Ted, Ted, Ted

This site has an impressively long list of education policy blogs that a person could spend all day looking at. I can’t do that, but I can reprint the list right here for those who are interested:

Andrew Pass
Barnett Berry
Bill Jackson’s Education Blog
Board Buzz
The Chalkboard
Charter Blog
Chris Correa
Cranky Professor
Critical Mass
DC Education Blog
Dave Shearon
D-ED Reckoning
The Education Wonks
Ed Knows Policy
EdPol
edspresso
EdWize (UFT)
Eponymous Educator
The Essential Blog
The Gadfly
Get on the Bus (Dayton Daily News)
The Gradebook
HE & OS
HUNBlog
IALA
In Other News (Ed Week)
Instructivist
Intercepts (Mike Antonucci)
Jenny D.
Joanne Jacobs
John Merrow
Kindling Flames
Matthew Yglesias
Mark Lerner
NCLBlog (AFT)
NYC Educator
Quasi Dictum
School Me
School of Blog
School Zone
Schools Matter
SharpBrains
Sherman Dorn
Small Talk
Special Education Law Blog
The Start of Something
Teach and Learn
Teacher Voices
Teachers’ Lounge
Teaching in the 408
Tim Frederick
VARC Blog
The Wake-up Call
This Week in Education
Whitney Tilson

I should say something about the concert we saw last weekend. Mary, Laura and I went over to Berkeley to see the New Lost City Ramblers, who have been collecting and performing old-time, mostly Appalachian music since well before I was born. The leader is Mike Seeger, who is brother to Peggy Seeger and half-brother to Pete. (American royalty.) This was part of an annual old-time music festival that’s been getting bigger and bigger lately; it appears that this is another of those out-of-the-way genres that’s been due for a revival.

The atmosphere was that of a homecoming. These guys could do no wrong with this audience, and they didn’t. In demeanor they remind you a bit of some of those old-time Afro-Cuban players like Guaracheros de Oriente: the material is so powerful and the performance style so calm, almost casual, that you’re surprised when your heart has suddenly been torn out and shredded by what you thought was just a three-minute folk song. They sneak up on you that way.

An autoharp, when played by someone who knows how, can be the most beautiful thing you ever heard. Mike Seeger knows how.

The next day I went back with Laura and Lilly for the outdoor concert part of the festival. There were lots of string bands playing on the grass and we got to see some smoking banjo players (clawhammer style only — I felt like a turncoat for practicing Scruggs picking the way I do), plus a real live gut-bucket. We agreed to try to make one of our own as soon as we could figure out where to get one of those big galvanized washtubs.

We are up in the Sierra Nevada near Lake Tahoe for the week, staying in a big house we rented with three other families we know from preschool. I have pictures, but I sent my camera out with Laura this morning on an all-day hike, so the pics will come later. One of the dads is a scout troop leader and knows exactly where to take kids in the mountains around here.

It’s been magnificent so far. The weather couldn’t be any perfecter. The lake, which can be ice-cold, has had all summer to warm up (at least the top 3 feet or so) to an almost swimmable temperature. Yesterday we took an inner-tube ride down a few miles of the Truckee river, which drains Lake Tahoe out into Nevada. Some of the kids saw a river otter. There are two other kids in Lilly’s age group and four in Laura’s, so no one is sitting around with nothing to do.

My excuse for missing the hike today was that I had to drop Mary off at the train station in Truckee so she could get back to San Francisco in time for work. Teachers and staff are supposed to show up tomorrow to get things ready for school to start next week. I’m sneaking a bit of time at a coffee shop in Truckee to catch up on the chaos at work, which hasn’t died down just because I’m not there.

Mary has been away at one of those professional training things since Friday (the 11th) and it’s not going so badly here, considering. Lilly got a little querulous a couple of times in the first 48 hours, but seems to believe me when I tell her Mom’s return is closer and closer. I think six months ago she would have been inconsolable; there’s been some growth going on.

