Michael S Weller's blog

Six Word Saturday

2009-04-11T08:39:00.000-07:00

This week's Six Word Saturday (after a one-week Michael Weller hiatus), hosted by Cate at Show My Face:

Spring break equals return of neurons.

That blessed week of sleep and reflection, spring break, has finally come to us long-suffering teachers of Suburban Working-Class City School District (SWCCSD). Don't get me wrong, I love working for SWCCSD--it's sensibly small, easy to navigate, and very people-friendly. I've had face-to-face conversations with Assistant Superintendents, which I can barely imagine happening in the Los Angeles Unified Supersized District (LAUSD). I'm also fortunate enough to work with site administrators who listen and care and try earnestly to get better at their jobs--also a rare thing. I just think the SWCCSD should have made spring break the week before Easter, not after.

In this way the World Wide Web 2.0 gave me too much info, because while my colleagues in other states and other parts of California (whom I follow through blogs and Twitter) were living it up on vacation, I was slogging through my last pre-break week at Southeast Working-Class High School (SWHS). Again, don't get me wrong--I got to take my journalism students to the Los Angeles Times building on Wednesday, and I got paid for this. Not a bad gig--in fact, a great gig--but one that I need a lil' break from. For one week.

Worthy Cause Wednesday, returning on a Thursday

2009-04-09T15:47:00.000-07:00

(One of these days I'll get this Worthy Cause Wednesday thing out on an actual Wednesday...see below for this week's excuse, er, explanation!)

When I was an undergrad at UCLA, I got involved with a group called Project Literacy. This was a student-run organization of volunteers who tutored children in underprivileged neighborhoods (my group went to Watts) once a week in reading. We rode in a van to a branch library and met the children there, and worked with them for about an hour.

So simple, and so satisfying!

Okay, so you may not be a student at UCLA, and I don't think Project Literacy takes donations. However, there is an umbrella organization called ProLiteracy that provides information on a number of national and international literacy-volunteer organizations. Their search page allows you to find organizations in your area. If you can, consider donating time--once a week, once a month--to help someone learn to read. If you can't fit it into your schedule right now (full disclosure--I can't fit it in right now myself), a donation might also go a long way toward helping with this worthy cause of helping adults and children learn how to read.

Now the explanation, as promised above...

This week was our last before spring break, which (as some in my audience will know) is a week of quiet, determined survival for a teacher. The brain doesn't function so well during these times. To top it off, last night was Open House, which meant a thirteen-and-a-half-hour day.

And so, Worthy Cause Wednesday on a Thursday!

Worthy Cause Wednesday, debuting on a Tuesday

2009-03-31T06:58:00.000-07:00

I've won my first award--thanks to Mrs. S over at The Scholastic Scribe for recognizing me as a Superior Scribbler! Happy blogoversary, Mrs. S!

I'd like to use my moment at the podium to launch Worthy Cause Wednesday (Worthy Cause Tuesday just doesn't have the same ring, and I didn't want to wait a whole day to thank Mrs. S for the award!) and mention two organizations that are doing wonderful work.

The first is an international organization, Nothing But Nets, which provides African families with mosquito-repellent bed nets. A $10 donation buys a net wh

ich can save a family from a mosquito bite that would likely give them malaria. (In Africa, malaria is a leading cause of death.)

Here in Southern California, two women are doing their best to help our four-legged friends in need. The Mutt Movement rescues dogs from shelters and places them in foster homes until they can adopted. They bring their dogs out to the sidewalk next to the Larchmont Farmers' Market every Sunday to give them a better chance at finding a home. Marlene and I are going to take them some dog food and other supplies next month. If you're local (or even if you're not!) and can help, they can use volunteers and donations. They're not a non-profit, so you wouldn't get a tax-deduction, but you would be helping the dogs!

Speaking of whom, here's a few of their very worthy candidates for adoption:

Even if you can't donate money or goods (and with so many folks losing jobs and having pay and hours cut, it's understandable), a mention on your blog or your Twitter account (or wherever else you share) would be most helpful, too!

Thanks again for the bling, Mrs. S!

Six Word Saturday

2009-03-28T09:51:00.001-07:00

This week's Six Word Saturday, hosted by Cate at Show My Face:

Saturday morning restorative: repotting Grampa's roses.

My grampa was a gardener for the city of San Diego at beautiful Balboa Park. He worked all over the park, including the famous rose garden. He also had a lovely collection of roses at his house in San Diego's Clairemont neighborhood. When he died in 2005, I took over the care of the garden, and before we sold his house in 2007, I transplanted as many roses as I could and moved them up here to LA County. I now have eight roses in pots, and they're in need of repotting (most of them haven't been repotted since the transplant almost two years ago). My hope is to keep them going in pots till Marlene and I buy our own house sometime in the not-too-distant future--then Grampa's roses will be the VIPs (very important plants?) in our rose garden.

