Lily

I spent last weekend in Las Vegas, visited with friends Mike Pearson, Marc Pitchford, and Donna McKay, and spent time with my family (mom Ruth, sister Jane, John, Allison, Vincent and Lily). All are doing well. Of course the most enjoyable time is with my grand niece Lily. It is strange to go from Carson City where it is late fall to Las Vegas where it is still late summer, with 20 degrees Fahrenheit higher temperatures. I visit Las Vegas about every six to eight weeks. It is always a culture shock, I will never get used to Las Vegas even though I grew up there, but at the same time it is always great to see family and friends.

Lady Fern with fall color

I had a great three day backpack trip in the Granite Chief Wilderness, enjoying fall colors and doing some exploring of abandoned trails.

Check out my trip report on Granite Chief blog at http://granitechief.wordpress.com/2009/09/27/powderhorn-2009-09-23/

Today is fall (autumnal) equinox, the day on which night and day are of equal lengths, one of the quarter-days of the year. Of course the seasons trail the official days as the earth heats up and cools down more slowly, and so the beginning of fall is often celebrated by the cross-quarter day Samhain in the celtic/gaelic calendar, which evolved into Halloween in our current calendar, October 31. I notice that days are still summer-like, but mornings are fall-like. Though my tomatoes are still producing, the vines are looking a little wilted. Last Wednesday when I headed up to Incline Village, some of the aspen trees were turning and there was a yellowish cast to all the vegetation. It is a good day to stop and reflect on the year, as are all the seasonal dates of the year.

Dan & Teralyn Dancing

Dance Awakening at Harbin Hot Springs is one of the greatest contra dance camps around. The story of the dance is: dance, soak, eat, hike, and repeat as needed. The place is wonderful, the staff (musicians and callers) are wonderful, the dance organizers (Kelli and Shane Butler) are wonderful, and the dancers are just a whole lot of fun. The dance staff this year was caller Rick Mohr and The Figments, Anna Patton, Will Patton, Ethan Hazzard-Watkins, and Owen Morrison. The catered food is great. The hot springs are in a canyon in the coast range, between Clear Lake and Napa Valley, with a system of trails up to and along the ridges.

As a substitute teacher, I get a chance to see more classrooms than regular teachers do, and in most cases more than administrators do. I see what works, and what doesn’t, and I have strong feelings about schools and teaching. I believe that John Dewey laid out much of what we need to know about education over 100 years ago, but our schools systems have largely gone off the path he illuminated. He believed that a major purpose of schools was to produce good citizens, and that students developed citizenship skills by experiencing and practicing those skills rather than ingesting pre-determined knowledge.

I’m thinking I should really write up my educational philosophy again, but until that happens, here are some resources that have significantly influenced me.

Stop Homework – I believe that homework should have to do with the relationship between home and school, and not be used to extend the school day into the home. If homework brings home school learning to the family, or brings the knowledge and experience of the family back to school, great. Otherwise, I don’t see any place for it.

Responsive Classroom – There is simply no better resource in my experience for creating caring and academically successful classrooms than the books offered by Responsive Classroom. I hope to someday take one of their trainings.

Project Citizen – A way to involve students in community issues while meeting academic goals.

Cathryn Berger Kaye – The Complete Guide to Service Learning book and her workshops have changed the way I teach and the professional development I offer.

David Sobel – All of David’s books have influenced how I teach, and much of my effort in education is to bring David’s ideas to the classroom and to school systems. I use Place-Based Education: Connecting Classrooms and Communities as a resource every week. I’m reading Childhood and Nature: Design Principles for Educators right now.

Richard Louv – Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder brought all of these ideas up to date in parent and teacher friendly language, and has transformed the way we think about school, though not yet how we practice school.

