Something I like to assign occasionally in class are 2, 3 or 5 minute free writes. So while the students were scribbling last night, I thought I'd do it too. Here is what I wrote:

Before class I was going from the education building to campus center. Don't students understand keeping right? Well, they didn't act like they knew -- they practically knocked me down as they streamed through the open door, the one on their left but my right, in their rush to get to class. I didn't want to get jostled or worse, have my foot stepped on, so I waited there until it was clear, but it must have been at least a dozen students who ignored me, did not let me through and also did not make any effort to open the door on their right! I finally was able to continue, but I felt pretty glum, to tell you the truth.

But on my way back from the bookstore (where I was buying cards for all the April birthdays in my family), a young man came up to me and said, "Are you Professor Giuliani?" (I said yes, even though my name is spelled just a little different from Rudy's). He shook my hand and said he has signed up for my class in the fall. Made my day! (He had "A" written all over him.)

Spring break is over and the countdown to end of semester begins. In faith formation on Monday, we celebrated spring even though it doesn't feel like it out there! The lesson focused on The Parable of the Sower. The art print was "The Flower Seller" by Diego Rivera, the saint handout was about St. Fiacre (Patron Saint of Gardeners), we studied the world map to locate France and Mexico, read the parable and the handout, and planted tulip bulbs and pansies in the flower pots. Snack was apples with caramel dip. Only two classes left in AY '13-'14, hard to believe. When we told them, the kids were disappointed that it will be over so soon. Last two weeks will be our culminating project, stay tuned!

Being a faculty member is a "good gig" for me, as I like to work independently. But there are occasions when support from someone else is helpful. Such is the case with finding academic materials. It's possible to locate whatever is needed without turning to others, of course, and that's my preference most of the time. However, when it comes to textbooks, there are incentives for publishers to sell their books, and no shortage of sales reps who (allegedly) are eager to lend a hand.

Not true. I have never been contacted by (or found on my own) a competent book sales rep. It isn't that I never hear from any; I am contacted all the time. But no matter the publishing house, the rep invariably disappoints. Check off another today! Sigh. Maybe it is a crummy job and so the rep puts in little effort, I don't know. That's really no excuse, though. Update your linkedin and get back to work, OK? On my own once again I guess.

Added: This has absolutely nothing to do with the rest of this post, but I didn't feel like creating a new one. I used to be somewhat interested in world and national events. Somewhat, not a news junkie by any means. I think that might have been before 9/11 and turning 40, both of which changed me.  Anyway, I find myself fascinated by the missing jet mystery. I've written before about my talent for detective work here.

Today I entered a writing contest. That's something I haven't done in a long time. There will be a ton of entries, of course, and I don't expect to win. But (I tell myself) the payoff is in the writing, and that really is the truth. I expected to spend today grading essays, and instead I spent the day writing. I'm pleased I resisted my tendency to put every task associated with "earning my bread" high on my priority list, while promising to write once each line was crossed off. The problem is that I run out of steam, and writing has to wait another day, when new priorities surface and claim top positions.

I'm referring to "serious" writing (though at times it is humor), not what I do here most of the time. I manage to find time to write here (almost) whenever the desire strikes me. But serious writing is different, it isn't journaling. With serious writing, although it often comes to me in a burst, I craft every sentence, contemplate every word and study every comma. I listen to the voice to find just the right note.

"It's spring break after all," she said. Was that an excuse or a challenge? "Others are increasing their carbon footprints so they can lay on beaches." I deserve my guilty pleasure.

Tomorrow's faith formation theme is St. Patrick. We're going to study the art print St. Patrick by  Jan Tillemans (1955, stained glass window at Basilica of Our Lady of the Cape Shrine in Quebec), read about St. Patrick and watch a couple video clips, find Ireland and Britain on the map, make rosary beads and learn (some of) the rosary, and have shamrock sugar cookies for snack.

On March 13, several students from both classes emailed me in the morning, worried over road conditions. Although classes weren’t delayed or cancelled, the cold, icy & snowy conditions (and that St. Patrick’s Day break was looming) persuaded me that this was a perfect opportunity to use Collaborate.

In the afternoon class, what was on the agenda was handing out and explaining an assignment to prepare for a classroom activity on March 27, and small group meetings, where students work on presentations they will give on April 22. 10 (of 22) students logged on at 1:15, one appeared late in the class, and another emailed me later to say she'd tried to log on, but was unsuccessful. I did not hear from the other ten students. I used audio to explain expectations, and powerpoint to share the assignment (which is in PDF on blackboard as well). This took 15 minutes. Only one student used the mic while in the main room, the others used text chat. A couple added emoticons etc. to my powerpoint on the whiteboard.

