Monday Miscellany: A Day Late But Not Too Short

My posting has been light lately. This is not for any lack of postable material, but for a real lack of time and energy to complete the task. There are so many things to say and so few alert brain cells to compose them. Here are a few.

I recently had a birthday. It brought to mind the best gift my wife has ever given me for my birthday: my HP Photosmart R707 Digital Camera.

When I was younger and much less wise, I had delusions of becoming a writer. I thought I could be the next Tolkien. If not that, maybe the next C.S. Lewis. Well, I would settle for becoming the next George MacDonald. If I had to, I would become the next Stephen Lawhead. Surely, I could write better than Lawhead. My dreams never quite worked out the way I wanted them to. To become a "writer" one has to, well, write. To become an "author" on has to write well (can one "auth"?). I had neither the discipline to write consistently nor the gift to write well (as readers of this blog can well attest).

My wife's gift of a digital camera was a stroke of genius. My wife is a bit of a genius anyway with two possible exceptions: choice of husband and giving of gifts. My wife tends to either reveal the gift to me way too soon, use the gift more herself than I do, or get me something so obvious that I guess what it is just by looking at the expression on her face. She has gotten me some fine gifts in the past, but, in her words, "I never know what to get you." The camera was brilliant. Yes, I gave her a harsh glance for spending so much money on something, but it has become one of my favorite possessions and an outlet for my spirit of creativity past.

In the past year I (mostly I, some by my wife) have taken over 2,400 photographs. Sure the bulk of the photos are deletable, but we haven't had to pay to have any of those professionally processed. I have found that I have to take 10-20 pictures to get one good one. I have to take at least a hundred to get one that I am truly happy with. Sure, digital photography is easy, but creating an image that I find attractive has been a great joy for me in a trying year. Now I feel that I am ready to move up to a "real" camera. As soon as I win $700.00 in the lottery, I am getting this.

I know I am no artist, but here are some of my favorite photos from the last year. I cannot share all of my favorites with you as many of them reveal more of the faces of my children than I am willing to share publicly on the Internet. I will be happy to e-mail information to any friends and family who want to see my "private" photos on my flickr account.

The captions for each photo are above the photo being described.

This is one of the first pictures I took that I really liked. There is a lovely patch of daylilies that bloom quite vigorously each spring. This one waited until the fall. It was as though it was waiting for me to get my camera. I must have take thirty to forty pictures of this one flower. I caught this one the first time I experimented with black and white. It was a beautiful, late autumn afternoon. I love the creamy quality of the pedals against the stone.



This is my "most viewed" photo on my flickr account. It has been viewed 34 times (that means someone saw it and thought enough of it to click on it to get a closer view). Two people have even been kind enough to "favorite" it. I took the photo early this spring when the maple behind my house produces approximately 17 billion of these little beauties. All of them land in my gutters. This is not one of my favorite photos, but I feel I owe it to the 34 people who have made it my most popular photo. By comparison, real photos by real photographers on flickr get thousands of views.


This is my second most popular photo on flickr. It also has 34 views, but no favorites. It looks like my son is being very solemn and patriotic before this veterans' memorial at Veterans' State Park; in truth, he was looking at the water fall.



This is one of my favorite photos of my boy. He was wearying from his first day of fishing and was wishing he could be a rider in the boat in the distance.


This is my favorite "accident". I was trying to get a good photo of this mystery flower (read about it here). I like trying to take "macros" (photos of small things, or extreme closeups) and I saw my girl come into the picture. I said her name disapprovingly, but it was too late to stop my finger from clicking the button. You can see her looking over her shoulder at me as though to say, "What did I do?" She is quite lovely. The flower came out pretty good too.


This is one of my favorites. It was early spring, and I had been trying to take pictures of dandelions for a week. I had gotten a couple of decent ones when I went out at sunset one day and saw this one standing all alone and proud. I have not changed any of the coloration on this photo. I like the bare trees against the sky as frames around the dandelion illuminated by the sunset.


Thanks for the gift my love. If any of you want to see more, please feel free to go to my flickr site. Almost all of the pictures look better big. If you want me stop slowing down your computer with silly pictures, feel free to comment.

Peace

Lonely Girl

On the way to the football game on Friday, we stopped at a local park to run off some energy. I snapped the photo below. It seems to fit with Monday's post about my daughter's adjustments to the changes in our lives.



She had a good time that night. I think she was so happy to be out with her daddy that she didn't complain once (even when we had to use a very unsanitary bathroom). It was her brother who whined (and he only a few times when he was quite tired and cold).

