sarah - I'm guessing you purposely designed in "dead cat spaces" in all your studio projects? also - boys are nuts - they become a little more reasonable after 6.
@Sarah, Boys are all candidates for the Darwin prize through most of their childhood. I have no idea how my brother and I survived. Growing up with electric fences and farm machinery sure did offer opportunity for acts of stupidity. We laugh about the stupid stuff that didn't kill us all these years later though. So I guess there was some redeeming value.
ha ha - dead cat spaces! One of my fave arch school tropes. Amazing how wide-spread that one is. (at least IN THE US, ha ha ha!)
I don't think I can quantify any generic differences between euro and american architects. I've met some euro designers who definitely seem more ready to take risks - which I appreciate, as I find the US design climate usually too risk-averse and too dominated by a totally hypothetical "public" (as in "resale value" or "what the public wants") - but I've also met euros who seem chained to the past, or to what's conventional to build in that country. Generally, they don't seem to have to detail CDs as much as we do, probably because of legal climate & contractor quality. But as much as that can encourage more risk-taking it can also encourage inattentiveness. To sum up: meh. Personally I think architecture's mostly a mixed bag, wherever you go.
Although - to completely negate my last entire paragraph - I will say that the level of design quality woven right into the fabric of daily life in Portugal is insane. The populace at large seems to actively understand and appreciate architecture. Not that they all agree on style - far from it, I've read the rants online about new projects going up in historic towns, etc etc - but they seem to expect quality design, in a way that people in the US definitely do NOT. (And I mean that in all sorts of things in life, not just architecture: their serving implements are beautiful, they dress attentively and nicely, they seem to have an eye for aesthetics everywhere.) They talk about design, they know about it, and even the most random "background" building in Portugal seems to have some aesthetic nicety about it that shows that someone was thinking about it, crafting it. I think their proportion of Pritzker winners to population size speaks volumes. It really astounds me how every town I've been to in Portugal - even the remote, tiny ones - have just lovely planned spaces in them (both urban and architectural). So, who knows. Perhaps there is some kind of generality to be made here.
Actually, I was referring to boys being ALLOWED to survive. Abram is always going 90 miles an hour. Never still, and never listens. It's infuriating, embarrassing, and most of all exhausting.
Sarah, I honestly don't know how much of that is just boys in general and how much is certain types of boys. Angus is constantly infuriating and embarrassing and exhausting. He's also incredibly smart and clever. I don't know if puberty is going to make it all much easier or much, much worse.
Tomorrow is going to be a rough day, some things going down at the job that will be difficult. On another topic, apropos of the movie my husband is watching, Ewan McGregor is unbelievably appealing.
hah sarah. boys are a handful. i have huge respect for my mum raising my bro and me on her own. my kids are amazingly polite and calm compared to friend's male spawn. barely any hair pulling at all.
It's probably good news short term. Long term, maybe not.
Dead cat spaces are those bits of unresolved space in your floor plan "where cats go to die". Also called SLOIP in my school, for Space Left Over In Plan. It happens a lot when a beginning student is trying to make everything very rectangular and exactly the required square footage but none of it quite clicks together gracefully.
OK so I'm officially not at work so I feel more comfortable posting about my job. I could still lose my job over postings I make here or really anywhere on the web I suppose but that was one bit of self-employed freedom that I vowed not to give up when I became an employee and I even had agreed to in my job interview: I can post about professional topics on websites because it is part of how professionals practice and engage these days. I agreed to use decorum and professionalism in my postings…which I usually do, but who can resist tossing out the occasional reference to Brad Pitt's abs when one is discussion CNC routing?
So the Museum laid off 21 people today, and 8 currently empty positions are not being filled. We lost 11% of our workforce (this is all public knowledge from the press release). But I look around at my crew and we have *all* been busting our butts trying to keep up for the last 6 months, and now we've all - in all departments - lost good people who carried a lot of the load. It makes me think of all the Austerity stuff going on across Europe - how much load can a person take before they just give up? How long can I move two steps forward and one step back every. single. day. because I have so much work to do that I'm stretched thin and scattered and inefficient with no end in sight? I know that many, many architecture firms are facing this right now - they don't want to commit to hiring in an uncertain economy, so they're piling more work on fewer people and no one is getting a raise for taking on the work of another half-person or more. But how long can this last? Self-employment is looking just dreamy again to me…f*cking health insurance remains the biggest obstacle, but I've also discovered since working as an employee again that I really, really prefer working with people as part of a team rather than alone (but for the dog) in my home office.
