Baltimore Diary

Validation

Charles Foster Kane: As Charles Foster Kane who owns eighty-two thousand, six hundred and thirty-four shares of public transit - you see, I do have a general idea of my holdings - I sympathize with you. Charles Foster Kane is a scoundrel. His paper should be run out of town. A committee should be formed to boycott him. You may, if you can form such a committee, put me down for a contribution of one thousand dollars.

--Citizen Kane(1941)

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I've been added to the blogroll over at the Baltimore Sun's Classroom Connections blog. It's almost like acknowledgment that I know what I'm talking about. At least somebody thinks so.

Epiphany's been added, too, along with a couple of other local education-related blogs that I'm just starting to read.

At some point today I'm going to photocopy my hand, stick the image on the wall and repeatedly lean against it as a means of patting myself on the back.

Running On Ice

Oerstadt: I told you earlier I have a destiny, a purpose. Satan reasons like man, but God thinks of eternity. Well, I prostrate myself before a world that's going to hell in a handbag, 'cause in all eternity, I am here and I will be remembered. That's destiny. A bomb has a destiny, a predetermined fate set by the hand of its creator, and anyone who tries to alter that destiny will be destroyed.

—Deja Vu (2006)

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I've had two pretty crappy days at work this week. I don't know that it's going to improve any. Yesterday I went into the office and there was a bunch of turmoil going on. There was a city-wide meeting of principals going on, after which they would break up into their area-based groups for further inservicing. Nobody knew whether they were going to be presenting any of the materials to the principal, or if they were just going to assist homehow, or what. My boss goes into Overdrive Mode and has me edit an existing PowerPoint presentation with the relevant material, plus he grabs another couple of people to put together a folder full of handouts, a pre/post test for the staff development end of things, and a few other details. All of this because nobody bothered to tell him whether or not he was presenting any of this material. He and I worked from about 10 am until after 2:00 putting the whole thing together. I have to say, we did a pretty good job. However, at about the time we were ready to leave, the AAO calls my boss and tells him that his sole responsibility is to deal with the pre- and post-tests. However, she'll also need some help on the PowerPoint. I look in the closet and see all of the projectors are there. So I grab a projector and an extension cord, and all the materials that we were given by North Avenue last week. Pack it onto a folding hand truck and take it to the elevator.

Which is, naturally, out of order.

So I have to get this hand truck of stuff, which includes a $1500 digital projector, down three flights of stairs. Fun!

The presentation was taking place at the Professional Development Center, which, after a couple of years' absence, has returned to the building at 2500 Northern Parkway. This part is a pretty sweet deal for me, because I live practically walking distance from this place. I get to PDC and it turns out that I didn't have to bring the projector; they have these training rooms now which have PCs connected to projectors mounted to the ceiling. The images get projected onto this smart board jobbie to which you can take a stylus, and it basically acts like a big tablet PC. You can click on an item projected on the board  and have the computer react appropriately.

So I spent four hours working on a presentation that didn't get used, went to a building to be the guy who helps the guy who's handing out and collecting quizzes, plus running the presentation stuff because nobody else can figure it out. Not the most productive use of my time. This part was all after school hours, incidentally: I got home at 6:00. And I therefore didn't get to work on the presentation I KNOW I'm doing next week because of all this.

And this is all because our new AAO wouldn't return her phone calls over the weekend, or during the day Monday until literally the last minute. In short, we spent a bunch of time making her look good that day and I have no real feeling that our efforts were truly appreciated.

Today, I had a very long IEP meeting at a school, which I can't talk too much about (confidentiality and all that), but the short version is that I got sandbagged into the team making a decision that I think is inappropriate for this student at this time. The team, I'm sure, is more than happy not to have to deal with this parent anymore as a result of this decision. Not to mention her advocate, who figured he could discuss medication because he works in a pharmacy. Naturally I took the time to ask, and of course he's not a pharmacist. "But I've worked in a pharmacy for fifteen years."

Like that carried any weight for me. I could spend fifteen years in a garage but that wouldn't make me a Corvette.

The only bright spot on my horizon is that I have a meeting tomorrow afternoon that will practically guarantee that I'll get home at a decent hour.   

