Blasts from the Past

I feel over- whelmed tonight with friendship. The internet is a miraculous thing to me. I have no idea how it works, but it's such fun! Tonight, I've been "talking" with students from my first years of teaching simultaneously, even though one is in Michigan and the other is in Oregon. At the same time, I was playing games with my sister and instant messaging her all the while. Crazy! Last night I reconnected with others from grade school and my early high school years. It's been so interesting to find out what has happened to each of them since I last saw them, decades ago.

Earlier today I had a message from a classmate in 8th grade. He is now a pastor in Wales, of all places. And even earlier a student who graduated 10 years ago came back to give a chapel talk to the students. In the 10 years since he graduated, he's made and lost millions, but just recently found his focus and is now a lay pastor for an area church. Such fun to see the current students learning from graduates!

The student from Michigan was in the very first American Literature class I ever taught 30 years ago. His family built boats (still does). Three years ago, he and his own family went to Peru to build a unique boat, a floating church for a congregation that lives on the Floating Islands of Lake Titicaca. Coincidentally, I took our senior class that year on a mission trip to the same region in Peru and we saw the church that this "boy" helped build. We literally missed each other by days. Another student in that first class was along on the trip as a doctor. I would love to have seen them, but it was quite satisfying seeing their work and hearing the excitement of the people as they talked about their new place of worship.

[I'll not mention, but briefly, that the internet was also re- sponsible for all but destroying my computer last weekend and it took the entire weekend to get it back (that and $145 to the guy who restored it properly...). It's a love-hate relationship I have, I guess.]

Pictures are of Lake Titicaca, Peru...taken in December 2005. These people literally live on straw islands that float in the middle of the highest navigable lake in the world. The floating church is docked for the moment, but it can float from island to island as needed, just like a boat! Pretty cool!

Facing the Past and Creating a New Present

I admit it. I have a Facebook Account. I started it to keep in touch with my nieces who are busy getting good grades in college, but who check in at their own Facebook accounts several times a day. I figured I could stay in touch and involved in their life on a daily basis this way, and that has been the case. What I didn't expect was how many other people I would connect, or reconnect, with. Hundreds. Literally. Most of them former students from the four academies where I've taught over the past 30 years (can it be that many?!).

Oh the sweetness of a note in my inbox asking how I'm doing, if I'm still teaching, reminding me of something from another place, another time. Oh the dismay of realizing that these "kids" are no grown up with children and grandchildren (a few of them!). I've loved that when they ask "remember me?" I do. I've loved catching up, seeing pictures of babies and spouses. i've loved playing Scramble and Word Twist with 'kids" I used to give vocabulary quizzes to each week!

A curious thing about this facebook set up is that once you are friends with someone online, you get to see who their friends are. Even curiouser has been the discovery of such things as the daguther (from Oklahoma) of a 4th grade classmate of mine (from Ohio) who is good friends with our former chaplain (from California) and the young woman (a graduate of our school who commuted from New Hampshire and now travels around the country with her evangelist husband)! Their college alma mater was the common denominator between the three of them (and while my classmate and I also attended this univeristy, it was at different times from each other as well as the three young people).

It is a cliche to say it's a small world when referencing my world. It's also a truism. it choulsn't surprise me anymore, how connected we are in small and big ways. Everywhere I've ever been in the world (literally), I've found someone I know or who knows someone close to me. School has always been the connecting point, one way or another. Christian schools all of them. And even though quite a number of these kids I'm reconnecting with are no longer part of the church that used to connect us, they feel a connection to the Christian schools they attended for a year or more several years in their past. Enough so when they see a face from that past, they reach out and ask to reconnect, to create a new present as friends. I have yet to turn down a request.

It's the same way with God. It can be years between conversations but He will always accept if we ask to be His friend. he will always be glad to see our name attached to that request. And it will be as if we had always been talking. How cool is that?

Photos: My current school in eastern MA, my former schools in Maine, central MA, central Michigan, and my current school again.

TechBytes

For at least half the summer, my alarm has gone off at 6:30 in the morning. Even on Sunday. Don’t ask me why. It just does. Most days, I even wake up before the alarm goes off! Still, I try to lie in bed as long as I can, savoring the fact that I don’t have to leap up, hurry through my morning routine, and rush off to school.

When I finally get up, not really all that much later, I shower, dress, eat breakfast (while watching GMA or the Today show, something I can never do during the school year), and (yes, at the same time) turn on my laptop and spend the next 30-45 minutes checking e-mail, reading blogs, and writing an entry on my own blog.

All too soon, it’s time to go. I pack my laptop, make sure my digital camera is in my bag, grab my new cell phone (complete with “better” camera and a keyboard so I don’t embarrass my nieces with my “terrible texting”), and go off to work (two hours later than during the school year). Once in the office, I turn on my laptop again, check my e-mail, glance at the RSS feeds, especially the Facebook ones (have to keep up with all my children, you know), and get busy with the work at hand.

All of a sudden, a flash at the bottom of my screen catches my attention. It’s Ed on Yahoo “chat,” needing advice on how to flesh out the 10 page paper he’s writing for a “head start” college English class. No sooner do I put his mind at ease, than I see that I have 8 new e-mail messages. There’s one from Astrid (director, not cousin) asking if I’d help her with an in-service for Northeastern Conference, one from Gary telling me about a schedule change for the SNEC in-service, one from Ron suggesting some changes to the PowerPoint Presentation I’d sent him, three from Edwin (replying to my five different messages of the night before), one from VistaPrints telling me they have something special “just for me,” and one from Martha asking if I’d write an editorial for the first issue of TechBytes, SNEC’s new quarterly technology newsletter.

