It’s that time again—the annual moving-into-the-dorms rite of passage for college freshmen. Somewhere along the line, academic and social concerns went by the wayside as the foremest contributors of butterflies in the bellies of brand spankin’ new college students. These days, the principal worry is having a big enough pile of plastic crap for the picture-perfect version of dorm living.

It probably needs to be color-coordinated as well (because god knows no one wants to end up with the orange closet organizer, the pink Mac, the green fridge, the purple hamper, the red desktop organizer, the red bean bag chair and the blue shower caddy).

If you need a second curmudgeonly opinion, read the excellent rant on Around the Academy.

If you need some inspiration for frugality and the reduction of crap in the world, watch this non-preachy and tolerable video: The Story of Stuff. I generally loathe informational videos and documentaries (excepting, as always, Dogtown and Z-Boys) and this was totally watchable.

Please feel free to read the Reuters article on how much money parents pay every school year on questionably necessary school supplies.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

The most painful impact the recent upswing in the price of gas has had for me is the impossibility of taking road trips. Because the cost of filling up our tanks is starting to match up a little more closely with all the other gas-pumping countries in the world, jumping in the car and driving all over hell and gone for no reason whatsoever isn’t the feasible plan it once was.

Road trips used to be the practically free vacation option for college students (and anyone else who didn’t mind sleeping in the car or at a skeezy motel). The current price of dead dinosaur juice is severely limiting my road tripping, solo and with my kiddos. I have an entire collection of exquisite road trip memories.

When I was a kid, my Dad took my brother and me on several perfect road trips. I clocked my first unsupervised driving time in my Dad’s ancient Ford truck on a straight-ass road that went for miles through the desert while my Dad took a nap in the passenger seat and my little brother tried in vain to convince me it was a good idea to let him steer. The closest thing I’ve had to a religious experience was the sunrise I saw over a cornfield in Kansas one summer morning.

When I was in college I made good use of my Japanese four-door sedan and would ditch my friends and housemates regularly for solo road trips. I wasn’t entirely alone—I’d bring along my Mom’s dog for protection, my Dad’s old 35mm camera that he picked up in Vietnam and I was fortunate to be gifted with, and an assload of black-and-white film. I drove all over California, shot rolls and rolls of decrepit architecture, ate whatever they were selling at roadside fruit stands and convenience stores, drank stupid amounts of coffee, and slept in my car at rest stops or pulled over on quiet farm roads*.

Interlaced among all those road trip memories is not even one whisper of a thought about filling the gas tank. I totally took it for granted that I could just drive away for several days and meander all over the state or the country. I’ve driven back and forth across the United States three times, including a six-week road trip I took for college credit during my senior year at The Evergreen State College.

That trip involved driving from Seattle to California, from California to the Deep South, driving up and down the Mississippi River and throughout Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana, back to California and then back up to Seattle. The most expensive part of the trip was paying to sleep in motels when I wasn’t staying with friends. (I had matured enough to realize that sweet young things sleeping at rest stops was beyond the limits of asininity).

Until recently, I had assumed those trips were just the beginning of my cross-country road trip collection. Now it makes me slightly nauseated to think of how much it would cost to drive to the East Coast and back again.

The newly published book, Twenty West: The Great Road Across America by Mac Nelson, comes at a good time then—I can read about driving Route 20 and have a vicarious road trip thrill. Not as exquisite as a real road trip, but a hell of a lot cheaper. U.S. Route 20 extends from Boston, Mass. to Newport, Oregon and would make an amazing trip. I had always planned that someday (in the far distant future) I would take each of my kids on their own road trip the summer prior to their sixteenth birthdays, so they could learn to drive out on a deserted highway for a week, away from the city. I have ten years to start saving for a Route 20 road trip with my oldest…

Further Reading:

History of U.S. Route 20
ForeWord Magazine Book Review
Mac Nelson Book Signing at Talking Leaves Books
Road Trip: Route 20—Coast to Coast!

*I realize, now that I’m an adult with two children, that sleeping at rest stops was dangerous and I’m very, very lucky nothing horrible ever befell me.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

Randy Pausch passed away today. Death pisses me off, especially when the dead people are fairly young and were exceptional human beings. (Apparently that means I don’t care if old a**holes die). Anyway, Randy Pausch was a Carnegie Mellon professor who taught and researched computer science, human-computer interaction and design, and was considered one of the pioneers of virtual reality research.

He was best known to the non-tech world for the Last Lecture he gave at Carnegie Mellon after being diagnosed with inoperable pancreatic cancer, entitled Achieving Your Childhood Dreams. The book he co-wrote with Wall Street Journal writer Jeffrey Zaslow (via cell phone dictation), The Last Lecture, has been on the best-seller list for months.

He was smart, funny, straightforward, and a pretty happy guy both before and after his diagnosis. His students loved him, and as soon as the rest of the world met him via YouTube, they loved him as well.

