When Bella moved from daycare to kindergarten last year, I truly believed that we could make the public school system work for her. My parents did it for me, advocating with the school district to find me the additional challenges that I needed and always making sure that I was in the right place and was not bored. We started with asking the school to evaluate her for first grade, and we should have known something was wrong right then. At first the kindergarten teacher, not a new recruit to the school system, said that wasn’t something they did and the principal was confused when we asked her about it before school started. The school system’s policy on this is very clear, that we have to make the request and they will perform an evaluation and the decision has to be made in the first 30 days of school. When we sat down with them to review the evaluation, the teacher was obviously put out that she had to do this work. Her speech was rushed, she didn’t want to be in the meeting, and while she had a few complimentary things to say about Bella, the bulk of what she had to say was how unready Bella was socially and because she couldn’t follow directions or do everything a kindergartener needed to do at the end of the school year.

Even speaking as someone with an obvious bias, I can say that Isabella has always been bright and creative. We’ve tried to encourage that as much as possible, such as finding science enrichment classes for her or getting her tools like a Leapster Tag so that she could learn to read on her own. Now she loves her chapter books and would spend all night reading if we let her. She always has a half a dozen little art projects going on. She asks questions constantly so she can understand what is going on around her. It’s sometimes hard to remember that she’s only six years old. But she’s also very stubborn. She’ll put her foot down and refuse to do things, especially if she doesn’t fully understand why it’s needed. She also loves to test her limits with everyone.

Even though I know with absolute certainty that if Bella was put in first grade she would have adapted to the environment within a month, I didn’t press the matter with the school. It was obvious they did not want to move her, and I did not want to create an adversarial relationship with them from the very start. We decided to take a “wait and see” approach and continue to help Bella with the few missing skills at home. From a selfish point of view she was now staying in a half-day kindergarten, heading off on the bus at 11 AM and returning at 3 PM, with nothing to eat at school but a milk break (where the kids get to pick chocolate milk). Marcy tried to get some lunch into her before she left, but still we would hear about “problems” that tended to be at the end of the day. What do you expect when the kids haven’t had anything to eat for almost 4 hours except a little sugar?

I have no illusions that Bella is a perfect child. Early in the year, in September, she had a problem where she took an item that wasn’t hers from school. We had a lot of things to say to her about this, and it seemed to mostly solve the problem. A couple weeks ago, there was another incident where she took a couple things belonging to other students, but it was only witnessed by another kid (not a teacher), and from all accounts it was a case where they were “found” items (on the carpet without the owner near them) and Bella was trying to do the right thing and return them or figure out whose they were. And then earlier this week, on Tuesday, she took a roll of stickers from near the teacher’s desk and handed them out to her friends in class. None of these things were the right thing to do, and all of them got her in a lot of trouble at home. But I believe the most recent incident was motivated by a bit of a “Mean Girls” incident in the neighborhood last week, and the one just before that she actually had good intentions, she just wasn’t sure of exactly what to do.

Marcy was at the school for something unrelated on Tuesday after school, and was cornered in the hall by Bella’s teacher. The teacher told her about the incident with the stickers, reminded Marcy that it was the third time and therefore a pattern, and proceeded to tell her how Bella would be in in-school suspension the following day. Marcy let her know that we were both available to talk with them at any point, as our schedules are flexible, but the teacher said it would be one to two weeks before they had all the paperwork done (because you know this goes on her permanent record) and could discuss a behavior plan with us. Marcy was floored, and relayed all of this to me. I read Bella the riot act after her karate class and started another round of lost privileges with her. I then made plans to go talk to the principal the following morning. Regardless of how wrong Bella might have been, there was no way I agreed with suspension as a solution to it, in school or not.

I ended up talking to the assistant principal the next day (who, as most parents know, is typically tasked with discipline in most schools), and here’s where it gets really interesting. She explained to me that all she was going to do was have Bella in her office when school started for about an hour to do her work and have a talk. While some might call it in-school suspension, she didn’t see it that way and there was no paperwork or record. Just a chance to give a little shock to the child and reinforce that the behavior was not acceptable (and this I have absolutely no problem with). She also said that she didn’t know anything about two weeks to create paperwork, and that if I wanted to talk about behavior I was to come in any time I wanted. She assured me she would talk with the teacher and find out where the communication issue was, and I relayed some of the neighborhood incidents that might be affecting Bella so that at least the assistant principal would have a more complete picture.

This all painted a very clear picture for us, and it’s clear that the problem was actually some combination of a bad teacher and a bad school. What I predicted at the beginning of the year had come to pass, and Bella was getting into trouble most likely because she was bored and was now being labeled as a discipline problem. The teacher, who after we requested the first grade evaluation we had never felt anything but resentment from, was not doing the right thing by our daughter, and it doesn’t matter whether that was because she was overworked or because she just didn’t care. And the school district is just too large for us to get them to help us solve this problem within the system. When I was in school, the state mandated that the school districts must teach all children to the best of the child’s ability, but now all that matters is the tests and ranking numbers. The official statements that kids in a grade are all at different levels and they adapt to challenge each child were just platitudes that they had no intention of executing on.

