Ahh, the North Carolina State Fair.  Fried foods, bad traffic, great people-watching, and… wait, what’s this?

Emily told me a couple of days ago that in the “Animals Made Out of Fruit” exhibit, she came across a fearsome sight.  Here it is, courtesy of her Flickr photostream:

My dear God!  Someone please stop this raptor before he rapes again! I bet he’s got himself one of those vegetable/mineral boom boxes and is listening to loud rape music.

Also a concern: his neck seems to be between his forelegs and hindlegs.

Also a concern: this animal/vegetable/sex criminal won an award!

This picture illustrates the need for more education dollars in more ways than I could reasonably elaborate upon in this space.

• Driving back from lunch with Pam Pate yesterday, I saw a campaign sign for Vernon Twinburger, with the slogan “Already Serving You” and a link to his blogspot.  The b&w drawing on the sign made it look like the dude had a very fake mustache.  So I checked out the blog to see if this was some viral thing, and sure enough, it’s a fake candidate with a very fake mustache.  The site is fairly lame– a couple videos (shot, as I found out from Ruby at Orange Politics, at Weaver Street, so the pranksters are local), but no real substance or lampoon.  But at the end of one of the videos, the voice says, “Vernon Twinburger is not campaigning for anything, because you’re already being served.”  Being served, indeed.  (The whole “you got served” thing would be more appropriate if the site had caused me to do anything other than waste two minutes on some YouTube videos.)
• My ability to work effectively is diminished by a factor of 12 for every hour of sleep under 7 that I get.  I slept about four and a half last night.  And somehow got dehydrated, even though I didn’t drink anything but water yesterday.  Like 20 gallons of it.  So I’ve spent most of the day getting rid of some of the more trivial, administrative things that I needed to do for, um, weeks.
• I swear to you, this campaign season is making me so tired.  I cannot stand it.  I cannot.  I just want to fast-forward now to November 4, cast my vote, and then sit back, drink a beer with friends, and watch CNN’s coverage of the widespread voter fraud and election-stealing.
• I got an iPhone app that allows me to upload photos to Flickr immediately after taking them, but have come to the realization that I don’t really have anything that I want to photograph.  I saw a bright orange ‘76 Mustang this morning and thought, “This could be my best chance to photograph something today.”  Hella lame, I tell you.

I will leave you with these thoughts from a friend who teaches elementary school:

1:17 PM I love being a kindergarten teacher: one of my boys just informed me that it took 3 dimes and 5 penises to make 35 cents

1:18 PM it’s the new math I guess

1:20 PM he then proceeded to tell me how his dad uses dollars because penises are hard to carry around

it took everything i had not to fall on the floor laughing hysterically

1:21 PM

my favorite one this week though is one of the boys very solemnly came up and asked me if I’d ever been in love

1:22 PM and whether it felt like a popsicle melting in your pants

1:25 PM

I just ate the sticker off my granny smith apple.  Well, to be more precise, I just ate anout 3/4 of the sticker, and when I was taking the next bite, I saw the remaining bit.  So I didn’t eat the whole sticker.  But now I am left wondering which is more toxic– the pesticides no doubt used to make sure this delicious apple grew to be ginormous, or the sticker and its adhesive?  I mean, they have to consider that 1 in 10 dummies will just end up eating the sticker, right?

Michael Pollan wrote a tremendous pieces for the NYT Magazine this weekend: An Open Letter to Our Next Farmer-in-Chief.  In it, he argues that the American food system is deeply broken, and with the price of oil rising, in need of reform… soon.

It must be recognized that the current food system — characterized by monocultures of corn and soy in the field and cheap calories of fat, sugar and feedlot meat on the table — is not simply the product of the free market. Rather, it is the product of a specific set of government policies that sponsored a shift from solar (and human) energy on the farm to fossil-fuel energy.

The piece lays out an agenda that includes not just reform of the government’s approach to agriculture (which should delight free-marketeers), but a prescription for better health (cutting back on plentiful corn and soy could mean limitations on cheap non-food derivatives like high fructose corn syrup) and some re-tooling of the educational system as well (taking a long hard look at agricultural/industrial education and how we promote certain careers).  This is the kind of thoughtful editorial that could spark some real discussion in a classroom– you could use it as-is for high-schoolers or adapt it for middle-schoolers.