I’ve had an interesting logistical challenge in getting both of them to their appointed activities at 8 am and retrieving them both at 5 pm. I’ve been enforcing punctuality for Laura’s dropoff in the morning, so that I can get Lilly in before 8:30. Being late is OK with her because she doesn’t like the breakfast they serve at her summer camp anyway, but I want her to get at least some of her RDA of runaround time in. In the afternoon I’ve reversed the order and picked up Lilly around 4 and got to Laura just a little before 5.

It would be a lot harder to pull this off during the school year, when adults seem to get all picky about kids showing up on time for things. Summer is the forgiving season.

Here’s a fine picture of Laura and Lilly taken by Mary. She has this knack for getting pretty pictures from unusual natural lighting.

I’m glad that this guy still reads Newsweek, so the rest of us don’t have to.

This delightful spam was passed along by Paul.Capitalism:You have two cows. You sell one and buy a bull. Your herd multiplies, and the economy grows. You sell them and retire on the income.Enron Venture Capitalism:You have two cows. You sell three of them to your publicly listed company, using letters of credit opened by your brother-in-law at the bank, then execute a debt/equity swap with an associated general offer so that you get all four cows back, with a tax exemption for five cows. The milk rights of the six cows are transferred via an intermediary to a Cayman Island company secretly owned by the majority shareholder who sells the rights to all seven cows back to your listed company. The Annual report says the company owns eight cows, with an option on one more. Sell one cow to buy a new President of the United States, leaving you with nine cows. No balance sheet provided with the release. The public buys your bull.

The World at War “On March 2 [1933], Hitler was asked by a [reporter] whether the suspension of liberties was permanent. He answered in the negative, saying that full rights would be restored as soon as the … danger was over.”

Mary and Lillian have been in Atlanta all week, schmoozing it up at the American Public Health Association convention. It’s been pretty hard, not for any practical reason — things have gone very smoothly for me and Laura so far — but because I love them both so much and like having them around. Laura, ever in touch with her feelings, has kept me updated on how much she misses them but hasn’t seemed upset about it. We’ve been staying busy. I worked at home Monday and Tuesday so I could drop off and pick up Laura at school, and in the evenings we worked on our big project. (I can tell you about it here without giving away the surprise, because I’m pretty sure Mary won’t be looking at any Web browsers while away from home.) We cleared out my old work space downstairs, which I haven’t used much since I stopped freelancing, and turned it into a nice cozy office for Mary. I moved her computer down there and hooked up the very nice 20-inch monitor, which she didn’t have room for upstairs, while Laura decorated the walls with colorful frescos of dinosaurs, spaceships and girls with bows in their hair. I threw out a few years’ worth of paper, which I’d been meaning to do for a long time. That cleared out a surprising amount of space.

Reason No. 1,352 why there’s obviously something wrong with me: This kind of thing just makes my day. Laura has already picked out “Mom” and “Hannah;” perhaps in a couple of years she’ll be ready for: “Straw? No! Too stupid a fad. I put soot on warts.”

Michelle Whittington died Sunday. For several years she was the head teacher at Playmates Preschool’s Young 5 section, which is for kids who are almost ready for kindergarten but aren’t old enough, or old enough but not ready. She built it into a strong, joyful, lively place, a little fog-belt Summerhill. When Laura got there last year Michelle had retired because of her illness. We got two very smart and original teachers to carry it on, but you could tell it was still Michelle’s place. In the Playmates archive box there is a picture of her in gardening gloves, taking care of things around the co-op. She was a real tree-planter.

Needs no comment. Courtesy of Michael Smith again, the intrepid Peru journalist/blogmaster.

You liked the book, you’ll love the band. Thanks to my connections in the Judicial Branch, I am now the president of the Jue-Kuster Household Chapter of the Trout Fishing in America Fan Club. Laura is the vice-president and power behind the throne, and Mary, because she’s not quite as crazy about them as me or Laura or even Lillian, must settle for Minority Leader. Lillian is of course the Sergeant-at-Arms, and, using one of the more obscure powers of the post, commands you, if you have or are a kid, to go get all their CDs right now.