Bryce Moore's Blog, page 124

Chinese MEMORY THIEF is Here! Let’s Test It with Google Translate

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You might have seen yesterday that my author copies of THE MEMORY THIEF in Chinese arrived in the mail. This is beyond exciting, especially since the books themselves look gorgeous. They have embossed covers with a beautiful illustration, and there’s a series of full color illustrations right at the beginning that match the cover’s style.

Many of you have asked to see more of the book, so I thought I’d post a video here of what it looks like in person. Better than just trying to slap a series of pictures up, right?

Forgive the soft audio. I was filming in my office, so I was using my library voice.

Early Morning Seminary

[image error]Tomas is now in 9th grade. While most of you no doubt recognize that for the fact that he’s now officially in high school, some of you will also realize it means he’s now started early morning seminary. For those of you who don’t know what that is, Latter-day Saints high schoolers outside of Utah (and maybe some other states in the west with large Latter-day Saint populations?) go to a church class each morning before school starts.

For Tomas, that means he’s up at 5:30 and out the door by 5:50. (We’re taking turns with a carpool to get him and other students there.) Class starts at 6:20 and ends in time for him to make it over to school before classes there begin.

What do they study? It changes based on the year. One year they focus on the Old Testament. The next year it’s the New Testament, then The Book of Mormon, and finally Church History. Then it starts over, so over the course of four years, each student gets the whole package.

What does Tomas think about it? Well, this morning I believe his direct quote was, “Why do they start this so early?” which I can’t help but ask as well. When there are so many studies coming out that say teenagers need more sleep, suggesting schools should start later in the day, it’s a bummer that it starts to early each day. On the other hand, I also believe it’s a good thing for kids to be thinking and learning about religion. (Though I suppose that’s a topic for another time, and one which a fair number of you might disagree with.)

When I was in high school, I didn’t do early morning seminary. I did home study, which meant I met with a teacher once a week to go over the material, and then it was self-guided during the weeks. In practice (and being completely honest here) it meant that I crammed in the entire year’s worth of study in the last few weeks of the year. Definitely less effective. (Manuals had fill-in-the-blank pages to show you were doing the work. It didn’t take a genius to figure out you could fill those blanks much faster if you just skimmed . . .)

Our school district has school start an hour later each Wednesday, which means we just have seminary Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. We also cancel fairly liberally in case of bad weather (thankfully). But this is going to be a long term commitment for us. Tomas, DC, and MC will never overlap years, so we’ll be doing this for the next 8 years straight, followed by a year off, and then it’ll be MC’s turn.

In practice, I got up at 5:55 each morning before this. Now I’ll get up a half hour earlier or so. My plan is to come over to work after I drop Tomas and the others off, and use that half hour to get writing done first thing in the morning. I think it’ll be very doable, even if I loathe getting up so early. (But then again, I hated getting up at 5:55. So it’s not like my feelings are changing much.) I’m not sure what I’ll do on Wednesdays. I typically do better with a sleep schedule if I can do the same time every day.

In any case, wish us luck, and if you see Tomas looking a little bleary eyed the next while, you’ll know why.

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve been posting my book ICHABOD in installments, as well as chapters from UTOPIA. Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.

The Joy of Orthodontics

[image error]I’m sitting here in the orthodontist’s office, waiting for Tomas to get wired up for his second round of heavy metal. This also means I just made the first payment for said round. Adulting is more expensive and far less fun than advertised, though on the plus side, it’s not my mouth. I definitely feel for him.

When I was growing up, I had to have some wiring done to get my teeth in order. I know there were braces involved on my bottom teeth, and I had to wear a retainer on my top teeth for quite some time. But the actual process is pretty much a blur. I don’t remember how long it lasted. I remember getting the bottom braces off, but not much more than that.

(Ironically, when I moved to Maine at the ripe old age of 28 and went to my new dentist’s for my first cleaning (yay dental insurance!), she noted that I still had cement on my teeth from those braces. I guess it had just been hanging out there for fifteen years or whatever. It’s gone now.)

While you have to worry about actually having the work done when you’re growing up, you don’t have to worry about anything surrounding that. How much it costs. What actual work is happening. To me, it’s sort of like the difference between being a passenger and a driver. Before I could drive, I never really paid any attention to how I got wherever I was going. The car was this magic device. You entered it in one spot, and then some amount of time later, you got out at your destination. I let my parents worry about all that stuff in the middle. (Likely because I was too focused on my Gameboy to really have a clue what was happening.)