I presented to teachers today.

It did not suck.

Please understand that this was kind of important, as my last presentation to teachers was such a god-awful disaster that I seriously considered leaving my job.  I was entirely sure that I had lost any and all of what made me worthwhile in my current position.

Everything we do, if we are to get out of bed in the morning and interact with others, requires a little bit of ego.  Not a ton– though I am an egotistical sonofabitch by most standards– but enough to get out there in the world and not have it crush you like the cockroach you are.  (Feel free to swap “you” for “me” and “I.”)  But for a couple days after one ill-fated presentation, even that took monumental effort.

I used to have no problem with standing in front of a group of people and talking, either about things that I know well or things I know nothing about.  Somewhere along the line, that changed; it took a turn for the worse.  And it’s not all groups; I was able to present my class at school to my peers, a group of people I have tremendous respect for, and my teachers, whom I adore and would never want to let down.  That was no problem at all.  In fact, I looked forward to it.

I wonder sometimes if this is a sign that I am so far removed from the classroom that I know in my heart that I’m less qualified to talk about things than most.  I am feeling that way, even though I was teaching at the college level only a year ago.  But K-12 is a different animal, and it requires a different understanding.  If you have not taught K-12, you cannot actually understand… but then, I suppose what I fear is that I have not taught K-12 in so long that I cannot actually understand either.  That’s disappointing.  And a little scary.

So it was nice that today did not suck.  But I am not out of the woods yet.  I need to find my way back into the school environment for a little while if I am to continue to do my job well.

Kay Ryan is the new Poet Laureate of the United States.  I’m not one to get too awfully excited about Poets Laureate, because, well, it’s probably not really all that desirable a job in some ways and selecting artists to do jobs that are fundamentally administrative… well, the success rate on that is about the same as the success rate for selecting teachers to do jobs that are fundamentally administrative.  Our most recent Poets Laureate have been tremendous artists and, for a variety of reasons, perfectly mediocre Poets Laureate.

Well, in fairness to them, the job description kind of sucks: “The poet laureate consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress serves as the nation’s official lightning rod for the poetic impulse of Americans. During his or her term, the poet laureate seeks to raise the national consciousness to a greater appreciation of the reading and writing of poetry.”  Raising the national consciousness to greater appreciation of anything is all but impossible, unless we’re appreciating terrorist fist jabs and that sort of thing.  And poetry… how is one to raise the awareness?  Fly to Hollywood and ask every studio currently producing a tearjerker movie to include a great poem in the eulogy scene?  Lobby USA Today to replace their visually-appealing-but-grossly-incorrect info-graphics with poem-graphics?

If you ask me (and no one did, by the way), Poets Laureate should be spending all of their time and energy promoting programs for teachers, programs that not only get poetry into schools but raise the quality and character of poetry instruction.  Because it sucks!  From what I have heard, Robert Pinsky did a tremendous job during his tenure as Poet Laureate and has continued to focus his energies in this direction, for which I am tremendously grateful.

Kay Ryan’s appointment to the post has potential, people, so I’m hopeful.  By her own admission, Ryan is “an outsider,” though I suppose I dare you to name a poet who doesn’t believe he or she is, in some fundamental human way, an outsider.  Dana Gioia, maybe.  Billy Collins.  Yeah, ok, so give me a list of ten.

At the very least, I find Ryan’s work to be magnificently energetic.  If you’re not familiar, you should check out these poems.

…by an Earthquake

John Ashbery

A hears by chance a familiar name, and the name involves a riddle of the past.
B, in love with A, receives an unsigned letter in which the writer states that she is the mistress of A and begs B not to take him away from her.
B, compelled by circumstances to be a companion of A in an isolated place, alters her rosy views of love and marriage when she discovers, through A, the selfishness of men.
A, an intruder in a strange house, is discovered; he flees through the nearest door into a windowless closet and is trapped by a spring lock.
A is so content with what he has that any impulse toward enterprise is throttled.
A solves an important mystery when falling plaster reveals the place where some old love letters are concealed.
A-4, missing food from his larder, half believes it was taken by a “ghost.”
A, a crook, seeks unlawful gain by selling A-8 an object, X, which A-8 already owns.
A sees a stranger, A-5, stealthily remove papers, X, from the pocket of another stranger, A-8, who is asleep. A follows A-5.
A sends an infernal machine, X, to his enemy, A-3, and it falls into the hands of A’s friend, A-2.
Angela tells Philip of her husband’s enlarged prostate, and asks for money.
Philip, ignorant of her request, has the money placed in an escrow account.
A discovers that his pal, W, is a girl masquerading as a boy.
A, discovering that W is a girl masquerading as a boy, keeps the knowledge to himself and does his utmost to save the masquerader from annoying experiences.
A, giving ten years of his life to a miserly uncle, U, in exchange for a college education,loses his ambition and enterprise.

