Video Work In Progress…

Alright, so I’ve been working on a video montage from the North Pointe Kids junior  prom. So far, all I have is a poor quality video uploaded. However, it’s watchable and so, until I get the new one up this weekend, you’ll have to settle for this one. Enjoy!

Facebook Does it Again

Most people have at least heard of Facebook. The social networking giant continues to grow at an amazing rate. With so much growth and popularity, you would think they would be more sensitive to the needs of their members. Sadly however, they seem to ignore their outcry.

In October 2009, Facebook implemented changes that didn’t go over so well for many. I actually liked those changes. It allowed me to see the conversations with the most postings along with ones I was actively involved in without having to go look for them. Then, once I got caught up with all the important stuff, I could switch to the live feed and see what was going on in real time. Those were the good days. But much like Conan O’Brien’s short tenure with NBC came to an abrupt and premature end, so did what I think was the best Facebook design to date.

Probably the most disturbing and frustrating change for me is the loss of the shortcut bar at the bottom. No matter where I was in Facebook, there was my loyal Facebook bar allowing me to navigate to the parts I use the most all without having to scroll up or down. This was truly a shortcuts bar at it’s finest. Sure, it could have used a few more features, but scrapping it all together was a completely unintelligent idea. The departure of this bottom bar also meant the removal of the notifications alert at the bottom. Despite what Facebook might pretend to believe, this feature was more useful the old way than it is now. It was nice to be able to bring up a menu and  then click on the notification that was most interesting to me at the time (and in most browsers, I could open it in a new window and never have to leave the home screen). Somehow, they have forced themselves to believe that the new was is much more convenient. How is having to scroll up and down more convenient then 1 or 2 clicks immediately?

I liken the Facebook short cut bar to Google’s bookmark bar. The sites I use the most sit right at the top of the screen for quick and easy access. Never do I have to scroll up to find the bookmarks I want. I just click and there they are. If I need one that is not on the bar, I can click the “Other Bookmarks” tab and select from a list of saved sites. This is how Facebook’s notifications used to be. I could bring up a popup menu and decide what I want to look at. But now, I can’t do that and the feature that was my most favorite and one of the reasons for abandoning my Myspace and going to Facebook is now gone. Unfortunately, Facebook is still where I keep in contact with the majority of people and so, can not leave them behind just yet. They should feel fortunate. If Google Chrome were to take my permanent top bar away for something at the top of the page I had to keep scrolling to, I would be using a different browser.

It seems to me that Facebook would at least consider allowing the user to pick the homepage style (much like Myspace has done in the past). That way they could really see how many of their users would stick with the old. I guess that’s why logical and practical people don’t run companies though.

My Opinion Makes Sense Only To Me

My church just ended a 21-day fast. At first I thought “How silly. Fasting is a thing of old.” It really isn’t. It’s something that God uses to teach us a thing or too. He uses it to convey a message. And, He often uses it to correct us. And boy, did I need some correction. God and I had  a lot to work out. I was going to journal here about it but one of the first things God taught me was that Fasting is between Him and I. Thus, I need not spell out everything He had me work on. I just know it was a very rewarding experience.

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Musing Over Observations

I find the need of putting so many kids on medication unnecessary and expensive. Is it just me or our schools becoming less and less patient with “normal kid” stuff? Can you blame them? They are asked to perform the impossible. Turn a young child into a  little adult. When they don’t conform to what is not natural for them, they are considered a burden to the the teacher and the school and place on medication. Here’s a suggestion: If a system is not working, change the system.

I happen to personally know a handful of kids who are medicated for all the wrong reasons. These are kids who seem to be able to shut-off their ADD/ADHD when not at school. This confuses me. Isn’t this something that should affect all aspects of their life? Why does it only happen at school? And, when it only happens at school, why are they medicated? Because the schools are lazy. Well, maybe not lazy, but they are expected to conform these “spirited” youngster into a common mold. Then these “molds” are supposed to go make something of themselves.

