Nature of things

I haven’t written lately because, well, I’ve been busy. And now is supposed to be those lazy days of summer?? Apparently not.

Recent highpoints:

Work has had its ups and downs. On the downside – it’s budget time again and I had to come up with a 10% cut to keep pace with rising paper and ink prices, shrinking circulation, and other things out of our control. Painful, yes, but also a healthy exercise in product evaluation and quality control. On the upside, I was able to preserve the status of my most key personnel; I happily gave a glowing evaluation to a critical staff member; and today we got an RFP from one potential client, a “next steps” request from another, and an important commitment from an existing client. Not bad for a day’s work.

This is a busy period for my wife – a couple of those out-early-home-late performance weeks where she’s juggling back-to-back events, multiple press interviews and media queries, live performance photo shoots, and client visibility. She recently switched to a new web-enabled cell phone (a pocket-sized computer, really) that gives her mobility whole monitoring the several hundred e-mails she gets daily (plus weekends), and it’s already paid for itself in terms of flexibility. Now she can actually drive home from work (15 minutes) and deal with 30 or 40 e-mails before she walks in the front door. Or, if duty calls, she can book a newspaper interview from her beach chair—though she’d prefer to leave the thing at home rather than risk dropping it in the sand. In today’s anytime-anywhere now-now-now mode, that amounts to major progress.

I’m looking forward to early August, when we decamp to the Cape for two weeks. Nick will be in camp there (his annual infusion of rifle and arrow shootin’ and sailing), and while it’s absolutely not vacation time for either Kathy or me, there is a healthier pace to our life. I get to walk the dog in the early morning (something I don’t even consider at home, even though I get out of bed at the same hour either way). My “desk” is our outdoor dining table on our screened-in porch (Kathy opts for the indoor laptop and the AC). We have wireless Internet, a good printer, cell phones, and FedEx knows where we live. We haven’t figured out how to make this a permanent live/work location, but we’re considering the angles. Anyhow, I get a ton of work done on the porch and I get to hear the birds chirp – a win-win.

In non-work life, I have poison ivy for the second time since Memorial Day. Serves me right for trying to improve our view at the Cape. I don’t know where the poisonous plant was that I touched, but I’ll tell you this: Those recent reports about rising CO2 levels from global warming causing poison ivy to flourish – I believe them. Pretty soon, I’ll be like that boy in the bubble, never leaving the house without long sleeves and gloves, then stripping down to my skivvies using rubber gloves and tongs, and washing everything with Technu (I wonder if they make it in “fresh” scent?). Then again, when I gaze over the cranberry bog across the road from our house, with its seasonal colors and soft contours, or see the stars and sky through the trees, I guess a little scratching is a small price to pay…

Speaking of nature’s modes of revenge, we have West Nile Virus/EEE mosquitoes in our Brookline neighborhood (everybody out of the pool!!); it’s tick season on the Cape; and the no-see-ums were out in force last weekend on the beach. On top of that, we have deer invading gardens in our neighborhood in Brookline and hordes of ravenous chipmunks devouring our tomatoes and digging holes in the yard on the Cape. And bunnies… lots and lots of rabbits this year. The only thing we haven’t had was the cicadas. This was supposed to be their big year (one in every 17, or something like that) and not a peep, or squeak, or whatever that sound is they make. Did they appear elsewhere and I missed out on the chorus, or are they waiting till there’s a new man in the White House and all’s right with the world?

Search Me?

I was killing time on the Web tonight, snooping on a few old friends to see what might turn up on Google. That led me to search myself.

Well, if I’d known how common my name apparently is around the world, I’d have changed it a long time ago, or at least taken my full, formal name more seriously to improve my future searchability. (I suppose it doesn’t help your Google ranking to modify the form of your name with each job change over the past decade or so…who woulda knew?)

Anyhow, I did turn up some interesting things. Like a link for a now-defunct video titled “William Weber eats small children.” I’m not really sure what to make of that. I’m also an author, a TV newscaster, a deceased actor (remember the 1943 classic “Happy Land”? … me neither), a film editor, the oldest living Cincinnati Reds ball player, a guitarist (whose slogan is “Buy me whiskey now!”), a plastic surgeon, and the fellow responsible for space telecommunications and navigation for the JPL. There are many references to other Dr. William Webers (something my parents would have wished for – but none of them links to anything about my uncle, the best Dr. William Weber in my book.) There’s even a whole Bill Weber directory on Linked In. (See if you can pick me out of the crowd.)