Goofus and Gallant

[Neela and Abby is trying to help a women who was rude to them, who has just twisted her ankle]
Drew: Don't touch me!
Neela Rasgotra: Try not to move, I'm a doctor. You may have broken your ankle.
Drew: If you're a doctor, I want a second opinion.
Neela: Okay. Doctor Lockhart, would you care to give a second opinion?
Abby Lockhart: Sure, your ankle may be broken and you're a bitch.

—ER, "Nobody's Baby" (9/29/05)

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Yesterday while working I had to go from one location to another. As I do.

I realized that it was a little on the late side and that, if I didn't stop for lunch (read: breakfast), I wasn't going to get anything to eat until supper. So I hit the drive-through at the McDonald's on McClean Boulevard, at Perring Parkway.

Normally this one's pretty busy, but not so much this day. I drove directly up to the menu board/loudspeaker jobbie and placed my order. I have to say, the young lady taking my order was very pleasant, cheerful and easy to understand. Those who know me, know that this sort of thing goes a LONG way with me. Drove to the first window, gave her my debit card, again with the pleasantness. There was no car ahead of me so when that was done I went straight to the second window. Get this: my food was actually waiting for me. I was so happy that I actually sent the corporation an email to tell them about it.

However, you probably don't much care about all that. What's more, that's not why I'm writing all this.

So I pull the car into a parking space nearby and shut the car off, leaving the key in the accessory position so I can keep listening to the radio. This is for about ten minutes, so I can eat my fries and double-check my schedule, that sort of thing. Then off to my next destination.

Except, not so much.

I turn the key and nothing happens. Uh-oh. Then I remember that, because I shut the car off altogether, I have to re-set the kill switch. So I take care of that and try again. No go. A single "click" and that's it. Crap. No previous sign that there's a problem with the battery and now this?

Well. I'm just practical enough that I do have jumper cables in the back of my car...somewhere. I have a lot of crap in the back of my car. At present it includes two 12-packs of Coke Zero and a pair of collapsible chairs that I brought to the most recent football game at which Wee One was cheerleading. Also, being a bit of an electronics geek, I have numerous other cables and wires back there. Frankly I wouldn't be surprised to find Billy Batts back there as well. I go fishing through all this and do, indeed, come up with the jumpers, which naturally are tangled up with about twelve feet of telephone wire.

Now it's off to find some assistance. Fortunately, the pickup truck two spots away has a pair of guys in it eating their lunch. I go over and ask them for a jump: "Hi, excuse me, do you think I could get a jump from you guys?"

The driver's response, through a mouthful of French Fries, was a lame-ass excuse about already being late for something, he's going to literally be leaving in about two minutes, blah blah blah. Yeah, because a battery jump takes a half hour and nobody on the planet would give you a pass for helping out another human being. Fuckwit.

A few spaces away there's another pretty large vehicle and, while the driver seat is empty, the passenger seat has someone awaiting her partner. As I approach the car, the driver comes up. I explain the situation and he's more than happy to help, so long as I have cables (because he doesn't). He pulls into the space adjacent to mine and, as we pop our respective hoods, there's a problem: Our batteries are on opposite sides of the cars, so the cables don't reach. And it's not as though he can go to my other side, because I'm on the end space and there's a curb/median thing there.

Finally I say, "How about if I let off the brake, let it roll back a bit and you nose it in, in front of me?" He says that would probably work. So I get in my car, release the brake and allow it to roll about halfway out of the spot (we're on a slight incline). Meanwhile, my benefactor has to ask the the guy in truck that turned me down, who's still sitting there, to get out of the way. This, he had no trouble complying with, being late and all.

I get the jump and all is well so far. The guy noted a little corrosion on my battery terminal and pointed out that it appears to be the car's original battery, so maybe it's just nearing the end of its life. All of which are true, so I guess after almost exactly six years and 80,000 miles I haven't much cause to complain.

Except about the other asshat. Too bad I won't be around to see the karmic wedgie he gets.

You Go, Boy

Huey Freeman: They gon' fire you.
Mr. Uberwitz: For what?
Huey Freeman: For being an irresponsible white person.

--The Boondocks, "A Huey Freeman Christmas" (12/28/05)

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If you're following what's been going on in Baltimore City Schools recently, you know that the system has a new CEO. Dr. Andres Alonso took the job with the proviso that he got to run things his way, and he's certainly been doing that. With the exception of the Baltimore Teachers Union activists, the press on him has been pretty good so far, and it looks like he's really in to ensure success in the system.

