Thoughts on Education – 3/15/2012 – What is college for?
I can’t help but start today with a response to an article that I discussed in my last education post. The original article had students talking about what they didn’t like about the lecture format. This one has professors responding. I will be honest that the professor responses are quite underwhelming in my opinion. I don’t know if it is a result of editing that makes the professors less compelling than the students or what. In fact, the best response that I saw there was in the form of a PowerPoint, but the editing of the video made it impossible to read the PowerPoint fully in the time allotted for it. However, when paused, the best points are there, and they largely mirror the ones that I would make. That is, the the failure of lecture is the fault of both the instructor and the student. Since the fault of the instructor has already been raised, I’ll focus on the student side. Students are raised in our educational culture to see education as both something they will be guaranteed basic success at with not that much effort and as something that is a nuisance and waste of time. That combined attitude is hard to combat in a semester course, when the student is one of many sitting out there in a semester class. As well, when they get to college, most students have not encountered the straight-up lecture format before, and it is simply foreign. As the PowerPoint points out, the students are encountering a different form of education for the first time, and they are being asked to adapt to it. However, our current educational structure is so student-focused that the students are not expected to adapt anymore. They should be catered to completely and not asked to leave their comfort zone. When the students encounter the lecture format for the first time in college, they have gone through a life of having their own educational styles catered to over and over, and so their reaction to the lecture is what you would expect. They want what they want, not what we want. What is interesting about this is that I will repeatedly stand up for the right of myself and fellow instructors to grade differently (usually harder) and assess differently, but I am willing to explore different methods of content delivery because the students aren’t responding. I wonder why this is. I have made my own comments here about the lecture format, and I guess that’s it. I do agree that the lecture format is broken, so I have much more tolerance for trying something new.
Of course, what all of this leads into is the bigger question of what college is for. A couple of articles have passed through my Evernote on this topic as well recently. It always helps when the current presidential candidates are talking about it, as that leads to a number of related articles scattered throughout the news sphere. This one from The Washington Post tries to address this broad issue. I have been reading Michelle Singletary’s commentary on personal finance for a while, so I would have read this one even without the educational focus. She sets up the standard two sides of education here, asking, “Is college a time for young adults to just enrich their minds, or should students use that time to concentrate on a major that will prepare them for a career?” She comes solidly down on the second motivation, pretty much dismissing the idea that college should be a time to take whatever classes you want, get whatever degree you want, and just explore. Her point is primarily financial, which makes sense as she is a financial correspondent. She believes that the financial cost of education these days means that students do not have the ability to learn for the sake of learning and need to be focused on what they can get for their education. She does not completely dismiss the idea of education for education’s sake, but she definitely comes down on the side of a practical education. I can’t say I disagree, but I certainly did the opposite. I don’t think I ever got a practical degree, and I feel lucky to have looked for a job and gotten one with my MA in History just before the recent financial collapse. My wife is just finishing up a BA in Art History, and we are currently trying to figure out what to do with that. So, I can understand. It is also at the root of why so many of my students ask me what they have to take history, as they see no practical use for it.
I just have to note this article from The Washington Post as well. It is from the Class Struggle blog on their site, and it gives a nice historical look at the idea of college. As Jay Matthews notes, “The outpouring of college student support after World War II fueled the unprecedented surge of the U.S. economy and its education system. This would be a good time to remember that before we start slipping back.” He notes the challenges facing the idea of college education all around, with Obama pushing more students to enter college, while Santorum is saying we should not. Matthews points out that we see a similar discrediting of education for all that was also seen just before the big push from the GI Bill. He warns us to remember that the benefits of education always seem to vastly outweigh the cost. I am never explicit about this when I teach my students directly. I do, however, always try to talk about the idea of education to my students and to place the education they are getting into a broader context for them. I hope that I do that reasonably well, but I know I could do more. I wonder at what level I need to be doing something like this, talking more about college in the historical sense. I know that the students generally don’t get much direct discussion of the value of college, so we would probably do well to talk ourselves up.
I’m going to close here, as the next article I want to talk about probably needs its own post. Just as a preview, this is the article I want to discuss in some detail. Your homework – read it ahead. OK, just kidding, but it is quite interesting.
Thoughts on Life – 3/13/2012 – Buying a house
We have made a big decision. We are looking to buy a house. My wife (ok, girlfriend when we started) and I have decided it is time to stop renting and time to get in a house. There are a couple of reasons for this.
