Brighter Flames Arrayed

Lately I’ve been reading some blog posts about having a lifestyle and budget suitable for traveling. I don’t really see much of the advice as applicable because when I look at my job and my life situation I realize that, wow, my entire life is perfect for someone who wants to travel aboard for a few weeks or even over a month every so often. But I don’t like to travel overseas (something that I will address maybe later) so I’m pretty much completely wasting this opportunity. But you, you can learn from this. So here is my first ever travel-related blog post on why working at an independent boarding school could be a really good idea if you are a (or want to be a) teacher and a traveler.

If you’re familiar with boarding schools (and the secondary level, mostly) in the US you would know that our school vacations are long. Usually there are at least two to three weeks for Christmas/New Years and some two or even three week breaks in addition to the longer-than-public-school summer breaks. The main reason why boarding schools have fewer, longer breaks is logistical: every time students leave school is a logistical (and sometimes financial) nightmare for the school and the families. This is especially true for international students, of which we have many. While it’s the vacations aren’t during flexible times it’s nice to be able to take two or more weeks off at a time so if you do spend a week or two traveling you still have some time to take care of other things.

The independent school hiring season occurs between January and April, so if you want to take a long period of time (6 to 8 months) off to travel but stay in the industry it is in fact possible to leave a job in June and come back to the US in January or so to apply for new jobs and attend interviews. One of my colleagues did that at least twice, though the economy was better when she did this so she got a new job every time pretty easily. With the focus on globalization and diversity experience traveling aboard also looks pretty good on a resume or during an interview.

Then there’s the possibility of free travel in exchange of taking some students with you. Not every school do this but the place I work at offer trips (and financial aid for those trips) during Spring Break to various places around the world. Some of my colleagues are spending two weeks with about a dozen students in Peru right now studying ancient ruins and native wildlife. In past years my colleagues have done trips biking across Holland and building schools in Africa. Traveling with a half-dozen teenagers isn’t exactly easy but it is an all-expense-paid travel experience where you get to share your passions with eager minds.

Let’s leave the big picture and go back to my life. Currently, I’m not paying rent since I am required to live in a dormitory (and work some nights supervising it) as part of my job. I have the same housing available to me during breaks and the summer so I effectively have storage for all my stuff that’s paid for if I travel. (Another way of looking at it is that I’m not losing cash if I don’t live in my apartment.) This is a major advantage of working at a boarding school as opposed to a day school or a public school. If I choose to I can eat all of my meals at the campus dining hall and completely eliminate my grocery bills. Essentially it is possible for me to live with zero expenses most of the time—our dining hall does close, for example, during most breaks.

Being in Vermont also helps in that it costs very little to maintain my car. Insurance rates here are wonderfully low (I keep seeing ads saying “save $200 on your auto insurance” online and I keep thinking “how is that possible since I don’t even pay $200 for my auto insurance!”) and, if you are smarter than I am, you can find a good mechanic that charges a fair rate. This doesn’t quite apply to everyone and, unfortunately, most boarding schools are at places where you do want a car. Parking is definitely not a problem though if you live on campus and park there, though I tend to leave my car at my parents’ (who live closer to a major airport anyway) when I do go away for a while.

Basically, I am living a life where I can save a lot of money if I wanted to (enough to go around the world every year, according to this blog) and have long stretches of time to spend that money traveling should I choose to do that. I don’t, but many of my colleagues (who, unlike me, are not single and do have pets) do and they are spending their spring breaks in Europe, Cancun, Mexico and other places that I have no desire to go to. There isn’t much flexibility in vacation days when you are teaching (or working in a non-teaching position that has similar vacation time), but the upside is that there is both financial stability and large amounts of time and resources available for traveling that a “normal” job doesn’t allow.

Wing :: Mar.10.2010 :: Posts :: No Comments »

At some point during a faculty discussion Farmville was brought up and it was immediately dismissed since it is not something that our students would want to play since the graphics looked like they were meant for small children. That really scares me. Farmville, when I think about it, is much more destructive (and much less constructive) than games like World of Warcraft or Modern Warfare 2, which many of our students do play. And when you think about it it is so much easier to dismiss Farmville since it doesn’t look like a game that so many people over the world—and so many students in our school—would play.

