Fortunately she doesn't have an unpleasant laugh. I didn't notice what the presentation was about. Probably something about introducing new technologies to schools. Nobody at my table is really listening to what's going on.

As usual, nobody is talking about students. It's all about teachers. I don't understand this. You would think that, considering that teachers have no purpose without students, the topic might come up.

Jargon watch: Islands of Excellence (meaning isolated groups of effective teachers). In this particular jargon set, the only thing worse than an island is a "silo," which means being completely closed in and unaware of what's going on around them.

Curriculum netting. I have no idea what this means. I think you use a curriculum net to capture unsuspecting teachers and force them to do your bidding.

Update 3

Just finished unlistening to the Unconference Breakout. I chose my group because unlike all the other groups that were sitting in a circle, this one was arrayed so I could sit in the back and read.

We are currently enduring what was introduced as a "short but powerful" presentation about something. I think it's supposed to be powerful because it concerns a blind person who likes video games (really), but the general rule is that when you refer to something in advance as "powerful," it usually means that the power is not evident to the listener.Or in other words, it isn't really powerful.

Willful inattention is a skill I've been developing and honing for years now. It takes, well, powerful concentration to totally ignore everything going on around you and focus on whatever else you want to do. I began to learn this when I realized I understood stuff that we were being taught in school faster than some of the other kids. So what do you do when the teacher is repeating his or herself? Until 6th grade, I would mostly disrupt the class, another skill I've continued to practice. But then after I got kicked out of school for doing that, I had to be more flexible and sophisticated.

The related skill is to be able to sound like you're listening when you're not. The trick is in catching key words. Listening to the way people speak, it's not hard to catch what they're trying to emphasize and listen to only those parts. That will give you enough material to give a non-stupid answer if you get called on.

"Your classroom will be a node in a network of learning."

Update 4

Having finished lunch, it's time to leverage the wisdom of the crowd.

I learned a new word: amenuensis. It means a scribe or stenographer.

Update 5

We are now doing something with the unappetizing name of "chunking." It involves writing things on post-it notes and sticking them on big pieces of paper. Now we're going to stick dots on the post-it notes. It's called "Voting Your Passion."We get to represent our passion with dots.

Update 6

Last time checking in from the eduverse. We're wrapping up, talking about our new collective sense of purpose and how we'll always be connected and we should all be Facebook friends. Oh, and the camp reunion is next fall at the Cherry Hill Bowling Alley.

Collegiality

I can honestly say that I've never spent a moment thinking about what it might be like to drop a child off at college. I still don't know what it's like, but today I got a first taste. It's prospective students day at one of the schools my daughter is considering attending next year. We've split up for the moment, and I'm sitting outside observing the activities fair. These are poorly named things, since there's rarely any sort of activity in them. They usually consist of bunches of people sitting around tables talking to each other, while other people walk around and see what kinds of food (I guess the food is what makes it a fair because there are no rides) is being offered on the tables.

After the activities fair, which was apparently pretty controversial in the way the school selected which activities would be represented, there were the requisite welcoming speeches and panel discussions. One thing I learned from the speeches is that the students here are wonderful and are doing all kinds of amazing things. Thank goodness!

This over the top achieveiness (that's a word, right?) was also well represented among the prospective students. There were so many editor-captain-president-whatevers that the dean of admissions had to stop for a moment to mention that there were plenty of students there that weren't the creme de la creme, being just the creme I suppose. This was quite magnanimous of her. Even with whatever kind of credentials inflation people engage in, you would think there would be a limited number of these paragons of high school accomplishment to be had. It's the Northeastern elitist version of Lake Wobegon, where every child is "above average."

After the speeches, the student panelists displayed similar enthusiasm from a different perspective. I don't mean to seem cynical about this, but the whole thing was pretty predictable, mostly because of the kinds of questions the kids were being asked. "Is it a problem if you want to do thus and such?" "Oh no! The school makes sure you can do as much thus and such as you want. And even if they don't, if you really go for it you can get what you want!" It was like reading a bunch of college application answers out loud. The better questions were more practical and specifically focused, like "how do you get an on-campus job?"

After walking around campus for a while, the prospectives went off to dinner with the currents and the parents who remained went to a Dean's reception, which had a misplaced apostrophe because it was hosted by a number of deans. And guess what the deans spoke about? All the amazing things the students were doing this summer! When she got up to the student who was going to Tunisia because she had been inspired by her intensive semester of Arabic, I'd had enough.