We took Bella that morning after I got back to tour a Montessori school. Before we left, Bella asked the following questions:

• Can I learn more math? (Yes, and science and everything else) Yes!
• Is it all day? (Yes) Awesome!
• Is it all year? (Yes, you’ll go there this summer) Awesome!

After we left, having made the decision immediately to move Bella there, we asked her if she wanted to start in 1 week and cancel the gymnastics spring break camp she was going to (at her request), or start in 3 weeks. She immediately told us that she wanted to start going to the new school now.

On the way back to her public school, she told us that she hoped she was in the class with the teacher she spent time with at the Montessori school while we were touring because she was nice and didn’t yell at her. Marcy and I looked each other, and I asked Bella who yells at her. She got very nervous, and we reminded her that she wasn’t in trouble. We asked if it was someone at her public school. She said yes, her teacher yells a lot. If we didn’t know before that we made the right decision, we certainly did now.

This is Bella’s last week in public school. She starts at The Boyd School on Monday, April 2.

What I need is something along the lines of a virtual thirdplace, an incubator, and coworking, all mashed up. It’s no secret that most of what has been inspiring me lately is space related. And as I said in my previous post about Spacepoints, there’s a need to coordinate the resources available to the community so that you don’t need to know people to be able to get something done. Additionally, I’m a practicioner of Getting Things Done, which says that you should only have a thought once (in an ideal world), at which point you capture it and decide what to do with it. Roll all this together and it’s a pretty interesting concept for enabling people interested in STEM outreach to do, without worrying as much about the “how”. Not to mention the multiplicative effect of putting lots of ideas out there.

We’ll start with users signing up. As part of connecting to the system, they will fill out a profile that lets them specify what their skills are. This can be hobbies (like an amateur photographer, or a woodworker), professional (e.g. a lawyer), or anything in between (someone who used to do graphic design professionally but is now writing books). They can also add in resources they can reach within 1 degree (someone they know directly). This would be along the lines of they have a relative who is a publisher, for example. By doing this we build up a resource database that can be used when working on a project later.

Now we add in the ability for users to quickly capture ideas. Whenever someone has an idea about something to do, no matter how small the idea is, how impossible they think it is, how ill-defined it is at the moment of conception, the person should be able to quickly save it in the system. They can send it by logging into the site and writing it down, by emailing it in, by sending an SMS or a tweet, or any other way we can think of. Reliable capture is an important GTD concept, and here it will let all the possible ideas be captured. Additionally, as soon as an idea is captured, it should be open to the rest of the community for comment. This lets everyone start fleshing out the idea, expanding on it, spinning off of it, and most importantly, turning it into a reality. It will be important to treat this as brainstorming, and keep it positive and constructive.

Once we have an idea and comments on it, we’re ready to start executing. This is where things start to get tricky, because there’s a big difference between talking and doing. For any project, leadership could be collaborative, or it could be coordinated by a single person. If it’s a single person, it could be the person who originally came up with the idea, or it could be someone else who wants to run with it. Regardless, this is where the database of resources comes in. Users should be able to search what’s available, contact folks to find out if they can help, and attach people to the project. Much like an incubator, there should probably be some amount of common resources available to use, such as web hosting or database servers, for those projects that will exist online.

There are a lot of gaps in this idea right now. For example, how do you handle projects that you want to keep somewhat closed? And how do you track credit for a project? That’s less important than a lot of technical details, but it’s critical for continued engagement that people have their contributions recognized. And when an idea really takes off, the people who made it happen should be identified and celebrated. We’ll figure out the details along the way.

Spacepoints is just such a grand idea. It’s not a game. It’s not an app. It’s a dozen apps, and a hundred different games, and so much more. The problem is that even trying to describe it is difficult, because there’s no way to do it without talking in concrete terms. So we talk about a system where people can tell other people about the space outreach things that they do and earn points. But what about a check-in app? OK, so we add that in. And what about the next idea for how to increase outreach and awareness? Why does it have to be space? What about particle physics? I could go on, but hopefully you get the point. This is why we talk about “Spacepoints: The Flame Thrower”. By injecting what seems ludicrous, we’re trying to remind people to think outside the box.

Even more than that, we really have to just do something. This is why whenisthenextrocketlaunch.com is a great example of what Spacepoints is after. Sean Herron, sitting at SpaceUp Houston wanted to do something, and in less than an hour he registered a domain, created a website, and had a finished project to provide people with information about when and where the next rocket launch is. It’s about ISS Notify, where Nathan Bergey created a device to show when the ISS is going overhead, shared the design, and then got other people excited about the project on KIckstarter! He didn’t need the incentive of Spacepoints for that, just a desire to share his excitement for space with everyone else.

