Making Lemonade

Well, Duke may be out, and Carolina may be rolling, but yours truly is still the queen of HORSE in THIS household.

Utah Trip

Earlier this month I was lucky enough to get to take a trip to Salt Lake City to visit our college friends Steve and Sarah, as well as to do some skiing with them and other Greenmen that came to visit! Sarah already beat me to the punch with pictures on her blog, but I thought I'd include a few here to show you how beautiful the Wasatch in the winter are and how much fun we had. My pictures are online, and Gordie took some nice ones too that are also up.

Day 1 at Solitude - lots of snow all day long!


Somehow we managed to survive...


Our group at Alta, Day 2


Steve leading us to one of his favorite spots at Alta


Gordie drops in!


Silliness


Erin is happy to be out in the snow!


The beautiful vistas over Snowbird's Mineral Basin (Day 3)


Ari, Steve, Steve, and Sarah

Tom's snow-beard


Steve and Sarah at Snowbird


Hooray, fun trip

Thanks, Steve and Sarah for hosting us - and it was great to get to see your dogs and the city, too. Hope we can do it again sometime! For anyone else out there considering a ski trip to Utah, the mountains are really quite impressive and we all had a blast exploring them. Maybe next year we can get everyone to come out to California for some Tahoe adventuring...

A moral quandry

When I was in high school, the most common cheating was "borrowing" homework answers. Cheating on a test was a much bigger deal, and I can only recall one instance where I knew of people cheating on a test.

By all accounts, cheating is much more prevalent in high schools these days. So far in my teaching career (3 months), I have caught and referred two students for cheating on a test, and there were two more that escaped for lack of hard evidence. It creates quite the dilemma for a teacher. Should I...

A) Make my tests as cheat-proof as possible. This creates problems in its own right - more work creating and grading multiple copies of the test, photocopying students' answer sheets to ensure they don't change them, strict rules about bathroom breaks and what students can and cannot do after they're done with the exam, calculator and cell phone monitoring, and constant vigilance.

OR

B) Create "normal" tests and make students take ownership for their own behavior.

I'd love to be able to use option B - I feel like high school should be "practice" for real life, and students of that age should be able to make their own ethical decisions. But if a student is caught cheating, there are major consequences, including failing a course for an entire semester and notification of any college they may have already been accepted to. So, what to do?

Uvas Canyon

Saturday morning offered a rare, brief window free from both lesson-planning and rain, so we went out to explore a new park nearby which purported to have some good waterfalls. Given the recent consistently heavy precipitation we've been having, this sounded like a good option. Uvas Canyon is maybe 45 min South of us, kind of towards Santa Cruz but further East. The many waterfalls were nice - kind of reminded me of hiking in New England where the trails often follow a rocky creek through the woods. Banjo, as always, loved getting to romp around a bit and sniff a bunch of new smells. And apparently this place is ladybug Mecca. Check out the conglomeration of little red bugs below! There were masses of them on rocks, trees, sticks, leaves, you name it! Strange. Although our sighting was apparently not an isolated incident - I've since learned they like to winter in Santa Clara county. It's fun that we are still - after five years living in the Bay Area - still discovering new places to explore!

Ladybug convention on a mossy rock

Closeup of some of our ladybug friends

Group shot, sans Tom

New Math

Found this blog, entitled "New Math," and I got a kick out of it. Maybe you will too. Here are some of my favorites:

Happy Paczki Day!

Happy Paczki Day everyone! (pronounced pun-shkee)

Makes me wish I was Polish... mmmm...

So, friends and family in places like Toledo, or Buffalo - is this description of Paczki-fever in your towns accurate? Have you had a paczek before?

In Toledo, Ohio, people will start waiting in lines at 4 AM to get fresh paczki for Fat Tuesday. A local Polish grocery store called Stanley's, located on the north end of town, makes them homemade. The same thing happens also in Buffalo, NY, Cleveland or Garfield Heights, Ohio.

I also would like to see (or compete in?) this event:

A cultural phenomenon is the emergence of the "Pączki Challenge", an eating contest in which individuals attempt to race from one side of a room (non-standard) while eating as many pączki as they can before reaching the other side. The person who arrives first and has eaten the most pączki wins. Typically a ratio of 1 pączek for every 10 steps is considered competitive. Amateur competitive eater McKay Johnson holds the record at The Greater Chicago Paczki Challenge. He was able to consume 18 raspberry filled pączki before crossing the room.

Yum, I guess.

2nd Annual Pioneer Cabin Trip

I know I know, you are sick of posts about snow. Sorry. But there are probably going to be at least a couple more after this one, considering my excitement over an upcoming trip to Salt Lake City to visit and ski with friends Steve and Sarah (and Gordie and Erin F and Emily and Anonymous too!).

But the snow is finally falling in copious amounts in the Sierra, and last weekend we were able to take advantage of it with a trip up scenic highway 88 to Kirkwood, staying at Karen's family cabin in Pioneer for the second year in a row.