In four years (from 2004 to 2008), World of Warcraft managed to gather 11 million subscribers (according to the Wikipedia article and some math). The New York Times claims that Farmville has 22 million players playing daily four months after launch. I don’t have the hard numbers to prove it (yet) but I’m pretty sure many more of our students play Farmville over World of Warcraft. For one, we block WoW access on campus but since we do not block Facebook (many day schools do, but we are a boarding school and do not) Farmville is easily accessible. Also, Farmville is free and World of Warcraft involves money, therefore (possibly) parental approval and a credit card.

I can argue that many games our students play regularly (anecdotal evidence, since I haven’t had time to collect hard data) have educational “redeeming” qualities. World of Warcraft teaches teamwork. Call of Duty trains reflexes and hand-eye coordination. The Sims, if you consider it as a simulation in which your actions have determinable consequences on a closed system, teach programming and perhaps ethics. Starcraft (we have a lot of Oriental international students) does all three to a varying degree. Maybe I’m a video game apologist. But no matter how hard I try I can’t really say that Farmville teaches anything of significance.

Being billed as a social game Farmville sure has very few “social” features. The two main social aspects of Farmville is “bother other people to get things” and “visit others’ farms to get things”. The former makes Farmville something of a pyramid scheme (like almost all Facebook games) and the latter, until a recent update, did not actually accomplish anything cooperatively. Even now visiting another person’s farm does not provide actual “interaction” and “teamwork” means “if you click on my farm five times we both get a very, very, very small amount of extra stuff”. Farmville also allows you to “gift” others with trees, items and animals but once again there is no actual social interaction in the gifting process.

What annoys me is not that Farmville’s social features are lacking but that it is marginally more popular than other, similar games that encourage actual social interaction. For example, Farmtown is a similar game that allows you to hire others to plow your fields or harvest your crops and by going to a central chat room and hiring people the player spends less time clicking monotonously and possibly even learn something about labor supply and demand. In essence, Farmville’s teamwork component asks players to put in more time playing to obtain small amounts of in-game resource reward (which, I must add, is actually not worth the time) or put in time to send unsolicited mail to other people so those others can spend more time playing. Games like Farmtown (and World of Warcraft) reward players in both a reduced time necessary to reach a goal and in-game resources when they work as teams.

Do I really have to go into why clicking on rhombuses to plant crops repeatedly is not an exercise in hand-eye coordination for young people without disabilities and is more likely to help them develop health issues instead? I look forward to the day when someone posts an article or paper on using Farmville as a physical therapy tool but I’m not holding my breath.

You could argue that Farmville is a simulation of farming and is a modern iteration of old educational simulation games like SimFarm with new graphics. That would be true except that Farmville has almost no risk involved. This is the main reason why I think Farmville doesn’t actually teach anything. A real farmer has to gauge what to plant crops and when to plant crops or what animals to raise (a local farm sends out chicken pre-order forms so they can decide how many chickens to raise each season) and planning a farm is a real, complicated economics problem. Since there are no weather, no supply and no demand there are only two factors involved in choosing what to plant: which crop makes me the most money/experience points and will I be able to log in to harvest it when it is ready. The only possibility of failure in Farmville is to forget to log in to harvest your crops before they go bad. Basically, if you log in everyday (which many people do) you cannot lose.

Maybe that’s why my students are obsessed with Farmville. If you haven’t noticed from the top corner of this blog I teach at a school on a big ol’ farm. I’ve asked students why they don’t just walk over to the barn and milk real cows instead of milking fake ones on their computer screen and the answer has generally been “but I did that this morning!”. You can in fact screw up real farming really easily; and it’s hard! Farmville is an idealized form of farming that involves no risk, no physical work beyond sitting there and clicking on boxes. And it still gives the simulated satisfaction of producing “food”. Of course, it doesn’t actually produce anything of value; I’ll excuse a student who needs to go feed real cows from work, but I don’t think I’ll ever let “I needed to harvest my raspberries so I couldn’t do my math homework” be a valid excuse in the classroom.

Farmville is a much bigger problem, I feel, than any other game out there right now. And it really scares the crap out of me.

Postscript: There is one somewhat possible redeeming factor to Farmville: using Farmville as a medium for visual art. Just like real farmers cropping their crops to resemble a picture of someone and taking an aerial photo of it Farmville players are using the decorative items and crops in Farmville to make pictures. Decorating a farm is a real draw to Farmville and is an outlet for lots of creativity; it is also a steady revenue stream since buying decorative items cost money and one quick way to get all that in-game money is by spending real money.

