Bud the Teacher

DSC03487
Originally uploaded by Bud the Teacher

We’re headed out tomorrow for a quick trip to Isle of Palms to visit family and introduce Teagan to the ocean. I’m itching for a break.
I’ll be turning most everything off during the break, although I reserve the right to upload some photos and pass along some tweets about our trip.
See you in mid-July.

Teagan @ ten minutes
Originally uploaded by Bud the Teacher

World, meet Teagan Elizabeth Hunt. Teagan, world. Y’all’ll get acquainted soon enough.

It was a long day today, beginning early and finishing late. Teagan was born around 9:40am. Seven pounds, seven ounces. Twenty inches. Ten fingers. Ten toes. Two eyes and ears. One mouth.
More photos will, I’m sure, make it to the blog in the coming days, but I wanted to toss one up and to scrawl a couple of thoughts from the day here before they are forever forgotten.
1. Newborn Pampers smell better than almost anything.
2. Newborn babies smell better than Newborn Pampers.
3. Babies’ heads are funny-lookin’, and it’s impossible to keep a cap on them. It’s wrong to use duct tape. Very, very wrong.
4. Having a child changes everything. For always. There will never be a time when there wasn’t a Teagan. (I know — this is a thought that I had when Ani was born, too — but I wasn’t a blogger then, so I didn’t get it down. Better late than never.)
5. I like very much looking at the world through the eyes of someone who’s never seen anything like it before. There’s a sense of wonder, even in a cross-eyed newborn stare, there that I find intoxicating, invigorating, and downright neat. Ani has been really good for me in this regard. Teagan is, and will be further still, too.
6. This world and the universe it exists within will forever be full of amazement, wonder and awe. Wow.

Enough gushing — off to sleep. Thanks for indulging a proud father.

    In this podcast, I begin by trying to explain a trend I’m noticing in my own blogging practice.  Then I move into a discussion of being "in the zone" in a creative sense, emphasizing my work with the CSUWP’s Advanced Institute on Technology and Teacher Inquiry, and wrap up with some thoughts, and not very articulate ones at that, on how I’d like to see more ways for blogs to represent or honor visual text.  Oddly enough, I was listening to this week’s Teachers Teaching Teachers and I heard Paul Allison mentioning his desire to see blogs with more visual and audio components.  Here’s to synchronicity. 

The Show Notes

• My "internal filter" post - Full of reassuring comments.
• Kevin’s Meandering Mind
• CSUWP’s Advanced Institute Mother Blog (check the sidebar for our active bloggers)
• Sandra’s BookArts blog
• Natalie’s blog

    I’m headed out in a few hours to help facilitate a meeting for folks from different writing projects who are thinking strategically about their web presence(s).  Should be an interesting opportunity to check in with colleagues, meet some familiar names, put faces to them, and work together to learn more about how to take the good work of National Writing Project local sites online. 
    As I prepare to depart, though, I wanted to point out some great comments and feedback I’ve gotten regarding why teachers join corporate groups.  Steve mentioned my post on the subject from a while back and his community’s gotten active in explaining some of their passion.  That’s good, and they deserve more of a response from me — but I can’t pull it off right now.  Watch for it soon.   In the meantime, read the original post and chime in.
   Look for thoughts about web presence(s) this weekend via the blog, assuming I’m not all consumed by the conversations.  Which is entirely possible.  If that happens, look for them next week.

    I’m working with a student right now on an essay that I think is really interesting, self-reflective and an important piece of writing for her.  It’s for my journalism class, which means it’ll get published in our school newspaper.
    I’m certainly no fan of anonymity, and think it should be used rarely, very, very rarely.  (Dan Rather agrees with me — and that’s cool.  Thanks, Andy, for the podcast!)  Sometimes, though, I think it makes sense for a student to post a piece anonymously if the piece might be one that could hurt the student in the future.
    In this case, the piece involves alcohol and I don’t want it to be attached to the student’s online identity ten years down the road.  I expect that this sort of writing will happen from time to time, and I need a way to properly look after those students.
    Since we’re using Drupal for the paper, every piece needs to be attributed to a particular author.  We’re going to create a new account for these anonymous pieces, and I’d like a clever pseudonym for the account, a name that says "we’ve chosen anonymity for a good reason."  We considered several historical pseudonyms:

• Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay used "Publius" in the Federalist Papers.  A little too weighty.
• Benjamin Franklin has used tons — Silence Dogood, Poor Richard, Polly Baker (which I kind of like, but I don’t think it quite fits)
• Here’s a good list that I still need to look through more thoroughly.  Maybe there’s something good in there.

    Got any ideas?  We’ll certainly include an editor’s note in the blog explaining why we’ve gone with anonymity and who the original user of the pseudonym is.

    DOPA’s back.  Sort of.  Only worse.
    Andy Carvin’s got a round up on the new version of the legislation that would put an end to much of the work that I’m doing online with students while doing nothing to improve the online landscape.
    This is ignorant legislation that solves zero real problems.  I urge the  Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation to ignore this legislation and to focus on other stuff.
    I don’t actually see this passing the Senate — but I do think Brian’s right that we should be paying attention and sharing our feelings.  Here’s a link to his handy "talk to the committee" applet.
    I sent multiple e-mails to representatives and senators when DOPA was first making the rounds, and didn’t get one single response.  Not one.
    When/if I get a minute, I’ll pull up those e-mails and name some names.