When did we start noticing this “ADD” or “ADHD” problem? When our society became burden with a ridiculous notion that everyone should do the same thing at exactly the same time. But wait, we don’t do that do we. Then why do we mandate in schools? Both Vygotsky and Piaget made sense when they determined a child learns best from his experiences in his environment. While they differed on what that environment should consist of, they were in agreement that without certain stimuli, they would not develop correctly.

And yet, here we have schools that eliminate most of the “environment” to keep kids “contained”.

I’m not saying kids don’t need school, they do. I’m not saying that teaching them to sit and listen is not important–it is. I’m only saying that you can have to much of something–and right now kids have to much of nothing. Broken is our system and broken it will stay if all we do is “reform”. We need to “rebuild”, not “reform”.

21 Days of Fasting–Why I Chose Facebook

There comes a point every so often where we should examine ourselves and examine the things in our lives that might be interfering not only with our walk in God (the most important thing) but also with other aspects of our lives. While the latter can be a result of our unsteady walk with Christ, it’s still important to address things that can be a stumbling block and/or a hindrance to a more abundant life in Christ.

This week at North Pointe, we began a 21 Day fast in which we all had to give up someone. Yes, many went for the traditional “Daniel” diet (fruits and veggies) while others chose to give up things like Mountain Dew, steak, fast food, etc. I on the other hand did some reflection and discovered that I have allowed social networking sites (particularly Facebook) to consume way to much of my free time. In fact, it is because of Facebook directly that I never get time to update this blog which I am sure had lost the majority of it’s readers. Perhaps I can use this opportunity to get back in the habit of writing though I am sure Satan will attempt to place another stumbling block in my way.

The sermon this morning had us reflecting on our thoughts. If we are to hold every thought captive, at which point do we decide to stop doing that? In relation to Facebook, I would often times decide “no God, I don’t have time for that” while sitting on Facebook hours at a time playing FarmTown or posting comments on rather meaningless garble that would have probably been best left alone in the first place.

In an attempt to search myself and God’s direction for me, Facebook was therefore the stumbling block that simply had to be removed. I would not be able to focus completely on this fast–nor would I be able to reap it’s benefits–if Facebook was not taken out of the equation.

Many of you may wonder why I am even posting anything about this fast on a blog. After all, doesn’t the scripture say to go into your closet and pray? Do not misunderstand me. I am not doing this to sound spiritual but in an attempt to encourage the reader. For me to come and claim that I am somehow better than any other Christian because of this Fast would be wrong of me to do.  Instead, I want to show transparency, something that is lacking in the Christian community of late. Instead of being open and honest with each other, we take scripture out of context so that we can justify ourselves and hide behind scripture.

My writing during this fast is not to convince you to go out and do it yourself. I was a bit skeptical as to whether or not I wanted to participate. It was only after seeking  God and searching myself that I came to the conclusion that I had to take part. Fasting is very Biblical. I believe we are supposed to do this. Yet, I have never fully comprehended the meaning of it. I still don’t really don’t, but I am hopeful that during this, God will reveal His word to me on this.

You can take this as you want. Whether you think it’s hypocritical, ridiculous, or spiritual, it is your decision to do what you wish with this information. I do hope there is someone out there still reading this. If not, that is O.K. too. May God bless you this week as you go about your day.

In Christ,

Josh

aka: The Anzanite

Definite Maybe…

Working with kids has its ups and downs. Mostly ups. Today was somewhere in the middle. They all decided that they don’t like it when I am mad yet successfully made me so. Overall, they are a great group to work with–even if they are know-it-alls.

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Working on getting stuff ready for my trip to California. Heading out Thursday morning. My flight from Killeen leaves at 6am. A 3-hour layover in Dallas should be interesting–and by interesting I mean boring. Found out there are free Internet stations so maybe I can update my experiences as a go along (if you are on Facebook, I’ll up date in real time). Should be a lot of photos of this trip. We’ll see.

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Got to finish. Have one more day of work tomorrow too.

It’s Christmas Time

What!? A WordPress Blog!? I thought these were suppose to discontinue.

