sudo life

Earlier this week, I found myself at the public library.  During my browsing, I ran across a book that had been recommended to me by a friend, so I picked it up and checked it out.  The book was Educating Esmé: Diary of a Teacher’s First Year.  I’ve been pretty busy this week, but tonight I couldn’t get to sleep so the opportunity to dive in presented itself and I took it.  This book is a relatively quick read, but also contains some emotional depth.

Esmé is a first year teacher at an inner city school in Chicago.  The diary entries contained in the book haven’t been censored for publishing, so it reads as a very authentic look into her perspective.  There are both great victories and terrible defeats, representing the full spectrum of experiences (including some very humorous anecdotes), from a student who stabs a teacher in the back with a pencil, to another student who brings their 2 year old brother to school because there’s no one to watch him at home, to a class yelling “play ball” after the anthem in a very inappropriate (but hilarious) setting, to a class coming together and awing the school with a literature show they put on.  I felt Esmé’s despair and helplessness when considering the situations her students found themselves in, but also her deep pride in their eventual successes.

Working at a university, I am largely ignorant of most of the issues confronting public school teachers, except for those issues relating to educational technology.  This book was very eye-opening in that regard as Esmé’s nemesis throughout the book was the one person who should have given her complete support: the principal.  It was disheartening to read about his repeated meddling over completely irrelevant issues, such as what name Esmé should answer to.  The principal really represents must of what is wrong with public education in this country today.

The hardest part of reading this book is watching the idealism fade away and a near-cynicism replace it, only to see the pride in her students at the end of the book.  About halfway through, I began to worry: was I reading yet another story of a wonderful creative inspirational teacher that would quit after her first year, or third?  According to the Washington Post, half of all teachers quit by their fifth year, so this sort of outcome would not be out of place; in fact, it’s all too common already.

About halfway through the book, Esmé makes the following poignant observation:

“In my opinion, the prefabricated curriculum and board mandates that are concocted to hide [inner classroom workings], can work both ways.  They can be benign suggestions to make talented investors out of teachers.  Or they can make it so people who don’t have anything to share can still work, since their scripts are made up for them.  Nobody really knows which is happening when the teacher closes the door.  At worst, mediocrity.  At best, miracles.”

Have we created a script that anyone can use to “teach?”  I haven’t been able to sleep tonight as I am coming down with some sort of cold, but I think it’s this observation above that will keep me up for just a bit longer.  If you get a chance, especially if you’re a teacher at any level, I highly recommend this book.

Book Reviews education

In the last month, I’ve heard several different people talking about The Shack, a book that supposedly has new ideas about god and what it means to have a relationship with it.  Last night, a friend loaned me his copy, and I sat down and read it.  At right around 250 pages, it’s a quick read, although the writing itself is not high quality.  For those of you in the know, think “Twilight.”  The writing is self-important, predictable, cheesy, and only thing good I can really say about it is that it’s sincere.  I don’t know how old the author is, but this is the level of writing I would expect from a junior high or high school student.

As for the content, there is nothing that’s really ‘new’ in this book.  It’s basically an anarchist’s reinterpretation of christianity using new age ideas.  The main theme is an attempt to solve the problem of evil by using an appeal to emotion.  There is nothing in the way of evidence or reason offered, and many parts of the book can be considered anti-intellectual.  The parts where it did mention something scientific, the author got it horribly wrong, including a bungling of quantum mechanics (to be fair, though, who doesn’t bungle quantum mechanics?), and the continuation of the idea of mind / brain dualism.

Important issues were brought up by the protaganist in the book.  The doctrine of original sin is re-interpreted as ‘humans wanting their independence and getting it.’  To his credit, the author seems to skirt the issue of hell, and seems to imply that everyone goes to heaven no matter what, and holds to the idea that justice and grace are completely incompatible.  That is a refreshing view from a christian, but nothing life-shattering.