Above is a picture of one of the yellow roses from last spring's bloom, taken by my friend Bob when he was "rose-sitting" for me.

Six Word Saturday

2009-03-21T08:24:00.001-07:00

Six Word Saturday is brought to you by Cate of Show My Face.

Dinner date. Two years later, engaged.

This week's SWS is in honor of the just-passed St. Pat's Day, which marked the two-year anniversary of my first date with a beautiful woman who later became my lovely fiancee.

To our chagrin, the restaurant where we met that night has since closed, but the little courtyard off Colorado Blvd. in Pasadena is still there. Here's Marlene, about to write a wish for the "wish tree" in the courtyard last year.

Garden Update

2009-03-20T19:56:00.000-07:00

Last weekend I began the exciting but nerve-wracking task of repotting my grandpa's roses.

History of my grandpa's roses and me, in brief: grandpa was a gardener at Balboa Park in San Diego and had a beautiful collection of roses at his San Diego home; when he fell ill, I took care of them; when we sold his house about a year and a half after he passed away, I transplanted them; they've mostly been in the same pots since the transplanting in Sept 2007. My friend Bob took care of most of the roses at his home in Woodland Hills while we lived in the apartment in South Pas; I just got them back from him this month.

So I did a little reading on repotting, in particular this excellent article from Our Garden Gang and then another excellent article by Stuart Robinson. I decided, at length, to start with the brandy rose. This rose was in a pot that was big enough; the problem was that I had only filled it--I have no idea why--about one-fourth full of potting soil.

So, even though it has grown remarkably well in such a tight space, I needed to get it out and put more soil (and nutrients) in the pot. While I did prepared the pot, I let the brandy rose rest in an empty pot.

I also used the sharp end of my pruning shears and then my fingers to tease out the roots from their root-bound tangles so that they were, as Stuart Robinson recommends in his article, dangling freely. Finally, I got the rose back into the pot and into the shade

with some pine-needle mulch (from last year's Christmas tree).

In non-rose news, the sunflowers and pumpkins I planted earlier this month are starting to sprout!

Oh, I almost forgot--while I worked on the rose repotting, Lucy supervised.

Six-Word Saturday

2009-03-14T10:19:00.001-07:00

After a two-week due-to-moving hiatus, my humble contribution to Six Word Saturday (courtesy of Cate at Show My Face):

March spring-forward: insidious neocon plot.

I'm convinced that Mr. Bush had nefarious intentions when he moved the annual time change--no offense to Cate or my friend Alma, both of whom are probably wiser than I since they focus on the positive, ie extended daylight, rather than the negative, as it relates to the time change. :)

Chicken and Yum, or Yum and Chicken?

2009-02-22T20:36:00.000-08:00

Today we were moving stuff into our new place, and Marlene suggested that we get a dozen donuts for the rest of the gang. So we headed over to the Yum Yum Donuts on Fremont below Main in Alhambra. Next to the Yum Yum is a Popeye's Chicken, and the two establishments share a modest parking lot. Apparently there was some haggling over whose customers could park where, which was solved with a can of spray paint:
However, "Chicken" soon got the upper hand:

Who gets to park here?

Six-Word Saturday

2009-02-21T09:14:00.000-08:00

Cate, at Show My Face, has a Six-Word Saturday challenge that I recently discovered (through my reading of The Scholastic Scribe--warning, today's post at the Scribe is a bit racy!). Here's my maiden entry:

Goofed on Mr. Linky--whoops! Repeat!

(To see what the heck I'm talking about, see links 12 and 13 on today's Six-Word Saturday.)

Edit, late Saturday: Cate fixed my Mr. Linky goof, so now I'm just number 11. :)

Oranges and Calla Lilies

2009-02-18T19:33:00.000-08:00

Marlene and I are leaving our small South Pasadena apartment for a house in San Gabriel. (We're not homeowners yet; this is still a rental, but I hope it will be our last rental, that our next move will be to a house we own.) We both like living in South Pas, but I certainly won't miss having to house our menagerie in a 1-bedroom apartment, and I especially won't miss our awful upstairs neighbors, who flick their cigarette ash over the railing and drop their groceries on the landing with a thud at 10 pm.
We have a few weeks to clear out of South Pas, and we've already signed the lease on the San Gabriel house, so we're high-rolling with two residences for awhile. The house was built in 1936, and according to the owner, the orange tree in the backyard is as old as the house, a holdover from the time when the street had but a few houses surrounded by orange groves.
I picked a few oranges, but haven't tasted them yet. The owner says they're delicious; we'll see.
There's also a dry pond in the backyard that we're going to turn into a vegetable garden. I planted sunflower and pumpkin seeds on Monday to start the process--according to Heather Flores' Food Not Lawns, these plants are soil detoxifiers.
Meanwhile, back on the porch at South Pasadena, one of the calla lilies from my grampa's house is about to bloom.

