Eleanor's 2nd Annual Valentine's Day Cookie Party

Through the screams, the tears, the frosting faces and the mess Eleanor and company had a grand time at this year's event.

King's Hill Cabin

Two weeks ago the family, the Netburns and the Brandons headed up to the Forest Service Cabin at King's Hill, high atop the Belt Mountains in Central Montana. The reason we were in the Belts was to ski at Showdown and the cabin is literally 300 yards from the parking lot.

The Belts have gotten hammered with snow and their are rumors circulating around my students that Showdown is in the top 5 top snow ski resorts this winter (I'm skeptical). Needless to say there is 50 to 60 inches of snow up at the cabin. On Friday night we had a bit of a struggle to even find the cabin as darkness, light snow and being tired from a long drive compounded to limit our ability to see much of anything. Eventually the cabin was found, the wood stove fired up followed by the inevitable wait for the stove to heat up the cabin.

I snapped these couple of pics as we waited. I wrapped up in my old and trusted Big Red. Folks kept making fun of me for wearing big read and all the joking reminded me of the story of how Big Red came into my life. It was in November of 1998 that I was driving from Virginia to Montana to take the first job I ever held in Montana, a gig at the Aspen Youth Alternatives. As my little Saturn station wagon motored across Kansas and into Colorado during the drive out I quickly came to the realization that I was going to need a fundamentally better winter coat than the one I had. I stopped at Sierra Trading Post in Cheyenne, Wyoming and came across this rather large, overstuffed Marmot synthetic down jacket. I remember I asked a saleslady what the ideal use for such a jacket was and she told me (and I think I remember this verbatim) "It would be good if you had an ice climber on belay and you were just standing around". I of course had no idea what that meant, but it certainly sounded badass so I bought the jacket.

At some point that jacket was dubbed Big Red. Most mornings you can find me walking around the frog ponds in Lewistown wearing big red as I walk Salsa. Its been a good Montana jacket even though I have never belayed an ice climber in it.

Photoshop learning curves

I recently activated a free one month access to the software tutorial site lynda. This site is really one of the better online tutorials I have ever found and I have to give a shout out to friend and former student (FHS 2006) Ian Matteson for turning me onto Lynda.

Anyway, as always I'm trying to brush up on my photoshop and InDesign skills. Tonight's efforts can be seen here with an attempt to hide the boogers underneath E's nose and to burn and blur everything but E. What do you think?

What's new at Fergus High School? I'm right in the middle of my Mock Congress. A couple of years ago I stumbled upon a program run by the Youth Leadership Initiative run by the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia. This outfit supports and offers an Internet based mock congress called e-congress in which high school students create "mock" federal bills. My students' bills are sent to high schools all across the country where they are vetted and debated in a "mock" committee while my students do the same with bills from all over the country. The end result is that students learn quite a bit about contemporary issues (popular bills usually involve capital punishment, immigration, legalization of drugs, higher education costs, abortion, same sex marriage) and they get to experience the anticipation of waiting to find out if their bills pass.

The end result is experiential learning at its best, a school of education that I love to be a part of. I firmly believe that the best teacher is the experience of doing and this mock congress style strongly pushes that idea.

Here you see some students from my A.P. Government class researching and writing their bills.