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Well, I did it. I started working on my fork of Anchor CMS to get it up and running with PHP 8. Honestly, most of the work so far has been updating the build system with new versions of the JS packages used to bundle everything up. I haven't needed to do much with the PHP yet.

Anyways, I can set up a new instance from scratch, create the admin user, and write some posts. I've fixed a few CSS errors and I'm going to start working on updating the Sass files because they have some deprecations since they were first written 10 years ago.

The repo is on Github if you want to take a peek.

I've been thinking about moving back to a small CMS for the blog. Specifically becuase I would like to be able to just log into something and write rather than using my current static site flow.

AnchorCMS is an old blog app I've opined about in the past and I decided to take on another project and work on a fork. The maintainers shut down the original codebase back in 2020 and it's been sitting since.

The plan right now is trim down the installation flow and tailor it for myself - it'll be updated for PHP 8 and use SQLite for a database to keep my server running with low overhead.

I have no idea what I'm in for because I haven't touched PHP in a minute. We'll see how it goes.

In 2023, I tried my hand at watercolor painting and sketching in general. Then, in 2024 I just...stopped. No real reason why other than I didn't make time to continue the habit. I would pick up a pencil here and there, but I didn't commit to making the practice a habit.

Earlier this year, my kids asked me to take a walk out into the woods and do some sketching. I relized that I had set art up as this escape where I had to be alone and couldn't have people around. That's true sometimes - I might want to do something quietly by myself - but it can't be all the time. Keeping it for those alone time moments meant that I just didn't create anything.

So, in an effort to get back on the horse, here is some of my recent arting.

I really like watercolor, so I'm pushing myself to use them more. I sketched two bluebirds from photos on the Internet and then painted. I'm trying to be loose with my brush, but I am very much out of practice. That said, the one on the left came out pretty good.

Keeping on the bird theme, I tried a couple of robins. I need to work on controlling the paints as they come off the brush. I think I tend to use too much water, so I'm left trying to mop up the runs, which causes paint to reactivate a slosh around...it's an area to improve on.

I switched to landscapes for a little bit. Julia Bausenhardt is a German artist who has a wonderful blog on nature sketching and journaling. She wrote a post about sketching all in blues recently that I wanted to give a try. This helped me think about how to mix different values to convey depth.

Kristie DeGaris is a Scottish drystone waller, author, and photographer I follow on the socials. She shared some photos back in February which included a striking image of this building on a bright green hillside.

I went back to birds and did some sketches from photos. I should have taken more time to warm up - I tend to dive right into the painting without due preparation. I'm disappointed in how the top left painting came out because I knew as I was painting that I could've done better had I just slowed down.

The top right cardinal was better, but my washes were uneven and I went back to try and fix them which caused the paint to run...oh well. I was happy with the sketches before I began, so that's a win.

I will not be discussing the bottom bird in this post.

This is probably my favorite so far. The washes are more even, you can tell that they're cardinals, and they even have the right proportions and perspective. It actually looks like one is looking at you, which is progress.

I don't know that I've defined my own style yet. I like Julia's nature sketching and the artistic realism she's able to capture. I also really like Liron Yankonsky's YouTube channel which is much more loose and interpretive rather than illustrative. I've been trying to emulate his approach a little more in my form, but my water and paint control isn't quite there yet, which leads to mixed results.

It really boils down to doing more painting regularly and being willing to just go for it. I do see improvement and I know what I want to work on...I don't feel like I'm floundering. I'm enjoying the process even though I'm scared to paint sometimes. It's kind of like this blog...I'm doing the art for me, not for an audience, so it is what I want it to be.

I only finished two books this month - it was a slow one for reading.

I, Robot - Isaac Asimov

I didn't know that this was a collection of short stories. I think had I known, the experience would've been more enjoyable. I kept trying to piece the various stories into one narrative in my head. They're all related, but not as a single, unifying plot.

I'm not used to reading older science fiction. The dialog felt very 1950's and...more innocent? than I was expecting. I think Dr. Calvin's persona parallels the robots in her approach to problem solving, which was an interesting plot device.

Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space - Adam Higginbotham

This is, without a doubt, one of the best books I've ever read. It is detailed without feeling tenacious and paints clear, relatable portraits of everyone involved in this disaster from the families all the way up to the top officials of NASA. It is an absolute must-read if you remember the accident or grew up hearing about it as a kid watching Space Shuttle launches.

