Odds and Ends - Spring thaw 08

Been a busy, busy time for me with trips to Iowa to see my mom who is on the mend from hip surgery, to the state legislature where it is still on the waiting list for a brain donor, and to the DuKane Library Institute near Chicago where I had a chance work with outstanding area school library media specialist. (Pam Kramer runs a class act!) School board reports, workshop handouts and a column are sort of rounding out my evenings.

But the weather seems to be moderating! 

Anyway, I've not had the chance to explore entries in my GoogleReader as deeply as I'd like. Here are a few I need to get back to soon:

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Sorry to start with a negative, but Seth Godin is overrated. But now and then he does peak my interest. Like in this post:

Encyclopedia salesmen hate wikipedia...

And CNET hates Google
And newspapers hate Craigslist
And music labels hate Napster
And used bookstores hate Amazon
And so do independent bookstores.

Dating services hate Plenty of Fish
And the local shoe store hates Zappos
And courier services hate fax machines
And monks hate Gutenberg

Apparently, technology doesn't care who you hate.

LMSs and TLCs (Technology and Learning Coordinators) whom do we hate? Or do we just hate anything that asks us to examine what value we add to education - and then realize we must change as a result of what we find?

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 Wonderful blog entry by Pete Reilly on the need and content for a Students Bill of Rights. Check it out.

I took a little softer approach on this topic when second grandson Miles was born a couple years ago. Here are his "Bill of Rights."

Miles will start school in 2010 or 2011. Here’s what I hope he finds:

1. A place that cares as much about his happiness as his education.
2. A place that cares more about his love of learning than his test scores.
3. A place where he feels safe and welcome and can’t wait to get to every morning.
4. A place that honors creativity more than memorization.
5. A place that has a library full of stories and a librarian who makes them come alive.
6. A place where technology hasn’t taken the place of playing with blocks, finger-painting, naps, graham crackers, or a teacher’s soft encouragement.
7. A place where he learns to work and play with kids who make not have been given the blessings of a middle-class lifestyle or a fully-functioning body or brain.
8. A place that teaches kindness along with math, tolerance along with history, and conservation along with science.
9. A place where teachers are excited about teaching and passionate about encouraging the passions in their students.
10. A place where he is never compared to his older brother, Paul.

What would you put on a Students Bill of Rights?

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NCTE is going high tech on us! From its Toward A Definition of 21st-Century Literacies.

Twenty-first century readers and writers need to

• Develop proficiency with the tools of technology
• Build relationships with others to pose and solve problems collaboratively and
  cross-culturally
• Design and share information for global communities to meet a variety of
  purposes
• Manage, analyze and synthesize multiple streams of simultaneous
  information
• Create, critique, analyze, and evaluate multi-media texts
• Attend to the ethical responsibilities required by these complex environments
  

Sound like any other sets of standards you've been reading lately??? Looks good, English majors!

(Full disclosure - I was an English teacher in my career's larval stage.)

Still have found no organization adopt my Bullshit Literacy Standards and I don't quite understand why. 

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I was very flattered to be tagged for a Blogs That Make Me Think Award by Carolyn Foote at A Not So Distant Future.

The rules of the meme are:

1. If, and only if, you get tagged, write a post with links to 5 blogs that make you think,
2. Link to this post so that people can easily find the exact origin of the meme,
3. Optional: Proudly display the ‘Thinking Blogger Award’ with a link to the post that you wrote

In addition there is a note: “Please, remember to tag blogs with real merits, i.e. relative content, and above all - blogs that really get you thinking! ”

Thanks, Carolyn. My guess is that what most people think while reading the Blue Skunk is "Why am I wasting my time reading this stuff?" Anyway, here are 5 folks who, as much as it makes my head hurt, really make me think:

1. Pete Reilly at Ed Tech Journeys
   
2. Paul at quoteflections 
3. Joyce Valenza at A Never Ending Search
4. Scott Adams at The Dilbert Blog. (Recent observation: Women prefer taller men. That’s probably a good thing from an evolutionary perspective. If the preference worked in the other direction, eventually our descendants would evolve smaller and smaller until squirrels ate them.)
5. Stephen Abrams at Stephen's Lighthouse. 

 Ok, I actually have 68 subscriptions in my Reader and if all of them didn't make think at least once in a while, I wouldn't still be subscribed. Thanks to everyone who writes and shares...

