Assessment Assessment (or What Condition My Condition is in)

In our age and at our society's demanding pace, there is too much information available to the human mind in too many ways and in a variety of tones, opinions, and levels of authority. 

I don't say this as anything but a simple and personal observation. I am a teacher of both college age, and high-school age at-risk youth, and I participate in a variety of online and in-service trainings, and it astounds me how many people have high-level high-importance and high-volume expensive opinions and impositions. We had one such trainings today on assessment (formative and summative high-impact and highly-effective this is the engine of all that moves and grooves in education stylee), and it was two hours followed by other stuff followed by another hour and a half of stuff related to and immersed therein. 

I know I've probably been in this blessed business for too long and following too many bad career decisions and abusive employer relationships, but I don't know how the education sector can afford to keep spending all of this money on self-important emcees, administrators, and other passionate and impositionally pensive pundits and keep quality individuals involved in the teaching cadre to take care of our lovely students anymore.

We'll keep 'reforming' and 'reimagining', but when will we actually make education something besides a terrible simulacrum of industrial production? Pert soon, I pray and hope.

 

The new year has arrived up the canyon, and with it, more snow than we've had at one time for years and in glorious condition. It's not often that we see this sort of weather and at a time when we can readily take advantage of the snow, so we headed up and down the canyon numerous times and got really good and tired and cold in pursuit of beauty over the past few days.

The High Holy-Days

 

Christmas. Yuletide. Noel. Holidays. Every year is different despite similar expectations and preparations, and I wouldn't want it any other way. 

Everyone but the Korea Dude was at the cabin for the holidays, though this one featured quite a bit more cars and trucks going up and down the mountain for classes, breaks and outings.

Always a pleasure and about as much work as anyone can handle, no matter what.

To Wrong Red Canyon

 

 

 "Well, what are we gonna do?" was both said and implied heavily and freqently as the day aged past early, and we all knew we needed to get out and down some road pretty quickly. The latest storm predicted and lauded as a big deal and anticipated with warnings was bearing down on our valley like the disembodied hope and savior it was, and time was waisting. 

Ideas like beach balls bounced around the living room, but red canyon, only an hour or so away from where we sat or waddled about chasing dreams and housework, was the noodle that usually stuck at this time of year when weariness is always the opposite of daylight, so that's what we did and we were glad we did it...

 

Attempted Mobile Blog

One never knows what one will find, but ya keep looking for ideas, trips, projects, fixes, and apps that resemble hope and dreams gone by- that's the universal condition of the aging human, in my limited experience.

I found this app that enables me to blog from an app on the phone, and we’ll see how it works. It'll probably be an unmitigated disaster, but here goes...

 

 

 

And so the grab continues, as has been done heretofore in other worlds.

This Time of Impending Winter and Gratefulality

Not enough time or energy yet to gather and store up sufficient wood round the wee house on the high desert, but we’ve had some time to reflect on what the crazy summer and fall has wrought. And we're grateful for the life we have made together.
With constant threat (but not much reality in Utah, at least) of fire, a threat of new COVID’s and a newly collapsing economy, there’s been talk of changes in the house in the Burningham family as we try to get along with new and fairly recent upheaval as the winter comes on. 

Jesse's in South Korea, Bryn is working as a manager and curator for a local gallery, Jeru is getting ready to work up at Beaver Mountain for the winter again, Tor preps for a stent as an Alta hot shot next spring and summer, Hyrum doddles with school and tries to figure out what he wants to do with himself as he enjoys his little adobe house/studio, Asher fixes cars and leaves things unfinished from time to time, Anwyn grows up and loses friends to far away moves, Miya grows a foot and a half in one year, and Ianto is wandering around and dealing with all these bizzaro changes...

But it is good to be alive and with each other as much as we're able to get it together.