A, undergoing a strange experience among a people weirdly deluded, discovers the secret of the delusion from Herschel, one of the victims who has died. By means ofinformation obtained from the notebook, A succeeds in rescuing the other victims of the delusion.
A dies of psychic shock.
Albert has a dream, or an unusual experience, psychic or otherwise, which enables him to conquer a serious character weakness and become successful in his new narrative, “Boris Karloff.”

Silver coins from the Mojave Desert turn up in the possession of a sinister jeweler.
Three musicians wager that one will win the affections of the local kapellmeister’s wife; the losers must drown themselves in a nearby stream.
Ardis, caught in a trap and held powerless under a huge burning glass, is saved by an eclipse of the sun.
Kent has a dream so vivid that it seems a part of his waking experience.
A and A-2 meet with a tragic adventure, and A-2 is killed.
Elvira, seeking to unravel the mystery of a strange house in the hills, is caught in an electrical storm. During the storm the house vanishes and the site on which it stood becomes a lake.
Alphonse has a wound, a terrible psychic wound, an invisible psychic wound, which causes pain in flesh and tissue which, otherwise, are perfectly healthy and normal.
A has a dream which he conceives to be an actual experience.
Jenny, homeward bound, drives and drives, and is still driving, no nearer to her home than she was when she first started.
Petronius B. Furlong’s friend, Morgan Windhover, receives a wound from which he dies.
Thirteen guests, unknown to one another, gather in a spooky house to hear Toe reading Buster’s will.
Buster has left everything to Lydia, a beautiful Siamese girl poet of whom no one has heard.
Lassie and Rex tussle together politely; Lassie, wounded, is forced to limp home.
In the Mexican gold rush a city planner is found imprisoned by outlaws in a crude cage of sticks.
More people flow over the dam and more is learned about the missing electric cactus.
Too many passengers have piled onto a cable car in San Francisco; the conductor is obliged to push some of them off.
Maddalena, because of certain revelations she has received, firmly resolves that she will not carry out an enterprise that had formerly been dear to her heart.

Fog enters into the shaft of a coal mine in Wales.
A violent wind blows the fog around.
Two miners, Shawn and Hillary, are pursued by fumes.
Perhaps Emily’s datebook holds the clue to the mystery of the seven swans under the upas tree.
Jarvis seeks to manage Emily’s dress shop and place it on a paying basis. Jarvis’s bibulous friend, Emily, influences Jarvis to take to drink, scoffing at the doctor who has forbidden Jarvis to indulge in spirituous liquors.
Jarvis, because of a disturbing experience, is compelled to turn against his friend, Emily.
A ham has his double, “Donnie,” take his place in an important enterprise.
Jarvis loses a small fortune in trying to help a friend.
Lodovico’s friend, Ambrosius, goes insane from eating the berries of a strange plant, and makes a murderous attack on Lodovico.
“New narrative” is judged seditious. Hogs from all over go squealing down the street.
Ambrosius, suffering misfortune, seeks happiness in the companionship of Joe, and in playing golf.
Arthur, in a city street, has a glimpse of Cathy, a strange woman who has caused him to become involved in a puzzling mystery.
Cathy, walking in the street, sees Arthur, a stranger, weeping.
Cathy abandons Arthur after he loses his money and is injured and sent to a hospital.
Arthur, married to Beatrice, is haunted by memories of a former sweetheart, Cornelia, a heartless coquette whom Alvin loves.