This all sounds more negative than I actually feel. The school is justly proud of its current and prospective students. What I'm negative about is the lack of imagination and originality in the way everything was presented. You'd think it would be hard to talk about all this great stuff and make it totally boring and predictable, but you'd think wrong. Somewhere in my archives (that's what I like to call the boxes in the attic) is a parody of the Wharton admissions speech, which I delivered when I was in the Wharton Follies back in 1980. The only part I remember is the passage, "You are the creme de la creme, the icing on the cake, the butter in the frosting, the raisins in the raisin bran." I've never heard it said better.

This is kind of awkward to say, but I'm afraid that taking this writing class is interfering with my writing. Not in the sense that it's physically stopping me from writing, or that I don't have time to write because I have to do assignments (I don't actually have to do the assignments. I just need to write). The problem is that the whole thing is kind of intimidating and makes me unusually insecure.

The whole idea was to get better as a writer, but really all I want is to be told what a wonderful writer I am. This strikes me as an unlikely outcome, not having anything in particular to do with my writing, which I know is perfectly competent, but because if you pay someone to help improve your writing and you give them something to critique, critique it they will.

So if I know that, you might say, then why does it make me insecure? To which I would reply, "Exactly." I have no idea why. I'll keep you posted.

Consequences or Truth

All over my neighborhood, city, state, country, and as far as I know, world, there are soon-to-be-graduating high school students in a state of paralyzing anxiety, agonizing over a monumental decision. Where do I go to college next year? And of course, it's not just the students. It's their parents, friends, relatives and school guidance departments poring over facts and figures and planning visits to faraway lands (okay, I'm exaggerating- let's say rural Maine) in the search for the Right Choice. Hours of thought and thousands of dollars, all spent on the first important decision many teenagers make.

For my child, college admittance was a mixed bag, as it is for most kids. The subsequent uncertainty, while different and I guess preferable to the pre-results tension, has yet to subside. Selecting a college seems like a big decision for a young person. After all, it's what they're going to be doing and where they're going to be for the next four years and possibly more. It's their first experience away from home, living somewhat independently, meeting new people and exploring new horizons, growing in ways nobody can imagine. For many people, it's the first time they get to choose their own path. It's the Biggest Decision Of Their Life.

Or not. Maybe it's the LEAST important decision. Here's the problem. The consequences of a college selection cannot be anticipated and, in fact, may never be known. Nobody can predict the ultimate results for any given person at any given school with any degree of accuracy. It's weird to think that you make this huge, exhaustively researched decision and you'll probably never know if you made the right choice. But it flows directly from the old nature versus nurture question that child psychologists argue endlessly over. 

Nobody knows for sure how much of what a person turns out to be is dependent on the individual and how much comes from their environment. And if we don't know that, given the wide range of parenting styles and home situations, how are you going to glean a difference from a bunch of fundamentally similar institutions? Does it matter if you go to Middlebury versus Bowdoin, Bates, Skidmore, Wesleyan, Hamilton, Kenyon, Carleton or Haverford? Even comparing any of those places to "dissimilar" types of colleges like Penn State or Universities of Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan, Texas or Florida, could you possibly assure me that a person's life will be fundamentally better, or even different, if they chose one versus the other? 

If there are no knowable consequences to making a decision, what kind of decision is that? If you normally make choices based on expected outcomes, on what basis are you going to evaluate this one? You simply can't, at least not in any scientific kind of way. If you talk to college students, my experience is that almost everyone likes where they're going to school, whether it was their original first choice or not. 

Then is this any more important than choosing Diet Coke versus Dr. Pepper? Of course I'm not saying that college itself is inconsequential; college is a terrific experience for many people. I'm saying WHICH college is inconsequential. And I understand that there are situations, like financial considerations or ultra specialized programs, where a particular choice matters. But I'd argue that these cases are a small minority.

So does that mean that it's not really such an important decision? I hated where I went to college, but maybe I would have been just as immature and miserable anywhere else (though at the time I would have told you I loved it) and pretty much nothing in my post-college life seems even remotely connected to the particular school I attended. Other big decisions, like finding a job, getting married, buying a house or having kids, give frequent and often specific feedback as to whether or not things are working out.