    I’ve been tagged into the five things meme by Doug Belshaw.  In a better attempt for you, dear reader, to get to know me better, I’m to "reveal" five things about myself that you otherwise wouldn’t know from reading this blog.  Here goes:

1. I have a twin sister who teaches Kindergarten in the same school district where I work.  In our first year of teaching, five years ago, we had a buddy program where, once a week, my students traveled to her classroom to read and write together.  (And no, we’re certainly NOT identical.)
2. I am a pop trivia, um, freak.  My students and colleagues know this, and, so whenever there’s an essential question involving who played in what movie or sang on what film soundtrack or what the name of that one character’s sister’s dentist was, I get interrupted in class.  I don’t mind, and I actually enjoy being able to come up with an answer, most of the time, on the spot.  One teacher has dubbed this frequent questioning "Stump Bud."  She sometimes keeps score.  Sometimes, students challenge me to tell them whether or not some bit of TV trivia is true.  I was stumped when one student told me recently that MacGyver once fought Sasquatch.  Turns out that’s true. 
3. I dabble in music sometimes, and was the frontman of a band called Clockworked in the late ’90s.  If you need a song to add to your Christmas collection, try this one (iTunes link –   All others click here).  I’m singing lead vocals.  (I don’t receive any money from the purchase of that song or album — it goes to the label and to a local charity.)  I also wrote and recorded the song that my wife and I shared our first dance to.  She was pleasantly surprised.
4. I’m not the handiest guy I know.  But I like the idea of being handy.  I have a love/hate relationship with Home Depot/Lowes-type stores.  I go in amazed by opportunity and potential — and leave empty handed, frustrated by my limited manual dexterity.  It’s entirely possible that I just spent several hours destroying the flat rear tire (and possibly wheel) of my snowblower.  I have the same love/hate relationship with cooking shows, particularly Alton Brown’s Good Eats.
5. I think that This American Life is perhaps the best regular attempt at storytelling on the radio right now.  (Here’s a link to their podcast, in case you aren’t already a listener.)  I’d love to tell stories like this, but I can’t.  Yet.  I love great storytellers like Ira Glass.  I put him on a short list of favorites, people like Garrison Keillor, Charles Kuralt, and Walter Kronkite.  I’d put newspaper columnists Bill Johnson and Lewis Grizzard on that list, too.  I’d love to tell a story as well as these guys do or did.  They tell real stories about real people in amazing and entertaining ways. 

And now, it’s my turn to tag some others.  How about Karl, Cindy, Donna, Josh, and Tom? 
 

    I’m safely at home right now, enjoying the beginnings of my non-denominational seasonal special days break, and here comes the blizzard. 
    I’m thinking we’re in for a white Christmas this year  .  .  .  .

    I have this, uh, friend.  He’s a teacher working with a student on a video project, and he kinda told this student that he could, uh, very easily convert video from DVD (.vob) to a format that he could work with in Windows Movie Maker. 
    I This friend needs to get started on that conversion, and he’s found several programs that will do the job — but they all cost around $30.00.  That’s too expensive for me this friend.  The "free" versions of these tools will only convert about half of any particular file without being registered, which isn’t quite what I  my friend needs.  All the files we’re transferring are original work;  the student shot them this month. 
    I know he’s already considered online services — but the files are
really too big for uploading in any reasonable length of time. Any suggestions?  I’ll be sure to let him know.

Chris’ (or is it Chris’s?) posting of Taylor Mali’s poetry reminded me of this poem, one I think I like better, although Mali’s performance of "What Teachers Make" is far more dynamic:

Undivided attention
By Taylor Mali
www.taylormali.com

A grand piano wrapped in quilted pads by movers,
tied up with canvas straps - like classical music’s
birthday gift to the insane -
is gently nudged without its legs
out an eighth-floor window on 62nd street.

It dangles in April air from the neck of the movers’ crane,
Chopin-shiny black lacquer squares
and dirty white crisscross patterns hanging like the second-to-last
note of a concerto played on the edge of the seat,
the edge of tears, the edge of eight stories up going over, and
I’m trying to teach math in the building across the street.

Who can teach when there are such lessons to be learned?
All the greatest common factors are delivered by
long-necked cranes and flatbed trucks
or come through everything, even air.
Like snow.

See, snow falls for the first time every year, and every year
my students rush to the window
as if snow were more interesting than math,
which, of course, it is.

So please.

Let me teach like a Steinway,
spinning slowly in April air,
so almost-falling, so hinderingly
dangling from the neck of the movers’ crane.
So on the edge of losing everything.

Let me teach like the first snow, falling.

Remember, y’all, that  National Poetry Month is only a few short days away.  I hope you’re all preparing your poetic contributions. For those of you more interested in reading good poems instead of writing them, you can always subscribe to the Poem a Day e-mail service of the Academy of American Poets.