Archive for December, 2008

As I survey the class full of 5th graders, I realize that “this is where it begins.” This is where the kids begin to academically thrive or barely survive. At Pre-K, where I was working yesterday, it’s just learning to follow instructions, coloring things, singing songs, that stuff. You’re a student, you have a bad year in Pre-K, you can recover. But in 5th grade, you begin to develop skills you’ll need, or not develop them.

There are so many distractions that keep them from thinking about school. I’ve seen kids come in and I just sensed that they had had a run in with a parent, God only knows of what type. A girl showed up this morning, wearing a pretty pink sweater, in tears. How should I respond? She won’t be able to pay much attention, I sense, if she’s seething over some hurt. It could be she feels bad a lot. Many students in our district have difficult home situations.

But then, she’s at school now. When you come to work in the school you begin to see that it is a fully functioning life-pod, with places to feed people, rest, exercise, and do everything but sleep. It should be possible to make the school a separate place with a separate peace. For years, the schools have sought to fight the “overwhelmed student and parent” problem by setting the school in opposition to the outside world and make it a hermetically sealed off “safe place.”The most widely discussed part of the effort has been free school lunch and breakfast.

So today, in the modern school, we have resources to help people. But I am still concerned about how much impact this help is going to have on the indiividual student unless someone relates to that student — this would generally be the teacher — on a personal level so that the student feels like they are part of a community. This is part of my goal as a teacher: to teach them that individuals are important. Call me an idealist.

So I ask the girl with the pink sweater if she is okay. Does she need to go to the nurse? Does she want to sit down to the side and rest? She calms down, says no, she’s okay, and goes to her desk. There’s no way, as a sub, to know if this method of “identify and address” student emotional concerns is working over the long run. But I feel it’s important, human to human, to at least show concern and recognition of kids’ feelings.

Did you hear that they had a tornado touch down in Plano Monday night? I don’t want to scare you. But some people from outside town, of which I used to be one, are not up to speed on the weather safety issues for those of us who live in North Texas.

At first, when they told me we have severe weather here, I was inclined to take it as a Texas tall tale. I wish that were true, but now that we’ve lived here for six years, I can tell you that yes, they were right, we have severe weather here, weather that demands preparedness and knowledge for comfort and even safety.

First of all, when the schools and businesses close because of ice conditions, it is recommended you do not leave the house for anything short of an emergency. Do not be fooled by the fact that we don’t have a “really cold” winter here. It may not be sub-zero, but ice conditions in North Texas are severe. The reason everything is closed is because you can get stranded out there, sliding on a sheet of uphill ice and unable to move, or lose control of the car on the ice and hit something or somebody. Don’t drive if you don’t have to.

That advice also goes for when we have downpour rain conditions. I’m not talking about a little sprinkle; what I mean is if it’s sheeting down and the flow is 4 inches deep in the gutters and spreading halfway across the street. This happens whenever an inch of rain falls in an hour or less. You will look out the window and say “my God, it’s coming down in sheets.” And you thought this only happened in Louisianna.

Try not to go out until the flow subsides, and especially don’t go anywhere if you do not have first hand observation experience of the roads. Don’t drive into large puddles. Waters rise quickly and can be deceptive. Every year someone drives into what looks like just some water flowing across a road and gets swept away and drowns. Stay safe, stay home.

Usually, while it’s pouring like that, it is during an electircal storm. These will not be your grandma’s severe thunderstorms. Do not equate the Texas thunderstorm with the ones on the coast. We have winds of up to 70 mph and more than one kind of lightning. There’s “heat lightning” which jumps from cloud to cloud, which can be distant and soothing, almost, then there’s the more conventional kind that flies down out of the sky and zaps things like boats out on the lake and radio towers and cars out on a flat plain and the tree in your front yard. If you’re driving, don’t touch any metal inside the car during an electrical storm. Stay inside the house if you can, because things do fall and fly around under such conditions. And also because of the Big Thing in Texas weather.

Yes, we have tornados. You will want to have a viable tornado alert plan in your home. Even though the number of houses in Fort Worth hit by tornados has been very few in recent decades (the famous one that hit the Bank One Tower downtown and several other buildings left damage of 2 lives lost, 6 seriously insured and a $500 million repair bill) but we go on alert at least once or twice a year, usually in spring. 

The way you know about the alert is either 1) you have a severe weather radio, which I urge you to purchase, and it switches on to give you a weather warning from the NWS, or 2) you hear the sirens. The tornado sirens in the city of Fort Worth sound like an air raid.

