Im in ur database, recording ur memez

Do you ever see students write weird things online and wonder what they are talking about? I’m assuming you have a basic understanding of txt/im shorthand, but you might also want to keep up with the Snowclones Database which will give you the key to unlock some of those catchphrases or patterns. They’re also fun patterns to use when communicating with your students and I think they play into the same part of the teacher’s brain that loves to make puns and sly references just to see which students will pick up on them.

If you want to cast your net a little wider and read up on a bunch of online culture, Wikipedia has a list of Internet phenomena… I feel like I should generally know what’s on this list too, just so I don’t accidentally walk into the computer lab with a virtual “kick me” sign on my back. And having this level of understanding also allows me to communicate with and understand my students in ways that are just not possible otherwise. Anyone have other sources for keeping up with the Zeitgeist?

 

WordPress MU

From the ongoing saga in which I am building my school’s new web site using WordPress MU, and attempting to get 100 teachers to use it…

Since DreamHost pretty much couldn’t tie its own shoes for the first month or two we had their service, we decided to jump ship to Joyent. They were generous and accommodating about getting us set up, and the PTSA agreed to pay the bill, so it’s been non-stop theme development and widget wrestling for the past month or so. We’re almost ready for this summer’s launch.

The teacher training (How to Use WordPress 101?) starts next week, and I met Friday with my two colleagues who are helping me give the training sessions. I believe that this training will be a huge determining factor in how well this new service gets adopted. As of Friday, there were just a couple of bugs remaining — few in number, but pretty much show-stoppers in terms of convincing teachers that this is a better system than what we have. People’s first impressions often center on the interface and how it demos, as opposed to the underlying power or long-term use implications. Not that these are always completely different. Anyway, the point is that I was pretty motivated going into the weekend to solve these bugs. Good thing, because they were annoying.

The first bug was that uploading files did not work. I tore everything apart looking for problems with permissions, problems with paths, problems with PHP configuration… nothing. Eventually it came down to one line in the wp_config.php:

define('ABSPATH', dirname(__FILE__).'/');

For some reason, ABSPATH was getting set to .. instead of the full path, and so WordPress couldn’t figure out where to copy the file once it was uploaded. I put that one line of code in its own file, and it worked correctly on the command line and when hit from the web. I could even hit the whole wp_config.php file directly from the web and it worked. But when included or require_once’d into another file, it would return dots (or, maybe dots and slashes). After enough time playing with that to determine it was hopeless, I hardcoded the absolute path. Next bug.

The next bug was that the WYSIWYG editor simply did not appear. This was the sad window:

This turns out to be a terrible thing to try to track down and none of my messing with realpath or the gzip settings or permissions solved it. Finally, out of desperation, I installed the Miwa Editor Plugin. Not only did it magically solve the problem, but I know the WYSIWYG table functionality will be welcomed by teachers who don’t know HTML. The only catch is that I didn’t want every single teacher to have to activate the plugin just to have a functional blog. Fortunately, there’s a wonderful facility in WordPress MU designed to help with exactly this situation: mu-plugins. Placing a plugin there instead of the regular plugins directory activates it for all users. The only problem is that it didn’t work.

The happy ending of this story comes through a search for make a plugin work in mu-plugins. I considered including some expletives in there, but didn’t think they would actually help my results. Google brought me to the answer on blog from Australia. All I needed to do was move the miwa-editor.php file out of its own folder and into the mu-plugins folder, since for some reason mu-plugins works differently than plugins and won’t descend into subdirectories to find the plugins. (I of course, had tried to place the entire miwa-editor folder into mu-plugins. Silly me.) Since miwa-editor.php hardcodes the path to the version of TinyMCE that it uses, I just left the rest of its folder in the regular plugins location. And it worked. And all was well.

 

Pink Slip Rescinded

I didn’t write about this when it happened but I, along with 500ish other people, got the paperwork in March telling me that my services would not be required by SFUSD next year.

Yesterday I got the happy letter telling me to ignore the previous letters.

Personal outcome for the moment notwithstanding, this is a ridiculous situation. I don’t actually know enough about state politics to really understand the details that lead up to the immediate crisis (keywords: Proposition 13, Vehicle License Fee, California Budget Process) but I do know that it’s insane to run institutions designed to serve the basic needs of children — education, health care, food — on a roller-coaster of funding. I’m glad San Francisco has a “Rainy Day Fund” (2003’s Proposition G) that seems to be set to stave off the worst of the immediate problems. But this money is limited and it seems unlikely that the pool will be refilled before it is emptied.

Coming up in June there’s an election in which the good people of San Francisco have the opportunity to vote for a parcel tax (Proposition A) that will fund schools. This seems to be the most politically-viable way to get money into the system, and so I encourage you to vote for it. The patchwork pastiche approach to funding public services is aesthetically displeasing to the engineer in me who sees inefficiencies all around, but I don’t see any good alternatives that get the job done. I realize there is no way to build a perfect airplane from the ground up while it’s already flying along, however clumsily.

 

Making a Zine

I just had a very encouraging meeting with a couple of colleagues (at a lovely off-campus venue) about a project we’re going to do with my freshman classes. The basic idea is that students will create a zine about how they relate to their neighborhoods, with a focus on understanding and preventing violence. It was really nice to collaborate with these colleagues — in about 45 minutes we created the project, planned out roughly 2 weeks of class time, connected with some other events going on at school, and divided up the remaining work.

The starting point is that we’ll bring in some zines for students to look at, and let them find out what they like about this form of publishing. Then we’ll have a series of writing prompts to help them explore their neighborhood relationships and experiences or ideas about violence. The writing will take place in our online forums, and so there will be documented responses and conversations. Then students will find writing (their own or that of others) from these forums and other sources to assemble with MS Word into a layout. The first stage of the project will culminate with students looking at the layouts done by the whole class, and possibly voting or otherwise indicating their favorites.

Then these 100-odd pages of filtered and laid-out content will go to a smaller group of interested students (the “editors”) who will work outside of class to cut-and-paste together the final zine. In addition to the pages, there will also be drawings and paintings done by students, and written contributions from parents and other community members that we’ll collect at the school’s open house night — which also happens to coincide with an art show at the school.

The cool thing is that the aforementioned colleagues I’m working with are our librarian artist-in-residence and a community health outreach worker. So they’re both very flexible in terms of schedule and can come in to work with my three classes. I’m looking forward to it!

 

Teach What You Love

This is my advice to anyone who is considering a teaching career, or teachers considering changing subjects: make sure you love the subject. Seriously.

In my 10th grade class I decided to include some business topics. It seemed to go along nicely with learning PowerPoint and all the web technologies. After all, the point of this stuff is to build applications and sell them to Google, right? Well, maybe not entirely. But it was hard to argue against including some basics of business, financial and media literacy, as we know them in 2008. I even got a collaborative project going that applied the skills.

So, what’s the problem? I’m not really excited about business concepts. Sure, I think they’re important and useful and I probably refer to business models and ideas a lot more than most teachers. But it isn’t something I’m really passionate about teaching. It’s not as intellectually interesting as programming, and after talking to students about markets and products for an hour I get to a point where I don’t really care about the Ansoff Product-Market Growth Matrix at all. It’s just a tool. I wish we weren’t dwelling on it, but at the same time I don’t want students to be confused about these concepts and many of them are.

Hence my advice. You’re going to have to live in the world of the subjects you choose to teach. Don’t pick lightly.