Sunday, April 19, 2009

What's eating up my time right now? Playoff hockey. As a Canucks fan it's been a couple of years since I've had the pleasure of seeing my team in the postseason. As of this afternoon, Vancouver's up 2-0 in the series, but in about 2 and a half hours they play game 3 in front of the St. Louis home crowd so it should be tougher for them to get a win today.

Here's a couple of commercials from the Boston Bruins--I like both the clips and the fact that the Bruins have won the first two games of their series with Montreal:



Thursday, April 16, 2009

The Cynical Career Counselor Explains Your Future as a

Plumber (version 2)

Hi kid--what line of work you see in your future? Plumbing? I guess I can tap into a few ideas on that one. Get it? Tap? Meh, I guess if you don't have a sense of humor working by yourself all the time is probably a good plan.

You'll need to go work at one of those plumbing supply places--you could even start now if they're hiring--so you can learn the names of all the various connectors and tools you'll be using when you start your career. Best thing is to chat up the customers; it's how you'll eventually find somebody to take you on as an apprentice.

You'll do fine on the apprenticeship, but the down side will be driving around all day in a stinky van with a your boss who has moved into the vehicle while he and his wife sort out their divorce. Once you have your journeyman papers you'll take your meager savings and buy the tools you need to go into business for yourself.

Your first few months will be slow, but your willingness to take on any job, no matter how small, and your readiness to go out to calls at all hours of the night soon has people passing your business cards along to friends. Word of mouth is augmented by cheap ads in neighborhood newsletters and paying kids to slip flyers into mailboxes.

Eventually you get your van paid off and when you find out your girlfriend is pregnant, you figure you've got enough to make the down payment on a decent house and the two of you move in together. Two years later you're married and your second child is on the way. You've come to realize that you need to work longer and later to pay the bills for your growing family.

The moment that everything changes seems so innocuous at first. You advertise your "call any time--day or night" in bold type in your yellow pages ad, so you're used to calls coming after midnight. This one is from a worried housewife who explains she needs you to come fix a backed-up toilet, and an hour later you're at her home.

She explains that her child is beside herself since the little girl's favorite stuffed animal was accidentally flushed down the toilet. She knows the toy may be a little damaged, but pleads with you to be as careful as you can as you try to retrieve the lost treasure.

You explain the difficult of her request, but you also take great pride in your skill in this sort of situation, and soon you're pulling the offending item from the commode--but it's not a child's toy at all. As you turn to question the harried mom, she's gone and a burly biker type is standing in the doorway, brandishing a tire iron. You look more closely at the package in your hand and realize you've just retrieved a drug stash that must have been flushed.

You nervously surrender the package, which is inspected by the biker, who then favors you with a gold-toothed grin and slaps five hundred dollars into your hand. "Just forget you ever came here" he warns, and you're happy to do just that, but it seems he forgets his own advice.

Three months later you get another late call, but this time you're just told an address and there's a different biker who explains he's heard you're good with this particular problem. You again are successful, and this time you get seven hundred bucks for your trouble.

It's a more common situation than you'd ever have guessed. When drug dealers see cops pulling up outside, there aren't many options available to them, so the toilet flush is a clichéd but often successful act of desperation.

Some of the bigger players eventually start calling you for more legitimate plumbing assignments--they want a new wing on their luxury drug-bought home and you're already trusted so you get the job. You wake up one day and realize that more than half your income is coming from felons, and it worries you.

You become paranoid; you think your home is being watched, or you're being tailed when you drive around town. Your wife gets annoyed as you refuse to go out and spend your ill-gotten gains, preferring instead to hide away in your home with the curtains all drawn.

A month or so after your wife leaves you, taking your two kids with her, one of your worst fears comes true. One of the drug lords you've worked for had an undercover cop infiltrated into his inner circle, and the narc passed your name along to the investigation team. They take you downtown and leave you to sweat in an interrogation room for an hour before they come in and confront you with enough evidence to put you away for a couple years.