I did find a few links about me, including a reference to a job I had five years ago, found on a Swedish website. By adding my town to my name, I did find a few references to me connected to our local school’s School Improvement Plan (I’m on the advisory council), to my standing on our historic neighborhood board (I’m the V.P., heaven help me), and eventually to me at work.

And finally, there were a couple references to my favorite other William Weber, who lives around the corner. But I don’t need Google to find him. We not only live three blocks apart, we cross paths at the same car dealer, dry cleaner, video store, landscaper, HVAC service, market…

With or without Google, I guess, there’s a lot of me to go around.

Spell check, or check out?

At the risk of this turning into a rant, I feel compelled to talk about the craft of writing and the slippery slope that today’s school children – at least in my community – find themselves careening down (rather than scaling successfully).

In my community, the prevailing wisdom (and I use that phrase very loosely) seems to be that spell-check is the great solution to all that ails the beleaguered education system, a system that apparently doesn’t have the time, will, leadership, or vision to put basic communication skills high enough on the list of “basics” that our children need to learn in elementary school.

For my son, an incoming seventh grader, his last spelling drilling took place in 3rd or 4th grade – around the same time he had his last instruction in cursive writing – though that’s a subject for a separate rant, er, I mean, blog entry. Anyhow, since then, there has been sporadic spelling work, though it’s usually wrapped into vocabulary homework for social studies, meaning that the meaning of the word is more important than the spelling thereof. In 4th grade, there was a little of this and that for spelling, grammar, and handwriting, but certainly how words were spelled was not a priority. And in 5th grade, where written homework increased both in quantity and required quality of expression, the fact that spelling mistakes occurred just wasn’t that big of a deal. My son’s teacher – a wise but career-end-stage teacher – said, quite frankly and on more than one occasion, that since kids mostly use computers to do their homework, spell-check will take care of most of their spelling mistakes. There was simple no acknowledgment that whether the child could actually spell correctly without spell-check was or should be a point of concern.

So far, I’ve only dealt with spelling…grammar is yet another sad story. Other than a glancing blow past the concept of outlining (yes, the classic subject-predicate-dangling-modifiers graphic scheme of olde), there was absolutely no attention paid during class time to whether kids used necessary nouns and verbs, proper punctuation, correct capitalization, sensible sentence structure, or anything else. The language arts/social studies teacher seemed more concerned with covering the requisite course material than making sure the kids could communicate their knowledge.

And – in one of those mixed-up bits of edu-think these days – the teacher followed a strand of prevailing thought about “reaching all learners” by requiring the students to do posters and drawings and storyboards for some of their assignments – and grading the students on the quality of their projects. What the heck ever happened to putting words on paper to demonstrate one’s knowledge? Or giving a speech in front of the class? And what consideration or accommodation is given to kids who are crummy artists, or can’t translate fact-based content into sketches and pretty colors? No knock to the kids who actually can draw better than write…but for the kids who find drawing a struggle, or an unsatisfying way to communicate, they become double losers – penalized in their learning process and their grades by having to draw a picture rather then put into words what they learned about, say, the trading/commercial practices of ancient Africa. And note, this doesn’t even begin to approach the question of why the kids aren’t learning to express themselves via 21st-century tools such as websites, blogs, wikis, Nings, PowerPoint, podcasts, and video as opposed to antique approaches like drawing with freakin’ colored pencils! (Check out Vicki Davis' Cool Cat Teacher blog and some of my other ed-blog links for a glimpse at the possibilities.)

Where does all this lead? In the near term, it presents a class of seventh graders who are entering a new school term woefully unprepared to perform at the level or writing quality that their teachers will expect – thus dragging down the learning process. It means our kids are being taught using old-school methods when the world is moving to Web 2.0 and beyond. And in the longer term it points to kids who are going to struggle in high school if they somehow don’t learn writing and spelling and note-taking skills ASAP. (Did you hear the rumor about the Brookline high schoolers who can’t read the blackboard when the teachers write in cursive?)

As a parent, it leave me angry for my son, livid as a taxpayer, frustrated as an editor who spends his days covering 21st-century education gains, and disheartened as someone who simply cares about our nation’s role and standing in the future. Do I think it’s all a lost cause for my kid? No. My son is a smart boy who will pull it together in his own time. But, man oh man, I don’t like what it says about my local school district and it’s ed policies.