End of Term

Time to dust off the cobwebs and post a new entry. We are at the end of the dead rush to Christmas break, all my grades are in and I have to brag about some the wonderful work that my students created this term. My computers in education class was a great group and their ends of term collections were wonderful. We worked with teaching through narrative and in the integration of animation in to illustrate the points in each lesson. The concept is to develop a story and to work the lesson objectives around that story. My students developed media narratives such as one that featured an alien who needed more oxygen on his planet (a lesson in photosynthesis), one where a young girl who met her brain which then explained the functions of her other organs, and another about a young girl who needed to budget to buy snacks (learning to count money) and so many other really wonderful ideas. A full collection creative approaches that were on target and anything but boring. I think Santa came early this year.

Hurricane in the Gulf

Dutch Fishing Boats in a Storm: 1801 by Turner

Ida will be my first hurricane since Katrina and I would be less than honest if the prospect of this surprise storm did not make me a little uneasy. I have been through many hurricanes but Katrina was a life changing event so even the prospect of a baby (category 1) storm tends to catch my attention when it shows up on radar heading for our home.

We live south of Highway 90 and the houses across the street from us back to water. Our house is on higher ground and our house is not in the flood zone but the ones across from us are (we still have flood insurance since the edge seemed a bit too close for comfort). I heard a news story reminding people to keep the garage doors closed since alligators looks for higher ground when the water rises and they like garages and sheds. I cannot imagine anything much worse that going out to your car and meeting an alligator settling in for the duration of the storm. I wonder how often this happens or if this is just something that makes a good story to spook people. We do live right next to a national wildlife area and there are enough alligators in the county to hold a legal hunt once a year but I have never seen one in the wild. Of course I am not looking to meet one either. It may seem childish but I am not fond of animals that can eat me.

I do not think that we will have to leave since the storm is not a strong one. At this time the eye is expected to hit Mobile Bay about 40 miles east of us so we should get a good feel for the wind and good bit of rain. I do not think that schools will close for this one but tomorrow will tell the tale. Time to freeze some water and fill up the car just in case.

Youth organizations and Winning

My freind and I have been co-writing engineering graphic workbooks for about ten years. In the beginning, we were both teaching graphics so this was a natural extension of our work. In later years, I have moved away from that field but I still enjoy working with this subject even through the time I have to devote to it is much more limited. I was first exposed to drafting as a student in high school and I was so proud of those drawings because I felt like I could really draw even if it wasn’t art. It was a great feeling.

Every student needs to have an opportunity to learn something that gives them that same sense of success. For some this makes the difference between staying in school and leaving early. It also needs to be a real achievement, not a participation award. Unfortunately, those opportunities are dying. In an era when success is measured by standardized test scores, there are fewer and fewer programs that give students something tangible to hold on to. Even in career and technical education, the youth programs now depend on testing to determine winners at competitions.

Students no longer travel to large halls to exhibit their work, admire the work of their peers and then return home reach the mark set by their peers. Part of this is due to the over involvement of parents who rob their children of the sense of achievement by doing the work for them. Using tests helps to weed out this type of abuse. Part is this is due to cost; most organizations do not want the event to last any longer than needed so often only the judges now view the work and everyone removes their work after judging. This allows everyone to leave as quickly as possible after the awards.

For these reasons, the focus is now on the winner rather than the work. At the last science fair for which I volunteered, the projects did not even stay up long enough for the participants to view the winning entries. I never did know what the students had done to merit their awards. They did not have an opportunity to stand by their work and receive the accolades that their work deserved. The other students did not have a chance to see what a winning entry looked like.

This is a real loss. As a student, I went to several of these types of events and although I did not receive many ribbons, I was proud to be there and to be part of my group. I was impressed by that my peers had created such wonderful work and this made me believe that I could also create wonderful work because people my age had done those beautiful projects. How lucky I was to have a great drafting teacher who gave me the opportunity to learn the value of striving for improvement rather than one who just tallied up the wins. It easier to believe that you can achieve something when you see achievement as a process rather than as a strike of genius.

On Internet Trolls & Technical and Occupational Education

As many of you may know, my department at the university is slated to be closed this year. I am an Associate Professor of Technical and Occupational Education at The University of Southern Mississippi. This means that my colleagues and I will very likely lose our jobs. Since two of us are tenured faculty members and one of us is a tenured track faculty member, this has been reported a good bit in the regional news and has even merited an article in the September 28th issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education (Glynn, D., When Tenured Professors are Laid Off, What Recourse?).

Up until today, I have refrained from commenting on this issue since it has received more than its due share of attention; however, today I read a comment that I cannot let pass. It was posted as a comment to The Chronicle of Higher Education article mentioned above.

Kudos for getting rid of "technical and occupational education", whetever [sic] it means. Let's teach our students some knowledge that can help them be competitive [sic] workforce, rather than demagogy.

This was from a post signed physicsprof.

I will tell you what it means.