You're easily intimidated into agreeing to wear a wire and being part of a large scale drug offensive. You help the team by first suggesting a new protocol that includes shutting off the water to homes before they are raided, which makes it tougher to flush evidence--one tank just doesn't do it, you explain--and your wire records the evidence of those who do manage to successfully get rid of their stash only to call you for your retrieval expertise afterwards.

When the arrests are made and the indictments handed out, you're put under protective surveillance. It's not as simple as your police handlers had suggested; some of the major drug players have powerful connections in various levels of government, and these forces begin working behind the scenes to create problems for you.

They're unable to do anything to break your agreement with the cops--your testimony for immunity on the drug charges--but in an ironic twist, the powerful allies of the crime lords use the same trick the feds used decades ago on Al Capone; they go after you for back taxes.

Seems you weren't very accurate in reporting your extra income from your criminal friends, and a forensic audit easily uncovers several years of tax cheating. Your immunity from drug prosecution doesn't protect you from the tax rap and a few months after your former friends begin serving their sentences, you too find yourself behind bars--not a great situation for a known "rat".

Bad career memories won't be the only reason you avoid the communal bathrooms as you try to live out your sentence.


(I realized shortly after I began this that I'd already done a plumbing CCC post a long time ago, but I like this one better, so I think I'll replace that one.)

Tuesday, April 07, 2009

Schools Without Failure

Type this into google and you'll get several thousand hits. I went to an all-day workshop, or more accurately, a presentation yesterday about this topic.

It was a guy probably ten years younger than me explaining his school's approach to improving passing/graduation rates. It reminded me of the optimistic innovations I was involved with back in the early 90s. Ultimately, the lack of seniority of myself and some other teachers in our team destroyed a program as we were bumped by senior teachers who didn't care about the program.

I moved on and focused on theatre/drama and later turned down an opportunity to go back to a program I'd spent three years and $25 thousand in grant money helping to build. I never really looked back or regretted it; the program was dead a year or two later. The folks who'd built it were mostly gone and the others didn't want to put in the extra work needed to really establish it.

It was fun at the time, though. The kids in our pilot classes loved our integrated studies program. We started with two classes of grade 8s, and kept them together for English, Socials, Science, Math and Computer studies. The following year we added a Drama/P.E block as well. We took kids of all types, not just high achievers like some programs, or "at risk" ones like others. Our test and satisfaction survey results with parents, students and staff were better than both the "regular" program and the french immersion program.

I went to other districts to give workshops about our program, about using Drama to teach Social Studies, and how to adapt time tables to improve learning. We had groups from as far as Arizona come to visit and see our program. We were videotaped for a ministry of education production (it's weird to be wandering over to help a kid in a computer class while a bright spotlight, camera and boom microphone follows you) which I still have a copy of somewhere--I should post a clip of a much younger me with moustache and one of those narrow, square-bottomed wool ties that scream 80s now, just for a laugh.

I got to go to conferences in places like Phoenix and Tahoe to meet some of the big names in educational innovation and get their advice on what we should do next.

Then it ended. After I got bumped to a different school I joined a district working group on innovation, and later did some contract work and gave workshops on curriculum and such, but I found that I was losing interest in trying to push against the intertia of the whole system and instead I wanted to do the best things I could for my own students in my own classroom.

Meanwhile, the province moved more and more to the right, ditching most of the initiatives of the early 90s and instead focusing more and more on standardized testing and returning to the "basics" as they are fondly (but often inaccurately) remembered by rednecks everywhere.

So I was reluctant to go to this workshop yesterday. Been there, tried it, I thought. That said, I was pleasantly surprised. This was not some egotistical prophet trying to sell his book, but rather a very committed, sincere teacher working at a school that's trying to do things differently.

No "zeros", don't mark homework, no penalizing for late work. It felt like my teacher's soul rebelled at the very idea of such things, but when you worked through what he means by that, and how they are actually making kids be more accountable, there are many very good points that made me pause.

Perhaps we older dogs should stop and glance at the tricks a little more before we dismiss them. Maybe I'll try to explain it more at some point if anyone's interested.