KinderCaminata

On March 20, hundreds of kindergarten students descended on Fullerton College for the annual KinderCaminata, a festive mix of childish enthusiasm and college spirit that's been going on since 1994 when 2000 children attended the first event at Santa Ana College. Galal Kernahan proposed the concept to Los Amigos, an Orange County service club whose motto is, "You plead it, you lead it." And so he did, with great success.

Each year kids from local public schools are bused to college campuses where they are treated to events and entertainments designed to spark their interest in attending college when they grow up. The recent gala at Fullerton College was the first I'd ever seen or heard of KinderCaminata. I had a blast. The kids seemed to enjoy themselves too, both the little ones and the college kids.

You can read the Hornet's story by Alyssa Navarro here.

Romance and Facebook

Photo Credit: Leo Postovoit

I'm trying to catch up with the new social networking tools because I'm told they're a goldmine for journalists. But mining is hard work, and you never know if or when you'll strike gold. I posted and twittered for quite a while before I found anything glittery.

Facebook is a carnival, and I still find it confusing. Yesterday the managing editor of the school paper sent me a message, and I had a heck of a time dealing with it. Where was it? Was it on his wall? Mine? Some sort of private message? Was he not answering me because he was busy or because I replied in the wrong place?

Finally I called him, using my landline because my cellphone still feels like unfamiliar technology and I don't trust it. It was jarring when the managing editor of the paper last semester asked us all for phone numbers and specified that they should be "real" phones, not "some number your mother's going to answer."

I think by "real" she meant "cell," which seems as odd to me as the notion that my mother, who lives in another town, would pick up my landline. For the purposes of that discussion, I guess I am my mother -- that is, the person who answers that ancient, immobile instrument in the kitchen. They always said we turn into our mothers. I was warned.

Then there's Twitter. It's quieter and I like that. I can also see some real potential in it for journalists. I can send short text messages from my computer or my phone (well, I can't send text messages from my phone because it's primitive and I'm incompetent, but, in general, people can send them), and they'll be received by anyone who is following me, following being a little like stalking, but with the active cooperation of the stalkee.

Oddly, though, the most interesting part of Twitter has been the minutiae. Paul ate at The Hat and posted a photo of his chili fries in a tweet. That's the sort of little stuff that makes our lives real. After a while you begin to feel like you know Paul. And you develop a craving for chili fries.

And then, amid the carnival confusion and the twittering minutiae, I catch a glimmer of something else. Ethan Morse, the student trustee representing Fullerton College on the district board of trustees, has just proposed to his girlfriend, after sunset at the pier, with the words "Elizabeth Marry me" spelled out in candles in the sand, placed there by friends. There are pictures on Facebook the next day.

Pure gold.

Blogs vs. Newspapers

Print journalism is on the decline, and that's ok with me.

Don't get me wrong. My father was a reporter. (That's him on the left -- Ernie Crowley at work at the Middleboro Gazette in the middle 1950's.) I grew up thinking newspaper writing was pretty grand.

Now that I'm studying journalism I've come to realize its importance in enlarging our worlds and holding us all together.

But journalism is not synonymous with print journalism, and print journalism is turning out to be unsustainable. It's a very odd notion, isn't it, to gather "all the news that's fit to print" and distribute it daily to thousands of households on paper that will fill recycling bins and line birdcages the next day?

Which brings me to blogs.

Among journalists it's a hotly debated question (see the editorial in today's Hornet) whether blogs will replace newspapers. The argument against blogs is primarily that they are unreliable. Who knows who's writing them, how knowledgeable or trustworthy the writer may be?

But that betrays a basic misunderstanding of the blog.

Does anyone worry about how knowledgeable or trustworthy a printing press is? Or a roll of newsprint? A blog is a medium the way newsprint is a medium.

Is anyone seriously going to argue that Pravda, for example, was totally trustworthy just because it was printed on paper and its name means "truth" in Russian? What about The Enquirer? It's a newspaper. Does that make it a reliable source of news?

The reason people trust newspapers, to whatever extent they do, is that those newspapers have established a solid reputation. Readers sort out the wheat from the chaff when they read, and they can do that online as well as anywhere else. They can tell the difference between The New York Times and The National Enquirer.

