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30 Days of Blogging: Day 14

Teaching computers in a middle school is never an easy job. It’s not so much the crazy kids or the behavior problems, it often getting the right mix of teaching something that is challenging enough for the more engaged students without losing the less engaged students. It can also be about creating a curriculum that other computer teachers, who may not be as “into” computers, can handle.

I often find myself thinking of some exciting and challenging material that I think the students can handle, only for it to be way over their heads or too hard when it comes to the assignments. I can often adjust the assignments as we go but for some, I feel like I have lost them and they are turned off to learning some of these cool things. Then getting my fellow teachers on board with teaching some of this material can really be a challenge if they are not computer geeks.

This year particularly I have felt worn out over teaching the curriculum that we are trying to agree to and I don’t look forward to the future. Every time I try to inject some real 21st century skills into what we teach I get shot down as “they need to learn to keyboard” or “they need to learn to write business letters” or something else along those lines. It’s only been recently that I have won the battle to teach coding in one of our classes. But even that has only been a partial victory since the class is called Creative Computers so that the other teachers are free to teach things other than coding.

In the meantime I have students who want to learn to animate, 3D model, design games and a whole host of other computer skills that we can’t seem to build into our curriculum. One of the things that I would really like to work on is developing a class that is totally project based so that the students can produce a real tangible product when they are done and learn some real computer skills in the process.

30 Days of Blogging: Day 13

Not sure why but I have always been wary of the number 13. I used to stay home on Friday the 13ths, and I tried to avoid anything that had a 13 in it. For my 30 days of blogging, this is my 13th entry and I thought of skipping it so that I wouldn’t have to use it, but I know this is an irrational fear and not grounded in reality.

What is strange is that I have been afraid of it since I was a kid and before I had any kind of context surrounding it. I have thought that perhaps this is a holdover from a previous life. Perhaps the number 13 had something to do with my death in a previous life or perhaps it is something that I need to resolve before I can ascend to be  more enlightened. What is also strange is that both of the important women in my life were both born on the 13th. There does seem to be some connection there someplace.

The only time I broke a bone was on Saturday the 14th which was close enough to Friday the 13th to give me pause. And although I can’t be sure I think the only time I have gotten stitches was on a Friday the 13th. It’s weird but I am always paying attention when a 13 comes to call.

30 Days of Blogging: Day 12

Today was a cold December day so I tried to stay inside as much as I could. I still needed to get my outdoor lights hooked up which I did but froze my fingers off. It wasn’t cold enough that I had to be careful touching anything metal, but it was pretty close. But the lights are hooked up now and they are a Dawn-to-Dusk variety so they will stay on all night and turn themselves off in the morning. I’ve thought about taking them off the switches that they are currently on, but I figure there may be a time when we want to shut them completely off.

The next thing that needed to get done was getting my portable hard drive with wifi set up. It’s the My Passport Wireless Pro by Western Digital and it has been an awesome gadget. I have put all most all of our DVDs, music, ebooks and even photos on it and we take it with us when we travel so that the kids have something to do in the truck. Each kid can watch whatever movie they want to watch or listen to whatever music they like and it’s all available no matter if we are traveling down the road or staying at a hotel. Luckily I have enough content right now to satisfy all the age levels of my kids but I can see that as they get older they may want more diversity. The device also has Plex built in so I would like to get it set up so that it can be our Plex server for our house.

The next thing we had to do was get our Christmas tree set up. Luckily it is a artificial tree so we just get it out of the box, plug it in and put the ornaments on and it’s done. We do it as a family so it is kind of fun working on it and Maya is still pretty excited about getting it done. I put the tree on a Belkin wifi plug so we can control it with an app and I can automate it.

Overall not a bad day and we got a lot done.

30 Days of Blogging: Day 11

Well after just 10 days I finally missed a couple. I knew that Thursday would be tough since I had to take pictures for a boys basketball game and those usually run pretty late. So I needed to do my blogging either after school or before dinner, neither of which happened. Then I missed Friday too which was also tough because I had to take pictures during the school play. Again this was a late night affair and I had to run some errands before we left.

So I missed two days, but I’m going to keep going because I’m not always sure that these 30 day challenges are always consecutive. I can still keep going and complete 30 days of blogging, it will just take 32 days from when I started. I think it is assumed that these challenges will be 30 consecutive days but my goal is to do the task for 30 days so that it becomes a habit or that I can incorporate it into my daily routine. If I can keep going for the entire 30 days then I feel that I can still incorporate the practice into my daily routine.

