In case you haven’t heard the Ypsilanti High School football team won there division this fall and are now off to the play-offs. They went 8-1 in the regular season and they will be facing off against Portage Central in the Division 2 play-off game this Friday night at Shadford Field. If you like to watch football you might want to go check it out. The game is at 7:00pm and the team could definitely use all the fan support they can get.
Yesterday Jules and I and a few other people (Carol, Mary, and Ann) went to see an exhibit that started a couple of weeks ago at King Hall at EMU. The show is a mix of photographs and audio. The photographs are all of people who became parents as teenagers. The subjects range in age from 12 to 100. The photographs are displayed in pairs with a chair sitting in front of each pair of photos. Also with each pair of photos is a set of headphones. You sit in front of a pair of photos and listen to a pair of recordings from the subjects of each of the photos. The subjects of the photos tell there own stories of what happened to them.
In some cases the the subjects are still young and had their children recently, including one fifteen year old who just recently gave her child up for adoption. Another story comes from a 100 year old woman who had her first child at age 16. The subjects came from a variety of circumstances and each had their own unique story. The one common thread is that none of them had an easy time of it. Some had supportive families, others did not. All the stories were compelling. The show was put together by photographer Michael Nye. Our friend Ann Schafenacker was on the planning committee for the event. You can get more information on the event at the Washtenaw County public health department site.
The show runs through this weekend and is definitely worth checking out. Set aside an hour or two and pay a visit.
The exhibit will be open for our community October 5 – 21, 2006
King Hall, Eastern Michigan University
Monday – Thursday, 10 AM – 2 PM & 4 – 8 PM
Fridays 10 AM – 6 PM Saturdays 11 AM – 5 PM Sundays 1 – 5 PM
Please join us for this remarkable event!
The Ypsilanti High School drama club has been invited to participate in the 2007 Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland next summer. This is a huge honor being only the third ever school from Michigan invited to participate in the festival. There’s just one problem. In order to send the cast and crew to Edinburgh for 2 weeks and put on four performances they need to raise $100,000. That means they need a lot of help. I’m helping them out on a couple of fronts, the first of which is now available. I’ve setup a special PayPal account where people can make donations to the club. The donation button is up on the top of the left sidebar. If you can help the drama club participate in this amazing opportunity, please click the button and donate what you can. If you’ve got a blog or website and want to put the donation button on your site, send me an e-mail and I’ll send you the code that you can paste into your site. If you have any other idea’s for raising money, please contact me or Michelle Peet the drama teacher at the high school in charge of the club.
The audio of last nights Ypsilanti School board meeting is live at the site. You can subscribe to the feed from the Ypsi Government podcast page on this site. The most interesting thing to me was the opening discussion of a bond issue that will likely come to a vote next August. There is building work that needs to be done and also technology upgrades. This is a perfect opportunity for the district to go open-source and I will do what I can to make it happen. There was other interesting stuff to. The agenda is available here.
Max recorded a new MewzikCast last night featuring Uncle Seth, the MudMen and the Supersuckers. The MewzikCast has a new logo 
and a CafePress store is now open with stuff featuring the logo. Go check out the show.
The podcast of the meetings of the Board of Trustees for the Ypsilanti Public School District is now live. You can find it http://ypsischools.podshow.com/. The audio of the meeting is uncut and unedited. I’ll be trying to record all the public meetings of the board and posting on podcast site. Podshow provides free podcast hosting services. You can leave comments or discuss the events on the site by registering. You can listen to the audio on the site by simply clicking on the Play It button on the left hand side.
If you click on show archives you can will find icons for various audio players like iTunes, Windows Media Player, etc. If you click on the icon of your favorite player the podcast will open in that player.
Finally if you want all the recordings automatically downloaded as they become available, you can subscribe with the orange xml button. Just click and drag the button to the podcatching software of your choice. You can use iTunes, Juice, Doppler and other software for getting podcasts. If you do this the podcatching software will periodically check the feed for new recordings and automatically download them and install them into whichever audio player you use. This works on Windows, Mac and Linux machines. You can learn a bit more about podcasting in this article on podcastalley.com. The podcasts are absolutely free and are just straight mp3 files. That means that you can listen to them on any digital audio player, not just iPods. You can also listen on the computer, on a cell phone that plays mp3s, or burn to a cd.