Wing :: Feb.28.2010 :: Posts :: 1 Comment »

Unexpected bonus teaching at a school in rural Vermont with a significant outdoor component: teaching basic concepts from multivariable differential calculus is actually rather easy. When students learn that level curves and gradient vectors are perpendicular to each other it makes perfect sense to them: if you’re going for maximum challenge you go perpendicular to a trail. Once they associate the x- and y-axes with east/west and north/south, respectively, partial derivatives as measures of angle inclination become pretty obvious. There are natural connections between surfaces and heights and mapping altitude with lat/long using a GPS-enabled device. For functions of three variables it’s easy for them to associate each point in space with meteorological data. Everything involving visualizing surface becomes easier when there’s physical association and memory along with it. In fact, if it wasn’t so cold out there I’d have class on back trails behind campus.

Having class right next to the fiber and visual arts studios is also helpful. You can do a lot of demonstrations with marker-on-fiberglass planes and fabric models of surfaces that wouldn’t be as three-dimensional even with the latest version of Mathematica. (That, and the projector in my classroom doesn’t do greens very well and it makes projecting complicated/shaded things rather difficult.)

Wing :: Feb.27.2010 :: Posts :: No Comments »

I’m not mad at Google Buzz because it wants to be another social network service that gathers stuff from me and splat it out all over the Internet. That’s awesome. My problem with it is that it may be a product launch that will actually reduce the amount of technological progress we make as a whole.

The immediate fallout of Buzz is that now we can no longer expect any part of a web based e-mail system to be private. It never really was; I don’t doubt that web based e-mail services have been selling information to spammers and we know that Google harvests message contents to show us ads. That’s fine. But to blatantly slap their power in all the users’ faces is not. Yeah, we know you can do this, but don’t rub it in our faces and call it a good thing.

From the parental/teacher standpoint a bigger problem with Buzz is that everything is automatic. With Facebook and Myspace there is a key component to a breach of privacy: you have to provide the information before it can be leaked to someone you do not want to see the information. Just like we teach our kids, if you don’t put it on your Facebook profile nobody will know about it but assume you will have no control over it once it’s there. Buzz is changing that game. Relevant data that you did not actively generate is now shared with others. The part that the Internet is focused on is that I can be “friends” (networked through a bi-directional edge) with someone simply because they harassed me and I replied telling them not to harass me. The most prominent case of this being that of a woman who gets harassed by men who think it’s cool to rape her suddenly having her entire contact list (including her mother’s e-mail address) exposed to all those people. When you have a software rollout that may result in facilitating capital crimes it’s a little more than an oops. It does immediate damage. Also, it kills trust.

This brings me to the reason that I absolutely hate Google Buzz is probably the same reason Google itself hates it at this point: it completely destroys trust in Google’s services. We’re on the verge of great technological innovation with what Google’s been doing. Google Apps is amazing. Google Docs is an exceptionally useful piece of technology. Many schools and non-profits have switched to or are switching to Google Apps from the traditional Novell/Lotus/Exchange/FirstClass/whatever models they’ve been using. But now that Google has demonstrated that it can and will create a gaping (physical) security hole for all 150 million plus of its users for the sake of a product that isn’t very good I wonder if sysadmins and administrators will continue to trust Google with Google Apps. I surely won’t; not to the degree that I currently do anyway. And that’s really, really sad because Google Apps is a great piece of technology.

Sure, not everything Google does was a hit. Take Wave. When Google rolled out Wave it was disappointing, but we can live with (or without) it. Some people liked it, some didn’t, the usual people whined about it, Google probably learned a lot from the launch. Nothing of significance happened. Great.

But when Buzz came about not only are people directly harmed by it but I’m afraid that progress itself will be slowed down because people who make decisions (and when you’re in the education sector, these decisions are about children) will now be less willing to take risks with Google. I doubt enough people will abandon Google’s innovations to actually make humanity as a whole go backwards in information technology, but some order of change down the line has just became negative and eventually we’ll feel its impact.

I’m not sure if any other company can have this kind of impact. Take Microsoft. If nobody trusts Windows 7 because it’s known that there’s some major privacy flaw built in we’ll just keep using XP. No big deal. The way Windows 7 handles everything isn’t completely revolutionary compared to XP. The same applies for software patches. Sometimes a new Office patch introduces a security flaw but, hey, just don’t download it and wait for the next one. It’s not like you really needed the patch to fix the garbled text in Turkish in the help file that nobody reads anyway.

