After over 5 years, it’s time to lay this blog to rest. I haven’t counted how many hundreds of posts I’ve written, but I’m pretty sure the final number is nicely sized. Anyone wishing to communicate in the future can use this secret code: alexaharrington@gmail.com. I’ve enjoyed the ride, people. Here’s my favorite post of all time, so I can go out happy.

The Teachers You Remember

I had the best fourth-grade teacher. He was amazing. Everyone loved him. I was in his guinea pig class–the class he had his first year teaching at our school. Before he showed up, the teacher population in the town’s only elementary school had been all female. I showed up on the first day of my fourth-grade year and searched the posted class lists outside of both of the classrooms that I knew to be fourth grade. No me on either list. My Dad was grumpy and had to get to work, so he and I started at one end of the school and read every class list outside of every classroom until my Dad spotted my name. He hollered that he’d found me. I hollered back that he was mistaken, because that was not a fourth grade classroom. He read (very) out loud: “Mr. Fridae. Fourth grade. Alexa Harrington.” Certain he was wrong, my response was loud and sarcastic as I stomped my way across the courtyard to read for my damn self just how wrong my Dad was.

When I saw that there was a new teacher in town, he was a boy, and I was in his class, I burst into tears. Total meltdown. My Dad has nary a sympathetic bone in his body, so you can imagine how far my tears and pleading for a girl teacher got me. He stood there watching me. I think he blinked a few times in an unimpressed manner. And then said, “Well. Have a good first day. See you after work.”

I was pissed, then I was miserable. I was not the only one suffering. Everyone else who’d been unlucky enough to have their number pulled and to end up in the new guy’s class was out on the playground being teased mercilessly by the other kids. We were the pathetic freaks who had three strikes against us: our teacher was new, he was a boy, and his name was Fridae. What kind of name was that? It wasn’t even spelled right. The bell rang and saved us from mean chants involving the days of the week.

We lined up, followed our new teacher inside, sat down and waited for him to explain himself. He was going to need to dig deep to save us all (himself included) from what could surely be the worst year of our elementary school lives. We were not going to help him; he had gotten us all into this mess and it was up to him to get us out. We were surly and glaring and gave him nothing, not even the benefit of the doubt.

I don’t think he noticed our negative attitudes. He was so damn happy to be there and to get the school year started that he mowed right over our hostile little ‘tudes and started teaching. We had never seen a teacher move that much. He was all over the place. He smiled. He laughed. He thought so far outside the box that there was nothing square left to see. He taught by doing. We always had some crazy, messy, perfect project going in our room. Kids from other classrooms would go out of their way to walk by our room so they could stare through our windows at the huge, anatomically accurate, exactly to scale papier-mache eyeball on their way to the bathroom. It took us weeks to build that thing. It was three feet in diameter and I can guarantee that none of us will ever forget that the image the retinas send to the brain is inverted.

He would keep us in after the recess bell rang if he was in the middle of an important thought. He had total control over the room and no one would move until he gave the nod. The first time it happened, all the other kids filing past our windows on their way out to play stared in at us, clearly wondering what atrocity we had committed that was resulting in the missing of recess. Out on the playground the kids grilled us for cause. We told them the truth: Mr. Fridae had still been talking so we’d had to wait. They laughed and said surely the jig was up, he’d seemed cool for a while there but it was looking like he really did suck (cutting into recess is death for a teacher, everyone knows that). We worried that maybe they were right. The last few months had been pretty fantastic, but if Mr. Fridae was unaware of the sanctity of recess, then maybe he was not as great as we had started to believe.

A few minutes later the bell rang. We hadn’t had nearly enough time to run around. We all lined up. The other lines were laughing at us and we were irate: we had pledged our allegiance to the wrong teacher. The teachers headed up their lines, waited for that thing teachers wait for as proof of respect, obedience and cooperation: that fraction of a second of stillness and quiet amidst the cacophony. Once we’d shown them that they were still in charge, the teachers all motioned for us to walk back inside. We lifted our feet and all lines moved but ours. Mr. Fridae had his hand up, signaling us to stop.