Technical and occupational education teaches individuals to teach their trade to others. If you own a car that runs, have working plumbing in your home, can flip a switch to turn on your lights, you have benefited from the skills of someone who studied a technical and occupational field. If you have had your teeth cleaned, buried a loved one, purchased a wrought iron fence, eaten produce that was fresh and enjoyed a fine meal prepared by a chef, your life has been improved by technical and occupational education. If you are sitting on a manufactured piece of furniture to write comments on that last article you read on a working computer, you can thank someone who was trained in technical and occupational education. Over thirty occupations that affect you every day of your life are part of this field and it is one of the largest educational endeavors in the country and has been for more than two hundred years. It provides education for direct employment for thousands of individuals not pursuing a baccalaureate degree and provides others with marketable skills that make the pursuit of that degree possible without having to depend on student loans.

This field is based on the belief that every individual deserves the right to earn a fair wage as they develop from beginner to apprentice to master craftsman. It was founded by individuals such as John Dewey, Charles Prosser, Charles Allen, and Rufus Stimson who celebrated the contributions of the working class and is dedicated to making the lives of these individuals as intellectually rich as possible by developing the “head, heart and hand” of every person. I can think of no endeavor that is further from demagoguery than technical and occupational education. It empowers others rather than consolidating power and provides a path for every motivated individual to improve their status in life by becoming an active, contributing member of our society.

This is what the writer of that post missed. Such people are called “trolls” on the Internet. They live for the quick comment, the witty retort, and the barely distilled knot of opinion paraded as wisdom.

This means that instead of an active dialogue regarding how we train teachers of technical and industrial subjects, the intellectual debate has been reduced to a game of “gotcha”. Although this is true of many topics, in this case, the topic happens to be one that I know something about and have spent my life studying.

This individual could not be bothered to type a search term into Google to learn what Technical and Occupational Education is before he added his two slugs worth to the discussion.

The Internet was once hailed a brave new world where there would be a free exchange of ideas, open to all without cost or at a very low cost. Such an opportunity carries with it a responsibility; you must spend some time actually reviewing and studying the issues you write about. This is not only so that your own comments will be worth reading but it is also important for you to be a wise consumer of information on this very open market. How sad that virtual discussions so quickly dissolve into na-na taunts that would not be out of place on a kindergarten playground.

I look forward to day when we grow up enough to match the potential of our technology.

Sleepless

I am in one of those periods of time when I cannot sleep again. There is just too much going on at work and I am behind on a project so instead of sleeping I end up staring at this little screen.

So I looked up some articles on this topic and to my surprise, exercise actually keeps people awake if they exercise too close to bedtime. Now since exercise is a rare and novel event in my life, I am certain that this does not apply to me but I do remember that exercise can make you pretty tired so this one is a puzzle to me. The website I found this on is filled with photos of fit people so maybe the rules are different for the slim and trim rather than the round and well padded.

The article is at http://http//www.fitbuff.com/i-cant-sleep-4-common-causes-of-insomnia/ in case you are interested.

St. Thomas of Villanova on the Love of God

Every now and then you read something that is simply beautiful and you wish you could write something half so memorable. Today is the day to honor the memory of St. Thomas of Villanova who was the Archbishop of Valencia in the 1500's and a noted educator of his time. Although he was remarkable in many ways, it is his writing that stays with me. This is how he described the love of God.

"Wonderful beneficence! God promises us Heaven for the recompense of His love. Is not His love itself the greatest reward, the most desirable, the most lovely, and the most sweet blessing? Yet a further recompense, and so immense a recompense, waits on it. Wonderful goodness! Thou givest thy love, and for this thy love thou bestowest on us Paradise."

No wonder he has been called one of the glories of the Church in Spain.

Darth Vader Grotesque

A grotesque in masonry is a stone sculpture that acts like a gutter to direct water away form a roof. (A gargoyle serves a similar purpose but the water exits out the mouth of the carving; the water runs over the top of a grotesque). In the great age of cathedral building, these often depicted demons or other representations of evil as well as mythical or fanciful figures.

In the National Cathedral in Washington D.C., there is a grotesque of Darth Vader very high on the northwest tower. You can see a photo of it at this link.

http://www.nationalcathedral.org/about/darthVader.shtml

Pretty neat way to tie modern myth to traditional practice.

The Value of Old Books

I was in the library last week looking for an old textbook on metal working. I had forgotten how to calculate something and to my surprise, the information I needed was no longer in my current books. All of the newer books have wonderful sections on why something should be done or the theory behind an idea or practice but specific directions on how to do something is slowly vanishing.

I consider this a major problem since more and more industrial and trade workers are retiring and these skills will be lost with them. The likelihood of being able to find this information in the future is not strong since it is unlikely that these old books will be digitized since they are “so out of date”.

In many trade areas, there is now only one textbook available in the field. In some areas, we are down to zero. No matter how many years of experience a worker has, it is unlikely that he or she knows everything about all aspects of their trade. Most workers specialize and so they are very strong in the area in which they worked and less strong in other areas. Since people tend to teach what they know and use often, good methods may be lost without a book or other reference to record seldom used methods. Yet there are times when this information is still needed.

We need to start recording this information on the Internet so that it remains available. If you know something well, consider writing about it and either publishing it or posting it online. Just a few of the areas that seem to be vanishing from print include beginning pipe drafting, metal casting, and geometric constructions in drafting and safety layouts for machine shops.

By the way, I found what I was looking for in a 1942 textbook. I put in a request that the book not be discarded when the collection is reviewed for culling. I wonder how long it will remain on the shelves. I also wonder how many people realize that old books are now the best place to look for this type of applied information.

Swine Flu

Woke up with muscles so stiff that I could only move like the Tin Man. Since this had gotten progressively more painful over the last two days and I had a fever, I decided to go to the doctor. This was quite a learning experience.

We have not been in the area long enough to have a family doctor so I went to an after hours clinic. While I was waiting, several persons were denied treatment because they did not have insurance or the right kind of insurance. I wondered what these people would do and frankly it was hard to watch those conversations. Some of these people were obviously quite ill.

After about an hour, my name was called and the receptionist requested my insurance information. After glancing at my papers, she quickly informed me that they did not accept Blue Cross/ Blue Shield and told me to call the number on the card to find a local provider. Stunned, I retreated to my car to make some phone calls.

It turns out there is only one network provider who is an internist in my town and who is accepting new patients. The first open appointment would be in the second week of October. The other four phone numbers were either disconnected or no longer accepting patients. At this point, the pain in my muscles was significant and I could not stand without using something to pull myself up. I seriously considered going to the emergency room. Instead I called my physician in my former town (2 hours away) and I was able to get an appointment.

My husband generously left work early to drive me. It turns out that I have swine flu and it has aggravated a problem in my back since the flu affects muscles. I have a bag full of drugs and will have to stay home for a few days.

But what about those other people who did not have any place to go? How many of those people just go home? I know that I did not want to go to the emergency room because of the potential cost and I also know that no matter what I said on the phone, the physician offices I called had no other suggestions. They did not have any place to refer me to other than the emergency room.

Think about this.

This means that if you do not have insurance, you either must ignore the problem or go the emergency room. This is because by law the emergency room must treat you.

Notice that since my insurance was not accepted, my only local options were to go the emergency room or wait weeks to see a doctor.

One of the big arguments against health reform is that we would have to wait weeks for an appointment. How is this different from what we have now?

Another argument is that you would have to travel to receive health care. Travel? You mean drive two hours one way to see a doctor like we did today?

One thing that might be different is that those dejected people who left that clinic this morning might not be spreading whatever illnesses they have to their communities since they would receive treatment.

I find it hard to believe that the current system is best we can do

Issues in a pug's life

When you are a pug, one of the big problems in your life is what to do with your tongue when you nap. Here are some of Kao's attempts at a solution.








Hold it with your paw.












Fold it in half.

Rest it on your pillow.


I am sure that he will work on this again tomorrow.

Falling on your sword

Last week senior faculty in the department of economics at my university offered to retire to save their department and the jobs of their younger colleagues. Although I admire the nobility of the gesture, this idea makes me uncomfortable.

It can easily become an expectation. Although at present, such a movement would benefit me (in my profession, I am still considered young), I worry about what this says about our culture as a whole. When will the noble gesture become a de facto requirement?

It is way too easy to assume that everyone is ready or able to retire at the same age. It is impossible to know everyone’s individual circumstances. They may not be financially able to retire. They likely have important ties in the profession that will be lost with them.

In many ways, we are responsible for creating the world we live in. Do we really want a world where employers push everyone past a certain age or term of service out the door because their benefits are expensive and times are tough? Is this not a form of age bias? Note that this does not have to be a stated requirement, once a few precedents have been set it will become a cultural expectation.

In ancient Roman, leaders were expected to take personal responsiblity for their actions and the actions of others and if they failed at an important task, they were expected to “fall on their sword” to preserve the honor of others. I wonder how many noble sacrifices it took for this to become an expectation. Based on recent conversations and blog comments, I would bet it was a pretty small number.

That practice fell out of favor. It is not always effective to solve problems by shutting out the individuals who have the most history with the issues. I hope we take the time in current situation to consider the larger picture.

Transitions & Tenure

Last spring, I achieved the famous goal of every academic. After years of work I was awarded tenure. This is considered to be the ultimate gold star.

I have worked in industry and in higher education and the hours in the university world are very long, much more so than industry jobs. The public does not see this since so much of the work takes place in locations outside the office. One year I worked more than half of the weekends of that year on a project related to my job. I do not know of many professions that require seven day work weeks on a consistent basis. In my field, most of my teaching is at night and I teach at multiple locations. This makes for a very long work day since I still have responsibilities that must be addressed during business hours.

For this reason it has always bothered me when I hear people talk about those lazy professors since it is such an unfair judgment. Only about a third of the job duties of a professor involve teaching; you must create and publish research, participate in leadership roles in professional societies, serve on government committees and work to generate grant funds. All of these are required to stay employed. It is great job but it is like an iceberg; there is more to it that meets the eye.