Chroni's Famous Sandwich Shop

2009-02-09T11:29:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, Marlene and I went to Chroni's on our way home from the Larchmont Farmers' Market.

This easy-to-miss-if-you're-not-looking-for-it shop on Whittier Boulevard in East L.A. makes some A-plus hot dogs. Mustard, ketchup, and onions is all they put on the dog, and these are really all the dog needs. It's very flavorful, and cooked so perfectly that, as Marlene points out, it snaps when you bite it.

Marlene has been going here for years with her mom and grandparents. Apparently, her grandfather took her mom and aunts for a tasty snack in the years when Marlene was just a glimmer in various eyes. The shop has been owned by the same family (we assume that their name is Chroni) since its inception; today Ron, a hulking, mustached descendant of the founders, mans the counter. He is polite, and likes people, as Marlene's mom puts it, but he'll pass you over and take the next customer's order if you don't know what you want. He also adds up all the totals in his head--no need for a cash register here.
We shared three hot dogs, a cheeseburger, and chili fries--and while Marlene drank grape soda, I quenched my thirst with that long-neglected, underappreciated nectar of a cola, Royal Crown. $19 and change for both of us, which may not be the cheapest meal in town, but for such a delicious and generous one, certainly a reasonable bill. The cheeseburger, though perhaps not worthy of a Huell Howser special as is the hot dog, was quite good, and the chili fries tripped pleasantly across my tongue and into my stomach without the gastric backlash that often follows such an indulgence.
Speaking of their chili fries, Jonathan Gold of the L.A. Weekly has written elegantly of this dish and of Chroni's pastrami sandwich. Also according to Gold, Los Lobos gives the shop a shout-out in liner notes to one of its albums.

Find Chroni's Famous Sandwich Shop at 5825 Whittier Boulevard, near Keenan, and between Atlantic and Garfield. 323-728-7806; now open 7 days. Cash only (at least until Ron figures out how to swipe a credit card in his head).

To take public transit to Chroni's, catch the Metro Rapid Bus 720 on Whittier. The same line runs along Wilshire west of downtown. Later this year, the Gold Line will extend to Atlantic and Pomona, about a mile and a half northwest of Chroni's.

Web 2.0 defamation lawsuits multiply

2009-02-09T11:23:00.001-08:00

An interesting article about backlash over consumer reviews on sites such as Yelp.

Web 2.0 defamation lawsuits multiply

tags: digital citizenship, defamation, Yelp, Web 2.0, wisdom of the crowds
- The Web 2.0 movement, which ushered in an interactive Internet, sought to put power in the hands of the people by tapping the so-called wisdom of the crowds to change the world - and to keep such a digital democracy in check.
- A decade later, as defamation lawsuits have begun to mount, some are questioning the wisdom of the crowds, and wondering if it hasn't turned into mob rule.
- Most of the lawsuits claim defamation
- Californians who get sued over something they've posted online are protected by a state anti-SLAPP law (Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation). While the law does not permit libel, it does protect people who speak out on matters of public interest, including protection of consumers, said Mark Goldowitz, an attorney who founded the California anti-SLAPP Project in Berkeley.
- Consider Steven Biegel, a San Francisco chiropractor who recently settled a suit against a former patient, Christopher Norberg, after Norberg used Yelp to criticize Biegel's billing practices. Biegel's Yelp page has since been littered with negative comments about his practice and about his decision to sue Norberg from people he said he's never treated.
  
  "It's called flaming," Biegel said, "bombarding someone with negativity. It's an unfortunate chink in the system."
  