We lowered our feet. Mr. Fridae waited only long enough for the other lines to notice that we weren’t moving. They were all still within disbelieving earshot when he told us that in return for allowing him to finish his thought earlier, he was giving us payback of the recess loan plus interest. The other teachers were confused, the other kids were envious, and we were stoked. This was unprecedented. It was beautiful. Extra recess on an empty playground. No teacher has ever made me happier than I was at that exact moment.

Something as simple as the subtraction or addition of recess doesn’t seem like it should be huge to grown-up me. And it wouldn’t be if the memory didn’t come attached to the emotions I had at that moment. Turning and running out onto that pristinely empty playground while everyone else walked back inside was the end of ever questioning Mr. Fridae. From that moment on, we were utterly devoted.

I’m happy to report that his wonderfulness and over-the-top enthusiasm didn’t end after our class. He kicked ass two years later when my little brother had him and has continued to do so. What was it about Mr. Fridae that my classmates and I loved so much? That he enjoyed teaching? That he consistently went above and beyond? That being in his class was like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory with textbooks and spelling tests? I think it must have been all of the above, with the important addition of his wanting to be there teaching us. He was having an adventure and he wanted us to be in on it, too. It was like being taught by a really tall, super-smart fourth-grader who had the authority to request school buses for field trips.

Author’s note: In the next few months I’ll be moving away from the Pacific Northwest and back to my exquisitely sunny birthplace. I’m still in touch with Mr. Fridae and his wife, Mrs. Fridae (who taught me literature in the 6th grade). They’ve sweetly let me know that if I warn them I’m in town, they’ll have me over for dinner and cake-baking will be involved. Excellent.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

(California hills)

One hopes that prospective college students and hopeful job applicants will have pre-emptively removed any and all unsavory material from their Facebook and MySpace pages prior to the application processes. One hopes. Sometimes this hope is in vain.

Maybe it’s the new Darwinism: all the SAT Prep courses and higher education in the world can’t get a dumbass either into college or hired up well if he/she lacked the survival skills to keep the fabulously unprofessional (and naughty!) bits off the Intertubes. Think, people! Help the future you to succeed!

Yes, social media is sometimes looked over by the powers that be in order that an applicant can be fully vetted. Your can read about it in USA Today. Good luck out there.

Pertinent Posts:
Teaching Privacy
Online Reputation Logic

Posted by Alexa Harrington

(the new Darwinism)

Not to say that all other humans are sheep (less than intelligent, with a herd-like mentality), but lately I’ve found myself muttering “I’m surrounded by idiots!” whenever I’m awed, yet again, by the incapability other humans seem to have to move forward, make simple decisions, follow directions, or to be independent thinkers. And I’m not just talking about children; all humans are included.

A hilarious post from Learn Me Good’s John Pearson (Mister Teacher) made me feel better. We are all surrounded, but thank all that is holy some of us are funny.

Related Post:
25 Edu Blogs Worth Reading

Posted by Alexa Harrington

(sheep)

The life of a freelance photographer sounds delicious: travel the world, explore everything your little heart desires, hone your craft, equipment and water being the heaviest—and practically the only—items you’ve got to carry around. Freedom, time to think, the chance to become intensely focused on one person, place, or thing for as long as you damn well please.

Is that what it’s really like? Is it dangerous? The perfect life? Boring? Effing lame? Just as FUBAR-ed with red tape as everything else in this world? Can you even make a living?

Four articles on freelance photographers in the BBC News will answer your queries and mine. Unless you’d rather not know and would prefer instead to just pack your camera and head out.