I'm about halfway through another science fiction book that I'll finish this month. I'm trying to decide if I can do another nonfiction or if I need to save that for once school is out.

I keep track of everything on LibraryThing if you want to connect there.

Last week wrecked me. Nothing in particular was bad, but the whole thing just felt bad overall. I 'm finally feeling like I'm back on track with school and life things, but for a few days there, I was just hanging on.

On Monday, we were busy finishing up our unit on gases in Chemistry. We'd been hyping up the culmination - the steel barrel crush - with all of the classes. We got all of our students to come down at the end of the day only to have the demonstration not work. I'm not sure what happened, but it was kind of a big letdown. I had a few ask if I was embarressed, and I'm not, but I'm defnitely disappointed that we couldn't make it happen. It's kind of a lot to set up and coordinate and it was a bummer to start the week off with.

I'd also been struggling to challenge the web development class lately. We'd been in Javascript for several weeks, looking at ways to interact with pages they'd built, but I could tell I was losing a subset of the class. So, I took some time to back off and go back to some CSS work. We focused on grids and students spent a week building out small portfolio starter sites using grids to layout a main menu page and then to build out content pages. This class is really in the grind now and some are realizing that they don't love writing code every day. I'm glad they're sticking it out, but I needed a way to rebuild some interest.

So, I introduced a wide-open choice project. Working alone or in collaboration with others, I gave them the opportunity to design and build whatever they wanted. Luckily, I only had to change one group's direction (but not by much) and the interest and activity level picked up noticeably.

In my infinite wisdom, I also offered to help groups with server needs - if they wanted persistent storage, I would throw up a couple database routes. Two groups took me up on that, so there was a couple hours of working with them on their models and what routes they wanted available. Then, there was a group who really wanted to build a chat app. Me, an idiot who has never worked with websockets, said "sure."

The next 48 hours of my life were consumed with fighting to get a simple websocket server up and running. I started by trying to tack it into a Flask server I already had running and it quickly got into sunk cost territory. I struggled with the routing, I struggled with the application server, and I struggled with nginx. Finally, I gave up on that route, ripped it all out, and got it running as a separate service.

Going down that whole consumed my time and my thought processes. I couldn't focus on other things because I was so mired in getting this one thing to work. I really should have just let it go and asked the group to step back until I could dedicate more time to making it happen, but I chose to try and do everything. It was a bad call.

My work quality in my other classes went down. I was frustrated and tired and it bled over into other secetions. My advanced chemistry class half-did a lab that I'd been trying to put together with meager results and then kind of just floated the rest of the week. I lost out on some chances to push their own thinking becuase I fixated on the other course.

The week took a big toll on me. I left on Friday having everything running and my grades caught up, which was a huge win. I spent time tonight planning out the next two weeks before spring break for regular chemistry so I don't have to think about what's happening there. That will let me do some damage control for the advanced chemistry section and finish up their current unit strong before the break as well.

Time management has always been my weak point in teaching. I get too invested in specific projects and then I struggle to keep the other balls in the air. This year has been better (just like last year was better than the one before) and next year I'll have one fewer class to prepare, so the end is in sight. I love my job and I love my work and I really hope that this last week was the last one I'll have like it for a while.

I read a ton this month. Granted, two of these entries are comics, which is not in my normal rotation, but they were both omnibus collections, so I'm counting them as books.

Resident Alien Omnibus Volumes 1 & 2 - Peter Hogan

I started watching the TV adaptation on Netflix sometime in January and I noticed at the end of one episode that it was based on the comics. I liked the first season of the show, so I decided to check these out. The show and the comic diverge in plot, but the general premise is that an alien crash lands on Earth and has to fit in while he waits for rescue.

The comics were enjoyable and flowed well. Supposedly, there are more coming out, so the third volume may make its way into these lists. The first season of the TV series is better than the second. I have not started the third season yet.

The Feather Thief - Kirk Wallace Johnson

My wife read this and we renewed the library loan so I could read it. I vaguely remembered a This American Life episode about this story and the book goes so much deeper (the TAL episode featured the author, so he knows his stuff).

