bt’s Weblog

After a summer of network expansion and the problems it entailed I’m only a week or so behind where I hoped to be at this time. As I went from place to place getting computers to work as intended eight hundred and some returning and new students lined up with mom and or dad to get their schedules and books.

This is one of the best things about being part of a high school faculty. My how they’ve grown and even having a parent tagging along can’t totally suppress their excitement at seeing classmates, comparing schedules and beginning to catch up with friends as they stuff books in their lockers. When they come back next week for orientation there will be no parents standing by making suggestions about how to arrange the locker and the excitement level will go up considerably as they reconnect with classmates with no censors standing by.

Each school year begins with hope, promise and excitement. Student concerns are for the most part very local - what you’re wearing, what you did over the vacation, where your boy/girlfriend’s locker is located, what’s up for the weekend. Freshmen are especially “precious” as they repeat patterns of behavior that I’m sure their parents followed when they began high school. We adults wonder who will be the leaders, the stars, the dropouts while the students limit their scope to where homeroom is and how to get from there to the first class. Their anxiety is covered with a thin veneer of bravado but shows itself in the loud conversations and the many near collisions as they navigate the corridors.

When seen in light of all these young people with their immediate concerns that I know will expand as the years pass I know all the work I did was worth it. Their world is not simple or easy no matter how they limit their focus. They need the best shot they can get to feel safe and secure as they test their strengths, find their weaknesses and learn how to stand on their own and be part of a community at the same time.

So let’s get on with it ladies and gentlemen. Tuck in that blouse and pull that tie up. For your first assignment, answer the even numbered questions on page six. It will be collected next time we meet. Click on the first link in the learning unit document to begin our exploration of the Greek city states.

It is 21 degrees F with a respectable wind speed that is blowing very light powered snow down and around. The hyperweather actually happened so it isn’t hyper, is it?

My Epson 4490 scanner is working well and today I’m doing some prints of photos I took in Forestville, MD (near D.C.) after the Blizzard of (February) ‘66. That’s when nearly two feet of snow fell and closed the school for a week. Two blizzards, forty years apart and the photos let my memory bridge the gap as if it weren’t there at all.

The scanning has brought this fact to the fore in relation to time and my thousand year ‘project’ and the place of memory in the mix. One fact that could be a thesis or two for those interested is that even though the subjects of the photos are years older they somehow exist in my mind and emotions as they were when the photo was taken.

So do we have an infinite number of persons within that one person? How many experiences and interactions have been recorded and ‘frozen’ with those individuals? It is said that even after death we remain alive as long as someone remembers us and my experience of the 30 year old photo bringing back things long past suggests there is some truth to that. But I do not experience what the other does and once I am gone my memories go with me.

I can post all the photos I want and append extensive explanations of the time, place, circumstances, emotions and background of the photo but still you will have your own reaction and it may be nothing like mine. The subject would understand the context and his own feelings and they would be different from mine.

It seems we must rely on our own abilities to emphathize with a photo subject and to the degree we succeed we keep that subject ‘alive’ even for a thousand years.

What a difference a day makes. Well, at least in the final digit of the current year.

Read a few “year that was” and “year to be” articles. We’ll see.

Best news of the day is the story about the British student who created a 1000 x 1000 pixel page and rents pixels at $1 each. He has made a million dollars! His blog shows he’s also been all over the place as a celebrity. I can understand it and am happy for him.

Alex Tew’s Blog is described as “The website of Alex Tew, a 21-year-old entrepreneur, who hopes to pay his way through university by selling 1 million pixels of internet ad space for $1 each.”

It is 28 degrees F outside and instead of rain we had a few inches of snow. It is pretty and peaceful in West Haven, CT.

It was just another day in Iraq with more people dying from bombings and shootings. The headlines report a “near record” year for American soldiers killed. Is it a hopeful sign that we missed last year’s ‘record’ by four bodies? The idiot and his crew in the White House, despite earlier protestations, will remove U.S. troops from that hell hole in the coming year. They believe we will forget the conditions they set for withdrawal and go ahead anyway. It’s okay with me. Get us the hell out of that misbegotten situation and impeach the fools who sent them there in the first place.

Our ’strong’ economy ended the year with the stock market below last year’s mark. So much for another of this administration’s fantasies.

Happy New Year. It can’t be any worse, can it? Well it can and may well be as long as shrub and company have their way.

One characteristic of each New Year is the ritual of wrapping up the old year with lists of the best and worst of just about everything. These wrap-ups could serve as a starting point for building a thousand year summary of events.

Memorable events are data points that represent a filtered view of each passing year. This filtering process is a natural attribute of memory in that only certain events qualify as memorable in the life of an individual as well as a society. Another way of looking at it is that the majority of events are forgettable e.g. what you ate for breakfast (if indeed you eat breakfast) or what you wore to work on the first Monday of February last year.

What wrap-ups effectively do is posit those things that are worthy of remembering and the rest are wrapped up and thrown away. My list and your list and the NY Times’ list on any given topic will differ but it seems that only the latter will count in the memory of the nation. In the thousand year view only institutional memories are preserved.

There’s snow on the ground and the sky is overcast as it has been for the last couple of days. The temperature is ten degrees above freezing. It is Christmas as I remember it.

Last evening I attended Mass in a small chapel with perhaps 200 people of all ages from toddling children to toddering old folks and it was good to join them on this feast of hope and family. It is Christmas as I like to celebrate it.

In a while we’ll get together for drinks and dinner and then I’ll visit my sister and her family. We will enjoy ourselves and we comment on how things aren’t as they should be. It is Christmas as I live it.

There is in all of this a reminder of how things aren’t always perfect and sometimes they are downright crappy but what we celebrate says there is always hope. This is Christmas.