Now that I’m actually in the driver’s seat, I pay a lot more attention. Straightening your teeth is a complicated, expensive process. As I said, this is already the second round for Tomas. The first one involved getting his jaw into the right position. As I was driving him here this morning, we were reminiscing on that process. It had involved putting pistons into his mouth. Actual pistons between the top and bottom jaw that controlled how he could open his mouth.

While this was (obviously) preferable to getting head gear, I still don’t like to think of what it would feel like to have that happen to me. Not being able to move my mouth the way I want to. Being stuck with it all the time. Ugh. Thankfully, that’s behind us now.

Denisa and I debated doing this second round, talking it over with Tomas some as well. The first one had been almost a necessity for medical reasons. It would have caused him headaches (both literal and figurative) to leave the jaw the way it had been. This round is more cosmetic, for the most part. In the end, we felt it was the thing to do now. Straight teeth can help your self confidence. Healthy teeth keep the rest of your body healthy as well. And doing it when everyone else is lets you avoid at least some of the self conscious bits.

Anyway. It’ll be a couple hours more before he’s done. No clue how he’ll feel at the end of it. Wish him luck.

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve been posting my book ICHABOD in installments, as well as chapters from UTOPIA. Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.

Who’s Your Favorite Author?

[image error]I’m not a fan of favorites. It always seems to take too long to decide on just one, and when I do, I feel like there are so many other wonderful things out there that I’m subtly insulting by having One Choice to Rule Them All. However, as I grow older, I’m also discovering that it doesn’t need to be that hard.

“Favorite Movie” is simple and obvious. I watch Groundhog Day once a year and have developed an entire tradition around the film. How could I have any other movie as my favorite? “Favorite Television Show” has also evolved over the years up to now, and it’s clearly The Wire.

“Favorite Song” is much more difficult, and I don’t have anything approaching that. Not even “Favorite Genre” when it comes to music. I have *least* favorite (Country), but that’s not the same thing.

“Favorite Author” always felt like a really tricky area for me. As a writer and librarian, there are just so many to choose from. But today I realized as I was reading that I definitely have a favorite author, and it’s clearly CS Lewis.

One of my favorite series growing up was The Chronicles of Narnia. I read them over and over, and I loved them all. I reread them recently with DC, and I still just adore them. So much fun, and so well done, in such small packages. But if that were all Lewis had to offer, it wouldn’t have been enough to catapult him to the Favorite slot.

But he’s written so much more than that. The Great Divorce, Till We Have Faces, Surprised by Joy, The Screwtape Letters, and more. He’s an author that appeals to me both for his writing and his thoughts. I can reread what he’s written time and time again. He entertains me, and he makes me think, and he has such a talent for making abstract thoughts understandable and relatable. I find myself quoting him often, both in writing and casual conversation.

So in the end, how could my favorite author be anyone else?

How about you? Who’s your favorite author (if you have one), and why?

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve been posting my book ICHABOD in installments, as well as chapters from UTOPIA. Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.

Revisiting the Chore Chart

[image error]Last year I wrote about a new development in my family: the creation of a chore chart. I’d written an update a week later to report that it was all going smoothly, but I haven’t said anything about it since then.

The chore chart persisted in more or less the same form this entire time. It’s really hard to believe we’ve been using it for a year and a half now. 18 months of the chore chart. But over the last while, I’d noticed something else happening.

I’ve been feeling more and more stretched thin. When I first made this new chart, I’d felt it was important to have parents be included in the mix, mainly so the kids felt the whole process was on the up and up. Being fair is important to me. The whole reason for the chart coming into being was because Denisa’s work schedule was making things too hectic for her, so putting her on the chart didn’t make sense. I took one for the team.

But as I said, the last while my participation had gotten worse and worse. I’d come home from work and do my writing, and then I’d just be exhausted. I’d feel guilty that I wasn’t pulling my weight on the chore chart. My kids stepped up their game, but even then, it still didn’t feel good. I couldn’t forget I was slacking. It was there at the back of my head, all the time.