The general story is that fly fishing lures, over many many years, have been idealized by the materials you use to create them. Bird feathers, in particular, are a main "ingredient" and give the fly certain prestige. Old fly patterns rely on endangered birds. A fly-tying savant from the United States breaks into the British Museum of Natural History and steals hundreds of preserved specimens. The book chronicles the break in and the fallout after.

Tusks of Extinction - Ray Nayler

I found this more enjoyable than The Mountain in the Sea. The premise felt more plausible, so the suspension of disbelief was easier. In short: elephants are extinct, mammoths are back, and a woman's consciousness is used to do the work of restoring the population.

Human nature doesn't change - some people want revenge for past harms, others want the thrill of dominating the natural world. Ultimately, the characters are driven by their own desires and fail to see the destruction that comes as a result of not understanding the other side.

Peter and the Secret of Rundoon - Dave Barry

The third installment in the Peter and the Starcatchers series based on Peter Pan. I've been reading this aloud to my kids before bed. I felt pretty undewhelmed (again). The book was all over the place between characters imperiled in Neverland and in the fictional desert country of Rundoon.

The plot draws a little more out of the story - Peter's connection to the Starcatchers is deeper than originally thought, but there is no exploration of the meaning of that connection. It jumps from one bad situation to the next without explaining any of the significancs of the plot developments over the course of the three books.

There is one more to go and, hopefully, it's got a little more meat to it.

The Mercy of Gods - James S.A. Corey

I loved The Expanse books and I didn't know they hard started a new series. This is set in a new universe (though, there were some details scattered in that hinted back to the protomolecule and others from The Expanse) and focused on a group of humans who are captured by an invading alien species called the Carryx.

The book does not feature large scale space shoot-em-ups like The Expanse novels and instead takes a more slow-burn look at how humans react to captivity. The main cast is a group of scientists who weigh out the benefits of behaving and obeying their new captors or resisting outright. The balance between the two extremes pushes the group to the brink.

Brambleheart - Henry Cole

An easy read aloud for my kids. This was more time dependent because they're participating in a book club, so I read this to my younger kids so they could participate. The main character is trying to find his place in a community with stringent expectations. Help comes, but not in the way anyone was expecting.

All of my reading is tracked on LibraryThing if you want to connect in real time.

This week, I was talking with some colleagues about the rate of students using AI to comlpete classwork. The short story is that their students are turning to AI tools for every writing assignment, regardless of topic or genre. A stark - and discouragin - instance was a free-writing assignment where students were asked to write reviews for five of their favorite things. It could be movies, music, tech, food...anything that they found so good that they just had to tell someone else about.

Most went to AI and then copy and pasted it's thoughts.

Another teacher in the group said she had spoken to some recent graduates who said they have varying expectations in their college courses. Some professors have a blanket ban, others require students to use AI tools. I am firmly in the camp of teaching my students as they are now, not necessarily where they'll be in the future, but it really made us wonder if we're neglecting something important by not teaching students explicit skills in using the systems.

They asked how I handle AI in my chemistry classes and my short answer was that I've shifted heavily into labs this year. I don't have them doing much online research and, when I do reach for some kind of writing task, it's linked very tightly to papers which are coupled to what we're doing through instruction. I ask open-ended questions, but they're following specific procedures and protocols that are unique to my room.

Earlier this semester, we were working on unit conversions. I did a little exploration with students considering carbon dioxide release in combustion, measuring the amount of carbon released for every gallon of gas burned in cars. After we realized that we release a ton of carbon dioxide just from driving, I moved the discussion to AI tools. I taught about why it's more expensive per search than a traditional search. We also looked at water use for data centers and looked at the cost - economically - of the two data centers Amazon and Microsoft are building. Students were shocked that both companies were given billions of dollars worth of tax breaks to come and, ultimately, pour CO₂ into the air unchecked.

I've written about my discomfort because of known issues as well as some of my exploring local-only models which had mixed results (soon to be revisited). I don't think this is zero-sum where I have to jump in wholesale, but I cannot - and should not - ignore the culture shift that is happening with my students. I think my approach in the short term will be to pair up the task with a specific, targeted analysis of what LLM tools can actually do and contrast it with what students think they can do.

Here's an example:

I'm going to do a March Madness-style element bracket with classes this year to break up the spring monotonmy. If I were to ask them to research an element, every student would take out their phone and copy/paste the first paragraph from the model into their slide or whatever.