  He said he hasn't talked to Yelp about the bad reviews, although they bother him, because he figures there's nothing he can do. He expects to drop his Yelp sponsorship.
- OpenTable in San Francisco, a site that takes reservations for local restaurants, started publishing reviews of the establishments in September. But the reviews must be current, and only diners who have actually eaten at a restaurant are allowed to write about it, said Scott Jampol, OpenTable's senior director of marketing. That's to prevent both diners and restaurant owners from trying to game the system.
- Angie's List, a subscription service that lets people review local businesses, requires reviewers to use their real names and has started allowing businesses to respond to reviews.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

"21st-century education" - thoughts from the blogosphere

2009-02-03T19:18:00.001-08:00

Today I read a few interesting posts/conversations about technology, digital learning, and "21st-century education." I've highlighted the ideas that jumped out at me...especially in the "Dangerously Irrelevant" post, the thoughts about whether or not our students are really creating content at home as opposed to being simply passive consumers of information.
I'm still figuring out what I think about all this.
By the way, speaking of figuring out, it only took me about 45 minutes to figure out how to post these links from Diigo! :)

CatchPhrase | Avenue4Learning

tags: 21st-century, 21st-century schools, 21st-century education, catchphrase
- Alvin Toffler said:
  
  “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”
  
  I use that quote OFTEN, because that is what 21st century learning means to me.
- BTW, I really would be disappointed if the US (or anyone else for that matter) found a way to assess creativity, problem-solving, critical thinking, innovation- through standardized methods. It would make it easier to compare our kids, though, right? Because all kids are apples.
Dangerously Irrelevant: A taste of honey

tags: no_tag
- Scott, I agree that interactive games allow for problem solving opportunities but I'm not sure I'm witnessing any real self imposed content production going on outside the classroom. In fact I would say students are very passive consumers and seek a high level of entertainment not necessarily engagement.
- Kathy, I think you are right - it isn't neccessarily the technology - it is the active learning that is the key motivator.
- The argument about "tasting honey" could easily have been held in the days when TV was king. When kids went home, they had rich access to video content from their tv. It would only stand to reason that we needed to make sure every kid had a tv at school - thereby making sure there was no downshift; provide that honey!
- Do we automatically assume that it is "all good"; and therefore we must meet them on their playing field?
  
  While I am skeptical, and have no data that really drills into what they are doing while using technologies, I still would agree with Scott that schools need to be something different. I am just not sure it is because of simple abundance of technology in student's lives.
- Technology does have its place in our classrooms but with mainstreaming and including special needs students along with regular education and gifted students, technology cannot be the only source of instruction delivery.
- We need to be creating meaningful and authentic work for our kids - and mirror the way technology is being used in the world outside of our classrooms.
When 21st-Century Schooling Just Isn't Good Enough

tags: Alfie Kohn, alfie, kohn, 21st-century, 21st-century schools
- How can we rid our schools of those who refuse to be team players? Well, we can insist that all classroom instruction be rigorously aligned to state standards – a very effective technique since most of those standards documents were drafted by people steeped in the models, methods, and metaphors of corporations.
- The final distinguishing feature of education that’s geared to the next century is its worshipful attitude toward mathematics and technology. “If you can’t quantify it or plug it in, who needs it?”

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Acres of Books - the movie?

2009-01-24T20:21:00.001-08:00

Acres of Books - the movie?

Posted using ShareThis

CaliforniaAuthors.com discusses a movie about the late lamented Acres of Books in Long Beach. The amateur filmmaker, Jedediah Laub-Klein, was a long-time employee of the store.

I discovered Acres of Books a few years ago when I was in between cars (lost my old Chevy Malibu in an accident and still hadn't bought a replacement) and decided to ride the Metro Lines from my apartment in Koreatown to Long Beach. The store was right off the 1st Street Blue Line stop, and I wandered in and spent quite a long time there. I don't remember what I bought, but I do remember being really impressed by the fiction section.

In a city as far-flung as Los Angeles, it's easy to go for several years without returning to a place like Acres of Books--Long Beach isn't terribly far but it also isn't close, and I have a bad habit of forgetting that Southern California eats its history. So I didn't make it back until I read about the store's closing in the LA Times. By the time I made it down to Long Beach, most of the stock had already been sold.

The lesson here, of course, is to patronize my favorite bookstores more regularly. This summer we also lost South Pasadena's wonderful Book House.

I'm certainly going to visit my newest fave, Book Alley in Pasadena, as often as I can. The old Novel Cafe (when I was in college, we drank endless coffee there while studying; it was there that I discovered the works of one of my favorite novelists, John Calvin Batchelor) has expanded to Pasadena, so that's another option. Brand Books in Glendale is another wonderful store, and I just learned about the 100 year-old Williams Bookstore in San Pedro--Marlene and I will be going there next weekend!

The slum lives in Los Angeles

2009-01-19T08:04:00.000-08:00

This morning, news of an apartment building's collapse was on L.A.'s Channel 11. Above is a picture from the L.A. Times.

