Brighter Flames Arrayed

1. Facebook keeps showing me advertisements for masters degrees and teacher training programs. “Want a teaching job?” “Degree in one years online!” “Earn your masters online!” Sometimes it even claims that I can get a bachelor’s degree in education so I can get a teaching job. It’s reasonable (but annoying) if I was just randomly bombarded with advertisements for degrees I already have and/or don’t need through e-mail (which happens a lot). With all these targeted ads on Facebook you’d think that they can actually target correctly—for example, not selling “hey guys you can get teaching credentials in a year” ads to people who have “teacher” as their current job.

2. One of my coworkers once worked as an encyclopedia salesperson. Talking to her recently reminded me how much I loved encyclopedias because back then there was no Internet. Being curious I wanted to see if people actually still sold encyclopedias nowadays. Did you know that if you Googled the word “encyclopedia” the first three results are online encyclopedias and the fourth is the Wikipedia article on encyclopedias? The current Encyclopedia Britannica has about 32,000 pages. At 1 cent a sheet of paper 32,000 sheets of paper costs about the same as three 1TB hard drives (or 1 netbook computer with a .1TB hard drive).

2.5. It’s been a while since internal one terabyte hard drives cost over $100. Now, if you look carefully you can even get an external one for under $100. I’ve been spending the last few weeks making and editing videos and I’m still nowhere near by 2GB Dropbox limit thanks to good lossless codecs. Maybe one day I will need a 1TB drive; but by that point they probably won’t even sell them anymore and the world would have moved on to 10TB drives or something.

Wing :: Nov.29.2009 :: Posts :: 1 Comment »

Last Saturday I carved my first turkey. I suppose that it’s some form of an American rite of passage into the dominate male provider of the family; a coming of age food-related ceremony much like eating your first chicken fried steak and surviving to tell the tale. Since I ate my first chicken fried steak on Monday. I suppose that this is American food ritual week or something.

Oh wait, it is.

Talking to the basil queen about Thanksgiving plans reinforced my belief that I don’t really like turkey much. I much prefer chicken and, if the Lord may see fit to bestow upon us this most magnificent of bounties, goose. Granted, the turkey I had last Saturday was really good—but that was made by a great chef using a quarter-million dollar brick oven and I’m sure that I’d like chickens or geese cooked in the same manner even better. In fact, all carving a whole turkey did for me was to remind me how long it’s been since I roasted a chicken. So I went, got a chicken, wrapped it in herbs, garlic and bacon, roasted it and will be having chicken for the next three days or so.

The whole idea of traveling during Thanksgiving weekend is, frankly, dreadful. Just like I try not to drive through Boston during rush hour I tend to avoid getting on the roads when everyone else is doing the same thing. Making a fourteen (or more) hour round trip (usually twelve, but the interstates are quite clogged currently) to see my parents is probably not the best use of my time considering that I’ve been working nearly non-stop for the last two weeks and am completely exhausted even without the traveling. The extended family never gets together for both mobility and drama reasons—I expect that the next time the entire extended family will get together is for a funeral—and that’s fine. I’m not really interested in spending a day with people asking when I’ll be expected to reach the next stage of the socially acceptable lifestyle and me telling them something non-committal instead of providing the possibly heart-attack-inducing truth.

You see, rituals are great. But when they cause more grief than joy it’s time to reevaluate the necessity of the ritual. Besides, I’m more of an efficacy kind of person anyway. So my Thanksgiving plans involve doing all the things that I need to do but didn’t have a chance to do in the last month. For example, cleaning my bathroom and updating my blog. Really, for this Thanksgiving, I’m thankful for all the people in the country who are busy struggling to get together with their families and overeating inferior fowls (more on that next time) so I can be left alone to relearn vector calculus and watch all those movies from Netflix that I have piled up.

Wing :: Nov.25.2009 :: Posts :: 1 Comment »

Reading Chris Lehmann’s blog post The Other Thirdteen reminded me of something that I’ve been thinking about for a while: we’re all failures as educators because we’re not perfect. In particular, I’m not perfect and that is completely acceptable. My personal failure rate has been about 5% in the last two years—that is, I am completely incapable of reaching out to about 4% (which is about two or three) of my students every year. There is really no trend among these kids; there have been representatives from every race, grade level, age and level of mathematical ability that you can find in a small New England boarding school. This doesn’t actually mean that they don’t actually learn the math or end up not wanting to do math. It’s just that I’m not their primary source for the learning and the inspiration.

Basically, I’m not perfect. But that’s why I have a diverse group of colleagues with vastly different teaching styles. I am flexible enough to deal with 96% of my students but there are things I cannot do well; generally I am more fiery than most. If I can’t get a younger student to consistently do his homework maybe my calmer, older, motherly colleague can do that. Or maybe a student who really, really needs applications I cannot provide will go to the staff engineer. The idea is that every single student I cannot reach has some other support network; and if she doesn’t have one it’s my job to find her one.