Yeah, well they haven’t. Maybe it’s better. Quite honestly, a technical problem over their at Anzanite.com caused a complete malfunction of the new blog. Thus, here I am, blogging away here at WordPress.

Where have I been? Well, thing have been rather crazy and exciting around here. First grade has been going exceptionally well. My students are making remarkable strides in their educational ventures. They get two weeks off from work. I on the other hand, have work to go to. I’ll bit, it’s a little different than they usual. We have all those displace CCISD kids who are off the next two weeks. Sound crazy? More or less. But it should be a good week. I’m only there for 3 days anyway.

Why only 3 days? My flight for California leaves on Thursday morning 6am CST. I’ll be out there until Monday (my flight lands back in Killeen at 10pm CST). I’ll be able to enjoy the holiday with Family.

Hope the rest of you have a good CHRISTmas. More to come!

Alas! The Time Has Come!

Greetings. It’s been awhile since my last post. I’m sure many of you have forgotten me or my blog by now. The few of you who are still subscribed to feedburner may have noticed that there hasn’t been an update for awhile. There is reason for that.

Besides my time being consumed with my wonderful first grade, there have been other thins occupying my time as well. I’m not going to get into detail on that right now (that’s all for a future post). One thing I will say is that the blog has moved. This post will be copied and pasted to the new location and then, that will seal it. From now on, you can access th blog at http://www.anzanite.com . WordPress is still the host of this blog, but it will not be hosted on their server. It is moving to my server.

In addition, I have a set of new tools and addons at my disposal and will be making use of them very soon. Please update your feed readers and bookmarks. The exact address of the post is http://www.anzanite.com/index . Thanks for all the support and I look forward to sharing with you in my future endeavors.

In Christ,

Mr. Josh

AKA The Anzanite.

Reflections:What Once Was and What Is

From time to time, our walk with God takes us to place where we must reflect on the past, the present, and what His will is for us in the future. In just about 15 days, I will have been living in Texas for exactly 1 year. While this last year has been a growing experience with me and my walk with God, the months leading up to that year were not so great. That’s what happens though when you are alright with God. Just alright. Every time you think you are alright with God, He allows a circumstance to befall  you that reminds you that there is so much more you have to learn.

In many cases, being forced to learn new things causes us to put up a fight. Students from Elementary to High School fight against parents and teachers when being told that they MUST learn in order to receive an award whether a grade or some special treat. Yet even with that prize, it is still not enough to make the situation peaceful or less stressful for parties on both sides. Similarly, God had something new in store for me in the form of opportunities here in Texas. I however decided I was already alright and didn’t need God telling me what I should and should not be doing. Yes, these are all things I have talked about before and it just sounds like I’m repeating the same old testimony. In reality though, it was a situation that nearly had me walking away from church for good.

For those newer to this blog, there are only remnants of it’s origins left. Many a blog was deleted and edited to reflect a massive change of heart and spiritual direction. Though, through some of the older blogs, you can kind of piece together some of what happened. For those that know, there was a lot of anger, a lot of frustration, and a lot of other things. I once wrote in a now non-existent post “I do not hate the people of my former employment…”. This was a statement to help me rationalize that I was doing the right thing. Let me tell you, the minute you ignore Proverbs 3:5-6 and start to try to use your own reasoning for things, you are destined for trouble. My personal experience taught me that we have no choice but to rely on God’s understanding and wisdom. When we lean on our “own understanding”, we look foolish and exposed for the real person that we are–a sinner who needs God.

But God is patient (which should be an example to us). Even though I was ready to give up on church and doing the “Christian” thing, God was not ready to give up on me. I think God was frustrated when he saw that I had taken matters into my own hands. By doing so, I was not willing to listen to Him. I was so hot, loud, and angry that the sound of His still small voice was completely drowned out by my mindless and thoughtless commotion.

Now, over the course of a year, God has turned my entire spiritual world upside down (thanks of course with the help of some of the greatest people I’ve ever met). I stumbled upon a new church that was so alive, I could hardly believe it. I’m not saying that my old church was spiritually dead, I think, like we all get at times, they were just stagnant. I know I was stagnate. And I wasn’t getting any fresher by sticking to the same old routine. I was to comfortable.