According to Channel 11, investigators believe that the building was "not up to code." Imagine that.

Yesterday in the Times, there was an article about the possible instability of "soft-story" apartments in the event of an earthquake. Perhaps the biggest takeaway from the article is the fact that only one city in California, Fremont, mandates retrofits for these buildings. So a building in Los Angeles could be in accordance with laws and still be unsafe in an earthquake.

I have just finished reading Jacob Riis' The Making of an American, in which he recounts much of his battles to improve conditions in New York City's slums in the late 19th-century. This collapsing apartment building reminds us how far we have to go.

Web 2.0 for Beginners at Cool Cat Teacher Blog

2009-01-13T19:59:00.000-08:00

On Vicki Davis' blog:

As educators, we know that vocabulary is one of the single most important indicators for academic success and we teach students new vocabulary all of the time. Shame on us if we are going to ask our students to learn new words daily, and we cannot wrestle with a few new words ourselves! We must stop making excuses and get those neurons firing to learn some new terms! Education is not just for the young - stop preaching it and start practicing it!

She goes on to include some exercises for beginners to Web 2.0. Part of her instructions include using a learner's notebook to write about your experience with the exercises she recommends. This is a nice idea, given my love of writing in notebooks! I think I'm going to use the journal I keep in my classroom for professional reflections.

This weekend, I'm going to do her exercise #2: "write somewhere on the Web," specifically, "write a meaningful comment of at least 150 words or more," and then check the site for three days after leaving the comment. I'll blog about this after I do it.

I'm also going to see if I can figure out how to link this post in the comments--or do a trackback (still not sure what that is!).

Chapter 2

2009-01-03T22:06:00.000-08:00

The launch of this blog coincides with another, more important, beginning: today I proposed to my beautiful girlfriend, and she said yes!

Chapter 1

2009-01-03T17:13:00.000-08:00

This metaphor of the blog being a memoir is helpful! Here's what my readers may want to know about me.

I'm 31, have been "a writer" since ninth-grade. I live in the west San Gabriel Valley (in Los Angeles County, just outside Los Angeles proper) and teach at a high school in El Monte. My teaching assignment includes a test-prep course (for the state high school exit exam, or CAHSEE) for juniors and seniors, three ninth-grade English classes, and two levels of journalism.

Therein lie quite a few of my interests: California history (and specifically, the rich and varied history, or histories, of El Monte), student publications, the teaching of writing and the National Writing Project, school management and organization and communities of practice, teachers-as-leaders and teachers' professional development.

I'm also interested in organic gardening and sustainable living, under which category I can put a whole subset of interests: community gardening, subscription farming, social investing, public transit, bicycling. I'm an avid soccer fan (and sometime player), and want someday to write about the history of soccer in this country. I also devour whatever I can learn about Los Angeles.

I hasten to add that I'm new to some of these pursuits, and while I flatter myself on having a green thumb, I can't claim to be an expert on any of them. Isn't that why we communicate, though? Different perspectives, different expertise. One of the great pleasures of reading novels with my students is how they always show me new understandings of texts that I've read many times.

As a writer, I've had several projects in progress for some time (another New Year's Resolution: to finish more of what I start), most significantly a memoir about my grandparents and a long poem.

Technology is of course one of my interests as well, though I consider myself as much a digital immigrant as digital native. I'm like an educated immigrant who handles himself well in English during the workday but finds great comfort in speaking his native tongue at home. I'm also not saying that my vinyl is better than your mp3, or that the LA Times on my doorstep is better than the RSS news feed on your monitor, just as a reasonable person wouldn't say that Hindi or Spanish is better than English (or vice versa)--simply that I'm more at ease with the older stuff. Digital technology is not my native language, yet I recognize the value of "bilingualism." Again, isn't learning each other's language another wonderful part of communication?

Preface

2009-01-03T17:09:00.001-08:00

One of my New Year's resolutions is write more: to write every day, and to write in new forms. I've wanted to join the 21st century in this respect for awhile; the hardest part, it seems, is getting started.

The other hardest part, if you will, of blogging is deciding what to blog about. I have so many different interests, I worry that I will not write about everything I want to write about--and so I write about nothing, a kind of procrastinator's paralysis. I also fret about the danger of trying to write about too much, so that I write about everything, but write about nothing very well.

So I'm just going to get going with this--the exposition of my Web 2.0 life-story, as it were.

(I can tell that I'm not confident about what I'm writing when I use phrases like "as it were" and "if you will" more than once in a short period of time.)

Test

2008-12-28T23:17:00.001-08:00

This is a test.