Today I was more relaxed

in the classroom, almost too relaxed, since it was my intention to create the conditions that allow me to be easy in the classroom, as if I were subbing. I jumped in on more commenting instead of just listening and thinking my own thoughts. I ate the food I brought from home throughout the 4 hours which probably helped keep blood flowing to my head a little better. One thing I forgot to do from this past week was to bring up the budget issues(districts laying off 12%), and what it means? Fortunately it came up in a round of comments, and the overall feeling was that "[we shouldn't worry because there will always be teaching jobs available. It might not be the right position, but there are jobs.]". But my shop mentor is telling me that they have no idea what they are going to do to meet budget cuts next year. With the 12 percent of teachers who lost their jobs this year, they will likely be required to be the first hired back when possible. So that leaves a pretty bleak outlook for teacher/candidates for the next 3 years. atleast!? And I'm thinking, how much more before the great public stands up in solidarity and uproar at how we are treating our teachers? This is not even a Job issue at first. It is equal parts Education issue, System issue, and our Democratic principles at play in the wrong direction; break down.

Our group jumped right up and gave our presentation after dinner. I was a bit nervous still, but that's to be expected since this is my first class. Also, subbing has only prepared me to deliver relatively simple content. There is the added complexity of being a teacher/candidate. And my own battle with championing the public education while entering it through a private one. So my presentation was a good stab at trying to account for all my perspectives, and trying to deliver my style at the same time. But in hindsight I rushed through it and didn't give roughly half of what I was going to say, but again, it's my first class. The pictures were pretty! in my humble opinion. I tried to look at the issue of cultural diversity by giving my own perspective on culture, and offering a different way of looking outside simply the education system, and investigating other conditions in society that need to be present for education to work in the education system. I believe we have heard it several times in our class, and it is a global constant; that education starts in the home and the environment we are born into. It's a foundational community issue.

This website

(Plumbob.org/ted615) is something I am really proud of. I have had one classmate and one middle school teacher give excited comments on how it was organized(in book format with the navigation menu on the left). For those of you who don't know already, I am a Drupal evangelist, I think they call us. Drupal is Free/Open source software that is built by amazing people all over the world. They are creating web infrastructure that this site is running, and it is nothing short of an amazing human feat to create publicly available tools of this quality and power. It is definitely my aim to help bring open source infrastructure to education, starting with using it myself where I can. Part of my philosophical core is that all information needs to be kept as easily available to any human in proximity of a public internet connection. (One quick community plug, FunnyMonkey up in Oregon is doing great things with the Drupal Community and their schools)

A very intriguing condition

present as I organize my coursework and professional life on this site, is this sense that I am also a journalist investigating the entire profession, even though it is not officially recognized as a profession, and I am not always delivering an unbiased journalistic point of view. But I try to write differently when I post a blog entry(such as this). And at the same time I am basically adding these blog entires to my classwork outline as a reflection. So I have essentially baked into my classwork a broadcast outlet which I am developing on twitter for now. I had a very productive and full interview with a metal shop teacher that I recorded for my own use, so I got to explore this journalism a bit further. We had a great talk, Thanks Mike!
Coincidentally I had a conversation with my dad over lunch about the news industry. Which is such a weird term all in itself. The reality of it is that new internet-age models are logically going to envelope the older models. That's competition people. Wake up, your news industry is going to change(Don't worry, its a good thing. We need it). With what? I only know it has something to do with all of us taking to the most free/open source internet we can manage at the time, and start reconnecting everything in different ways. Maybe if we all take time to write reflections of your community and life, teach our youth to do the same, we may have the opportunity to create unprecedented expansion of the basic Democratic principle of speech and education. Yet the system still lives squarely in older data systems. Most of these systems are not even connected to the internet, that is if the school is fortunate enough to have a data set that lives on a computer.

Seriously. When is enough, enough?