- First, we really do not like the place where we live right now. This apartment complex is tolerable at best. We are surrounded by loud neighbors, and this has been true of whatever neighbors live there, as the turnover is high. The maintenance level at our complex is also really low, and has been for a long time. This means that everything is old, most of it has been patched together multiple times, and many things break every year. So, we have to put up with them coming in over and over and not fixing things over and over.
- Second, this apartment is just expensive on our budget. Yes, I know a house will be expensive too, but it will feel less like flushing money down the toilet with no chance of improvement ever. Right now, though, the money is hard to justify, especially considering the condition of the place. Plus, everything is exactly the opposite of energy efficient here, and we could hopefully rectify this in a house.
- Third, we can actually afford a house big enough for us right now. Yes, there aren’t a whole lot of 4+ bedroom, 2+ bathroom, 2250 sq. ft. + houses out there for under $150000, but there are some. That was not true not that long ago, but the housing prices have dropped far enough for buying to be a realistic option for us.
So, I have now scheduled our first viewing of a house we are interested in. Oh, and, yeah, we have no idea what we are doing at all . . .
Thoughts on Education – 3/11/2012 – What is broken in higher education?
I’ve taken some time off as we begin Spring Break here to get some of my own stuff done. We are doing a big clean out around the apartment, as we are probably going to move out of out apartment when our lease is up, and it would be nice to move a lot less stuff. I also sat down to start our taxes this weekend. Other than that, I’ve been trying to do “other” things, such as catching up on magazine/free reading, going through paperwork, and such things like that.
On my plate also is catching up on some of the articles I’ve been saving up. I’m trying to group them into themes, and today’s theme is articles that talk about what’s wrong with higher education today. I’m going to hold off on my own opinion here to open this post, as that will come out as we move along here.
The first article I came across is this one from the Chronicle of Higher Education. At its center is a YouTube video that talks about why students think that the lecture is a failing model for education. Three big points that come out of it, I think:
- First, they talk about lectures being boring, especially those where the professor simply reads off of the PowerPoint. This is undeniably true, and not just for students. I have been to enough conferences and presentations where this same thing was done to have experienced it myself many times. Solution? Well, we certainly could use some training for how to teach/lecture. Also, professors just need to care more. If that’s what they are doing, then it’s hard to call that really teaching. I imagine, however, that a lot of this is exaggeration on the part of students as well, as I know there are many students who would be dissatisfied/bored with anything that they were told they had to do, which would include listen to a lecture.
- Second, a comment that resonates with me is the one about attention spans and the 90-minute class. While we don’t have 90-minute classes at my community college, we certainly have mostly 75-minute classes. When the average human attention span is 20-25 minutes at the outside, we are asking even the best and most dedicated students to do something unreasonable if we expect them to sit and pay attention to a lecture for 75 minutes at a time. Yet, I do that very thing every day I’m in class.
- Third, and really the comment that stood out to me the most, one students said that they are told over and over to think outside the box, yet the ones who never seem to innovate are their own professors in their teaching styles. Yup. Can’t say anything more than that is spot on.
A second interesting article also addresses these concerns. In “Why School Should be Funnier,” Mark Phillips discusses the uses of humor in the classroom. I think that we do too often take the view that classes and college are serious, important things. As he says in the article, he’s not talking about throwing in a few jokes but about really seeing the absurdity of the situation we are put in. I address this regularly with my class, as I am very open about the failures of the lecture model and how the fact that they are expected to sit here and pay attention for all this time through the semester is, to a certain extent, absurd. My students (I hope!) appreciate it when I give the sly asides, the knowing winks, the “real reason you need to know this,” and all of the other things that I try to do to keep them engaged and going in a format that encourages torpor and boredom.
A third article focuses on the problems of who is driving educational reform. In this case, the experts are pulling us forward to the future. Educational reformers rely on educational experts to tell them what they should do to fix things. Usually, these experts are located outside of schools, connected with specific political ideas, and intent on fixing one part of the system at a time. In each of these cases, we end up with a failure of reform. I have not been asked much about what I think works or not, that’s for sure. In fact, the one group that usually does ask me what works or not are the textbook publishers. I hear from multiple publishers all the time who want me to tell them what is working and what doesn’t. Yet, as you move up the chain of administration or outside of my college completely, I have yet to have any input on the reforms coming down to me. It does always blow my mind every time I see the next thing coming through, and I have to wonder who thought that up. Perhaps we need a revolution from below to fix things.