Sauntering in the park on a fine day in spring, Tricia and Plotinus encounter a little girl grabbing a rabbit by its ears. As they remonstrate with her, the girl is transformed into a mature woman who regrets her feverish act.
Running up to the girl, Alvin stumbles and loses his coins.
In a nearby dell, two murderers are plotting to execute a third.
Beatrice loved Alvin before he married.
B, second wife of A, discovers that B-3, A’s first wife, was unfaithful.
B, wife of A, dons the mask and costume of B-3, A’s paramour, and meets A as B-3; his memory returns and he forgets B-3, and goes back to B.
A discovers the “Hortensius,” a lost dialogue of Cicero, and returns it to the crevice where it lay.
Ambrose marries Phyllis, a nice girl from another town.
Donnie and Charlene are among the guests invited to the window.
No one remembers old Everett, who is left to shrivel in a tower.
Pellegrino, a rough frontiersman in a rough frontier camp, undertakes to care for an orphan.
Ildebrando constructs a concealed trap, and a person near to him, Gwen, falls into the trap and cannot escape.

If you don’t teach online for a while, you forget how time- and energy-intensive it is. My organization, LEARN NC, employs a lot of online teachers, and they’re pretty great. You should see the evaluations they get. They’re awesome.

I’m filling in as an online instructor for a little while, and it’s exhausting. But I really like it– almost immediately, I’ve been able to learn about the students and try to forge a personal relationship with them. It doesn’t happen this way in a face-to-face classroom… some students can be with you for a month before you really know anything about them. I’m not saying that’s good teaching, I’m saying that’s a reality sometimes. In the online environment, they tend to share a little more personal information at the beginning of the course because they don’t see their peers… no immediate feedback.

I don’t know if it’s kosher for me to say this, since I work in online learning, but I don’t know if I like face-to-face teaching or online teaching better. When I teach in a classroom, I have a strong sense that teaching is an art, and one I enjoy. I don’t have that as much online. Which may mean teaching is more science than art, and any gratification I get in the classroom is more my own edification than actual evidence of student learning. I had a boss who used to say, when asked how we knew our program was successful, would reply, “I see that look in their eyes, and I know.” I’ve used that logic myself. And it’s a surprisingly non-measurable metric.

Ah, but that look. That excitement. You don’t see that as much in an online course. Is that look, that excitement the best proof I have that I’m doing a good job? Because, if so, I might really suck at this…

I’m putting together a presentation with Bill Ferris on Virtual Mentoring for the 2008 Raising Achievement & Closing Gaps Conference in Greensboro, NC. (Info for stalkers: Bill and I have two presentations next Tuesday, at 9:15 AM and 2:30 PM.)

It’s been a while since I have created a presentation from scratch; David Walbert and I did one on Web 2.0 last fall, but rather than create a “presentation,” we threw up a wiki with some talking points, and then asked the group to explore and edit, and then we brought them back together for some discussion, during which we modified the wiki. We did the presentation a couple of times, each time using the most up-to-date version of the wiki, and it got better, I thought. It was fun.

Bill and I don’t plan to have participant computers (or even Internet access) for this one, so it was time to create a PowerPoint. I’ve heard about– heck, I’ve presented about– effective use of PowerPoint, but Dan Meyer’s repeated posts about transforming presentations got me thinking about how I could do better, and working collaboratively with Bill meant that I couldn’t be lazy about planning or I’d be making his life more difficult.

So I set a goal– more slides than words in this presentation. I was going to try to find images (using a Creative Commons search on Flickr) that would be more effective at presenting the information than any number of bullet points.

End result: fail. I found one place where it behooved me to include what looks a little like a tag cloud. But the presentation is a far more visual animal than I’ve ever used before, and while it isn’t going to change the world or make the listeners faint with glee, I think it’ll be more stimulating than the norm.

Photos from flickr by Creativity + Timothy K Hamilton, otisarchive1, woodleywonderworks, Del Far, and welshkaren. People who share with Creative Commons are awesome.

The choice quote of my meeting with educators yesterday:

“Collaboration is an acting verb.”

I have been chronically confused for quite some time about i.e. and e.g.– it’s one of those things that I have been meaning to look up but always seem to forget about when I am at a computer. Marielle’s post on Instructify today cured me forever by pointing me to this simple explanation. Thanks, Marielle!