Tenure is difficult to earn and many professors do not make it. If you are declined for tenure, it can mean the end of your academic career because your chances of landing another job at a different university are greatly reduced. You will lose your current job if you do not receive tenure. So the stakes are very high; if you do not make tenure you are basically out of the profession.

Most people do not understand this at all. Tenure means you can keep your current job, not that you have lifetime employment. It is also protects you from being dismissed if your research is in an unpopular or controversial area. It is intended to protect academic freedom. It is not a gravy train that allows you sail off into retirement.

Universities can and do void tenure agreements. This is most commonly done when there is a financial crisis. They can close programs and dismiss the faculty in those programs to save money even if the faculty is tenured. It is customary to give a year notice if this is to take place since academic jobs searches are usually held once a year and so it is very hard to find another job in the middle of the academic year. So you can work very hard for the five to six years that it takes you to earn tenure and still lose your job.

This week my program was selected for closure. This means that my position is will likely be eliminated. I will need to look for a new position by next May. So I am at a crossroads, should I look for another academic slot or move back into industry? It is time to consider how I want to spend the rest of my working life.

In case you are interested, the closing of my program made the papers. Here are two stories about the closure:

USM terminates 3 professors
http://www.hattiesburgamerican.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2009909010317



Where will we get vo-tech teachers?
http://www.hattiesburgamerican.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2009909020301

What is Worth Knowing Revisited

This is a very interesting white paper on the status of higher education. It highlights some issues that have long been lurking in the background. The core of the idea is that there is some content that is really worth knowing and that letting students determine what they want to learn is not always in their best interest.

I thought this was a good addition to the previous posts on how we decided what content should be in the schools. (In case you are not familiar with this format once you click on the text link and get to the document, the little box in the upper right corner will make the paper large enough to read)


What Will They Learn

Crayons and the First Day of School

I was standing in line at an office supply store and looked down into a display filled with that faultless symbol of childhood, crayons. There they were all lined up in their neat little rows like little solders just waiting for orders from commanding little fingers. Perfect points and neat wrappers. Bright happy colors just waiting to work outside the lines.

I just had to hold a box to experience that instant memory of school days. Just one sniff and you can remember how important this was to you at the beginning of school. You always wanted a new box and the teacher always sent a long list of supplies that you followed your mother around to collect. There would be Big Chief tablets with the Indian drawing on front, Number 2 pencils, a ruler and maybe some glue or scissors. In the lower grades there would be jars of paste that the teacher would have to stop all the boys from eating. As the years progressed, these would be replaced by glue sticks that would get too hot and melt in your desk. A packet of construction paper that would never have enough blue sheets but way too many orange sheets would go in the cart and notepads with wide lines to practice handwriting.

There were always items in the stores that were not on the list that you secretly wanted your mother to buy but you knew better than to ask since the list was long and the store was too crowded and you were getting a lot of new things anyway. But the best purchase of all was that box of crayons.

I always wanted the box of 64 with the built-in sharpener. I could not imagine any possession more decadent than this. Sixty-four colors!! And the points would always be sharp! I would try to convince my mother of the necessity of this purchase and she would always point to the list and we would buy the 8 or 16 count box that was required. Of course on the first day of school there would always be one kid who would have that box, and the rest of us would watch with envy as he used his impossibly grand selection of colors and covered his desk with crayon shavings. It was the definition of wealth when you were five years old.

In later years, the teachers would collect all our crayons on the first day of school and dump them into a box for all of us to share. I always disliked this because I tried very hard not to break my crayons and this method insured that someone would decide to “share” by breaking one in half. No more neat little rows of possibilities, now you had to hunt for that leaf green and the point would always be broken and the wrapper reduced to dingy grey.

But today I was looking an army of unspoiled soldiers and as I was inhaling their wonderful aroma I could not help but notice the older man behind me in line looking at me as if I had lost my mind.

I looked at him and smiled.

“Pick one up and try it; it is the very essence of your childhood”

And to my surprise he did.

He sighed and then smiled a smile that had just been waiting to be rediscovered.

And then he put the box in his cart next to his printer cartridges.

So once again crayons had help color my world outside the lines. And it was the perfect way to begin another semester.

Internet Job Seeking

Ran across a nice little article:

The Dirty Dozen Dangerous Online Job Search Assumptions

Good information that would be easy to forget in the depression of a long job hunt. With so many people looking for work, I thought it might be worth posting.

St. Germanus and Alleluia

I try to spend a few minutes each day reading in the morning before I start my day and at night before I go to bed. Some of these readings are just for enjoyment and others are part of a daily devotional practice. One of my favorite devotional readings is a work called Butler’s Lives of the Saints. This is a collection of daily readings for each day that offers short biographies of historical and sometimes less than historical figures that were important saints traditionally honored on each day. Although this is a catalog limited to Catholic saints, it is interesting to me because the variety of religious experience is so diverse.

