This Is Not News

I have spent the last several months tracking websites and doing research in order to buy a new computer this holiday season. I’m thinking that instead of ordering from a place like Dell, I’ll go with one of the smaller operations that lets you pick exactly what pieces of hardware you want. So I know a lot more about cases and power supplies than I did when the summer started.

As much fun as I’m having, though, part of me wonders if I need a computer the way I used to. I bought my current desktop in 2006 when I was finishing my dissertation and needed to use a desktop publishing program to lay out the whole thing. Since then, I haven’t really been doing the graphic design or image editing that would require a really powerful machine.

I still do a decent amount of writing and reading on the Web, but I am very fortunate to have a school-issued laptop for that. I also use it to do my grading using a program provided by the school – although that’s changing to a web-based app, so by next year I may only need a tablet with Internet access to do my grades. The major drawback with the laptop is that I don’t love the laptop keyboard. It reminds me too much of the keyboards I used in college, when I wound up with a very sore left wrist. I have an ergonomic keyboard on my desktop. Thing is, the desktop is downstairs. The laptop lets me hang out in the living room or the dining room and not feel like I’m ignoring my family. I’ve started using Google Docs to do some of my writing and record-keeping, so I may not even need to buy a copy of Microsoft Office anymore.

If push came to shove I could probably do a lot of the reading and writing with a tablet, but as much fun as the iPad appears to be, I haven’t found the killer app that’s the reason to pick one up.

If I’m honest with myself, there is really only one reason why I am even thinking about buying a new computer, and that’s computer games. I would need to do some major upgrading to my current machine to be able to play Mass Effect 3 when it comes out, so it makes more sense to buy a new one. I’m hoping that if I do get an upgraded desktop, I’ll try to do some video editing or other projects for school that will leverage all that power. I’ll probably pick up a Blu-Ray drive to see if that’s worthwhile. But right now, I don’t know if there are that many tasks on my To Do list that require all the computing power that Intel and company are making available.

Still, in the end, I guess I’ll think of something.

Started a new school year today, although the students aren’t back yet. That’ll happen over the next couple of days. But the start of the year has me thinking back. 15 years ago I started my senior ear of college at Fordham University. I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately, because I absolutely would not trade my college experience for just about anything. And since now it’s my job to help high school students prepare to have similarly rewarding experiences, I have to think about why it was so valuable to me.

Certainly there was an academic component. I built a strong foundation in my coursework that helped me get into grad school. I barely had any adjuncts or TAs in four years of classes. Heck, my roommate from junior year is a veterinarian, my roommate from senior year is a medical doctor, and two of my editors-in-chief from the newspaper went on to get doctoral degrees. Lots of my friends were no less brilliant for not getting time-consuming and expensive terminal degrees. (Some folks might say that makes them even more brilliant, but that’s just my student loan debt talking.) Rubbing against all that brain power in classrooms and in late-night conversations was a great experience that sped up my thinking and development on a lot of topics.

But the truth is, I was a humanities major. I could get Plato’s Republic out of the library a lot cheaper than I got it from the campus bookstore, let alone the tuition. With the Internet today making more video lectures and discussion for a possible, the truth is that someone who is truly interested in learning the material for the sake of learning the material, rather than getting a credential to tick off a box on a job application, can do so without the actual college experience.

I still feel like I got a lot of value from college. There is a social element, of course. I met many of my best friends at Fordham, and 15 years ago I started dating Pattie. 12 years of marriage and one wonderful daughter later, that seems to be working out. College can’t help but introduce you to a bunch of people, and if you play your cards right you’ll find people you can connect with. There are lots of people in the world, though, so if you keep your eyes open you could probably make friends without college, too.

The thing is, it was easier for me to learn that material and easier for me to make those friends because the traditional college experience was, for me, its own little isolated world, a microcosm that brought a lot of people into a relatively confined environment and forced them to bounce off of one another. It accelerated the processes. And because it was a small world, I could explore many different sides of it. In college, I was an academic. I was a journalist and writer. I was a program planner. I wrote a screenplay; I co-wrote a play and got to have it staged. I lived on my own for the first time without having to worry about every single detail that being independent requires. I got to grow up, figure out who I wanted to be and build up some resources to help me become that person. For me, it worked, and that’s why I will forever be grateful to Fordham.

So, one day after extolling the benefits of my urban lifestyle, we drove two for two hours to Lancaster so that we could sit in a horse-drawn tour buggy for an hour. Due to a scheduling conflict, Alex missed her Girl Scout troop’s trip to Lancaster earlier this year, so we had promised her we’d take her out ourselves. It felt good to check another box off the To Do list for the summer.

It was also good to drive through the countryside and then get face to face with the animals that provide us with milk, butter and other dairy goods. Much as I like city life, it wouldn’t be possible without people doing the farm work, and it’s good to have a reminder that the Milk Fairy doesn’t come around to refill Acme’s shelves. The farm that we visited is an interesting mix of old and new . . . we passed one-room schoolhouses along with houses with solar panels on the roof.

