08.31.09
Posted in Current Events at 3:49 pm by Kaihaku
Reading Rainbow is finished. The will is there, the need is there, but the money is not. It’s easy to blame the department of education for being too one dimensional but in a world where corporate executives spend millions of dollars detailing their homes the fact that no one is willing to pick up the bill of several hundred thousand dollars. That’s a huge bill for most of us but for a small percentage of the population that’s pocket change. It’s doubtful that they watch Reading Rainbow anyway, I suppose. It’s a low budget high value show. I don’t understand why it needs to pay to renew broadcasting rights if its a non-profit. Then, there are a lot of things I don’t understand.
Even if you can’t remember a specific Reading Rainbow episode, chances are, the theme song is still lodged somewhere in your head:
Butterfly in the sky, I can go twice as high,
Take a look, it’s in a book — Reading Rainbow …
Remember now?
Reading Rainbow comes to the end of its 26-year run on Friday; it has won more than two-dozen Emmys, and is the third longest-running children’s show in PBS history — outlasted only by Sesame Street and Mister Rogers.
The show, which started in 1983, was hosted by actor LeVar Burton. (If you don’t know Burton from Reading Rainbow, he’s also famous for his role as Kunta Kinte in Roots, or as the chrome-visored Geordi La Forge on Star Trek: The Next Generation.)
Each episode of Reading Rainbow had the same basic elements: There was a featured children’s book that inspired an adventure with Burton. Then, at the end of every show, kids gave their own book reviews, always prefaced by Burton’s trademark line: “But you don’t have to take my word for it …”
“The series resonates with so many people,” says John Grant, who is in charge of content at WNED Buffalo, Reading Rainbow’s home station.
“I think reading is part of the birthright of the human being,” Burton said in a 2003 interview. “It’s just such an integral part of the human experience — that connection with the written word.”
“I think reading is part of the birthright of the human being,” Burton said in a 2003 interview. “It’s just such an integral part of the human experience — that connection with the written word.”
The show’s run is ending, Grant explains, because no one — not the station, not PBS, not the Corporation for Public Broadcasting — will put up the several hundred thousand dollars needed to renew the show’s broadcast rights.
Grant says the funding crunch is partially to blame, but the decision to end Reading Rainbow can also be traced to a shift in the philosophy of educational television programming. The change started with the Department of Education under the Bush administration, he explains, which wanted to see a much heavier focus on the basic tools of reading — like phonics and spelling.
Grant says that PBS, CPB and the Department of Education put significant funding toward programming that would teach kids how to read — but that’s not what Reading Rainbow was trying to do.
“Reading Rainbow taught kids why to read,” Grant says. “You know, the love of reading — [the show] encouraged kids to pick up a book and to read.”
Linda Simensky, vice president for children’s programming at PBS, says that when Reading Rainbow was developed in the early 1980s, it was an era when the question was: “How do we get kids to read books?”
Since then, she explains, research has shown that teaching the mechanics of reading should be the network’s priority.
“We’ve been able to identify the earliest steps that we need to take,” Simensky says. “Now we know what we need to do first. Even just from five years ago, I think we all know so much more about how to use television to teach.”
Research has directed programming toward phonics and reading fundamentals as the front line of the literacy fight. Reading Rainbow occupied a more luxurious space — the show operated on the assumption that kids already had basic reading skills and instead focused on fostering a love of books.
Simensky calls Reading Rainbow’s 26-year run miraculous — and says that its end is bittersweet.
Reading Rainbow’s impending absence leaves many open questions about today’s literacy challenges, and what television’s role should be in addressing them.
“But” — as Burton would have told his young readers — “you don’t have to take my word for it.”
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08.17.09
Posted in Life and the happenings there of at 7:33 pm by Kaihaku
My throat and right ear are host to an ‘acute bacterial infection’ a.k.a. Strep Throat, this is good news however as it means that I am not, as I have been in the past, afflicted by a virus. These microscopic invaders, following lunch today, shall be subjected to all the devastation that antibiotics can break. Devastation to which they, unlike viruses, are quite susceptible.