So I brought this up with the fam a few weeks ago, and we agreed it was time to make a change. The kids have more practice with chores now, and we know what they can and can’t do better. So I went back to the Excel sheet and removed myself from the mix. Now, MC has some set chores she does every week, and Tomas and DC alternate back and forth between responsibilities for other chores.

Already I can feel a difference. I hope it sticks. I’m very motivated by checking in boxes, but that can also be a problem, as I feel really guilty when those boxes don’t get checked. I realize this might sound silly to many, but it’s an aspect of myself that I’ve been able to use to get a lot more done each day than I otherwise might. It’s just that I’m discovering I need to be cautious how much I apply it. Otherwise it can be too easy for me to always feel like there’s tons of things I need to be doing. In that case, I’m unable to really ever relax unless the slate is totally clear.

That isn’t always realistic.

In any case, yay for a supportive family and kids willing to chip in to help everyone out.

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve been posting my book ICHABOD in installments, as well as chapters from UTOPIA. Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.

Biggest Surprises of My European Vacation

One of the things I love about traveling are surprises. You never really know the experience you’re going to have until you’re in the middle of it. (Ironically, one of the things I hate most about traveling are also surprises. When you think everything’s going to zig, but it does nothing but zag, that can be either very good or very, very bad.)

This past trip, I was revisiting a lot of places where I’d already been before. Salzburg. Vienna. Prague. I didn’t really think I’d get too many surprises out of those places, but I was okay with that, since they were some of my favorite places to visit. And yet they still managed to surprise me. In Salzburg, I read in advance about how incredible the Untersbergbahn was. Supposedly it was a gondola ride up a mountain.

I’ve done some of those. They’re fine, but I didn’t know if I really wanted to do another, especially when there were so many other things I could be doing, and this would require a special trip out of our way. But all the reviews I read of it said it was great, so we tacked it on at the last minute. As we followed the GPS to the spot, I was impressed by the mountains. We were in the Austrian Alps, and those peaks are pretty tall. I kept looking for a small peak where the gondola would take us, but I couldn’t see it.

When we were ten minutes away, I saw a tiny little house perched near the top of the biggest peak in the area. Surely that couldn’t be the . . . But then I saw the gondola heading up the mountain, and I knew it was. 4,300 feet up into the sky in under 10 minutes, leaving you 6,000 feet above sea level at the top. It was gorgeous and exhilarating, and I can’t believe it took me three times to Salzburg to find out about it.

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Likewise, the trick fountains of Hellbrunn were a great surprise. I’d been there before (it’s where the “Sixteen Going on Seventeen” gazebo resides from The Sound of Music), but somehow never checked out the fountains. They were made hundreds of years ago, designed to spurt out water on unsuspecting guests. They’re very successful in that task. I thought I’d be smarter than the fountains, but I got quite wet through the course of the tour. Each time you thought you’d escaped the worst of the water, but there was almost always a fountain right where you’d run for safety, and it would only turn on once you’d stopped to catch your breath.

The kids loved it. Salzburg was already a favorite city. To find two new fantastic experiences there was a real treat.

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But the biggest surprise of the trip for me was a new city: Krakow. I’d never been to Poland, and Krakow was just about 3.5 hours from Denisa’s mom’s house, so it seemed like an easy trip to make. I didn’t know much about the city. It was nothing much more than a somewhat familiar name on a map. My expectations weren’t extremely high. It was just something to do, some place to go.

But it was absolutely charming. It’s got a compact old city, packed full of beautiful churches and buildings and a castle. It’s walkable, with great restaurants and a fantastic central square. It also feels very Eastern European, with the architecture and building design. We stayed right in the middle of the old city (had to walk a half mile to the parking lot where we stashed our car, since there was no parking or driving where we were). Sure, there was no AC at night, and the apartment was a bit run down, but the city itself was marvelous. I definitely want to go back. It didn’t dethrone Prague as my favorite European city, but I still loved it.

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As for worst surprises of the trip . . . the last apartment in Budapest probably wins that award, but we won’t dwell on that. Remember the positive, I say. And nothing’s better than a really great surprise.

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve been posting my book ICHABOD in installments, as well as chapters from UTOPIA. Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.

The Start of a New Semester

[image error]When I was in college, I only ever saw it through the eyes of a student. I went spring term a few times, and so I thought I knew what things were like in slower times. But I’m now heading into my 11th year working at a university full time as a staff member. You start to see things differently after you’ve been at a place for that long.

