San Francisco Field Trip

December15

Click on pic for more images

The family and I took a trip to San Francisco to meet up with the husband’s family this weekend, so that dominated our schedule. The first part of the trip was to the Dickens Christmas Faire, a local institution that Terry and his sister have attended for years, but I never got around to going to. My observation, it smelled a lot nicer than Victorian England as the place fairly reeked of some mixture of cloves and spice. I guess it’s like the Bellagio, all of the canals–none of the sewage?
Sunday was a trip to the California Academy of Sciences. This was one of a number of San Francisco museums to undergo renovation recently. It’s reopened in the last few months, so there were crowds. Husband and sister in law used to go there as kids back in the day (the 1970s), when most children’s facilities run by the city had free-admission for local kids. Now it cost us $65 to get in with two adults and the son. Dh liked it, but it was definitely not the CAS of old. SIL hated it for that reason. She did bring up an interesting point, that they had cut the number of exhibits, including ones she loved. One of them was the “Hall of Man” which had old school exhibits about the evolutionary development of mankind. The evolution part seemed to be regulated to botany and zoology in the Islands of Evolution exhibits which focused on the Galapagos, and Madagascar islands. This made me wonder how both liberal and conservative desires could be shifting the focus of teaching about evolutionary science. I’m sure that the “Hall of Man” seemed too anthro-centric, and shifting to the Galapagos gets you talking about ecosystems, not just one species. OTOH, it helps you conveniently avoid discussing man as a primate, and keep the focus on turtles and frogs, which is less inflammatory to the anti-evolution crowd. I’m just wondering?

I HATE when my economy melts down

September29

posted under fun, orchids | No Comments »

Week Four in Review

September27

The week was choke full of stuff and had a good start, but ended with me getting a nasty upper respiratory infection which I’m still nursing.

Fifth Grade

Work continued on election ads. I had a whole long list of ads to get through, but got to just the first three on this list (which were from the LBJ vs. Goldwater race):

Sixth Grade

I had the students do something I hadn’t tried before, they picked out photos on perseverance, and favorited them. This is in preparation for making their own motivational posters using Motivator site.

Fourth Grade

I am FAILING at showing the first episode of “When We Left Earth”. The students are restive, and socializing. It is either not exciting enough, or just too long (I showed >20 minutes, but they are tuning out within the first 5). I may need to just cull the highlights? Suggestions welcome.

Teacher Training

I did my first training which was a 2 hour overview of Web 2.0. The turnout was small (about 6-7). My pacing was off, and I had to cutoff some parts (I always leave 40 minutes at the end for them to “play” with the tools). Here is my follow-up post:

posted under orchids | 3 Comments »

Catching up on last week…

February5

Wednesday January 30, 2008 in a Sentence

Today was an inverse sh*t sandwich: my desktop o/s was fried last night when the server crashed, so I had to be reimaged; the school day went great; I got my cell phone lost/stolen at the end of the day.

Tuesday January 29, 2008 in a Sentence

The high today was 45 with rain; I feel like a human icicle.


The Nocturnal Shed

Monday January 28, 2007 in a Sentence

Okay, here is a lesson in how not to plan a lesson: Why was I having them do three seperate tasks in one day, with three brand new web apps? BREAK IT DOWN next time!

posted under onions, orchids | No Comments »

The funny, interesting, and just tragic…

September23

Around the Corner v2 – MGuhlin.net – Mudflaps and Libraries

  • Public Libraries in Wyoming have a new campaign featuring the mudflap gal. Now there’s an advocacy campaign! This reminded me of back when I did work advocating for public libraries. Truckers are apparently big library users (they like audio books). For the record, I consider this funny and interesting.

Math and Science Education is Important, but Not for Me

  • Public Agenda has a new study on parents’ views of math and science education in Missouri and Kansas. Seems they think their kids science and math education is just fine. What’s your answer to this:
    1. Is knowledge of Algebra essential to get into college?
    2. Is knowledge of higher math (Calculus) essential to get into college?

Learning and Blogging

  • I quizzed Miguel during a chat at Teachers Teaching Teachers, about his indefatigable blogging. He is one of the most prolific people in my feed reader. He says it’s all on the way to learning. I think it’s his position. He spends a good part of the day online researching for his job, so he can run across things worth sharing. I’m keeping up a very ambitious blogging schedule doing 3 posts a week. Other teachers in the classroom are not even at that level. There’s a reason for this, we’re teaching not surfing during our workday (and this is not to knock Miguel, that is his job). We want teachers in practice to blog, but really, given the U.S. teaching schedule, where is the time? I think you’re more likely to end up in Dy/Dan’s situation where he is working so much perfecting his lessons, it’s getting in the way of his life. Looking at becoming an administrator leaves me scratching my head, because most of the good ones work even longer hours than teachers. The Internet changes some things about time and place, but it can’t make up time out of air.

News – Berkeley student gunned down outside Oak Park shop – sacbee.com

  • This is the barber shop across the street from where I work. The workers and owner volunteer in our school. An oft-neglected fact of living in a neighborhood that is a shooting gallery is that not all the folks that get killed when bullets fly are drug dealers who “deserved it”. This was probably a robbery, the young gentleman was closing the shop for the night. What price can you put on the promise of a life like this? That is something that is truly priceless and all the MasterCards in the world ain’t gonna make this right.
posted under onions, orchids | No Comments »
« Older EntriesNewer Entries »
rssrss
rssrss

Links of Interest


License

Creative Commons License
All of Ms. Mercer's work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.


Skip to toolbar