This year, I can invite them to do that - use the model to generate some information about the lethality of the element. But then, anything they use must be backed up with a citation. So, use the model to start the process, but dive into actual verification of information and make that the practice. The model becomes an assitant.

Really, what I want to teach students is that by relying on a model to gather ansewrs, it is supplanting their own voice. I want to know what they think, what they care about, what they're frustrated with. I remind my classes that answering questions and taking time to talk is literally my job. I am there to make sure they are learning, not just that they're able to find the right words to answer a question.

Copying and pasting from an AI model might get the answer right, but it's removing the most important part of the answer - their own voice. The social and political climate right now is pushing to remove voices and I want to make sure that every teenager that comes through my room has - and can use - theirs.

I was at the grocery store early this morning getting head cold care supplies. We'd managed to avoid the worst of this spring bout of sickness so far, but it caught up.

The sun was just peeking over the horizon and I heard a cardinal in the trees. I haven't heard a cardinal in weeks. They're there - they don't migrate - but I hadn't heard one in the morning since the late fall.

There was also a tufted titmouse in the distance. You've probably heard one, too. Hopefully, now you have a name to put with it.

All of the kids are quiet in bed. My wife isn't feeling well and I've found myself enjoying the quiet of the house.

I often have to resist the feeling that I should be doing something.

I think the only something that needs doing is taking these quiet moments as they come.

Toward the end of high school and into college, I developed a tase for metal/metalcore music. Super loud, really intense. One difficult part of being a metal fan is that it's kind of isolating unless you really know the other people in the room like it.

As such, I have a playlist on our Amazon music account called "Dad" which has a collection go-to bangers. My wife knows and tolerates this listening, but I don't really play it for my kids. Today, it came out, they think it's dance music.

I played about 20 seconds of "Beyond Repair" by Johnny Booth (be warned, it's intense). It started with nervous laughter and ended with, "that's enough, it's too screamy."

Good times.

I went on kind of an AI rampage during some professional development yesterday. 24 hours later, I'm feeling just as sad about how it went and more in a mindset to think things through more clearly.

Since starting to pay attention to AI, I’ve found my philosophical training kicking in. This has helped me notice that people tend to conflate things in multiple ways. I’m not immune from these, but I’m trying my best not to let them cloud my judgement.

First, we think through existing tropes that we’ve seen (e.g. ‘Skynet’ in the film The Terminator). Second, we conflate different types of AI (e.g. predictive vs generative). Third, and this is what I want to deal with in this post, we conflate different kinds of ethical concerns about generative AI.

I cought a portion of a discussion between Doug Belshaw and some others following Doug's post. The thread branches a couple times, but they're also worth reading. Doug is right and that categories of ethical concerns are more helpful for framing discussion than just "AI is good/bad." I also appreciate his point (starting here) that there is a difference between platforms and tooling.

In the end, I'm still really stuck on the environmental impact. I am by no means carbon neutral - it isn't a reality for me in my current living situation. But, I can avoid creating more problems by choosing to participate or not participate in certain activites. If (when?) the realities of energy requirements change, then I'll feel better about trying generative tools out more regularly.

New year, new books! I finished three in January and I'm on my way to however far I get in 2025.

Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void - Mary Roach

I enjoyed this book more than the other book I read by Mary Roach, Fuzz. Mary has a ton of sidebar humor thrown in and she covers a lot of the details of space travel that aren't discussed in most publications. Each chapter was dedicated to a particular facet of living in space from hygiene to bone loss in zero gravity. She quotes early astronauts (Jim Lovell and Frank Borman are frequently featured) along with the researchers and engineers who have to solve the problems that come with living in space.

Peter and the Shadow Thieves - Dave Barry

Another read-aloud to my kids, this is the second book in the Peter and the Starcatchers series. This was a sprawling book, going from Mollusk Island (Never Land) to London and beyond. Peter goes to warn Molly and her father of approaching danger and has to figure out how to navigate the dangers of London. Meanwhile, the other Lost Boys are left alone on Mollusk Island to figure out how to make do without Peter.

I don't think it was as good as the first book and several parts felt very drawn out, but my kids and I had fun reading it together.