So I will continue with my 30 days of blogging and hopefully won’t miss any more days. Monday will be tough again because we have a band concert at night. I don’t think it will go as late at night and I think I can still find some time on Monday to get some blogging in.

30 Days of Blogging: Day 10

The winter is tough for getting anything done. The sun goes down too fast and doesn’t come back up fast enough. The weather is cold and rainy or snowy or icy. I would like to get some exercise in but I don’t like to go out when it’s cold and dark. When I get home, I like to make a fire to sit by and just watch TV, read a book or surf the Internet. I know it’s only a couple of months but it sometimes feels like forever. I probably eat too much, especially with no exercise, and don’t eat very good food. 

Today in class we were watching the Supersize Me movie for health class and my thoughts always dwell on how well I’m eating, exercising and staying healthy. Right now I haven’t been doing too good of a job because of the winter days. I just need to make a better effort at eating better (or not at all) and finding ways to get some exercise in. We have a treadmill that I need to get set up and I need to walk to the elementary school to pick Maya up when I can. The last few weekends, we have had leaves to rake which have been good workouts on the weekends, but it is still the in-between days that I need to be better about. My next 30-day challenge will involve some kind of exercise routine so that I can build that into my daily life.

The good news is that it is pretty easy to write in my blog when I’m sitting around just watching TV or getting warm by the fire.

30 Days of Blogging: Day 9

Today I was in a meeting with some of my fellow computer teachers (they like to be called business teachers) and we went over our plans for something that our school district will be implementing over the next few years, Standards Reference Grading. We are planning this switch to better help students (and teachers) figure out what is the most important concepts that they should be learning and testing to see if they are proficient in these. We will still need to give the standard A, B, C, D, and Fs but these will hopefully be better aligned with what the students have learned and how the students are progressing.

I’m not going to go into the details of how Standards Reference Grading works but we spent today creating what is called Proficiency Scales which are 4-point scales to rate our students on based on the specific skills and abilities we want our students to leave our classes knowing. What has gotten better about these meetings, especially with our new teachers, is that we have been able to focus better on what are the most important things that we should be teaching. Before we had one teacher who kind of dominated the discussions and she would try to make us follow what she was doing even if we disagreed with her. She would often make it sound that we agreed with what she had suggested in a previous meeting (or even a few minutes before) when that was clearly not the case. Now I feel like we have some sanity for what is going on and I feel like I have some support for only working on the items that we should be teaching in computer class and not a lot of extra and in my opinion less important items.

Before we had these new teachers, we had a group of teachers who were really living in the past and want our computer classes to be only about typing and making documents (preferably business documents). Now while I feel those are important, there are so many more skills and knowledge that we could be giving to our students with computers. I felt that the road that we were heading down was a dead-end that would only have left us as a support class and not a separate subject in our own right. Today I have a better feeling about what we will be teaching moving forward so that we can make our case for why our subject area is still important and needed.

I think we should be building in more coding, 3D modeling and Digital Media skills but those will come with time. And I will always be able to work those into projects that I have the students do in my various classes.  

30 Days of Blogging: Day 8

So I’ve been re-watching Babylon 5 recently and I’ve been struck by how timely it is for what is going on in our country right now. While the main storyline of a great battle between the forces of light and dark permeates the seasons, it’s the subtext of the anti-alien sentiment from forces on Earth that really speaks to our current time. The Earth First movement is very much like what Trump is doing now with his Make America Great Again, in fact in one of the scenes I could have sworn that one of the characters talks about making Earth Great Again.

The show is also masterful at discussing the causes for why the movement gets started: loss of jobs, fear of change and the awakening of a larger place in the universe for Earth. These are all the same things that the followers of Trump are feeling. Babylon 5 also does a good job of sympathizing with and showing the evils of these emotions that the characters deal with so that it creates a very layered story and is not just one dimensional of good vs. evil.

Another storyline in Babylon 5 though that is also part of our times is the conspiracy theories keep the mystery to some of the episodes. With the Psi Corp and the various government intrigues, it seems like stories that were taken directly from our own daily news. Unfortunately, while many of today’s conspiracies are being used by Trump and his brand of conservativism to drum up support for himself and have no basis in fact, the some of the conspiracies in Babylon 5 are ultimately true.

Well, as I re-watch the show, I wonder if Babylon 5 will get a reboot like so many other shows from the ’80s and ’90s. If it does, I wonder if it will have compelling stories of racism, conspiracy and some of the other themes that are present in today’s world.