The flip side of this is that Dr. Alonso is wasting no time in looking for things to happen. If you read Epiphany's blog, or the education blog over at the Baltimore Sun's website then you know that there are stories, both true and untrue, floating about with regard to Dr. Alonso's ruthlessness about this sort of thing. Pretty much anyone who's in an administrative position in Baltimore City Public Schools works at the pleasure of the CEO and the Board of Education, and his stance is: perform, or be fired.

Part of my job (which is BTU level) is to assist people in schools with Special Education issues. There's a person in each school called the IEP Team Associate, whose job it is to schedule the annual review meetings for the Special Ed students, hold the meetings, ensure that the students are getting their services, and enter the appropriate data into the appropriate system. (There are actually four computer systems we need to deal with: one to handle the education programs, one to track the services, one for students who need transportation and one which maintains the records for all  of the students in BCPSS. The information in this one populates some of the data in the others.)

With so much data to handle, there's a lot of room for errors where information in one system doesn't match what's in another system. So one of the things I get to do is assist schools with their "Data Cleansing." I'm able to run reports to help determine whether information in the system may be incorrect, analyze that information and help out with getting it straightened out.

Data Cleansing started last spring as a gigantic push to ensure that there were as few errors as possible before we converted a lot of this information into a single database. When the company which was supposed to put this thing together fell apart, we were left with several stopgap measures, but the data cleansing project continued.  Because, after all, the data's supposed to be correct anyway. When we started DC there were literally thousands of errors systemwide, most of them the result of typos that were easily fixed. As spring moved toward summer, it became clear that there were going to be some errors that simply couldn't be cleaned up for one reason or another. There were a couple of glitches in the system that meant that a problem just had to kind of stay out there in cyberspace forever. North Avenue was aware that this was the case and the matter would be dropped. When school started up again in August, we continued generating reports and fixing data, but because we weren't under the pressure of a drop-dead date (you know, the one that never materialized. Not that that's anyone's fault), it wasn't quite so bad dealing with stuff. 

With Alonso at the helm, however, DC has become an intensive project again. Dr. Alonso has told principals that they can get their data straightened out or they can clean out their desks. This, in turn, has a lot of principals running scared and there's a tremendous level of pressure being exerted on the IEP Team Associates by the principals as well as my office. We're constantly calling, offering help with the data cleansing, and the principals are all "Hey, why isn't this problem fixed?" And it doesn't necessarily help that, once you fix a problem, it takes anywhere from 24-48 hours for the different systems to talk to one another and catch up with the fixes. Not much you can do there; it's the way the system works. But it makes principals nervous to hear "I fixed it" and when they run the report the problem's still there.

Not to mention those occasional problems that are just going to hang out there forever, or until the appropriate patch is written, or whatever. People are getting a little crazy because the reports aren't absolutely pristine. But you know what? This isn't necessarily a bad thing. The data needs to be straightened out, the pressure needs to be on, and this all should have happened over twenty years ago. The Consent Decree is one of those things that weighs heavily on the shoulders of the system, and it's good to see that Dr. Alonso is committed to getting us out from under it, rather than either paying it lip service or viewing it as something to be endured, as so many before him have done.

While I Was Out

Helen Stewart: My officers are trained professionals.
Nikki Wade: Well, if Fenner's anything to go by, you'd be better off training chimpanzees.

—Bad Girls (1999)

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GF came through the surgery well. It actually took longer to get her anesthetized than it did for the procedure itself, and she was discharged several hours later. Scientific progress!

When I went to work on Thursday, I had to present a staff development session that I'd taken the time to re-write, since the materials they gave me were just so awful. Although I got there early in order to set up my room, I nearly didn't get it all together on time because of people doing one, or both, of two things: 1) asking about GF, and 2) telling me how bad the previous day's session was.

Obviously I can't comment on that, because I wasn't there, but I do know this. Many of the people who presented this material had expressed that they weren't comfortable with it because they weren't familiar with the stuff they were talking about. This concern basically went ignored. The second thing was that they wanted a script to work from. The person who developed that particular aspect of the training was very resistant to writing scripts, because it tends to lead to cookie-cutter work. In general I tend to agree with this, but that doesn't mean that I didn't set myself up with a solid list of talking points. I don't really think these people even had that. The other thing was that the topic was a comparison of the old computer system vs. the new one. There's a serious paradigm shift involved here (hence the presenters' discomfort), and the product is deeply entwined with the process. The hope was that the morning session would be about process, and the afternoon about product. As I understand it, they spent so much time trying to separate the two that few people learned anything.