‘Challenged, empowered and terrified’: The life of a freelance photographer
A year in the life of a press photographer: Leon Neal
Adapt to survive: A photographer’s view of the market today
The story behind the news pictures

Posted by Alexa Harrington

Hilarious bit about what happens when students are made to memorize great poetical works and can recite them at will for life, even when drunk and wandering the streets in the dead of night. This post from Fielding at The Guardian makes me regret not keeping up the curious habit of learning poems by heart so one can pull them out at odd times throughout one’s life. My fifth-grade teacher made her students memorize a poem of their choice every week, and then recite the poem on Friday. I loathed every single Friday from September through June in 1985. The vomit wants to come back whenever I see a Shel Silverstein book.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

If you’ve read this blog for more than a few months, then you know where I come down on the College Rankings issue. It’s crap, and I don’t like it. You can read the full, venomous fury in the Previous Posts list below.

For now, here’s one rankings list that is based on tuition costs alone, which I mostly trust because I can’t see how they could tweak and warp basic numbers. U.S. News and World Report has a simple list of the 10 Most Expensive Public Medical Schools for In-State Students. It’s not at all what I would have expected.

1. Oregon Health and Science University
2. University of Pittsburgh
3. University of Minnesota
4. Medical University of South Carolina
5. University of Virginia
6. University of Illinois
7. University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey—New Brunswick (Johnson)
8. Michigan State University (College of Osteopathic Medicine)
9. University of California—Davis
10.University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey—Stratford

Previous College Rankings Posts (the short list):

Hone Your Inner B.S. Detector
Beware the College Rankings Machine
New System For Ranking Colleges
College Rankings
Acceptance

Posted by Alexa Harrington

(image: UC Davis water tower)

There’s a great series of student job search posts up at Phil’s Career Blog. The articles hit on three different students, their respective education paths, and how each one tends to move through the world. The advice Phil gives goes into pretty excellent detail based on each student and what skills/knowledge they each bring to the table.

Amy Achiever’s Traditional Search
Steve Striver’s Traditional Search
Bridget Blazer’s “Off Road” Search

Posted by Alexa Harrington

(job search)

Students have moaned and complained for decades about cafeteria fare. Shockingly, when Mrs. Obama and the Los Angeles School District massively revamped public school lunches in an effort to decrease obesity in America, the high school teens refused to eat black bean burgers and quinoa and demanded their nachos and strawberry milk back.

It turns out that healthy lunches are all well and good for small-scale sample tastings, but when massively produced for a large high school audience on a daily basis, the ew factor is upped considerably.

Whatever. Teenagers start the day angry. Trying to please them only makes them understand that you are their bitch. Also, they will immediately begin subversive activities, like bringing in Cheetos and Pepsi from the outside to ingest and to sell at a profit to their slower-on-the-uptake peers.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

What has risen 400% in 25 years? Not housing prices in San Francisco, but that’s an excellent guess. Nope, it’s college tuition. That one-liner factoid takes me out at the knees and makes me want to hurl.

Phenomenal amounts of money are spent, borrowed, and paid back over lifetimes for higher education. At some point, one hopes, the college students will become educated enough to figure out when the price of education is just too damned much.

Since that hasn’t happened yet, two professors were interviewed on NPR recently so they could explain WHY college costs so much. It turns out that any and all tuition payers (students, parents) are at the sticky bottom of any given school’s list of people to impress or keep happy. The violent rage I’m feeling makes me warm inside.

Economist Richard Vedder of Ohio University and Stephen Trachtenberg of George Washington University tell NPR host Neal Conan what in the hell is going on with college costs.

You can read listen to the story (30 min.) or you can read the transcript in its entirety here.

Excerpt from the transcript:

CONAN: I wanted to ask, you wrote an op-ed for CNN.com, “Why Does College Cost So Much,” you argued essentially that colleges have absolutely no incentive to reduce costs.

