Author Archives: witchyrichy

In October 1989, I was in my second year as a high school English teacher in an urban school in eastern Pennsylvania, near Philadelphia. We were on strike, and I was trying to make ends meet by working temp jobs. One evening, close to Halloween, a friend called to say that my cat was in her kitchen. But I don’t have a cat. I know, she said, but my husband said I can’t have another one. So I think you should take this one. I vaguely knew that my lease said no pets but often that meant except cats, so I drove over. There she was, in the kitchen, and the first thing she did was arch her back and hiss at us all. I took her home and she’s been with me every since.

What will I remember about Calypso? Her fierce independence…she had probably been out in the wild for a little while before I got her, and she had learned to survive. She was the boss. Somewhere I have a picture of her sitting on the coffee table with three dogs laying on the ground around her. All of 8 pounds soaking west, she could keep our 70 pound black lab Ivy from leaving a room. And she could purr, and wrap herself around you, and settle into your lap, the essence of love and contenment. I loved her for all of that.

She is officially named after Calypso, the witch in the Odyssey who seduced Odysseus and kept him on her island in happy bondage for seven years. But Calypso is also the name of Jacques Cousteau’s boat and since seafood was her favorite–especially shrimp–I think that’s appropriate, too.

Her last winter was a good one. We put in a wood stove and she was in heaven. And this spring, she seemed as sprightly as ever, eating as well as she ever had. She loved sitting in the office window watching the pond and listening to the water.

It’s just so hard to believe that she is gone…

See a picture of her in her younger years

A wonderful friend, my advisor at WM, sent a link to this poem. It will make you cry, but it also touched my heart. (Scroll down when you get there.)

I am an adjunct instructor for a school of education. All last year, I kept up with the adventures of a blogger who called herself “newoldschoolteacher.” She was incredibly unhappy in her master’s program and let everyone know how stupid she thought the whole thing was. I found myself often annoyed with her seeming unwillingness to give any credit to her professors. I know there are plenty of things wrong with what she calls the “education establishment” but there are also plenty of good things happening. I can only hope that at some point in her new career, she encounters a student like herself, one who refuses to find any good, sure she knows better than the teacher and not afraid to say so.

Today, I discovered that she is guest blogging for Eduwonk. In her first post, she comments that this blogging experience will be different, since she will have to read and comment: “For my blog I just spewed out random thoughts that came into my head, which usually consisted of nonsensical cursing at the nearly unbelievable stupidity and wastefulness of the education establishment. Saying something constructive is more difficult.” It seems hard to me to believe that she missed the irony and hypocrisy of that statement. I suppose though if you are just “spewing,” rereading is not a prerequisite. It might have been nice for those of us who are working hard to try to prepare new teachers if she had tried out the “constructive” approach last year.

Reviewing Virginia’s Community of Learning database and listening to The Devil Wears Prada on my iPod. This website–for a web design firm in India–had been submitted. I don’t think I’m going to approve it, but I was intrigued with the description of their business, wondering how it applies to educational technology: “ITdefine provides a one-stop resource center, enabling our clients to focus on their core competencies and use technology as an enabler for lowering operating costs, allowing faster growth, and ensuring higher profitability.”

Is there a definition of instructional technology integration embedded in this description? Core competencies would suggest content, which in most states is defined by curriculum standards. And, of course, the enablers would be different: identifying them would be an interesting exercise for a group of educators? What do we want technology to enable? Enhanced learners, good citizens, creative thinkers.

But, we also have to be careful about making technology too transparent. Media literacy is an important 21st century skill (although I would argue that it’s been an important skill throughout the centuries) that should be addressed in every content area.

This week, I will be visiting with the OEBs, the group of English teachers with whom I started my career as a teacher nearly 20 years ago. What does OEB stand for? I’ll give you the first two words and let you (depending on your high school English experience) figure out the third one: Old English B…. It was a name they adopted when one of them heard a younger English teacher using it as a term of derision towards them in the lunch room. They wear it proudly and definitely represent old school English teachers who believe in the orderliness of grammar and the precision of literature.

For four years, I was one of them, standing over my students with textbook in hand as we read Romeo and Juliet and Great Expectations. I wasn’t as strong a believer in grammar and experimented with writing workshop approaches including sentence combining and journaling. And, by my third and fourth years, I had begun to let my “freak” flag fly, putting up a Peter Gabriel poster, allowing students to use song lyrics as part of the poetry unit, and incorporating music and film as part of the course. Luckily, these were pre-NCLB days when a teacher really could close her door and do what she wanted to a large extent.