To close today (yeah, I know, not a long one today, but I am on vacation . . .) is an article about the path of college from The Huffington Post. In it, the author brings together multiple different studies to talk about something very important when considering what is broken in higher education. At the heart of it, we still have an assumption that college works as a straight line, where you graduate from high school, pick a college, go to it, and graduate in four years. Even at a community college, we look at that same thing as the norm, with just the detour of a community college first. I must admit, that is exactly what I assume still as well, despite the evidence in front of my face every day. The reality is that students start, stop, transfer around, switch degrees, leave for 15 years, have kids, hold multiple jobs, get sick, take care of sick family members, join the military, drop out, etc. To shove everyone into that little box of four-year completers is just stupid, when you get right down to it. And, our funding at the college level is dependent on that completely. We fail a student if we can’t get them out in 2 years for community college and 4 years for college. Yet, how many people really do that? How many want to do that? Our funding levels depend on a myth of college completion. Our assumptions about how to teach and advise students works on this myth. Our assumptions on who a student is and what he or she should do in our classes rests on this myth. What is broken is the way we do things. What needs to be fixed is the way we do things. While it is easy to blame the students for that whole list of things that I said up there, the reality is that the students are going to be that no matter what. We have to figure out how to adapt to it. And the people who give us the money to be able to do this had better get it in their heads that just because we can’t say that 100% of our students graduated from our community college in 2 years, that does not mean that we are failing.
Thoughts on Education – 3/9/2012 – Using technology in the classroom
I’m going to try and get back to some of the education issues that have been coming through my Evernote lately. I’ve got quite a backlog over the last couple of weeks while I have been grading, so I should have plenty to write about over the next week or so. Today, I want to concentrate in on the general category of technology in the classroom, as I have been accumulating quite a bit on that recently. Of course, the recent Apple announcements and developments are relevant to this as well.
I’m going to start here, with a general article about what teachers think in general about the use of technology. As the article itself says, the results are not particularly surprising, but I will put up the general infographic here, as it illustrates what I think is not too far off from what I see, especially among the younger faculty.
I hope that you can click on that to make it bigger, but the basic message here is that the majority of teachers surveyed thought that technology in the classroom would help both the learning of the students and their engagement with the material. In fact, the two questions that refer back to the older “technology,” namely textbooks, got the lowest Agree responses and the highest Disagree responses. Again, I don’t think there is anything surprising at all about this, but I wanted to start here.
In a similar vein is this article from The Washington Post, which discusses how textbooks are failing to engage our students and help them learn. He notes that textbooks are not effective at engaging students because that is not what sells textbooks. We don’t choose a textbook (me included) because I think it is going to be some sort of magical panacea to solve all of the problems for my students. Instead, at least in history, we look at them primarily in terms of coverage. Which textbook covers the material we want to cover is more important than which textbook students will like. In fact, I have often found that if you talk to a group of instructors about choosing textbooks, the textbook that is most likely to be appealing to students is often dismissed out of hand as not being what works for us as instructors. So, there is a fundamental disconnect there. My feeling about this is echoed in the article as well, where one teacher is quoted as saying, “Even when adoption committees include content specialists, these people typically evaluate the accuracy of the content, rather than whether the instructional strategies are effective.” In fact, the author quotes another educational administrator, who noted, “The educational community was quick to respond to the (legitimate) criticism of textbooks but quicker still to adopt their horrific replacements: excessive use of lecture, worksheets, movies, poster making, and pointless group work.” We are flailing around as far as I can see. I feel like that myself, where I am just trying so many different things all the time without ever knowing what I’m doing. That’s why I’m doing this, so that instead of trying new things at random, I am trying to plan things out. Anyway, there’s a lot more to this article, and I do recommend it as very interesting reading when we think about how the old technology options are failing us.