VEDDER: That’s right. Now, there are a few exceptions to that. The for-profit higher education sector is certainly a clear exception, but by and large, most colleges do not get rewards. The presidents of the universities, the senior officials, the key faculty do not get rewarded by being efficient, by teaching more students for the same amount of money or whatever, by using buildings efficiently, six, seven days a week, et cetera. There’s no incentive in that for them.
So there’s no great compulsion to reduce costs, and yet spending more money often has rewards. It can help improve your rankings in the magazine rankings that go on by magazines like US News or Forbes. And it is actually beneficial to colleges, or at least it’s perceived to be beneficial to colleges, to spend more money: nicer facilities for students so you attract more students, better students, whatever, lower teaching loads for faculty so that they’re happy and content and not likely to cause a lot of problems.
So the job of a university president is to raise a lot of money, tons of money, and distribute it, and not too much attention is placed on lowering the cost to the consumer.

CONAN: In fact you argue that the consumer, the student and then the student’s parents, but they come last in a list that includes, you mentioned the faculty, key faculty members are bribed with lower teaching loads. You mentioned alumni, who are in a sense are bribed to make donations to the school through successful sports programs and other things like that, and trustees.

VEDDER: Yes, I think that’s right. Remember, colleges and universities don’t have the profit motive that compels people in the traditional private sector to cut costs, be efficient, try to get more bang for the buck, as it were. So that is sort of lacking. It’s a nonprofit sector, and there’s a lot of third-party payments, that is government money and also private, philanthropic money, that comes into universities that reduces the need to depend utterly, solely on the consumer to foot the bills, to pay the freight, as it were.

Related Posts:

How To Avoid Graduating College Summa Cum Debt
Watching America’s Higher Education Creams Go Down In Flames
College Tuition: Save Or Borrow?
Ways To Kick The Ass Of Student Loan Debt
International Students Bring $18.8 Billion To U.S. Economy
I Live In A Van Down By Duke University
College Or Gambling?
The Cost of College and the Three-Year Degree Option
Streamlined and Fuel-Efficient Three-Year Degrees
Economy Makes Being an RA Seem Like a Good Idea
Increased Tuition Increases Some More

Posted by Alexa Harrington

(image: new Stanford University library)

Mr. Casey Wiley, lecturer at Penn State University, wrote an excellent piece about the current Sandusky situation at Penn State, with the emphasis on the wonderful things that come out of PSU (i.e., not just high-profile coaches on trial for the unthinkable), and how he and his students have been affected by the Sandusky situation. Wiley comes at the problem trying to figure out what it means to be at Penn State and how to go about finding the amazingness that is still Penn State.

Here are some tidbits; the entire article can be found at EDU in Review:

Three weeks before the allegations broke en masse, on some sunny fall morning, I asked my mostly freshman composition students to write about what it means to be at Penn State. No, that wasn’t right, I said. I thought about it more. I’m an outsider here, I told them. I’ve been teaching at Penn State for two years. I grew up in upstate New York, and I have no family members who attended the university. This may be the case at other major universities, I continued, but hyperbole aside students here seem to express — in the most real and basic sense of the word — Love for the school. Students have feelings for it, a heavy devotion. I said this in all seriousness.

In short: What is this feeling of being at Penn State? Or of being Penn State?

My students smiled — they got it, this strange, maybe naïve philosophy: Penn State-ology, or whatever silly thing one might call it. My students wrote, but in the end, they couldn’t articulate what this Penn State feeling was. Football? Paterno? Tradition? My dad went here? And my grandpa? The social scene? The library and old buildings? In short: Penn State just was. And it was good. I wasn’t satisfied, but I couldn’t articulate why. My students watched me. Like most days, roughly a third of them in this 24 person class wore an article of clothing with big PSU lettering sewn or ironed to it.

… I’m not sure what the students can learn from this horrible situation – long and short term – but I remember saying to them in class and out that week, that while they have every right to feel ashamed, confused, angry with Penn State and its leadership, or lack thereof, maybe the silver lining here, if there is one, is that the students, the community, me, we can all be reminded that Penn State is not a so-so school with a big football program; it is a strong school, now with a tainted football program and hierarchy. And because of that, the entire school is tainted. But the school doesn’t stop teaching and researching and discovering and learning. This school is built on ideas, and the advancement of ideas, I told them. And I believe that.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

(image: Brian Cover)