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Posted in Life and the happenings there of at 4:21 am by Kaihaku
The two new English Teachers for the Royal University of Agriculture have arrived. I wasn’t in the best of shape to show them around but it was fun to watch the Sachs orient them – the Sachs have been here only a month. One is a SALTer from Canada and the other is Cambodia’s first YAMENer. Observing their first day I felt a dull bittersweet ache – a sort of homesickness for Kampuchea. I’m glad that I’m leaving here with this feeling, I was afraid at one point that I wouldn’t.
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Posted in Life and the happenings there of at 4:12 am by Kaihaku
Saturday I worked with the new Computer Administrator and taught him some more of the workings of Ubuntu. That evening I decided I would watch some cable television, splurge a bit before going to bed. I caught fragments of Stuart Little, Sniper 2, Sniper 3, Journey to the Center of the Earth, Conspiracy, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, Indictment: The McMartin Case, and a slew of others as the night continued on. It was 3 AM before I finally turned in.
Sunday I awoke with a high fever and a racing mind stuck in a seemingly endless processing loop of all the crap media I had absorbed the night before interspersed with frantic bursts of real but trivial concerns – like where am I going to go the day I get back? It took me hours to pull myself together enough to get up, get a shower, soak a rag in cold water, and get a drink – I was dehydrated as well and my throat felt terrible. Eventually I took some paracetamol and that seemed to help a bit. Towards evening with my head a bit clearer I decided to try to focus the mental din by continuing my current read-through of the Bible. I happen to be on Job which is an interesting book to read with a fever. I didn’t eat anything that day, which was probably a mistake, and drank as much as I could stomach.
This morning I forced myself to get up and eat some kuyteav at the place on the corner. I slowly began to feel better, Amara was nice enough to give me the two oranges she brought for lunch, though I’m still feeling a bit weak and the sore throat persists.
Now I have to wonder what brought all that on at once. Was it an allergic reaction to hollywood? Just coincidence? Malaria? Swine Flu? Stress?
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08.14.09
Posted in Life and the happenings there of at 4:25 am by Kaihaku
It’s been a long day of network troubleshooting. I fried one installation of Ubuntu trying to get it to forget about the domain and had to spend over an hour digging through individual files to get it up again — I’m quite thankful for my study of Unix so long ago, knowing how to work vi finally proved useful!
On top of that I’ve also been writing progress reports and have that re-entry manual sitting on my desk. Lots of things to think about as I go home. Where will I live? Where will I work? Revising MCC Cambodia’s Computer Policy and trying to get the network stable again are refreshing straightforward in comparison.
All that leading up to the fact that thanks to OC ReMix’s Hedgehog Heaven album I have a strong craving for Sonic the Hedgehog 2. Please don’t even suggest emulation, not for a classic.
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08.11.09
Posted in Life and the happenings there of at 6:42 am by Kaihaku
Well!
Two weeks ago, just before our three days of program five year inquiry and discernment meetings, the Phnom Penh office server crashed in a bad way. Our server technician, previously our general computer technician, took it off to his repair shop. The week of meetings passed and on saturday he informed me that both the primary hard drive and the secondary hard drive had failed. It was alright though, he assured me, as they were under warranty.
Late monday morning he brought the server to the office and hooked it up to the immense relief of Seiha and Sheri who had stored a significant portion of their files there. The last several back-ups on the server had failed to restore but one from about a week before the primary hard drive failed was still good – though apparently the secondary hard drive had gone around that time and had been removed. So he boots up the server and starts puttering around…then the Phnom Penh start realizing that they can’t print. When I’m around I’m usually the first person they ask for help with that sort of thing so I was bombarded. I soon discovered that none of the computers on the network could access each other anymore, though they had been fine before the server went and before it was returned. So I deduced, without too much difficulty, that there was a new conflict with the restored server. Unfortunately our server technician didn’t seem to agree. He reinstalled the domain profile on Shari’s, inadvertently deleting her thunderbird profile in the process, and then spent most of the morning running tasks on the server, updates I presume, and reading the paper. The new computer technician and I attempted to resolve the conflicts but, without server access, it was beyond both of us. Which I suppose raises the point that when I attempted to log into the server I found that my password was no longer valid. Quite frustrating. By the afternoon it was clear that the server shares were the only thing accessible on the network and that none of the computers, not even Shari’s, could access the domain. So I spent the afternoon getting as much as I could off of the server.