Over all, I have to say this book really isn’t worth reading.  My evening would have been better spent finishing up Proust was a Neuroscientist (review to be posted soon).

Theology Book Reviews, christianity

Yesterday, January 13th, 2009, at approximately 10:07 p.m., my avian companion of 5 years and 11 months, Dimitri Shostakovich, died.  That is her on the right, in a picture taken last summer.

At approximately 7:30 p.m. last night, I checked in on her as part of my daily routine. Well, and partly because I liked to visit her when I was feeling anxious.  I discovered her sitting on the bottom of the cage with her wings spread.  I wondered if she was attempting to lay an egg, and grew concerned because I know that parakeets especially are especially vulnerable to problems when this occurs.  I did not view this as a likely event, however, because she never laid an egg in the previous years.

I pulled her out of her cage and examined her for possible problems.  There was something definitely wrong, but there wasn’t anything I could do.  She grasped by fingers strongly, and I thought that was a good sign.  I made a nice nest for her using old t-shirts and a shoe box, and she settled in, not moving much.  Every once in a while she would move her head and readjust herself.  Then, at around 10:06, she attempted to fly one last time.  She couldn’t get airborne.  And then she was still, never to move on her own again.

I watched her chest carefully for any signs of breath, hoping to see any kind of movement, but it was not to be.  Intellectually I realized she had died, but there was a feeling of detachment from the situation, as though I was watching a movie instead of actually experiencing the death of my dear friend.  The feeling has yet to leave me.

A flurry of thoughts surged through my mind in the following minutes.  The first was the irrational need to cover the body.  Even though it felt like I was rejecting the reality of her death, I still covered the nest with another t-shirt.  The second was more practical in nature: I am going to need to purchase a shovel.  I did not like that thought, but it was stuck in my head and would not let lose.

It was late, and I was extremely tired.  Yet, it felt wrong to just go to sleep.  I didn’t want to do anything really.  I went outside and went for a walk, trying to clear my head.  Ironically, when I got back inside, the first thing I did was head to her cage to see her, like I had done so many times before.  It had always been comforting to have a bird that didn’t care about money, or girls, or social anxieties, or school, or anything.  She would always climb on my finger and say hello.  She liked to chew on my eyebrow, probably because of the salt from perspiration. Many times, if I was in another room working on something, or watching tv, she would fly out and land either beside me or on my shoulder.  Well, there was one period in my life when she really liked landing on my feet, goodness knows why.  I guess the white foot mittens drew her in.

This afternoon I buried her.  Her body now occupies some space beneath the frozen ground in a local park.  She’s beside a tree that I’d like to think she would find enjoyable.  I don’t know why that matters.  I know it doesn’t matter to her.  For all intents and purposes, she ceased to exist the moment her brain ceased functioning.  The only meaning her burial has is the meaning I assign to it.  I suppose in that sense, it’s important.  As I handled her body for the last time, I was amazed at how soft she felt.  She didn’t feel any different, except for the lack of life signs.   The whole experience was surreal, and continues to seem that way.  My sorrow has only begin to set in.

At 10:07 last night, Dimitri Shostakovich turned into an ex-parakeet.  She will be missed.

Personal Friendship

There are many things that I’m working on posting, but I’ve been very busy finishing up preparations for the class I’m teaching this semester, as well as the content management system I’ve written for my institution.  This particular post will be about the end of an era – the chapters in my life marked by the geographical presence of my best friend Tara Craven.  This morning at around 7:30 in the morning, Tara left Kansas City headed to greener pastures and hopefully, a happier life in San Antonio, Texas.

I met Tara over 6 years ago, and it’s been a great six years.  We went through a lot together: hospital stays, road trips, kite flying, and so much more.  She’s been a better friend than I could have imagined and certainly better than I deserved.  She influenced my life in so many ways.

