Pseudopodia

Unbelievable. staceythinx: Science is lovely in silk (at...

Thu, 31 May 2012 13:49:56 -0400

Unbelievable.

Science is lovely in silk (at least it is in the hands of Karen Kamenetzky).

Kamenetzky on her work:

I dye, paint and stitch cottons and silks to create boldly colored wallhangings inspired by microscopic/cellular imagery - a kind of visual invented biology with textiles. I find this imagery metaphorically rich since all change fundamentally happens on this infinitesimal level.

It is very difficult to find a place to put something like this...

Wed, 30 May 2012 15:47:37 -0400

It is very difficult to find a place to put something like this around the house.

Lest I be accused of the above being a humblebrag, I acknowledge and assume full responsibility for the brag in question.

But seriously, where am I going to put a plaque.

A: In my office closet.

Pop Takes Photos: Bog Walk

Wed, 30 May 2012 12:23:33 -0400

Pop Takes Photos: Bog Walk

Baby Quails (Taken with instagram)

Wed, 23 May 2012 19:29:45 -0400

Baby Quails (Taken with instagram)

Worked on my finishing stamp for a show. Fun times. Finishing...

Sun, 20 May 2012 15:50:00 -0400

Worked on my finishing stamp for a show. Fun times.

Finishing Stamp (Taken with instagram)

Pile of Franklin (Taken with instagram)

Sat, 19 May 2012 15:46:27 -0400

Pile of Franklin (Taken with instagram)

It’s AP Bio Exam Day. Greet the day with awesomeness,...

Mon, 14 May 2012 06:02:53 -0400

It’s AP Bio Exam Day. Greet the day with awesomeness, friends.

LCD Soundsystem - I Can Change @ Jools Holland (14 May 2010) (by notaIways)

Der Buster (Taken with instagram)

Sun, 13 May 2012 18:34:31 -0400

Der Buster (Taken with instagram)

I Write Letters: Don Ricardo's = Grumpy Time

Sun, 13 May 2012 14:01:17 -0400

Mom is traveling today, so we decided to go out for dinner last night. She picked Don Ricardo’s, a (previously) totally fine place to eat in our village. It was not fine. Here is the text of the letter that I wrote the management this morning, describing our evening’s dining experience:

To whom it may concern;

I am writing to inform you of the experience that myself, and my family had while dining at your restaurant last night (Saturday, May 12th). My mother has to travel today (Mother’s Day), and as a result, my wife and I took her, my step-father, and my step-sister, out for diner last night as an early celebration. Content to let my mother choose the venue, she selected Don Ricardo’s. My wife and I have eaten at your restaurant before, and found the food to be good, and the service to be amenable. We made a reservation for 6 pm more than 24 hours in advance.

My wife and I arrived before everyone else. Speaking to the hostess, I indicated that we would not need a table for six people, as I had originally indicated, since we were only going to be five that evening. When the rest of the family arrived, we were brought to our table. This is where our experience began to decline. The table that we had was an octagonal table that five people were somewhat crammed around. This would not be a major issue, except that the placement of the table, in the first dining room of the restaurant, was such that we had three occupied tables within a foot of three sides of our table. The fourth side of the table, where I sat, extended into the lane of foot traffic more than any other table in the dining room. Since my mother is somewhat hearing impaired, and my wife is eight-and-a-half month’s pregnant, we asked if we could sit at another table. After all, we had made a reservation the day before. The wait staff indicated that this would not be possible, even though there were clearly three tables that were unoccupied in the patio-style dining room that was beyond the one that we were seated in.

Initially, we were willing to put up with the inconvenience, but after 10 minutes, the dining experience became intolerable. One of the tables that we were nestled against had a party of very loud, very young children, making conversation impossible. My wife was uncomfortable with the lack of room. I kept getting nudged by diners and wait staff, as they walked past the table. My step-father indicated to the hostess that perhaps it would be appropriate to move us to one of the still-unoccupied tables in the patio area. This did not occur. Finally, after our waiter came to take our order, asking us what we wanted, before walking away after the hostess spoke to him, we decided to leave. I informed the waiter that we were going to leave, at which point, he indicated that the tables that we had been previously told were not available in the patio area could be made available if we would reconsider staying. We were not interested, and I offered to settle up our bar tab (two beers, two cokes, and one unsweetened iced-tea). The waiter told me that our bill was $40. When I asked how that could be, it was discovered that we had been charged for two frozen margaritas, which no one in our party had ordered. That corrected, I was offered a bill for $20, which I paid, and we left.

