t8om

08:26 pm: wwwooooooo
so my Intel days are over........my wife had eyelid syrgery so my new job is that of Male Nurse....I've been provideing frozen peas in a bag to her all day... 20 min on 20 min off until Monday....keeps me from jumping right into doing the yardwork or other household joys....aside from ice...and cooking

03:28 pm: Subliminal Guy
DANG! (wooo hooo!).....I'd been looking looking forward (not) to the Intel IISME "Report Out" (boring presentation) - don't those terms like "report out" nake you feel important and contributing to a team effort (puke)? I had to redo the IISME Intel DVD that I created (ssshyeah!)for the Intel community group because Shari called and needed smaller video clips so that she could put them together with other group videos. Forunately I brought my Mac Laptop which I was going to do stuff on during lunch (no not play video games) otherwise I wouldn't have been able to help Shari (there is a higher power making my hopes come true). So I got stuck (thank god) working with my dang computer (I love my mac) to rip the dvd, import it then create 3 separate video files - I hate this stuff (naahh...it's fun!!) I hope that they didn't miss me (I don't care at this point I just want to do my job and go home - my son misses me) I missed out on the snacks too...(I hate Rice Crispy treats anyway) Maybe someone could email me the powerpoint so I could at least see that (but delete it before I even read it)

I hope (mostly)that no one was offended (jeez welcome to America-prepare to be offended) by this stuff I was mostly joking (no seriously I was just doing some creative writing - mostly)

01:22 pm: wooo..
Good News - I get to leave work early today
Bad News - I have to go see the dentist to fix an old filling - about 1.5 hours...
Good News - I can make up the time at home
Bad News - I can make up the time at home - until about 7:00 with a numb lip/face/brain
Good News - I'm done with this list

Wouldn't it be cool to be able to leave school whenever you wanted for appointments? Well so what that would be totally impractical...not happy about my afternoon here.
Ok so I have to fill this post with 250 words but i don't know if i have that many on my brain. Next year's bloggers should not have so many posting requirements. Professional bloggers can blog effectively every day - people with too much time can ramble in their blogs every day. I've more than used the measely 16 "other" iisme hours. (dang only at 158) so yeah I think that quality in blogs should be emphasized over quantity unless there is a raise involved in the situation.

Anybody like going to the dentist? How about novacaine? anybody enjoy that? ever get a headache with it? It's one of my most unfavorite things on the planet - I'd rather get another tatoo.

05:05 pm: Looking forward
to next summer...
1 going to sleep til 4:00 the first week.
2 Heading to the beach fo sho!
3 staying up til who knows when...
4 not being the one who has to go to bed when the house is filled with out of town family
5 experience fully a summer outside of a grey cube

so yeah there were about 20 people embedded in the Perazzo home this weekend and I missed most of the fun. I did venture out Friday night and got myself a Tatoo. No I'm not going to get a chopper and start doing crack....my wife, her sister and younger brother all got tatoos a few months ago in honor of the youngest brother who died tragically at 16 several years ago. They chose a Kanji (Japanese) character that means "Little Brother" so this weekend the other brother was in town so it was his turn to get the same tatoo. I'd been thinking of what I would put on me permanently since they had theirs done so when we went I decided to do it. I chose a Kanji character that means THINK. We went to Dragon Tatoos in San Jose to see Pinky Yun who is truly a Master Tatoo Artist. He's done work for a lot of famous people none of which he'll put on the walls of the studio because he's modest.
Anyway it hurt but I did it - he was impressed that I was that tough for my first one. Now I have a beautiful work of art on my arm and wish I could go play the rest of the week with the Family but......you know the story.

10:02 pm: Hitting the Wall
.....yeah I'm getting ready to be done with this job.....I'm feeling boxed in and too focused - this is getting old. I'm REALLY happy to know that we're going to be done soon. End of summer celebration? I'm looking forward to an end of summer nap... My brain is tired....I miss my real job....HELP MR. WIZARD! I dont WANT to be an engineer anymore! (any of you 40somethings remember that cartoon? I don't see how people can do this stuff everyday all year long....Of course I imagine they'd say the same thing after being in my job for a day. Yeah all of this stuff has been covered by everyone hasn't it?