I think what made the most profound impression on me was the fact that he didn’t do some sappy-ass tear-jerking farewell lecture. He used his final lecture as a way to tell his wife and kids what his childhood dreams had been, how he had gone about trying to realize those dreams, and what he learned from the achievement (or sometimes not quite) of each item on his list.

His lecture was certainly moving, but I wasn’t watching it and thinking words like heartbreaking, bittersweet and poetic. I was thinking, “This guy has always paid attention to what other people had to teach him.” The priceless bits of knowledge he gleaned while moving through life and working his way down his list of childhood dreams are uncomplicated and perfect. If you haven’t already, I would highly recommend watching his lecture.

Further Reading:

Associated Press: Prof whose ‘last lecture’ became a sensation dies

The Legacy of Randy Pausch

Randy Pausch: The dying man who taught America how to live

Posted by Alexa Harrington

Matthew K. Tabor has a bit of an urgent post/note up on his blog. The Fresh Air Fund needs to place about 200 more city kids in rural homes this August. If you reside in any of these Northeastern states or provinces, you can have the opportunity to give a disadvantaged NYC kid a summer vacation.

The screening process is fairly painless, but is not instantaneous, so anyone interested in hosting should start the process sooner rather than later. If you ask for Angie, she’ll get you through in a timely manner. Here’s all the contact info you should need:

If you or someone you know would like to be a host, check out the information page:

Please host a child or help us get the word out that we need folks who can welcome a child from the city into their homes next month.

One last thing that is actually very important. We are looking for families who want to extend an invitation to a 9-12 year old. We really need more families who want older children and boys.

Please Email Angie, angie@freshair.org, immediately and she’ll speed you through the process!

Or, you can call us at 1-800-367-0003 (212.897.8900) — ask for Angie

Posted by Alexa Harrington

There are several points in every person’s life in which a major, life-changing decision must be made. I myself have never had to decide whether to work toward my Special Forces qualification or to go to law school, but I’ve always wondered how that thought process would go…My major life decisions were more along the lines of which order to do grad school, career and motherhood.

Steve Bogucki at Educated Soldier has a post up in which he works through his Special Forces vs. law school quandary. It’s very interesting, as is his blog. I think he and I are probably at opposite ends of the political spectrum, but that doesn’t mean I can’t respect him as a dedicated soldier and as an intelligent student. Also, his Mom pointed me in the direction of his blog, and he refers to her as his ‘confidante’, so he can’t be all bad.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

Reuters has this article up about a middle school in Boston that has stopped using textbooks, paper and pencils in favor of laptops. The laptops are handed out to every student at the beginning of the school day, the kids use them all day for math, reading, etc., and hand them back in at the end of the day. The school library is still standing and stocks lots of fiction in book form, so I suppose I can support the idea of computers replacing all tree-based implements of learning in the classroom. (Really, I think it’s that I can see the inevitable age of laptops-for-every-human and no-more-trees-left-for-paper coming down the pike, so I may as well give up and step out of the way.)

I adore pencils and paper (Ticonderoga #2’s and college ruled) and books that are bound and I will probably never give them up completely, regardless of mankind’s technological advancements. However, as much as I prefer words in print to their computer-screen counterparts, I do understand that technological evolution, progress, and advancement (blah blah blah) is forward motion and that is usually a positive thing.

I’m not terribly fond of the increased amount of screen time elementary and middle school kids will be adding to their daily tally if laptops are to be used all day in the classroom, but I’m sure that back when someone started writing on paper, there was my cave-writing counterpart bitching about how mankind’s technological advancements into paper making were going to ruin everyone’s eyesight. The symbols can be bigger on the walls, you jackasses! We’ll all go blind if you start writing small on that clay tablet crap! I am crotchety and I fear change no matter which epoch I’m residing in.

Further Reading:

Testing with Tech: The Role of Technology in Supporting and Enhancing Assessment

Technology Integration

Technology Not Being Used Effectively in Schools

NEA Survey Results on Technology in Public Schools and Classrooms

State Leadership in Technology For Schools: Trends in access, use and capacity

Technology Literacy and the MYSpace Generation

Posted by Alexa Harrington

Dr. Julie-Ann McFann over at Around the Academy wrote a beautiful post about the new GI Bill issue. She writes from the perspective of not only the daughter-in-law of a WWII veteran who benefited greatly from the GI Bill, but also as an educator who has taught students that enlisted in the military because it was the most realistic shot any of them had at paying for a college education. She’s as cranky as I am about the whole thing.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

I think we (and by ‘we’ I mean Americans) used to be a little prone to taking the commuting portion of our college education for granted. That is no longer the case. There’s an article in the NY Times about the rising cost of commuting coinciding with the rising number of college students enrolling in online courses.

Taking some or all classes online, or earning an online degree is looking better and better to impoverished college students. It saves money and the planet.

Posted by Alexa Harrington