HEY!!!  Wanna' go to Hawaii??

Found via Kairosnews today: 

What:  Computers & Writing 2004 in Hawai'i: "Writing in Globalization: Currents, Waves, Tides"

Where & When:  Honolulu, June 13-14, 2004

Wonder if any of my blather on ethnicity and blogging might work as a paper with a little editing?  Hmm...come on, I know a couple of you have some goodies tucked away that could use publishing.  We could submit and then organize a party next summer on Waikiki!!

Hey, it's a plan!

 

  7:14:22 PM    comment []

A

 

Project Status:  FIRST LEGO League

 

We begin.  The flyers to be sent home with every one of a hundred and twenty students is sitting on my desk. Two drafts and a mess of editing for gender-bias yields this spiffy pile of fluorescent chartreuse flyers, collated and stapled, certain to catch the eye of boys and girls and parents.

 

I’m committed – kind of.  I just realized as I was stapling this $53.00 pile of duplexed copying that the school principal has asked me to include a qualification in this promotional flyer which may deter girls from applying.

 

Damn.  How am I going to tell this guy I’m walking out on this sponsorship and the money provided by a Fortune 500 company if girls don’t feel welcome on this team?  I’m sure he has the right intentions, but the request to give fifth-graders a better shot at participation means excluding fourth-grade girls AND promoting this to a class which has already seen last year’s team of all-boys in action.  The fifth-grade girls will already have it in their heads that girls aren’t welcome to participate.

 

I’ve tried my best to put a holistic spin on this flyer; I’m encouraging kids with good teamwork skills and writing aptitude, as well as those with science, math, computer skills and LEGO experience.

 

Compare text from my flyer to last year’s as sent to parents:

 

Mine --

 

Does your fourth- or fifth-grader:

 

·         Enjoy problem solving and creative assignments;

·         Like to work with others as a team

·         Take pleasure in working with computers;

·         Have interests or skills in science, math or writing?

 

If so, they’re a potential candidate for the FIRST LEGO League Team!

 

A selected team of 8 to 10 fourth- and fifth-grade students, under the direction of parent coaches, will:

 

·         Accept the Challenge and begin researching a solution together;

·         build a robot from a special LEGO MindStorms kit;

·         program it to complete a variety of tasks to complete the Challenge;

·         write and make a presentation of the Challenge solution.

 

 

Last year’s, written by the principal –

 

Students will be selected by teachers and myself based upon their interest and/or skill in math and science, construction with LEGOs, computer operation (navigating and/or elementary programming), researching and writing, and working on a team.  In order to do this we will look for:

 

·         Teacher input

·         Math and science performance

·         Student writing

·         LEGO constructions

 

Teams of students between the ages of 9-14 build an autonomous robot from a special LEGO MindStorms kit and program it to complete a variety of tasks around a central challenge.  The challenge highlights a current scientific or technological problem facing the world today.  Construction and programming of the robot, and a researched presentation is completed under the direction of parent coaches during an eight-week period in September, October and November.  Teams compete in a regional competition at the end of November.

 

 

Can you see the difference, not just in writing styles, but in the promotion itself?

 

What do you see and what gender are you?  It might help me -- a lot.

 

  3:00:02 PM    comment []

m

 

Breakfast

 

Strange, isn’t it, how little things trigger memories?  How is it little things can set off a whole train of thought?

 

Being one of those “protein power” freaks, I was eating slices of leftover steak for breakfast.  Not bad, but they needed something.

 

Ah, that's what's called for.  Wasabi – a little bit mixed with mayonnaise.  A silky bite.

 

I grope for the little green tube of wasabi paste and the mayonnaise jar; a tablespoon of mayonnaise plopped first into my small condiment dish, a dollop of wasabi past squeezed on top.  I mix them into a smooth and creamy pale-green mixture with my chopsticks; picking up a small bead of the mixture, I put it on top of the steak and indulge.  The wasabi is sweet-hot, mellowed by the mayonnaise; it is a pleasant foil against the umami-meatiness of the steak. Mmm.

 

I am suddenly four years old, sitting in my parent’s kitchen, looking out the window.  I am waiting for my father to come home after work with sweets from Chinatown.  Moon cakes, filled with blackish bean paste that melts in the mouth; I enjoy them as much as my father does.  He tells me when he arrives with the white pastry box in his hands that these are just like the ones he ate as a child.  We each eat one with relish; he finishes mine since it’s too much for a four-year-old to eat all at once.

 

It’s not until this very moment, decades later, that I realize how terribly homesick my father must have been for some time after he left his home in Hawaii.  He’d joined the service after high school, gone to college in the cold, northern Midwest and found himself with his young family in California after graduation.

 

He must have felt much closer to home there on the west coast than in the snowy north.  It must have been so much easier in the 1960’s to be Asian-Pacific Islander in California than anywhere else on the mainland.   He fit into the scenery as if he’d grown there.  I remember how many people looked like my father at a distance, just in my immediate neighborhood: brown-skinned, dark haired, stocky build.  I could easily lose him in a crowd if I wasn’t paying attention.

 

He stuck out like a sore thumb when we lived in Ohio and in Michigan in the 1970’s.  It wasn’t until we moved to a town where a Philippine doctor had an established a practice that he looked less unusual.  People would mistake my father for the doctor, striking up a conversation with him thinking he was their physician.  No, he was only the other brown-skinned, dark haired, stocky build man in town, not their doctor.  It must have worn on him to be mistaken as frequently as he was for someone else, for one particular someone, by virtue of not looking like a local.

 

Perhaps it’s that his hair has grayed now that my father no longer seems the odd man out; perhaps it’s that there are many more people like him here, brown-skinned, graying-dark haired, stocky build.  He’s no longer such an oddity.  Maybe he’s grown more comfortable, at home here; although moon cakes are not to be found around here, it’s no longer a challenge to buy rice in bulk or find a selection of soy sauces, Asian condiments, even a range of Asian restaurants in which to dine.  Being Asian-Pacific Islander in the Midwest is not as challenging and odd as it was in the past.

 

Steak with steamed rice on the side, a little wasabi and green tea; I think I fix that for my dad’s birthday breakfast in a couple weeks.   I’ll find more wasabi for the occasion.  No problem.

 

Wonder if I could make some moon cakes?

 

  9:55:08 AM    comment []