When I moved to middle school, the old school approach really seemed out of place, and once I read Nancy Atwell’s book In the Middle, I made some serious changes. For several years, I ran reading workshops in my 7th grade reading class, reserving three days a week for in-class silent reading and journaling. When my OEB buddies complain about the young teachers who try these methods, their biggest concern is over rigor and assessment. Indeed, while running a workshop where students read most of the time seems pretty easy, in order to be effective, there must be a strong underlying structure of classroom management. More importantly, however, the teacher must be actively involved in the reading lives of her students. I was constantly reading myself, working through the shelves of the school library, so I knew which books to recommend to whom. I always seemed to have a reading journal open in my lap, responding to students’ ideas and pushing them to think critically about what they were reading. It was tough work, but those days when it clicked and for 30 minutes my room was full of readers, sprawled on the floor or leaning on desktops, books open, minds engaged, I was glad to do it.

Part of the point of this reminiscence is that I am starting to think about my fall course for elementary school teachers. I get two credits this semester and want to give my students a very personal, exploratory experience of instructional technology. I was considering taking a game approach but now am framing it as a journey. We’ll do some preparation (setting up accounts) then locate helpful resources then head to places like AV Alley and Spreadsheet Street and Podcast Peninsula to learn about technology and see how it can fit in our classrooms. I have taught some version of this class for several years now and just like my English teaching experience, I have moved from a traditional course to a more open ended workshop.

NPR had a story about the 400th birthday of Rembrandt and began by discussing his 1660 self-portrait. Susan Stamberg suggested that if listeners were close to their computers, they could bring up a photo of the painting at the NPR website. Even radio has become “multimedia” these days, and considering its demographics, NPR can probably assume that their listeners are at least near a computer if not actually listening to the broadcast on the web. (That’s how I do it…)

Here’s the story: NPR : Rembrandt’s Unsparing Eye

And here’s another story about Rembrandt from the BBC: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/5182990.stm

Tim from Assorted Stuff linked to this article about the school division in Illinois that has threatened to discipline students for things they publish to the Internet even outside of school hours. It is their way, they claim, to protect the students from themselves. So, students who post pictures of themselves smoking, drinking, or engaging in leud behavior may find themselves with detention or suspended from school. After all, more and more colleges, according to the school division, are investigating students on the web and this poor behavior could influence the rest of their lives. The article ends, “Better to think twice, then, about dancing naked on the bar after the prom ?¢‚Ǩ‚Äù somebody out there may not see it as all that funny.”

I don’t disagree with that sentiment; after all, I always talk to my pre-service teachers about how to use blogs appropriately by using pseudonyms or otherwise masking their identity as well as the identities of those they are writing about. Their blog entries aren’t as much personal diary entries as they are journals of their journeys that may be useful to others who are considering education or also pursuing their degrees. So, by all means, we need to sit the kids down and have a long talk about what’s appropriate and what’s not and why. But, at some point, they have to decide what they are going to do. And, since it happens outside of the school day and isn’t published on school servers, it is none of the school’s business. They might, to be helpful, bring particularly bad sites to the attention of a student’s parents, but that’s it. We are trying to bolt 20th century ideas onto 21st century media, and it just doesn’t work. The school’s role is education, education, and more education, helping kids become savvy internet users who benefit from the good stuff and avoid the bad stuff. Let’s help them work to make good decisions, which certainly includes pointing out what we think might be bad decisions.

Gardened here early…raked under the crepe myrtle where I had dug up the periwinkle. Planted hostas behind the myrtle and gladiolas that I rescued from other places in the front. Looks so much better.

We headed to the property around 3 and basically hung out. I staked a spot out by the dip in the road where I’ve been seeing a small bird. Got one good look–birding is about patience–and decided it is an eastern wood peewee. It had pretty clear wing bands unlike the eastern phoebe. Also listened to a Carolina wren and saw at least three of them jumping around the stumps.

Read another whole book today: East of the Mountains by David Guterson. Interesting…don’t like it when animals get hurt as part of the plot…but in saving his dog, he saves himself so it works somehow.

I updated by librarything catalog and have read 17 books so far this year. I’m just two or three behind the pace for 50 in the year and I’ve got plenty of fluffy one-dayers on the shelf. I read plenty of serious stuff, too, so a few good novels move the list along and provide a bit of relief.

AFOOT and light-hearted, I take to the open road,
Healthy, free, the world before me,
The long brown path before me, leading wherever I choose.

Henceforth I ask not good-fortune?¢‚Ǩ‚ÄùI myself am good fortune;
Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing,
Strong and content, I travel the open road.

These lines from Walt Whitman are some of my favorite. Almost a mantra, words to conjure with. Whenever I think of them, I picture the first tarot card in the major arcana. It is The Fool. He is often portrayed as a jester, his belongings tied into a scarf on the end of his staff, a small dog yipping at his side, as he walks along the road or, in some versions, off the edge of a cliff. The Fool represents beginnings, the start of the journey when we are full of hope and promise, and perhaps a little naive. The Fool does not have a number…he is not the journey, just its beginning, but his exhuberance and optimism must not be forgotten even as the road chips away at our naivte.