And, when I read this article from the Chronicle, I saw myself and how I use technology a lot of times. Unfortunately, I don’t mean that in a good way. As it says, in online courses, especially at the community college level, “the professors are relying on static course materials that aren’t likely to motivate students or encourage them to interact with each other.” While I get a lot of compliments from students about the way my course is organized, I know that I use few real tools, and I certainly do not effectively encourage interaction in my classes. The article goes on to talk about a study where the results came from. That study concluded: “It found that most professors relied on text-based assignments and materials. In the instances when professors did decide to use interactive tools like online video, many of those technologies were not connected to learning objectives, the study found.” I certainly would say mine fits this completely. My course, is completely text-based. There is little to no video or interaction in my own materials. I have adopted some from McGraw-Hill that I use in conjunction with my textbook, but that is actually in a completely separate classroom from my own in Moodle. While the article does note that technology is again not a panacea to solve all of these problems, I think that in the online environment, a failure to be innovative in technology will cause the students to treat the course as a chore to get through. Of course, I may just be thinking some fairy-tale thoughts here that a student could really feel completely engaged by an online course, but I think I could do better.
As we think about the future of technology in the classroom, there are a lot of directions it could go. I’ve been exploring some of those in this blog as I have gone on here. I am trying to keep current on what’s going on out there, and trying to see what ideas might work for me. This article from Mind/Shift talks about the future of technology in the classroom. The article considers the near, medium, and long term forecast for technology. In the near term they consider mobile apps and tablet computing as the center piece of where we are going. We certainly are thinking about that at my community college. The faculty work group that I’m on has been given iPads to explore and the task of finding apps that can be used in the classroom to enhance learning. As well, we will be buying classroom sets of iPads to use. So, nothing new there based on what I have seen. The mid term is going to be gamification and the use of data to influence education. I have also been exploring gamification in this blog, so I guess I’m right on top of that topic as well. As to the use of data, if the big assessment push we all seem to be on is any indication, I think we’re already on this path. I don’t know how far it will go, but it is certainly a trend that we are involved in. The longer term is going to include gesture-based computing and increasingly ubiquitous connections to everything. I certainly agree that those are both technologies that could come into play. What is interesting about the article though is that the so-called future of technology in education includes little that I’m not already engaged with. I guess that means that instead of looking to these things to come out in the future, I need to figure out how to use them now and just get on with it.
So, where am I going with this. Still thinking, but moving along. I want to incorporate technology, and I want relevant change. I don’t want change for the sake of change, as I feel like that is what I have been doing for quite a while here. I think that more is needed, which is why I keep working on this blog. I need real change that comes with solid thought and evidence behind it. It will still be an experiment, of course, but I would like it to be an experiment that is directed in a productive manner. So, I shall keep thinking and planning. It’s hard to do more in the middle of the semester. Let me know what you think? Those of you who teach, what are you thinking of doing? Are you looking to change something? Those of you who do not teach, what would you like to see?
Thoughts on Teaching – 3/8/2012 – Comparing sections
Hey all,
OK. So, I really wanted to post to say — I’M DONE! My first massive grading session is done. I have divided up my class this semester into 3 sections, which means that, at the end of each section, I have a large amount of grading to do. I just finished the first one. I’m, of course, the crazy one for assigning so much stuff, but I have this crazy idea that students should do a significant amount of writing in the classes they take. I have the students write at least 1750 words for me (in several different projects) at every third-way point through the semester. So, if you want to consider it that way, I am basically an academic masochist, because I am, of course, the one who has to grade all of that. Still, crazy as it all is, I believe that what I am doing is right and that what I am doing is helping my students. They might not agree, but very few students like doing the assigned work anyway.
I will say that I was generally pleased with how the assignments worked out overall. This last bit that I just got done grading was a total experiment. I just assigned the first take-home exams since I’ve been at my community college. I had no idea how it would go, and I think it went reasonably well. They did have to submit the exams to turnitin.com to try and curb cheating. Still, I did have to report 4 students for cheating on them. Otherwise, I definitely was pleased with a lot of the results that I got. Some were not good, as you would expect, and a certain number of people simply didn’t do them at all. But I got a solid third of them that were actually well written and well reasoned all the way through. I consider that to be pretty good.
But what I set up here as the topic of the day is one of those weird things that all of us who teach (or have been in class) know, that all sections of a course are different. I know this is nothing new, but I felt like I needed a topic today, and not in the mood to go look at articles after just finishing up grading today.