30 Days of Blogging: Day 7

Today I set up my new phone, the Mate 20 by Huawei. I know the American government has been putting pressure on carriers to not carry Huawei phones because they are a Chinese company, but they make a great phone for the money and I’m not too worried about them spying on me. I can totally understand if you worked in some capacity for the federal government, that it would probably not be a good idea to have a Chinese phone. 

Otherwise, it is very much like my old phone, the Mate 10, just with updated hardware and software. The battery life has been awesome on the Mate 10 and I’m expecting similar performance from the Mate 20.  It should also have a great camera because it is just like the Mate 10, but better. I also like that it has a fingerprint sensor on the back instead of on a button on the front. Having it on the back is so much easier than trying to get a thumb on the front. 

What I wasn’t too excited about with the Mate 10 was the way they tried to make it look like an iPhone or a Samsung. The Mate 10 had design elements that were similar to both of those kinds of phones and to be honest if I’m getting a Huawei phone, they should just create their own style. On the Mate 20, I’m a little concerned about the fact that it has removable storage but its a Nano SD card which is something new that Huawei is trying to push on everyone. I wish they had just stayed with the regular micro SD card like everyone else. I guess if it catches on then I can say that I had one of the first phones to use it, but because its not by someone like Samsung, Google or Apple, it probably won’t be something that becomes standard. The good news is that the Mate 20 comes with 128Gb of storage so I don’t really think I’ll need any extra storage for a while.

One other issue that I’ve only been having recently is that I can’t get a good cell signal from AT&T at my house. It hasn’t been a big issue, since I can make IP calls from my house so I don’t need the cell signal, but I’m a little concerned because I don’t know if its a cell tower issue or a phone issue.

Well, now I get to live with my new phone for a while and I have to fend off my boys who both want my old Mate 10.

30 Days of Blogging: Day 6

This has been the hardest day so far for my challenge. Part of the problem with today is that it is a Saturday and I typically don’t do much on a weekend except getting caught up on the household activities that I have neglected during the week. This is also why I would be worried about becoming a full-time writer if that was the only job I had. Working and running the kids around to their activities during the week helps to keep me busy and give me things to think about. Today I mostly ran errands and did some yard work.

Managing the kids is also a big task, especially on a weekend when they don’t have any structured activities. They mainly just want to watch TV or play video games and I would like them to work on some other projects to engage their creativity. So I often have to come up with things for them to do just to keep them busy. When I think back to my own childhood I wonder if my parents ever thought about these things. I remember that most of my weekends as a child were spent in front of the TV or reading. I also had Legos and puzzles. My brothers and I would go outside on occasion and play with the other kids in the neighborhood, but on rainy days we were kind of stuck in the house. I can remember some fun snow days when we would play some board games.

But I don’t remember much interaction with my parents except for going shopping or running other errands with them. I know my brother would go fishing with my Dad down at the beach which was only a couple blocks from our house, but we were not allowed to go down there by ourselves.  When we moved to Germany for a few years during my pre-teen years, we had a little more freedom to wander the fields and forests that surrounded our housing development and when we got back I was able to travel around more on my bike to see my friends who lived further away.

30 Days of Blogging: Day 5

We adopted another cat a few months ago. His name is Finn and he was an all black kitten when he came to live with us. Now that he is almost a year old, he’s still as black as night except for his yellow eyes. He has turned from a feisty little kitten into a sweet little cat with his own personality. But he also has some magic about him. There has been more than a couple of times that he has appeared out of nowhere. One minute I look and he’s not there, the next he is staring up at me as if asking “you called?” I’m not sure if it’s because he’s so black that he is like a shadow and I just don’t know he’s there. Or if he really is magical.

I’ve always liked cats since I was introduced to them during my college years. My father never could stand them, mainly because he grew up on the farm and knew mainly the farm cats that would sneak around in the barn and get underfoot. He was more of a dog person and that’s mainly what I grew up with. But when I went to college and some of my friends had cats, I got to know them better and was drawn to them. They made great pets, especially while I was living from apartment to apartment. They are very low maintenance and don’t need constant care and walking. Cats are also great because as long as you give them enough food and water, you can leave them alone for a couple of days without needing to worry about them.

There were also a lot of myths that I had heard over the years about cats and their behavior. I’ve heard that cats were sneaky and selfish and aloof, but in reality, they are very caring, loyal and affectionate. They all have their own personalities and each one is an individual. They also pull their weight around the house by keeping the bugs and mice in the house taken care of. I’ve even used them in the yard to keep the moles under control.

Cats are special and magical and they make great companions.