East Coast trip, part 1: Virginia

[jrtom]

A week and a half ago, I flew out to the East Coast to attend my 20th high school reunion, see some friends that I hadn't seen in quite some time (fdmts, fenicedautun) and meet a colleague of mine that I'd been working on an open-source project with for several years.



The reunion was cool in some ways, and disappointing in others. I got a chance to hang out a bit with owenthomas, which was a lot of fun as usual. I spent some time with people I knew from choir (Britt, Jesse, Robert B) and some others from classes (Rob W) and with a few more people that I don't think I had any significant interaction with during high school itself (Eric and some other people whose names are currently escaping me). Eric (who actually lives in WA) and I had some interesting conversations (over the care and feeding of online communities) over pizza at 2 AM on the Friday night prior to the main events, which felt very much like high school...except that the pizza should have been Domino's. Interestingly, the basis for conversation with several people was their military experience (rather than what I might have expected, i.e., academic or software engineering or science), mostly on the strength of having grown up in a military family. But, you know, any party at which you have a good audience for a story about a complete lunatic in an F4U Corsair employing a ramming attack--on another plane!--can't be a complete loss.

I spent more time than I'd like during the reception-y bits of the reunion circulating without really interacting. This is my typical "I'm at a party at which I don't really know people" (or, in this case, the "I don't want to look like I'm following the few people I know around like a puppy") mode. I did eventually get over that by the end of the evening--I didn't quite close down the party, but I came pretty close (and would have stayed longer had I not had a 6 AM pickup for my ride to the airport).

I enjoyed dancing, not least because it's a lot of fun to watch owenthomas dance.

I really appreciated Jocelyn's work in putting the slide presentations together, both for the at-school event and the dinner event; it was cool to see even a few snippets from the subsequent lives of various of the students.

I didn't see very many people that I remembered from choir, band, or orchestra there. This was a shame, because that's where a lot of my social life in high school was based, and there were several specific people that I was hoping that would attend, but didn't.

The original principal and co-creator of the school (I was in the second graduating class) was there and gave a talk about the political/organizational formation of the school. I was quite disappointed to hear him say, repeatedly, that he didn't think that it would be possible to create such a school today. I don't think that such an attitude is very constructive, and it weirded me out that I didn't notice anyone else that seemed to disagree. I happen to think that my high school is a truly excellent creation and though I realize that it doesn't (yet) scale, there's no reason I know of that a comparable school can't be created in at least most dense population areas.


I was glad of my chance to hang out with Tom (my JUNG-ian colleague) for a couple of hours. A week or so would have been nice--I think we could burn through a lot of pending stuff given that amount of concentrated time--but at least we had a good talk about future directions and so forth.

Comments

Re: the possibility of the impossible

[judovitch.livejournal.com]

Honestly I can guess - there's been a depressing trend recently in this country away from creativity and ingenuity, and towards execution and metrics. That is, (at least where I work) the emphasis used to be on coming up with cool new ideas and then somehow trying to make them feasible. Now the emphasis is on management by spreadsheet and step-up plans. I expect something similar is happening with the school system. The Jefferson that we knew took a bunch of smart teachers and a bunch of smart kids, threw them together in a blender with a bunch of resources and figured that good things would happen. I don't think that's really possible in the current climate.

Re: the possibility of the impossible

[jrtom.livejournal.com]

Well, TJ consistently shows up very well in a bunch of different metrics, so one could certainly point to it as an example of how that approach can work.

BTW, note that this post is not friends-locked. :)

Re: the possibility of the impossible

[judovitch.livejournal.com]

Noted and thanks for the heads up, but I've been ranting about this publicly at work for quite a while now - it should come as no surprise to anyone who actually knows me. :-)

Re: the possibility of the impossible

[amnesiadust.livejournal.com]

This was sort of what I expected also. You can experiment if it's okay to fail, but when people expect a certain standard of performance, there's a lot less latitude to do crazy, or even unorthodox, things in the hopes of big payoffs. When I heard that there was a prep class for the TJ admissions exam, and that they'd abandoned the essay portion of the application because parents were writing the essays for their kids -- well, those might have been apocryphal, but it's clear that the public's perception of the school had changed by that point, sort of the beginning of the end. Sad.