Whenever we do these staff development sessions, participants are asked to complete satisfaction surveys. I do get to see them although they are anonymous. Usually they're positive when talking about me and my co-presenters; occasionally the subject material, or some piece of it will take a hit. I would be very curious to see the surveys that come from other rooms, or from sessions that I'm not involved in.

In the long run, it's not enough for Dr. Alonso to reorganize people and fire (or encourage the resignation of) others. It's also important that he work to bring some common sense into the policies and procedures that we go through on a daily basis. I'm sure that people at North Avenue read the surveys, but there isn't much sense that the commments are in any way heeded.

When my boss and I first heard about the changes that were going to be made with regard to the schools we'd be working with, there was a great deal of apprehension on our part. We truly thought that we were not exactly going to get "the best and the brightest" people to work with. We were very pleasantly surprised to find a bunch of motivated, competent people who had been just so beaten down by the way the system was working, or failing to, for them. Phone calls and emails had gone unanswered, requests for technical assistance apparently went ignored. All they needed was a little support from the people one level up and their jobs would have been so much easier and less stressful. Consequently the first part of this year, for me and for my boss, has been taken up by helping some of these people play "catch-up" with some of the students they've had problems with last year.

How difficult and frustrating it must have been for these folks, looking for help and feeling like they were shouting down a well. And in a way, nothing's changed, really: these people are getting the help they need, and as far as the ones who no longer work with me and my boss? What we're hearing is that now they're the ones who are asking for support and finding none. Do with that what you will.

Yes, Deer

Lorelai: Sweetie you're never gonna find the deer.
Rory: Well, I'm gonna try.
Lorelai: Well, I'm in heels!
Rory: Well, stay in the car.
Lorelai: It's dangerous in the car with all the kamikaze deer running around... [gets out of the car]
Rory: I have to find it.
Lorelai: Alright, wait up! So what does the deer look like? Huh? Does it have any distinguishing marks - besides the word 'Jeep' imprinted on its forehead?

—Gilmore Girls, "The Deer Hunters" (10/26/00)

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Because she didn't have enough to deal with yesterday, what with the impending surgery:

Yesterday morning, GF was enroute to the doctor's for an appointment. She was headed up the Jones Falls Expressway and was about at the point where it meets up with the Beltway, when a deer leaped into the roadway from the side. She barely had enough time to react, braking hard and swerving and all, and she managed not to collide with it.

What she didn't count on, however, was the other deer that wasn't able to stop in time to avoid colliding with her.

This second deer crashed into the rear passenger quarter-panel area and did damage to that panel, the wheel well, and the rear bumper. The deer, of course, is dead. The police report says that, naturally, nothing much can be done about something like that, so she's not at fault. GF has a sore neck from the vehicle being bashed into from the side rear.

There are two bright sides to all of this:

1. She was already on the way to the doctor anyway, so she didn't have to wait long to get checked out.
2. She wasn't driving her own car. That one's in the shop (again). She was driving her father's pickup truck. So now it's his headache.

Dream A Little Dream

Dr. Meredith Grey: In surgery there is a red line on the floor that marks the point where the hospital goes from being accessible to being off limits to all but a special few. Crossing the line unauthorized is not tolerated. In general, lines are there for a reason, for safety, for security, for clarity. If you choose to cross the line, you pretty much choose to do so at your own risk. So why is it that the bigger the line, the greater the temptation to cross it?

—Gray's Anatomy, "Break On Through" (1/29/06)

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I don't often remember my dreams, but last night I had a strange one.

A little background: before I moved to Baltimore, I was married for a second time. Love at first sight, blah blah blah. We lived together for three years and were married for two before she decided that she didn't want me in her life anymore. In retrospect I should have seen it coming. In retrospect, I should have seen a lot of things. There was a lot of anger and hostility on her part, and I suspect there's still some, although I'm still in the Molly Bear camp. Longtime readers will recall an exchange I had with her awhile back.

Anyway. She has four children, Boy, girl, girl, boy. The second girl is almost the same age as Daughter. The oldest is now 22, I guess. I'm not going to get into a big thing about the family dynamics, which would include the kids' father, but I'll say that in retrospect there really were no good guys and no bad guys. There were just a bunch of people who were spun out of control because strong emotions and that particular set of circumstances just don't mix.