Children of God - Mary Doria Russell

This is the sequel to The Sparrow, which told the story of Jesuit priests travelling to Alpha Centauri following music heard by SETI. I read that back in 2020, which was an emotional trip. This book was no different. Set years after Emilio Sandoz was returned to Earth, it picks up the story with a second mission of priests returning to Rakhat with Sandoz unwillingly brought along.

I started and stopped a couple times while reading it because the themes were so heavy. New characters emerge and we learn about what happened to both Emilio and the peoples of Rakhat following The Sparrow. Each of the plots wove together seamlessly and brought the entire Rakhat story to a fitting end.

Onward to February! I keep track of current and upcoming reading on LibraryThing if you want to see other books I've read and what I have coming up.

Quick note: I'm going to use AI synonymoulsy with large-language model applications through this whole post. They're not the same thing and artificial intelligence, as a field of study, has much more interesting applications that are generally ignored in the vernacular, particularly in education.

This morning, I attended some professional development that focused on artificial intelligence (ie, chatbots) in education. I ended up posting to Mastodon...a lot...

I've played both roles in this situation. I was an instructional technology coach for many years, so I understand the position the presenters and planners are in. I think, two years back in the classroom now, I have more complex thoughts on that time in my career that will show up in another post. This time, I was the classroom teacher who needed some presenters to tell me about the promise of AI.

The day was bookended with normal edtech hand waving, pretty much textbook - we started off with the "calculator moment" slide which reminded us all that calculators scared the hell out of teachers back in the day. That moved into a reminder that "AI is here to stay, so you're better off just using it" main talking point. It was tech-heavy, focusing on the tools and what they can do and the promise they hold to "change everything." The end of the day sounded like a chance to talk about more of the big picture implications, but those questions and points were either deflected ("We're not here to tell people what to do") or ignored as valid concerns for a teacher ("Yes, the environmental stuff is bad, but it helps with so many things.")

On the whole, sessions led by technology-first folks were all about efficiency, working more productively, and offloading the hard tasks like building assignments, valid assessments, and leaving thoughtful comments for students on report cards and IEPs.

Do not get me started on that last sentence.

All of the ideas shared were low impact and reduced the inflection points of human interaction we should have in our classrooms in the name of efficiency. If you can't talk to every student every day, have a chatbot tutor them til they get it right. Have students paste their story into the bot to get feedback instead of having students pair off and read each other's stories. At one point, when trying to demonstrate how easy it was to get started, a presenter said, "If you're good at talking with people, you'll be good talking with AI."

We go to school so we can work together. We build connections, we share ideas, we challenge...most of today glossed over what we lose as a result of diving in just so we're not "left behind."

All that said, my middle block was led by a split role collegaue. They teach and help with implementation. Their session began by acknowledging the difficult questions of ethical use and not just in the context of cheating. We talked about intellectual property theft, the damages caused to individuals and creatives, the damage to the environment...all of that before starting a discussion about what we've heard or seen with AI in the classroom.

Rather than assuming we need to be taught, they invided us to dialog before moving into a branching workshop where each of those concerns was addressed. There was not ulterior motive and they were prepared with complementary lines of inquiry. They planned it like a teacher and, while I don't agree 100% with their perspective, I felt invited to consider ideas.

I know I'm biased going in, but this was a real eye-opener for me since I've purposefully removed myself from edtech over the last couple of years. I'm discouraged by the overall tone of the day but I'm hoping that we can start to model what we want our students to do, especially when we're in group learning situations.

This year's stoichiometry test has come and gone with less than thrilling results. We're okay on unit conversions, but when we add that extra step of using the balanced reaction to describe ratios between substances, things fall apart.

This is a tough concept that I struggle to teach well. I don't know if more labs/hands on will help - I added one this year and I didn't see better results. Granted, we had several weather interruptions last week that preceeded the test, but even today, there are still large gaps in understanding that I need to do some digging into to figure out what is going on. My hunch tells me that is a "will" issue instead of "skill" issue for 90% of students.

There are many quotable sections in D'Arcy's retrospective on his career in education technology. A few in particular jumped out at me:

Context matters more in education than we initially assumed. A perfect learning object for one instructor might need significant adaptation for another. We learned that reusability often comes at the cost of effectiveness. And the term “Learning Object” became so genericized that it became meaningless.

