It's been a long weekend. On the way home from work on Friday, as I was close to home, I looked up and saw black smoke. The closer I got, the clearer it became that the fire was close to my house. As I raced down the street to my home it looked like the fire was behind my house, in the vacant field. Pulling into the driveway I rushed to get the back door open to get Monster out and ran to the truck with him. Once he was in the truck I ran to the backyard. The fire was indeed behind the house, but luckily on the next hill over. Within minutes 4 helicopter tankers began dropping water on the hill, with firetrucks rushing up the street. By that time spectacular flames began to leap skyward, but the wind was cooperating and the fire was being pushed to the other side of the hill. Had we gotten Santa Ana winds that day, my house would quickly have been gone. The winds held out of the south until the fire fols had the fire under control about 2 hours later. It was a very scary couple of hours.

 

I have an arrangement with a neighbor who has a key to my house to get Monster if a fire should break out. I also have a key to her house to get her dogs out should it be necessary. We came close on Friday.

 

On Saturday I spent all day in La Jolla at Southern California Quarterly Meeting of Friends, and yesterday I spent getting housework and cleaning done.

 

 

Usually banjo lessons are a practice in humility for me. They help me remember what it's like for my students when they're learning a new skill. Sometimes my teacher needs to tell me three or four times, "No, Joe, for slides you use your second finger, not your first!" Repeat, repeat, practice, practice. It's all about practice.

 

But sometimes we're blessed. Sometimes, for no reason you can discern, it all comes together. Today was one of those days. We started on a new song today. "Banjo in the Hollow". Now I've been practicing rolls for two months and one of my favorites is the foward/backward roll. It just so happens that this song is made up of chords using that particular roll! So when I started learning the song today it went very quickly. In forty-five minutes I had played through the song! First time that's happened. My teacher reminded me that as I progress it should become easier to learn songs, but it was still magical for me! And such a pretty tune. An old Dillard song.

 

So I'm pretty "UP" today!

Spent last weekend in Nashville with 20 other yearly meeting clerks from around the USA at a convocation of yearly meeting clerks sponsored by Friends General Conference. Every region of the US was represented, except for the south central region. I also met the two other western yearly meeting clerks from North Pacific Yearly Meeting and from Intermountain Yearly Meeting. We three clerks pretty much cover all the states from Denver to the West Coast. We've decided to get together on our own. We're pretty much siblings since we all came from PYM, which split into these three yearly meetings. It was a great weekend of learning and sharing with each other and I'm very grateful for the weekend. It's good preparation for August and the next three years.

 

Nashville was a trip. Country music pervades the town, beginning right at the airport. I heard lots of good music and ate lots of good southern food, especially barbeque. I'd love to go back sometime and just hang out.

Well, another piece of equipment bit the dust this last week, on Saturday. A metronome I've had for thirty years has had its spring sprung Saturday! I took it apart and tried to fix it, but it wouldn't be fixed. Probably an antique these days. A Seth Thomas Metronome. I don't think they even make them anymore. It was the old mechanical kind. One of the reasons I loved it was because it had that old clock kind of sound as the timing spindle swung, first left, then right. But thirty years is a good long time and so I wasn't too sad. It was, though, kind of like losing an old friend who's traveled with me. I thought about all the places I've lived in 30 years and how that metronome went to all those places with me. Gave me an opportunity to reminise about Des Moines, Ames, Providence, New York City, Claremont, South Killingly, West Babylon, and Los Angeles...so many wonderful places to have lived.

 

So I replaced it yesterday with this relatively cheap, but versatile, electronic metronome that is also a strobe tuner, count down timer, needle tuner, and reference tone maker.

 

With all those functions, it still doesn't have the class of the old Seth Thomas.

 

 

This seems to have been my week to upgrade my electronic stuff. The replacement TIVO came on Monday and I spent Monday night replacing the old one and installing the new one, which of course has a very different way of being programmed. Different controller, different programmming style, but some nice new features, like caller ID. I didn't know it had caller ID until last night when someone called while I was watching the television and, BINGO, up on the screen pops their name and telephone number. Alright!

 

Then during the day on Thursday the school replaced my lap top computer and I have a brand new tablet PC! So of course that meant staying awake all night on Thursday transferring stuff from the old lap top to the new. Like the replacement TIVO, different way to control it, different programming style, but some wonderful new features. I'm pleased to say that as of yesterday afternoon I think everything successfully ported over, including student grades and tests, the most important thing I needed not to lose. It also seems to work well with my home network, so most of the stuff was easy to transfer via wireless.

 

And, on top of it all, I finally finished my taxes and mailed them off yesterday.

 

Today, another day long Quaker Meeting. Nothing new there....

The Tivo died today. It had been acting up for the last week. Suddenly while watching live tv there were long pauses between some frames. No matter what I did to correct the situation, nothing worked. I figure it was a hard disk failure because the Tivo always records the last 30 minutes of whatever is on the channel you're watching. I looked back and I had bought it three years ago to watch Lance Armstrong at the Tour de France. The Tivo is perfect for sports events. You can replay even live television to see key moments during the race. And you're not bound to the showtime. You can see the show anytime.

 

When I called to see if it could be fixed, the tech said, "Oh, no, it's too old. You have a really old model!" Harrumph! Luckily they will replace it for free, but it's totally outrageous that a piece of equiptment is now old at 3 years. Of course, a Tivo is basically a computer, so computers these days are considered ancient after three years.

 

I feel REALLY old today, since I'm thirty times as old as my dead Tivo. How quickly things get old in this world!

The first tests, which were given last week and have now all been graded, usually are a time of assessment for both my students and for me. Did they learn what I thought I was teaching? Did I teach what they were learning? Can even the best teacher in the world help a student who doesn't do any work? At the college level, how much should I be motivating students to do the work? Many of my friends teach as if this were still high school. They give out review sheets, practice tests, etc. I don't. I think at this level I need to be teaching students how to do that on their own. I shouldn't be doing their work. If college is supposed to make a person an independent learner, and I think it is, than doing that for students is counter-productive. I'm more than willing to teach a student how to make up review sheets and practice exams, but I really do believe that they need to learn how to do that and my doing it for them is no help in the long run. I think about someone I hired years ago who I wound up firing because they were hired into a supervisory position and they constantly needed to be told what to do. Perhaps they were the product of too much hand holding and never having been asked to take responsibility for their own learning.

 

All that being said, motivation is important and so is pushing a student to excel and not just to regurgitate, but also being asked to think independently. My students really dislike having to think critically. "Tell me what to do and I'll do it!" But a college degree is to some extent a certificate that says you're an independent learner.

 

A conundrum inside a paradox...