Index Animi Mei

2010 Jul 11 (Sun)

singalong junk
I just watched Jerry Maguire for the second time this week just as a way to unwind. The second time through I realized I had to figure out the tracks that were used. The first one was by Bruce Springsteen (his iconic voice gave it away), but the second was an instrumental. It is, quite simply, my favorite melody. Yay for left-handers! :-)

[all posts in /music/] [permanent link]

2010 Feb 20 (Sat)

OpenOffice and corrupt file
Tonight I was continuing work on my BTSA documents and I panicked for a few minutes because when I tried to open one of my files and OpenOffice gave me an error:

The file 'file.odt' is corrupt and therefore cannot be opened. Should OpenOffice.org repair the file?

Naturally, I did want OO to repair the file, but that failed as well:

The file 'file.odt' could not be repaired and therefore cannot be opened.

So I google'd quickly to see if others had the same problem and found this page among others which goes through one way to solve it. But that seemed like quite a bit of work for just getting the text and no formatting. The BTSA documents are specially formatted, so it would really suck to have to replicate all the formatting again. On a hope, I thought I'd try AbiWord, and voila!, it worked. I tried to export a copy so that OO could open it, but OO croaked again. Anyway, I'll just be using AbiWord from now on, since I don't really use OpenOffice for anything else, really. Thank you, AbiWord developers! :-D

[all posts in /tech/] [permanent link]

2010 Feb 05 (Fri)

Frustration

First semester is done for this year and I'm frustrated. I really do love the place where I work. The students are great, the faculty is great, and I love to teach. So why am I frustrated? Well, it's not the people that are the problem, but the ideas swirling about in the ether on campus. What has made me frustrated is the lack of common educational philosophy held by the members of the faculty and what effect that has on the students. I'm not claiming to have the One True Methodology or anything like that; I'm a third-year teacher and know I have much to learn. So what do I know?

Well, I do know that the lack of a common philosophy will only create differences of opinion: Different assumptions produce different products. "What is the purpose of schooling?" is what the tenets of various philosophies answer. I honestly believe that is at the crux of any decision a teacher makes in a classroom. As a public teacher, I also need to ask myself what is the purpose of public schooling specifically. Is the purpose of schooling dependent on something as trivial as who provides it?

At a collaboration meeting that I initiated today among my colleagues who are teaching the same subject as I am this year, I wanted to really start the ball rolling with not only saying we have something in common (i.e., the best for our students), but show distinctly to ourselves and to everyone that as professionals we can distinguish between the good and the bad of schooling. One manifestation of this would have been deciding on common assessments, common homework, or simply a common lesson. Sadly, I don't think we came to a common understanding on anything because we have differing philosophies upon which we base our practice.

Where does that leave us? If there is such a thing as good and bad schooling, what measures do we use to qualify our methodologies as either one or the other? How do we measure two practices as both good, but one better than the other? Why do we consider certain practices good? I'm continuously thinking about these questions with the faith that reasoning and discussion will produce the truth of the matter.

[all posts in /education/] [permanent link]