So in the dream, I'm in front of a building that I've reached through some sort of mass transit. I go inside and there's a hallway ahead, an open room to the right and a stairway that doubles back (as in, you have to make a U-turn) to go upstairs to the left. At the far end of the hall is another door that's apparently open, because light is spilling into the hall. I'm here to retrieve something, and it's in the open room.

I go into the room and there are people there, some of whom I know. A couple of them are my (former?) stepkids, still at the age I saw them last. I sneak past them all and go to a bookshelf at the far end of the room. There are books on the shelf that I've identified as mine, and I grab them and stuff them into a tote bag I've brought. The people in the room have moved, so I have to be extra sneaky to leave the room without being identified. I get into the hall and move toward the stairs to sit on them and organize the stuff I've taken.

Before I get there, a pair of nine-year-old hands have embraced me from behind. It's stepdaughter #2, who is actually glad to see me. She's wearing a t-shirt that's much to large for her, and she has a bunch of questions as we sit on the stairs. I work on looking through and organizing the books, none of which seem like they should be especially important. She asks me questions about why I left, why I was trying to hide just now, why don't I go talk to her mother (indicating the room down the hall), etc. (She always was the inquisitive and insightful one of the bunch.) I sit there trying to answer her questions in a way that a nine-year-old would understand, and which doesn't assign any blame to anyone. Before I can leave, I'm awakened by the alarm clock.

Not that I put a lot of stock into dream analysis, but according to dreammoods.com,

• Bookshelf:To see a bookshelf in your dream, represents the various levels of your mind where ideas, concepts, and memories are kept. It also suggests your need to acquire some information or knowledge in a situation before making your decision.
• Book: To see books in your dream, indicates calmness. You will advance toward your goals at a slow and steady pace. Books also symbolize knowledge, intellect, information and wisdom.
• Children: To see children in your dream, signifies your own childlike qualities or a retreat back to a childlike state. It is an extension of your inner child during a time of innocence, purity, simplicity, and a carefree attitude. You may be longing for the past and the chance to satisfy repressed desires and unfulfilled hopes. Take some time off and cater to the inner child within.
• Staircase: To see a staircase in your dream, symbolizes change and transformation.
• Stairs: To dream that you are walking up a flight of stairs, indicates that you are achieving a higher level of understanding. You are making progress into your spiritual/emotional/material journey. It also represents material and thoughts that are coming to the surface. [I wasn't walking, we were sitting, but it was definitely an "up" staircase.]
• Hallways:To see a hallway in your dream, symbolizes the beginning of a path that you are taking in life or a journey into the unknown and self exploration. It represents spiritual, emotional, physical, or mental passages in your life. It is indicative of a transitional phase in your life.

Do with all of that what you will. And does any of it have to do with the fact that I'm sitting in Sinai hospital today, while GF goes through surgery?

Where Ogling Gets You Put on a Special List

Joan: Well I can't do any stunts. No, No, and how about the jumps? So, so. So why am I here, well it's really odd, but I'm here to cheer on a mission from God. So put me in the game or leave me on the bench, so you can go to heaven and I'll get out of French.

—Joan of Arcadia, "Bringeth it On" (10/31/03)

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Wee One has spent a chunk of the summer and fall in Cheerleading. Since the City doesn't appear to have a program, she joined through Baltimore County Recreation. (Living in a border neighborhood does have a few advantages.)

Despite being 8 years old, she was placed in the 5-7 group because she'd never been in Cheerleading before. This irritated GF a little but she got over it. So off we went, to practice twice a week and ultimately going to actually cheer at Harford/Baltimore County Youth Football games. There are different cheerleading squads for different age groups, and likewise the teams. So the girls got to cheer for the Parkville Patriots (color scheme the same as the New England team) in the same age group.

The Patriots are, to be blunt, not a very good team, but it's only fair to point out that all of the boys are new to football. There's a younger age group, but apparently none of them aged out to this group, or whoever did age out, didn't continue playing. So what we have is an entire team of rookies. They have one game left, and I think their record is 0-137, although I did hear that one game we didn't attend, they actually won. And the girls were out there every week, cheering on the boys.