Saying goodbye this morning was very difficult.  It hasn’t really settled in my mind that she’s not here any more, but’s that the way big changes always are for me.  The reality sets in slowly, giving time required time to adjust.   I’m also left with a sense of ‘what now?’ that adds to the unease and anxiety I’m feeling about the start of this semester and my social situation in general.

I have other good friends here in Kansas City, but for today, for the moment, it feels like a very lonely place to be.

Personal Friendship

photo credit: TheArtGuy

This post contains BREAKING NEWS.

I haven’t been blogging lately, or keeping up with all my blog subscriptions.  While my Google Reader is telling my I merely have 37 unread posts, this is at least partly due to the judicious use of “mark all as read” button.  But why is this so?  Well, I have my final two grad courses for this semester to finish up this week and the next, and I”m also putting the “finishing” touches on the CMS I’ve written for my School.  But yesterday something was offered to me, and today it was confirmed that has thrown a huge load of work on my shoulders.  I don’t mind one bit, however, because this is something I am *really* looking forward to.  What is it?

*I* am teaching a class here at the University next semester.  My *own* class!  It’s in the catalog.  Students are registering for classes.  I keep pinching myself.  This is *actually happening*.

So what class is it that has my heart thumping in equal parts fear and excitement?  TE385, also known as “Teaching and Learning with Technology.”  Basically I’m going to teach future teachers how to be more effective students and teachers (and people in general) by utilizing technology.

I have many ideas about what I want to cover in this class.  I’m not the only person teaching this course; there are other sections, so there is a basic set of things I need to cover, and then we can move beyond that.  I’ve started the process of creating the syllabus, and the collosal size of this task is starting to set in.  I have a lot of work to do in the next month if this class is going to be successful.

Personal education, teaching

Well, even though I kind of forgot to carry on the last meme I was tagged with (sorry, Shalini!), I will go ahead and make my way through here.  The same disclaimer Epicanis supplied when he tagged me applies here.

Five Things I was doing 10 years ago

1. Attending my sophomore year in high school
2. This time of the year was district band season, so I was making the district honor band and actually practicing my euphonium.
3. Joining the Cross Country team.
4. Preparing for my drivers license examination
5. Working on Driftwood (my one time pad encryption program written in QBasic – How embarrassing!)

5 Things on my “To do” list today

1. Setup a meeting to get some data automatically fed into my system (done)
2. Have dinner with my friend Tara
3. Purchase sandwich bags at the store
4. Check my ongoing Chlorophyll experiment to see where I’m at there.
5. Check out an episode or two of this seasons’ Big Bang Theory.

5 Snacks I love

1. Cheese and Crackers
2. Popsicles (the sugar free ones taste better)
3. No-bake cookies
4. Sunflower seeds
5. PB & J

5 Things I would do if I was a millionare

1. Build a house with crazy home automation (and all those other goodies like a home lab, recording studio, two stories library, hidden rooms / passageways, observatory etc.)
2. Get my souped up Mac Pro
3. Visit New Zealand
4. Quit work and get my doctorate.
5. Purchase a Dodge Viper

5 Places I’ve Lived

1. Osage City, KS
2. Bennett Springs, MO
3. Lebanon, MO
4. Kansas City, MO
5. Butler, MO

Hmm, that one makes me sad…

5 Jobs I’ve had

1. Insulation Installer – I put the fiberglass insulation into private homes.
2. Sheetrock Grunt – Yeah, carrying sheetrock from the lumberyard to the job site.  While it was on the truck, all was good.  Other than that… not so much.
3. Work Study at the SOE – From my first day on campus here at UMKC, I’ve working in the same department.
4. Web Developer – This was a shitty job and turned me off to ever developing for other people ever again.  I still do it anyway.
5. Audio / Visual Tech – My Current position.   My actual job isn’t any like the title.