I answer the other messages, but ignore Martha’s. Sisters can get away with that. Sometimes. I go back to work editing the Staff Handbook, periodically checking the notice bar to see if I have any more messages. The phone rings. It’s a prospective parent. We talk awhile, and then she asks “do you have a website where I can see more about your school?” I tell her the URL and give her LeeHan’s e-mail address as well so they can work on financial registration without either having to step foot in the school.

As I’m hanging up the phone, I happen to see the date on my calendar: August 6. I pick up my new phone and press 9. “Happy Birthday, Mom!” I say. (It’s her 80^th.) I’ve caught her out running errands, so I don’t keep her long. “I’ll call you later and see how your day went” I say.

My notice bar indicates I have another message. It’s from Martha, sending me a draft of TechBytes, showing me how much space she’s left for “your editorial." I read through the document, and am impressed by the extensive list of technology “help” out there for educators. She’s even annotated it! I resolve to go on a “field trip” with the EW/GBA faculty at some point during our Pre-Session. I ignore the obvious nudge regarding an editorial.

A flash of red outside my office window catches my attention. I grab my camera, press the 5X zoom lever and snap a perfect picture of the cardinal I’ve been watching throughout the summer. The 8.0 pixels show every detail!

It’s a brief interlude, but enough to revive me. Back to the Handbook. I come to the page about GradeQuick and Edline and am reminded that I need to nail down some serious in-service time to insure that the bugs are worked out of this helpful-but-frustrating program. I go to Windows Messenger and send Martha an urgent request for help. Within seconds, she responds. “I’ll do your in-service if you’ll send me your editorial.”

Ain’t technology grand?!

Technical Difficulties

I've been having technical difficulties for the past month at least. It started with my laptop crashing on a fairly regular basis, to the point where I had to final admit I needed a new one. There were a few hoops to jump through to get the new one ordered and then the two-week wait for it to be assembled and shipped.

In the mean time, a friend loaned me his brand new HP laptop that was fully loaded with most of the programs I use regularly, but not all. This limited me in what I could do, never mind that most of the people I work with don't have the latest versions of Word or Publisher, or other things I use to communicate with them. Still, I appreciated the generosity of this friend to let me use his new toy before he even got to do much with it. Limited or not, it was far better than not having anything at all, which is where I'd have been without it.

When the new laptop finally arrived on Wednesday I was all excited. Imagine my shock and dismay when I discovered that there was no software loaded or along with the computer rendering it useless to me for anything except e-mail. I am still waiting for that to arrive.

Then there's the fact that my several-times-dropped digital camera quit in the middle of an event at the end of October which forced me to buy a new one (which I got at a bargain, but hurt all the same). Add all this up, and you have a rather expensive reason for the lack of recent posts here. I hope to be back on track by next week.

All this adds up my not being able to do much with the blog, what with having no programs to work with, or no camera, or no way to edit, etc. I expect to be back to normal sometime next week. I can't wait until I have everything all together in one place, working (I hope) at optimum speed and quality.

Meanwhile, here are some interesting (to me) pictures that have been collecting in the new camera until I could download them today. The first picture is of the ivy that grows on the gymnasium wall at school. I think it looks pretty cool in it's fall colors. Next is a collection of basketballs in our gym waiting for the kids to finish their warmups so they can do drills. Again, it just looked cool to me. Then, there are my two funny housemates, May (the calico) and Teddy (the fluffball). The final two pictures are of birds lined up on the top of two stores that I visited on Sunday last. I just thought it was interesting how they all gathered up there in a row like that. It's too far away to see what they are, but I just liked the idea of all those birds lined up, looking down on all the shoppers =)

Shuffling our attention span

I was watching Charlie Rose's interview with Paul Simon earlier this evening. Paul is a hot commodity right now because he was just awarded the first ever Library of Congress Gershwin Award for Song Writing. A couple of nights ago I watched the concert that commemorated this award with all kinds of other artists singing his songs. That was a treat. But this with Charlie Rose was fascinating as they conversed about the craft of song writing.

Towards the end of the conversation, he started talking about how first CDs and then the iPod changed the way he writes, the way all songwriters write any more. He said it used to be that you planned out an album as a whole, a collection of songs that create a theme or a message the artist wants to convey. With the old records, you had a side A and B, and you designed your play list to lure the listener over to the other side of the record. There were about 22 minutes to a side, and that was about right for one's attention span, he said. With the advent of the CD, there was now 65 minutes to hold a listener's attention. "That's longer than your English class!" he exclaimed. But with the option of "shuffle" on your 5-CD player or your iPod, you are no longer listening to a whole album at once, nor are you listening to a single artist at one time. Your musical attention span has diminished as much as your others. He said this, along with the ability to download any song you want, has changed the music business so much that he may never release another album again.

I must confess that I had not thought of that aspect of this new technology before. No doubt, though, it will soon be a topic of discussion in the academic world, if it hasn't been already. He talked about the loss he feels with this speeding up of the world. He talked about the pleasure of slowing down, of listening to something all the way through, of a sustained musical experience. He said that people think they are getting more by speeding up, but the reality is that you can get more by slowing down, by going deeper.

There's more, much more in this interview. Rhythm, world music, deconstructing and reconstructing a song. The emotionally draining experience of writing even a single song. If you have the time, listen to the whole thing. His observation about music can actually apply to many other aspets of life.