In addition to the games, however, there is some cheering competition. There are three meets in this realm. The first one we missed because of being in Florida, but I hear that we placed sixth out of seven teams. Yikes.

Yesterday was the second meet, which was held at CCBC Dundalk. We got there shortly after 8:00 to get Wee One registered, and then we got on line to get ourselves in. At 9:00 the gates opened. 

Not having done this sort of thing before, we had to wander around a little bit before we got the gist of what was going on. And by "wander around", I mean that we pretty much circumnavigated the field before we realized that we were supposed to be about twenty feet from where we started. But they had the field roped off, and the assorted teams within the ropes, in a pair of lines that surrounded an open area with a huge gym mat. At either end were tents with various support services, including a DJ/announcer tent, a place where the EMTs were stationed, and a staging area for teams getting ready to go on. The parents would, therefore, sit behind the roped-off area designated for their own kids. And they'd only sit if they brought their own chairs. Fortunately, we were prepared. We staked out our space and put up our chairs.   

The schedule was pretty tight, what with each team being scheduled in five-minute increments. Still, they actually managed to get ahead of schedule until one of the girls fell from a "build" (where they lift a girl above the others), and hurt her leg. Everything stopped for awhile until they determined that she was okay and a bit shook up. They gave the team a few minutes to regroup and allowed them to present again. Naturally, points were taken off for nearly killing one of the team, but overall they weren't bad. But now we're running late. 

But still, when there are eight or nine different squads participating and different age groups, this sort of thing is going to take a lot of time. Wee One's squad went on at about 10:20 AM but you stay around to see who gets the award. All of the awards were given at the end of the morning session.

Let me tell you something: all of the girls really got out there and gave it their all. But the Parkville 5-7 group really took their prior showing to heart and worked their butts off over the past two weeks. Practice went from two days a week to three (which is OK under the rules; teams can't do more than 10 hours per week and we went from four to six), and (here's the important part) parents were discouraged from hanging around practice. This, I think, went a long way toward getting the girls to do what needed to be done. They didn't have the helicopter moms interfering with everything, and they didn't have to deal with the kids constantly craning their necks to see if mom saw the cool move.

Also, Wee One has been determined, for the last month or so, to perfect her cartwheeling skills. She has a congenital problem with her leg, which doesn't affect her mobility, but it can make her clutzy from time to time. So this kid would practice her cartwheels for literally hours at a time. I know for a fact that a couple of days last week she finished her homework and asked to go out, not to play, but to practice cartwheels in the front yard. And practice she did, until supper was ready two hours later.

I have to imagine that most of the girls worked this hard, because they were fantastic. I won't say they were flawless, because they weren't, but I saw stuff out there that I didn't think they'd be capable of a couple of weeks ago. And, it paid off: Her squad took First Place for their division.

You don't know ear pain until you've been in the center of a hundred females screaming at the top of their lungs.   

Probably Not the Only Literate Guy in the Room

Jimmy Monahan: If you knew what those words meant and could spell 'em, you'd be almost literate.

—The Merry Monahans (1944)

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In my current position I get tapped a lot to present staff development. Most staff development sucks in Baltimore City schools, for a number of reasons. Sometimes the material has already been presented approximately 385,873,847,000,000 times and the people in attendance are just sick of it. In other cases, it's the presentation of the material. I can't even begin to tell you how much I hate training sessions where the presenter simply throws a PowerPoint slide, or a transparency, up on a screen and then just reads the slide to us. The alternative to reading the slide is the trainer saying, "Can we get a volunteer to read that to us?" There are many people who talk to me about this, and the overall attitude is, "Do they think we're that stupid?" (North Avenue spies reading this, please take note.)

So I was asked to do some staff development during two days' worth of training next week. GF has some surgery coming up on one of those days, so I had to turn that one down, but I said I'd be happy to present on the second day.

There are at least three reasons why I like to present on staff development days:

• First, because being the guy standing at the front of the room is far more interesting than being one of the poor schlubs in the seats;
• Second, I'm actually pretty good at it. I can do a "cold" reading (i.e., no prior exposure to the guidesheets) better than a lot of people who are supposedly well-prepared;
• Finally, because it gives me the opportunity to make the whole thing a little less painful for the participants.

