California – Say NO to Proposition 8

Too many blogs out there have already pointed out the half-truths and outright lies being used by the supporters of Proposition 8, so I’m not going to go into those. For those of you unaware of what this proposition says it is a referendum to change the constitution of California by inserting the following:

Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.

In other words, we would be writing legalized discrimination into the constitution of California. The only arguments I have heard against this boil down to religious arguments and/or the scare tactics I mentioned above. The supporters would have you believe that if the proposition is not approved that teachers will start teaching kindergarten students that boys can have sex with boys and girls with girls. Oops, sorry. I said I wasn’t going there.

The other argument I have heard is that this is a “Defense of Marriage Act” as if this will protect marriages. What? If your own marriage is so messed up that you need to tell someone else that they cannot marry, then there really is no hope for you. What I always find interesting is the number of people who argue against gay marriage, but have been divorced or separated themselves. If you want to protect marriage, find a way to make your own marriage work – don’t tell two people in love that they cannot. Or is it jealousy that this “abnormal” couple is in love, but they are not? Who knows?

Please, California, vote this proposition down. Show the country that common sense and rational thinking still mean something.

MS Office 2007 vs. OpenOffice 3.0, Part 2

On September 7, 2008 I wrote part 1 of this post, although at the time I did not anticipate there would be a part 2. As a quick recap, I had been a diehard OpenOffice (OO) user for a couple years but because more and more teachers at my school, including one that I had to work closely with this year, were using MS Office 2007 and it’s wonderful XML formatted documents, I began using Microsoft’s product again. Because I rarely do anything halfway, I began solely using it to “reacquaint” myself with its features. Now that OpenOffice 3.0 has been released, and I downloaded it the day of release, I decided to revisit my decision.

First of all, I have really grown to like the ribbon menu in MS Office as compared to the toolbar in OpenOffice. Below is a screenshot of part of the bar in MS Word:

And for comparison, part of the toolbar from OpenOffice Writer:

Clearly the OO Writer toolbar is a much more traditional toolbar, and for the most part it is not that MS Word does all that much more than OO Writer, but I tend to be a visual thinker, and the MS Word menu “feels” right to me. If you don’t care, then OO Writer is nearly as good. One issue that I had when I first moved to OO was its commenting tool. I had just begun using this feature in my old version of MS Word, and I really liked its ease of use and, again, the visual aesthetic. OO Writer had an opportunity to input notes, but I could not easily find a way to have them show up next to the text the way that it did in MS Word. In addition, when commenting in MS Word you could select a word, phrase, sentence, or paragraph and the comment would be clearly seen as referring to whatever you selected. In OO Writer all it would do is leave a little mark at the beginning of what you were referencing. MS Word 2007 did not improve on their features in this area, but OO Writer did at least put the comment next to the text. You can see a comparison in the next two images:

Commenting in MS Office 2007

Commenting in OpenOffice Writer 3.0

In both cases I selected exactly the same text, but you can see that in MS Word it is clear what exactly my comment is referring to, but not so in OO Writer. Is it that big of a deal? Probably not. It certainly is not a deal-breaker for me, or I would not have switched from MS Office XP to OpenOffice 2.2 in the first case. But I do like the commenting in MS Word better.

Another thing that I like in MS Word that is not supported in OO Writer is the inking capabilities. Since I have a Tablet PC it is nice to be able to comment on student papers that were sent to me and send them back with written comments. However, I probably do not use this enough for it to be that big of a deal. In fact, recent developments may be leading me away from a Tablet PC anyway, but that is probably another blog post.

This brings me to the main reason I made the switch from OO to MS Office at the beginning of the semester. Too many people could not handle Microsoft’s new XML document standard. They did not know how to regularly save their documents in the old .doc (or .xls) format, and that meant I could not open them until I emailed them back, often explaining how they could go about saving it in a way I could look at, and then wait for it to come back. OpenOffice 3.0 has taken care of this!!!! You cannot save OO documents in the XML format, but you can open them, and then save them in just about any other format except for XML. So when working with someone who is using MS Office 2007 you can still use OO 3.0 and open their documents and share them. I am very excited that OpenOffice made this update, although I am disappointed that it did not happen earlier.

So the question becomes whether or not I plan on switching back over to exclusive use of OpenOffice now that my main reason for switching to MS Office 2007 has been dealt with. Well, if you have been reading carefully you will probably realize that I like a number of the aesthetic features in MS Office, and since the school has made its choice to waste money, er… use MS Office I will continue to do so. However, I plan on continuing to advocate having the school switch to OpenOffice. More teachers and members of the IT department seem to be open to the idea than they were before, so possibly when Microsoft comes out with its new Office program we can finally make the break. I will gladly switch back fulltime to OpenOffice then (and secretly hope that they improve the commenting in Writer!). I should mention that I will probably be buying my own personal laptop again this year, as opposed to the school one I have now, and I will definitely choose OpenOffice 3.0 for the primary reason that it is free. I like MS Office, but not that much more to pay my own money for it.