It went further than just waking me up. I stepped into a spiritual realm that, before coming out here, I thought was old-fashioned Bible stuff. Never again! God shook me up and opened up a new world I couldn’t help but want more of. With the help of those great Christian people (and an awesome church), I came to realize that there was so much more that God wanted to bestow upon me. I thought I had all that I deserved or could get. So not so.

Here I am nearly 2 weeks after our Revival and still just as in awe as I was during the Revival. I’ve been to those “mountain top experience” sort of things before but I’d never been to something like this. This was a God-encounter! And now that I have actually encountered God, there is so much more I want to learn.

I have been blessed to work with the people I’ve worked with in Anza. I have been blessed to be a part of the lives of those from Anza. But I never expected for God to bless me as much as He has here in Cove. I guess what I’m trying to say is thanks to God and thanks to all of those who have allowed me to be a part of your lives. It has been a privilege to work with the kids/students I have worked with. I hope am a blessing to those of you who read this and those whom I see in person on a regular basis.

In Christ,

Mr. Josh

The Homework Problem

I know that practically every kid dreads homework. Maybe not every assignment but at some point, every child comes to a point when they want to be doing something else. In fact, I’m pretty sure that any kid would want to be doing something. Lately however, I have heard parents complaining about homework–and rightly so.

For those of you who have been with this blog for awhile, it may seem that I contradict myself in this post. Understand, I do not. I have never been fond of homework (either as a student or as a teacher) and believe that there is a place for worksheets and “dittos” but not to the extent that they are used today. This has always been my belief and I have not wavered from that. Recent comments regarding the homework load of some after school students I am priveleged to know brought this debate back to the surface.

First things first–if I could get away with sending absolutely NO homework home, that’s how it would be. I know though that parents expect some kind of “homework” though and my curriculum demands (some) homework (though I have devised a way of still completing EVERYTHING and minimizing the homework load). I find almost funny to me that people think that the more homework a child has, the better education they are getting. This is simply not so. In fact, careful observation of the homework coming from the schools around here suggest that it is only used for the purposes of preparing kids for the standardized tests. I know this because I assist many of these kids with homework on a regular basis in our afterschool program. They even come in with this pointless garbage ON A FRIDAY! Seriously!? Can’t kids be kids at least on the weekend? Besides that, many of the kids I see on weekday afternoons have soccer, football, and other activities to go to, just to name a few. These are all programs they SHOULD be in afterschool. Yet I’ve discovered that time after time kids aren’t getting the rest they need because they have homework assignment after homework assignment to finish after all their events.

And what response does the education system have? Education is important. Well yes, but these activities are equally as important and need to be taken into consideration when planning an education system. Even the first graders here are overloaded with page after page after page of worksheets and the regurgitation of the days lesson (most of which I have learned they tuned out after sometime). The common response is “The teacher didn’t teach us this.” Now this opens a few possibilities. Either this child was not listening in class or, the teacher really did send home a new concept before teaching it. The latter is quite unlikely as most homework assignments usually have a completed class assignment on the back side with the same concept.

Then again, perhaps the child was listening but was just unable to retain everything spewed out for that day. I repeat that I believe that there is a place and time for worksheets and writing assignments. There is a place for teacher instruction. But there is also too much of BOTH! And yet, nearly every curriculum calls for hours of instruction and the droning on of the teachers and piles of piles of worksheets to be completed. Do people really believe that this is good education?

My previous post has a picture of something I observed my first graders doing. They built a hopscotch game out of puzzle mats. No prompting. No instruction. Nobody telling them where to put the squares or how many there should be. The did it on their own and it came out great. Recently in my classroom, I acquired two sets of those marble run play sets. It was intriguing to watch them work as a team and develop a course that would take their marble through all the various twists and turns before depositing it in a collection piece at the bottom. One piece in particular allowed the Marble to jump from one tower to the next. The whole concept of measuring trajectory and figuring out how far away the two parts had to be was solely up to them. Nobody showed them how to set it up and they had disregarded the instructions within the 1st 5 minutes. This was something the conquered on their own*.

