We are off to Seattle for a very quick trip to visit daughter, son-in-law, and grandsons, and I am taking Friday off. We will miss a late-May snow storm, evidently, with some predictions of up to 10 inches of snow early Saturday. The temperature in Denver today is going to top out at 90 and will drop to under 30 at night within 36 hours.
Reporting on the weather qualifies as one of those things I would call "predicaments," meaning there is not much anyone can do about the situation. We can take precautions, like bringing in some plants, covering some others, and turning on the heat while we are away. By the time we return, we will likely see no trace of the snow, however much falls.
By next Tuesday we can turn off the heat again, and I hope for the last time until next fall.
We will drive to the airport, looking to park in a commuter lot for the first time in over two years. DIA shut down shuttle buses during the pandemic and only restarted them in December. There won't be as many as pre-pandemic, so we need to build in a bit more time. In related news, DIA's security lines have been growing longer once again as people (like us) return to flying.
We invested in a five-year TSA Pre certificate, so we may miss the worst of the lines... and that is a choice by us to mitigate a predicament, which boils down to overcrowded airports and inefficient practices, by investing a bit of money.
And we will drive ourselves to the commuter lot, which will burn some gas, recently purchased at $4.05 a gallon. We can whine about the high gas prices but there's clearly not much that can be done about them. We can drive less, and we do. We are down to one vehicle and it is a 2010... still under 50,000 miles. You control what you can control.
High school is a predicament, in my mind, rather than a clear problem to be solved, and that is unsatisfying to many students and parents, not to mention educators. Progress as a learner or teacher can't be measured in small bits of time, or even in one year. We don't learn in a steady way, but in fits and starts and stops.
Sometimes I wonder how we managed prior to all the standardized tests to decide what kids were learning and how they measured up. I suspect we managed by not engaging in all the national comparisons at all. We just trusted teachers and schools to do their jobs.
Sure, people complained and disagreed, but mostly people retained an overall confidence in the worth and success of public education.
High school media programs are predicaments. How do we train, motivate, and organize a significant number of students of various skill levels and interest levels to inform, entertain, and persuade a complex community? And how would we ever know if we have "succeeded"?
We are at the point in the school year when many states and national organizations offer critiques of media over the summer... as a way to rank and rate and confirm and question and suggest new ideas. I have written such critiques for many years, and here's why I know student media is a predicament:
I could copy and paste many of the same comments I was writing 20 years ago into almost any publication critique today. Change is incremental, at best.
Education and student media are moving targets, much like Colorado weather or gas prices. There is a constant turnover of teachers and students, with each new group needing to be taught. I saw that late snows in Colorado are hardly unusual, and I guess that helps a bit when we worry about how the peony bushes will fare in this quick storm.
They will probably be fine. So will be all.
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