January 2012
27 posts
Adam Sandler - I Wanna Grow Old With You
♬: Share a song that takes you to a certain memory in the past.
Describe yourself.
I grew up, moving from home to home. Actually, house to house. There never was a “home” for me. My parents didn’t make much money. My mom was one year into college before she found out she was pregnant. She became a stay-at-home mom. My dad couldn’t obtain his high school diploma. So he started working in the upholstery business because it was the only thing he knew how to do. His father had taught him everything—all the tricks and fundamentals—of how to make anything. My dad built all of our furniture, fixed all our cars, and remodeled the entire house they currently reside in. He is extremely talented and I’ll say that exact same thing to anyone who asks.
My parents took care of us. But it wasn’t easy. If you didn’t know, the upholstery business could only take us so far sometimes. We had trouble with rent. We had trouble with bills. Sometimes we even had trouble with food. I can’t tell you how many times we had to pack up and leave, selling all our belongings (no matter how personal or sentimental) in order to gather a small portion to get us into our next house. By the time I was 10, I thought I already experienced all of “life’s struggles.”
When I was 15, I didn’t live with my parents for a while. They moved to a different state again. At the time, I wasn’t being reasonable. All I cared about was staying with my friends. What I really thought in my head was that I was tired of my family and the way we were. We weren’t solid. I didn’t move back in with them until almost a year later. Even then, I didn’t realize how foolish I was. I didn’t feel even one spec of remorse for leaving my little sisters. I hadn’t even realized how long it had been since I last saw my parents’ faces. They aged in the short amount of time I wasn’t there.
The year I turned 16, my mom had a miscarriage. None of us knew if it was a boy or girl. I wish I knew. With four kids, two adults, and only our clothes, we moved back to California during that winter.
It wasn’t until I started my first year of college.. I can’t explain exactly what happened. It was as if I crossed over this imaginary line. I left behind a selfish, immature person. The year we moved back was the year my mom was diagnosed with diabetes. I guess.. I felt a sudden need to take care of the family. I wanted to erase this guilt inside, the guilt of being a horrible and ungrateful daughter. I spent that first year of college balancing school, taking care of my sisters, and keeping the house in order. 2010 was possibly the most difficult year of my life so far. Friends were too much to handle and relationships were too hard to keep. I guess without the distraction of friends, work, or a boyfriend, I grew to love being a part of the family.
But here I am, back to where I was when I was 15. I’m living in a completely different state. Sometimes, I feel like I moved backwards in life. Sure, I had some personal reasons to be over here. But there were no reasons to be away from my family. I always wonder how they’re doing on a day-to-day basis. The only comfort I have is knowing my dad is now a huge success. He started off with a small workshop he built in our garage and now.. he’s designing shops for business entrepreneurs and franchises. I’m proud of him. His years are a lot wiser than mine. My mom is hanging in there. She’s still being superwoman, taking care of four kids even with two of them in a different state.
My mom is the reason why our family survived through the years. She kept us on track. There wasn’t a skipped day of school that went by without her nagging us about our futures. And who else has the tenacity to keep my dad in check? Being a mother is not easy. You have a weight on your shoulder that you carry for the rest of your life. My mom is the reason why I’m living so freely with no direction. It’s ironic since she’s the one pushing me to pursue a career path. I guess.. the reason why I haven’t decided what I wanted to do yet is because I look at my mom and see infinite possibilities. I can be dwelling at rock bottom but there’s always hope that life will run it’s course and eventually collide with something happy.
As random as this is, I decided to write about my mom today. This post is dedicated to her.
The Dancing Shutter.: La Jolla Cove Engagement Shoot // Keone Madrid & Mariel Martin →
dancingshutter.tumblr.com
Before I flew back out to San Francisco, I had the pleasure of shooting Mariel Martin and Keone Madrid’s engagement photos. These two were the funnest, weirdest, most perfect madly-in-love couple I have ever shot. It was definitely at the top of my favorite photo shoots lists. They made the…
☀: Share a turn on.
“Falling in love consists merely in uncorking the imagination and bottling the common-sense.”
I adore men who capture me with words.
☹: Share a turn off.
One of my biggest turn-off’s would be smoking. “I’m not saying I wouldn’t give you a chance. It’s not you…”
It’s the cancer-causing death smoke of horror.
If you were a nice, genuine guy who was respectful of my distaste in smoking then sure. I’d give you my time of day. I wouldn’t judge you at all. Just know that I’ll always have a tiny squirt gun in hand as soon as you light one of those cigs.
✓: Share something about yourself others might think is weird.
When I’m settling into bed, I have to tuck the sheets under and around my feet because if I don’t.. the paranormal activity ghost will pull me out and eat me :(
❁: Share one of your insecurities.
One of my biggest insecurities, surprisingly, does not associate with my looks. It used to be.. until this one big head told me he loved and appreciated my flaws. My biggest insecurity now would be my personality. More specifically: my willingness and tendency to be outgoing. I’m always on edge or scared that I’m too boring. Especially around my best friends who are all completely opposite of me. In a big crowd, no one will turn to me to start the conversation. I’m more of a nod and listen along kind of person. Don’t get me wrong. I can carry a conversation.. there just won’t be a guarantee that it’ll be a fun or interesting conversation. I have to try really hard to talk when I meet new people. Sometimes I’ll say stupid things to make them laugh. Or even a fake laugh. At the end of the day, though, that’s just how I am. I’m pushovery nice and will do my best to make my friends and family happy. But if that’s boring then.. shiet, screw you.
When an adult took standardized tests forced on kids →
washingtonpost.com
wow and oy!
