second thoughts: April 2009

I love the internet

so the other day i swallowed some mashed potatoes that were so fricken hot it burned alll the way down to my stomach. it felt like i was having massive heart burn for liek 15 seconds! it was so crazy! soo my chest/insides are still in pain 2 days later and it is the weirdest sensation ever! I googled "burn esophogus hot foods" a second a go and the first hit was this:

Can hot foods damage your esophagus?
Last Wednesday I swallowed some hot mashed potatoes. It didn't burn my mouth because I swallowed quickly but it burned all the way down to my stomach. I am still having pain down my esophagus when I swallow. Could I have caused major damage, or should I just wait and let it get better? Does anyone know how long it takes for the esophagus to heal?

Makes me feel a little bit better that other people understand what i'm saying and makes me feel less crazy...!

Day of Silence 2009

This is an overdue blog post about what it was like to Break the Silence.

"Please understand my reasons for not speaking today. I am participating in the Day of Silence, a national youth movement bringing attention to the silence faced by lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans-gender people and their allies in schools. My deliberate silence echoes that silence, which is caused by name-calling, bullying and harassment. I believe that ending the silence is the first step toward fighting these injustices. Think about the voices you are not hearing today. What are you going to do to end the silence?"

While I was not silent for the whole day, after work last Friday, I walked over to Library Mall from Witte with my 'Straight but Not Narrow' pin and my '4 out of 5 LGTBQ students reported being verbally harassed in school last year' poster in hand. I silently stood in sea of rainbow, while a few men and women,while greatly outnumbered, shouted words of 'homosexuality is a sin' and 'you shall perish in hell' into the crowd.

After 30 minutes or so, the silent march began down the middle of state street to the capitol. It was a strange sensation to have onlookers gawk and stare at my sign, trying to read it as they pulled out their cameras and snapped photos of the colorful protest.

When we got to the massive white steps, a man moved to the front and took out a mega-phone, and began a memorable speech. He reminded us why we were silent today, and for whom we were breaking the silence for. We were breaking the silence for bullying in school. For bullying, name-calling, and tormenting that breaks down students every day. For students like 11 year old Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover.

The hairs on my arms stood on end while he spoke, and when he finished- we broke the silence. We screamed- and it felt great.

Various speakers went up and recited spoken-word monologues, poems, and thoughts. One girl spoke about a college scholarship she found online this year. The scholarship was an essay contest and the topic was: Write a persuasive essay on why heterosexual marriage is better than homosexual marriage. While the letter she submitted didn't fit the topic's parameters, she read it for us anyways. I hope the essay readers read her essay.

* * *

In my education policy class we just studied LGTBQ issues in schools. We watched a training video on how to even start talking about these issues, and how to start making change.

I get extremely excited to think I'll be a teacher next school year. I'll be able to have these conversations and will be able to start making some waves.

This also scares the shit out of me.

What is going to happen in my rural Texas town when I want to have my class participate in Ally Week in October? Will I be able to?

What will happen when I want to make activities about TransACTION in February, or when I allow my students to be Silent for an entire day next April? Will any of them want to?

Being a teacher has so much responsibility! The more I think about it, the more the weight of it presses down on my shoulders.

You are teaching children.

Teach them to read, to write, to reason AND to respect.

On technology reducing costs in Higher Ed: Virginia Tech

[Update: Kevin Carey blogged about us!]

......
In designing the Math Emporium, Williams started by rethinking the issue
of space. Campus space is inevitably a scarce resource, subject to
bloody administrative battles between professors and departments. But
all Williams needed was someplace cheap that students could get to
easily, with enough room for hundreds of computers and little else. He
also wanted space that other academic departments wouldn’t want to
steal. So he leased the vacant former home of Rose’s Department Store, a
now-bankrupt regional discount chain, for the bargain price of three
dollars per square foot.

Then Williams rethought the student learning experience from the ground
up. Undergraduate education, particularly at big state universities, is
often passive and regimented. Students sit and receive information in
the form of lectures that occur at a time and place of someone else’s
choosing. The Math Emporium courses that Williams designed—there are
currently nine—work in a very different way. Each course is broken up
into a series of "modules," available on Emporium computers or the
Internet, that students are required to complete within a certain amount
of time. Each module outlines a specific set of mathematic principles
and concepts. These are translated into specific examples to review and
problems to solve.

Once the module materials are completed, students can take randomly
generated practice tests that draw on a central bank of thousands of
potential questions. If they get questions wrong, the computer refers
them back to the appropriate materials, and there’s no limit to the
number of practice tests they can take. When they decide they’re ready,
students come to the Emporium to take an official, proctored test that’s
generated in exactly the same way as the practice quizzes. Then they
move to the next module. Instead of marking progress by time—the number
of hours spent in proximity to a lecturer—Emporium courses measure
advancement by evidence of learning.

-Kevin Carey

I think this is genius by the way...
along with how Yale is using technology.

Damn Yale, you so fine!

P.S. Kevin Carey is coming to my Higher Education class today- kind of excited!

Run Run Run

My first race :)

Sunshine is the best disinfectant

Could look at this all day....

For the love of books

my brother is famous....kinda.

a little Octavio Paz late night reading

We don't ask for happiness, nor rest...but an instant, only an instant, of full life, in which the contrary meet. Life and death, time and eternity join. Blindly we know, that life and death are not but two contrary movements but complements of the same reality. Creation and destruction that meet in the act of Love; and during that fraction of a second, Man enters a more perfect state of being.

Feliz Cumpleanos to me?

We are currently eagerly awaiting your arrival to our regional induction on June 1, 2009. Induction check in will run from 11:00 am - 5:00 pm at the University of Texas - Pan American in Edinburg, Texas .

I'm a pirate.

I had a dream last night that my eye was being cut into. I was in extreme pain in my dream so I forced myself to wake up, only to find out that I was crying in real life because my eye hurt so bad.

I tried to see if anything was in it, I blinked and blinked. I stood under the shower holding my eye open as i was screaming and trying to flush it out, and after still crying 2 hours later, I went to the ER.

They dyed my eye green and used a special light to tell me that I have a huge cut along my whole cornea.

No clue how that happened, but I tell you, that pain i felt the time i broke my arm in HALF (literally bones through my shirt and all) was nothing compared to this.

Luckily it has a 3 day healing time, so It already is feeling a lot better.

MAN, I hope that never ever happens again or to anyone else ever!!