Of course, it also helps that I live in such a small town. There’s a huge difference when you take a town of 7,760 people and then add 1,750 students to the mix. It’s a difference that’s readily apparent, but it becomes even more stark with each passing year that I live here.

In the summer months, campus is almost in hibernation mode. (At least, the library is.) We do most of our renovations then. We go to conferences. We get things in order for when the students return. There are some summer classes, and there are summer camps that go on at the university, but much of that doesn’t end up directly affecting the library.

The week before classes start up again, students and faculty begin to return. It’s easy to mistake this initial influx of people for what things are “really like.” “Ah yes. This is what it’s like when people are back.” But then classes actually start, and you remember just how wrong that is. Sort of like when I drive down to Massachusetts and hit traffic in Portland. “Ah yes. This is what traffic is like.” And then comes Boston and I remember what it really is.

I’m always excited to see the students return each year. To see all the freshmen wandering around with confused expressions, looking more than a little bewildered, but doing their best to pretend they’ve got it all together. To see friends meeting up again after a summer off. It’s a great reminder for why I do what I do and just what goes on here.

Academia in America can get a bad rap from time to time. It’s accused of being too expensive and being irrelevant. And there’s definitely an argument to be made for each of those in some cases. But for many, many students, it’s still the best way to prepare for a long, successful career. It’s also a wonderful transitory period as students learn the ropes of being adults instead of children. More than a hundred years ago, “teenager” wasn’t much of a concept. You were a kid, and then you were an adult. But in the intervening time, that time of being a teenager has really developed and broadened, and now it’s very much an important part of a person’s life. College plays a real role there, giving people time to establish who they are and how they will approach life.

In any case, I’m excited to see everyone back, even though it makes for a harried start to my week. Students are the lifeblood of my workplace and my town, and it’s great to have them back.

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve been posting my book ICHABOD in installments, as well as chapters from UTOPIA. Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.

Revisiting My Rewatch of The Wire

[image error]At my university this year, there’s a special program starting up: The New Commons Project. (I blogged about it previously here.) After a long nominations and selection process, they’ve picked 12 works that are vital to today, for a variety of reasons. It’s a cool project, and I’ve been happy to play a part in it. It’s led by a group of very dedicated people, and they’ve been a ton of fun to work with.

Better yet, they’re leading off with my favorite television show of all time: The Wire.

To make things easier for anyone who might be watching The Wire as part of this program, I’m presenting you here with every episode review I did of the show, back when I was rewatching it a few years ago. I go into great detail about why the show’s so excellent, and why I feel it’s an important one for people to watch. It continues to inform my world view today, causing me to understand how our society works in a way I didn’t before watching the show.

It’s a dark show, and very adult. Full of good and bad people doing good and bad things. Sometimes the good people are doing the bad things, and sometimes the bad people are doing the good things. But that’s how life is. (Really, I have to stop here. It’s waaaaay too easy for me to go on and on about this show.)

In any case, to those of you about to binge, I salute you!

Season One

One and Two
Three and Four
Five and Six
Seven and Eight
Nine and Ten

Season Two

One and Two
Three and Four
Five and Six
Seven and Eight
Nine and Ten
Eleven and Twelve

Season Three

One
Two and Three
Four and Five
Six and Seven
Eight and Nine
Ten and Eleven
Twelve

Season Four

One and Two
Three and Four
Five and Six
Seven and Eight
Nine and Ten
Eleven and Twelve
Thirteen

Season Five

One and Two
Three, Four, and Five
Six and Seven
Eight, Nine, and Ten

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve been posting my book ICHABOD in installments, as well as chapters from UTOPIA. Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.

Budapest in Three Trips

[image error]This past vacation, I had the chance to visit Budapest three different times. Once at the beginning, once in the middle, and once at the end before we flew home. It was interesting how each time I went gave me a different experience, and I wanted to use that as a place to discuss how little things can make us each have entirely different impressions of a place or event.

First, a description of each visit.

Denisa and I stayed in Budapest together when I arrived in the country. She’d left the kids with her mom, and we had two days to explore the city on our own. (Well, more like one day, seeing as how on the first, I was still very jet lagged.) We stayed in one of the nicest hotels in the city. (Easy to do, when the city is fairly inexpensive. I think our hotel was about $150 a night.) It had a wonderful breakfast included each morning, air conditioning, modern facilities, and was very conveniently placed.