I am not writing this letter to complain about the hostess or wait staff, who seemed very nice and professional. But for whatever reason, the system of meeting the needs of customers at Don Ricardo’s broke down in our particular circumstances. The idea that five people could comfortably fit at the table where we were seated is misguided (particularly when one of them is quite pregnant). It is unfortunate that it required our wanting to leave before accommodations could be arranged. I do not work in the restaurant industry, but it is my understanding that business works best when the needs of customers are met prior to their wanting to leave your establishment. I’m not sure what it says that the hibachi restaurant next door was able to seat us at a table for six, without a reservation, when we left Don Ricardo’s, but I don’t think it’s a good thing as far as your restaurant is concerned. And while I have no problem paying for the beers and sodas that we began to drink, I would suggest that the appropriate course of action for Don Ricardo’s to take in our circumstance, would be to refuse to take my money. After all, it wasn’t our fault that we were leaving.

In a village full of restaurants, I don’t think that Don Ricardo’s can afford to have situations like ours occur with any frequency. I hope this letter helps you address the problems in your system so that no other diners have an experience similar to ours.

Very truly yours,

Four years in to our current mobile numbers, and my lovely wife...

Sat, 12 May 2012 14:01:56 -0400

Four years in to our current mobile numbers, and my lovely wife still gets random calls for “Ralph”, former owner of her particular 10-digit number. Last weekend, she also got this image sent to her via MMS.

Could you imagine a more fantastic accidental picture?

I assume that the smiling gentleman is the friend of Ralph, not Mr. Tyson.

Unfortunate Typos in Administrative Emails

Sat, 12 May 2012 08:13:26 -0400

This week was Teacher Appreciation Week. I’m lucky to work in a district where everyone pretty much appreciates everyone else pretty much all of the time. In the middle of the week, we received the following email from one of the district administrators. I’ve taken the liberty of emphasizing the typo:

Good Morning everyone,

I just wanted to take the time to wish each and every one of you a Happy Teacher Appreciation week!

Thank you for all that you do for our students, families and the entire Community. This is certainly a team effort that we could accomplish without your dedication, compassion and professionalism.

Have a terrific week, you certainly deserve it!

Oops.

Obviously, this little slip of the keyboard doesn’t mean anything significant about this particular administrator (who would be the first to chuckle along with the rest of us), but it certainly brought a smile to my face.

Made with Paper

Thu, 10 May 2012 22:35:48 -0400

Made with Paper

Pop takes photos: The lascivious Franklin

Thu, 03 May 2012 14:00:53 -0400

Pop takes photos: The lascivious Franklin

An easy collaborative review structure

Wed, 02 May 2012 14:01:06 -0400

I never feel like I’m particularly good at reviewing for things. I always feel like I’m missing some crucial piece of the puzzle that would unlock everything and make the experience more worthwhile for my students. I don’t like review games, much. Ideally, students would come in full of questions that they wanted answers to. That doesn’t really happen in any major capacity. So…what to do…

One thing I really DON’T want to do is spend class time having students take exams (at least not until closer to the AP exam). All of that can be offloaded to home. While we’re in class, let’s use the time we have to do something more worthwhile. Sure, I’ll spend the first half of the day fielding questions as we review the course sequence, but that get’s old. What can we do during our other period? Let’s build useful structures. It’s from this perspective that I have hit upon the structure I’m about to explain:

Before she passed away, a tremendous colleague in the AP Biology community had developed a few interesting review structures. She had made cards that asked students to respond to particular prompts within the larger context of course themes. She had put a bunch of vocabulary with common prefixes and suffixes on a bunch of similar cards. She had also asked students to compare particular things across different lineages (e.g. gene regulation in a human vs. gene regulation in E. coli). These are great structures, and I have used them for a few years now in their analog form.
It was easy to take this material and put it in to a series of google docs. I have a laptop cart every day for one period, so access is all set.
That accomplished, the only thing left to do was to run off a copy of each doc for this year’s group, open it up to editing by the class, post the link in the class forum, and explain the criteria:

Each student claims a specific number of items on the sheet for a particular day.
Each student responds fully to their claimed prompts.
I indicate my satisfaction or lack thereof with student work.
We repeat for eight days.