Once the tour was over, we promptly indulged our consumer tendencies by visiting an outlet center so I could shop for a new year’s worth of clothes for work.

After satisfying our daily requirement of irony, we visited with friends of ours who are teaching at Franklin and Marshall College. It amazes me sometimes how many of my friends went into the education field, but I guess that’s what happens when you hang out with the people who like school. 🙂

So I’m trying to make a pot of chili. Because i like to make my life difficult, I made most of the chili Tuesday and then put it in the fridge so that the flavors would meld or deepen or do whatever they do. My plan tonight was to add the beans and actually eat some chili. But it turns out that in my infinite Daveness, I bought a can of refried pinto beans instead of whole pinto beans. So I walked around the corner, picked up the beans and a couple of other things at the local supermarket, and came home.

At which point my can opener promptly broke, leaving me with four sealed cans between a finished pot of chili and me.

OK, a couple of minutes to collect myself, and I went back around the corner. As I was walking to the supermarket, I saw that the door of Alex’s dance school was open and her dance teacher was standing there. So I crossed the street to make some small talk, and as it turns out the DVD of her dance recital was ready so I was able to pick that up. So, bonus errand done, I returned to the supermarket, got my can opener, and now I intend to see these beans stewing in a pot of chili soon after I hit Publish.

I live in a neighborhood that’s sort of a cross between a fully urban area and the suburbs. We have blocks of rowhomes, but also office parks and plenty of shopping centers/strip malls. It’s not fully walkable, but just being able to walk around the corner to buy groceries is something I value. That I can wind up unexpectedly crossing another errand off my To Do list during that five minute walk is a bonus that reminds me that life in a spread-out suburb is probably not something I’m cut out for.

I’m writing this on my laptop in the middle of the second power outage of the evening. Hopefully I’ll get power back so that I can connect to the Internet and posit it before midnight, but either way I’m going to count my post-every-day streak as intact.

We have enough candles to see in the living room, and for now we can use our cell phones and flashlights, so we’re not totally unplugged. Trying to keep a nine-year-old girl entertained without television, Wii, or Internet is proving to be a challenge. I can’t say that I’m providing a very good example, since I’m here using a computer. But once I finish writing this I’ll see if there are any puzzles we can work out by the candlelight. We may have to crack open the freezer and try to eat some of the ice cream before it melts. It’s a tough burden, but we’ll try to bear it.

The funny thing is, there are a lot of non-wired things I’d like to do; plenty of books to read or rough notes to write. They’re kinda hard to do at 10:30 at night, though. I’m definitely gonna have to give Mr. Edison some extra thanks when we do important inventions in World History this year.

(Note: Power’s back. For now. DUN DUN DUN!)

To celebrate my effort to return to frequent blog writing, I’m going to take a moment to discuss other things I have not had the time to do, particularly in regard to the category of having fun.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying I haven’t had any time to enjoy myself. I know the whole All Work and No Play thing. Especially in the summer, I can not complain about my leisure time. What I have noticed is that regardless of how much time I have, there are infinitely more things I have the opportunity to do than I have time to do them.

I have DVDs in my cabinet that I have not watched, months after I bought them. Most of them were in box sets, and I’ve watched some of the discs in the box, but there’s still stuff I could watch.

I have computer games and Wii games that I could keep practicing. One of these days I’m gonna score 100% on the guitar part to Driver 8. Steam had a ridiculous sale where I bought a bunch of games I have not tried to play yet, because I’m still trying to figure out how to kick the computer’s tail in Civilization IV.

I have Netflix and a Wii. Good heavens, that could keep me busy forever. Lost. Battlestar Galactica. Doctor Who. How many more shows that I haven’t seen yet?

I could always get the Harry Potter books out of the library again if I need to go on a two-week reading bender. And there are plenty of history books downstairs in my basement that I could read. (No comment, Pattie!)

I don’t always get to these things because Pattie, Alex and I also like to hang out with friends. And if no friends are available, we go hang out at Barnes and Noble, where there are MORE books to read.

I go through this litany in part to remind myself of how lucky I am. (Hold on to that thought, we’ll be getting back to it this week.) But I also go through it in the hopes that I will, perhaps, reduce the number of ADDITIONAL leisure activities that I pay for.

I mean, given that DVD and Netflix account, why am I still paying for cable? I spend more time following baseball on MLB.com than I do on TV! By the time I work through my backlog, there’ll be at least a year or two’s worth of new programs for me to watch! Do I need Food Network that badly?

And even with the games library that I have, I am looking at two BioWares coming down the pike, and I’m practically ready to throw my credit card at Amazon.

To some extent, this search for new experiences is a reasonable one. But as I get older, I’m getting to that point where I gotta prioritize my luxuries. And maybe someday soon I’ll have the sense to use my time and other resources more wisely.

