A Case of the Sundays

To tell the truth, I don't mind Mondays. It's time to go back to work. I'm resigned to that fate. And since once I'm at work I'm trapped there for ten hours because there's only the formality of a 80-mile one-way walk home through a frozen wilderness and the likes of Terreton and Mud Lake keeping me there, I'm fine.

But some days, it's Sunday evenings that get me down.

I'm still home, church is over, dinner is done and we're settling into an evening of relaxation. Then it hits me: I can't stay up late tonight. I have to go to be early so I can get up at 4 am to get ready for the bus. Huh. The letdown starts.

Same thing used to happen to my Dad, so that's probably where I get it. He and Mom would sit on the porch behind the morning-glory vines, watching the sun set and listening to the noises of sprinklers, cars, children, and the singing birds. Dad would let out a big sigh. Only one night did we ask him why.

"I have to go to work in the morning," he'd say. This from the man whose life and virtue was work. Rarely missed a day to illness, only missed days when the rain or snow made it too mucky to lay brick, and there were plenty of foul days he went to work anyway, just because that's what you do on Monday mornings. No cases of the Mondays allowed, either.

I have a life much easier than my father's, so I shouldn't get down in the mouth as Sunday evening approaches. But still, the melancholy is there.

Read in 2009, and A Bit on Social Networks

First of all, I'm getting a bit smarter about this. Last year I obliterated the "Read in 2008" list without preserving it. No great loss, of course. But to there are no regrets, here's the list from 2009, which is going away today:

• Atomic Bazaar, the; by William Langewiesche
• Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco, by Bryan Burrough and John Helyar
• Because of Winn-Dixie, by Kate DiCamillo
• Beggar Queen, the; by Lloyd Alexander
• Bel Canto, by Ann Patchett
• Chuck Amuck, by Chuck Jones
• Colour of Magic, The; by Terry Pratchett
• Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, A; by Mark Twain
• Daisy Chain, The; How Borrowed Billions Sank A Texas S&L, by James O'Shea
• Dave Barry Turns 50, by Dave Barry (natch)
• Disney's World, A Biography, by Leonard Mosley
• Doctor Fischer of Geneva, or The Bomb Party, by Graham Greene
• E-Learning by Design, by William Horton
• Eragon, by Christopher Paolini
• Erewhon, by Samuel Butler
• Eric, by Terry Pratchett
• Everything You Need to Know Before You're Hijacked, by Dan McKinnon
• Feet of Clay, by Terry Pratchett
• Flying Dutch, by Tom Holt
• From the Holocaust to Hogan's Heroes, by Robert Clary
• God's Smuggler, by Father Andrew, with John and Elizabeth Sherrill
• Going Postal, by Terry Pratchett
• Goldberg's Angel: An Adventure in the Antiquities Trade, by Dan Hofstadter
• Great Escape, The; by Paul Brickhill
• Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society, The; by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows
• Gulag Archipelago, The; by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
• Hiroshima, by John Hersey
• Imperial Earth, by Arthur C. Clarke
• Jingo, by Terry Pratchett
• John Paul Jones, by Samuel Eliot Morison
• Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, by Susanna Clarke
• Light Fantastic, by Terry Pratchett
• Making Money, by Terry Pratchett
• Maria Looney and the Remarkable Robot, by Jerome Beatty, Jr.
• Mirage, by Howard Fast
• Monstrous Regiment, by Terry Pratchett
• Moon-Spinners, The; by Mary Stewart
• Nemesis: The Battle for Japan, 1944-45, by Max Hastings
• New Freedom, The; by Woodrow Wilson
• Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting Along in America, by Barbara Ehrenreich
• Nixon: A Life, by Johnathan Aitken
• Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe, by Graham Allison
• Online Education: Global Questions, Local Answers, edited by Kelli Cargile Cook and Keith Grant-Davie
• Peanuts: The Art of Charles M. Schulz, edited by Chip Kidd
• Peter and the Starcatchers, by Ridley Pearson and Dave Barry
• Phantom of the Opera, The; by Gaston Leroux
• Real Peace, by Richard Nixon
• School for Scandal, The; by Richard Brinsley Sheridan
• Schulz and Peanuts, by David Michaelis
• Sentinel, by Arthur C. Clarke
• Sourcery, by Terry Pratchett
• Telling the Truth, by Lynne Cheney
• Thud! by terry Pratchett
• Tortilla Flat, by John Steinbeck
• Unseen Academicals, by Terry Pratchett
• Wanderer of the Wasteland, by Zane Grey
• We Die Alone, by David Howarth
• Wizard's Hall, by Jane Yolen
• Wolfling, the; by Sterling North

This year, just to shake things up a little, I'm going to track the number of pages read. I don't know why this information is important, but as long as I'm tracking author and title, one more bit of information won't overload, now will it?

On to the social networking thing: I think I know why Facebook is winning the war. They're everything to everybody. You can either go there and put up photos and blog posts and play games and such, or take all of the crap you've got scattered across the Internet and pool it all in one place, from Blogger to Flickr to Twitter to -- and I'm still exploring this -- even boring your friends with your musical tastes and samples of, say, Burl Ives singing "Look At the Donut, Not the Hole." If that isn't a bit of vital social information, I don't know what it is.

So then comes the question: Which social networks do I keep up with? Good Reads, I have to confess, is on the brink of being dumped, not because it isn't useful, but because it's not necessarily social. I can brag about the books I'm reading well enough on Facebook and my blog and get the same kind of social interaction. Of course, you get out of these things what you put into them, and I've not put much into Good Reads as of late.

I should. It's a good site. But it just hasn't reached that critical mass, must-have for me yet.

Kind of like Uncharted for many, many people. It's there. But it's not yet one of those sites you absolutely have to visit every day for fear of missing something. That'll give us something to work on this year.

Start of the Silliness

Blogger's Note: This is the introduction I've just written for a paper I'm writing, in which I will outline my pedagogical basis for building an online public speaking course (which can be seen here).

Allow me a little facetiousness, because I may have found my teaching philosophy summed up in a cartoon. Specifically, “A Tale of Two Kitties,” a Warner Brothers Merrie Melody from 1942, in which two cats (modeled after the comedy team Abbott and Costello) try again and again to catch and devour an anything-but-helpless little bird – Tweety in his debut.

Babbitt is the teacher. He spends a lot of time using various tools to help and encourage Catsello to try to “get the bird.” From climbing a ladder to get the bird to being shot up to the bird’s nest either by explosives or a jack-in-the-box, Babbitt encourages Catsello to use familiar tools and a portion of his own wit to capture Tweety, who represents that goal of both teacher and student – a valuable, pedagogically-sound learning experience.

And though I am no teacher, and though I realize I have as much to learn about teaching as Catsello has to learn about hanging about on a wire when Tweety wants to play “This Little Piggy Went to Market,” I believe the course I have built, “Communications 101: Public Speaking, Everyday Speech,” adequately applies the theory of constructivism, along with scaffolding and a learner-centered focus, to create an environment in which I as the teacher can help students apply their current knowledge to learn and apply new skills. That does not mean I have built the perfect course – far from it. I know I have much to learn. But because this course relies on a pedagogical foundation to support its use of technology in helping students apply their current skills and knowledge in the realm of public speaking, I believe I could successfully convince administrators at the University of Idaho to let me teach this course.

Here's the video. I hope I've proved my point: