Square Dancing!

5th Graders Learning to Square Dance from Alan Tong on Vimeo.

A Day in the Life of a Fire Lookout on Mt Tam

Party Rock Anthem - Shuffle Dance Tutorial -Part 2

Party Rock Anthem Shuffle Dance Tutorial - Part 1

2011 Park School Dance competition 3rd place winner (as selected by peers)

2011 5th Park School Dance runner up (as selected by peers)

2011 Park School 5th Grade Dance Competition Winner

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Suburban Wilderness

About one hundred feet from my front door a creek which passes under the street and meanders down to Richardson Bay.

I've written about this creek several times on this blog but now I'd like to share with you some pictures of the things I've seen in or on it over the last year or so.




click on photos to enlarge

The Two Wolves

I heard this old Cherokee story the other day.  I thought you might like it.

A young Cherokee boy, angry about being mistreated and not knowing what to do, went to his grandfather for advice.

The grandfather told him:

I too, at times, have felt a great hate for those that have taken so much, with no sorrow for what they do.
But hate wears you down, and does not hurt your enemy. It is like taking poison and wishing your enemy would die. I have struggled with these feelings many times."

"It is as if there are two wolves inside me. One is good and does no harm. He lives in harmony with all around him, and does not take offense when no offense was intended. He will only fight when it is right to do so, and in the right way.

But the other wolf is full of anger. The littlest thing will set him into a fit of temper. He fights everyone, all the time, for no reason. He cannot think because his anger and hate are so great. It is helpless anger, for his anger will change nothing.

Sometimes, it is hard to live with these two wolves inside me, for they fight to control my spirit."

The boy looked intently into his Grandfather's eyes and asked, "Which one wins, Grandfather?"

The Grandfather smiled and quietly said, "The one that I feed."

Which wolf will you feed?

Big Time Timmy Jim - Tim Lincecum's ESPN Commercial

EVERBODY Needs Practice

The San Francisco Giants won their first baseball playoff game in 7 years last night. The Giants earned their spot in the playoffs mostly on the strength of their pitching, which in terms of Earn Run Average (ERA, or Earned Runs per 9 innings) was the best in the National League this season.

The winning pitcher was Tim Lincecum, also known as "the Freak". Lincecum has won the National League Cy Young Award, the most prestigious award a pitcher can earn, two years in a row. He is one of the most feared pitchers in the league, has lead the league in strikeouts for three consecutive years and is the first San Francisco Giants pitcher since Juan Marichal to strikeout at least 200 batters in a single season three years in a row. He even has his own ESPN commercial.

One of the reasons for Lincecum's success was his practice routine, which was taught to him by his dad. Lincecum's dad supervised his workouts right up to the time Tim became a Giant.

Lincecum started the 2010 season with a 5-0 record and a 1.76 ERA. It looked like he was headed for another great season, but it didn't quite turn out that way.

After that great start, Lincecum began to struggle.

In August, when the Giants were trying to gain ground on the first place Padres, Lincecum didn't win a single game. He has an ERA of 7.82. He was so ineffective the fans worried that something was wrong with him. His fastball, which he was throwing at 94-95 miles per hour at the beginning of the year, was down to around 90 miles per hour. Lincecum said that he felt fine, and that he should probably go back to doing some of the things he'd been doing earlier in his career.

Lincecum was referring to his practice routine. Sometime after the beginning of the season, he'd stopped practicing some of the things which made him successful. In late August, he started doing these things again. In September, when the team needed him most, Lincecum won 5 games and lost only one.

The lesson here is a simple one: Everyone, no matter how good, needs to practice.

PE is a class where kids learn new physical skills, then practice them. When we are learning a team sports unit, like football, it is very important that everyone be given a chance to participate by playing different positions. This helps students to understand the game and try new skills. The more chances a student gets, the more likely they will experience success. Success gives the students a sense of satisfaction and accomplishment.

Some of you do an outstanding job of sharing responsibility. On your teams everybody gets a chance to play every spot and experience some personal success. The members of those teams became excited about playing football. I had several students from those teams tell me "I understand football now!" and "this is fun!"

Unfortunately, this isn't true of every team. The members of some teams get so wrapped up in winning or showing off how much they know or how good they are (at least in their own minds), that they neglect to give other teammates a chance. This is selfish. It prevents students from learning. Several students from those teams told me: "I don't get football," and "this is boring".