The promise of having reusable content libraries, even between teachers at the same school, is compelling. But I'm often modifying or adjusting whatever I find, whether it's in the shared Google Drive folder with my colleagues or on the Internet. As they say, all politics are local, so is all teaching. I'm modifying - year over year - the materials I use with students. There is no one-size-fits-all collection of stuff to use with teaching.

But the real story was more complex. [Learning Management Systems] tend to shape pedagogy in subtle ways. Their design implies a certain model of teaching and learning - one based largely on content delivery and assessment.

I had the great fortune of learning to teach from a wonderful mentor who took advantage of early digital learning tools to make it more accessible for students. My first position also encouraged us to develop strategies for using wikis and blogs. I felt frustrated by the push to move into an LMS for coursework because I already had systems and strategies in place for those kinds of interactions.

In the next paragraph, D'Arcy concedes, "That said, LMSs solved real problems. They made online teaching accessible to many more faculty." This is on point because the burden of online teaching tools, at the time, was heavily skewed toward the non-technical teacher. I was comfortable trying new things and figuring systems out. Others either aren't comfortable or don't have the mental energy to do that prep work, which is also fine. Years ago, I felt like the LMS could be used as a stepping stone into other tools that do some things better. And that's a good thing.

If you're in education, go take time to read this.

Where Part 1 ended the story of Paul, Duke of House Atreides, and began the story of Paul, "Muad'Dib," Part 2 ends the story of the Lisan al Gaib and begins the story of a would-be God Emperor’s holy war that he’s not exactly psyched for because Chani’s right to call him out on his bullshit.

This is great take on why Dune Part Two is so powerful. It's not "true to source," but it captures the tragedy playing out through Paul. I think the film adaptations cut through all the extra stuff in the book that couldn't have made it in anyways.

In my mind, the Villeneuve version of Dune is right up there with Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings adaptations.

Something came over me this weekend and I decided to watch a bunch of movies. We had a long weekend for the Dr. Martin Luther King holiday, so Friday night, I decided to do a rewatch of Dune, Part One. I missed the theater run and watched it on one of the Big Streamers at some point. The rewatch was just as good and, after having finished the book again in 2024, I think the movie holds up really well.

Saturday night, I decided to watch Godzilla Minus One. I remember getting the original Godzilla movies growing up from the public library, so there was a bunch of nostalgia in this for me. I watched it in Japanese with subtitles turned on and it was definitely the way to go. The acting was amazing and I was fully bought into the story.

Sunday night, I re-watched Dune, Part Two. I saw this one in theaters back in April (that was an experience) and I wanted to watch it in closer proximity to finishing Part One. I had forgotten about how well the second part shows Paul's descent and I think the conflict plays out exceptionally well through Chani's story. The ending left me feeling really sad because there is no real path to redemption. I also read Dune Messiah last summer and I'm curious how that particular story will make its way into the (rumored?) third movie.

The artic air settled over us on Monday night and school was cancelled on Tuesday. Feeling melancholy over the other events of January 20th, I decided to watch Oblivion because I had a vague memory of seeing it, but not remembering any of the story. It was a good escape and, pleasently, I did not remember the main story twist, so it was fun.

This is the most I've watched in such a short period in quite a long time, but it was fun to just watch the stories play out. On the other hand, they started to put me in a mood and I've had a hard time focusing on other priorities, so I think that will be it for this time around. Maybe next year, I'll do it all again.

We're neck deep in unit conversions in chemistry and we've come to that bridge, yet again, where we have to wrestle with stoichiometry. Converting between units has gone better this year because I introduced with some models using common units like dozens, grosses, scores, and others. They counted beans, did their multiples and partials, and were able to get to the mol (I'll always leave the "e" off) without too much of a problem.

But then, we got to chemical compound conversions using balanced equations. Every year, this is where we come to an impasse for some students.

In the past, I've used the "mol island" metaphor and associated diagram to help make sense of the conversions that are happening to get from A to B:

Each year, moving from mols of A to mols of B is the hardest part, by far. The idea that you can convert between substances is hard to capture and, really, I should probably develop a new lab to help with the concept, but this year, I don't have time to at the moment.