Now you may ask “what the education in that?” Well, one aspect of our current closed minded, scripted curriculum is to teach critical thinking. Our current system has already told them what to think (because there is only one right answer to the question). In the case of the Marble Run, there was not one right answer. They had to use problem-solving skills to make a marble jump and make it to the other part of the run.

Not to mention making in balance correctly so it wouldn’t fall over on the very unsteady carpeted floor. Sure, it would be easier if they built it on a table, but who’s allowed to climb on tables? This led them to devise a plan that would also support their structure if they expected to be effective at all. What can be learned from all of this? Well, let’s break it down.

First, geometry. While it’s not the typical triangle, square, circle curriculum, it definitely has geometry in it. They had to figure out how to put the pieces together so that the marble(s) hit every run. Place the wrong piece in the wrong place or direction, and the marbles would drop to the ground.

Secondly, math (and more specifically algebra). Granted, first graders aren’t solving equations in my class, but they still needed to know how many pieces it would take to get from point A to point B without having all the information. While they may not know it now, they were preparing THEMSELVES for algebra problems in the future. This would also develop their counting skills, addition, and subtraction as they needed to know how many pieces there were, how many it would take to build it, and how many pieces would be left when they were finished. To further the problem solving development, they also tried to figure out how to incorporate the leftover pieces in their completed structure all this working as a team (team building skills, social interaction, positive peer  pressure, etc). And this was only about an hour of the day! How many other hours of the day are THAT productive.

For those of you squirming uncomfortably and about ready to shout “THAT’S NOT EDUCATION” give me another minute. All of the above happened AFTER are regular day of events (which actually could have been less than it was if I had known it was going to be that productive). This has led me to develop actually class time set aside for projects such as this while also making sure our core curriculum is finished.

No, it is not Caine learning. No, it is not unschooling. It is not traditional. It is simply a blend of the best ideas from everywhere! Perhaps there is no utopian form of education but I for one do want to find new and innovative ways to teach. Not just to teach, but to engage students in learning and develop their desire to want to learn more. After all, why should we just keep doing things the same way just because that’s how its been done for so long?

*I would like to note that while I did participate in some of the marble run activity, I was referring to a specific day and a specific set of events that I was NOT an active participant in–merely an observer*

Poker Chip Learning

Are you serious? A Christian teacher using poker chips for learning? OK, get over it, they are GREAT manipulatives (and cheap). I bought about 1000 from Walmart for about 5 bucks. I didn’t really need 1000, but it looks better to fill my manipulative bucket (and by manipulative, I mean math manipulative not that the bucket is a manipulator–more on that in another post). These circular little trinkets provided a great visual and hand-on tool for learning place value (among other things) and the kids had a blast using them. They even wanted more and harder and harder situations to figure out. They were engaged in the learning and came away with more than they would have had I just done a typical routine.

All in all, today was extremely productive! Week 2 is off to a great start! Thanks to all of you who have kept me in your prayers since the days at AVCS. God has blessed me so much since then–more than I could have ever dreamed. In fact, a thought occurred to me:

I believe that if my job back in Anza would have continued, it would not have led me to where I am now. I believe where God has me is where He intended me to be now all along. If I had not been presented with my job loss, I probably would have not listened to His call to move on.

What’s the point of all this? We sometimes can’t see at the time why things go the way they go. In these hard economic times, it’s hard to see how God could be working. But I was pretty much at rock bottom not to long ago. I can assure you, He is ALWAYS working. It doesn’t feel like it sometimes, but He is working…and He will see us through.

This thought remains to be continued…when I have more time. For now, just wanted to say that teaching 1st Grade is still a whole lot of fun (and work). But, I couldn’t imagine doing anything else right now. It has also proven to me how much fun “work” can be. I look forward to each and everyday as another day to impact lives (whether my first graders or the after school kids). Even on the rough days, I look forward to the next as a fresh start for God’s blessings to overflow.

So, until another new day is upon us, have a blessed night!