04:45 pm: Qualified - UnderQualified bbbBBBBbbbb
Ken's post on this topic was especially poingant today. Yesterday I was jammin' and thought I'd fly into work today and accomplish a lot...I was wrong. I flew into the briar patch today. I spent the day yesterday with a tutorial about creating and incorproating a database into the simulation I'm building and that went great but now that I have to apply that to the model I'm lost. How does this connect to that? What means what? HAH? Tomorrow I meet with my partner and we'll find out if I've either wasted my time or he'll be able to help me/us with this strategy. Cross your fingers for me.

and on a personal note..seeing how the current administration is handling the latest in the series of never-ending crises in syisrafghanonranraq...if President Shrub's Sesame Street foreign policy takes us into a World War 4 I'm taking my family to Canada or Switzerland before my son is old enough to become a pawn of Neo-Conservative World Domination...y'all -

06:41 pm: Does your classroom have AC?
I'm hanging out at home - not adventurous enough to go outside - I tried that earlier and felt the need to return to the Air Conditioned abode... anyway i was thinking what it was like when I started teaching...our classrooms do not have AC and as I remember it was pretty difficult to accomplish much when it was hot. When they constucted the building for my Tech Lab they of course had to include AC because it was going to be filled with computers and boy was I happy...I didn't make much noise about it with the rest of the staff though...They'll be renovating our school next year and the staff had to argue - to push for the district to include AC. How many high tech corporation places don't have airconditioning? Uh oh...this is turning into another rant about what's wrong with Education so I'll stop here

05:23 pm: You know....
It seems to me like this blogging thing is more work than the traditional ETP. Yeah. Writing something everyday, writing here writing there, keeping track of them and figuring out what your ETP is... oh AND doing your job. The TRADS have to do their job and....figure out what their ETP is going to be about. That was my experience at Lockheed a couple of years ago. So my thought is that we ought to get some sort of bonus? Yeah I'm thinking maybe a couple extra hundred dollars...maybe a laptop or maybe even the Adobe Design Bundle - sure it's $1600 but we're worth it right? Ok lets be realistic. Here we go..how about we get a paid final week in August?

10:37 am: Posting this replyhere because no one responded to it and....
.....responding to cybercontessa's post about creativty gave me the chance to articulate these ideas which have been bubbling around my brain for a while.

Creativity has been killed for the most part in education. Memorizing boring fact and rules - drill and kill work to prep for an exam - most of the material is gone after the exam. Take a look at the Almighty Standards. How many do we have to cover per subject per year times 12? The curriculum is a mile wide and an inch thick.
Could any of us pass a test covering all standards for say 6th grade? Can you describe the growth of the Maurya empire and the political and moral achievements of the emperor Asoka or have you forgotten where the Maurya empire was? I've listed all 6th grade standards in a previous post. check 'em out
How do we expect them to learn anything let alone be creative when their heads are swimming with so much information (and hormones in middle school and high school)? Information we can't realistically expect them to retain after 12 years of bombardment.

Tell me where I'm wrong....

11:13 am: bbbbbBBBBBBBBbbbbbb
Time....I'd like to have an 8th day of the week called Satunday in between Saturday and Sunday - we'd have to make the year 313 days though...and we'd have to speed up the orbit of the planet around the Sun and that would perhaps change global weather; Maybe that would reverse the current trend towards global warming.

IISME really cut into my prep time last summer so I vowed to take more time this summer after work and on weekends to clean my room (lots of computers from the campus to recyced), install programs on computers, delete files from last year, work on the wireless setup, reformat 7 of my Macs AND add Adobe Illustrator both to computers AND my curriculum. I haven't made it there though. Last year I had to take two weeks out of July for my CLAD certification so I had four days to decompress before school started. It maybe another year of teaching by the seat of my pants which I can do because I'm a professional but it taxes my brain.

I'm also working on becoming an Apple Certified Instructor - so I'm teaching myself Final Cut Pro, Soundtrack Pro, Motion Graphics Pro, LiveType and whatever the DVD creation program. I don't plan on finishing this until next June but I've got a lot of work to do to prepare for the exam. So....yeah.