Subscribe to the podcast with this link
YPSD Board Meetings
If anyone wants to assist in this project by volunteering to record some of the meetings or record meetings from the other local districts (Willow Run and Lincoln) please let me know.
During the recent Mayoral campaign in the city of Ypsilanti I recorded the audio and video of the debate held at McKenney Union and then made them available as a podcast for the community. In the interest of continuing and expanding community awareness and involvement of what is going on in local government, I want to expand on this and start a new initiative. I want to record all the public meetings of the various local government bodies including the Ypsilanti City Council, the Township Board of Trustees, and the School Board. My idea is to setup an account on Podshow+ and create feeds for each body. This part is already in progress and I’ll let everyone know when it’s ready to go. The next step is to get all of these meetings recorded. Finally I will get them posted so that anyone can listen to them. Podshow is a company set up by Adam Curry and Ron Bloom to provide podcasts and podcasting related services. On the Podshow+ site they offer free hosting and bandwidth for podcasts. So this initiative will cost nothing other than the time it takes to record edit and upload the audio files. If anyone out there is interested in helping out with getting the meetings recorded, please let me know.
Update: It appears Steve Pierce has already had the same idea. I’m going to talk to Steve about participating in this project.
Many years ago I learned that you cannot control the events that happen to you only how you respond to them. The way that you respond to events is a reflection of who you are. Someone who stands back and declines to respond when others launch attacks on your behalf is not worthy of respect in my opinion. Until a few months ago I had not really heard of either Paul Schrieber or Steve Pierce. I still don’t know either man personally. However, what I have witnessed in the course of the recent mayoral primary campaign and in some personal communications leads me to think that Paul Schrieber would not be the best person to be mayor of the city. Mr. Schrieber to my knowledge did not personally attack either of his opponents during the course of the campaign. However, supporters of Mr. Schrieber did attack Mr. Pierce. To the best of my knowledge Mr. Schrieber never publicly disavowed of their actions. By declining to condemn the actions of supporters, he tacitly approved of those actions. Now his wife Penny Schrieber has written a very nasty letter to Mr. Pierce attacking him and his supporters. In a post on his blog today Eric Touchberry wrote about contacting Mrs. Schrieber to confirm whether she had written the letter, she not only confirmed it, she also called all of us local bloggers “idiots”.
I don’t deny Mrs. Schriebers right to express her opinion of myself and other members of this community. Make no mistake, we Idiots are members of the Ypsilanti community and most of us have been involved in trying to make this a better place to live and work. If Paul Schrieber is to be mayor of Ypsilanti, he needs to step forward and tell the whole community exactly where he stands, on this and also on the actions of his other supporters. If he decides that he will continue to sit back quietly and let others do the dirty work than maybe the voters of the city should reconsider who should be mayor before the election. Maybe if Mr. Schrieber decides that being honest with the community is not important, there should be a write-in campaign for the November general election.
The Ypsi School District has put up their Calendar for the 2006-7 school year. The district website only has it as a pdf file. I added all the dates from the calendar to a Google Calendar and made it publicly accessible. If you are using any calendar program that can read .ics calendar files like Apple iCal, Evolution, Mozilla Calendar, or others you can subscribe to the calendar by putting this address in the field for the remote calendar to subscribe to in your calendar program http://www.google.com/calendar/ical/school.abuelsamid@gmail.com/public/basic.ics . If you already use Google Calendar you can just click this button to add the school calendar to your calendar 
. If you prefer to just see a quick web-view of the calendar you can just click on this link to see the calendar in your browser. If you like you can also subscribe to an RSS feed of the calendar here
If you haven’t tried out Google Calendar you should definitely check it out. It’s free and has some really nice features and is easy to use. You can manage multiple calendars such as work, home, school, etc. You can also set sharing preferences for each of your calendars and subscribe to public calendars. For sharing you can set each calendar to private, share with specific users or make it public like I did with this calendar. If you use gmail and you get a message with a date in it, you can click on the message and quickly add it your calendar. If an event includes a location, when you click on the event in the calendar it will include a link to the google map showing the location. You can import calendars from iCal or any other program that can generate .ics calendar files. The only downside is that you can’t manage your calendar offline and sync it to GCal. But apparently they are working on this. I would like to be able to sync my palm treo to my google calendar.
