I had the pleasure of meeting with FHS teacher extraordinaire Scott Slechta yesterday to discuss the possibility of his students blogging for Fairfield Voice. It was a great meeting, with a positive outcome. At the end of the meeting however, Scott got serious and asked me if this would cost the school anything. When I assured him that it would not, he was relieved, for as we all know, our district has to cut millions from its budget to accommodate larger budget cuts at the State level. Which reminded me…

Education Cuts Hurt

Reminded me that I’ve  been meaning to write about this for a while, but  life got in the way. So here goes…

A few weeks ago, the Iowa Independent reported “Education to endure 58% of budget cuts from the State budget. 58%! At the time I thought, “are you shi***ng me?”  I mean, one of the reasons my family and I moved to Iowa was due to the quality of the education system. We are the home to the standardized Iowa test after all…

58% indeed. Which led to millions (my apologies, I can’t find the exact figure right now. ..) of dollars being cut from Fairfield’s education budget, which will likely end up as cuts in the arts (among other things of course) because they seem to always get cut before anything else. (But that’s fodder for another post…)

I just can’t help but to be angry about this. Angry at the State, angry at Washington. I still support what the White House is doing, however, both the President and the First Lady (as most Presidents and First Ladies have done for every administration I’ve followed) have spoken out about the importance of education in America. Yet, here’s where slogans such as “No Child Left Behind” really get us -  “The United States now ranks eighteenth in Education among the World’s industrial nations” – The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development November 19th, 2008

Eighteenth? Really? The world leader that is these United States?

I have always believed that there is nothing more important to the future of our country than education. And I know that many of you do too, particularly the group of wonderful, giving people who teach our children. My gosh, I received an email from a teacher at FHS that had a timestamp of 4:15 AM on it a couple of weeks ago. This underpaid, over-extended group has got our future in their hands. Yet, our government, who continues to talk a good game about education, continues to take these amazing public servants’ budgets away. Leaving them with wonderful choices such as “do we buy math books or a couple of trumpets” to make instead of being able to put that time into our children or, perhaps, into getting some sleep.

I am appalled that Iowa Governor Culver has cut so deeply into our future. Surely, governing is not easy. Governing is about making tough choices. There are major trade-offs that have to be made. I understand, I really do. But if education is his “centerpiece” as indicated on his campaign website, “Issues” Nov 7, 2006 – “Drawing on his experience as a teacher, Culver has focused on education as a centerpiece of his gubernatorial campaign. As Governor, Culver will expand Iowa’s accredited early education programs, raise teacher salaries, create innovative programs to keep new graduates in Iowa to teach, and make college more affordable and accessible for Iowa students” then I am really confused.

It’s time for this madness to stop. This country is in trouble. It has been for years. And it’s not just due to what we read about in the headlines. I’d suggest that a big dose of what is wrong is that we (the government) have NOT prioritized education. For if we did, we wouldn’t be staring down the barrel of huge budget cuts year in and year out. We wouldn’t be making the already hard job of teaching our children ever harder.

Education is a social process. Education is growth. Education is, not a preparation for life; education is life itself. – John Dewey

I couldn’t agree more with Mr. Dewey and I couldn’t believe more in education – and I know that I’m not the only citizen who feels this way. Our government? I’m just not so sure anymore…

What’s your take?

Fairfield’s Singing Cedars Early Childhood Program is sponsoring a very special presentation by world renowned early childhood educator Helle Heckman entitled “The Child in the Care of the Authentic Adult”. She will address the issues facing anyone working with children 9 and under, such as parents, teachers, home-based caregivers, and home schooling parents in this very unique and engaging presentation.

“For the last few years I have traveled the world visiting kindergartens, childcare workers, nurseries and schools. Everywhere I have met a growing need to council parents about how to handle everyday life with small children. It takes guts for parents in this day and age to go against the stream and follow their intuition… knowing that children need to be given the space to develop naturally and in their own speed and way.” -Helle Heckman

Helle speaks of the importance of not engaging the child in testing or academic learning for the first seven years and advocates allowing the child to develop naturally through creative play. She says that children are based in doing and it is necessary for them to “do the work of life in order to be tuned into life”.

“It is a great honor for us to be able to bring Helle Heckmann to Fairfield” says Eniko Reeder, co-founder of Singing Cedars. “Helle was a huge inspiration to me. I met her at a critical point in my training… here was this truly authentic woman who brought all of herself to the children. I totally resonated with that as a way to teach.”

Helle is the founding director of Nøkken, a pioneering kindergarten in Denmark of mixed age children from 1 year to 7 years. She has traveled and taught throughout the Americas, Canada and Europe for the past eighteen years and is currently on a world tour. She is a member of the Danish Steiner Waldorf Kindergarten Association and serves on the board of The International Early Childhood Association.