Ugh.
gruen, I promised you a post on architecture so I will try to do that later tonight to help me get focused back on the good things again.
Good ol Indiana. Cuts to education and culture just to make Not My Man Mitch look good with a surplus. Damn shame too, the IMA has always been one of my favorites and I still visit every chance I get.
I'm terribly scared of what Mike Pence might do. I don't care if he is from my hometown, he should not be anywhere near the Gov. office; but when the only other choices were John Gregg and Rupert Boneham it is easy to see why he won.
This was yet another reason my return visit to the state was for the job search only.
John Gregg gave him a decent challenge, at least. Pence is a dipwad, but he doesn't have anything directly to do with the IMA's situation. The thing with the IMA is it is definitely debatable whether we are in a poor financial situation or not. Some similarly-sized institutions are doing better and some worse, but our current Board seems to want to take a very conservative track - not surprising for Hoosiers, eh? <sigh>. The previous director (a genius among men, seriously) managed to piss off a bunch of donors, so the hope is that we can woo some of those people back with a new director (who has an excellent fundraising track record). Personally I wish more time had been spent wooing before the ax fell on a bunch of really good people, but I guess that's why I'm not a director.
Self-employment is looking just dreamy again to me…f*cking health insurance remains the biggest obstacle, but I've also discovered since working as an employee again that I really, really prefer working with people as part of a team rather than alone (but for the dog) in my home office.
I sure as hell don't want this to digress into politics, but I think most architects understand that most practices are small, so I don't know a single architect who voted for Romney, who said he would be dismantling Obamacare on his first day on the job. At least I hope not. People don't understand Obamacare. The people who are blatantly against it are the "I've got mine" crowd. They think it's European or Canadian style health care. It's not. It's all about getting the 1 in 7 Americans who can't access health insurance into the market for it. True, they may have to pay for it, partially or fully, if they have the means, but they can't be turned down. Merely being prescribed any kind of sleeping medication or antidepressant leads to an almost automatic rejection in underwriting for the person buying solo. I'm sure there are other triggers, too. The reality is that no one over 40 has a perfect health record. Yet, there are many people out there who work for themselves, or in small groups, and have benign levels of elevated blood pressure, cholesterol, or glycemia which will not require much in the way of medical care and meds until they are clearly past Medicare age. On Jan 1, 2014 these shenanigans are supposed to end.
good luck with job donna. you imply further rounds of cutting in the future? not good.
really hope this sequester rubbish gets resolved too. whether it is real or not can imagine it being used as cudgel to balance state budgets and also make america more dumber with less support for education and arts. Because education is communist ( i guess? i really don't get the republican hangup with education) and art because its plum dangerous to encourage people to be thoughtful about life... austerity ain't doing a hell of a lot of good for europe so far. not sure why usa wants to go the same route.
@observant. yup older brother. younger brother is professional performer (very good one), also in japan. we both ended up being travellers for one reason or another. both artists too, which is weird if you think about where we came from. but anyway we were absolutely hell on wheels as kids. boys are insane. seriously.
i don't think republicans are against education, as long as it's run by private capital ventures, success is based on testing of math and reading/writing skills only, the curriculum is consistent with their religious beliefs, and teachers are free agents with no bargaining power or right to organize.
oh, and those students who can't succeed in the above model, can't be counted (aka the 'charter school' success story.)
The argument that I have heard isn't so much against education, but against having to be responsible for educating others' kids. It's this idea that my family is my responsibility, and your family is yours. My education in my responsibility, and your education is yours. I think this stems from the frustration of kids wasting the free education they were given.
Vado, had I stayed in New Orleans there was no way in hell my future children were going to public school. I heard way too much in the news about them.
education is an investment it isn't free. america used to know that. if its wasted on some who gives a fcuk? its the ones that end up inventing tang that its all about.
where do the dinosaur wranglers hang out anyway? there are a few of em running the country that need to be herded a wee bit.
in louisianastan the legislators who are so gung ho about charter schools ie christian jesus rode a dinosaur schools, backtracked when some muslims decided they wanted a charter school. there is talk among my gf and some of her peers about starting an athiest humanist charter school.
