Practical Knowledge

20. March 2009 · Write a comment · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: ,

Laura at 11D and Tim at Easily Distracted both posted about the more down-to-earth knowledge they feel young people (and we, really) should have. The comments at both posts also add a lot of ideas to the conversation.

I’ve been reading Sarah Vowell’s Wordy Shipmates and she says she’s urban and she really doesn’t want to know how to survive in the wilderness the way the Puritans did.

I know quite a bit of practical knowledge that’s been quite useful to me: typing, foundational computer skills, cooking, changing a car tire, gardening (even though I’m not good at it, I know the basics), basic home repair, dealing with bee stings.

I also have some knowledge, thanks to a Red Cross babysitting course and other sources that I haven’t had to use yet: CPR, how to use a tourniquet, what to do when someone ingests poisonous substances, building a fire without matches.

My kids both said that they thought learning to play an instrument was important. Which I thought was interesting since it seems so very impractical in many ways. They’ve both learned to play an instrument, so they must have thought it was important.

There are things I don’t know, like canning and storing food, that I’d like to know, and things I don’t know well enough, like financial management, that I wish I knew more about. I’ve learned quite a bit about what it takes to set up a small business (something that make’s Tim’s list), but it’s been trial by fire to say the least. I took a personal financial management class in college that was really useful, but now I find knowing how to budget and actually disciplining yourself to stick to a budget are two completely different things.

I would add to Laura’s list directed primarily at young women to seriously use and learn about technology. I can’t tell you how many women I see who shy away from even the basics of knowing how to save files or upload them to the web or the difference between an operating system and a software program. You don’t need to learn programming, but I think a lack of knowledge about computer basics is going to relegate you to jobs that don’t pay very well. Even if you do do something like start your own bake shop, you’re gonna need to manage payroll and invoices, maybe create your own bakehouse blog, so technology is important everywhere.

What are your practical knowledge triumphs and gaps?

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Economic Fiascos

18. March 2009 · Write a comment · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags:

Like everyone else, I’ve been outraged by the AIG bonus story. The more I read about it, the more angry I get. As I commented over at 11D, I used to work on a bonus structure. I know what a bonus is for and it’s not for failure. In our scheme, you got a bonus if you personally had good sales, but you got significantly more if the company did well overall. This eliminated much of the competition and we were inclined to help each other out. And I’m not the only one who’s worked under such conditions–waitresses and salespeople of all stripes function under a compensation plan that rewards better service and hard work more than it does poor service and less work. So it makes no sense to most people that people get rewarded for failure, either their own or the company’s. There were certainly times when I personally did very well, but the compay didn’t and so my bonus reflected that (an additional company bonus was on the order of 5-10 times what an individual bonus was–usually something like $50 or $100 compared to $500; we weren’t getting millions).

Tim Burke writes quite cogently about the backlash against the outrage, registering a complaint similar to the one I’m making above–that is, that one is in line for bonuses because one takes certain risks that when they pay off, monetary awards accrue and when they don’t, too bad so sad. He makes two other arguments, one against the idea that we’re too far removed to be able to judge and so we should just be quiet and one against the idea that these guys are jumping ship for greener pastures (to mix my metaphors). The gall of, in this case conservatives, arguing that we should just let the professionals do their jobs, strikes me as paternalistic at best and to me, goes against the idea of a democracy. Hello. We own most of AIG. We have a right to make complaints. Anyone who thinks otherwise wants a different kind of government.

And I agree with Tim that many of these former employees must not look too good to future employers. I’m thinking that their ability to find a job at all is difficult. Although I also think the financial industry tends to have a short memory to go with their shortsightedness, so that in 6 months or a year, these people will be right back in it, bonus structure in tact.

I don’t know that I want a witch hunt whereby the names of these people are plastered all over the newspapers and the Internet, but I do think there should be more accountability than just subtracting the bonus amounts from our latest loan to AIG. Part of me thinks that we shouldn’t loan them anything, just let them fail. Then there will be no arguing about bonuses. The articles below have more, including the little tidbit that the bonuses now amount to $450 million. Yippee.