If you have any additional school events you’d like added to the calendar, just send me a message with the info using the contact form at the top of the page and I’ll put it in.
Last night I went to the first in what will hopefully be an ongoing series of coffee chats about the Ypsilanti Schools. The meeting was held at Bombadill’s and hosted by Richard Weigel. Richard came on board with the Ypsi Schools as Executive Director of Educational Services. Among other things he is responsible for curriculum and teacher training in the Ypsilanti Public Schools. About twenty people including various parents and three members of the school board (Amy Doyle, Floyd Brumfield and David Bates). Several issues were discussed over the two hour conversation. Richard seems to have a lot of good ideas, and seems to be implementing some good things. I am definitely looking forward to using the new EdLine system this year. It is being rolled out this fall for middle and high school students. All the parents will be given account information for the system, where we will be able to login and check up on attendance, homework assignments, grades etc. This will be very helpful in allowing me to check up on what my kids are supposed to be doing. That was definitely an issue last year. It is hard to be able keep up with what the kids are supposed to be doing, when the teachers have upward of 100 students to keep track of. This will hopefully allow the teachers to communicate information to the parents and students in an efficient manner.
Two big issues that came up were curriculum and grouping of students. On the subject of curriculum, they are currently reworking how it is defined and how students are evaluated against the curriculum. The plan is to have a clearer description of what the goals and expectations are for each subject at each level. By clarifying what the goals are the teachers can get help in planning different activities to target the skill and capabilities of students. In conjunction with that will be better defined ways of evaluating whether students know what they need to know at each level. The implication is that there will be more flexibility in moving students when they have demonstrated proficiency at a particular level. I think that this would be a very good thing and might help to overcome the other big issue that came up. This has to do with grouping and distribution of students.
Although Mr. Weigel denied that it was official policy, the reality in the classroom is that students are assigned to classes in such a way that there is a mix of students at different levels of capability and achievement. The idea behind this is that the higher achieving achieving students help set a good example for the struggling students and can help bring them along. In principle this may be a good idea. The problem with this is that the reality is a lot tougher. In an environment where you have a particularly wide range of students, unless the teachers are really prepared to facilitate, the students help each other, it just doesn’t work. There is also the issue of behavior. The top students are expected to provide and example for the behaviorally challenged students. When you are talking about elementary age children, this idea puts a lot of pressure on the higher achieving students. They are expected to help the other students but at the same time the teachers still end up having to focus on the behavior problems. While the teachers are doing this, the more adept students aren’t getting challenged and as a result are getting dragged down through boredom and frustration. At the same time I suspect (and this purely conjecture on my part, I have no evidence to back it up) I think it may also be frustrating to the struggling students to see other kids have a relatively effortless time with work and this can also be counter-productive. I think that students can help each other. But I also think that the kids should probably distributed with a somewhat narrower range in each individual classroom. I understand the desire and the rationale to have widest distribution in each classroom, but I don’t think the reality works. Many of the parents in attendance last night expressed basically the same concern, Richard heard us and took copious notes. Where it goes from here remains to be seen but at least we are talking and someone from the administration is listening and acknowledging the concerns.
Finally at the ending of the meeting I spoke to Richard after asked me if I knew much about podcasting since I was recording the discussion so Jules could hear it. I told him about Max’s podcast We talked a bit about my ideas for providing the teachers with training on free and open-source software tools that they can use. He was very enthusiastic and wants to move forward with that. I definitely want to do whatever I can to help the schools improve and I urge everyone in the community to contribute whatever skills they have to the cause.