Peace

Monday Miscellany: Homecoming

I have a lot to say, but not enough time to say it, so I will keep it short.

Earlier this summer I was worried about how my son would adjust to having to go to Kindergarten for the first time, get two new brothers, and have his dad go back to work all within the space of a single week. I was worried about the wrong child. My daughter has not adjusted well to the changes. She has been overtly rebellious and is draining what is left of her mother's enengy right out of her. She must be quite lonely.

My wife bought herself Lego Star Wars II for the PS2. It is a very fine game.

Last week was Homecoming. I took the boy and girl to the football game (the entire family got in free). They lasted through the first half. They both profess to wanting to go again. Football is hard to explain to a five year old. He figured out on his own that they went into the huddle to make a plan. He was most impressed when the cheerleaders did a stunt, "Cool, I didn't know they could do that!" He also liked the punts because the ball went really high.

I got my first search result for "Striplings Butt Rub". It took the searcher here. My site came up first on the list. I don't know whether to be pleased or queasy. The good news is that it was probably the only seach to my site that may have gotten information useful to the searcher.


Peace

The Price of a College Education: Dumb and Dumber

Recently, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute issued a Civic Literacy Report titled, "The Coming Crisis in Citizenship. In it, the ISI claims that not only do students learn little about American history, economics, and government in college, in some cases they actually exhibit "negative learning." In other words, they knew more when they were admitted then when they graduated. Testing of incoming freshmen was compared with testing of graduating seniors; this testing showed a remarkable lack of progress. This held true for both Ivy League and "lesser" colleges (or "Elite" and "Non-elite" schools as the report calls them). Students at Yale scored 1.5% less as seniors than they did as freshmen!

Two days ago, CNN reported, "Harvard University, founded 370 years ago to train Puritan ministers, should again require all undergraduates to study religion, along with U.S. history and ethics, a faculty committee is recommending." The article went on to reveal that:

The State University of New York and George Mason University have adopted general education requirements that include mandatory American history.

In the Ivy League, Columbia University has a significant core curriculum with courses that include material on religion, and Dartmouth currently requires a course in the analysis of religion, though that will change next year, according to its Web site. But Harvard would be the only school in that group requiring students to take courses in both religion and U.S. history.

Public colleges in Colorado, along with Ohio University and Arizona State, are among the other universities currently reviewing general education requirements, said Anne Neal, president of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, a generally conservative academic group that has urged universities to toughen general education requirements.

SUNY and George Mason "have adopted general education requirements that include mandatory American history"--it wasn't required before? No wonder the ISI Report found what it did.

I have read with interest the response to the ISI Report. As a high school AP US history and government teacher, I have often noted the happy tragedy that occurs whenever one of my students does well on the AP US History exam. It validates my teaching and his or her learning, but it also means that they will not be taking US history at college. While it is true that many colleges do not accept AP credit, it is easy to see how an advanced student could take enough AP exams to avoid taking any college social science (history, economics, government).

I have always been secretly disappointed that my best students would not be talking a “real” college class in US history. I am not enough of a statistician to know how AP plays into the ISI Report, but it does not appear to my near-sighted eyes to have been addressed as a factor in the report. I think it could be a factor that merits study; until then, I will continue to prepare my students as though they will not be taught a thing in college. It is the prudent thing to do either way.

Today in the WSJ and fresh on the heels of the ISI report, Naomi Schaefer Riley asks, "Test Question: Why is high school the new college?" Her answer, they aren't learning anything useful in college, but the enforced rigor of test-based high school courses (especially AP courses) actually gives students useful knowledge and skills. In her words:

Why? Because college increasingly offers a crazed social experience at the expense of rigorous study. But high school does better: It is often the last time that students are forced to learn something. Parents make their kids show up at school. More than a few teachers convey basic skills and knowledge. After-school life centers on burnishing a college application, not binge drinking. AP courses, where they exist, exploit these structured years for maximum learning.

I'll try.


Peace

October

The calendar has rolled down to October again. Some random reasons why October is my favorite month:

Summer has been left behind in September; the air is cool and the days are still long enough to enjoy the sun.
Baseball playoffs and the World Series
College football
My birthday is this month.
Holiday season will be here soon.
My cooling bill and my heating bill will both be very low.
The grass will stop growing soon.
Orion guards the clear night sky.
Flannel and hot chocolate are socially acceptable again (both together and individually; I had my first cup of steaming cocoa today)



Peace