Delusions of Adequacy

If there's any part of me that wants the Lakers to win the series, it's the part that feels badly for Karl Malone and Gary Payton. Malone especially... Payton will be back.

But Malone... doggone it, Malone deserves a ring. Just one. After all those years coming this close with the Jazz, but always coming up against the steamroller that was the Michael Jordan/Phil Jackson-era Bulls... doing his best to rally his team against the Lakers... all the dedication, all the pain... staying in, and joining with his hated enemies (okay, I may be projecting a little bit here)... after all that, to come this close again, only to see it snatched away again... it's operatic, in a way.

I just have to think if Malone hadn't tried all those baseline jumpers back in the '97 (or was it '98?) Finals, he wouldn't be where he is today. I distinctly remember that sinking feeling as Malone went up for yet another 15-foot fadeaway, knowing it wasn't going to go in, knowing that the Bulls were going to rebound and convert, and there wasn't a thing to be done about it. If the Jazz had won just one of those series, Malone would probably enjoying his retirement, like Stockton, instead of having his dreams crushed yet again.

The Pistons win again.

And convincingly. No last-minute come-from-behind last-ditch three-pointer heroics. They just outplayed, outhustled, and outshot the Lakers for 48 minutes.

It now looks like the Lakers may be in trouble, at least to my uneducated eyes. The one game the Lakers won, on their own home court, was one the Pistons basically handed them in the final seconds. I'm not saying that the Lakers didn't deserve to win or the Pistons didn't deserve to lose; I'm saying that the best the Lakers have done is one shaky win, while the Pistons have racked up two decisive ones.

Of course, the Lakers have had their problems: Shaq in foul trouble, Kobe failing to produce last night, Malone's knee. Shaq and Kobe have been here before; and they can combust at any time to drub just about any team.

Too bad I'm going to have to miss the rest of the games.

We're the Detroit Pistons, and we're here to play.

If the Pistons are going to win, Hamilton and Billups and the Wallaces are going to have to step up and play like marquee players. Kobe demonstrated the value of the marquee player last night with the clutch three-pointer that sent the game into overtime. Marquee players are marquee players because they make those shots, even if they've hit 4 of 28 three-pointers in the playoffs so far. Even if their team is struggling and they're facing criminal charges, they go in and play and get their 33 points and 7 rebounds.

The Pistons are in this... but then, so were the 76ers at this point a few years ago.

In the on-going drama of my Integrating Technology in the Curriculum class, we must respond to daily journaling questions. Today's question:

"You have used CD's containing 600 megabytes of information on a single topic and the Internet where anyone has worldwide access to information. With these vast resources of information at our fingertips, how will our teaching roles change?"

My answer:

Technology will make only minor changes to the teaching profession until it becomes pervasive in schools. By pervasive, I do not mean each classroom having a computer or even several computers; I mean until Internet connectivity is as common as notebooks or pencils. This means wholly electronic classrooms, or even virtual classrooms far beyond the hobbled, interaction-limited “distance learning” systems in wide use today.

Only when each student has digital textbooks, submits work in electronic formats, and has desktop access to teacher-controlled sources of information, will technology truly have revolutionized the art of teaching.

Until then, teachers will continue to serve in the roles they always have: guides, coaches, models, and sources of information, as well as gatekeepers guiding students in determining what parts of the avalanche of information now available to them are reliable. It is in this final area that teaching will find itself most greatly changed in the foreseeable future: it will no longer be enough merely to teach students to use the card catalogue or the periodical resource guide when the reliability of each source of information must be carefully judged, when entering the word “Jew” in the most common search engine yields sites devoted to hatemongering, and when so much voluble commentary is generated by people with so many axes to grind.

Arguably, I didn't go nearly far enough. A hundred years ago, no one would have predicted the information revolution. Today's predictions are probably as off-base as the art-deco futures of the 1930's. Who knows? In another hundred years, we may be sharing each other's thoughts directly, without the intervention of such a clumsy artifice as language, and teachers will be obsolete.

In the class I'm taking right now (Integrating Technology in the Curriculum), one of our assignments was to create a timeline (using Timeliner 5.0) of our lives.

And as I examined mine, I realized that most of the exciting things in my life have already happened.

My life peaked, in terms of activity and excitement, when I was between the ages of seven and twelve. That's when we lived in Mexico; that's when I was traveling all over the eastern US with my parents on fundraising trips; that's when I learned a foreign language, a different culture, and ways of filling my own time with reading and music that have stuck with me to this day.

Since I came back from Mexico, a lot has happened; but much of it has been trivial.

Prime example: I spent four years working in the Electronics department at Wal-Mart. I made Wal-Mart some money, they dribbled a little back to me. Big furry deal.

The only thing I've done since I came back from Mexico that even came close to the importance of the work I was doing there (yes, I was working there, too; not the way my dad was, but I was witnessing every chance I got) is teaching where I am now. There's much to be done here: children to teach, racism to fight, professional skills to hone and expand.

And maybe I'm romanticizing my time in Mexico too much. I did spend quite a bit of it playing with Star Wars action figures.

But I do hope I haven't seen my best days already.

Been a long time since I watched a basketball game all the way through, but last night's trouncing of the LA Lakers by the Detroit Pistons was too good to miss.

If Birdstone could beat Smarty Jones, maybe there's hope for the Pistons...

Haven't posted anything this week because I've been away from my points of Internet access. Posting will continue to be light for the rest of June and July, at least. This fall, I'll be thinking hard about getting service at my house, though I live in a benighted area with no high-speed access to speak of.

Had a fairly productive week. Wrote a prologue I'd earlier decided not to write, and found it very useful writing the fifth draft of chapter 1. Maybe once I get the fifth draft of chapter 1 finished, I can move on to the third of chapter 2. And if I finish the third draft of chapter 2, I can write the first draft of chapter 3.

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban is easily the best movie of the series so far. It's the first one I fully intend to see again in theaters.