The Larry Scott class offered through Southern Flames last weekend was, to me, many things:

• A huge education. Larry demonstrated many tricks and techniques that I had never before seen, and explained some things I had seen before in a new way so that I finally “got it.” I sort of understood the idea behind linear encasing already, but was missing one little aspect — the very acute angle of the casing rod relative to the bead. Now I can do it (though I still need practice, duh). I’m also totally sold now on using boro punties for making cane and latticcino, because my hands can twist the punties much easier than mandrels.
• An impressively-run workshop. Southern Flames knows how to do things right! The organization provides bagels & cream cheese if you don’t have time for breakfast; the class TA takes lunch orders and brings your lunch back so you don’t lose so much time going out to get it; various little things like mandrel holders, stickers to put on your mandrels, water cups, and so on are already set up. Oh, and Carl was a most excellent TA.
• A really, really frustrating experience. Okay, so I was the least-experienced glass person in the class, and it did show at times. I was working on a Minor burner, when I run a Bethlehem Piranha at home, so my torch wasn’t always doing what I expected. I didn’t have quite enough elbow room so had to be careful of the space around me. Possibly the worst thing, though, was the floor right behind my chair — every time someone walked on it, it jiggled, jiggling me, usually right when I was trying to precisely place a dot on my bead. I’m dot-challenged enough anyway, so I don’t need any further hindrance. In the end, of the six beads I attempted, only one came out fairly decent. Four others were more or less showing the technique but far from acceptable, and the last one…well, the Night Sky bead went into the water cup after first the bead release broke and then the bead itself broke.Some things are just better attempted at home on familiar ground!
• A veritable feast of eye candy. Larry’s beads are to die for. I wish I could have afforded to buy more than one. I’ll just have to practice making my own variations.

I did indeed get my money’s and time’s worth out of the weekend, and I would highly recommend Larry’s classes to any lampworker. Any problems with the class were strictly due to the student, not the teacher, LOL.

In the last issue of the alumni magazine from Case Western Reserve University, where I did my graduate work, I found an entry in the “In Memory” column that stunned me.

Tanya was my closest friend in graduate school.  She was several years younger than I and an undergraduate, but it didn’t matter — all of us computer science women tended to hang out together.  We shared a love of crafts, especially stitchery, cats, and cooking; we had similar personalities and senses of humor.  We were lab partners for several courses and worked exceptionally well together.  When one of us would get sick of the grind, we’d take a break for a bit and go shopping and do girl stuff.

I moved back to Atlanta and eventually finished my degree; she graduated with both her B.S. and M.S. and moved to Columbus to work for what is now Lucent Technologies.  Neither of us was that good at constantly staying in touch, but every year or two we’d touch base via email and get caught up on each other’s lives, almost as if it was still the early 1980s in Cleveland.

I had not heard about her illness, so it was shocking to see her name as I read through the magazine.  It has taken me days to be able to write this entry, and I still have a hard time realizing that I’ll never see her smiling face in this lifetime.  She’s another person that I’ll always wish that my husband had gotten to meet, just to know another part of my prior life.

Tanya, you made the world a better place in the too-short time you were with us, and you are missed.

If you didn’t see 20/20 last Friday night, with John Stossel’s report on “Stupid in America,” find a way to see it on a rerun, find someone who taped it and borrow the tape, get a tape from ABC, whatever. It is a must-see for anyone involved with the K-12 public education system as a parent or a taxpayer or a concerned citizen. Of course, the NEA and the AFT are up in arms about it because it goes completely against their agenda, not to mention that they are pinpointed as a big part of the problem.

Of particular note were the comments from the Belgian teenagers as they were interviewed about their performance relative to that of American high schoolers on an international standardized test. “Compared to our regular tests, this was easy.” “The American kids must be stupid.”

Stossel’s pinpointing of the causes of our failing school system was, of course, oversimplified. He neglected the role of the media in shaping today’s society, and more importantly the role of the parents at home, in favor of pushing the pro-voucher, pro-choice solution (which I do agree with) and calling the teachers’ unions to task for their complicity in perpetuating the problems.

Still, his message is dead-on and needed — I see the results of the failure of our schools to do their job every week, four days a week, in my own classroom.

I hate to give this former student any more time, or any more sense of his/her own self-importance, but this really is just too absurd not to share. I’m posting the whole comment just so you can get the full flavor, and decide for yourself what it says about this student…

Jeez!!! She is still teaching? Amazing how that kind of teacher are not yet fired! WORST teacher I have ever had! DO not take her, SHE will make you HATE computer science. She basically gives a lecture and does not give a damn about you. Plus she is horrible looking ( her hair style is disgusting) …..

What can you say?

As I was grading the last of the web projects today, I followed the link from one page to ratemyprofessors.com to see the latest slams against me (rolling eyes). As usual, they were tacky, tactless, and inadvertently very funny. One in particular complained about MY HAIRSTYLE!!! Give me a break, please — what does my friggin’ hairstyle have to do with what, or how, I teach?

Just a few minutes later, though, I received a blind copy of the comments that Anne sent to my department head in lieu of she and Carolina being able to fill out a course evaluation for this semester. Let it suffice to say that those two ladies are prime examples of why I teach…not the other type of student, whose non-constructive comments appear anonymously in public fora.