Category Archives: essays

Documenting Your Growth

I used to be an expert at a program on my computer. When I say expert, I don’t mean just good. I used Finale (music notation software) from version 1 (1988) heavily until 1999, completing a good solid decade of almost daily use of that program to write and arrange music. I knew it in […]

Browser Bookmarks

One of the things I regret is not saving all of my chats and email from college. I remember learning how to download email at some point and kept copies of some of it on floppy disks. My many hours (days, weeks) on IRC was altogether lost. It was such a blow to lose that […]

Memory and Scent

My Background I’m feel somewhat vulnerable for discussing this, but the topic is so fascinating to me, I feel like there is at least some benefit in putting some thoughts down about it. I have a strong affinity for smells; I can’t say I am in anyway unusual from other people in this regard, except […]

Reflections on Teaching

My first year of teaching graphic communications and computer applications were intense experiences. I’d just graduated with a masters degree (in music) and suddenly I was thrown into a new job that I hadn’t precisely prepared for! But I had a lot of computer experience and I set about designing lessons on that experience as […]

Curriculum as Jellybeans

Part of me wishes we could redesign our curriculum. Not mine, not any specific schools’, but all of it—by pouring jelly beans out on the table. I think maybe what we teach is as important question as how students will learn it. So some have the idea that mixing up traditional notions of “in school” […]

A time for courage

These are my own thoughts, written on time away from work. Some years ago I sat in a planning meeting with my colleagues—we all worked for a preK-12 school division in Virginia—and we were discussing the set of core values we would use in our next strategic plan. We’d done some work to identify our […]

Florence

In college I took a music history course and it just so happened that our professor was an expert on the music of an Italian baroque composer named Claudio Monteverdi. We ended up spending a lot of time on early Italian baroque music and I can still remember the lectures about the Gonzagas, the Medici, […]

Knowing by Doing

This past week I have been supervising the hand-out of new 1:1 technology to our students. It isn’t the first time I’ve done this, but this year I wanted to take a particularly strong hands-on role with the roll-out or deployment, as we call it, of devices. I did several introductions to high school students, […]