Kids, I need your help on this. Kids can't learn if they aren't given a chance to go so. The next time we have a team sports unit, please, please give everybody a chance to contribute. Sharing responsibility makes everybody feel good. It keeps people's buckets full.

Who's That Big Kid?

Farewell, Class of '10

We're going to miss you. Good luck in middle school!

(click on photo to enlarge)

Scavenger Hunt Solutions

Thanks to all of you who decided to participate in this year's scavenger hunt.  Hope you had fun!



Double click on a picture to enlarge it.

How Failure Breeds Success

How long did it take for humans to invent a controllable aircraft?

The first known drawing of a flying machine was done by Leonardo Da Vinci in around 1488,

but the first controlled flight of an airplane wasn't until 1903.

That's a span of 415 years.

So what happened in the meantime?  Didn't anyone try to make an airplane between the time of Da Vinci and the Wright brothers? 

Of course they did.  There were many, many attempts to build aircraft before the Wright brothers.  They just weren't successful.

So, how did the Wright brothers accomplish what other before them had not?  Did they suddenly awake one day with a breakthrough idea? 

No.

They learned from everybody else' failures.

Orville and Wilbur Wright took the knowledge gained from everyone who had gone before them, eliminated the things that didn't work, kept the things that did and added their own twist, "three axis control"; a system used to this day.  The result?  An airplane that could go up, down, left and right.

The Wright brothers themselves failed many times before they flew successfully.  But each failure taught them something.  By figuring out what went wrong, devising a solution and sticking to it, they were ultimately successful.

This is just one example of a process that has been repeated throughout history.

Everybody fails at some point.  It is how we handle failure that determines whether or not we will eventually succeed.

The two simple keys to succeeding from failure are:

1.  Don't give up.
2.  Learn from your mistakes.

It's not paying attention to this second key that causes people to fail repeatedly.  You see, in order to learn from your mistakes, you must first admit that you made one.  If you can't admit to yourself that you made an error, you can't learn from it because in your mind, you haven't done anything wrong.  Many people choose to blame others for their own errors and therefore never learn from them, dooming themselves to fail over and over again.

So try to remember that it's okay to make mistakes.  Admit them, learn from them and do better the next time.  That's how to be successful.

"Every failure brings you one step closer to success"

Michael Jordan "Failure" Nike Commercial

The Best Teachers I Ever Had

By the time your formal education is over you, like me, will have had dozens and dozens of teachers.  Some of them will be funny, others will be boring or seem bored themselves, and some will seem like they're trying too hard to be liked.  The best of them will keep your attention, fascinate you and inspire you.  On this Day of the Teacher, I got to reminiscing about some of the teachers I had.

Among the teachers I had was a creepy middle school English teacher who used to flick his tongue, like a snake, whenever he was asked a difficult question. 

Then there was the high school Chemistry teacher who used the analogy of boys asking girls to a dance as a way of explaining chemical reactions.  It didn't always work.  Whenever a student asked for further explanation, this teacher would simply repeat the same analogy again.

In college, I had an Economics teachers who use to come to class in costumes in an effort to make a very dry subject interesting.  It didn't work.

I remember those teachers for their idiosyncrasies, but don't remember much about what they taught.  Memorable personalities perhaps, but not particularly good teachers.

The best teachers I had all shared a common trait; passion.  Passion not only for the subject they taught, but for teaching itself.  Their passion was contagious and inspired me to change the way I looked at the world and the way I thought.  I feel their influence to this day.

In high school I had Physiology teacher named Mr. Hawks.  He wore his hair in a crew cut and drove a Jeep.  He had obviously once been in the military. 

His classroom consisted of rows of lab tables.  On the first day of class, I sat in the back row.  The first thing Mr. Hawks said to us, as he pointed successively to each row of tables, was:

"In my experience, this is where the A students sit (pointing to the front row), the B students (the second row), the C students (the third row), and everybody else (gesturing to the rest of the room)."

"If you want to change your seat," he concluded, "now would be the time to do so."

I didn't move, but thought, "Whoa, this guy is going to be tough"

And he was.  He was very demanding and very particular about the quality of our work.  He allowed no talking in class and his demeanor was such that he only had to tell us once.  But, he was also a fascinating lecturer and a great story teller who always managed to keep our interest.  It turned out that talking in class wasn't a problem, because none of us wanted to miss what he had to say.