I would think the schools in Canada in rural areas without strife and in nice suburbs of big cities are probably safe places to send one's kids. I would imagine a school in a part of Toronto with a lot of poor people and strained social fabric would not be. Essentially, it's the same in the U.S. The money is available for the good school districts, and those kids then get into the best universities. The poor ones are so mired in unsolvable problems that one doesn't know where to start. It takes a special kind of grit to pull oneself out of those situations. I think that most teachers who leave teaching probably taught in the rough districts. It isn't the ones teaching in Newport Beach or Palm Springs.
Yes, they say many small towns in the Ozarks are hell holes full of meth labs that L.E. people sometimes inadvertently stumble into. And, boy, are they surprised. Then, there are some poor towns that still have a Bible Belt mentality.
Still, I wonder if part of teacher training is to look for "meth mouth."
Meth labs aren't just the thing of Winter's Bone. I'm talking about rural New York, Vermont, Maine, Indianastan, Illinois, California. Poor people live in the country.
Not sure if you had a point there observant. If you are guessing at what it was like as a kid growing up in backhand of nowhere Canada in the 70!s and 80's it was simpler than now but also a lot poorer. First generation off the farm meant going into a trade in those days and art was for the fay. It's a different world now. Better and worse. More surreal now I would say. Jane Fonda in Vietnam made sense. Now we have rodman in N Korea watching hoops. And it's like a publicity stunt not ideology. Crazy that nobody really does moren shrug about that. I blame it on the dinosaur hunters.
Are you guys ever stunned at the general availability of marijuana in the world of regular grown ups? I always assumed high schools and colleges were just steeped in pot, as mine were, but isn't it time we acknowledge that pot is already almost as available and common as booze and just get on with taxing and regulating it? Jeez.
the state legislature in kansas proposed a law that says, for equal time, teachers would be required to teach scientific evidence supporting the proposition that global warming is not a thing that is happening. the dinosaur thing is over. we're attacking the epa in schools now, because those people are really hurting the oil companies. i mean sure, record profits are nice if you're into that sort of thing, but without the environmental regulation and people complaining about poisoning groundwater and such, they could set the bar a lot higher.
i think the architecture of a meth lab would be a good studio project. those folks really could use deflagration venting and a fire suppression system.
Medical marijuana places are already more abundant than even coffee shops. Now they are going to have recreational marijuana dens. They are working out the legalities now, should see them next fall. My biggest concern is tourists getting high then trying to drive in the mountains... Traffic is already terrible.
Meth-Mouth is definitely not part of teacher training in Texas, anyway. We are taught to look for signs of homelessness, though. And it's fairly apparent when a kid is poor, or has a rough home life, and I am in the suburbs.
Depressing too, in its own way, is that often kids from rich families ALSO come from broken homes and suffer from it. But we are taught to think that that doesn't happen and it goes unnoticed.
A kid from a broken home with money is going to have more opportunity than a kid from a broken home without money. Lack of money can have side effects like malnourishment or some sort of child labor thing that can reduce the kid's ability to get a decent education. There is also less hope when you're surrounded by poverty, which I think can be demotivating.
I wouldn't disagree with that, curt as I'm sure that you wouldn't disagree that a rich kid can have some significant fallout too and that it can go unnoticed because they are rich. I don't say this to be controversial or oppositional, I say it because... I work with rich kids from broken homes.
... yeah, it's particularly troubling when a rich kid from a broken home is taught how to use an assault rifle by his Mom and then ... well, you know the rest of that story.
you know what really burns my britches? homes that are literally broken. you know - like tile coming off walls in the bathroom, missing roof shingles, structural problems... such promise... ripped away by years of neglect (or maybe homeowner just couldn't afford it - who am I to judge?). you try and try to help by making recommendations that might keep things together, but there's only so much we can do.
Are you guys ever stunned at the general availability of marijuana in the world of regular grown ups? I always assumed high schools and colleges were just steeped in pot, as mine were.
Yep. My HS and college were steeped in pot, and the HS was parochial. Go figure. I learned something. You were cool and "in the know" if you had mere access to this stuff. To this day, I couldn't tell you where to get pot. I have TWO friends who would have it on hand, and offered it to me, which I declined. However, as to not being "in the know," I knew back then that I was NOT cool (LOL) and that was ok with me.
I can't recall where it was on the USA but there was recent article saying teachers would not be allowed to teach critical thinking because it was causing children to question religious doctrine. Texas maybe. Definitely a republican idea, though it shouldn't be by rights. I wonder what happened to the drive for excellence that used to be an ideal worth having ... Did Amerika decide the price was too high cuz the sheep were getting restless? The new mantra seems to be to fcuk the poor and make it stick by keeping them dumb through governmental fiat. Canada ain't a heckuva lot different lately.