 

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Two good posts this week with more realistic takes on Internet dangers:

• Nancy Willard"s  Social Networking Risks: The Myths and Realities
• David Pogue's How Dangerous Is the Internet for Children?

Worth reading and sharing with the person who controls your Internet filter.

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And finally, I'll leave you with this inspirational quote: 

Give a man a fish, and he'll eat for a day. Give a fish a man, and he'll eat for weeks! - Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata, authors of Animal Crossing: Wild World

Odds and Ends - WInd chill edition

A few things that caught my attention over the past few days:

The Not-the-Father-of-the-Year Award: A man from Minneapolis left his infant son strapped in his car seat for three hours while he visited a strip club. The baby got frost bite and the man got thrown in jail. I find this remarkable. Not that a guy is dumb enough to do this, but that "his wife bailed him out of jail about 2:30 a.m."

Age-ism Alert: I suppose there are legitimate concerns about the new Real ID program that was unveiled last week. But but this really honks me off:

By 2014, anyone seeking to board an airplane or enter a federal building would have to present a REAL ID-compliant card, with the notable exception of those older than 50, Homeland Security officials said.

The over-50 exemption was created to give states more time to get everyone new licenses, and officials say the risk of someone in that age group being a terrorist, illegal immigrant or con artist is much less. By 2017, even those over 50 must have a REAL ID-compliant card to board a plane. (AP story)

Hey, we geezers are just as capable of performing terrorist acts as younger people. We just need a nap afterwards is all.

Chutzpah Award: From LM_Net where there is an ongoing discussion about library media specialists being abused as tech support personnel:

We have a media specialist in our county who was invited to her principal's home for dinner.  She and her husband graciously accepted and showed up on time...only to be asked to spend the first hour and a half of the evening hooking up his son's computer!  

Brush Up Your Shakespeare: I'm about half finished with Bill Bryson's delightful new book:  Shakespeare: The World As Stage (Eminent Lives, 2007). Bryson is at his best here - interesting, funny and perceptive. (He is an Iowa boy, after all.) If you are not a Bryson reader, you ought to be. Both A Walk in the Woods and In a Suburnt Country will have you ROFL.

We Need More of This: A blogger that actually shares concrete classroom instructional strategies - not pontificates on educational theory. The real use of the "social web"?

Johnson's First Law of Blogging: Sooner or later, everyone blogs the cat. (Guilty myself, of course.)

Have a wonderful week! Hope to see some of you SL tomorrow night!

End of summer Start of school

Labor Day is always a wistful time for me. The long weekend of family and friends at "our" resort in northern Minnesota, The Cry of the Loon, signals that summer is indeed gone and that fall and school have officially begun. Even grandson Miles pictured above seems to be in a reflective mood. Although he doesn't go to school, I'm sure he will miss his brother who will be a first-grader this year.

Our all-staff back-to-school gathering last week was one of the very best I remember in my career. Highlights included:

• The superintendent listed a dozen major accomplishments of the district last year, including beginning all-day kindergarten throughout the district, implementing a new reading series, installing 100 new projectors and SmartBoards in classrooms, and having our school board recognized as the best one in Minnesota.
  
• US Representative Tim Walz re-joining us to offer a heart-felt thanks for our work in getting him elected to Congress last year. Tim, a social studies teacher from the high school across the alley from my office, is the only elected teacher serving in Congress. He also seems to be one of the most articulate and value-driven. Any surprise?
• Jamie Vollmer "the blueberry guy" gave a great speech on education. I suspect Vollmer is old news to most educators, but if you don't know his work, check it out here. The heart of Vollmer's message is summed up in his "Blueberry Story":
  

We must change what, when, and how we teach to give all children maximum opportunity to thrive in a post-industrial society. But educators cannot do this alone; these changes can occur only with the understanding, trust, permission and active support of the surrounding community.

He strongly advocates that we stop trash talking our own schools and fellow educators and instead tell positive stories to counteract the biases in media against public education. Sensible, concrete advice. (Another intriguing part of his website and talk is "The Burden" - the added expections of public education from 1900 to the present.)

It may just a heightened sensitivity because of Vollmer's talk, but the comic strips this fall seem to realy be playing up the negative aspects of returning to school. Yeah, it's a perennial source of humor, but wouldn't it be nice if we saw the antics of some of the kids who enjoyed returning to school? There are those kids still out there. Right?