Gone to Winter Fire School...

Last year was a wash for UFRA's Winter Fire School. Covid did that for most everything for a year and a half, so when we got word that January 2022 was on, we bit like steelhead in a good riffle.

We got a good place on the lee side of the mesa, and even though I didn't get much sleep in my little twin-sized bunk bed for the three nights, being with my kids and good friends made it a good deal that I knew I'd have to pay for over the next week or so- but that's what life's all about. Feast and famine, play and, well, pay.

 

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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.

Change-of-Year 2022

 

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.