My wife, Brenda (on the right), has taken up a very worthy cause that hits close to home. Her sister, Ann, has been battling multiple sclerosis for almost nine years. Last year my wife walked the local San Diego MS 5K Walk with her sister and together they raised almost $1500. This year, Brenda wanted to help even more. She has decided to tackle the three day, 50 mile MS Challenge Walk. By committing to this event, she has shown her dedication to helping her sister and helping find a cure for MS. This year she has agreed to raise at least $2500. She details her motivations on her MS Challenge Walk web page.

If you would like to help her, you can donate directly on the MS Challenge Walk web page. Or if you would like to see any donations you make matched (*see below) by her sister's employer, you can e-mail Brenda at bmcdowell@hotmail.com for where to send a check. Any contributions would be greatly appreciated.

I am very proud of my wonderful wife and I thank you for reading.

* Ann's employer has agreed to match any funds donated by Ann directly. Therefore, if you would like to give directly to Ann (through my wife), she can get your donation doubled. If you do it this way, however, you will not get an official receipt from the MS Society.

Throw out all of the political drama my district is currently going through, the occasional wacky parent, a handful of disruptive kids, and the low pay - I love my job. Interacting with a 150 kids a day, discussing topics that I find interesting, developing curriculum, getting to read more about these topics, and getting to guide my own curriculum make me want to keep coming to work. You'll notice grading is not on that list. Grading is the part of the job that I actually despise at times. I know evaluation is one of the keys of education and do my best to make sure that I give my students a fair shake, but when I collect a big project or an set of essays, a feeling of dread circles over my head and doesn't disappear until I have finished.

I just finished grading 109 AP World History essays on the Haitian Revolution in the last week. This set easily took me 25 hours to finish. I usually take 2-3 weeks to get back essays, but I wanted them done well before the grading period ends next week. This is on top of writing a couple lectures (2-3 hours) and revising a lesson for my AP class. I have friends who have said it must be nice to be done with work at 2:30. But, as my wife will attest to, I am always working. I always have a paper to grade, a lesson to work on, a meeting to attend, or a book to read. When I have nothing to do for tomorrow, I think about the next day or even the next school year. Something always needs revising.

Then there is all that time off in the summer. Yeah right.

Anyone else ever get comments that teachers "have it easy"?

Today I got a visit from a former student who wanted to introduce his pregnant wife to the teachers who helped him turn his life around. This was a student who was in trouble six years ago. He was spinning his wheels, involved with the wrong crowd, doing stuff that could have probably gotten him arrested. But, he got out.

Last time I saw him, two years ago, he had just returned from his first tour in Iraq. He had joined the Marines after high school and that choice seemed to stabilize his behavior and start him in the right direction. His demeanor on that visit was intense. He had been part of invasion, had acted as a sniper, had seen concrete victories. He was proud and tough. He had killed the enemy. I even let him speak to one of my classes; many of the students were intimidated.

This visit was much different. He had been back from his second tour of Iraq and was preparing in a month to return for a third. Not since Vietnam have units seen so much action, he claims. Plus his wife is due in June. His somber attitude was such a contrast. He now has something to live for.

He also mentioned an assignment he did in my class - one that I have done every year since he sat in the back of my classroom. After going through the experience of a soldier in World War I, students read a number of poems written by WWI soldiers. Then the students are to write a poem of their own from the perspective of a WWI soldier. This student, who didn’t do any work before this, wrote an amazing poem. Six years later I still remember the class's reaction (and my own). Here was a student that was disruptive, lazy, and generally unmotivated (he would agree with me). This assignment turned him around in my class (and he turned himself around completely the next year). I have mixed feelings about my students joining the military (especially today), but when he told me before he graduated that he was joining the Marines, I knew that it was the right choice for him at the time.

Now as he prepares to go to war again, I wished him the best and asked him to stay safe. What a silly thing to say. But what else is there to say.

Here is his poem, written six years ago.

4 the Dead

Death, Destruction, Pain, Despair
Is what I see, as missiles fill the air.
As we duck down in the blood soaked trenches, we march each day.
Painful memories of fallen friends, dead as they lay.
War torn Hero's that died each day.
Fighting for independence, giving their lives away.
Friends trapped in barbed wire and blown to ash,
Soon to be picked up and buried like trash.
Body parts mixed, identities lost.
How many souls will this war cost.
I keep asking myself why we must fight.
'Cause I must pray each day to survive the night.
Mangled frames, and empty shells
Each day we walk right through the gates of hell.
Looking at pictures of my wife and kids.
Leaving them will be the hardest thing I ever did.
Sanity slipping, losing it fast.
I saw my best friend's neck get slashed.
I have found a reason to keep fighting this war.
Taking revenge for fallen comrades is what I have in store.
The cries of those still living in the field.
Those that cry out to be healed.
Some times I wish I would just die,
'cause next to the dead is where I lie.
Quietly into the night we all must go.
Dying with strangers we hardly know.
I've seen men cry but not weep.
I've seen men die from fear in their sleep.
Till I die I shall do my best,
But in the end I shall fall like the rest.