Like someone said under "forgotten" M.Arch., there should be a thread on crazy things that happened in architectural school. We could extend that to offices, too.
However, here's a crazy situation that happened in neither - with the IDP adviser outside of your firm who countersigns your forms after your firm has signed them. He was sort of the go-to IDP guy for the local chapter. I told him that it had been another 4 months or so, and I had a form for him to sign. He asked me "Why don't you meet me for lunch?" I didn't think anything of it. I thought he wanted to talk IDP ... and shop. Well, he SORT OF wanted to talk shop. It turned out he was doing "multi-level" and wanted me to get under his pyramid. I told him that, beyond going to work, doing some travel, going to the gym, and my job as an evening adjunct teacher, I wasn't interested. Not quite verbatim, he said something like 'oh, come on, this is a better opportunity than teaching at night. Quit that.' I had been using this guy for an adviser for over a year and I had to seek out a new one.
The stupidity of IDP advisers, outside of one's firm, could be a thread.
go for it observiant. no idea what you are talking about but sure you will be able to turn it into a shit storm of posts.
totally unrelated, saw in news that some offices in usa will maybe need to charge consumption tax on services, and it is apparently a shock. I didn't deal with billing when working in north america but we have always had to include tax for our fees here in Japan. Is that not the norm in the USA ? sounds great if so.
Thread Central
sarah - I'm guessing you purposely designed in "dead cat spaces" in all your studio projects? also - boys are nuts - they become a little more reasonable after 6.
@Sarah, Boys are all candidates for the Darwin prize through most of their childhood. I have no idea how my brother and I survived. Growing up with electric fences and farm machinery sure did offer opportunity for acts of stupidity. We laugh about the stupid stuff that didn't kill us all these years later though. So I guess there was some redeeming value.
ha ha - dead cat spaces! One of my fave arch school tropes. Amazing how wide-spread that one is. (at least IN THE US, ha ha ha!)
I don't think I can quantify any generic differences between euro and american architects. I've met some euro designers who definitely seem more ready to take risks - which I appreciate, as I find the US design climate usually too risk-averse and too dominated by a totally hypothetical "public" (as in "resale value" or "what the public wants") - but I've also met euros who seem chained to the past, or to what's conventional to build in that country. Generally, they don't seem to have to detail CDs as much as we do, probably because of legal climate & contractor quality. But as much as that can encourage more risk-taking it can also encourage inattentiveness. To sum up: meh. Personally I think architecture's mostly a mixed bag, wherever you go.
Although - to completely negate my last entire paragraph - I will say that the level of design quality woven right into the fabric of daily life in Portugal is insane. The populace at large seems to actively understand and appreciate architecture. Not that they all agree on style - far from it, I've read the rants online about new projects going up in historic towns, etc etc - but they seem to expect quality design, in a way that people in the US definitely do NOT. (And I mean that in all sorts of things in life, not just architecture: their serving implements are beautiful, they dress attentively and nicely, they seem to have an eye for aesthetics everywhere.) They talk about design, they know about it, and even the most random "background" building in Portugal seems to have some aesthetic nicety about it that shows that someone was thinking about it, crafting it. I think their proportion of Pritzker winners to population size speaks volumes. It really astounds me how every town I've been to in Portugal - even the remote, tiny ones - have just lovely planned spaces in them (both urban and architectural). So, who knows. Perhaps there is some kind of generality to be made here.
Sarah, I honestly don't know how much of that is just boys in general and how much is certain types of boys. Angus is constantly infuriating and embarrassing and exhausting. He's also incredibly smart and clever. I don't know if puberty is going to make it all much easier or much, much worse.
Tomorrow is going to be a rough day, some things going down at the job that will be difficult. On another topic, apropos of the movie my husband is watching, Ewan McGregor is unbelievably appealing.
much worse donna. then easier.
hah sarah. boys are a handful. i have huge respect for my mum raising my bro and me on her own. my kids are amazingly polite and calm compared to friend's male spawn. barely any hair pulling at all.
Well, I've survived the first round of layoffs at my job. No further comment than that at this point.
morning all,
what exactly are dead cat spaces? @Donna, well i guess that's good news?....