That actually is not the worst weather sound you can hear, though. They say the tornado sounds like a freight train when it comes and if the winds are kicking up badly or you hear something in the distance that doesn’t seem good you’ll want to go in the bathroom, in the tub, or a closet away from windows, or, ideally, in the crawl space under the house. You can have a “safe room” constructed for about $10,000, but most people just take their chances. Which is always what you have to do, with anything, and certainly with Texas weather. But — forewarned is fore-armed. So there you have it, a thumbnail sketch of what you should know.

Visit this page on About.com for best places to hide from a tornado at home.

It's a salesman! It's a Christian! It's ... Fred7Man!

We’re introducing another Twitterer today. Fred Campos of Bedford is here to communicate and befriend and say yes, you can be a Cool Christian.

Twitter Handle:

@Fred7Man

Blog: The Thoughts of the Average Christian Servant — Latest post is a positive view of the controversial NY Times bestselling novel The Shack.

Bio: Self-declared to be “one super conservative, don’t own a television, Christian parent.” But wait — there’s more. He also is an aspiring self-help writer and sales team leader who, if you read his blog, knows his business/motivational publishing and theory. Can the Bible-guy be on the leading edge of social web tech while selling stuff? Fred answers questions about his Twitter usage below.

Who or what got you started on Twitter, and why? I am an aspiring writer, and I learned about Twitter in the DFW Writer’s Workshop in a special class taught by another of our members, Kristen Lamb. Kristen taught us about the importance of the web’s social network for book authors. A social network enables you to connect with potential readers and allows you to build relationship necessary for promoting your books via word of mouth.  In that class, I learned about Twitter.  My life has not been the same since!

How did you come up with your Twitter “Handle?” In the old computer days before the Internet, people used to chat on Bulletin Board Services (BBS), and my old handle was “fredman. ” It has stuck with me, I added the seven because the name was already taken on a few services. It just made sense to keep the familiar I had been using for over 10 years.

What twitter applications do you use, if any? I’m now using Tweetdeck.

Are you on other social networks? MySpace, Facebook, LiveJournal

What would you miss most if you were forced to quit? Instant access and feedback to a group of people in a matter of moments.  For example: I was cooking a turkey this past Thanksgiving.  My job was to turn the oven on and put the bird in.  Let me state for the record—I am a non-cook.  Well at 6 a.m. my wife was sleeping soundly.  As I went to the oven to turn it on, I realized I didn’t know if it should be “bake” or “broil.”  I asked my twitter friends for help and in a matter of seconds I had a bunch of “bake” tweets.  What other media gives you that kind of install access to opinions, especially without having to wake the wife. 

Why follow Fred at @Fred7Man:

1. Gasp in astonishment as he goes out in the freezing cold for “prayer run.”

2. Find great ways for life’s little irritations to show God’s Grace.

3. Catch up on all the games you can play with little kids that you’re not playing with your own kids–such as chess and Chinese checkers–and feel good that at least someone’s doing it.

4. Catch him surfing the web during a sales meeting or “borrowing” someone else’s cell phone ear plugs from a hotel lost-and-found and know that he’s not (always) a saint.

Listening to (for about the fiftieth time): Love Story by Taylor Swift from the playlist I made for the “Admin” of this site, my mother. She requests popular music from me and then listens to it early in the morning, as she sits at her desk in the dark, in the wee hours, pouring ink onto pages

I write this on the brink of a move, a transfer, and a holiday; in the midst of finals, pre-Christmas preparations, and the winding down of the semester. Upon leaving work, in the circulation department of the campus library, I was greeted by a phone call, telling me to produce a blog “by midnight, preferably three hundred to five hundred words.”

“I’ll get right to it,” I answered, despite the fact that I actually spent almost every hour from noon to eight translating Horace (Latin poetry).

I am tired, but the truth is, I don’t mind writing. Now I have just returned from prayers and am ahead of schedule for studying, a rarity at any time.

So, I shall write about my impending transfer to TCU, which has enabled me to write for this blog as Fort Worth College Girl. I’ve attended Southwestern University this fall, a small (twelve hundred student) liberal arts school in Georgetown, TX, which is about thirty miles north of Austin. I could go into the reasons for leaving, but it boils down to a desire to be on a larger campus, and one that is closer to home.

I made the decision to leave last week, quite late into the semester. It has been weird telling people, as one can imagine. It can be awkward to admit that one is rejecting the school that was previously shared by both the members of a conversation. However, I rummaged up the courage, and, surprisingly to me, the news has been greeted with a fair amount of understanding, and sadness. Being a fiercely independent, loner sort much of the time, I didn’t know I had so many friends. It is a pleasant realization and one I will take with me as I go on, in regard to both the friends here and the ones I will make.