People I’ll tag.  This means you have to do this same thing:

• Tara Craven
• Evolved Rational
• My Life as Fanfiction Writer
• Peaceful Atheist

Personal Meme

I was excited to see that the H.M.S. Beagle people have launched an online version of their store.  This is the local science store where I bought my chemistry lab, microscope, and a few books.  While it appears that they could use some help in the design portion of their operation, they’re awesome for everything science related.

Science biology, chemistry, lab, resources

Back in August, my MBP developed some hardware issues that required a visit to the Apple store.  The Kansas City Apple Store happens to be on the famous Plaza, and very near to a Barnes and Noble.  So during this time, I ended up spending a large amount of time browsing books at said store.  As I went through the store, I happened to wander over to the science & technology section where my eyes fell upon a book with a very strange title:  “Everything Bad Is Good For You.”  If that wasn’t enough to pique one’s interest, the subtitle would be: “How today’s popular culture is actually makeing us smarter.”

Needless to say (but I’ll type it anyway), I was extremely skeptical.  Never-the-less, it was a provokative enough title for me to pick it up and turn to the first few pages.  The author, Steven Johnson,  begins with a discussion about a precursor to the modern fantasy sports games.  The story was engrossing enough that I went ahead and purchased the book, and once I was home I devoured it.  I just couldn’t put it down.

Johnson describes what he calls “the sleeper curve.”  His basic argument is that popular culture requires an increasingly complex involvement by the consumer to fully enjoy.  He supports his arguments with several specific examples taken from tv shows like “The Bachelor” and “The Sopranoes” and video games like “Zelda.”  I’m not much of a popular culture participant, and was unfamiliar with all three of these, but this did not hinder my understanding of his argument.  While I had started reading the book quite skeptically, by the end, I felt like he had made a good case using the examples that he did.  However, I do think his argument benefited from a selection bias to begin with.

One of my main criticisms is how citations and the bibliography were handled.  There were no in text citations.  The bibliography contained a snippet of the text where the information was used and then the source itself.  It’s a painful way handle sources.  One nice consideration was a section on suggested further reading, however.

Overall, this is a very worth-while book, and while I’m not completely convinced by his argument, I have to agree that Johnson is certainly on to something.  Published in 2005, it is available from Amazon.com, and other retailers.

Other Book Reviews Coming Down the Pipeline:

1) The Tipping Point and Blink by Malcolm Gladwell

2) The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

3)  Multiple Intelligences by Howard Gardner

I realize I’m a bit behind the times, especially with gladwell’s books, but I don’t personally know anyone else who has read them.

Book Reviews Book Reviews, education, technology

I’m an Apple fanboy.  I own a Macbook Pro, an iPod, an iPhone, and I’ve spent countless dollars in the iTunes store.  Sure there are a few things I really can’t stand, like the lack of control over my iPhone, but it’s manageable.  Overall, I’m pleased.  There is a distinct improvement in the quality of software when moving from a PC to a Mac, and that has been the biggest thing driving my praise.

However, I’ve been noticing a trend from Apple.  They treat their independent developers worse than microsoft does.  There is a very low barrier of entry into writing software for microsoft.  There are countless articles, podcasts, and videos available to help someone get started, but also help all levels of developer.  With Apple, it’s extremely difficult.  I’ve been on the lookout for even a book that helps someone get started in development on Leopard.  There are reference books available, and books that are targeted at earlier versions of OS X, but nothing recent.

But what brought on this most specific rant?  This posting from macworld, announcing that the videos from WWDC (the apple developers conference) had been made available on iTunes U.  That sounds awesome, and I headed over to check it out immediately.  Unfortunately, these videos are free, but only to those developers that have paid $3500+ to become an apple “premier” developer.  Compare this to say the availablility of all the Lang.NET 2008 conference videos for free. You don’t have to sign up for anything.  The videos are listed in a clean interface and you can just scroll and download.  Things can’t get much better than that when it comes to developer videos.

Come on, Apple!  Get with it!