Two days of powder made for some great winter mountain fun, and tired bodies in the process. Kirkwood is really one of my favorite places to ski. I guess a big part of that is that it's maybe 45 min closer to the Bay Area than other Lake Tahoe ski areas, but it also has a whole lot of pretty amazing terrain. With a higher elevation, it consistently gets better and more snow than the other (more nationally known) places, too. It was really fun to be able to explore some parts of the mountain that I hadn't been able to ski in the past, thanks to the good conditions.



As with any cabin trip, there was plenty of apres-ski fun to be had too. Naturally, we brought our "personalized" version of Apples-to-Apples (which, you Greenmen will be happy to hear is a huge hit out here with our CA friends), and a few other games. Banjo got to come along too! We didn't make him hike 10 miles this time. I think he was happy to spend the day inside snuggled on our sleeping bags.





Thanks, Karen and friends, for what has become a fun tradition at the WoodCastle!

(pictures)

Bradley Hut Trip

A couple weeks ago I made a trip into the Tahoe backcountry with friends from work Adam and Marc, Dustin, and our organizers Erin (Adam's sister) and her boyfriend Jeremiah. We snowshoed/skied into the Sierra Club's Bradley hut, which is nestled right up in an alpine bowl just north of Squaw. Having been warned to bring our own sleeping pads, lighting, and cooking equipment, it was a nice surprise to find the newly renovated fully outfitted with mattresses (for 15), solar powered lights (good for ~3 hrs at night), and a decked out kitchen and picnic tables inside. It reminded me a lot of the nicer Dartmouth DOC cabins, but then again most DOC cabins don't have a 2-story outhouse or a 2nd-floor entrance with shovel in case the snow reaches 10+ feet. Nor do DOC cabins have 9,000' peaks surrounding you less than a mile away on three sides. Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on your feeling towards ridiculous amounts of snow) we were able to use the normal entrance due to this year's dry winter, but the snow conditions were still pretty great above 7,000' in the area thanks to a few inches that fell earlier in the week.

We were up there for two nights, so we got to do some good exploring of the nearby peaks. Perhaps the best part was that someone had left a couple plastic sleds up there, so we built a pretty fantastic kicker on a nearby hill and launched ourselves off it for hours. I'm afraid the pictures and videos we have don't quite do justice to the distance and air I remember getting, but the time-lapse video below is a pretty good summary of this activity.

Here are some more pictures from the trip. There are more available at my Picasa page as well as photos and some sledding/skiing videos on Erin's Picasa page. We all had a great time in a truly beautiful winter playground. Trips like this make me happy that we live in California!

Dustin and Marc at the trailhead


Evening light and tracks on Mt. Silver


Tom and the 2-story outhouse!


Tom and Marc on (fake) Mt. Silver


Marc with Squaw behind him


Our group by the hut

Heels 101 - Dookies 87

Although I was a little worried at the end of the first half, I'm happy to report that this last night in Durham:

Resulted in this last night in Chapel Hill:

Ty Lawson really took control of the game in the 2nd half - I don't get why he doesn't just drive and get either a layup or a foul every possession. Four in a row now at Cameron! I think Coach K summed it up best by saying "We're not as good as they are."

My insincere condolences to certain spouses, fathers, brothers in law, and brainwashed nephews who may have hoped for a different outcome. But don't worry, there's always the rematch at the Dean Dome on March 8th (4pm EST). I'll be cheering with my fellow (honorary) Tar Heel Sarah in Salt Lake City!

Tales from Teaching

Hi folks,

As my mom commented the other day "you must be busy - you haven't updated the blog in a loooong time". Too true.

My second semester is in full swing - I've been taking 3 classes at SJSU and am teaching 2 classes full time (Physics and Conceptual Physics). Needless to say, "prepping" for two classes while trying to plow through inordinate amounts of dry edu-speak readings has been keeping me busy. But I'm still enjoying myself!

Anyway, I'm going to try and pop on here every so often to give you a taste of what my new career teaching is like.

When I was in high school, the only school-wide organized drills we had were quarterly fire drills. Times have changed - there are now 4-5 drills and protocols that we have to be prepared to lead our students through at all times. A couple of weeks ago, we had a "CODE RED" drill at school. Code red stands for "armed shooter on campus" - it is scary that this is now a common enough occurrence that all students in California schools have to practice it. When the code red is called, we have to lock the doors, turn off the lights, and build barricades in front of the doors and windows. Then we build another barricade in the back of the classroom and everyone has to hide behind it in the dark, perfectly silent, until the police come and clear the classroom. You have to give a special code to the police or they will come in with the SWAT team. Once you're cleared, you have to evacuate the building in single file lines with your hands above your head. Everyone took the drill very seriously, although I had a hard time not laughing at the student evacuating in front of me who had to waddle to keep his pants from falling down (with his hands on his head).

De-pantsing aside, it was a sobering day for me as I think about my new responsibilities as an educator.