That said, I don’t regret the plastic guitar for an instant.

Chris Lehmann has a new post where he discusses the time demands of his job as principal of Science Leadership Academy, how he balances those with his family responsibilities, and the unrealistic expectations for self-sacrifice that are created by media portrayals of educators. Now, I follow Chris on Facebook and Twitter, and I have no idea when he switches his educator brain off to let it recharge. (Case in point – the blog post in question went up around midnight.) So if he’s saying there need to be limits, someone ought to listen.

I also think it’s worth it to zoom out from the school issue a little – is there any profession where the work doesn’t expand to fill all your available time plus, let’s say, 10%? There’s always that one-more-thing that we would like to do if we just had a little more time or a little more energy. We all have to find that line where we say “This is good enough.”

That said, I think there are two big factors at work making this the problem that Chris identifies in society at large and also within education.

1) We are, in many ways, a work-driven society. There’s very little pressure to be a successful person compared to the pressure to have a successful career. So instead of our professional standard of excellence being what you can accomplish in a 40 or 50 hour week, it’s what you can accomplish in a 60 or 70 hour week or more. So the people who meet that standard are the people who either don’t have families or personal lives to sacrifice, or who are willing to curtail the time they put into those areas. Once upon a time this was fodder for the Harry Chapin song “Cat’s in the Cradle,” now it lurks behind our discussions of gender equality in the workplace and a host of other issues regarding the balance between work, family, and personal life.

2) Society at large has so many problems, and so many of those problems have a direct impact on schools and students, that even if the most dedicated professionals like Chris found a way to double the time they spend working, it would not be enough. I think this makes it harder for teachers and educators to feel like they’ve reached the “good enough” point – especially when there are people who prefer to criticize the individuals who are already going above and beyond to try to fix the problem rather than criticize the society at large that has made the problem so daunting. Demanding that someone else fix this – without providing the tools to do so – somehow comes across as leadership. (And of course, there are educators and teachers who do the very same thing to their students or their colleagues, so I’m not saying any group is without fault there.)

I have been trying to develop/find a good barbecue sauce for pulled pork and barbecued brisket for a while now – the thinker sauce that I use to glaze chicken can overwhelm the meat when I want a BBQ sandwich. Tradition appears to call for a vinegar sauce, but I am easily overpowered by the taste of vinegar. Today I mixed 1 cup of apple cider vinegar with 3/4 cup ketchup and about half a cup of Coke and got a pretty good base. I added some molasses (2 tablespoons) and some of my Alton-Brown-inspired barbecue rub (3-4 tablespoons), along with some steak sauce and Worcestershire sauce. I think the last two additions were a mistake – if I’m trying to balance out the strong vinegar, I shouldn’t be adding flavor liquids with a vinegar base. So I think next time out I’ll go with a cup straight of cider vinegar, Coke, and ketchup (or maybe tomato sauce), then add in the rub and the molasses.

I also cooked the sauce a little to thicken it up and let the flavors blend a little more. I’m sure that’s sauce heresy, but it works for me.

Another thought that’s been running through my head, in part based on the idea that I heard in last night’s presentations and elsewhere that these days twenty-somethings are more likely to spend some time after college in an extended period of gathering their thoughts and figuring out where they want to go – possibly returning home to live with parents or taking some time before beginning their careers. In an odd coincidence of timing, I had just been talking to one of my officemates at St. Joe’s about how many of my future options and choices were shaped by the decision I made to major in philosophy as an undergrad: a decision I made at the age of 18 in large part because as a college freshman I had a history class I hated and a philosophy class I loved, and I couldn’t drop the former without dropping the latter. I never took another history course as an undergrad. So when I decided to pursue a graduate degree, philosophy seemed the most logical course. And when I decided that I wanted to pursue a career in secondary education, all of a sudden I found myself in a graduate degree program that did not match up particularly well with my overall career goals. So now here I am finishing up a second graduate degree. How different might all of that have been if I had loved the history course and disliked the philosophy class?

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So my urban ed class tonight was full of presentations on various books/reports on what the heck is wrong with schools and kids these days. I actually have a number of thoughts/rants based on mine that I’ll try to roll out over the next couple of days. Two different classmates discussed a book that complains about how all this technology is making the Millennial generation more insulated, concerned with self-image, and unable to pursue and retain real knowledge. The subtitle of the book was Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30. So in a small act of rebellion I decided to update the Facebook profile that I have mostly left dormant, and so I accepted a few friend requests and made a few of my own. I admit I was a little taken aback by how much information I suddenly had about what was going on on my friends’ sites, so I can tell it’s gonna take a while for this whole social network thing to click with me. And, of course, I am now blogging about social networking, which is all hopelessly recursive and probably still a couple of years out of date. But to hell with it, I’m too wordy for Twitter.