I have received kind letters, and notes on the dry-erase board outside my room by all my hall-mates (organized by my roommate). Groups want to see me before we all leave. It is all quite bewildering – and a little sad. But that is the story of life.

One realization is that this is one of the first choices I have made as an adult, one largely on my own, an idea of my own making and a process maneuvered by myself. These are decisions that make differences. In Memoirs of a Geisha, Chiyo is described as having a personality full of “water” which “flows from place to place quickly and always finds a crack to spill through.” I am not sure if my character is such–though  my eyes are blue, like Chiyo’s–but whether or not, I am flowing along the current of life, and though the decisions are my own, I feel I am floating on the life force of the world, sometimes gliding on a shimmering lake, sometimes playing atop a gurgling creek, and, sometimes rushing along atop a cascading river.

Our family of bloggers has grown. Now, in addition to the Fort Worth Mom Blog, we will be featuring the Daughter of Fort Worth Mom Blog — Fort Worth College Girl blog.

She has a typical young woman’s hopes and dreams, wants to finish growing up, learn to steer her own ship to find her own star, and then there’s the ongoing Hunt for the Eligible Bachelors of the Region. Like many young women, Texas Co-Ed dreams of finding the perfect prince. Will she succeed? We don’t know — her standards are very high.

She is a freshman at Texas Christian University and, by virtue of that fact, saddled with the title of the school’s mascot, she is for the time being at least a Horned Frog. As a student at TCU, Texas Co-Ed will be in an ideal position to comment on many trends both local and of more general interest.

Look for her first post tomorrow morning, and please welcome her.

I told you that I had more than one Twitterer I was planning to feature, and now I’ve got the post ready.  For basic information on Twitter, visit the original Twitter post on Richie Escovedo.

Bio: Eva-Marie Ayala is a Star-Telegram staff reporter covering the regional education beat. She is followed by over 200 other twitterers.

Blog: She manages the Fort Worth Star Telegram Extra Credit Blog, which covers many topics in regional education. The latest story tells which district offers the highest starting teacher salaries.

Twitter Handle: she can be found on Twitter at @fwstayala.

Interview: Eva-Marie answered a few questions about using Twitter:

Who or what got you started on Twitter, and why? Many journalists have experimented with and talked about Twitter a lot lately. I didn’t really jump in until this summer after talking about it with @Vedo and @Morate, who both use Twitter very effectively. At first I thought it would just be something to drive traffic back to www.star-telegram.com. And it is great for that by posting links to stories and blog posts, but I get so much more out of it. You can find people you wouldn’t otherwise know about (local and national) and better develop relationships with them in a very informal way. That helps me, as a reporter, to know who our community is and what they are concerned about, whether they are local or in education circles. I also get to tweet out info on breaking news, like I did covering Hurricane Ike, as things happen or maybe just an interesting side note that wouldn’t make it into the story itself. The community also gets to know more about who I am rather than just seeing me as some abstract reporter person.

How did you come up with your Twitter handle? I wanted a way for people to identify me (ayala) as a reporter with the Fort Worth Star-Telegram (fwst).

What twitter applications do you use? I use Twitterfeed to automatically tweet out Extra Credit posts, and I have the Twitter app for my Blackberry. I use Twitterlocal and Twellow to try and find more local folks to follow who are parents, teachers, college students, education groups or people connected to education in some way. I used Twittervotereport during the election to see if any problems were being reported in Texas. I keep meaning to use something like Tweetdeck or Thwirl, but I haven’t gotten that far yet.

Are you on other social networks? I do use Facebook quite a bit. It is mostly to keep in touch with work-related colleagues, but I also use it to post links back to Extra Credit and sometimes to find area students for stories, like college students who might be voting for the first time.

And Finally: Four Good Reasons to Follow @fwstayala

1. You’ll be up to speed on education news in the region.

2. Ecliectic topics run all the way from Oscar de la Hoya to local club scene, including cover charges.

3. Interesting repartee and humor between her, @vedo and @morate, some of which involves jokes dating bach to childhood.

4. You can finally tell people you “know” a Star-Telegram reporter.

Coffee and a Gordita for less than you’d pay for a vente at Starbucks

Where: On Magnolia avenue just off Hemphill in South Fort Worth, just south of the hospital district, in the St. Mary of the Assumption Church parish hall basement.

What: Breakfasts cooked by two prayer groups: the Guadalupana and the Pueblo De Dios. These breakfasts are offered as a service to parishioners and friends and as ongoing fundraisers. All proceeds go to projects of the prayer groups involved.

Fare: Specialties include homemade gorditas and burritos filled with chorizo, potatoes, or carne asada. Also pancakes. Especially choice are the gorditas. Prices range from $1.50 for a gordita or taco to $4.50 for a plate with eggs, chorizo, sausage and pancakes. Also coffee, not as good as Starbucks but at twenty five cents, it’s a bargain.