I then sent them to breakout rooms. There are 5 groups in this class. Group 3 had full attendance (4 members), Groups 1, 4 and 5 had 2 members each (out of 4 or 5 members). Group 2 had no members present, except for the student who came very late. The group with full attendance had a lively conversation (with audio, video, white board) and they stayed until 2:30, when class is always over. One of the other groups, with two members, also stayed until 2:30. The remaining two groups stayed for a while, then exited.

For the 4:15 class, the syllabus has a one hour video, a half hour lecture, small group and all class discussion (it’s a 3 hour class). 10 students (of 26) logged on at 4:15 (several were there at 4, right after I finished setting up). One more came late. Two more emailed later to say they tried, but were not able to log on.

I knew I couldn’t show the video, but I asked them to watch it before next class (3/27). I still gave my ½ hour lecture and showed my powerpoint. The midterm was due last night, and after my remarks, a few students asked me questions about that assignment, using both audio and text chat. There are also 5 groups in this class. Every group was represented (one by one member, two by three members, two by two members) but I just divided them into two groups of five (the 11th student came too late) and had them develop discussion questions. When they came back to the main room, each group wrote their discussion question on the white board, and we had a discussion using audio and text chat.

One group developed a question about the delivery method, web conferencing and collaborate, one developed a question about last night’s material. It was outstanding! Very reflective and enriched. Class ended at about 6:30 and I think would have been willing to go until 7 (but my dogs were getting antsy and so was I).

In both classes, students here & there would suddenly vanish, then reappear, always reporting technical issues. One student in the 1:15 class was in the library, and sound had been disabled, so he could not hear my remarks, but he did use text chat when in the breakout room. I emailed the 4:15 students to warn them about the library computers, but after class received emails from two students using library computers that have sound enabled who could not log on. (No matter how many times I remind students to test things and contact the help desk, they invariably email me when it is too late.)

One student in the 4:15 class commented that his roommate was sitting on the bed, marveling at him participating in class, wishing he had this opportunity.

Attendance in both classes was much less than it would have been on campus, but there is always a lot of absence the Thursday before a break. I recorded both sessions and put the links in blackboard.

All in all, both classes were fairly successful. The design of the 4:15 class was probably more suited to this delivery, mostly because it is hard to make progress on the presentation assignment without at least 75% of the members. But I couldn’t just switch the agenda, as I had promised them this time for the project, and at least one of the groups was able to use it effectively.

I learned from the 4:15 class that it is quite possible to have a good all-class discussion this way. In fact, there may be fewer distractions than in the classroom, and as a result it was quite in-depth. There was no social pressure from the slackers for the speaker to “shut up.” Of course, these are self-selected groups of 10 – it is possible they are the strong students & if the others were shed from the roster the class would improve dramatically no matter how it is delivered.

A commonality I notice with both 10 year olds & college students is that they get up and leave the room for 5 minutes or so constantly. For the little kids, it is ostensibly to go to the bathroom, and they always ask first. For college students, I have no idea, but I suspect it is to check their phones. Why is it young people can't sit still for an hour without needing to pee or wash their hands or send a text?

Faith formation tonight will focus on St. Kateri. We're planning to look at the art print "Kateri Tekakwitha" by Robert Lentz, find Fonda on a NYS map, watch a slideshow of pictures Robert Schmidt took at the Auriesville Shrine the day of Kateri's canonization, read tha play "Lily of the Mohawks," make mosaic wood crosses, and have cornbread with maple syrup (made by my brother) for snack.

 Our samples

 St. Kateri

I went to a scholarship event yesterday in the science library, and came across the Great Dane Project.

I planned to write a post about journaling in public for the past 12 years. I thought I'd review my "most popular posts of all time" and craft something. But nothing jumped out at me, except "I wonder why these are the most popular?" So I didn't come up with anything.

After "baking in the sun" (or freezing in the snow), my comments about the Gully Brook Press experiment are that my participation and engagement in the online world has shifted. At first I read a lot of other personal blogs. I was never much of a commenter, and the 6-10 daily reads shifted over the years, from blogger-recommends in the early days to national A-listers in the middle years, and then to locally well known a few years ago. At present I read the personal blogs of others only occasionally.