It's this last part that creates work for me, but it's the kind of work that people actually appreciate. I get a hold of the presentation materials and I basically re-write the whole thing. The "icebreaker" exercise (there's always the goddamn icebreaker and never mind if everyone in the room has known everyone else since they were all prenatal) gets modified, the scripting is a little crisper, and there's absolutely NO reading the slide to the group unless I'm really trying to hammer an important point home.

So on Friday I was asked to attend a meeting where we'd receive the training materials. As it happens, we were getting the materials for both days' worth of stuff, so I won't have to attend any makeup training for the day of GF's surgery. This, of course, was the most complicated material, and fortunately the person who prepared this material did NOT create scripts for people to work from, which means that they have a series of talking points that they have to make sound conversational. The bad news is that roughly half the people in the room weren't familiar with the material they were presenting (the new computer system for developing special education programs), and they were concerned that it would be pretty obvious that they didn't know what they were talking about. So these people are asking for scripts, and the specialist who put this stuff together is resistant.

Finally I suggested that she put a little more "meat" into the talking points and certainly avoid the scripts, because so many times people are subjected to a person standing at the front of the room and reading the slide "and I resent—I resent—that sort of thing. These people aren't stupid; they can read it for themselves."

Not five minutes later, we've moved on to discussing the next module, which I will be presenting. And the first thing we're told (by a different specialist) is to put up a given transparency. And we're told to say a little speech that is, word for word, what's on the transparency. I interrupt again. "So, we read the slide."

"What?"

I repeated, "We read the slide to them."

She offers up some kind of roundabout thing about how that's not what we're doing. Early in this speech, however, I stop listening to this line of nonsense. Apparently I'm not hiding this very well, because when she was done she said, "You look like you disagree."

I said, "I look like you think people are stupid."

She launches again into some spiel about different learning styles and whatever, but I'm not listening. Instead I'm reading through the rest of the guidesheets and comparing them to the transparencies. Nearly everything that we're expected to say is simply parroting what it reads up on the screen.

So now, because I just can't do that to people, I'm in the middle of re-writing a training module. And somewhere between fifteen and twenty people will get this, and about a hundred others will have slides read to them.

Incidentally, had I gotten the job I'd applied for several months ago, this is exactly the sort of presentation I'd be putting together for others to present. So in effect I'm doing my job plus the one that someone else was hired to do.

Look at That "S" Car Go!

Kurtz: I watched a snail crawl along the edge of a straight razor. That's my dream. That's my nightmare. Crawling, slithering, along the edge of a straight... razor... and surviving.

—Apocalypse Now (1979)

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One of the things that I truly enjoy about having the house in Parkville is having more space. Specifically, having a space to keep a decent-sized fish tank.

I'm the sort of person who would rather have about twenty small fish in my tank than two or three big ones, so I've got a pretty good mix going on in there. And now that I've got the Badass Gourami out of there, it seems like everyone's getting along, so that's cool too.

I go for as much realism as possible. No little plastic divers in there for me. I use live plants, real rocks (although I do have a fake piece of driftwood in there), a couple of pieces of coral I got in Florida, and a few giant barnacles. And, even though they tell you that you shouldn't use it, I put real sand in the bottom of the tank, which I mix with pebbles. And then I'll find an interesting rock or two and throw that in as well.

A couple of weeks ago we were, oh hell, I don't know, somewhere in the Towson area. We were in a Red Circle Boutique picking up something or other, and as we circled around I spotted a PetSmart. I realized that I needed to pick up vacation feeders for while we were in Florida, so we stopped in. In addition to the vacation feeders I looked into the plant tank to see if they had anything cooler than the stuff they sell at Petco.

I asked the girl there, who appeared to have a pretty decent clue, if she knew whether the plants in the tank were genuine aquatic plants. Here's something I learned the hard way: many of the plants that the big pet chains sell aren't aquatic in nature; they just look kind of cool and that's why they don't live very long. So you do have to ask these things, as it turns out. She pointed out a couple and I said "great, wrap 'em up."

Not long after that I discovered that I'd also purchased a couple of stowaways.

At first, I thought that the new plants were fragile and/or weren't taking root. I kept finding pieces of them drifting through the tank or floating on the top. Then I saw the two little black things on the glass. Is the charcoal coming out of the filter? No...wait. One of them is MOVING.

Son of a bitch. I've got snails in my tank and they're eating the plants. So far I've found four of them altogether. The plants seem to be recovering, but I get the feeling that there may be one or two more.