| March 18, 2007 | Shows | Recipe Calendar | Archives |
 Teacher dream eleventy-seven point five: in the classroom without a lesson plan. Even better, I don't know what the class is until the students come in. At least I'm not in pajamas or naked. I'm in a far flung wing of the school, not in a portable but I can see them from here. The first group walks in. Senior English. Someone has a shoebox Globe theater project. I let them play with it. Next period, a sophomore writing class. I give a topic. They launch into a pre-writing process someone taught them in junior high: make columns with headings like memory, texture, literary reference, sound track. They fill in their columns with great focus. After an off period during which I wander around the room (gray tables, bookcases), it's computer science. My most comfortable even though there are no computers; we can always talk architecture and languages. As a teacher I always had a detailed syllabus and lesson plans. Really.  Melissa is participating in an Owl Project with Unity College's Dave Potter and some geeks from MIT. They are using cellphones to call to owls and record their responses. The set up is a little fancier than just putting a cell phone out in the woods overnight; it's hooked up to a battery pack and an amplifier and gps stuff. Judging from what Melissa tells me about the meetings and their first installation, there is a lot of rolling of the eyes from the Maine folks as the MIT guys don't get why what piloted ok in Connecticut may not work in the Maine woods, especially at this time when the snow is about to let go and the sound of water running is everywhere. Cell phone reception is notoriously sketchy here. And what about racoons? You know they are bored this time of year and those weather proof clear plastic boxes have to look like little store front windows to them. I expect to see small rodents running around with ear buds. Stay tuned.  This just in from the Strange Bedfellows department: Bong Hits 4 Jesus. That's the sign a high school kid put on a 14-foot-long banner and unfurled as the TV cameras were recording the Olympic torch being carried throught the streets of Juneau, Alaska in 2002. The kid just wanted to get on TV. The principal tore his sign down and gave him a 10-day suspension. The kid sued, arguing for free speech. Now the case is coming before the Supremes. The Bush administration has come down on the side of the principal and the Juneau School Board, which are both represented for free by Kenneth Starr. You remember him. You get to hate him all over again. And on the other side, wearing the white trunks, are all the major religious right institutes and the ACLU. How brilliant that just a few words on a sign could set the religious right and the Bushies on opposite sides and put Pat Robertson in bed with the ACLU. We need to return Matthew Broderick to adolescence so he can play the part in the movie. The kid is Frederick; the principal is Morse. Watch for more on Morse v. Frederick. 
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