Sure some blogs are tripe, but they're not all tripe. Readers with a taste for top sirloin will be able to find that online as well. Some pretty impressive writers have jumped on the blogwagon. If you need convincing, check out the bloggers at the Huffington Post.

Happy Saint Patrick's Day

To honor the date, here I am in a hollow tree in Ireland.... a v-e-r-y long time ago.

Free Speech

Camille Paglia's in the news for speaking out against even the suggestion that the Fairness Doctrine should be reinstated, though the chances of that actually happening may be pretty slim.

"I don't get it," she says in this audio clip from a radio interview on New York's "The Mark Simone Show."

"The essence of the 1960's, my generation, was about free speech," says Paglia. "That's what Lenny Bruce was about. It was about the free speech movement, for heaven's sake, at Berkeley. What are my fellow Democrats doing?"

Maybe it's an old lady thing.

I was born in the same year as Paglia, and I remember the free speech movement. What happened to it?

You can be given the cold shoulder, fired, thrown out, divorced, or excommunicated for saying the wrong thing. There was a time when you could stand on a soapbox in a public square and rant at length, but public space is diminishing and free speech rights don't apply in private space.

Campuses are considered semi-public. In the interest of safety, campus officials may restrict free speech.

Even then, expressing an unpopular opinion can get sticky. Campus safety felt they needed to protect one speaker this past January , and the student paper itself objected to the same speaker's message last year.

To better manage possible conflict, Fullerton College's free speech area has been shrunk from the entire quad to a postage-stamp sized bit of lawn, and speakers must reserve a time-slot in advance (see AP5550).

That's better than the strategy at Yuba Community College which not only required a reservation to speak in a sharply defined area, but made even that option available for only two hours a week. That landed them in court.

So is it an old lady thing, this taste for free thought and outrageous opinion? Or is there still room left in the world for a little political incorrectness in the interest of diversity?

Taking Classes vs. Learning

Yesterday I asked a member of the science faculty for help with an audio project on the Asian citrus psyllid, and his first answer was that he's too busy teaching classes to keep up with the topic -- that topic, plant pests, being his specialty, you understand.

I sympathize completely. School really can get in the way of learning, whether you're teaching the classes or taking them.

It is one of the great blessings of not being a serious student -- that is, I'm not going for a degree or a certificate or even for a grade -- that I can concentrate on learning what really matters.

I take only classes that meet my specific need to learn, and I concentrate on those parts of the coursework that I care about and just don't worry about the rest. It's amazing how much I'm learning this way, but it's also sad how much school tries to get in the way -- how much I'm supposed to read that isn't particularly useful, or how many topics I'm supposed to cover that aren't important to me, or how many topics are important but aren't given enough weight in class.

I guess being older and really focused gives me a different perspective. I haven't got time to worry about details that are, in all senses of the word, academic. I'm too busy on a grand adventure.

Thoreau wrote, "If we respected only what is inevitable and has a right to be, music and poetry would resound along the streets."

I take that to mean, don't sweat the small stuff. It works for me. You just need to be sure what stuff is small and what's big.

By the way, the science guy ended up being a big help. :)

Photo Credit: David Hall,
USDA. Agricultural Research Service

SDS Lives!

The first time I went to a community college, in the late sixties, Students for a Democratic Society was a big deal. They were organized and exciting and protesting the war for all they were worth. In those days it was the Viet Nam war.

And now they're back!

Last Friday I attended a "student rally" at Pasadena City College. Originally designed to protest budget cuts, the event became a last-minute thank you to legislators who'd just surprised everyone by passing next year's budget several months early, and surprised community colleges by being very kind to them.

I put "student rally" in quotes because the rally was organized by a community college public relations group. It had sponsors and VIP seating and began with an opening address by the president of Pasadena City College.

That's not the way I remember the student rallies of my youth. In the old days there were blockades designed to keep students out and shut down the school. At this new-style rally students were bused in, and there were uniformed police cadets politely pointing the way.

But guess what? A little background research turned up the cool fact that SDS has been resurrected and students are still taking to the streets.

Need to see it to believe it? Check out the video: Funk the War