Ultimately, this is a case where, although the position I've taken can be supported by logic, I don't necessarily agree with the conclusion. Late adolescence and early adulthood are important times in personal development and for some, if not all, people, college is a key time of personal growth. Just because you can't know the consequences of a decision doesn't necessarily make it unimportant, but it does mean that maybe people shouldn't be fretting about it as much as they are. Because you never know.

Eyjafjallajökull

It's not like I'm pro-volcanic eruption or anything, but anything that gets the word Eyjafjallajökull into the news can't be all bad. In case you don't know how to pronounce it, check out the helpful pronunciation guide on Wikipedia (I promise, it's worth checking for a moment).

That's what I'd call ironic

I just realized that since I started taking a writing class that I've barely written a thing.

Themeless in Seattle

It's not that there hasn't been anything to write about recently. More like there's been too much. Life can get get very complicated very quickly around here.

The last part of spring break was not very breaky, though perhaps at times achy breaky, as it included extreme heat, college news for one daughter and early morning track practice for the other. All in all, it was a recipe for neither levity nor deep thought. However, here's a brief summary:

College admittance was a mixed bag, as it is for most kids, and the subsequent uncertainty, while different and I guess slightly better than the pre-results, has yet to subside. Selecting a college seems like a big decision, though the consequences of a college selection cannot be anticipated and, in fact, may never be known. Weird to think that you make this huge decision and you might never know if you got it right. I feel like my college choice seemed like pretty much a disaster, and my life turned out pretty good in spite of it. So does that mean that it's not really such an important decision? Maybe I would have been just as miserable somewhere else and pretty much nothing in my post-college life seems even remotely connected to the particular school I attended. Actual big decisions, like finding a job, getting married or having kids, very quickly give you a lot of specific feedback as to whether or not things are working out.

I'm writing an expanded version of that last paragraph, which I'll post as its own entry when it's done (and note the correct use of both versions of its/it's in the previous sentence).

Getting back into school has not been very easy, but the school days themselves are easier, since I only have 3 classes to teach for the remainder of the year. It's the time of the year where I have to figure out what we need to get done before we wrap it up. This sometimes leads to me cutting huge swaths out of the curriculum and focusing on a few key points, and sometimes has me rushing through whatever's left. I'm also torn between just doing math and spending time on other things I think are equally important.

The good news is that I'm getting back into biking. I'm feeling stronger than I did last year, which is a pleasant surprise. It's not that I feel like I'm really old or anything, but I've gotten used to a slow decline in some of my physical abilities. That being said, I'm a better skier now than I was a couple of years ago and my biking has been surprisingly strong.

I'm finally moving into the new school building. Because we were having a family health crisis at the time we moved out of the old building, all I'd done was throw everything in boxes and put them in the basement. While this is not that different from my normal paperwork management system, we got water in the basement and all the boxes got wet and one collapsed and I had to dig through another one of the boxes looking for something so it was a total mess. So now the stuff is no longer in my basement, it's in the trunk of my car. It has been in the trunk of my car for 6 days now. I brought one box into the office, but have not done any more for two reasons. First, the already-brought-in box is still sitting full where I put it last Thursday, and second, I realized from the funny looks that I was getting as I brought that box in that all the boxes I used formerly contained beer. Hey, I can't help it if the place we keep beer is right next to where the papers are. That's why there were boxes available when the other one fell apart. What was I going to do? Put the stuff in shoe boxes? I live with 3 girls, so there are plenty of shoe boxes available, but you can't put file folders in them.

So when I went to buy beer over the weekend, I had to move beer boxes full of school papers out of the way to get them in the trunk. Ah, the circle of life.

Toasty

Where are all the global warming deniers who were saying that all the snow we had this winter was proof of their position? In their air conditioned offices of course.

Call it a draw

I don't know much about Easter. I know what it commemorates kind of, but I don't really know what the actual ritual, as opposed to the bunny-related ritual, is all about. I guess people go to church, have dinner, and maybe barbecuing Peeps.

My only real engagement with it is an Episcopalian friend always calls me to remind me of my ancestral responsibility for the killing of his Lord. I always reply that had we not done him that service, that he and his people would still be worshipping with the likes of us. And they would have missed out on centuries of fun persecuting God's chosen people.

What I learned from watching 90210

I knew the California education system was in trouble. What I didn't realize was that graduation rates had fallen so far that all the attractive but stupid 25 year-olds were still in high school.

TSA question of the day.

Is peanut butter a liquid? Why can't I take it through airport security?