Every now and then I come across a story that it not well known that I wish was not so obscure. August 3 was the day to remember St. Germanus and since this story has stayed on my mind for several days, it seemed to be one that needed sharing at this time.

St. Germanus died about 448 A.D. and was important in supporting Christianity in Britain after Rome lost interest in the island. He was married and after a serving as a governor in Gaul was later selected to be a bishop. (At that time, clergy could still marry.) He spent much of his life working to discredit older religions that were still being practiced in Britain.

On his first trip to Britain, he converted many Britons who were much afraid of the Picts and the Saxons who frequently raided their lands. The Britons were greatly outnumbered and they appealed to St. Germanus for help from these groups of raiders. When the enemy was approaching, he led the army into a valley where sounds echoed and waited for the approaching enemy.

When the enemy army grew near, St. Germanus signed for all the Britons to shout “Alleluia” three times which echoed in the valley with such a deafening noise that the opposing army fled before the battle had began since they thought they were facing a much larger force. So the battle was won without any bloodshed, an amazing display of the power of faith in action.

The passage that inspired this idea is traditionally thought to be Rev. 19:1 & 3

After this I heard what sounded like the roar of a great multitude in heaven shouting "Alleluia” . . . And again they shouted "Alleluia”

This is the type of verse that most of us read over quickly and don’t really think about. We are too busy to get on to the “meat” of the passage. I like this story because it reminds me that an open mind can see more possibilities than a closed one and there is solution for every problem if we only have the faith to look for it. It helps me to remember to take the time to appreciate the details, they may turn out to be the most important bits. St. Geramanus reminds me that I am not clever enought to know what will be the valuable bit so I should pay better attention.

Selling your house -Part 3

I had the awkward experience of meeting someone whose house we had seriously considered purchasing but in the end we did not make an offer on that property. Of course they wanted to know why we had not selected their home.

No one is going to answer this question because there is no clear answer. Nothing is more personal that selecting your home. A strength to one buyer may be a weakness in the eyes of different buyer. Remember this process is not personal; they are looking at your house, not judging your taste or possessions. Some of the reasons an individual buyer may not be interested in your home are not in your control. If they want a pool and you don’t have one then that buyer is simply not going to consider your house. Everyone has a “wish list” that they are hoping to fill and it is a rare find that meets all the desired points on the first visit. It is more likely that your home will have some of the desired features and lack others. The buyer is going to decide what they must have, what can be changed and what they cannot live with.

Even though your home is not likely to be a perfect fit for every buyer, there are steps you can take to make sure that you do not remove your home from consideration that are independent of the factors that you cannot control.

In previous posts Selling your Home, Part 1 and Selling your Home, Part 2, I wrote about getting your home ready to sell by updating the paint and careful cleaning. A third point is to make sure that you are really interested in selling your home.

This seems like a ridiculous statement but many sellers do not seem that interested in actually selling their house. What are the symptoms?

• The house is cannot be shown on short notice. This eliminates many potential out of town buyers who will not be able to reschedule.
• The owner has not keep in touch with their real estate agent so the agent does not know if they are still in the house or not. The agent and/or the buyer do not want to walk in on the owner unannounced so it is easier to bypass the listing.
• The owners stay in house when the house is being viewed by a potential buyer. Most people are not comfortable viewing a home with the owner present and will rush through the house since it feels like an invasion of privacy.
• The owners forgot to give the agent the code for the alarm or to leave the alarm off.
• Pets are not confined.

That last point is really important. I have a wonderful dog that I love. He is an ancient pug and he has all the qualities of a pug. He is friendly, loves to warble at new people, breathes heavily when he is excited, and sheds like an Angora cat. Not everyone appreciates these fine qualities.

We decided to board our dog while the house was on the market. There were good reasons for this.

• It was not possible for me to return home to remove or confine my dog every time the house was to be shown; my work schedule did not allow for this..
• People say that they love pets. This is only partly true; they love their pets. Your pet is likely a potential cause of damage to the home in other people’s eyes. Even buyers who have dogs or cats are likely to wonder what repairs will be needed due to your beloved dog or cat. If your pet is not at home you can remove all the signs of the pet such as clouds of fur collecting under the furniture, feeding dishes and pet odors and know that these items will stay gone for a good period of time.
• Once a stranger enters your home and the dog is aware that they are there, they are likely to bark until the “intruder” leaves. This causes a potential buyer to rush through your home.

I can hear some of you thinking “But Fluffy is part of our family” and “Love me, love my dog”. That is exactly the issue. It is not about you; it is about your house, a structure that your family lives in. The buyer does not have to love you or your dog and will likely only meet you once. They have to love your house. Make the house the focus and make it easy for the buyer to view the features of your house. At this point is it a house not a home.

Boarding my dog meant our house could stay in spotless condition and could be viewed on very short notice. This made our house easy to show and it was shown a lot. One day our house was shown four times. This would not have been possible if I had to return home to tidy up before every showing.