The program will be at 7pm Wednesday, November 5, at the Public Library in Fairfield, IA.  Suggested donation of $15.

Presentation sponsored by the Singing Cedars Waldorf Community in Fairfield.  For more information call 641 469-3196.

“Every single day I am standing in the garden greeting the children – they can count on that. The children look me in the eyes and what they see is, there is an adult who knows what she is doing, who is real and authentic. That is what the children of today need more than ever.” -Helle Heckman

Gordon Rader

I met Gordon Rader through Astred Jones. Astred recently graduated from Gordon’s program, interned at Greens Restaurant in San Francisco, and promptly got hired on full-time. Astred deserves all kinds of kudos – she’s smart, ebullient, has tremendous perseverence and is dedicated to the culinary arts. I’ll venture to guess that she was Gordon’s favorite student this year. Astred decided that Gordon, being the chef he was, should be introduced to Fairfield’s eclectic foodie culture and to me, being the food snob that I am. We met at Revelations over pizza on an ArtWalk night last fall and our introduction immediately spun out of control into foodie debate to the point where the rest of our party possibly started to feel alienated!

I did not keep in touch with Gordon since that evening several months back, but something about the whole sustainability and ongoing food discussion here got me thinking that I should respond to his long-outstanding Facebook friend request. It’s a good thing too. Gordon immediately invited me out to check out the Culinary Arts premises at Indian Hills. I trekked over to Indian Hills on Wednesday and was pleasantly surprised by the setup.

The kitchen has the standard setup, but what was of real interest to me was what’s called the “Studio”. Gordon’s recognized that the media frenzy around food should be a wave ridden with care. He’s also recognized (before any other program at Indian Hills, I should add) that social networking has value. The studio incorporates a ceiling-mounted camera pointed at an instructional counter, behind which lie the standard kitchen accoutrements: 6-burner stove, commercial oven, deep fryer, and more. The idea here is that students should be able to create instructional videos and upload them to Facebook, YouTube, wherever. A large flat-screen mounted on the wall nearby provides feedback, but is also used for instructional videos.

Gordon’s trying to instill the core of social networking and cosmopolitan cuisine into his students. There’s obvious resistance though. He regularly deals with the “But Chef I don’t like that Mexican shit” and “Chef, nobody wants that spice stuff”. It’s the sort of thing that would make my patience wear thin very very quickly. Gordon takes it all in stride (albeit with a bit of Hell’s Kitchen-esque attitude) and cajoles his students into realizing that culinary arts is not about making baked potatoes and some grilled beef alone.

Gordon’s challenge is large enough with only the idea of introducing global cuisine to a large disinterested student population. He has taken his students on trips to France and Italy. But add to this that he maintains a quite interesting blog which he’s working on getting his students to participate in as a general requirement for his courses, and his regular updates to FoodBuzz, and you just start getting the sense of Gordon’s drive. Watch his Twitter feed and you realize that this is a man who’s maybe marginally insane, but in a good way

Gordon invited me, my wife and my friend Rushad as his guests to his students’ Contemporary American Dinner special menu on Thursday, July 9th, prepared by students Mangal Tamang and Ron Wixom. My wife and I are vegetarian and the chefs-du-jour very graciously prepared vegetarian options for our culinary delight. Mangal’s a Fairfield resident, via Nepal.

I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve had the snobbish and overly-opinionated view that Indian Hills could largely be written off. It’s an institution that does not inspire inventiveness or innovation as far as I could tell. I’m having to rethink all my prejudices thanks to meeting Gordon Rader.

In the upcoming parts of this series I’ll bring you Gordon’s vision of SE Iowa’s culinary future, including the American Culinary Foundation sub-chapter for this area and his work on sourcing locally, organics and green energy at the Indian Hills program. And reviews of the American Contemporary Dinner by Mangal and Ron.

US Cellular CEO - Jack Rooney

This ran in the Fairfield Ledger several days back. It’s Mr. Rooney’s response to Mr. Goldstein regarding US Cellular’s position on the cell-tower to be sited at Depot Ave. It appears that this response may have been been prior to the paid advertisement from Mr. Goldstein, since Mr. Goldstein references “no credible evidence”, which Mr. Rooney uses here.

This document came to me via Steve Carlson, part of the press/media relations team at US Cellular.

Submitted by: John E. Rooney
President and CEO
U.S. Cellular

Dear Residents of Fairfield:

As the president and CEO of U.S. Cellular, my top priority is to make sure our customers are satisfied with everything we do. Every call matters to us because we believe the most important thing about your phone is the person on the other end. In Iowa we’ve built a network of 700 cell phone towers so our customers can count on their phones to work wherever they are.

These towers greatly enhance public safety, help communities attract businesses, and offer a convenience we’ve come to expect. In order to keep our customers connected we must build new towers to handle the growing number of calls and improve the strength of the signals. It’s for these reasons we need a new cell tower in Fairfield and chose the location on Depot Avenue.