Have fun!

So, how is it going today?

Interested in the current poll results done by Gallup?

We are almost there!

Why I hate teacher movies

Teacher magazine recently compiled a list of their Top Ten Teacher movies (registration required). The list is as follows:

1. Mr. Holland’s Opus (1995)
2. Stand and Deliver (1988)
3. October Sky (1999)
4. Dangerous Minds (1995)
5. Freedom Writers (2007)
6. Chalk (2006)
7. To Sir With Love (1967)
8. Dead Poets Society (1989)
9. Remember the Titans (2000)
10. Teachers (1984)

You can see the list with comments as well as their list of runners-ups if you go to their site and register.

So why do I have a problem with teacher movies? Because it seems that in nearly every single one the teacher has to give up their life for their job. Maybe that is just the Hollywood version of what occurred, but that makes it worse I think. The message being sent to the public is that the good teacher, the great teacher, is the one that gives up everything for their students. I guess that is why, in my own mind, I will never be that good of a teacher – I have bought into the hype. I cannot do it. I love teaching, and I love my students, but I already spend more time on my job than I want, and I do not want to spend any more.

Stand and Deliver came out just as I started college, firmly on the path to becoming a math teacher, and I embraced it wholeheartedly. I wanted to be Jaime Escalante. Granted I wanted to do it in a nice suburban school somewhere, but I wanted to have that kind of impact on students. My second year of teaching, in an urban middle school in the same general region as Escalante found himself, I received an award – The Jaime Escalante Mathematics Teaching Award. You had to be nominated by a student, then selected from the nominations and then I and the student were interviewed, and I ended up being one of, I think, 8 or 9 recipients that year. My second year of teaching! I actually had the audacity and ego to wonder what I was going to do now that I had received an award named after a teacher I had idolized.

I laugh now, because I was so incredibly naive then, and I really had no right standing with the rest of the teachers who were there – many of whom had spent years perfecting their craft. I had lucked out, no more and no less. Once the reality of what I was doing started to sink in I started to see the movies for what they were. Pictures of people that most teachers could never live up to. I can manage my life day-to-day and take care of the students in front of me, and my family at home, and that is enough. I do not need to see a portrayal of the teacher who can do it all, and do it well.

Interesting that I have met Jaime Escalante, and my wife has met Erin Gruwell (the subject of the Freedom Writers). Both left their jobs. Escalante because his success proved his downfall, and Gruwell because she got to big for the job. We want our great teachers to be supermen(or women), but not for long, lest they remind the rest of us that we are mere mortals.

Finally, it seems that every statement has an exception and, as I read the list above, I must admit there are two movies on the list that I still love. Dead Poet’s Society showed me that teaching is about passion and helping students find theirs – something I continue to try and do, although it seems that math is a harder subject to do that in than English. And Teachers. Nick Nolte’s character said it best when asked why he was returning to the school even though half the kids were not after the fire drill.

“I’m a teacher!”

I’m a teacher.

Past associations

I do not get McCain pulling up Ayers and throwing him at Obama. I have just two things to say in response: Keating 5 & Alaskan Independence Party. If McCain wants us to look at Obama’s past associations, then it is entirely fair to do the same to him and to his running mate. If we dig deep enough I think it likely that everyone has someone in their past that is not a saint, and to assume that just because we sat in a meeting with that person, had a conversation with them, or was a member of a group with them that we share in their guilt is ludicrous at best.

But I have been thinking about this approach to things. It seems that there are those that believe our politicians should “stick to their guns” and never change their mind. Look at what they did to John Kerry because he had the audacity to change his position on something. All of a sudden he was a ‘flip-flopper’ like it was one step above pedophile abortionist. And look what it got us – a man in the White House so convinced he is right and so unwilling to change his mind on anything that our credibility in the world has had to take a serious nosedive because he cannot acknowledge that he might have been wrong.

The Republican playbook is pretty consistent because here they go again. Obama must be bad because he has a relatively tenuous connection to a man who was a radical when Obama was 8 years old. McCain’s connection to the Keating 5… er, membership in the Keating 5 and Palin’s connections to a radical separatist movement are of much more concern to me.

I, for one, want my president to be able to change his/her mind when it is appropriate. Refusing to acknowledge mistakes is not a sign of strength, but a sign of insecurity. GW is like the bully who just will not accept that he is not the most important kid in the playground. McCain is not like him, but he will clearly take a swing at those who he perceives as against him. Palin… Anyway, Obama has impressed me by not letting McCain’s angry tactics drive his campaign. He has stayed firm as a reasoning, reasonable, calm, and balanced candidate. Will he make the amazing grandstand type of moves that McCain might? I don’t think so, but then I want someone who listens first, thinks second, and then acts as my president. John McCain is not, and never will be, that kind of man. And Palin…? I do not think I even need to go there.

I was a Hillary supporter. I still think she would make an amazing president, but Obama has won me over. Let’s stay the course.

Remember to vote on November 4th.