Fiddle, banjo, subway, buskers, free-styling, hip-hop, all-in, right now. That's a lot of goodness mixed together.
April 25, 2010
should the dept of defense be in the education business? 03:27 PM
A small group of well-meaning people in Portland have been making a lot of noise about a Department of Defense funded science program for fifth graders called Starbase. In Portland, it is held out at the Oregon Air National Guard base.
Over the past week, the Oregonian has run a front page story (3 out of 7 school board members voted to discontinue the small percentage of funding that the district provides) and an opinion piece (I'm pretty sure this is by a former Lewis & Clark College prof - my alma mater).
My response is not that long, but about 100 words more than their guideline for letters, so I thought I'd publish here to be heard:
Dear Editor:
I teach fifth grade at Capitol Hill Elementary and I’ve taken my students to Starbase in two of the past three years. I love my job. However, one of my great frustrations is an education critic that hasn’t done his or her homework.
Starbase is a supplementary science program that teaches aeronautics and physics. Students are taught core principals of science, like Newton’s Laws of Motion, not “military science”. It is not a replacement for the strong, hands-on PPS science curriculum.
Starbase is held on the Oregon Air National Guard base. Anyone who has been there can tell you that it is not a glamorous setting. It is not taught by base personnel, but by Portland science teachers. Base firefighters, jet engine mechanics, and pilots have brief interactions with students simply explaining what they do.
I would no more forbid my children from attending Starbase than I would forbid them from a Franz Bakery field trip worrying that they might become bakers or a trip to the zoo worrying that they would become zoologists. One and a half million Americans are on active duty in the military. It’s a job that people do.
I challenge those with concerns to have meaningful conversations with students, families, and teachers, and also look at the data.
On the wall in my classroom is a quote by Yeats: “Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.” My students love the excellent, engaging experience. Starbase helps me ignite a passion for science.
A certain proprietor of an unnamed website will be recognizing "another circuit 'round the sun" on Wednesday.
If you would be so kind as to do the 5/7/5 haiku dance and e-mail it to me at christopher at naze dot net, you may find yourself immortalized at one of the few four character web domains still owned by an actual person.
"Sheed taught everyone that 'He's not washed up, he just quit on his coach' should never be your justification for signing a free agent."
As a native Portlander, Sheed is a part of our story.
Bill Simmons, in a virtuoso performance, demonstrates what it means to be a great sports writer. Passion, insight, poetry. That is the only way to the truth.
I took my dad out to dinner downtown for his birthday last night. Some of us hadn't seen some of the others in quite a while and it was a wonderful evening in a great atmosphere.
The place is famous for the seafood and so I ordered the halibut. I may have been tempting fate. I had the most divine halibut of my life last summer in Bandon. Thick, ivory colored, firm and moist. Buttery heaven in every bite. I've also recently added fish to my regular kitchen rotation, mostly cod with very good results.
The restaurant halibut was $29 and about as good as I cook at home (but nowhere near the heavenly Bandon halibut).
Flash forward to this afternoon...
On a whim, I picked up a box of frozen SoupMan chicken vegetable soup. Yes, it's Al Yeganeh, the Soup Nazi of Seinfeld fame. In all, it took about 6 minutes in the microwave.
Verdict? In the words of Andy Samberg in Lazy Sunday: crazy delicious!
Normally about twice the price of Progresso, it was an amazing value on sale. Having grown up in a world where Totino's Pizza and Banquet chicken set the standard for frozen food cuisine, SoupMan and other brands have turned the deliciousness/value equation on its head.
"If you want to live in the creative universe where anyone with a cool idea can make it and give it to you to run on your hardware, the iPad isn't for you.
If you want to live in the fair world where you get to keep (or give away) the stuff you buy, the iPad isn't for you.
If you want to write code for a platform where the only thing that determines whether you're going to succeed with it is whether your audience loves it, the iPad isn't for you."