I have spent very little time promoting Gully Brook Press over the years. I have not been interested in generating hits or links or fostering a commenter community. I have continued to write here, for myself and the others who visit, sometimes less, sometimes more, and I have never announced I was taking a hiatus, or taken one quietly. I have not changed the name, or very often, the look of the blog (and I have used blogger for all 12 years). The website design has changed three times, due to being forced to use different hosts (AOL to verizon to google).

Since 2009, when I started using facebook (I joined it a few years before, but didn't start using it until my 30-year high school reunion), I've spent more time in the social network, than at Gully Brook Press (both the blog and the website). I don't use facebook to promote GBP, but keep them separate.

It has served the purpose I intended in March 2002, which was to give me a place to post published works, and to write a journal. I wasn't sure whether I would abandon the journal quickly or eventually, as I have with every other journaling tool since I was big enough to pick up a pen. Well, I guess after 12 years you might say this has been the most successful of all those endeavors. It doesn't, and can never match Elwyn's diary in consistency, but it has been a rewarding effort for more than a decade. Bravo Gully Brook Press.

Today is the 12th anniversary of Gully Brook Press!

I can't believe it is this cold on the last day of February! There is no let up in sight, so March will be coming in like a lion. The cold is what's most memorable from this winter, but it looks like another snowstorm is on the horizon too. But Spring will surely come eventually!

Yesterday was Rosie's 2nd Gotcha Day.

Since I'm all about equal opportunity

Once again, I have had some pent-up things to post but just haven't gotten to it until today. In faith formation (where the kids have been awesome after the email about their behavior a couple weeks ago), I brought in the Bible I used when I was in catechism to show them. One boy looked at the battered little New Testament of the Jerusalem Bible and asked incredulously, "how old are you?" I laughed and said "I'm 52." "You're old!" he said. "Yes, I am old," I responded, "and believe me, you will get there someday. It seems like only yesterday I was your age." He won't understand this for many years, but maybe someday he will remember and it will resonate as the wisdom of elders often does.

I gave both my foundations classes a talking to about their use of electronics in the classroom, and that how apparent it is that they are not reading (the latter was mostly directed at the evening section). The evening section was perfect afterwards. In the day class I still had to call out a few students for nonstop texting, but on Thursday they shaped up.

We did an exercise called "the five most important events in American educational history" that I started using last semester, inspired by this website. The activity is similar to the new fad known as "flipping the classroom." Students individually do a scavenger hunt through this comprehensive online resource to find their five, then work in groups of 4-5 to come up with consensus lists that they write on the board and present to class. At the end I suggest events that might be missing. (Yesterday I added the Old Deluder Satan Act, the Morrill Act, the GI Bill.) Students are engaged by it and it works really well.

Twenty-one years have gone by since then, but they have had absolutely no effect upon my spiritual constitution; they have left not a single trace upon it; on the contrary, I seem to feel several years younger than I felt then. When a man reaches fifty, age seems to suddenly descend upon him like a black cloud. He feels immeasurably old—very much older than he is ever to feel again, I am sure. I doubt if any person ever crosses his fiftieth parallel without experiencing what I have just described. (Mark Twain, 1906)

There has never been a time in the past thirty-five years when my literary shipyard hadn’t two or more half-finished ships on the ways, neglected and baking in the sun; generally there have been three or four; at present there are five. This has an unbusiness-like look, but it was not purposeless, it was intentional. As long as a book would write itself I was a faithful and interested amanuensis, and my industry did not flag; but the minute that the book tried to shift to my head the labor of contriving its situations, inventing its adventures and conducting its conversations, I put it away and dropped it out of my mind. Then I examined my unfinished properties to see if among them there might not be one whose interest in itself had revived, through a couple of years’ restful idleness, and was ready to take me on again as amanuensis.

As I have mentioned recently, I am currently reading volume 2 of Mark Twain's autobiography. Every sentence is a gem. What an insightful way to capture the inspiration that fuels creativity: amanuensis.

 Gina Loves Mark Twain (2007)

I started this post last Tuesday, but didn't get back to it until eight days later. Snow, snow, snow absorbed a lot of time! But what was on my mind was the Mark Twain autobiography. It's a continuous source of joy. I was up to August 31, 1906 in volume 2 at that point.

I am just ticked by a couple of things I've read recently. First, he talks about writing as amanuensis. That the person is just holding the pen, and the words flow out; it isn't laborious at all. It is just transcription, the "writer" is just an effortless pass through. He believed when writing isn't like this, one must stop, let it brew, until the process naturally starts up again.