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Birthday Gratefulness

17. March 2009 · Write a comment · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags:

I had an excellent birthday yesterday, despite having to go in to work. I had a fun and interesting meeting with my co-teacher, where we hammered out plans for this week and discussed our thinking for the last few weeks of class. Sitting in my office, I was thrilled to see so many birthday wishes coming through on Facebook from so many corners of my life, from old high school and college friends to blog friends to former work colleagues. In class itself, the whole class sang Happy Birthday followed by my co-teacher’s singing of a different birthday song and then we all had candy. After class, another professor happened by and gave us cupcakes in honor of National Women’s Day. When I got home, Mr. Geeky surprised me with a bike. And not just any bike either, but a pink Schwinn mountain bike. I feel like a kid again!

As we get older, I think we no longer want to commemorate our birthdays as it’s just a reminder, as Mr. Geeky once said to Geeky Boy, that “we’re one step closer to death.” But it is nice to have a day just for you, where friends and family wish you well. I’m grateful to have such wonderful friends and family and for my continued health and happiness. As my father and I were saying last night on the phone, sometimes you just have to remember how good you have it.

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SXSW Edupunk Panel

16. March 2009 · Write a comment · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: ,
Edupunk: Open Source Education ~ Stephen’s Web ~ by Stephen Downes

Stephen links to the audio for the SXSW panel on Edupunk with Stephen, Jim Groom, Barbara Ganley and Gardner Campbell. It’s a really fascinating conversation that explores the role of higher education institutions in the future, the differences between institutional vs. personal learning, and generally what learning and education might mean as society moves forward.

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They Say It’s Your Birthday

16. March 2009 · Write a comment · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags:

So I’m 41. I survived a year of being 40. Now I guess I have to say I’m in my 40s. It’s been an interesting year. I voluntarily quit my job during a time when many people are being laid off, at an age when many people are looking for their next move up the career ladder. My new adventures have barely begun, and I’m looking forward to what’s going to happen with them. I’d say I’m still adjusting to life without a steady job, but the good thing is that I can adjust. I can shift as I need to. Life is definitely more flexible than it was before.

Sadly, today Spring Break ends. Normally my birthday falls sometime during spring break. This year, it marks the end of it. As you can tell by the lack of blogging, I did take some time off. I did some work though, preparing for the coming weeks of class, a little grading, and some work on the business side of my life. I had planned to do much more work, but after spending a good chunk of Tuesday working, I decided, screw this, it’s spring break! And I think that was the thing to do. Now, I’m ready to jump back in (mostly), and I have a list of things to get done this week. Here’s to another interesting year!

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The Rise of Online Social Networks

10. March 2009 · Write a comment · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: ,

Social computingImage by lorda via Flickr

Bryan Alexander points to a Nielsen report that shows that social network sites and blogs have now outstripped email in popularity. The biggest increase has been in the 35-49 age group (hey! that’s my age group). I think there are obvious reasons for this. First, is that this age group is likely to have teenagers who use online tools to connect with their friends. Those kids parents have signed up for Facebook or other sites to keep tabs on their kids. Or just to understand what it is that their kids are doing. Second, many of the initial adopters of these tools are now in jobs, working alongside their 30 and 40 something colleagues and encouraging them to use blogs or social networking tools for professional development.

Anecdotally, I’m seeing this increase too. I wrote before about being found in Facebook by high school and college friends (who are obviously in my age group), and being a little uncomfortable with that. Last night I was at Course Selection Night for new high school students (yikes! I have a kid going to high school!), and the PTSA handed out flyers indicating that they were on Facebook. I was actually happy about that and I’ll probably friend them soon. Yesterday, I was able to update my contact information and list my preferred volunteer activities via an online tool called PTO manager and I mentioned earlier that the elementary school used an online potluck site to coordinate a big event that required food donations. I was also able to find out more about the budget of the Middle School PTO through the online site because they posted the minutes.

In part, this has been spurred locally by a new mandate from the school district that they will not provide access to the student database for the PTO. In the past, materials were sent home via the students and/or were mailed and emailed by allowing the PTO access to mailing and email addresses. Well, no more. And so the PTO had to get creative about how to gather that information for themselves and how to reach out to parents. I think some of this new interest in online communication is spurred too by a younger group of parents. The parents of my daughter’s friends are often younger than me since their oldest is my daughter’s age. As these parents begin to volunteer, they’re more familiar with social networking than their older peers.

Interestingly, I was sitting behind some moms last night who thought that Facebook was a silly idea for the PTSA and didn’t want to get an account. As one mom said, “Whoever I want to see, I see. I don’t need to use Facebook for that.” Over the last 6 years that we’ve lived here, I’ve increasingly become aware of how many people grew up here. They have deep roots and have established connections over the years and don’t need these tools to maintain them or build new ones. They don’t socialize that way. But some of us do. Some of us are maintaining old friendships through blogging, twittering, and FB. Some of us are trying to find new connections through those same tools. And I’m glad to see some of the local organizations recognizing that there’s more than one way to connect with people.

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Money Can Buy Happiness

09. March 2009 · Write a comment · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: ,

Gretchen Rubin has been writing a series of posts that outline 10 happiness myths. Today’s is Money Can’t Buy Happiness. She argues that it can. As people are losing their jobs or seeing salary cuts and experiencing depression as a result, it seems obvious that money does buy some happiness. I agree. When we were young and poor, one or both of us in grad school, we were constantly running into situations involving money that made us unhappy. It was not fun to juggle bills, to put off much-needed car repairs, or eat meals made up of whatever canned goods are left in the cabinet. I can remember days of going to the mall just to have something to do and being thoroughly depressed because I couldn’t buy so much as a cup of coffee.

We’re way past that now, and boy, am I glad. Having enough money to buy the essentials and pay the bills on time is a blessing. But, we have taken steps backwards financially over the years. Moving here was one such step, and my recent decision to quit was another. Both decisions, despite the financial setbacks, were made to make one of us happier. And I’d say that both decisions were good ones. We may have to think a bit more about purchases, budget a little more carefully, plan longer into the future for even small things, but all in all, the stress of having to do that is minor compared to the stress of working in a job that no longer appealed and that took me away from my family more than I wanted it to.

As Gretchen suggests, even though money may be a bit tighter than usual, I still spend money on little things that improve my life. I’m not a regular coffee shop patron, but every once in a while, I like to sit down with a latte and a muffin. I like bubble bath and magazines and books. Those are all things I could give up if I had to, but they’re also things that make me pretty happy with just a small investment of cash. And, of course, there are things that don’t cost money that make me pretty happy, too. But sometimes, a few bucks will buy a little joy.

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Supposed to

09. March 2009 · Write a comment · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags:

I’m supposed to be grading right now, but I’m not, mostly because I need at least one more cup of coffee before I can tackle that. I am a slow grader. I can only manage 3 or 4 papers at once before I start to pull my hair out. It’s not that the papers are bad; many of them are quite good. It’s that the energy it takes for me to come up with the right comments that will be supportive of what’s good, redirect what needs improvement, and offer advice for the next paper is huge.

I was also supposed to go to a school board meeting on Thursday and make a podcast on Friday. Both canceled due to child illness. When my kids were little, I knew to plan for unexpected things to happen that might disrupt the best laid plans. In grad school, I started papers weeks in advance, just in case my progress was disrupted by a sick kid that wouldn’t let me leave their side. And this did indeed happen once in a while. But I’ve gotten complacent in recent years, as my kids have gotten older, and so even if they do get sick, they’re content to lie on the couch and watch tv, with just a few check-ins from mom, and some food and medicine every once in a while.