We spent our time going to different restaurants and exploring the city, walking 10 miles the one full day we were there. We had dinner at a lovely Hungarian restaurant with live music. We tried different ice cream shops and food trucks. It was an adventure, and tons of fun. Budapest seemed quite safe, friendly, and modern.

On our second visit, we were with our kids, and we met up with my sister and her family. 13 of us in all. We stayed in an apartment that was also close to downtown. It was fairly modern, if spartan. It had air conditioning, but the building itself had seen better days. (One of my nieces was startled by a rat running down the stairs as she was heading back one day.) No elevator, and it was quite a hike to get to our rooms. (Three flights of stairs, and then my own room was another two flights up.)

We spent our days going to actual places. Visited Parliament (gorgeous!), cathedrals, and parks. Budapest still felt safe and friendly, and the kids all had a great time. It was much more hectic than when it had just been Denisa and I, but that was to be expected.

On our third trip, we stayed one night, right before we left on an early flight in the morning. The apartment was downtown, but it was in a building that was poorly lit and in bad condition. The “air conditioning” advertised was in reality two old fans. The room was sweltering at night, and I couldn’t stand up in the shower (the ceiling was too low). It took a half hour for us to check in.

The city felt much colder, somehow. Darker. Less safe. We still had a good time, but really only when we went back to the places we’d been before.

If I’d gone to Budapest only one time, my experience of the city might have been very different, depending on where I’d stayed and what I’d seen and who I’d seen it with. But it was the same city, each time. I kept asking the kids what their favorite city was. Vienna came up a lot, and I think a fair bit of that had to do with the fact that our first night there was perfect. Beautiful apartment. A subway ride into the heart of town, where we saw Stephansdom and then walked to the old Rathaus, where there was a food and film festival going on. We ate under the stars and watched opera on the big screen. It was fantastic food and great atmosphere.

A vacation isn’t just where you go. It’s who you go with. What you eat. Where you stay. What you do. It’s the weather. Your health. The other people you meet. A few bad or great experiences one way or another can really skew the whole experience. In the future, I think I’ll be more ready to spend a bit more money to ensure good accommodations, as having a solid home base makes a huge difference. Our first two places were great. The third . . . not so much.

I remember seeing Dublin. We stayed way outside the city in a chain hotel, taking the bus thirty minutes in each time we wanted to see anything. I’m glad I’m at the point where I can spend more to be able to have a better experience, but it’s important to remember that this extends beyond vacation and into everyday life. The way we experience our towns and our jobs can be heavily influenced by what we can afford (or not afford) to do. Where we can afford to live. What we can afford to eat.

If someone ever tells you about the experiences they’re having in a place or with a person, never dismiss them because they conflict with what you’ve seen or done. Remember how complex everything can be, and listen.

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Like what you’ve read? Please consider supporting me on Patreon. Thanks to all my Patrons who support me! It only takes a minute or two, and then it’s automatic from there on out. I’ve been posting my book ICHABOD in installments, as well as chapters from UTOPIA. Check it out.

If you’d rather not sign up for Patreon, you can also support the site by clicking the MEMORY THIEF Amazon link on the right of the page. That will take you to Amazon, where you can buy my books or anything else. During that visit, a portion of your purchase will go to me. It won’t cost you anything extra.

Performance Based Education Continues

I attended another school board meeting last night, and I left feeling fairly discouraged. I saw a group of very well-intended people come to a (to my mind) nonsensical decision. As a reminder, my district has been struggling with what to do about Performance Based Education (PBE). Here’s an earlier post I wrote about the topic. Here are some of my biggest concerns about the system, quote by quote from that earlier post:

The difference between a 1, 2, and 3 is clear and distinct. It makes sense. But how exactly a student gets a 4 is much murkier than I’d like.
We’re experimenting with a class or two or three of students, where teachers are learning the ropes at the same time as the students.
If we go through all of this sound and fury and end up with another system that isn’t really that much different than where we started, it will have done nothing but harm.
I think the district should have very clear procedures in place to measure whether or not its working.
We’ve already invested heavily into PBE. So what? It’s a sunk cost. We should ignore the time and effort already spent and make a decision based purely on what’s best for us now.