So the point for this week is to make it easy for the buyer to view your house. If you are not ready to do this, think about how serious you are about selling your home. If it is too hard to view your house, buyers will simply move on to another house in the same market.

Excellence in Design - Expanding Tables

Excellence in design is a rare quality. Jon sent me a link to a video about this amazing expanding table design and I had to look up the source. Such a wonderful design deserved to be recognized.

The original idea is quite old but this current incarnation is both functional and beautiful. Check out the videos at
http://www.dbfletcher.com/capstan/

The type of item you want just because it is so surprising.

New Email

Have to change my email address since we are moving and Comcast is evil. The new address is Karen.Juneau@gmail.com
Thanks,
Karen Juneau

Moving

All packed and ready to go. . .
Just need to clean house for the last time . . .

Selling your house - Part 2

Now that we are looking to buy a house, something that really surprises me is how many people do not clean their home before they put it on the market. I have stepped over laundry in the middle of the room, been unable to see what color the countertops were through the clutter and been knocked over by the smell of kitchen garbage.

I understand that keeping a clean house is hard since we are all so busy that it is easy to let this slide and I have certainly been guilty of this but addressing this issue is really vital to selling your home.

2. Clean, clean and then clean your house again.

You really cannot expect a buyer to see pass the mess. It is not just about removing clutter and picking things up. Get out the scrub brushes and make the place shine. This matters because buyers tend to assume that a clean home is also a well maintained home.

Work to remove any unusual smells from pets or cooking. Put away the fish sauce and garlic for awhile. Take out the garbage every night.

Wipe out the window sills and wipe down the shoe moldings. Even though you are not selling your furniture, dust frequently and polish any glass table tops and mirrors.

Get the carpets cleaned unless they are very new. You need them to look their best and since many people assume that you have done your best to shine the place up, those spots on the carpet are assumed to be permanent. Even if all the spots do not come out, having the rugs cleaned will reduce or eliminate pet odors and will raise the nap of the carpet making it look less worn. Once you have them clean, vacuum every day if possible to keep them that way.

Pay particular attention to the bathrooms and the kitchen. These really must be spotless since most people look at these rooms very carefully. If the toilet or sink is so hopeless stained that it cannot be cleaned, you should seriously consider replacing or refinishing them. Make sure there is no mold in the edges of the sink or in the tile on backsplash. Replace any missing grout or caulking.

A lot of work? You bet but it is worth every bit of effort and will cost you very little. A side benefit is that you will develop better house keeping habits that will reduce your stress in long run and help you stay organized when you move to your new home.

Selling your house - Part 1

I do not believe that selling my home makes me an expert but since I have received a lot of questions about what we did to sell our home so quickly for our asking price, the next few posts will list what worked for us.

1. The single most important thing we did was use an interior designer to select paint colors for our home.
This is something that we learned a long time ago. Interior designers know how to pull the elements of your rooms together with color. They know the current trends in color selection. They can use color to minimize some features and highlight others. They will save you money over the long term because you will not have to redo something that does not look like you expected it to or that really does not need to be redone. Lots and lots of money.

In our case, we had a brick wall inside our house that I worried about since it seemed dark and a little out of place. Friends suggested that we cover it or tear it out. My brilliant interior designer was able to solve this problem by selecting floors and colors that complimented the brick. That wall quickly became the best feature in our home and it was a far, far better solution than any we could have come up on our own. It looked wonderful and now it was a feature that set our home off from all the others in our neighborhood.

You are probably thinking I could do that myself. I will just get a book and pick out a pre-set color scheme. This is why that plan does not work.

Let’s say that you want to paint your house tan. There are hundreds of shades of tan. Have you considered the undertones in your flooring, how the light is going to affect the color? Have you remembered to consider other features in the room such as countertops, cabinets? Can you hold all these subtle shade variations in you head when you are looking at colors and visualize how this is going to look as a whole? Do you have a good idea of what the color will look like on a wall rather than on that little sample sheet? Do you know if tan is still a popular color or are you about to select your favorite color from ten years ago?

Interior designers spent four years or more in college learning how to do this. They are professionals at what they do. How likely is it really that you can duplicate their work for your specific home by watching HGTV for a few weeks? Find an interior designer you can work with rather than an interior decorator (these are not the same). It will not cost anywhere near as much as you imagine it will.

When we painted our house, there was not single color that we liked with one brush stroke out of the can but since only a fool would pay for advice that they do not try out, we continued painting. In every case, the color was wonderful once the room was finished. Each room flowed into the next one and they all complement each other. I might have been able to select a single color but there is no way I could have gotten it right for the whole house.

By the way, after the exterior of the house was painted, people have stopped and asked me what color it is. Since the color compliments the brick and roof of the house it looks very rich and it made a huge difference in the curb appeal of the house.

What color is it?

Tan

A very specific shade of tan selected for our home by someone who knew what they were doing.

Sold!