It doesn’t help that all of my “supposed tos” are now self imposed. I could put off looking at the papers all week and torture myself by doing them all at once at the end. But I know I can’t. The podcast is kind of a marketing tool for a business I can’t really dedicate a huge amount of time for until summer. Eventually, this will need to be a more regular event. And, of course, it’s my own need to be involved that led me to want to attend the board meeting. I have no idea if this will or will not be useful, which makes me less motivated to make the effort to attend.

I’m also supposed to be exercising, but the last round of grading, plus a trip for a conference, left me little time for that. And now, of course, I’m thinking about putting a bathing suit on in June and it makes me fearful. I shouldn’t care. I really shouldn’t, but I do.

I don’t like all these supposed tos. Some of them–like the podcast–are easy to frame as “get to”. The fact that I can, if I want to, spend the time to make a podcast is a freedom most people don’t have. I can even do that with the grading. How many people get to teach college level classes at a place like my SLAC? But some supposed tos come from external pressures to be a certain way, to look a certain way, etc. Those supposed tos I’m trying to get rid of. What supposed tos would you like to purge?

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My Students are Teh Awesome

06. March 2009 · Write a comment · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: ,

I don’t often like to write about students here because, well, many of them read my blog and it’s not that I’d say bad things, but what I say might get misinterpreted. But I think when I see such good work coming out of them, I feel compelled to say something. We asked our students to comment on our blog about what they’ve learned in the class so far. We did this verbally in class a few weeks ago and we decided to do it via blog this time. Guinevere’s question at the end of here comment really struck me:

I’m still wondering how we take this out of the classroom and into the non-academic arenas. I really appreciated Rebecca’s post suggesting we attempt to balance our discussions of labels between the abstract and the concrete. I think we can definitely work to relate our discussions back to how we go forward in our daily lives. I began the semester contemplating how personal this journey would be for me. The first part of the class certainly was, but I feel now that we’ve moved into a very analytical, attempting-to-be-objective, super-academic approach to our discussions. That isn’t necessarily the worst thing we could be doing, but I’d like to revitalize my own efforts to connect more personally with our discussions, get a little messy and be subjective, and figure out how to relate academia to non-academia. It would be nice in our class discussions, large and small, if we occasionally took a step back and said “OK, what does this mean when we walk out of here at 4 pm?”

I like the push not to compartmentalize what’s going on in class, to realize that it can have implications outside of the classroom. But, of course, we haven’t discussed how to do that. I wonder, though, if we can think about what we could do. For example, the last collection of panels the students participated in had them presenting on a number of professions, both historical and contemporary, where the gender balance is skewed one way or another. Further, we discovered that pay rates in even the female-dominated professions were lower for women than for men. Can we do something about that? Or on a smaller scale, are there individual choices or actions we could take that would have a collective effect? It seems worth considering taking the class directly into the world in some way. I always assume that students take what they’ve learned and apply it however they see fit in their lives, but why not apply it sooner?

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Real PTA Moms Respond

05. March 2009 · Write a comment · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: , ,

Jackie at A Patchwork Life responds to the PTA debate, as a mom volunteering in a lower income school. I think that the parents who responded to Elizabeth’s post that I linked to yesterday tend to be in higher income school districts, where the tax base is such that they probably could fully fund the school if there were the political will to do so, and so there’s a frustration with the PTA fund raising efforts because they seem unnecessary or are creating further inequities between school districts.

The comments on Jackie’s post provide a completely different perspective on PTA efforts and should be a reminder that there are huge differences across school districts.

I have had experience at both ends of the school spectrum. I attended a school as a child where something like 85% of the students received free or reduced lunch. I’m sure they had to scrape for basic resources and that fund raising was an important part of that. At the other end, the first elementary school we were in here in PA was the richest in the area and the district actively competed with area private schools and was very up front about that competition. I went to PTA meetings there and volunteered in the classroom. Worst. Experience. Ever. I realize that that experience is not typical but it kind of scarred me. I mean the women who volunteered dressed for it, wearing pearls and diamonds and their best label outfits. I had on a t-shirt and jeans. One woman spent the entire time talking about famous graduates of her exclusive all-women’s high school. Ugh.

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