In my decisions and actions, I balance the following:

• I care about the people who use what I create.
• I care about the quality of what I create.
• I care about the people with whom I create.
• I honor my commitments to my employer.
• I am loyal to people who have earned my loyalty.
• I provide for my family.

I reflect on my decisions and actions to avoid:

• negligence,
• incompetence,
• deception,
• waste, and
• harm.

Agile practice is a means to these ends.

Short link: http://jkat.me/eUcbVN

Tag(s): agile, competence, harm, loyalty, negligence, quality, values

Comments: none

My daughter watches a television show on a children’s cable network that features a fourteen year old heiress. This character exists in a world of impossible opulence.

She lives in a historic hotel on the upper east side of a city that is most likely New York but is never mentioned by name. Her family occupies all floors of the ornate, beaux arts styled building though not simultaneously rather moving from identical room to room as the mood suits them.

Her bumbling, aloof, but well-intentioned father, the loving, competent but overtaxed mother and the irritating but endearing older brother frequently lose track of the heiress as they tend to go their separate ways during the day and most evenings.

A special episode was set on the building’s fortieth through forty-third floors which are the heiress’ closet — empty save for her next change of clothing.

She dines whenever she wishes on whatever she wishes. Her general preference being the meat of the last joint of the foremost leg of fresh dungeness crab flown in from the Pacific Northwest. It takes fifty crabs to supply enough food from that one small segment of their bodies to constitute a small snack.

She eats this favorite of all foods off plates crafted of pink diamond laid on a table set with pearl and titanium service glowing gold under candles lit with tapers made of tightly wound one thousand dollar bills.

When she has wept her tears dry — as she does most nights — the heiress re-moistens her eyes with drops of water distilled from a spring in oceania and instilled with hope gathered from the unfulfilled dreams and wishes of less fortunate children.

She is, in other words, a character America’s girls can both pity and aspire to become. And this is why her television show has been on the air and a hit in the ratings, in fact the tent pole of its network, for ten years.

Short link: http://jkat.me/gXstOs

Tag(s): children's television, television, writing

Comments: none

Robert Stolarik for The New York Times

Whatever thought went behind the panel’s actions, they were not at this public session to engage the public.

As the New York Times put it:

The panel, which has the final word on school closings, was set up as a check on mayoral authority, but in practical terms, it has been mostly a rubber-stamping body for Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s and the chancellor’s plans.

–Panel Votes to Close 10 City High Schools (NY Times)

My wife was upset by the Panel’s refusal to acknowledge collateral damage to other schools with student bodies residing in the same communities and often the same buildings. She became angry at the Panel’s indifference to the students currently enrolled in failing schools…

… someone asked the DOE representative what happened to the children who were stuck attended the failing comprehensive high schools that were being phased out in the Bronx and Queens. The bureaucrat said that New York City has a choice process for High School enrollment and those student had chosen that school, implying that any gaps in their education were their own fault because through their own free will they chose to attend a failing school…

–After sitting through a PEP (Panel for Educational Policy) vote… (clownmommy)

In his radio address, Bloomberg characterized critics at these meetings as misinformed:

Mr. Bloomberg said his critics fundamentally misunderstood the purpose of closing low-performing schools, a centerpiece of his efforts to shake up the school system. He said many parents did not realize that the schools would not simply be shuttered, but transformed into smaller schools.

– Bloomberg Calls Behavior of Black’s Critics an Embarrassment (NYTimes)

This has nothing to do with the comments my wife describes coming from the parent community of PS9.

parents asked for the decisions about their school be tabled until they could put together a proposal to make their school a zoned K-8 school for the growing neighborhood full of young families as option to be considered in lieu of closing “failing” MS 571 and inserting the philosophically opposite Brooklyn East Collegiate Charter Middle School to which lottery winners come from all around Brooklyn.

–After sitting through a PEP (Panel for Educational Policy) vote… (clownmommy)

My wife describes the panel’s paradoxical response telling parents they should have proposed alternatives to the Board of Education’s plan the year before the plan was announced so it could have been evaluated as part of the plan.

Bloomberg described the loud protests during the meeting as “embarrassing for New York City, for New York State, for America.” (NYTimes)

Yes, the attendees used tactics of civil disobedience. Yes, they were disruptive. Yes, they were angry. They were protesting a failed check and balance with great consequence to their lives. Civil disobedience short of any illegality and devoid of any violence strikes me as a moderate response.

Short link: http://jkat.me/gCGdFv

Tag(s): civility, New York Times, protest, school closings

Comments: none

Ever found yourself part of a discussion group you never asked to join?

I’m not talking about for profit marketing. I’m talking about an organization with a membership and good intentions. They dump their list into a mailing group.

The daily digest ends up looking like this…

Listserv is 25 years old and there’s no reason to keep re-learning this lesson. Notify your list that you’ve created a group. Tell them why they should be interested. Tell them who else is part of the group. Invite them to join.

People might want to participate in a conversation but they don’t want confused, antagonized strangers blundering into in their living room.

Short link: http://jkat.me/fqlljf

Tag(s): LISTSERV, mailing lists, netiquette

Comments: none

Short link: http://jkat.me/kyUPlu

Tag(s): brooklyn, fort greene, ice storm, photo

Comments: none