It's probably good news short term. Long term, maybe not.
Dead cat spaces are those bits of unresolved space in your floor plan "where cats go to die". Also called SLOIP in my school, for Space Left Over In Plan. It happens a lot when a beginning student is trying to make everything very rectangular and exactly the required square footage but none of it quite clicks together gracefully.
congrats i think donna. or congrats for now as the case may be. i wish you the best of luck. isn't this a fairly new position?
i've often wondered how evolution allowed puberty and preteens and such to happen. that's probably not in your cards for a few years though sarah.
Saw this today. Maybe it's just the music, but I think it's fun!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=L0TxbY2Bo20
Will:
I'm guessing you're the first born of the two. The first born is the standard-bearer. I'm of that same "kid constellation." I'm a "classic" last born.
OK so I'm officially not at work so I feel more comfortable posting about my job. I could still lose my job over postings I make here or really anywhere on the web I suppose but that was one bit of self-employed freedom that I vowed not to give up when I became an employee and I even had agreed to in my job interview: I can post about professional topics on websites because it is part of how professionals practice and engage these days. I agreed to use decorum and professionalism in my postings…which I usually do, but who can resist tossing out the occasional reference to Brad Pitt's abs when one is discussion CNC routing?
So the Museum laid off 21 people today, and 8 currently empty positions are not being filled. We lost 11% of our workforce (this is all public knowledge from the press release). But I look around at my crew and we have *all* been busting our butts trying to keep up for the last 6 months, and now we've all - in all departments - lost good people who carried a lot of the load. It makes me think of all the Austerity stuff going on across Europe - how much load can a person take before they just give up? How long can I move two steps forward and one step back every. single. day. because I have so much work to do that I'm stretched thin and scattered and inefficient with no end in sight? I know that many, many architecture firms are facing this right now - they don't want to commit to hiring in an uncertain economy, so they're piling more work on fewer people and no one is getting a raise for taking on the work of another half-person or more. But how long can this last? Self-employment is looking just dreamy again to me…f*cking health insurance remains the biggest obstacle, but I've also discovered since working as an employee again that I really, really prefer working with people as part of a team rather than alone (but for the dog) in my home office.
Ugh.
gruen, I promised you a post on architecture so I will try to do that later tonight to help me get focused back on the good things again.
PS thanks for listening TC <3<3<3<3<3
Good ol Indiana. Cuts to education and culture just to make Not My Man Mitch look good with a surplus. Damn shame too, the IMA has always been one of my favorites and I still visit every chance I get.
I'm terribly scared of what Mike Pence might do. I don't care if he is from my hometown, he should not be anywhere near the Gov. office; but when the only other choices were John Gregg and Rupert Boneham it is easy to see why he won.
This was yet another reason my return visit to the state was for the job search only.
John Gregg gave him a decent challenge, at least. Pence is a dipwad, but he doesn't have anything directly to do with the IMA's situation. The thing with the IMA is it is definitely debatable whether we are in a poor financial situation or not. Some similarly-sized institutions are doing better and some worse, but our current Board seems to want to take a very conservative track - not surprising for Hoosiers, eh? <sigh>. The previous director (a genius among men, seriously) managed to piss off a bunch of donors, so the hope is that we can woo some of those people back with a new director (who has an excellent fundraising track record). Personally I wish more time had been spent wooing before the ax fell on a bunch of really good people, but I guess that's why I'm not a director.
Sarah those are hearts!
Mike Pence is the biggest fucktard on the planet and the fact that he was elected makes me wanna do a Hoosier Hurl!
Self-employment is looking just dreamy again to me…f*cking health insurance remains the biggest obstacle, but I've also discovered since working as an employee again that I really, really prefer working with people as part of a team rather than alone (but for the dog) in my home office.