At last night’s meeting, the administration presented a “new” approach to PBE. Gone are the measurements of 1 (does not meet the standard), 2 (partially meets the standard), 3 (meets the standard), and 4 (exceeds the standard). They have been replaced by N (does not meet the standard), PM (partially meets the standard), M (meets the standard), and E (exceeds the standard). I’m not making this up. I also don’t think I have to say anything else about that “change” to lambaste it. But there were other changes made, so I’ll just continue.

After each student has been given a letter on an assignment (N, PM, M, or E), that letter will be turned into a number from 0-100 through some sort of process that wasn’t not described concretely at all yesterday, likely because it hasn’t been decided yet. Each letter will have a corresponding range. So an M might equate somewhere between an 80 and a 90. Maybe. They’ll figure out the details later. It’ll be up to the teacher to decide which M’s are 80s and which are 90s. (Though some board members seemed under the impression that this will be more prescribed than that. The administration didn’t correct that assumption. Maybe I just don’t understand it.)

Note that the 0-100 scores are not in any way really tied to traditional 0-100 scores. They’re tied to N, PM, M, or E. So what we’ll have is a grading scale that looks like the old one everyone’s used to, but doesn’t actually mean the same thing. I can’t help but think this will leave many people even more confused than they were to begin with. Especially when this change is happening the night before school starts. (That’s right, folks. My kids’ first day is today! Kindergarten, Fifth Grade, and Ninth Grade. Consider this my “back to school post” of the year. I’ll post pics to Facebook.)

I was concerned before that it felt like the administration was experimenting on a few graduating classes in an effort to get to a better grading system. That the teachers were still learning the ropes even as they were trying to apply the approach. This has only exacerbated this problem. Before, we at least had a year of the system to build on. Now, we’re trying to cobble together things as claim it’ll all work out.

I feel very much as if our district jumped out of an airplane last night, clutching only a single package that the jump master assured us was probably a parachute. Now we get to pull the cord and find out if it’s a piano, instead.

If this were the only alternative, then I believe we would have been better off simply sticking with the system that was used last year. But that ship has sailed. Let me readdress my earlier concerns, one by one:

The difference between a 1, 2, and 3 is clear and distinct. It makes sense. But how exactly a student gets a 4 is much murkier than I’d like. This hasn’t changed at all. All that’s different is that now the murky difference is between an M and an E.
We’re experimenting with a class or two or three of students, where teachers are learning the ropes at the same time as the students. As I just stated, this has actually gotten worse, not better.
If we go through all of this sound and fury and end up with another system that isn’t really that much different than where we started, it will have done nothing but harm. This is exactly what has happened.
I think the district should have very clear procedures in place to measure whether or not its working. There are no procedures in place whatsoever. Which is natural, as the actual grading approach (the line up of the letters to the 0-100 scale) has yet to be defined.
We’ve already invested heavily into PBE. So what? It’s a sunk cost. We should ignore the time and effort already spent and make a decision based purely on what’s best for us now.

It’s on the last concern I want to focus a little longer. One item most on the board kept coming back to last night is how appreciative they were of all the hard work the administration put in to come up with the new approach. The administration had had several all day meetings, then a couple more day long meetings with teachers to try and come up with a new approach. And they’ve spent hours and hours trying to make the transition to PBE in the first place.

I can appreciate hard work. So can teachers. Unfortunately, “hard work” doesn’t always equate to a suitable outcome, as this new grading system recognizes. I give this new approach somewhere between a PM and an N. Just because we’ve worked really hard on an answer and come up with a wrong one doesn’t mean we should keep hammering on that answer.

In the end, I hope all my worries are for naught. I’ll be working with Tomas today when he comes home from school, asking him to show me all the paperwork from his classes so we can try and figure out how each of his teachers will be grading this year. Assuming they’ve figured that out themselves.

Sorry for the negative post. I just call it like I see it. I think the board and the administration are burning a fair number of bridges in this effort, all in the name of improved education, without any real concrete proof that it will work. I hope they’re right, and I hope I’m wrong. When budget season rolls around next year, I don’t think there will be nearly the core group of impassioned school supporters ready to go above and beyond as they’ve done in the past to try to protect the budget, which is even more tragic, as I believe this will be right when we need to keep education as strong as possible.

Happy back to school, everyone!