23 "A Climate for Writing"

June 23, 2015

Topic Tuesday #153 2015/06/23 "A Climate for Writing"

Ladies and Gentlemen of my readership, we have had quite the week since I have conversed with you on topical matters. The news has been rather heavy, week over week and it has taken its eventual toll on me, thus I am unable to fully articulate the gravity of the activity on the world stage. I am not silent on it, as you can tell by my other posts and the continued activities of the ORly Radio Podcast. The news has hurt me and has moved me to alternative action. In as much as we have seen through time - adversity, even if it seems tangential to this writer, fosters creativity. This last week it was not the news of the Charleston murders that hit me the hardest. Though they are certainly shocking and deplorable, I have been desensitized to the bigotry and violence to those of color by those with a far paler character. No, what has moved me to some sort of action and kept me awake is the future.

I would consider myself a rational person and a man of facts and perspective. I have grown to trust the scientists that work in their chosen fields and have come to know many of them. They value the same things I do. Facts and the truths that they describe. The recent news that the figures were wrong and corrected on the so called pause in global warming was a hammer blow. I didn’t expect it to be so, as I had a feeling that this sign of climate change was not up for taking a vacation, but still, I had hoped that nature had a trick or two that would explain it and it would not be a miscalculation. Sadly, the results indicate that we were incorrect with initial findings and that the world may have warmed much more than was anticipated in other models and it was not getting any better.

The data that they used to make these statements came from a big data project, NASA Earth Exchange (NEX). It’s data is available to the public. http://climate.nasa.gov/news/2293/

“The NASA climate projections provide a detailed view of future temperature and precipitation patterns around the world at a 15.5 mile (25 kilometer) resolution, covering the time period from 1950 to 2100. The 11-terabyte dataset provides daily estimates of maximum and minimum temperatures and precipitation over the entire globe.”

I have concerns. I am a future minded person and they are painting a rather hot picture of the future, a future that if I am not a part of, surely my offspring will be. So I have to prepare them for the reality of climate change, rising oceans, hotter summers, colder winters, floods and droughts, and the people that deny it could happen. This is the tall order that keeps me up at night, and I figure if I am going to be kept up, I might as well be creative and productive with it.
This is the inspiration for a story I am going to write. It may be horrible and completely un-entertaining and worthless to some, but I will learn a lot along the way about how to write and communicate a narrative of discovery and adventure - one of surviving a changing world.
National Novel Writing Month is approaching you know.

Time to get to it. Let me know what you think.

Topic Tuesday #116 2014/10/07 "Common Core”

October 7, 2014

Topic Tuesday #116 2014/10/07 "Common Core”

Today was my first grader's parent/teacher conference. We talked about the usual about how they were doing, what they were learning and what the obvious obstacles were that had to be overcome. there was an underlying note of frustration from the teacher, but not with my child, or even me. This year she has been dealing with the aftermath of a promise that has not been upheld by her administrators. She was told that "common core would be less broad but more detailed" in it's approach. That she would be diving deeper on certain topics and not broaching others. That was partially true. She is diving much deeper on subjects with first graders than she ever has before, and she has been teaching more broadly also. The work load this poor woman has had to undertake to make this program work is monumental. Most K-12 educators already are famous for working LONG hours. This teacher was at school well before 7AM and wasn't likely to leave until it was time for dinner. I'm thinking a 12 hour day. Everyday.

Now I am not a luddite, I want new things to be tried. However... I have noticed in my years, and even when I was in k-12 myself as a student that the School Board has a long history of not letting a program run its course to determine if it actually works or not. There is already more talk about scrapping this curriculum than many before it, and we are just a few months in. And I can see why.

Common Core seeks to build a more robust and in depth understanding of educational concepts from the beginning. The program is intended to smooth the path to college by making the knowledge gap between college level courses more equitable. Florida has partnered with American Institutes for Research to build the Common Core curriculum as laid out by the national math, language arts and literacy standards. This is great if it is well balanced and starts at the earliest grades and builds through the education path.

I'm not seeing the implementation as having the right fit, yet. The demands on our young kids are pretty severe and in turn the teachers that are expected to make it work are even worse. How do you teach a child a math problem that is all words when the child hasn't learned to read well enough to get through the question? How do you expect an enormous vocabulary of reading and writing that balloons weekly when the kids who are losing all their baby teeth are having trouble with certain sound combinations? It's frustrating, and kids this age have enough problems with frustration without setting them up for failure.

I am willing to see this through, as I see the underpinnings are teaching not what to think as much as how to think about what they are learning. That is wonderful. My fear is that this will be scrapped and the progress that has been made will be stymied by another dramatic shift in how we are expecting to teach, and how we are expected to learn. Children need stability, and I wish someone would see that as best for the children and implement changes for an entire "crop" of kids. Starting at Kindergarten, make that education method the same through 12th. If there is a change in the method, address it with the next year's Kindergarteners and watch it go. Though there are many arguments against this approach, and rightly so, I would greatly like to see what happens if a plan is allowed to work from beginning to end...

Topic Tuesday #92 2014/04/22 "Why Am I Here Again?"

April 22, 2014

Topic Tuesday #92 2014/04/22 "Why Am I Here Again?"

It has happened to all of us (there is a reason I can say that truthfully). We pickup something to take care of in another room and walk there and once we arrive, the purpose of our journey has eluded us. In our confusion we may just wander back to our point of origin only to realize why we set off in the first place. we beat ourselves up over being too tired or any other plausible excuse for our forgetfulness.

Here is the result of a recent study, doorways trigger our short term memory to "clear". They are calling it the "doorway effect".

"...some forms of memory seem to be optimized to keep information ready-to-hand until its shelf life expires, and then purge that information in favor of new stuff. Radvansky and colleagues call this sort of memory representation an “event model,” and propose that walking through a doorway is a good time to purge your event models because whatever happened in the old room is likely to become less relevant now that you have changed venues."

Many things can trigger this same clearing of short term memory. Such as a phone call or a door bell, maybe a child needing attention. All things that can distract for a moment and take you out of your concentration could derail your train of thought. It also is something that be have very little control over. Some things the brain is just predisposed to do, such as the phenomenon of pareidolia, which represents our predilection for seeing faces and hearing voices when the genuine article is just some wind or clever trick of light and shadow.

It's hard to understand, but sometimes, you just can't trust your own brain. But knowing is.... wait... what was I doing? Oh year, getting a snack from the fridge. Why did I open the refrigerator? Huh.... Right... Sometimes you should just make some external reminders and don't trust that you will remember things. You may laugh at the person with sticky notes on their bathroom mirror, but they may know... or remember something that you forgot just walking through the door.