Author: LegoDoug

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Ouch: New Hampshire Charter School Cap Proposed

I just received this from the Academy of Science and Design, where I teach robotics, and where Isaac attends:

As almost all of you probably know, New Hampshire is facing major budget issues. The New Hampshire State Senate is currently trying to grapple with the deteriorating situation as state incoming revenue declines. This week, an amendment was proposed and approved in the Senate Finance Committee that would cap total charter school enrollment in the state for the coming 2009-2010 year at a level of 850, which is below current enrollment levels.

If this limitation stands as the bill moves through a full NH State Senate floor vote (likely this coming Wednesday June 3) and the following conference committee, this would be a MAJOR issue for the school. Depending on the exact level allocated to the school, this could mean ALL accepted incoming students would have to have their acceptance reversed, and it could even mean that there would have to be a “reverse lottery” to eliminate existing ASD students.

We strongly encourage you to take action on this issue, as it will affect your child’s educational choices and ASD’s quality.

One action you can take is to send mail to your elected representatives. The following link can be used to do this:
http://tinyurl.com/lmku2l

Some parents may also want to call their representatives. While this can potentially be helpful, it is also very important that you express support constructively, perhaps with personal stories, but DO NOT ARGUE with them! Remember that the legislators are dealing with a very major set of issues around funding, and are facing many difficult decisions at this time. Being hostile and/or combative can easily create irate representatives, which would hurt much more than help and can be very hard to reverse. Please only call if you are sure you can keep the conversation positive.

The ASD and other charter schools have been through this before, but it has always required work to get the legislature to see our side. Right now, we are all working through the NH Chartered Public School Association at all levels of government to make sure that this amendment does not get passed into law. While we are working hard with all the charter schools, we will not know the final outcome until the end of June. We will do our best to keep you informed as we move forward.

Kent Glossop
Board Chairman, Academy for Science and Design

Chris Franklin
Director, Academy for Science and Design

Here’s what I added to the petition I submitted:

Please help public education continue to improve in New Hampshire by rejecting the proposed cap on charter school enrollment.

Our son is attending the Academy for Science and Design Public Charter School in Merrimack. We have seen firsthand just how much he has learned at such a place, which is far more challenging than the private school he attended previously.

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Star Trek XI

I’ll describe Star Trek Zero in one word, the same word I uttered repeatedly throughout the film: Wow!

enterprise_console_n_and_i
Lieutenant Wilcox, USS Reliant, with an unidentified Orion Slave Girl.

Last night at 9:50 we went to Hooksett Cinemagic to see the film in digital iMax (yes, that’s iMax with digital video … quite an experience, as we’d seen with Monsters vs. Aliens a few weeks ago). A bunch of people from church were also there (including, of course, the Dunn family all in costume). However, the iMax was having projector problems. So, we got to see Trek in digital, and have free passes to return to the iMax whenever we like.

Without offering any spoilers, I’ll just say that J.J. Abrams lived up to the storytelling and adventure I expected. There are elements of things we’ve seen before in Star Trek storytelling (indeed, it would be hard to find something that hadn’t been tried over the years), but rarely are they executed with such fine attention to drama, detail, and humor.

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NaNi the Droll

A couple of days ago, Naomi said, “Dad, I made this for you!”

Naomi's whimsical airplane drawing.
Naomi’s “Whimsical” Drawing—Click to see full detail.

Inspired by Hook, Naomi drew people parachuting from a burning airplane. Guess who doesn’t have a parachute? (I love the little frown face she put on me.)

That’s one sarcastic kid we’re raising.

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School Fashion: Look What Kids Are Wearing These Days

This is “spirit week” at the Academy for Science and Design, where Isaac attends. Today’s theme was, “Famous People.” He relished the opportunity to develop, with Nichelle’s help, this slightly disturbing costume.

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Can you believe what kids are wearing to school these days?

A magic trick? Well, let me show you, I’ll make this pencil disappear!

img_8612c_medimg_8610c
Isaac as “The Joker,” complete with prosthetic makeup.

Turns out Isaac’s costume was voted best for the day!

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Why Do You Seek the Living Among the Dead?

But on the first day of the week, at early dawn, they went to the tomb, taking the spices they had prepared. And they found the stone rolled away from the tomb, but when they went in they did not find the body of the Lord Jesus.

The Garden Tomb, now empty.
The Garden Tomb, now empty.

While they were perplexed about this, behold, two men stood by them in dazzling apparel. And as they were frightened and bowed their faces to the ground, the men said to them, “Why do you seek the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen. Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee, that the Son of Man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men and be crucified and on the third day rise.”

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Outsourcing the Wilcox Family: Next Stop, China

The economy can certainly make life interesting. At times, this leads to momentary tension, such as today when my boss called me in to his office to discuss some internal reorganization.

Little did I know, when I started studying Mandarin last fall that it would be so useful!


View Larger Map

I don’t have all the details yet, but for the next five years, we will be relocated to Shenyang, the capitol of the Liaoning province, China, where I’ll be helping to lead a software development project integrating YUI components into our existing suite. The company will pay for our relocation and intensive language school.

Wow!

[Editor’s Note, April 20, 2009: There is an important follow-up to this post here. Please be sure to read it.]

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中文 Homework (Showing Off)

Okay, I’m going to show off a bit.

My Mandarin homework at the Chelmsford Chinese Language School this week was to write a paragraph about Naomi. Most of this we have covered in class, but I got some help from my friend Shenghan to make sure the grammar was correct, and still managed to make one mistake in with the suì character, which I have since corrected.