Programming .NET, apple, Programming, technology, videos

Today is google’s tenth birthday, and as part of the celebration, they’ve made their search index from January 2001 available.  It is very interesting to go through and see the results for some terms.  The comments at reddit cover quite a bit.  I played with it for a few minutes, and then decided to google myself.  Sharing a name with an Actor tends to put a crimp in my google ranking, but never the less I discovered something associated with me on only the second page: My Young Composers entry.  I was surprised that it was even still available.

The page contains a picture of me from my Junior year in high school, and two musical compositions that I was working on during that time period, both of which has been lost to time.  Variations was my major opus for the year, but it’s the other work “Song” that I was really interested in.  “Song” is the title of a John Donne poem.  As part of my Music Theory I class, I had set the first verse to music.  The file is a midi representation of the Finale Music file.

What’s interesting about this work is that I did not stop working on “Song.”  Over the next several months, I set the rest of the poem to music, transcribed it into a different notation program (Sibelius), and entered it into a composition contest being sponsored by SMSU.  To my astonishment, I was selected as a finalist, and had my composition performed by the SMSU choir.  There was some drama about this, as the letter that informed me of this had sat on a desk unnoticed for several weeks while I wondered when I was ever going to hear anything.  Luckily, it was discovered before the performance.

I walked into the performance nervously with my family.  In the hallways, I started to relax though, as I walked by actual choir members rehearsing my music.  This was actually happening!  It was a feeling I cannot forget.  I sat in the back and suffered through the first performance of the night.  It was some unaccompanied solo oboe piece that gave me a serious headache.  Then the choir marched out and began singing.  The experience was overwhelming.

The final piece was a work for wind ensemble.  As soon as they started playing, I began to doubt if I would win.  The piece was really great.  When they finished, the judges conferred.

A side note:  If you click on my Young Composers Entry, you’ll see that one of my favorite compoers at the time was David Holsinger.  Holsinger held demi-god status to me.  I bought his CD’s, jumped at opportunities to play his music.  I kept hoping he would come out with a Euphonium Solo I could perform.  As it turns out, Holsinger had been tapped by SMSU to judge this composition contest.  My composition was being performed for my contemporary musical hero.  Could this night have gotten any better?  Well, yeah, if I won.

The judges returned and announced their decision.  The Wind Ensemble piece won the prize.  I can’t remember what the prize was; it just wasn’t important to me.  The big thing was that the piece was being performed by actual people.  Nothing was said about 2nd or 3rd place.  The event was over, and it was time to go.  My band teacher had come for the performance, as well as my Music Theory teacher (who was also the choir teacher).  At the time, I had no idea what to feel, but they both shook my hand.  A number of people in the audience did, but I was still feeling a bit overwhelmed and numb.

Suddenly, I found myself in a bear hug, then being dragged off over to the side.  As I came to my senses, I looked to see who it was:  David Holsinger.  I blinked, not really understanding what was going on.  He had a thing or two to say to me.  He didn’t want me to feel bad about the outcome at all.  He felt the piece had been incredible and demonstrated a lot of talent.  There were a few things that I could do to improve the piece (check the range of the soprano part, for example).  I was nodding my head, thanking him, and wondering if I could ask for an autograph.  I never did ask for his autograph.

In the following months until I graduated High School, there was some talk about getting the music published, but I never looked into it seriously.  Perhaps I should have.  I started school in the fall at the UMKC Conservatory of Music, but I haven’t finished a serious composition since I wrote “Song” (later, I renamed it to reflect the first line of the poem – “Sweetest Love I do no Go”).  I’ve started several, but haven’t finished them.  Well, that’s ignoring were silly things like putting “Green Eggs and Ham” to music.  I’ve done a few arrangements, but nothing too serious.  Going to the conservatory really burned me out on music.  I finished my degree in it, but it got to the point where I couldn’t stand it for a while.

Never-the-less, that night is one of my proudest achievements.

Personal history, Music, Personal