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By Kyle, August 31, 2008 7:37 am

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The economy has definitively and specifically begun to take it’s mighty toll on the Mid-City neighborhood of Los Angeles!!! The Cold Stone Creamery ice cream store that has graced the newly developed plaza at the bottom of my street for the past year is now gone. If this happens to the Starbucks anytime soon, there’ll be riots.

Other than the high gas prices which, frankly, among the middle class have done more to create high levels of whining than new transportation habits, the downturn in the economy has done little to affect the day-to-day lives of a number of Angelenos. But seriously, I consider myself rather lucky….I have a very steady job (there will always be a need for math teachers), I commute 1.5 miles every day (to the chagrin of family and friends who get on my case about not simply walking to work), and I rent. And so, despite all my whining, I actually do really count my blessings!!!

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By Kyle, August 30, 2008 3:33 pm

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The final weekend before the madness starts, I’ve determined to make the most of it. So to begin, I began the day, by renting a small little vehicle consisting of two wheels and a motor. My roommate (who now owns his own) and I spent the morning and afternoon driving up and down the PCH. It handled great, the motor absolutely purred, and generally was a great way to spend a Saturday. Let’s see if the rest of the weekend can be this productive (i.e. how many hours can I keep myself from wasting watching college football).

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By Kyle, August 27, 2008 3:26 pm

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Get the little pink shapes in the big pink area. It sounds pretty easy, right? Wrong!

During the past two days, I’ve developed an addiction to the online game, Fantastic Contraption. In said game, the objective is to literally design and build a contraption that will move those little pink shapes into the big pink areas. You can roll them, you can toss them, you can squeeze them through, you can conveyer-belt them, etc…

This is one of the new physics based online games that have become incredibly popular recently. These games almost always involve creation, experimentation, gadgetry, and pretty much all follow the general laws of physics (i.e. things move, bounce, fall, and accelerate just as you would expect them to in real life). You can even see a list of 79 physics games here!!!

I DO NOT recommend these games to people who are trying to spend their time wisely.

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By Kyle, August 24, 2008 8:29 pm

What I’m listening to right now: The Zombies: I’ll Call You Mine. While certainly not one of the most commercially or critically successful bands of the 1960s, the Zombies were definitely one of the most influential.

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There are several downsides to blogging, one of which is that once you start, you might (gasp!) actually gain an audience, which expects, nay, demands, high-quality, frequent, and insightful comments about any and every event. In an effort to appease said audience, I offer up the following:

Florida. Iowa. Rock ‘n’ Roll Thai. Sean and Sara Watkins. Sunset Junction.

Moving on…

Yesterday, the word of the day was “sustainability”, yet not within the usual context of global warming and environmental consciousness, but rather in the context of schools. One of the greatest problems that is faced by Cochran Middle School (and likely many others within LAUSD) is a lack of sustainability. What exactly do I mean?

This is what I mean. Cochran middle school has managed, despite many flaws, to attract a number of very high quality teachers. These teachers, my colleagues, inspire kids, organize field trips, help improve their scores, invite special guests for assemblies, and even push some toward admission in some of the top schools in Los Angeles. “What’s wrong with this?”, you might ask. Nothing, except for what inevitably follows. These teachers leave, and when they do, many (though not all) of the programs they’ve started leave with them. The successes that our school has is so dependant upon the personalities and the above and beyond giving of some of our teachers that there is no sense of momentum. No sustainability. In essence, what we’ve managed to do is to re-re-re-re-invent the wheel.

I wonder as I begin my 5th year, how in the world Cochran can begin to create a culture of success that is actually sustainable past the tenure of any particular teacher. How in the world do we do this? Honestly, I have no idea, but at least the question has now been asked.

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By Kyle, August 16, 2008 8:00 am

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Today, The Hunsblog has it’s first birthday! On August 16th, 2007, The Hunsblog hit the ground running with a post entitled Hunsbergermath 2.0 (at least give me points for attempting some lame creativity).

When I first began blogging, I didn’t really have a plan, a mission, or a motive that drove what I wrote about. Now,…..well,…..actually, if you think about it, I still really don’t have a plan, a mission, or a motive for all these blog posts.

So why do I blog anyway? Perhaps it is simply the simultaneous fulfilling of my drive for technology in a way that gravitates quite nicely toward my ADHD. After all, it is certainly not the fact that I have anything important to say (so for those of you who’ve been consistently taking my blogging advice, I humbly apologize for your now worse-off life).

I guess, mostly it allows me to articulate what is going on around me, here in Los Angeles, particularly at school, in a (mostly) constructive way. It allows my to express in text, all the random thoughts that clearly (or not so clearly) go on within my head. And finally, it allows me to entertain the illusion that I communicate much more effectively and frequently with my readers than I actually do.

So with one year behind me, I look forward to another, even better year blogging!