I sure as hell don't want this to digress into politics, but I think most architects understand that most practices are small, so I don't know a single architect who voted for Romney, who said he would be dismantling Obamacare on his first day on the job. At least I hope not. People don't understand Obamacare. The people who are blatantly against it are the "I've got mine" crowd. They think it's European or Canadian style health care. It's not. It's all about getting the 1 in 7 Americans who can't access health insurance into the market for it. True, they may have to pay for it, partially or fully, if they have the means, but they can't be turned down. Merely being prescribed any kind of sleeping medication or antidepressant leads to an almost automatic rejection in underwriting for the person buying solo. I'm sure there are other triggers, too. The reality is that no one over 40 has a perfect health record. Yet, there are many people out there who work for themselves, or in small groups, and have benign levels of elevated blood pressure, cholesterol, or glycemia which will not require much in the way of medical care and meds until they are clearly past Medicare age. On Jan 1, 2014 these shenanigans are supposed to end.
good luck with job donna. you imply further rounds of cutting in the future? not good.
really hope this sequester rubbish gets resolved too. whether it is real or not can imagine it being used as cudgel to balance state budgets and also make america more dumber with less support for education and arts. Because education is communist ( i guess? i really don't get the republican hangup with education) and art because its plum dangerous to encourage people to be thoughtful about life... austerity ain't doing a hell of a lot of good for europe so far. not sure why usa wants to go the same route.
@observant. yup older brother. younger brother is professional performer (very good one), also in japan. we both ended up being travellers for one reason or another. both artists too, which is weird if you think about where we came from. but anyway we were absolutely hell on wheels as kids. boys are insane. seriously.
i don't think republicans are against education, as long as it's run by private capital ventures, success is based on testing of math and reading/writing skills only, the curriculum is consistent with their religious beliefs, and teachers are free agents with no bargaining power or right to organize.
oh, and those students who can't succeed in the above model, can't be counted (aka the 'charter school' success story.)
there's plenty of money for edumacation here in louisianastan. plenty that is if you're fixin' to teach your chillins that jesus rode a dinosaur.
The argument that I have heard isn't so much against education, but against having to be responsible for educating others' kids. It's this idea that my family is my responsibility, and your family is yours. My education in my responsibility, and your education is yours. I think this stems from the frustration of kids wasting the free education they were given.
Imagining Vado doing the, " Hoosier Hurl Shake"
Vado, had I stayed in New Orleans there was no way in hell my future children were going to public school. I heard way too much in the news about them.
education is an investment it isn't free. america used to know that. if its wasted on some who gives a fcuk? its the ones that end up inventing tang that its all about.
where do the dinosaur wranglers hang out anyway? there are a few of em running the country that need to be herded a wee bit.
in louisianastan the legislators who are so gung ho about charter schools ie christian jesus rode a dinosaur schools, backtracked when some muslims decided they wanted a charter school. there is talk among my gf and some of her peers about starting an athiest humanist charter school.
Will:
I would think the schools in Canada in rural areas without strife and in nice suburbs of big cities are probably safe places to send one's kids. I would imagine a school in a part of Toronto with a lot of poor people and strained social fabric would not be. Essentially, it's the same in the U.S. The money is available for the good school districts, and those kids then get into the best universities. The poor ones are so mired in unsolvable problems that one doesn't know where to start. It takes a special kind of grit to pull oneself out of those situations. I think that most teachers who leave teaching probably taught in the rough districts. It isn't the ones teaching in Newport Beach or Palm Springs.
rural areas are full of poor people and meth labs.
rural areas are full of poor people and meth labs
Yes, they say many small towns in the Ozarks are hell holes full of meth labs that L.E. people sometimes inadvertently stumble into. And, boy, are they surprised. Then, there are some poor towns that still have a Bible Belt mentality.
Still, I wonder if part of teacher training is to look for "meth mouth."
quit doing this. it is annoying.
Thank you.
Meth labs aren't just the thing of Winter's Bone. I'm talking about rural New York, Vermont, Maine, Indianastan, Illinois, California. Poor people live in the country.
Not sure if you had a point there observant. If you are guessing at what it was like as a kid growing up in backhand of nowhere Canada in the 70!s and 80's it was simpler than now but also a lot poorer. First generation off the farm meant going into a trade in those days and art was for the fay. It's a different world now. Better and worse. More surreal now I would say. Jane Fonda in Vietnam made sense. Now we have rodman in N Korea watching hoops. And it's like a publicity stunt not ideology. Crazy that nobody really does moren shrug about that. I blame it on the dinosaur hunters.
the state legislature in kansas proposed a law that says, for equal time, teachers would be required to teach scientific evidence supporting the proposition that global warming is not a thing that is happening. the dinosaur thing is over. we're attacking the epa in schools now, because those people are really hurting the oil companies. i mean sure, record profits are nice if you're into that sort of thing, but without the environmental regulation and people complaining about poisoning groundwater and such, they could set the bar a lot higher.
i think the architecture of a meth lab would be a good studio project. those folks really could use deflagration venting and a fire suppression system.