And on the negative side of things, there are scripted reading programs. The worst of these is Success for All, but the others are not much better. These programs are premised on several tragic ideas: reading must be broken down into parts – as it whole it has no value; curriculum writers know more about teaching and learning than do teachers; reading is supposed to be entertaining but not meaningful; reading can be taught with materials that are content free. These authoritarian scripted programs do not allow students or teachers to vary from the routine, in fact in many schools teachers are punished for being off the schedule during reading time. The materials would seem familiar to my generation, which was mis-taught with Dick and Jane books. Does it work? Yes, it increases test scores, at least for about two years, after which they begin to decline again. Why would scores decline after a time? Because scripted reading programs teach students to hate reading. They are bored with it, they find no personal reward in it. In middle school I continually see the result of SFA programs – students who hate reading, who would never carry literature with them in school, who show up for silent reading periods without a book. Sadly, more than half of the students feel this way. Talking with students about why reveals that they feel this way because they were forced to read boring and irrelevant books in lower grades. They’ve crossed reading off their list of interesting activities, and that is as sad a result as can be.

And for yet another hat to wear, I’m the Safe Routes to School (SRTS) Coordinator for Carson City School District for the 2008-2009 school year. I’m actually contracting with Sierra Nevada Journeys for the work. Three schools received grants for engineering, education, encouragment, enforcement and evaluation (the 5Es) – Seeliger ES, Fremont ES, and Bordewich Bray ES, so those are the schools that I’ll be primarily working with, but to a lesser degree the other three elementary schools and the two middle schools. SRTS is a program that encourages kids to walk and bike to school, and to identify concerns of parents that prevent kids from walking and biking to school and to solve those concerns. I’ve created a website to keep track of the program at http://srts.raincloudpub.com/.

the gorge on Five Lakes Creek

I’ve spent most of this summer backpacking, and that mostly in the Granite Chief Wilderness. It is my current favorite place in the world. As the fall comes, I’m broke and happy. As a result of spending so much time in the Granite Chief, I decide to start a website and blog on the wilderness, at http://granitechief.org/ and http://granitechief.wordpress.com/, respectively. I noticed as I tried to find out more about the wilderness that there isn’t nearly as much information as for many wilderness areas. There is no official wilderness map, no official guidebook, and no extensive sources on the Internet. This is the first summer since I was a wilderness ranger in the Gila (1983-84) that I’ve had so many nights out.

I’ve also been working on some environmental education projects, helping to plan the Tahoe Watershed Tours that occurred in August and now working on the Tahoe Environmental Literacy Summit that will occur October 11.

With the school year started again, I’m substitute teaching a little, but that starts off slow as teachers are reluctant to miss days early in the year.

This last week, after a three day backpack trip in the Granite Chief that finished off my exploration of all the trails, I attended the Echo Summit Dance Weekend at Camp Sacramento. Two days of contra dancing, incredible music and strong calling, wonderful people from all over California and beyond. Ahh!

I hiked on Sunday with Joe Herbst and Howard Booth in the Bowl of Fire area, off the North Shore Road of Lake Mead NRA. This was the first time the three of us have been together in… well, not sure, but well more than 10 years. I see Joe at least once a year, and Howard at least twice a year, but this was a long-overdue reunion.

We drove up Callville wash to the end, then hiked around and through the Bowl of Fire, and back to the car. The day was perfect, blue skies, warm temperatures with a breeze that kept it from being hot, and none better company.

Photos on Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/allisondan/sets/72157600004707642/

Our first real snow of the winter, about six inches in the valley, a lot more in the mountains. It is blue skies today, a good day to be out, but I’m mostly working.

On the Presidents’ Day weekend I got out for a three day backpack in the Sierra foothills. Walked out my door to Ash Canyon where I slept overnight beside the creek, then climbed up the ridge to the south, and over to Kings Canyon past the waterfall, then up the road that snakes towards the ridge to the south, and along that ridge to the west saddle where Kings Canyon Road (the old Lincoln highway) crosses from Kings Canyon to Clear Creek, camped there, and back home on Sunday.

Highlights were the lone pine that sits on the ridge between Kings Canyon and Clear Creek, which is visible for miles from certain angles, and is a bonzai-like tree about 20 feet tall. Probably very old, though not large. The closest other trees are a half mile further west on the ridge. The top of the ridge, to the south of the saddle, is also a really cool place, flat, with large pines and rocks along the outside edge to sit on an stare off into space. The weather was pretty amazing, 56 degree Fahrenheit on Friday, with a little spatter of snow early Sunday morning. Very pleasant for backpacking.

Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/allisondan/sets/72157600004892629/