California Education: Failing Kids? (3)

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Part 3 – Academics

In August I covered school lunches; in January I took a look at how they fail at school sport. Now I’m going to cover what I see as perhaps the most important aspect of an education system: academics. For this, I am going to use my son’s middle school as a reference and compare his school, a California charter school, to a local private school and also to my secondary school in the UK.

Before I get into detail on middle school, however, I do have one other data point to include. A foreign student we know who arrived here at aged 17 with UK “O Levels” (which are public examinations taken typically at the end of what the US school system refers to as sophomore year). When they asked about whether they needed to attend high school or could apply directly to colleges, they were told those exams exceeded the level required for high school graduation. Two years before students in the US would be eligible to graduate from high school.

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Wireless ISP Issues

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Those who have followed here for a while might recall that back in 2017 we switched our internet service from Comcast to a local wireless service through a company called Common Networks. They set up their network as a mesh network, with a couple of different locations at that time with Internet access (the Alameda movie theatre on the east end of the island, and the Digital Realty data center just over the estuary from us in Oakland providing a primary connection for the west end). If a node went down, no problem – traffic was routed around it automatically.

Monkey Brains

Fast forward a few years, and they were struggling and ended up being bought by a San Francisco based outfit called Monkey Brains who operate wireless networks in SF, and a few other locations around the bay area.

They came along and ripped out the little PC that we had on site managing the routing, and replaced the dishes on the roof. There were lots of outages and a lot of our neighbors left and switched to AT&T fiber, which was just starting to offer service around Alameda at the time. We had not had any serious outages, so we stayed.

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California Education: Failing Kids? (2)

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Part 2 – Sports

Back in August of last year I wrote the first part of my analysis of public education in California, and why I felt it was failing the state’s children. As I said then, that was just the first part of the analysis, looking at the state of school lunches.

This is part two of the series, looking at sports options for elementary school age groups. Middle school in the US is hard to compare with the UK since the latter combines the US middle and high into secondary schools. Our kids are in a combined elementary and middle (so called K-8) school, and while the middle school does offer some sports, they share the facilities I detail below (the campus the school is on was originally a middle school, so it is equipped in line with the other middle schools on the island).

Furthermore, this is looking at the city of Alameda, in the San Francisco bay area. It is certainly possible that some other cities have better facilities and/or options.

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Target No Longer Family Friendly

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Armed men at Target in Alameda

Not sure exactly when this started, but several of the Target stores we have visited recently, including our local one here in Alameda, now have groups of armed men in military-style uniforms, and body armour at the entrance.

This is an odd decision for Target, which claims to be a family-friendly shop, and has a stated policy of asking people not to carry weapons into their stores to help them “create an
atmosphere of family-friendly shopping that’s safe and inviting for our
guests and team members.” Having these armed men at the door does the exact opposite of that, for a number of reasons.

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California Education: Failing Kids?

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Part One – Food

Food might not be the first thing you think about when trying to assess whether an education system is working, but believe me, hungry kids are not going to learn much! Here in Alameda, kids spend 180 days at school – about half the year. If they are going to be healthy, and learn, they had better be getting a good school lunch.

Intrigued by a recent video from Evan Edinger on YouTube about the differences between US and UK primary/elementary school lunches, I thought I’d do a little research of my own. I’ve been unimpressed by the school lunches our kids are offered here in Alameda, and I do remember my own being better, at least some of the time.

Here is the video. Below, my own research.

US vs UK primary school lunches.
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AirTag Holders

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Hard Case for AirTag

Following an incident involving some hard to find AirPods (not mine), and the discovery that the Tile I have had attached to my car keys ran out of battery back in August, but failed to let me know this somewhat critical fact until I launched the app to check it was working, I splashed out on a pack of four AirTags.

These relatively inexpensive trackers come with no way to attach them to anything however, and when I went searching online for options, many of them were as expensive, or more expensive than the AirTag itself. I have ordered one nice carbon fiber one to see, but in the meantime I thought there must be some 3D printable options, and I wasn’t wrong…

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Car Conversion

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Vintage Voltage TV Show

I’ve been aware of the team at Electric Classic Cars in Wales, as well as others around the world, who specialize in converting older vehicles, typically those considered to be classics, into EVs. While watching season one of Vintage Voltage, the TV show that follows some of ECC’s classic car conversions, I was wondering whether there would be a market for that kind of thing here in Alameda, and what it would take to set up such a business. This post is my thoughts on that idea.

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Plug and Charge

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Charging at Electrify America

While I had tried this a few days ago at our local Electrify America location, today I had to charge at Gilroy on my way home from a quick (shopping) trip to Monterey. Had I charged the car to 100%, I might have been able to make the whole trip without a charging stop, in sport mode.

I pulled into the charger with 24% remaining, set up the camera (not easy given how short the cables are on these chargers) and plugged the car in…

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Road Trip #14: Monterey Two Night

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Monarch Butterfly

Unlike our previous road trip to Monterey, this one was going to be a three day, two night stay. That gave us extra time to do a little more around the area than just the aquarium, although we did manage to fit in a visit there as well.

We left relatively early in the morning, traveling with some friends, and met up at Sea Harvest in Moss Landing for lunch.

Pacific Grove

After lunch, it was a short drive down to Pacific Grove to visit the Monarch Butterfly Sanctuary and see all the monarch butterflies stopping there for the winter season.

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The “Metaverse”

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The Metaverse

Along with announcing a renaming of the company (to Meta), Facebook also showed off some of its thinking about their new virtual world concept, which they call the metaverse.

This is not a new concept. Indeed, Second Life has been offering most of what they describe for many years now, and, obviously, there is also the fictional Oasis from the Ready Player One novel and movie, which goes well beyond anything Facebook / Meta have talked about so far.

Just what are the challenges here though? Why has Second Life not been able to become a mainstream way of interacting, especially in the last 18 months while we have been trapped at home in the real world. Can Meta make this concept something billions use.

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