The real problem comes when there’s a student who the entire department has failed. This usually means one of two things. The student could actually be a poor fit to the school. It happens. Especially with more “different” schools like the one I teach at or the charter schools mentioned in Chris Lehmann’s post. And like Chris said we need to acknowledge it. But from my experience it isn’t just because of accountability reasons but that students who end up leaving a school provides an educational opportunity for both the student and the school. It’s not necessarily a bad thing. Students who leave a school (whether they want to or not) learn so much about themselves in the process (whether they admit it or not) that sometimes they may learn more from leaving than staying. Schools and teachers can also really learn from how and why the school didn’t serve the students who left; especially for schools that are constantly redefining / still figuring out what they are. It’s bad PR, sure, but in the cases of schools like Ginn Academy we really need to ask the thirteen kids who left what happened. Because there could be so much there.

The second kind of kids that fall through are the students that I worry about. If for some reason there isn’t a math teacher in the school they can connect to then it could have been a scheduling problem where they were never scheduled with a teacher they could form a connection with. Perhaps she had only one math teacher in the last three years and had no chance to experience a different style of learning. Perhaps two teachers of extremely similar style were scheduled in back to back courses and so the one student who needed something else but was too afraid to speak up never could learn anything for two years. Maybe there is a huge gap in staffing in terms of serving a specific subset of students and so “hiring a teacher who can work with students like X” goes in the long term planning bin. There is a problem and it needs to be fixed and it will be fixed.

Despite what all the movies based on True Stories and the articles on these passionate, charismatic educators that Chris mentioned on his blog may lead us to believe it actually takes more than one teacher or even school to reach every single student out there. There are people who come very close (my grad school officemate, for example) and perfection is a goal that should be reached. But certainly not with one person, or even one school; that’s just an amount of stress that one entity does not deserve.

Footnote 1: This figure of 4% is, of course, artificially low since I teach at a small private school. The number was higher in other settings but I’m not going to dig into it too much since there were lots of other variables too—for example, the fact that I had no idea what dyslexia was back when I was first teaching, much less how to deal with it. This is why you send your teachers to teacher school.

Footnote 2: In one case I was actually overwhelmingly inspiring to a student in that 5%. Said student not only did not get along with me but harbored a somewhat irrational hatred for me and studied for math tests essentially out of spite. Well. I’m not training Jedi knights here, guys. If spite and anger leads you to learn calculus, I’m all for it. Of course, one day this student is going to join the dark side and blow up the moon using integration by parts or something and it’d be all my fault.

Wing :: Nov.09.2009 :: Posts :: 2 Comments »

There is fire up aloft, there is fire down below
There’s fire in the galley, the cook he didn’t know.
Fire, fire, fire down below,
Let’s fetch a bucket of water, boys, there’s fire down below.

When I drove back home last night around 11 (midnight, if you take into account of what Daylight Savings time makes it feel like) things went pretty ridiculously wrong. I drove behind about three firetrucks heading towards a pillar of smoke reaching out towards the heavens at about where I live. That’s a problem. The good news is that my apartment was not on fire; the bad news is that what I suspected was true: the Putney General Store was on fire. Again.

The Putney General Store got hit by an electrical fire about a year and a half ago. Most of it had sprinkler systems install so only the third floor caught on fire. It was pretty quickly put out and the building was in decent shape despite not being actually usable as a store anymore. Being a historical landmark folks raised over $200,000 to try to rebuild it. Last night, at the point when it was almost ready to reopen, it caught fire again.

Investigators are saying that it’s probably arson. I mean, it really doesn’t take that much to figure out it’s probably intentional. First of all, there’s pretty much nothing inside this empty building that could start a fire. In general empty houses do not instantaneously turn into roaring infernos; especially after a day of rain. The fire also spread very, very quickly through the building and wood just doesn’t burn that fast on its own—the fire was seen three miles away and I could see the smoke from over ten miles away. Sadly, pretty much everything was destroyed in the fire so investigating at the scene will be hard.

Nobody was actually hurt in the fire. However, every single goddamn thing in this little New England town is made of wood. The fire could have easily spread to all the residential houses around the store—it did do quite a bit of damage to another commercial building—and then to the woods behind those houses are the entire county would have been on fire. Over a hundred firefighters from VT and NH was there which means that pretty much it took everything the local fire department could summon to contain this fire. That also meant that a very large surrounding area was understaffed for firefighting last night. The firefighters were amazing, though. Despite the fire being pretty much an unreasonable inferno they were in fact able to contain it.

Unlike most people who actually lived here for more than a few years I don’t have many fond memories of the place. I never really shopped there and it was more a landmark than anything else. What I’m more concerned with is that there’s a strong possibility that someone went and endangered the entire town for some unknown reason; usually when a store burns down it’s because of organized crime or insurance fraud but both those reasons do not apply here. I mean, if this was arson this would have been completely stupid and had absolutely no purpose besides causing grief and wasting both historical society and taxpayer money (oh, and causing extensive property damage to nearby buildings).

I’ve actually never seen this many sirens in my entire life. This includes the time when someone threw a grenade at a cop across the street. Driving into town was surreal. The entire area was cut off by fire department vehicles and so I (and the Guildford fire engine) had to take a detour. Well. What else was there to do driving home on a twisted dirt road with a pillar of bright smoke rising behind me besides singing Fire Down Below?

Wing :: Nov.02.2009 :: Posts :: 1 Comment »