How bright is the future?

This week our school district is doing it’s Standardized Testing. Oh, thrill, oh, joy. I’ve got my issues with these things; the performance of the students determines a lot of funding issues for the district, and the individual schools, but the tests results have very little impact on the students themselves. That means that the schools all have to teach the kids to do well on the tests, instead of being able to concentrate on teaching the kids to do their best as individuals. Not that the two are mutually exclusive, but where money is involved, guess which one has to take a bit of a back seat?

I believe strongly that a child will learn more and perform better in life (including on tests) if their parents show at least some interest in their education; the more interest and concern and cooperation a parent gives their kids schooling, the more likely the kids are to do well in school and in life. This isn’t an earth-shaking revelation, of course, it’s a pretty commonly-known fact. My point is that I’m not as concerned with my kids performance on these tests, since it doesn’t affect their grades. I am far more concerned with them acquiring the skills it takes to excel in life, including life within academia.

As a somewhat-involved parent, I volunteered to proctor some of the tests. This means that I show up and wander watchfully through the room, making sure kids are filling in the right bubbles, staying on the right pages, not looking around at others work (though the format makes cheating very difficult), and generally staying on track. It involves encouraging smiles, warning looks, and, unfortunately, absolutely no smacking of hands with wooden rulers.

This morning, as I was proctoring in a 5th-grade class, I gave in to the diversion of trying to guess which kids would finish first, and which ones would be falling asleep. It was interesting to see how wrong I was in some respects. I was looking at the kids from the front of the room, and I was suddenly struck by the fact that they were all so focused and intent on their tests. There was very little staring around the room blankly. They were quiet and ready to work, and did a very good job of working their way through the material. Out of 26 kids, only 4 needed a little more than the allotted time to finish.

Then I got to thinking about the potential of these kids, the possibilities that will they will have available to them. Some will be able to take advantage of the opportunities that come their way, and some won’t. Some will work hard, and some won’t. Some will succeed, and some will fail, and some won’t care.

I suddenly found myself praying for them. “Lord, bless these kids with Your presence. Give them opportunities to do great things. Help them to overcome anything that gets in their way. Give them courage for difficult times, and make them generous when times are easy. Send Your people to encourage them and bless them, and help them to see You all around them. Give their parents extra wisdom to guide them in the right direction. I know that some of them are in bad situations now, or will be someday; people will hurt them, people will abuse them, people will push them down. Lord, lift them up and keep them whole, so that they can find their way to You and be healed.”

I prayed in this way for a good part of the test, wondering what God would do with each of them. Some of them, I know, will never give themselves to God -- some will never have the chance, and others will run away from God. I don’t know what good my prayers will do, but I just figured it was important to give them whatever I could, aside from the encouraging smiles and warning looks.

If you have a chance, find a school that needs volunteers. Go in and ask if there’s anything you can do for them. They may look at you funny if you don’t have a kid going to that school. They have to be careful, of course. Perhaps, though, you can find a way to be a blessing, anyway. Be persistent in offering your help. And pray for the school, for its students, and its staff. Ask God to let you become a blessing to them, and watch what He does with you.

Gotta get this out of my head

I’m blaming my Uncle Roger for this one...

Camp Food
To the tune of “Bicycle Built For Two”

Camp food, camp food,
The food that makes rats afraid.
I’ll bet tramp food
Would taste more like mom’s homemade.
The hot dogs are boiled for hours,
The milk is so old it sours,
The butter’s lard,
The bread is hard,
And the kitchen is dirty, too.

Someday, someway,
Someone will hear my plea;
Serving camp food
Should be a felony.
I’ll give them my testimony;
I’ll show them the camp’s baloney
As evidence
Of negligence
On the part of the camp’s cook crew.

About 30 years ago (and it still shocks me to realize that I remember stuff that long ago), we found that in an issue of Mad Magazine, not long before we were to go to a church camp. My uncle Roger, who is less than 10 years older than I am, was with us that summer, and we decided that it’d be fun to sing that song at campfire one night. Roger wrote the words down in a notebook he was taking with him. Of course, by the time he’d written it, we’d all sung it through twenty kajillion times, and pretty well had it committed to memory.

As it turned out, the food at camp was pretty good. My mom and several other amazing ladies did a fantastic job of cranking out good food for over a hundred people in a makeshift kitchen in a wilderness campground, and nobody was complaining about it, except for those who didn’t have another notch to let out in their belt! We decided not to sing the song, since it didn’t make sense, and because we realized that we’d have to go to that same kitchen crew for our meals during the rest of the camp!