The sheet is opened up right before class, and stays open for contribution through midnight of the day that students are assigned the sheet. They remain available past that point as publicly viewable docs for ever. Students can make copies for their own usage for the purpose of studying, revision of responses they don’t love, etc.

It seems to be working well. Here’s a published copy of the first day’s sheet as an example (it’s the published doc, students have access to the copyable document on the google doc backend).

It’s certainly better than whatever else I would be doing with that half of my class time.

I like the bones of this structure a lot. Hopefully, in a few years, computer access will be so saturated that I can implement similar sorts of things across the board in my courses.

Pop takes photos: Zwiebel is displeased with your misbehavior.

Tue, 01 May 2012 13:49:21 -0400

Pop takes photos: Zwiebel is displeased with your misbehavior.

Fantastic. Poster, please! jakyraptor: ironnnny<3

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 17:32:39 -0400

Fantastic. Poster, please!

jakyraptor:

ironnnny<3

On Giving It Away

Sun, 29 Apr 2012 20:47:17 -0400

On Giving It Away:

I’m unapologetic when it comes to advocating for free and open exchange of materials among colleagues. The recent move to Google Drive has finally made it easy to share tons of files in a wide circle with almost no effort. Anyone who is interested can make a public collection and drop anything they want in there (within the strictures of proper usage rights and attribution, of course). While I love my Dropbox, that sort of public sharing is not something that it does well.

So, I thought a little experiment was in order. The above link takes you to a form you can use to post your own public collection of educational materials. All collections that are posted get popped on a spreadsheet that is publicly accessible to anyone who cares. It’s easy.

In my dreams, this thing goes on for thousands of entries.

Regarding My General Fanciness

Sun, 29 Apr 2012 14:02:00 -0400

I’ve come in for a few awards recently. In the last three weeks, I have been recognized with the following:

I am a Western Suffolk BOCES Model Schools Technology Integration Award Winner for 2012. This gives me a $1000 grant that I can use to buy something for my classes, and I’m buying this.
I am the Kim Foglia AP Biology Service Award winner for 2012. This award goes to people who do good things for the AP Biology teaching community, and is named in honor of a great colleague and friend to us all.
I am the Suffolk County Science Teachers Association High School Science Teacher of the Year. This one is probably pretty self explanatory.

All of them are, in some way, related to the scope and scale of the sharing of the work that I do. Which always tickles me, since, anyone with the inclination, could do similar sorts of things.

If one were to sit around and think about just how silly it is to suggest that any one particular teacher is more deserving of recognition than any one particular other teacher, one would quickly realize that this is not a particularly square-able circle. That’s not me being self-effacing (I am nothing if not confident of just how great a job I do in doing my great job), it’s just me speaking a bit of sense. I have enough of a connection to the staff of my district, the teachers in my geographic location, and (thanks to twitter) throughout the world, to know that great people are doing lots of great things. But to leave it there misses the point. The honor in these awards is not in the various titles, it’s in the fact that colleagues, bosses, and former students, actually think that you deserve them. As far as I’m concerned, that’s the biggest honor, and it’s pretty great.

We need a new typing program (adventures in administrative interning #1)

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 17:56:47 -0400

While I will not become an official administrative intern until May 21st, I have begun getting various tasks to begin filling my hour requirement with. Most of them are pretty rote things, but one of the first was being tasked with investigating replacement typing programs for our elementary student population.

Here’s what we currently use:

“Paws in Typing Town”! You may be unfamiliar with the program. You can be forgiven for your ignorance. Here’s how you install “Paws in Typing Town!”

That’s right. I currently have in my possession actual 3.5 inch floppy disks. Of course, I don’t have a drive to use them in, but still, it’s pretty great.

Now, you may be asking yourself what kind of machine is needed to run “Paws in Typing Town!”. Here are the system specs if you want to run it off of the dual-boot CD-ROM that is included:

4 MB of free ram. Quite the benchmark. And Windows 3.1 or HIGHER! Sorry, Windows 3.0 users, you’re out of luck.

Odd that “Paws in Typing Town!” isn’t playing well with our new power management software.

I’m not even all that clear on how we are currently running “Paws in Typing Town!” on our district computers. The High School is a land of XP and OSX.

I think I’ll be able to handle this particular task without too much of a problem.

Made with Paper

Sun, 22 Apr 2012 19:25:45 -0400

Made with Paper