Ok, minor panic. As you may already know I am to relocate to the coast campus for fall so my husband and I spent every spare moment last spring getting our home ready to sell. It has been on the market for three weeks and yesterday we received multiple offers, two of which were for our asking price. We accepted one but we now have to be out of our home before July 15.

We began looking for a home on the coast yesterday. We did not expect our home to sell so quickly.

Wow!

I also need to move my office the first week of July.

Time to see how good my time management skills really are.

Rituals, St. Joseph & Stress

We have had a lot of people view our house this week so maybe the real estate market is looking up. We hope so.

Several people have mentioned the urban legend about St. Joseph helping to sell houses so I found the following link interesting.

http://www.snopes.com/luck/stjoseph.asp

St. Joseph is the patron saint of homes and carpenters so I can understand how this legend got started. I really don’t understand why the statue needs to buried in the yard. That part of the legend baffles me and I cannot think of how that practice would have developed. I would have expected the statue to be placed in garden or in a niche in a bookcase.

The Catholic Church is not very happy about this trend and hopes that prayer rather than a superstition will be the choice of desperate homeowners. I find it interesting that when people are desperate for a solution they turn to a ritual for comfort even when that ritual does not seem to make much sense. This is a prime example of how important rituals are even in an age that tends to sweep them aside as ancient relics.

Rituals are important because they invest common acts with special significance. This is comforting because it allows us to pause and recognize an important moment in our lives and to reflect on its meaning. A known psychological benefit of ritual is that it helps people transition to new phases of their lives. This can be something as major as the loss of a loved one (Using Ritual with Children and Adolescents by Kenneth J. Doka) or as simple as ordering your day (Positive Rituals and Quality of Life by Michael W. Smull). Rituals help reduce stress by providing a sense of control of our lives. This is one reason that young children like their bedtime rituals to remain the same; it is comforting to have something in your day that is constant.

It is a loss that as we grow older we tend to discard the simple habits that could bring a sense of consistency to our lives. Rituals provide a great deal of benefit for the small amount of time that they require.

So if planting a St. Joseph statue helps you deal with the stress of selling your home, go ahead and get out the shovel. I prefer the more traditional ritual of daily prayers but that may not float your boat. However you decide to incorporate it, investing the moments of your life with meaning is a good practice and one that deserves to be carried forward into the twenty-first century.

Finished!

Our home is finally finished and so I have placed a slide show of it here to showcase our hard work. Katrina is really finally over and now it is time to move on. I hope someone loves it and it becomes as nice a home for them as it was for us.

It is ironic that you never really fix up a place until you are interested in moving on. Next time I hope to break this pattern but I better not make any rash promises.

If you are interested in a nice home in Hattiesburg, MS, check out BrendaLambert.com for all the details.

Home Improvements

We have been spending every spare moment for months working on our house. I did not know that it was possible to be sore in every muscle in your body at once. I am walking with the grace of C3PO and I lost feeling in my finger tips weeks ago. Everything has been painted, repaired replaced, polished and organized. My kitchen is a masterpiece of organization; everything is grouped by function. It took days and now it is too good to use. I just want to admire the neat little rows of glasses, the Tupperware that now has lids, the appliances that have all their attachments lined up awaiting orders and the flowerbeds that do not yet need to be weeded or replanted.

We still have a few items left, painting is forever since there is always one more place to "touch up". I still need to organize my files but right now I plan to spend time watching other people fix up their homes on HGTV. Home repair is much more enjoyable when it is a spectator sport.

How to Lose a Tip

It happenned again. My husband and I went out for dinner at moderate restaurant and the waiter decided to pull up a chair and sit down with us while he took our order. What is up with this?

My first job was as a waitress in family restaurant. It is a hard job, you stand all day, your feet hurt and the pay is not very good. People often blame you for problems that are not in your control, like a slow cook in the kitchen. I well remember how tired I was and frankly it was very motivational for me to continue in school to learn how to do something that paid better, had better hours and that did not perfume my clothes with the smell of pancake syrup.

Not once did I think that this was a problem that my customers should know about. Most people go out to spend time with the person they are with or to have a break at the end of the long day. I would never have sat down with a customer for a little break while I took their order because it is intrusive on the customer's space.

It just feels weird.

I have never met these people and now they are sitting next to me at dinner and sharing little tidbits about their day. These are always young people in their twenties so there does not appear to be a health issue. After taking my order, they seem to move from table to table repeating this pattern as if they are stuck in some form of adult musical chairs. I am not sure how to interact when this happens. It is uncomfortable because it feels elitist to react to this but there is a protocol for every profession. A great waiter is attentive to each table but is as invisible as possible.

The only thing I know for certain is that this is quickest way I know of to reduce your tip. You have just made your customer uncomfortable and created more of an interruption in their dining experience than was needed. They will remember this when you bring the check.

Worth the time

Just finished reading "Why Don't Student's Like School?" that I mentioned in a previous post and thought it was a good general summary of cognitive science in a very readable format. This is no small trick and I really appreciate how the author included only concepts that could be useful to teachers. I may use this in one of my classes an an optional read. It might be a good change of pace from the standard textbook.