Devindra reminded me of Cuil, which was described as the worst launch ever. Well, Cuil never did any damage. We poked at it, we laughed at it, and it was left to die. Some folks lost a lot of money and some folks lost a lot of time. But as a whole, society never lost anything except maybe for the ten minutes it took to make fun of Cuil displaying X-rated images for innocent searches. Buzz, that did real damage to both individuals and, in a less tangible sense, society, and it’s going to last.

Google is trying to change the game like it did with GMail and Apps and Voice and all the other stuff that I don’t use. When you say “I don’t trust Docs so I’ll just keep using Word and e-mail files back and forth” that’s a big step forwards not taken. I don’t think I can honestly defend Google anymore even when their software is the best for a situation because in applications like e-mail and document sharing privacy has a near-infinite utility value. And, well, I don’t like that.

Wing :: Feb.15.2010 :: Posts :: 4 Comments »

Last Thursday I discovered another link between Southern American and Southern Chinese cuisine: chicken fried pork, which is also called tonkatsu given the right sauces poured on top. This is exceptionally significant because Southern Chinese style tonkatsu (served on rice and without the standard Japanese tonkatsu sauce) is one of my favorite things in the entire world and discovering my favorite piece of Oriental food in a diner in rural Vermont is yet another proof that pork is awesome and transcends global political (but not religional) boundaries.

Not the pork I had because I was too busy eating to photograph my plate of awesome.

The basic idea of chicken fried steak/pork is that you take a steak or pork chop, bread it and fry it like fried chicken. That’s… tonkatsu. Except the local diner (and Southern tradition) puts homemade gravy on it instead of the sweet Japanese tonkatsu sauce. That actually makes it taste so much better. I am used to having tonkatsu on rice with no sauce but I actually prefer homemade gravy much more. Sadly there were no collards—the Southern obsession with dark leafy greens with salt in wet brothy goodness is something else I agree with—with my order like in the picture.

In order to understand why I love fried pork so much I’d have to go back to a story about my father like presidential memoirs do. When he was in Hong Kong he was a mechanic and repaired large looms in textile mills. He had his own machine shop in an industrial building that is now basically almost all offices and art studios since light industry has moved out of the city much like they moved out of New England mills decades ago. I spent a lot of time next to the machine lathes and not next to the arc welders doing basic office work and small prep work. Protip: If your kid has OCD having him organize your business receipts while preparing for a tax audit may not be a bad idea.

Now, pretty much every single industrial building has a cafe formed by knocking down several walls between adjoining shops/spaces and hooking up some basic kitchen equipment where heavy machinery would normally be. The one in my father’s building happened to be next to the rooftop of the garage/loading docks and so it was a swanky outdoor cafe with blue tarps haphazardly propped up with two by fours over folding tables and folding chairs set up on the rooftop. Places like these served large platefuls of meats and carbs for less than a US dollar a pop; located in a tower full of machine shops and small factories means that it gets mobbed everyday during lunch time.

Being six, there really weren’t many things I could eat there. Everything on the menu either contained lots of cheap vegetables stewed in (note: being six I have not developed a taste of vegetables yet) or had a sour or bitter sauce over it. Also, most things on the menu were meant for men who do heavy labor all day and the portions were intense. The solution: tonkatsu over rice with my father taking half the rice so the calorie count was once again something that mere mortals can consume.

As you can imagine a cafe in an industrial building with minimal kitchen equipment (basically a pile of natural gas tanks, some huge woks, several industrial sized gas-operated rice cookers, a pot of hot oil and no fear of exceedingly intense flames because everything is concrete and the chefs are as tough as the guys who carry 100kg parts up and down the stairs) is amazing at deep frying things. Places like this are also great at stir frying things or basically doing anything where being delicate is not necessary and intensity counts for a whole lot. Furthermore I’m pretty sure that they didn’t really follow all that many health codes so they could have put lead shavings into the food to make them more additive; who knows? This is where I developed a taste for breaded and deep fried pork.

And now thanks to rural Southern American traditions I can have fried pork with homemade mystery gravy (the best kind) poured all over it. Om nom nom.

Wing :: Jan.24.2010 :: Posts :: 1 Comment »