Medical marijuana places are already more abundant than even coffee shops. Now they are going to have recreational marijuana dens. They are working out the legalities now, should see them next fall. My biggest concern is tourists getting high then trying to drive in the mountains... Traffic is already terrible.
Meth-Mouth is definitely not part of teacher training in Texas, anyway. We are taught to look for signs of homelessness, though. And it's fairly apparent when a kid is poor, or has a rough home life, and I am in the suburbs.
Oh god Sarah that post depresses me so much.
Depressing too, in its own way, is that often kids from rich families ALSO come from broken homes and suffer from it. But we are taught to think that that doesn't happen and it goes unnoticed.
A kid from a broken home with money is going to have more opportunity than a kid from a broken home without money. Lack of money can have side effects like malnourishment or some sort of child labor thing that can reduce the kid's ability to get a decent education. There is also less hope when you're surrounded by poverty, which I think can be demotivating.
I wouldn't disagree with that, curt as I'm sure that you wouldn't disagree that a rich kid can have some significant fallout too and that it can go unnoticed because they are rich. I don't say this to be controversial or oppositional, I say it because... I work with rich kids from broken homes.
... yeah, it's particularly troubling when a rich kid from a broken home is taught how to use an assault rifle by his Mom and then ... well, you know the rest of that story.
you know what really burns my britches? homes that are literally broken. you know - like tile coming off walls in the bathroom, missing roof shingles, structural problems... such promise... ripped away by years of neglect (or maybe homeowner just couldn't afford it - who am I to judge?). you try and try to help by making recommendations that might keep things together, but there's only so much we can do.
all those broken homes... it's a shame.
I used to wonder how homes could get into such disrepair, and then the popcorn started peeling from my bathroom ceiling, and you know what....
I just clean up the pieces as they crash to the floor. Scrap and repair it? Ha! Ain't nobody got time for that!
Are you guys ever stunned at the general availability of marijuana in the world of regular grown ups? I always assumed high schools and colleges were just steeped in pot, as mine were.
Yep. My HS and college were steeped in pot, and the HS was parochial. Go figure. I learned something. You were cool and "in the know" if you had mere access to this stuff. To this day, I couldn't tell you where to get pot. I have TWO friends who would have it on hand, and offered it to me, which I declined. However, as to not being "in the know," I knew back then that I was NOT cool (LOL) and that was ok with me.
If you really want to understand what education is about apply for a scholarship.
http://privateschool.about.com/od/schools/tp/topboardingschools.htm
some drunk girl from groton did the groton hurl in my kitchen back in my boston daze.
I can't recall where it was on the USA but there was recent article saying teachers would not be allowed to teach critical thinking because it was causing children to question religious doctrine. Texas maybe. Definitely a republican idea, though it shouldn't be by rights. I wonder what happened to the drive for excellence that used to be an ideal worth having ... Did Amerika decide the price was too high cuz the sheep were getting restless? The new mantra seems to be to fcuk the poor and make it stick by keeping them dumb through governmental fiat. Canada ain't a heckuva lot different lately.
Where have all the flowers gone?
Like someone said under "forgotten" M.Arch., there should be a thread on crazy things that happened in architectural school. We could extend that to offices, too.
However, here's a crazy situation that happened in neither - with the IDP adviser outside of your firm who countersigns your forms after your firm has signed them. He was sort of the go-to IDP guy for the local chapter. I told him that it had been another 4 months or so, and I had a form for him to sign. He asked me "Why don't you meet me for lunch?" I didn't think anything of it. I thought he wanted to talk IDP ... and shop. Well, he SORT OF wanted to talk shop. It turned out he was doing "multi-level" and wanted me to get under his pyramid. I told him that, beyond going to work, doing some travel, going to the gym, and my job as an evening adjunct teacher, I wasn't interested. Not quite verbatim, he said something like 'oh, come on, this is a better opportunity than teaching at night. Quit that.' I had been using this guy for an adviser for over a year and I had to seek out a new one.
The stupidity of IDP advisers, outside of one's firm, could be a thread.
go for it observiant. no idea what you are talking about but sure you will be able to turn it into a shit storm of posts.
totally unrelated, saw in news that some offices in usa will maybe need to charge consumption tax on services, and it is apparently a shock. I didn't deal with billing when working in north america but we have always had to include tax for our fees here in Japan. Is that not the norm in the USA ? sounds great if so.
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