Next, he writes about going to Onteora for a visit. On October 9, 1906 he wrote:

Onteora was situated high up in the Catskill Mountains, in the [centre] of a far-reaching solitude. I do not mean that the region was wholly uninhabited; there were [farm-houses] here and there, at generous distances apart. Their occupants were descendants of ancestors who had built the houses in [Rip Van Winkle’s time], or earlier; and those ancestors [page 251] were not more primitive than were this posterity of theirs. The city people were as foreign and unfamiliar and strange to them as monkeys would have been, and they would have respected the monkeys as much as they respected these elegant [summer resorters]. The resorters were a puzzle to [them,] their ways were so strange and their interests so trivial. They drove the resorters over the mountain roads and listened in shamed surprise at their bursts of enthusiasm over the scenery. The farmers had had that scenery on exhibition from their mountain roosts all their lives, and had never noticed anything remarkable about it.

This article from the Chronicle made me think about how this money is being wasted in some cases. I am so thankful that this semester is the last one I will be teaching my Tuesday evening foundations class. It's a shame, really, as for many years it was my favorite section, but for the past couple of years, it has been nothing but trouble, and this semester is shaping up the same, sadly.

It isn't large (16) this spring, and I was hopeful that would make it better, but unfortunately that might make it worse! When there is a large enough proportion of students who are not engaged and put in little effort, there aren't enough average and serious students to dilute them, and it ruins the class.

Last night five students didn't show up, and I estimate that half of the students present had not done the reading. They were unresponsive, sat with their heads down, a couple texting on smartphones, others typing on laptops. I had an image of the prepared and participatory students harnessed and pulling a rope, hauling the millstones along. If it drives me crazy as the instructor, I can only imagine how the good students feel.

Are the slackers borrowing money for this? Are their parents giving them a free ride? Either way, they should not waste the money or time. Go get a job in retail for a few years, grow up and come back with some direction and work ethic.

Another rant. I've written before about the campus center dining situation being ruined after Aramark landed the contract in 2013. A few weeks ago I decided to give it another try, and was pleasantly surprised by a salad line (called something like "sticks & stems"). I discovered I could get a custom-made side salad for less than $3, or with avocado, less than $4.

So yesterday I ventured over there again. The line at Sticks & Stems was ridiculous, so I strolled (limped, lol) around to see if there was anything else appealing. Answer: No. The one place I tried was out of hummus. Is all students eat hot pretzels, subs, pizza, bagels and sushi?

I waited on the long Sticks & Stems line. Out of spinach. Wiped out of most other veggies, such as cucumbers. No blue cheese dressing. Salad wound up being half as much as last time I went, in other words not worth $4 or even $3. I will not be going again, I hope aramark improves or at least loses the contract next time it is up for bid.

Suction cups for the suncatchers came

A public service message brought to you by Rosie & Harry: "Boycott the Olympics."

I meant this to be "III" yesterday, but ran out of time. This is immoral, evil, disgusting, horrifying. I am boycotting not just the Olympics, but all thing Russian, forever. I will not stay in a business that is broadcasting the games, I will tell anyone who tries even the briefest mention of the Olympics to me of my outrage.

I. In faith formation last night, we focused on the Sign of the Cross. We read about its significance, studied the painting "Christ on the Cross" by Barthelemy d'Eyck (15th Century) and made these stained glass (actually plastic) suncatchers.
I was pleased to see this week and last (when we looked at "Four Corners of the World" by Pablo Picasso (1952-54) and read about St. Sebastian), they have learned something unexpected from being in class with us for 1.5 years. The minute they get a handout with graphics on it, even when the image is simply decoration and not part of the formal lesson, they immediately start analyzing the artwork with reactions about what they notice, how they feel, speculation about what the artist meant, and questions.

II. I've read a lot of Mark Twain's writing. I really mean a lot. Currently I am reading Volume 2 of his autobiography. It's such a treat when I stumble across an entry I haven't encountered before! But something is bothering me. Ever since I started to read a lot of his work, I've noticed that the "scholars," those folks who write the introductions and "make their bread"* from being experts, invariably assert that Susy was his favorite daughter. I always found this surprising. True, some people have favorites (although shouldn't) but most people do not, or if they did, they would certainly hide it.

 I had a hard time believing it could be true, but what did I know? At least that was my thinking. Now that I am into Volume 2, and encountering previously unpublished writings, I call BS. They have no clue what they are talking about. Unquestionably he was fond of his eldest daughter, why wouldn't he be? And of course she died as a young woman, which was a terrible blow. But I see not a shred of evidence to support the ridiculous claim of "favorite."

* thanks to Mr. Twain, he loved this phrase