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Via Facebook: Rules: You are supposed to write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you.

1. My mother is dying of pancreatic cancer.
2. My mother’s father died when he was four years younger than my mom is now, and my mom was the same age that I am. Saddening as that is, it helps me know that for every bit as difficult as this time is for our whole family now, we will make it through together.
3. While visiting my family this week, I learned that in four generations of my mom’s family, someone has developed some form of cancer.
4. I’m usually not this maudlin; it may surprise some people who know me well, but my mom has described me as “the cheerful one in the family.”
5. I love travel, and moving to new places. If I could practically live somewhere new every year, I probably would. If nothing else, it would cure me of my inherited tendency to acquire too much junk.
6. I love living in Seattle, it’s a beautiful city, especially from the air. Flying into Seattle feels like coming home, in a way that no place I’ve lived in before has.
7. I want to learn at least two other languages; it doesn’t really matter which ones, it’s simply a personal challenge. And no, computer languages don’t count.
8. I miss acting, and the theatre in general. Though I was only ever an indifferent actor, and lacked the total commitment to make a career out of it, some of my dearest friendships were formed around the stage.
9. My two most coveted roles are the Pirate King in The Pirates of Penzance (sorry Lumpah, though I loved our duets of O False One!, I’m too old to play Frederick, but you’ll always be the perfect Ruth), and Harold Hill in The Music Man. The Russian in Chess would also be on this list, but I don’t have the range, I’d have to settle for Molokov.
10. I’m a sucker for liturgical choral music. The Thompson Alleluia, the Biebl Ave Maria, and the Barber Agnus Dei are still heart-stoppingly beautiful even though I’ve heard or sung each of them hundreds of times.
11. In high school, I was on the competitive speech team, and I competed in a curious event call Extemporaneous Programmed Reading. Half an hour before the event, you were given an undisclosed piece of literature, and in that time had to read it, edit it down to a seven-minute speech, write an introduction, and dramatize it to a judge. The slacker’s perfect event, because I did close to zero preparation in the weeks before competition.
12. This event introduced me to poetry in a serious way for the first time (one of the three rounds each competition was usually poetry) and though I don’t read as much as I’d like these days, I still love Tennyson, T.S. Eliot, and Whitman. But I studied far too much Robert Frost in 6th grade to really enjoy him that much anymore.
13. I want to learn how to sail a ship, and to someday sail from Seattle to Santa Barbara to visit Kelli’s family.
14. When I’m home alone, which is rare, my evening ritual often involves gin & tonic, Miles Davis, a thick book, and a warm fire.
15. My dream home has Henry Higgins’ library from My Fair Lady.
16. I’d like to open a bookstore with an attached cafe that could provide all of the above, but I think Kelli would be afraid I’d never come home.
17. I’m married to the Coolest Chick in the World.
18. I am a Grade ‘A’ nerd and serious sci-fi/fantasy/comics/anime/manga/roleplaying fan, and though my wife respects and appreciates that, I don’t think she’ll ever understand it. To be fair, I don’t think I’ll ever really understand what drives her to run marathons.
19. Many people don’t understand why our marriage works. I could write a book about it, but it boils down to this: we spent 20 years being indivduals with our own lives, and marriage hasn’t changed that. Our lives intersect more often than not now, but we each respect when the other needs to go do their own thing.
20. Exception to the rule: my evening routine is missing a cat. A concession to the greater good.
21. When given a choice between a movie made before 1985 and one made after, I’ll probably choose the former.
22. I hope to instill in my children a love of old movies, old books, old buildings, old roads, and old songs.
23. I am as proud of my son as any father, but I fear he has inherited my introversion. Hopefully his mom’s genes will carry the day.
24. I’m constantly amazed at parents who think that they can practically ignore their children and then expect them to listen or behave themselves.
25. The responsibility of being a parent still frightens me a little. We’re molding not just their lives, but the lives of their families. When you see an obnoxious child, look not only to the parents, but also to the grandparents.

Uncategorized

“The teacher’s job is very simple. It’s to help the children ask the right questions.”

My father called me today for technical help. First because he was adding images to a Word document, and wanted to wrap the text around it, and the second time because he was having trouble putting the resulting document on a CD. Operations that, because Word and Windows have lots of power but little consistency in how things are done, were difficult for him to intuit how to deal with.

Afterward, my co-worker Sandra and I were talking about the technology generation gap. Her parents have computer science degrees, but she still had to convice her mother that just entering her credit card on a website didn’t mean she was buying the product.

I made the observation that it was surprising how often you find product makers “dumbing down” for children, when children are often most able to figure out how stuff works. Dillon, for example has a new toy music player, an early Christmas gift from Grandma Pat to keep him occupied on the flight back to my parents house. He loves it, and it didn’t take him long to figure out which buttons switch songs and which button makes the music start. He still has trouble (he’s not even two, after all), but he grasps the basics, even if the can’t always figure out the right combinations.

Sandra, in response, sent me an interview with an India physicist (not an educator) who launched an experiment with poor, mainly illiterate kids in a New Dehli slum, and found that, despite their poverty, the children were surfing the web and drawing pictures, and once they were shown the thing could play music, hunting down all the Hindu music they could find, all on an English language machine.

I’m not a teacher, even though my whole immediate family and half of my other relatives are educators at one level or another. So I’m often made aware of how out of touch I am with modern teaching. The two things I hear complained about the most are:

• There are too many incompetent, ineffective, and/or apathetic teachers
• There are too few resources for the students to learn from

It’s pretty clear to me that these two are related. Teachers, particularly in the public school system, are actually the least expensive resource (human or otherwise) in a school’s budget. They’re usually the most visible, most replacable, and the easist to blame when things go wrong.

Materials for the students, like books and computers, are expensive, take expensive physical space to store, and are more rapidly obsolete, and so expensive to keep current. Naturally, given this tradeoff, you’re going to end up with lots of questionable teachers, and little for the teachers to teach with.

The Hole In The Wall article, aside from demonstrating quite convincingly how children have a natural desire and talent for soaking up information, argues that the answers to better education are more resources, better access to information, and fewer teachers. Fewer total teachers, and more of the right kinds of teachers that know how to direct a child’s natural curiousity.

Now, there’s a world of difference between functional skills like operating a computer, and academic knowledge usually covered in classrooms. The article has answers for that too, but even without that, remember the teachers you learned the most from? For me, it was not the ones that said, “This is the way it is.” They had nothing for me that I couldn’t find in a book. The ones that I learned from are the ones that asked me, “What can you find out about this?” and had me go look for myself.

I can only hope that Dillon has the opportunity to explore the world he lives in, to ask his own questions, to find his own path, rather than having his world shaped and set for him. There’s no greater source of creativity and imagination than in children, and no better way to discourage them than tell them, rather than ask them.

“… by the time we are 16, we are taught to want teachers, taught that we cannot learn anything without teachers.”

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Kelli is encouraging me to blog more. While in theory I agree, the geek in me is always more interested in poking around on the site itself than adding any less-than-insightful content. So, an-upgrading we will go.

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From Muriel:

Please leave a one-word comment that you think best describes a quality that you and I have in common. Then feel free to copy and paste this in your own journal to collect responses from your own friends list.

I’m currently ignoring the fact that I have six top 5 lists to finish. So sue me.

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Yikes! Only two comments, and both decided to hit me with three lists. Er, this is going to take a while. But here goes the first:

Top 5 Reasons I’ve Put Up With Kelli for 5 years and eight months (give or take a couple of days):

Read more…

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Choose Your Own Top 5 List: Post a topic, list, category, whatever, in the comments, and I’ll post the top 5 according to me. Then post this offer in your own journal.

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Five Antonio Salieris won’t produce Mozart’s Requiem. Ever. Not if they work for 100 years. –Joel Spolsky

Quotes

From Slashdot: The Wall Street Journal has an article about Amazon offering the Complete (and they mean complete) Penguin Classics. I must say I share the sentiment of the reviewer who wrote:

“I would easily and gladly send for them this minute, thrill at doing so, eagerly await their arrival, only to be shot dead by my wife when she found out I’d ordered them.”

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Kelli decided we needed a treat for Father’s Day, and for the first time we left Dillon with a babysitter that was not related to one of us. It was good for us to get out on our own again, and we had a fabulous dinner.

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Wow. I’m shocked.

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