The rest of the 21 cards that make up the major arcana–the group of tarot cards concerned with spiritual questions and significance–trace life’s journey through learning and love, conflict and change, even death, coming, in the end, to the World. Often portrayed as a hemaphrodite, the figure on the World card represents completion, the world at peace. It symbolizes what Czicksmalhyi would call it flow, the threads coming together into a moment when we seem whole, balanced, and focused. And from this sense of authenticity, we can move forward again along the road, like Whitman’s fool, “afoot and light-hearted…leading wherever I choose.”

I begin with the tarot because working with tarot cards, a practice I started sometime ago, has provided me with a powerful way into my own thoughts and feelings, a way to think about heady issues like ontologies and epistemologies. I first picked up tarot cards at a time of turmoil and change in my life, during the 2000-2001 school year when I had made the decision to leave the classroom and start my own business. I don’t remember what drew me to tarot, but I know I wasn’t interested in using them to predict the future. Instead, I wanted a way of thinking about the past and the present, and how I might use my understanding to move into the future. The stories of the cards–Jung felt each card represented an archetype, or universal story–help me think about my own story.

They also helped me see that, for most of my life, I had been trying to live out a story largely written by others. You don’t have to know a lot of the story, but a brief narrative–that focuses mostly on the past six years or so–will provide a better understanding of the context from which my ontology, epistemology, methodology and axiology emerge.

Each day, I would draw a card. I would examine the picture then read about its interpretation. As part of the journaling practice I had started just about the same time, I would write, using the card as a springboard for thinking about my own life. What I learned from the tarot has helped clarify my deepest desires and most spiritual beliefs.

The most fundamental of those beliefs gets at my ontology. I believe we each create the world for ourselves. Reality is subjective; I cannot separate my view of the world from my biological, cultural, and personal lens. I am the product of parents with certain genetic predispositions and a community which had its own ontological and epistemological assumptions. My own personal experiences have served to help me understand my biology and examine my paradigm. This unique blend of biology, culture, and personality informs me

And it is these stories–lived forward but understood backward–that bring us into the world, weaving together our biological, cultural, and personal experiences. As we journey along, we pick up threads, then abandon them, perhaps completely, perhaps to pick up later when the time is right for that particular idea or activity.

On the surface, it seems easy to define my beliefs about the nature of reality and how we come to know. I am, at heart, a constructivist with a very liberal, relative view of the world. I fit the stereotype pretty closely For instance, I remember breathing a sigh of relief during the first class in qualitative research because after a semester of quantitative, which I found jargon-filled and dissatisfying, here was a place I felt at home, a place filled with stories, with individual voices bringing their perspective of the world, looking through the lens of their biological and cultural heritages.

I enter the world through narrative. I have been telling my own story for as long as I can remember, scribbled in binders and blank books.

I can trace the development of my oema through the progress of the 21st century. 2000 was a year of great change for me both personally and professionally: I left my job to start a consulting business with the college as my primary client and pretty quickly began to plan for graduate school. Personally, I began a practice that has become a fundamental part of my methodology: morning pages. I also began reading tarot cards.

The past five years have been an intriguing part of my life journey and they have brought me to a place where I can take shelter for a time. Ontology: what is the nature of reality? Subjective, viewed through the lens of our biological and cultural heritages; we can understand the biases and ideas that come from those heritages but it is difficult to escape them. I think we need to in order to truly be able to meet another person. As long as I see you as a category–African American, female, gay–I don’t see you as a person. It sounds trite but I have heard it voiced by others, most often on news programs when they are asked to comment on how a particular group is going to respond to an event (ie., what do women think about the trade deficit?). These commentators have balked–there is great diversity among women in terms of what they think about any issue or event, as diverse as the opinions in the larger population. While women may share certain concerns about children and the family, their ideas for how to solve those problems may be quite different: a stay-at-home mom may wish for better family leave while a working mom may wish for daycare in the workplace. And even amongst those smaller groups, there will be differences. Reality is in the eye of the beholder.

Spent some time this morning preparing for a workshop on 21st century skills and The Flat World on Thursday but then headed outside to garden. Dug up siberian irises to give away and send to the property and weeded the front garden where the zinnias are going to go. Ready to head to Ivy Run to put some plants in the ground out there and then lay in the sun and read. Just picked up Mark Kulansky’s book The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shelf, which uses the bivalve to tell the story of the city.

Bob gave me a water lily for the pond outside. I should plant basil, too. I think I’ll have time tomorrow morning before I head to lunch with Bonnie. I am trying to have a little vacation here at the end of the semester. There are lots of unknowns: did I get the job? What about my final grades for 604 and 610? I haven’t gotten an email from the 604 prof so I don’t think I have to redo the last paper. As for the job, it would be exciting and a new opportunity, but it would take up any free time I have so I’m not sure about it…or am I just compensating because I don’t think they are going to offer it to me?