Personality
Certainly, the section personality is one of the first things that I notice. Every section has its own personality, whether that be outgoing, shy, argumentative, accepting, humorous, depressing, apathetic, or whatever. Each has a personality that stays relatively steady through the time that I teach it. The only thing that does change the personality sometimes is if one or two people have really set the personality for the section and those people stop coming. But sometimes the personality is not keyed on any specific people and can be determined by the room, time, subject, or even my own level of energy at that time of day. I do think that instructors have as much to do with it as the students. If I’m giving the same lecture over and over, the class that generally gets it first is going to consistently have a different experience from me than the one that gets it on my third time.
The students have a lot to do with it as well. The gender ratio can have a lot to do with it, as a majority-female class has a different personality than a majority-male class. However, considering how the gender ration is skewing more and more female these days, I have a feeling that the personality of sections is going to be more and more female driven. Where students sit has a lot to do with it too. If you have a class where everyone sits in the back, you’re going to have a less engaged class in general than one where everyone sits up front. The more who sit at the sides and nearer the door, the less interaction you’re going to get. If the outgoing and engaged students sit front and center, they can raise the energy level of a class. A long classroom is easier for students to hide in than a shallow, wide one, leading to totally different interactions.
I have yet to figure out how to figure out the personalities of online sections in general. The only time I had an online section with a personality was one semester where 3-4 people tried to create a rebellion against my teaching and expectations. They didn’t get much support from the rest of the class, but that was a trying class that semester. For the others, online students are often so disengaged that it is hard to get a personality out of the section.
Academic Level
Another interesting difference in sections comes in the grades and completion rates. You would think that student entrance into sections would either be random or that a certain type of student would pick you, but with the variance of sections, I know that not to be true. Just to take this most recent grading session, here are the differences:
- First half of American History online – only 2/3 completed the most recent assignments, but the ones who did performed very well
- Second half of American History online – 7/8 or so completed the most recent assignments, but the results were scattered all over the place as far as grades go
- Second half of American History Mon/Wed sections – 3/4 of the students completed the assignments, and the majority did well on the assignments
- Second half of American History Tues/Thurs section – less than 1/2 of the students completed the assignments, and the grades were the worst
The strange thing about that is how it links up to the personality of the sections. The online sections don’t have much of a personality, but the first half section has some of the highest performing students I’ve seen in an online class in a while. Out of my hybrid classes, I definitely have the most fun in the TR class and find them to be the most engaged, but the fewest of them are doing the assignments and those who do are not doing them well. The MW sections are mixed, one being a 40-person section and one being a two-way video section with 15 in the room and 5 on a screen. The larger section works fine, but it always gets my first lecture, and it can be a bit slow going at times. The two-way video section is awkward at best. The students in the room are fine, but I never feel that I can reach the students who are accessing me over the video link.
Engagement
I know I’ve used engagement several times already, but this really is its own category as well. The variance between sections can be huge. I’ve had classes where they all seem to be paying attention to ones where I can’t get eye contact from anyone at all. I wish I knew what it was about the dynamic of the classes that affected engagement specifically, as I would do everything in my power to affect that directly. There’s nothing better than an engaged class. Not only is it an ego boost (and who are we kidding, as that is important), but it really makes me feel like I’m doing my job well. Any secrets out there on this one?
Anyway, those are just some ideas I had off the top of my head here. I’m pretty brain-fried here from all of the grading. I’ll be back to a more normal blogging schedule for a while now until the next set comes in.
See ya!
Thoughts on Teaching – 3/4/2012 – Ending another grading weekend
Another grading weekend comes to a close. I entered the weekend with the goal of grading 70 exams. I had 16 in my first half of American history online class and 54 in my second half of American history online course. I hit my goal and got all of them graded. It was a two-essay exam, so I graded 140 essays over the course of the weekend. They weren’t bad overall, with the first half essays being really good. Of course, the sad thing about them is that there are 30 people signed up for the class with only 16 of them even taking the first exam. So, I lost 14 before I even got to the first major grading assignment. The second half class was more mixed in results, but I had some really good essays out of it.
It is interesting to see how this works this semester, as this is the first time that I have done an essay-only exam. Usually there are multiple-choice as well, but I have become more and more disillusioned about multiple-choice and whether it really tests much of anything. So, this semester, I decided to cut the multiple-choice cord and jump into essay only. I am pretty pleased with the results, as I don’t see anything too different in the overall results in grades. It does highlight those who do not put in any effort more, as you could hide behind the multiple-choice before this point, whereas now if you have not prepared for the essays, you will not do well. So, I think the experiment has been a success. I’ve tried so many different ones, but this is the first time I’ve really come out of an exam and felt that the people who knew the material did well and those who did not did poorly. If a test is not supposed to test that, then I don’t know what it’s worth.