With one of those rare clear days on my calendar, my priorities in decent shape, and only a few things that were pressing on my to-do list, I shut down e-mail for much of the day and did some writing and editing. But instead of concentrating on poems, as I was sorely tempted to do, I wrote most of a two-part series on social networking for Instructify.

And, as with a day or working on poems, I’m bushed now. To reward myself for my hard work, I hopped over to iTunes and bought Pearl Jam’s cover of The Who’s “Love, Reign O’er Me.” Say what you want about Pearl Jam– Eddie Vedder has some pipes. Fuhrillz.

I’m about to head home from work and write the last poem in my two-month grind. I took last night off– I was allowed four days off in November, and ended up taking only one.

I spent the day at the NC School Library Media Conference, which was held in Winston-Salem, NC. I went to only one session that wasn’t a LEARN function– a session on social networking that was, I think, too advanced for beginners, too beginner for the advanced, and strongly focused on the technology rather than what we should be doing with it. (But, despite the fact that I know that sell was a little too hard, and I’m not convinced that the uses are even remotely worthwhile, I went ahead and set up a Twitter account during the session, and have Twittered a couple of times today. I swore I would not use a website with such a stupid name.)

When I got back into Chapel Hill, I headed to Linda’s for a blowout, where I showed Iron Scav pictures and just generally made merry for several hours. While I would normally have used the blowout to act the fool, I was quite tame. Stupid cold. I was very well-behaved. I met Team FAT’s Toilet Paper Mummy.

Waiting for me at home was the letter I’d been hoping for all week– the summary of my degree essay from my supervisor and my second reader. In his summary, Pete used a term that struck me as particularly insightful– and I wish I thought to use it in the essay: “deceptive motion.”

My second reader was who I thought it would be. Total hunch. Maybe I should say that’s who I hoped it would be.

Tomorrow, I sit down to write my semester evaluation. Once again, Warren Wilson has provided me with an academic challenge unlike anything I’d ever experienced before, and I’m so thankful for it.

I spent the day in a training for a product that the Community College system is evaluating, and as awesome as it is, I am not sure I can tell you anything more, because I signed an non-disclosure form. I had never signed a NDA before. I feel now like I have a great secret– though, to be honest, the secret would only have been fair-to-middling if it hadn’t been for the imposing NDA.

November is month 2 of poem-a-day grind, with mildly relaxed rules. Three U of M poets, three from Warren Wilson. Not everyone knows each other. I like it.

Seriously, if I don’t get on the stick and put up a profile for Kirk on Catster tomorrow night, I’m gonna be embarrassed. That cat has needed a profile since Monday.

I just finished paying off my undergraduate education. I wrote the final check today. It feels terrific.

Ironically, the engine for this early final payment was teaching undergraduate creative writing– I just got my payment for that today.

So, after ten years of laboring for the state, all of it at the institution I took out a loan to attend, I’ve finally given back the appropriate portion of the money the state gave me.

Still, and I know I’m repeating myself, it feels terrific.

Now, I just have to pay the state back for the money it gives me to attend graduate school.

New tinysides are coming soon. That makes me happy.

Copyright law, with respect to K-12 education, is severely broken. I just got an e-mail from a teacher who would like to compose a course that’s made from freely available materials, but how does one put together a broad course using only materials available in the public domain? I think the next step will be writing lots of letters, asking for permission to use this poem and that story. This would not be an issue, except that we want to share the course with other teachers.

Danah Boyd on the death of the English language:

SMS is, of course, taking this to a whole new level. This is pretty
well known outside of the US where SMS-speak has destroyed native
tongues everywhere, but we’re only about a year into massive texting
adoption amongst teens in the States. Now, they’re trying to be
expressive using as few characters as possible. Remember when
secretaries used to learn shorthand? Imagine how fast a teen today
would be at that. Maybe we should train them to be secretaries and give
them phones? Scratch that. But once again, the solution to a
technological limitation is to mess with the English language. Hmm.

I cut out on work today to hit the ballpark with McFee. The Bulls had an 11 AM game with the Norfolk Tides in a matchup of Triple-A teams whose major-league affiliates have spared them absolutely no talent. Seriously, JR House was the best prospect on the field. Yep, this guy.