This morning I came into work to more computer troubles and then Bud told me that he had just gotten a bill of $120 for the two hard drives. Some warranty. On top of all of it internet access has been blinking every since the server was reintroduced to the network. I came close to pulling the plug but the last thing I want to do is risk losing more data – there are still a few gigs that I wasn’t able to access. I did get Seiha back up and running though.
The Yordys treated me to lunch at ParkCafe which helped to relieve my stress and calm me down. It was quite pleasant, I had a tuna sandwich, and we talked about a lot of things – things other than computers. Afterwards, I went back to the guesthouse to take a quick shower and noticed that there were red splotches all over my shoulders. I had been even more tense than usual and had been rubbing my shoulders a lot so I figured that was the cause. Then it spread to torso and down my arms, covering the upper half of my body in red splotches… My mouth went dry and I got a headache. I think I discovered that I have another food allergy but, unfortunately, I don’t know to what. The sandwich didn’t exactly come with a list of ingredients. Regardless, I’ve never had such a violent reaction. It didn’t really disturb me because there was nothing I could really do about it. Though Daniel did look up my symptoms on WebMD — whatever it was wasn’t chicken pocks. It came on quickly, within half an hour of eating, and took about two hours to fade away.
Later that afternoon I had an emergency computer meeting with the Yordys and Andy. It looks like we’ll be switching back to a peer to peer network. It’s disappointing to lose the potential of the server but it’s proven itself unreliable and, at the moment, it’s what the office needs more. It will also save us the significant fees that the server technician charges us a month. It’s been a rough few days and I’m feeling kind of beat up, but I’m hopeful that a network remaking will set up something more stable. I really wish it had just worked out the first time.
Once you will know my dear you don’t have to fear. A new beginning always starts at the end.
~Within Temptation
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08.10.09
Posted in Life and the happenings there of at 5:06 am by Kaihaku
It was a rough morning, just about everything that could have gone wrong with the Phnom Penh office computers had gone wrong… The server had imploded the week before and when the technician in charge of its maintenance bought in its replacement it killed the network. Permissions suddenly vanished…
Well…that’s not really the point though.
In the afternoon I was sitting at a computer when I heard Amara gasp loudly. I turned and she waved for me to come over. She was watching a power point on her computer, one that a friend of hers had emailed her. It was a slideshow of pictures of a group of people, either Thai or Khmer, massing around a dead man in the woods. At first I thought it was pictures from the news but then they started dissecting the corpse piece by piece. It got gory fast and I turned away. Amara told me that they ate the body. She asked me with a laugh if I thought it was real? She kept on smiling broadly and laughing though her voice was troubled and I thought she was shaking a bit. It was the Khmer smile, the shield that they often raise when they’re ill at ease. She told me that the people in the slideshow weren’t human, that they were terrible for doing what they did. She kept on trying to get other people to watch the slide show, first Pheap and then Chylong. They all had the same reaction as her, they looked disturbed but they laughed. I remembered the Peace Corp couple in Prey Veng telling me how their host family was fascinated with watching real life disaster footage, gruesome footage of death and suffering… I wonder what it means to be Cambodian? Many of them seem to share a unwilling complusion towards the morpid. They can’t turn away. Is it because they grew up surrounded by stark reminders that life isn’t as valuable to us humans as we claim? I don’t know. Amara told me, still smiling, that she felt feverish after seeing those pictures and that she was going to complain to her friend. I had the unvoiced thought that she had passed it on to three other people herself…why? Was it seeking solace? Affirmation that this was wrong? I wish I understood…
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08.04.09
Posted in Testimony at 3:52 pm by Kaihaku
A few months ago I signed up to make snack for the team meeting. In a departure from the norm, I decided to make something healthy, so I bought some crackers, cut up some vegetables, and whipped up a quick dip. It’s become quite popular here in Phnom Penh, we’ve had it three times now and once I wasn’t the one to make it, so I thought I’d share the recipe, such as it is.
- 1 bulb of steamed garlic. Remove the softened cloves.
- 3 packages of Tofu.
- Diced Chives, Green Onions, or some other Greeny for color.
Then you mash it all together, adding salt and pepper to flavor. Quick, easy, and tasty.
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