As the semester went on, Mr Hawks began to loosen up.  When we did experiments, we got to see a different side of him, because he went from table to table, patiently answering questions and even making jokes when somebody got an unexpected result.

During winter break, Mr. Hawks took a trip to the Amazon.  He returned with several native artifacts, including a blow gun, a bow and a mortar and pestle.  He put them on display for the class.  We students excitedly approached the display.

One of my classmates picked up the bow and pulled back on its string.  The bow snapped.  The class went dead silent.

Mr. Hawks gave a death stare to the student and took the bow from his hand.

"No wonder I got it so cheap," he said.

I took Mr. Hawk's class when I was a junior.  His inspiration was such that I chose to go to college at U.C Davis as a Biology major and created in me a lifelong interest in the natural world around us.

As a graduate student in college, I signed up for a class called "Theories of Criticism".  I like to write and thought that this class was going to be about how to write movie and book reviews.  It was about anything but that.

The teacher for this class was a Mr. Jenkins.  The class was small, with only about 15 students.   We all sat around in a circle.  On the first day of class, Mr. Jenkins sat down, look each of us in the eye in turn and declared:  "in order to be an effective critic, the first thing you need to do is kill your ego."

This was my introduction to the single most interesting and thought provoking class I ever took.  It was way too complicated to explain here, but it turned out to have nothing to do with writing criticism at all.  Instead, this class made me take a look at our society as a whole and the hidden forces that encourage us to make the choices we do.  This was a 90 minute class in which Mr Jenkins did almost all of the talking and it was never, never boring.   If there was a theme to this class it was Socrates' writing that "the unexamined life is not worth living".  Mr. Jenkins had a profound influence on how I see the world and the people in it.  Just as Mr. Jenkins intended.

Mr. Hawks and Mr. Jenkins couldn't have been more different.  Hawks was very fit with an upright, military bearing and liked complete order in class.  Jenkins was overweight with long hair and liked to sit, informally, in a circle with us students.  Both, however, shared two great loves:  love for the subjects they taught and the love of teaching that subject to their students.  This is what made them the two best teachers I ever had.

 

Another Oceanic Garbage Patch

A gyre is a place where oceanic currents meet and combine to rotate in a circular motion, like an enormous whirlpool.  It is in one such gyre that the great Pacific Garbage Patch can be found.

There are 5 gyres in the world's oceans.  Researchers suspect that all of these gyres may serve as collection points for oceanic garbage.  Last month, they were able to confirm that there is, in fact, a huge garbage patch in the Atlantic gyre.

Both the Pacific and Atlantic garbage patches are composed primarily of plastic.  That's because, as you may know, plastic is not biodegradable - it doesn't rot.  That means that, as long as people continue to use plastic without recycling it or disposing of it properly, the garbage patches will get bigger and bigger.

While plastic isn't biodegradable is it, photodegradable.  This means that ultraviolet rays from the sun makes the plastic brittle, causing it to break into small pieces, yet doesn't make it go away.  Just makes it harder to see and easier to eat.  The garbage patches look like "synthetic soup".

The result is that while these garbage patches are immense (the Pacific garbage patch is said to be the size of Texas), they are hard to see.   Add that to the fact that they are out in the middle of the ocean and it is easy to understand why most people aren't concerned about, or even aware of, the garbage patches.

Should we be concerned?  How much impact does plastic pollution have on the environment?

Right now, we know that marine animals frequently mistake plastic for food and that some of the chemicals in plastic cause cancer in humans, but nobody really knows what the long term consequences of plastic pollution are because there are so many variables to consider.   Scientists suspect that plastic pollution will cause long lasting and far reaching difficulties.  Most will agree that plastic pollution is a problem that needs to be addressed as quickly as possible.

A plastic bottle showing bite marks

For more information on the garbage patches and their impact, click on the 5 Gyres link to the right.

For photos of the consequences of birds mistaking plastic for food, click on the Chris Jordan link, then on "Midway, Message from the Gyre".  Be sure to read the introduction (warning:  the photos are graphic and are not for the squeamish).  Some examples of his work are below:

Made from 2.4 million pieces of plastic, equal to the estimated number of pounds of plastic pollution that enter the world's oceans every hour. All of the plastic in this image was collected from the Pacific Ocean.

Closeups of the above image:

2010 Park School 5th Grade Rhythmic Movement Competition Winners (Evacua...