It was “Education Day,” which meant that just about every school between here and Lumberton bussed students to the baseball game. The program advertised a “day of learning and baseball.” Michael defied me to spot where the learning was occurring. I found only the baseball.

Still, we had seats about three rows behind the on-deck circle for the Tides, and it was a brisk, well-played game. Bulls 3-2, all three runs coming in the sixth after Michael predicted a breakout inning and I scoffed at him. All hail the prognostications of McFee.

I’ve spent the last couple hours doing a little work and sorting through submissions to Inch. Poetry submissions are outnumbering microfiction about 10-to-1. Whoa.

I’m in Caraway with a group of science teachers. The other group here with us is a leadership symposium for student government types. We have bonded over the Secret Order of the Polar Bear, a dice game/puzzle which uses the following poem:

Polar bears around the ice hole
in the days of Genghis Khan,
like petals around a rose
looking up toward the sun.

Are you a member of the Secret Order of the Polar Bear? If so, leave me a RARRR in the comment section. If not, find me sometime when I have five dice on me.

It’s official now, so I can tell those of you who have been wondering why I have been curiously silent on e-mail the past week or so: I have been hard at work! I’ll be teaching an Introduction to Poetry class at UNC this fall… I start my course on August 24.

I worked so hard after leaving the high school English classroom to reform myself, but apparently I just can’t shake the urge to seek out young minds and fill them with thoughts about poetry. If you’ve been reading along with this blog, you’ve seen some of the poems I’ve been thinking about a great deal over the past few days; you can probably surmise that many of those have found their way into my syllabus.

I’ve long held that the greatest way you could possibly ever thank the teachers who shaped you (short of immense fiscal remuneration, which I will also gladly accept in the future) is to take what you have learned, expand upon it, and teach it with passion equal to or greater than that of your teachers. I’ve been very lucky over the years to be paired with like-minded instructors on many levels, friends and teachers who share my peculiar interests and understand and support some of my poetic obsessions. In the past few months, before the opportunity to teach at UNC arose, I found myself increasingly grateful to the teachers who shared their wisdom about poetry with me. I am infinitely more grateful to them now, and hope to do justice to their teaching over the next semester.

–Donald Justice

I have reserved this, my 1500th entry, for telling you just how much I think for-profit education sucks.

Suck it, for-profit education!

Looking more at how one might take education online, Martha sent me this link: Technology creates lectures on demand. My immediate thought has a pricetag– I don’t see a heavy implementation in the K-12 arena right now because the cost to equip the classrooms is so high. Universities tend to have the capacity to create high-tech classrooms, high schools are generally lucky to have projectors.

And the question continues to come up– who wants lectures? The article mentions that universities are using these lectures as recruiting tools. I’ll admit that I’d prefer a university where I don’t have to show up for class over one where I do, but given the investment in hardware and licensing, wouldn’t you rather look at a university that’s doing something more cutting-edge than having one person stand up in front of a group and disseminate knowledge?

That said, if you are going to be standing up disseminating, then YES, we want your lectures captured and preserved for posterity. I can’t imagine the knowledge that has been lost over time because finer points of lectures were not captured, because interested students didn’t have the chance to go back and review. I see tons and tons of potential for new teachers to succeed by using pieces of older lectures when they’re stuck on a particular topic. I see digital libraries full of lectures and lessons on similar topics, so if a student doesn’t get it one way, they can search the library for a different clip that might shed some light. And I see the role of the teacher changing from “the one true authority” to “the person who shows you how to find and effectively implement information.”

That would be a good thing.

While we wait for Apreso to become affordable, let’s rock handhled cams and YouTube.

If you’re interested, I’m performing live at DSI Comedy Theater tonight and tomorrow, 7:30 PM.

I spent some time tonight in Second Life with Dan Winckler, and I’m seriously intrigued by the educational potential of the environment. Now seems like a very, very good time to do some research, so we’re playing a little with Moodle at LEARN, and I’m goofing with some ideas that might bear some fruit.

SL isn’t all that intuitive yet, but it seems like a rapidly developing community and I get the sense that a lot of people in there are interested in some of the same kinds of things– freedom of information, collaborative learning, etc. I wonder about the feasibility of having a LEARN NC event in SL sometime soon, as a tool for recruituing prospective students.