I don't know how many times I have heard Bush mention 9/11 since 9/11 and how many other times I've heard the event mentioned by politicians, talking heads on the television, or across the blogosphere. When I hear it, especially in a political context, I get annoyed, maybe even angry. However, today, I watched part of the 911 documentary filmed and edited by the brothers. It is amazing how fast I can zip back five years and remember everything that happened that day and the days immediately following it.

Some of my students want to include a clip of the planes crashing into the Twin Towers for their propaganda video project. I haven't decided if I will allow them to do it. I wonder if they see it as just a video clip, like one they might take from a movie, or something a bit bigger then that.

I had a meeting yesterday afternoon and found myself stuck in traffic (something I don’t usually experience in my five mile commute to school). During that time I did some reflection on a handful of experiences of the last couple days that show there is a certainly a technology gap in education and probably the rest of the country (and world for that matter). Generally there are five types of people who interact with technology. (Please note: these stereotypes are not indications of intelligence!)

1. The person who doesn’t interaction with technology on purpose.
2. The person who knows how to check e-mail, maybe pay bills online, use a word processor, a work specific application, and do Google searches. Just enough to be dangerous (as my principal recently put it to me). There is limited (and sometimes no) understanding as to how the computer works or what to do when something goes wrong.
3. Then there are people who are pretty tech-savvy when it comes to understanding the fundamentals and how the computer and applications works. They have a strong understanding of the Internet and can be proficient in web design or some other type of technology or media. Many times they are people involved in the theory of using technology, but will hire someone in the next work to do the dirty work. These people are geeks; they might be “cool” geeks, but geeks nonetheless.
4. Last, there are the supergeeks. These are the people who can not only build or troubleshoot a computer, but also can look at the heavy code (not html) and tell you what the problem is. They are the ones who are making open source software or working for Google or Microsoft. A lot of times these people in the first two groups don’t understand anything these people say.
5. There is a fifth group. They are the geek-supergeek combination. They are heavily involved in the theoretical side of development, but can code with the best of them. Plus they can communicate their ideas to people in all positions. I only know of a couple of these people.

It seems that a good chunk of the population within the sphere of education sits in or around position two. Many times they think they are closing in the third position – but those people usually aren’t. I think one of the essential characteristics of someone in the third position is acknowledging Socrates’ key belief, I know, I know nothing.

I believe myself to be in that third group. I have a decent skill base and a good understanding of many of the newer technologies available and how they theoretically work. However, if you ask me to do it from scratch or ask me to fix a MySQL or php or C++ problem, I will give you one of those sideways, tilted looks my dog (and two-year old) gives when I ask a complex question.

At my meeting yesterday, this division was clear. I was unveiling a new feature to a web site I manage and while the idea was very cool, it probably is not ground breaking. As I talked about knowledge management, social bookmarking, tags, open source software, and some other jargon, I realized that I was talking over their heads. They even began discussed paying me to go a national convention to present the new revised web site. Within a group of educated people who were meeting to help better an aspect of education, I created a buzz. It was certainly nice (good for the ego, right?), but I look at it as something that could be much cooler if I had a supergeek to help me fine tune and customize the software further.

The second experience that inspired this technology rant is a reaction to a link posted on my old AP World History web site. During the social unrest within the Muslim population of France last fall, we had briefly discussed the topic in class. Then I found an insightful blog entry from an American who had lived in France for a number of years. I linked the article so interested students could read a different perspective then the main stream media’s coverage (in AP Word we are big on point of view). Apparently, the blog owner needed some extra cash and since I linked to his site last November, he added some advertisements to the sidebar – including some very inappropriate links. A parent of student who is not in my class found the link and e-mailed the principal. Once I was alerted of the problem, I immediately deleted it. However, the page was in the parent’s browser cache and was still there the next day. There was more concern expressed about the matter when the parent believed the link was still in place.

I think that situation has been resolved, but it certainly illustrates the need for us to be careful (I am a bit embarrassed by the whole thing).