So how do we not fall into a trap where a single implementation becomes the definition for what Spacepoints is? The people who get it, the ones who couldn’t care less about the idea of Spacepoints if it gets in the way of the outreach, need to own the idea. As much it is about the community and getting people to go out and do, there still needs to be some kind of organization that are watching out against corporate entities coopting the idea (among other problems). This could be a non-profit organization, a “board of directors”, or something less formal. It is a place to provide guidance, to organize resources, and to make sure that the grand idea stays intact. If someone is working on a project and they need web design help, or graphics, or coding help, or anything at all, there should be a place they can go to find some help.

This is what I see Spacepoints as. It’s a way to enable people to do STEM outreach. Not just by incenting them to do so through points and prizes, but by making it easy for them to take something from an idea to a reality at ludicrous speeds. The more we can come up with to get people excited, the easier it is to find the next big idea that will be the breakout hit. So why are you still sitting here reading this? What idea have you thought of that you haven’t started creating yet? What’s stopping you?

Photography has been a hobby that I have enjoyed even in college, though I haven’t done much since then. That was before the prevalence of digital cameras, so it was a darkroom class that focused more on the technical aspects of developing film, and techniques for working with exposure in the darkroom. There was less work done on the composition of our pictures, though that probably would have been in a later class if I was able to take it. Time passed, and I shifted back to snapshots and horribly busy pictures where I try to show everything all at once. Once the kids were born, it was more important to get lots of pictures of them, and there are a few good ones in there as a result of the law of averages.

Last year I got a very nice Canon 7D body, and started picking up some really good gear to go along with it. So much, that I often get asked if I’m a professional, to which I respond “No, just an amateur who spends far too much.” Despite the new glass, like a Lensbaby and a sweet Tokina wide angle, I was still leaning on my 70-300mm zoom lens as a crutch, and occasionally dipping down to the kit lens that came with our older EOS Rebel. When the kit lens broke on a trip to Walt Disney World last year, I saw it as an opportunity to move to a Sigma 50mm prime lens to cover that gap I had on the low end. It’s certainly not perfect, as I have no way to cover the range from 18-50 or 50-70, but working primarily with the prime has been very helpful for me.

1. It has a f1.4 aperture, which is very fast and gives some beautiful bokeh. I had never played with depth of field before this.
2. It forces me to think about what is in the shot and what is not, rather than just yanking the zoom around.
3. When you try to fill the frame with a subject using a 50mm lens, you have to get close to them. When you get close to a subject, they look at you.

For the Digital Days class, I opted to take the beginner class on Saturday as well as the intermediate class the following day. I figured a refresher on the basics would be good, and I don’t regret doing that even if it was a little slow for me. The second day was where were really got into composition and lighting. I think the biggest takeaway I had from the whole weekend was “fill the frame.” That is, make all the space in your picture count and be aware of what is at the edges of your picture. Does it tell the story, or detract? Don’t take a picture expecting to crop it down, get in closer and take the picture you really want. I can see the difference in my photos of my kids even, where I have gotten in close and filled the frame as opposed to where I have shot them from too far away.

The other big thing was white balance. I’ve never touched that setting, whether on the camera (where I’m shooting in RAW anyways), or in post-processing. Suddenly I’m checking the setting in Lightroom when I process the photos and realizing what a difference it makes in getting the skin tones to look right. Such a little thing, but it’s a big deal. And it’s got me looking at some WhiBal cards to use as part of my kit.

The second day of class also had a model shoot. I won’t lie, I was somewhat dreading this. I’ve never worked with models before! When I take pictures of people, it’s people I know and most of the time they’re doing something. They’re not there specifically for me to take pictures of them. I had no idea how I was going to approach the model shoot, or what I would get out of it. Using it as an opportunity to work with some of the techniques like depth of field, motion blur, and lighting, I didn’t expect to come away with anything I was going to want to keep. Boy was I wrong! Not only did I take some pictures I really liked, I was able to take some shots that even the instructors didn’t really think would be possible, like this one (they didn’t think the strings on the racket would wash out enough):

Of course, the instructors weren’t as thrilled that I listened when they said “shoot 1000, share 8.” After the model shoot I handed them a full 16 GB memory card (700 images) for their review session. What was nice, however, was that they selected at least a half-dozen of my shots to put on the big screen during the critique.

I immediately turned around last weekend and took some pictures at our neighbor’s daughter’s birthday party this past weekend. Sure, I wouldn’t call anything there award winning, but it’s a far cry from even the pictures I took at Disney World last fall. It certainly gives me a lot more to think about when it comes to composing my pictures.