This was written by Marion Brady, veteran teacher, administrator, curriculum designer and author.
By Marion Brady
A longtime friend on the school board of one of the largest school systems in America did something that few public servants are willing to do. He took versions of his state’s high-stakes standardized math and reading tests for 10th graders, and said he’d make his scores public.
By any reasonable measure, my friend is a success. His now-grown kids are well-educated. He has a big house in a good part of town. Paid-for condo in the Caribbean. Influential friends. Lots of frequent flyer miles. Enough time of his own to give serious attention to his school board responsibilities. The margins of his electoral wins and his good relationships with administrators and teachers testify to his openness to dialogue and willingness to listen.
He called me the morning he took the test to say he was sure he hadn’t done well, but had to wait for the results. A couple of days ago, realizing that local school board members don’t seem to be playing much of a role in the current “reform” brouhaha, I asked him what he now thought about the tests he’d taken.
“I won’t beat around the bush,” he wrote in an email. “The math section had 60 questions. I knew the answers to none of them, but managed to guess ten out of the 60 correctly. On the reading test, I got 62% . In our system, that’s a “D”, and would get me a mandatory assignment to a double block of reading instruction.
He continued, “It seems to me something is seriously wrong. I have a bachelor of science degree, two masters degrees, and 15 credit hours toward a doctorate.
“I help oversee an organization with 22,000 employees and a $3 billion operations and capital budget, and am able to make sense of complex data related to those responsibilities.
“I have a wide circle of friends in various professions. Since taking the test, I’ve detailed its contents as best I can to many of them, particularly the math section, which does more than its share of shoving students in our system out of school and on to the street. Not a single one of them said that the math I described was necessary in their profession.
“It might be argued that I’ve been out of school too long, that if I’d actually been in the 10th grade prior to taking the test, the material would have been fresh. But doesn’t that miss the point? A test that can determine a student’s future life chances should surely relate in some practical way to the requirements of life. I can’t see how that could possibly be true of the test I took.”
Here’s the clincher in what he wrote:
“If I’d been required to take those two tests when I was a 10th grader, my life would almost certainly have been very different. I’d have been told I wasn’t ‘college material,’ would probably have believed it, and looked for work appropriate for the level of ability that the test said I had.
“It makes no sense to me that a test with the potential for shaping a student’s entire future has so little apparent relevance to adult, real-world functioning. Who decided the kind of questions and their level of difficulty? Using what criteria? To whom did they have to defend their decisions? As subject-matter specialists, how qualified were they to make general judgments about the needs of this state’s children in a future they can’t possibly predict? Who set the pass-fail “cut score”? How?”
“I can’t escape the conclusion that decisions about the [state test] in particular and standardized tests in general are being made by individuals who lack perspective and aren’t really accountable.”
There you have it. A concise summary of what’s wrong with present corporately driven education change: Decisions are being made by individuals who lack perspective and aren’t really accountable.
Those decisions are shaped not by knowledge or understanding of educating, but by ideology, politics, hubris, greed, ignorance, the conventional wisdom, and various combinations thereof. And then they’re sold to the public by the rich and powerful.
All that without so much as a pilot program to see if their simplistic, worn-out ideas work, and without a single procedure in place that imposes on them what they demand of teachers: accountability.
But maybe there’s hope. As I write, a New York Times story by Michael Winerip makes my day. The stupidity of the current test-based thrust of reform has triggered the first revolt of school principals.
Winerip writes: “As of last night, 658 principals around the state (New York) had signed a letter — 488 of them from Long Island, where the insurrection began — protesting the use of students’ test scores to evaluate teachers’ and principals’ performance.”
One of those school principals, Winerip says, is Bernard Kaplan. Kaplan runs one of the highest-achieving schools in the state, but is required to attend 10 training sessions.
“It’s education by humiliation,” Kaplan said. “I’ve never seen teachers and principals so degraded.”
Carol Burris, named the 2010 Educator of the Year by the School Administrators Association of New York State, has to attend those 10 training sessions.
Katie Zahedi, another principal, said the session she attended was “two days of total nonsense. I have a Ph.D., I’m in a school every day, and some consultant is supposed to be teaching me to do evaluations.”
A fourth principal, Mario Fernandez, called the evaluation process a product of “ludicrous, shallow thinking. They’re expecting a tornado to go through a junkyard and have a brand new Mercedes pop up.”
My school board member-friend concluded his email with this: “I can’t escape the conclusion that those of us who are expected to follow through on decisions that have been made for us are doing something ethically questionable.”
He’s wrong. What they’re being made to do isn’t ethically questionable. It’s ethically unacceptable. Ethically reprehensible. Ethically indefensible.
How many of the approximately 100,000 school principals in the U.S. would join the revolt if their ethical principles trumped their fears of retribution? Why haven’t they been asked?
Worth it to read the whole thing!
Multiple choice tests are bullshit. Nothing is as simple as A, B, C or D.
♡: Make a confession.
I have never watched one full Star Wars or Lord of the Rings movie. Sorry, world. Just not that interested at the moment.
✌: Share a childhood memory.
When I was 5 or 6, my sisters and my cousins on my Dad’s side were pretty tight. We hung out with each other and played violently all day. We basically declared Anthony, my oldest cousin, the king. Whatever he did or wanted us to do, we did. So.. one day, they all went rollerblading. At the time, I didn’t know how to roller blade. That or.. I think I was too scared to. So instead of being nice little kids and waiting for me or playing something else, guess what they decided to do?
Put me in the metal trash can and place the lid on top -__- That’s not even the stupid thing. I stayed in the trash can until my mom found me. HAHA, good times<3