This year, they're also struggling with procedure recognition - understanding where they are in a given process compared to where they need to go. I started tinkering with the idea of a flowchart, similar to how the old Holt Mini-guide to Problem Solving book models it:

This is nearly the same as my version, just less circley. I needed to do something different, and I ended up with this version:

I wasn't really planning on using it with students this year, but on a whim, I threw it on the board today and most of the class immediately asked for one to put in their notebooks.

I'm not sure what it is, but the yes/no questions along the way help them with the step-by-step processes needed to make it through a conversion, more than the island chart did. I think the connection between the questions and following the path to finish is providing an almost tactile interaction that is helping link ideas.

It's definitely a crutch, but I've always been more interested in teaching processes over fact retention. I think this is a better tool to help them approach novel situations and, with repeated use, they'll start to rely on the diagram less and less.

Frankly, this was born out of frustration and is more or less a happy accident. I'm hoping results actually pan out when I start to assess the skill formally next week.

I've struggled to efficiently grade web dev projects this year. Github Classroom is kind of a pain becuase I need to go to each repo individually and students are struggling with the git workflow. I decided to take that out for now. The next best method is to have them zip project files and then submit the zipped archive that I can extract. It was still a lot of clicking between folders.

Then, I realized (finally) that I can just extract the directories into one parent folder and run Python's built-in HTTP server. It makes clicking around the projects much easier and I can pop open the source tab right in the browser. No more opening and closing files between apps.

I wish I'd thought of this back in September.

I don't normally do blog challenges, but I got pinged by ~hyde with the call, so here goes:

Why did you start blogging in the first place?

I don't remember a specific thing that got me started. My first post talked about students and learning and technology, so it was probably something I heard during a professional development at school. This was my first year teaching and the school was pretty technology-forward, so I was doing a lot of exploring. That early writing is pretty cringy as I read it 15 years later...

My writing really beagin in earnest in 2011 after attending an education technology conference and getting connected to other teachers through social media and blogs.

What platform are you using to manage your blog and why do you use it?

The current version of this site is built with Pelican, a Python static site generator. I've been using this for a little over a year now becuase I moved from a shared hosting provider to a Linode VPS and I needed to cut down on resources. I tried WordPress at first, which is what I had been using for many years, but this new host only has 1GB of RAM and a static site made more sense. I also don't do enough shared writing or management to really necessitate a full CMS.

Have you blogged on other platforms before?

I had a brief stint of running my site with Jekyll in 2018. I also had it running on Anchor CMS a few years before that. I still miss Anchor.

How do you write your posts?

I have a private git repo that I use to sync posts between machines. Pelican turns Markdown files into HTML when the site is generated. I use Helix to write and git to push to the repo. A pre-receive hook on the server extracts the new files and rebuilds the site on each push.

When do you feel most inspired to write?

It depends a little on the week. I've done some work to make short posts easier to publish and I'm trying to make that more the norm. I tend to think about teaching the most because it's what I spend most of my day doing and I'll often chew on those posts for a couple days before actually starting to type. I don't know that I ever have a "fully finished" idea before publishing because this site works best when I use to to process my thinking rather than "publishing" my thinking.

Do you normally publish immediately after writing, or do you let it simmer a bit?

I tend to publish right away. If I have a change of heart, do more thinking, or expand my ideas, I'll either edit the post and note the update or I'll just write a followup post. I don't keep drafts around because if it's not enough of an idea to write it out, I don't need to worry about creating a backlog for myself.

From time to time, I will mark a post as "scheduled" to publish at a later date, but that's pretty rare. More of a nice to be able to do than something I reach for.

What's your favorite post on your blog?

Alan Levine asked a very similar question on his blog, asking which post was a contender for best post. I read it in November when he published it and the tab is still open on my phone becuase I will, someday, go back and comment.

I don't really know. Maybe this one?

I think some of my best writing is the life stuff. Not so much the thoughts on schools or tech, but the post about the time I had to fix a bad car problem or the other time I had to fix a car problem.

I don't think I can pick a single best post, but I think I can say, 15 years, in, that my Life category is my favorite collection now.

Any future plans for the blog?

I've got a couple things I'd like to do, like auto posting new articles to other places and making this the first place of sharing rather than jumping to social media. I want to write more about life stuff and tell more stories of living simply.

Who will participate next?

My fedi circle is pretty small still, but I'd like to see a post from Chris, Alan, and Tom mainly becuase I always make sure to read what they write when it pops up in my reader.