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By Kyle, August 10, 2008 8:20 pm

True story. I kid you not. So I’m sitting here on a sunny Sunday afternoon, mildly perturbed because it’s about that time that I should blog again, and I have very little material of which to blog about. Not only that, but I have to leave for church in about 10 minutes. The background music, Handel’s Behold, and See If There Be Any Sorrow, from the Messiah is hardly stirring my brain to come up with a blogging topic. Wasn’t that the point of this?

Anyway, a myriad of thoughts enter my brain as possibilities: Maybe talk about the comedy of Paul F. Tompkins I saw last night with my roommate. Maybe talk about how the current book I’m reading Good To Great is absolutely infuriating me because as it details the steps taken by organizations that have gone literally from “good” to “great”, it plays exactly to the opposite of the direction which LAUSD is going! The book is wonderful. And it’s clearly laying out the reasons why LAUSD is so stuck in the mud!!! Or perhaps I could blog a little about my upcoming trip to tropical Florida to visit my sister followed by an immediately subsequent visit to tropical Iowa for a cousin’s wedding. Individually, these topics are certainly not much to speak an entire blog posting about, and at best would only serve well as individual chunks of a grander literary scheme (in the vein of The End medley off of Abbey Road).

Anyway, like I said, I was sitting here pondering what on earth to write about when the sound of a circling helicopter slowly pervaded the room. At first I didn’t even notice as this is one of the dominant city sounds that I’ve long since grown used to. However, I soon ascertained that the helicopter was circling directly overhead as the volume grew mightily from a dull buzz to an all out roar. Again, this is not an infrequent occurrence, usually followed by an LAPD cruiser barreling up my street toward the high school or toward the neighborhood directly south of us. So as the sound of the chopper grew more and more eminent, I looked out my front window for the police car I soon expected to see zooming by.

There was nothing, nothing at all, when all of a sudden….a mid-90s Honda sedan drives down the road, coming to an awkwardly angled stop right almost directly in front of my house (directly blocking my neighbor’s driveway). Other than the unusually terrible parking job, the most interesting fact about this car was that it was immediately followed by about 4 LAPD cruisers who pulled up directly behind it.

Hmmmm…..you certainly don’t see this every day, I thought to myself, a fact which was confirmed when about 6 officers promptly exited their own vehicles, drew their weapons, and aimed them right at the driver of the now parked sedan. After yelling a series of commands to the driver, LA’s finest were able to coax him out of the driver’s seat, hands-behind-head, and face-down on the middle of the Rimpau Blvd. asphalt. The driver was cuffed, put in one of the cop cars and driven away, while the rest of the officers on the scene proceeded to start on their paperwork, finishing rather promptly, and had completely cleared out no later than 20 minutes after the incident occurred. And best of all, I wasn’t even late to church.

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By Kyle, August 7, 2008 7:11 pm

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Today was a day of memories!

Memory #1: Today for our professional development, we journeyed down into South L.A. proper for a day of teacher-to-teacher sessions. Mostly boring, although at times, actually helpful. Two years ago, we did the same thing, and one of my best memories from that experience was eating lunch at a little hole-in-the-wall BBQ joint called Smokee Joe’s. Anyone who knows me well knows that I am a sucker for good BBQ, and I was intensely disappointed when I was told by a colleague that this BBQ place had since gone out of business!

Memory #2: The background track your currently hearing is by a group called Arthur & Yu, a group that I had never heard of, and happened to hear live, during an in-store performance at a small little music shop in downtown Seattle during my road trip last year.

Memory #3: Today, after work, I stopped by the Bresee Foundation, an after-school recreation/tutoring center where a friend of mine from Mosaic works. It’s a very cool center, although it’s pretty far from Cochran to refer any kids there. What’s cool is that recently I happened to find out that one of my former students M—– (currently a junior), has been volunteering there and has gotten to know my friend from Mosaic pretty well. I’ve got to say that it’s so cool to see former students doing well, experiencing a life they love, and even giving back to others! The highlight of my day.

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By Kyle, August 4, 2008 5:03 pm

And so it begins. Without inspirational speeches, without collegial introductions, and without any sense of anticipation for the new school year about to begin. Rather, it begins with stray dogs running through the school hallways followed by three 90 minute sessions discussing one of the most bureaucratic and ultimately useless documents LAUSD has ever written, the “Math Instructional Guide” (or MIG, as it is known in close circles).

As roughly half the math department from Cochran (joined by half the math department of Mann Middle School) sauntered into classroom 108, our prison for the day, I looked around at the many faces, both familiar and new, hoping that my assumptions about what the day would be like would turn out incorrectly. Unfortunately, I was right, the knowledge of which I ascertained when our math coach instructed us to take 10 minutes, read some pages regarding the theoretical domains of skills, concepts, and problems, while taking notes (TAKING NOTES!!!!!!) on these blank pieces of paper lying around on our tables.

Luckily, I had my laptop and was able to actually spend some of that time creating assessments for the quizzes I’m planning on giving my kids the first few weeks of school. I’m sure tomorrow will be more of the same!

And just as Larry Norman began my summer break, he ends it as now as well, with I Think I Love You.

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