To date there is no credible scientific evidence that cell phone towers pose a risk to people’s health and I can assure you that we wouldn’t build towers if we thought otherwise. We commissioned a third-party test of the tower’s radio frequency (RF) levels and they concluded that it’s well within the government’s acceptable limits. Someone standing at the base of the tower would receive less than 1 percent (.81) of the acceptable RF levels. At 50 feet from the tower the RF level drops dramatically to .02 percent and at 500 feet the amount of RF rounds to zero (.00000000).

We began construction on the Depot Avenue tower in February after receiving our permit but put it on hold in good faith when residents expressed some initial concerns. Since then our associates have spoken with dozens of residents, some in favor of the tower and some against. They met with Mayor Malloy, Maharishi University and a committee to discuss alternative locations and unfortunately these sites were not environmentally suitable to build a tower. After exploring all of our options and in light of the RF study mentioned above, we felt our current location is the best one. We shared our plans with Mayor Malloy and resumed construction.

Cell phone towers are vital to our network to deliver our reliable service but at the end of the day we believe we’re more than just a phone company. Since 2005 we’ve donated more than $640,000 to schools and nonprofits in Iowa and our associates have volunteered more than 1,350 hours. One of our 10 $100,000 winners in our Calling All Communities campaign was Kuemper-Catholic High School in Carroll, and in our Calling All Teachers campaign a teacher from Washington Elementary School received $900 in funding to buy classroom materials. In 2009 we’re giving more than $3 million across our markets to support children’s education.

I hope this letter provides some peace of mind for those concerned about the tower. We care deeply for our customers and the communities where we live and work.

We believe in something better,

Jack

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Now that actual summer is finally here, I thought I’d take a moment to educate visitors and newbies to the area about “Heat Index” – a.k.a. “Why It Is So Freaking Hot Outside.”

In a nutshell: Humidity (water in the air) makes heat seem hotter.

Today, right now, the current air temperature is 93 degrees. Not bad, but I’ve seen worse. Down in the southwest you get higher degrees than this all the time. However, if you’ve ever been out there, you’ll notice one big difference – Humidity.

Humidity is expressed in percentages – 0% to 100%. These percents express how much water the air can hold at it’s current temperature. The hotter the air the more water it can hold. (”Dew” is what happens when night time air cools, reducing the amount of water it can hold. The excess drops on the ground.)

In the southwest the amount of water in the air is extremely low, even down to 0% at times. This effect is most noticeable when you step out of the sun. No matter how hot it gets the shade is always pleasant, and at night the temperature can drop to freezing (32 degrees) in the middle of the summer! Without water the air cannot hold heat.

Around here, however, we usually pull higher than 50% humidity. In fact, at our 93 degrees today we also have a 66% humidity. I found a Heat Index Calculator, which puts the Heat Index (”how hot it feels like”) at 112 degrees!

The point here is that, although it may feel like 112, it is in fact only 93 degrees. Every time you step out of the air conditioning and it feels like walking into a flaming brick wall, just tell yourself: “I, too, am mostly heated water, so this is no big deal. This… this is no big deal at all.”

Then go get yourself an ice cream and head on down to the local swimmin’ hole.

WORD ON THE STREET:

I’ve heard it said that an acre of corn or soybeans will evaporate more water than an open body of water (like a pond) of the same surface area. Anyone know if that’s true?

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[Section taken from the book  "The Sharp Knife of Forced Simplicity, Volume 1: The Numinous Rebellion"]

Everything we have is thanks to those who have come before us. Our fruits are large and tasty, our society is long-lived and powerful, our knowledge of Creation is outstanding. We touch the bottom of the ocean and other worlds. We are the beneficiaries of thousands upon thousands of years of human effort.

All this effort was for us. Perhaps a man took to selectively breeding vegetables so that he may have better food for himself at first… but when he has a family, their well-being moves to the forefront of his mind. Inside this loving desire to provide for one’s immediate family comes the knowledge that his efforts will improve the lives of his son’s sons… far on down the channels of the future. With every generation thinking like this, humanity rises quickly from lack to overabundance. Read the full story

StrangeMaps: US States as Countries

The fine folk over at StrangeMaps had an interesting overlay of US States as Countries of Equal Population. I generally have a ginormous ego about my excellent geography education and knowledge, but this one stumped me. What the heck is the flag that occupies Iowa?

My first thought was East Germany, but then I remembered that that no longer exists I actually had no idea, and had to CIA Factbook it. On that note, isn’t it wonderful that the CIA provides us all this great geography information? I guess they really should know it better than anyone elso tho’. Read the full story

For those of you who don’t know, there is a two-week Permaculture Design Certification course being taught in Eco-Village soon, from May 31 to June 13. At the end you’ll get an internationally recognized certificate!

More at Big Green Summer.