On Not Working

Most people when you tell them you work in education assume that they know exactly what that is all about since everyone went to school and so everyone is an expert on what teachers do. I am now in the middle of the famous “break”; you know the one that all professors enjoy where we lounge at home in our spacious private libraries, drink fine wines and sample French cheese with our colleagues while we devise new mental torments for students for next term.

Except I have no spacious library, cannot afford good wine and (heresy!) I do not like French cheese. All my colleagues have vanished from the live campus so that we can clean up the paperwork from the last term before the new term begins.

I have a nice little stack of paperwork of my very own; reports to write, records to update and some bookkeeping to catch up on for a professional society. I spent most of this past week out of town working on a new engineering graphics book and I did spend one day doing nothing really useful except for getting my hair done.

Now I suppose I could get to work on the mental torment bit . . . but then why would we need computer systems? I have just received a notice to change my password so that I do not lose system access and I love how this always seems arrive to when I am most likely to overlook this notice. I bet that most students are not even thinking about campus e-mail the first week after finals. Perfect timing.

Rocking the Status Quo

Just read a review of really interesting new book titled "Why Don't Student's Like School? in the Wall Street Journal. (You can read the review at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124079001063757515.html )

It takes on a lot of sacred cows in education like teaching "critical thinking" and "learning styles". Sound like a great read and one of those books that needed to be written. Time to check it out at the library.

Excellence Awaits- End of Term Grading

My room is now covered in neat stacks of end of term exams, papers and portfolios waiting for my review. I used to dread this end of the term flood but I have changed my opinion on this.

It is really pretty exiciting.

Those stacks contain the sum of what my students have learned this term. Each paper is a snapshot of where someone is in their life. Some are wonderful, some middling and some not-so- great. They reveal what is important to people, how they chose to spend their time, their best efforts and the I-hope-I-get-by prayers. They are little windows into people's hopes and priorities.

They also tell me how I did as a teacher. What I taught well and what was a crash and burn. What people valued in the class and what was a got-to-get-through moment. After I score everything, I will take stock of where I am and what I need to improve for next time. Then I will write these ideas down so I can make use of them the next time I teach that course.

Pretty good stuff - a chance to improve as a teacher and understand my students better. Not a bad way to end the term. It is worth a few extra pots of coffee.

Listen to your Mom

I was talking to my mom today about the cool roof idea and mentioned that I never see a white roof. She knew the reason for this right away. Light roofs show mildew and pine tree tassels make yellow/brown stains that are very hard to remove when they sit too long on most materials. So a white roof would look terrible in just a short time. Dark colors hide this problem.

So now you know two things:

• We all have very dirty roofs
• Moms are naturally brilliant

Cool Roof / Greener Roof

Worked on the house again this weekend. Every muscle is sore and of course I am sunburned since I was working on the roof painting cupolas. The roof just holds the heat and it gets pretty hot on a dark roof even in the late spring.

This made me wonder why we have black roofs in the first place. Dark colors hold heat and yet even though I live in the Deep South, all the roofs are dark to imitate slate or wood. White roofs would make so much more sense. It would be easier to cool the structure and there would be less stress on the roofing materials.

Apparently, light or cool roofs may be an idea that will take off in the next decade since there is at least one company promoting this concept (see The world's best roofing blog).
It feels like one of those ideas that is obvious now that someone pointed it out.

According to articles posted on that site, the basic advantages of a cool or light roof turn out to be:

• Cheaper to air condition the building since a light roof is only 20 degrees hotter than the air temperature rather that 70 degrees hotter than the air temperature on a black roof (This explains the wonderful roasting sensation I experienced today)
• The roof lasts longer
• It reduces the build up of greenhouse gases

Sounds great to me. Now we need some creative architects to come up with some designs that make use of this idea so our homes can be cooler without looking like ice cream stands.

What is Worth Knowing?

It is the end of another term and as I think back over the many students that I have encountered in past dozen or so years, I am surprised at how little students have changed. We may have computers, cell phones, and Twitter but every spring even my most dedicated students begin to stare out the virtual window. They are wandering in Facebook, checking e-mail and reading movie reviews. This really isn't all that new; it is just that the virtual window provides greater opportunities for wandering away.

I recently heard a speaker promote this as a good thing since it shows that students are computer savvy and that they are curious about learning. I cannot agree with this. Not all knowledge is equally valuable or interchangeable. There really is some basic content that everyone should know to be a functioning member of society. Not all of this information will be picked up by a random walk though the Internet.

I was a high school student during the contract era of education. For those of you who do not remember that era, students signed a contract that committed them to complete a certain number of assignments to earn a specific grade. You could work as fast or as slow as you wished. The end result was a mad rush for everyone to finish Algebra in the last few weeks and the favored few who were done early had too much time in that class and were engaged in a dead run in some of their other subjects. This system lasted only one year. The honest truth is that not everyone is equally curious about every subject.

So how do you decide what is worth knowing for you as an individual?