我

有

一

个

女

å„¿

。

她

叫

娜

奥

ç±³

。

她

五

岁

了

。

她

é•¿

着

黑

黑

çš„

头

发

。

她

喜

欢

è·³

舞

。

娜

奥

ç±³

是

一

个

亮

é—ª

é—ª

çš„

女

å­©

。

Here is the same text with the pinyin inserted:

wÇ’

yÇ’u

yī

gè

nÇš

ér

tā

jiào

我

有

一

个

女

å„¿

。

她

叫

Nà

ào

mǐ

tā

wÇ”

suì

le

娜

奥

ç±³

。

她

五

岁

了

。

tā

zhÇŽng

zhe

hēi

hēi

de

tóu

fà

她

é•¿

着

黑

黑

çš„

头

发

。

tā

xǐ

huàn

tiào

wÇ”

Nà

ào

mǐ

她

喜

欢

è·³

舞

。

娜

奥

ç±³

shì

yī

gè

liàng 

shÇŽn 

shÇŽn 

de

nÇš

hái

是

一

个

亮

é—ª

é—ª

çš„

女

å­©

。

Mandarin makes learning Spanish seem very easy by comparison. There are no Chinese-English cognates, and just learning the different tones is daunting. The “pinyin” phonetic aids help, but I still struggle with pronunciation, and, ultimately, need to memorize all the charcters. (Growing up in China, my teacher learned each character by being required to write it 1,000 times.) Of course, I occasionally have my rudimentary Chinese good-naturedly laughed at, such as a few weeks ago when I said, 我的太太不好。 My wife is no good, rather than 我的太太不舒服。My wife is not feeling well!

I’ll post a translation in the comments in a few days. In the meantime, you might have fun figuring it out. (Hint www.chinese-tools.com offers some excellent tools for working with Chinese, including a dictionary and input method editor.)

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Naomi’s Improv Ballet

NaNi (now age 5), loves to dance. After her ballet class, while another group was rehearsing for “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” she improvised this.

Toward the end you can see her looking into the studio room to see what the older students are doing in their rehearsal.

Naomi studies Ballet at Gate City Ballet, in Nashua, N.H.

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Just the Facts

The other day I was talking to someone who said he had heard on the radio that the US Federal government was going to give free digital television converts to welfare recipients, and that they were spending $100,000 each on plasma TVs in prisons. This came from what was described as “the most trustworthy radio news source in the area.”

Frankly, I couldn’t believe it. There was a coupon program to buy converters at a discount, but the program used up all its money, and had been discontinued. (Recently, it has been given more money by the federal bailout, and is operating again.) However, these coupons are available to anyone who desires them, so it’s hardly being targeted to those receiving government assistance.

But I wondered what the origin of these stories had been, so I hit the internet.

It turned out that millions of households on welfare might be given free digital television converters—in Japan sometime before their digital switchover in 2011. The prison story was a little closer to what’s real—the state of Florida’s department of corrections is spending $100,000 total, approximately $1 per inmate, out of its $2.3 billion dollar budget to convert existing television to digital.

Our opinions are often based on incorrect facts. Part of this is described in basic psychology—it’s called confirmation bias—how we filter evidence that strengthens our preconceptions.

But also our incorrect knowledge of history, various sciences, and current events allows us to hold on to incorrect opinions.

This is especially true in “popular knowledge”—think about all those e-mail forwards you receive that 15 seconds at about.com or Snopes could easily refute. Think about all the people who believe wearing a magnet on their wrist will make them healthy. Or all the “Christians” who espouse the heresy of the Prosperity Gospel and can even quote Scripture out of context to support it. Or that rubber tires protect vehicle occupants from lighting strikes. Or that a metal vehicle acts as a Faraday cage. (It doesn’t.)

At any rate, I have been thinking much of late that we should all do more analysis before we speak.

I wish we could all just be smarter.

I wish I could just be smarter.

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Nichelle: The Return of the Twins

[Note: I am keeping this updated via the comments. You will want to read them for the latest status.]

For just over a week now, the symptoms Nichelle has not experienced in years (for more than very brief periods of time) have been plaguing her again. These include sharp pains in various parts of her body, strange sensations in her head, abnormal exhaustion, and odd sensations of temperature. When these strike, it becomes impossible for her to lead the active life she has enjoyed for the past few years. At times the pain has even been bad enough for her to dig into our hoarded Vicodin supply. We call these pains “The Twins: Pain and Agony.”

For example, today she awoke in apparently perfect condition, and was able to get in a full Tao-Bo workout and her strength training. However, by mid-afternoon, her head began feeling foggy, and the pains had begun. On Sunday, she again began the morning fine, but by the end of our church service, did not trust herself to drive home.

A return of these dreaded symptoms was not something we anticipated. Nichelle has had the additional struggle of facing the possibility that this is back to stay for some unknown length of time.

Although we are certain that these have a hormonal component, we believed that a vitamin D deficiency was the cause of these difficulties. Nichelle has been on a high dose of vitamin D for the past few years, which appears to have kept the symptoms at bay. Nichelle had blood drawn on Saturday, and has an appointment to go over the results tomorrow morning. If it is a problem with vitamin D, it should be easy to correct. If that isn’t the problem, we would be back at the inexplicable and difficult state we were in a few years ago.

Clearly this is God’s path for us, and we will endeavor to learn from it and glorify Him, but please pray that Nichelle will be back to normal soon.