When we moved at the beginning of the year, we had decided not to put the girls into daycare for the time being. Marcy was not going to be working and we were looking for ways to keep our spending down. As a result we ended up looking for enrichment activities for Bella and found Curiosity Zone. Parents of young kids know it can be difficult to find good activities for children under the age of 5, so their Little Lab program was exactly what we needed. The night when she goes to her “science class,” as she calls it, has quickly become her favorite day of the week. So much so that we immediately signed her up for the entire year after her first day. She learned about geologists, engineers, astronauts, and other professions during the last session, and this time around it’s backyard science, where they’re learning about backyard animals, weather, and other fun things.

I can’t possibly overstate how proud it makes me feel that Bella loves science so much, and I do everything I can to encourage that. We have color crystal kits and prisms for her to play with at home. While she’s tending more towards her dolls lately, blocks and Tinkertoys and LEGO have always been the favorites. I take her to the National Air and Space Museum’s Udvar-Hazy Center to look at the planes, and her favorite exhibits are the space artifacts. I selfishly don’t want my mother to ever move from the condo she has in Boston because it’s right next to the Boston Children’s Museum. Bella’s imagination and creativity is astounding, and when you combine that with wanting to learn how things work it’s going to take her far.

Partly because of her interest in the space displays at the museum, and partly because I have never been able to see it, we wanted to plan a trip this fall to go see one of the final Space Shuttle launches. Who knows when there will be a replacement program, and there’s something about seeing the Shuttle launch, especially knowing there are people in it, that is more amazing than a rocket launch. The STS-133 (Discovery) launch is now scheduled for November 1st, the day after our planned Walt Disney World trip ends. That, much to my boss’s chagrin, has turned our trip into a 2 week vacation to Florida. We are renting a condo right on the Indian River in Titusville, directly across from the Kennedy Space Center, for the month of November. That way we have somewhere to watch from even if the launch slips by a few days (or a few weeks). Of course, we’ll spend plenty of time at KSC doing tours and seeing all the exhibits as well!

I’m also getting a little treat just for me. Several of the high energy physics labs, including CERN and Fermilab are hosting photowalks for amateur photographers on August 7th. I was able to get into the limited group going to Fermilab (only about 50 people per site are allowed). We’ll get to see one of the accelerator tunnels, the antimatter factory, and a few other sites. I just hope I’ll be able to get some good pictures, since I’m only just picking up the hobby again after a long hiatus. The last time I took any serious pictures was in college.

For those not familiar, Getting Things Done (aka GTD) is a methodology for capturing, defining, organizing, and reviewing every aspect of your life, from where you want to be in 10 years to what you need to pick up at the grocery on the way home.  It’s not tied to a specific tool, and the concepts involved are generally things you already do, just not with enough regularity.  If you want to know more, there are dozens of people out there who can explain GTD better than I can.

This is actually my third time trying to implement GTD. The last two times I lost control of my system and then just stopped trying because I was not doing regular weekly reviews and I was disregarding the “hard edges” of my calendar by trying to plan out when I was going to do things, rather than keeping my calendar to the “must do” things for a particular day and working from my context lists. But both times taught me the joy of clarity. Do you have any idea how amazing it is for someone like myself, who works in computers, to be confronted with a completely empty inbox?

It’s very easy to remember when I started working on GTD this time around, because it was two days before I registered this website. Like the previous times, I took a work day and went to Starbucks instead of the office. For the serious brain dump I needed to do, I have to get out of the office where I can be interrupted, and I can’t be at home where I’m distracted. But once I got everything that was on my mind down into the computer, I decided I wanted to start writing. I quickly came up with the site name and several topics that I wanted to write about. Which, of course, created new projects in my GTD system. A very clear example of how the human brain is made for having ideas, not holding them. Once you relieve it of having to hold onto things, it can get back to what it’s good at.

So why did I just take over a month between posts, if I’m so organized and clear? Life, that’s why. The whole reason I started up again is because things were getting out of control. I have a full time job, a full time retail business, a house, and a 3 year old. I got myself together, but June and July threw a few curve balls. I felt like I had to let a few things on my list slide while I dealt with whatever the current crisis was. Everything was still in my system, though, so I was able to look at those things and say “not today.” I actually came up with the topic for this post a month ago, but I wasn’t in the right place to write it until now.

OK, so why write it now? I realized this past week that I’ve caught up on many of my stalled projects at work, simply because I had clarified them and had discrete actions available for each. Meetings that I had been putting off scheduling suddenly got on the calendar because I put an action on my list first to write an agenda for them. When I was in a mood to take care of things that I had been ignoring, I was able to because I was adhering to the GTD concepts and I knew what all the actions that were required were.

It doesn’t stop there. I’m picking back up on projects around the house, and around the business as well. It feels so good to check the actions and projects off my list that I want more of that. Clarity is addictive, and I wonder what else is going to flood in to fill the void when my head is clear.