Roger, however, still had his notebook there, and one time left it at the campfire circle one afternoon. Someone was collecting the items left there and looked through the notebook to try to figure out whose it was. They found Roger’s name, but they also found the words to the song. The next morning at breakfast, Roger got a very special stack of pancakes, with paper from his notebook cooked into them. It never pays to even think about insulting the kitchen crew!

We all had a good laugh, even Roger. I, unfortunately, am still suffering with the words stuck in my head, so I suppose the last laugh is on me.

An update about MacJournal

I mentioned just over a month ago that I’d be trying out MacJournal to edit and manage my blog entries. It was a bit frustrating, as the thing didn’t always upload my entries to blogger.com and publish them correctly.

This afternoon I launched it again, and it notified me that an update was now available, so I downloaded it and tried it out. It seems to be behaving itself much better now. I’m a much happier individual.

The actual interface itself, if you were just using it as a personal journal, is very good, with a list of the entries in your journal, and a calendar showing what dates you write entries on. You can save out any journal entries to RTF, PDF, Word, web pages, plain text, and a couple of iPod-happy formats.

There is also this “full screen” mode, which gives you green text on a black screen (or your own customized color scheme), with nothing else on your Mac showing up. I guess that’s for those of us who are easily distracted by other windows on our screen, like those for any work we’re supposed to be doing. For me, it’s not really compelling, but it’s kinda cool.

I don’t know which feature I like better: being able to write while offline and post later, or being able to see all of my entries contained in a program on my computer, rather than having to go into the archive links on blogger.com. Being able to download all of my existing entries in my blog (or any new ones I make outside of MacJournal) is an extremely handy feature. It’s definitely a better writing tool than the web interface, and much cleaner than writing in Word or TextEdit, then copying it to blogger.com.

I’m establishing my ratings scale here, in terms of hot peppers:
• Bell peppers - not so hot; skip it
• Pepperoncini - mild; worth having sometimes
• Jalapeño - hot; good for anything you’re doing
• Habañero - smokin’; so good it hurts

So I’m calling the current beta (4.0.b4.1) “jalapeño” for now. If the release version maintains its quality, I might even upgrade it to “jalapeño-and-a-half” status!

After a trip to Arizona

My family and I took off for Arizona last Monday, since the kids were out of school for Spring Break. We flew to Phoenix, drove to Sedona, and visited the Grand Canyon. It was a fun trip, though a bit too short to really relax enough to call it a vacation.

A few thoughts:

• Arizona drivers like their speed limits low, and like to observe them. It was a bit of a shock to this California driver’s system.
• We rented a GPS navigation unit with the car. Why haven’t I already gotten one of these things? It was way fun. I didn’t need it, as I’m really good with maps and planning out routes already, but how much more fun to program in a location and let the little box give me directions! If I’d been able to connect it with my laptop, it would have been even more fun, but I guess I’ll have to buy my own for that.
• On the drive from Phoenix to Sedona, we stopped by the Montezuma Castle National Monument. My son was really excited, because he’s been studying a lot about Native Americans in school, and the Sinagua of Arizona were new for him.
• Sedona itself reminds me a little of Malibu; touristy, but enough “local gathering places” in the middle of the tourist areas to make it seem less so. Of course, I’ll take the beach over the red rocks anyday.
• The Grand Canyon -- wow. That’s one big hole in the ground. I’ve seen pictures so many times, but a picture really cannot do justice to the size of the place. It’d be fun to have a week or so to see all the places around the rim, and get a chance to hike down in. We had an afternoon to gawk and take pictures, but it was still memorable.
• Why in the heck do overpriced lodging establishments charge so stinking much for wireless internet access while you’re there? The installation and maintenance costs of the connections are so small, there’s no justifiable reason to charge just for that. In fact, adding on the software to manage the pay-to-surf connection only adds to the cost of the system, and adds to the cost of running it. Save some money, folks -- make it free! And if you’re not going to make it free, at least make it possible to use dialup from the rooms!
• The Phoenix airport has consolidated all of their rental car operations into a terminal a couple of miles from the airport. This, I suppose, makes it a little less crowded at the airport, but other than that, I can’t see much of an advantage for the traveler. We had to find the shuttle, ride 10 minutes, then walk into the rental terminal (big enough to be an airport in itself!), and wait in line 45 minutes at the Alamo desk. It was less than welcoming.

The high point of the trip for the kids was the swimming pool at the condo where we were staying. They’d have stayed anywhere there was a pool. The high point for me was the Grand Canyon. A very close second is that we got to make three visits to Cracker Barrel while we were traveling. I’m a fried okra an turnip green addict, and I’m not ashamed to admit it!

Too... much... information

Found this link to an article on The Cure for Information Overload. Good reading; a bit intense, but worth the time.

Enjoy!