I have an even bigger experiment in my last sections of grading. My hybrid class exams were take-home exams. They were also two-essay exams, but they had a week to work on them and turned them in to turnitin.com. I’ll get my first look at them when I start grading that part tomorrow. So, I’ll report back to you on that.
Thoughts on Health – 3/2/2012 – Diabetes check-up
I had good news today from my recent doctor visit. The results came back from my blood and urine tests, the first one since I have gotten my diabetes under control. I don’t have all of the numbers, as they were supposed to email them to me, but I have not received them yet. What I can say is that I was given a clean bill of health at this point. I asked about some of the numbers, and my non-fasting blood glucose level was 111, which is just fine for middle of the day with no fasting and after lunch. My a1c level was 5.5, which is actually great. It is supposed to be under 7 to be considered under control, so that is also a very good number. All of my other levels seem to be ok, as the nurse said there was nothing else there to worry about at this point. Until I see the numbers specifically, I can’t report anything more than that, as I need to look at the iron numbers and cholesterol, but apparently they are not at any sort of alarming level.
So, what that all means is that what I have been doing to try and control my diabetes is working. My combination of diet and a bit of medicine has dramatically changed my blood glucose levels, as they were over 350 before I started anything. I just checked, and for the last 90 days, my blood glucose average has been 104, and I average between about 95-100 on my fasting checks in the morning. All of that seems to be right on target from everything I have read. I have had a few spikes, but nothing serious at all, and I have not had any particular lows either, as I have been good at making sure that I keep everything going well.
I guess what that means is that I’m doing well so far. Good news.
Thoughts on Education – 2/28/2012 – Blogging in the class
I’ve been meaning to do this post for a bit, but my grading has distracted me from other things.
I attended a webinar last Thursday on the subject of blogging in the classroom. It was led by two authors of blogs and attended by several others running blogs in the classroom. In this case, the focus was history, and I found the fantastic blog Teaching United States History through the chat. We bounced around ideas among the 15-20 people active in the webinar, and I found it productive and academically stimulating. The primary discussion centered around how blogs could be used and how they could be evaluated as part of an assignment. I can’t say we came to any profound conclusions, but I enjoyed the time there and hopefully have made some contacts in the broader blogging community out there. I wish I had more time to devote right now, but I’m just able to get out these short posts right now.
So, here are some of my thoughts on blogging.
- As I’ve been exploring the “flipped” classroom idea, the question keeps coming up of how to evaluate the students. Weekly quizzes are an obvious way to get the students to do the work, but I’ve never really felt that quizzes truly evaluate much more than basic recall. LearnSmart through McGraw-Hill is a bit better, but at its heart, it is still a quiz. I also don’t really want to get weekly papers from the students, as I’m the one who then gets to grade them. So, something ongoing like a blog could be ideal.
- There is a danger with a blog that is not well defined. I tried wikis that were worked on over the course of a semester, but 90% of students did them all at the end of the semester. If I did not have weekly requirements for the blogs, most students would not do them until the last minute. And, if I have weekly requirements, then I’m back to grading something from every student every week.
- I like the idea of an informal blog for the students. It would be required but be open ended in what they write. But then, would they post well? Would I get what I want out of them, or would they turn into a busywork exercise of the students?
Just a few things I’ve been thinking about. What do you think?
Thoughts on Teaching – 2/27/2012 – Continuing to grade
OK. I know. An instructor starts a blog, and what does he write about? Grading. But then, when grading hits, it is all-consuming. I don’t do any outside reading. I isolate myself either in my office or back in the back bedroom. I do the basics necessary otherwise. And yes, again, I grade late into the evening. I didn’t even finish all that I wanted to grade this evening, but my eyesight was getting bleary and my typing was getting clumsy, so I decided it was time to stop.
The grading is proceeding well at this point. I can’t say much more than that, really. Just wanted to check in, but the bleary eyes and clumsy typing fingers are still here, so I will close.
Thoughts, Ideas, Ramblings, and Other Things 