How: Go down into the basement, take up a position on line in front of the card table, and place your order. Then sit at one of the tables and wait for your number to be called. At first it is likely to be in Spanish, but if no one answers, they will try it in English. Amenities are minimal: it’s a church basement and it looks like one. But the food is very good for the price, and it’s a veritable cultural exchange.

When: Sunday mornings from around 8 to about noon most Sundays of the school year.

Parish History: St Mary’s Church has offered breakfast to parishioners and friends for years, but only recently was the service offered every week. The ornate, barrel-vaulted church dates from the early 20^th century and has extensive stained glass work and statuary. The parish serves a large Hispanic population as well as a few former Episcopalians who came here with Fr. David Bristow, a convert to Catholicism and one of American’s few married Roman Catholic priests. Mass at 8 and 10 in English, noon in Spanish, and 5 in Latin.

St. Mary of the Assumption Church website

The breakfasts will be offered tomorrow and on the 14th, then there will be a break for Christmas, and they will resume on January 4th. 

One great aspect of Twitter is that you don’t have to know anyone, really, to join — unlike apps like LinkedIn and Facebook which assume you know the folks with whom you want to network, Twitter caters to those who plan to expand their contacts list. On Twitter, you can go from nowhere to somewhere on the social-netosphere fairly quickly. And if you’re veteran social networker, it’s more fun that ever.Think of it as a cross between blogging and texting.

When you join, you’ll be offered to add everyone on your email list, but I’d also like to suggest a few of my favorite Tweeps  – no I did not make that up, and it means Twitter People — so you can get in the swim of things quickly. I’ll introduce the first of these this morning.

Add Richie Escovedo on Twitter.com at @vedo

Richie Escovedo, a school communications and public relations guy in Texas; is also a husband, father, and occasional social media strategist when needed.

Twitter Handle: follow him at @vedo for opinions on PR, sports, and parenthood, among other topics. He’s followed by slightly over 400 people. 

Blog: Next Communications. Most recent: He thinks the NHL should thank Sean Avery for being a … jerk. Why? Read the post.

Who or what got you started on Twitter, and why? Twitter was one of the first in a set of web 2.0 tools/communities I participated in to get a feel for social media. I wanted to see how to to engage and experiment with social media at first to see how I could transfer what I learned into my professional life as a Communications/PR practitioner. 

 How did you come up with your Twitter “Handle?” My Twitter handle is simply the last four letters in my last name. Plus, it is an old nickname that I’ve had since high school. I’m glad I chose such a short handle b/c when you only get 140 characters, space is at a premium so I think it might be easier to re-tweet (that’s when you forward someone’s message on to your own network) some of my stuff since it doesn’t take much space to include me.

What twitter applications do you use, if any? Twhirl, Twello, Twitter Search, Tweet Scan, TweetDeck.

Are you on other social networks? Facebook, LinkedIn, various Ning networks, MySpace.

What would you miss most if you were forced to quit? The connections and new people I’ve met and being able to get inside, up-to-date, and breaking information faster than through the MSM.     

Sometimes I want to go to a locally owned coffee place with really good bacon sandwiches.

When I do, I try the Trail Lake Exit of the 20, one block south, on the right, in the shopping center next to CVS. At the end of a strip mall is a tiny storefront labelled TCU: the Coffee Urn.

One morning a few weeks back (I’m using the present progressive tense in memory of Damon Runyon) I’m in search of the human side of Fort Worth, so I stop at The Coffeee Urn. It’s just a few doors down from Starbucks, but their approach and clientele are completely different.

This place seeks to fill the void of locally owned and operated eateries in Southwest Fort Worth. As I come in to the sounds of an overhead blower, I see that a mural on the back of the restaurant showing a scene of Fort Worth before the roads were paved. It’s impressionistic, simple, but effective, making the assertion that “we are in the West here,” instead of the usual coffee bar claim which is more like “walk through these doors, and you are in Europe.” The honesty is charming. The coffee is cheaper than Starbucks. Three flavors today: Cowboy Blend, Cinnamon Hazelnut, and French Roast.

At the tables, two guys are playing chess. Two other guys are reading the newspaper. It’s very quiet. I hear the slamming door on the dishwasher, and then the sound of water washing around and plates being scraped. Someone sneezes. “I’m not worried about your knight,” says a bald guy at the chess table, who’s got one of those super size earings like the cannibals wear in movies. The guy he’s playing has a tattoo on his arm. They sound like rough characters, but they’re not. I can’t explain how I know this.

A new guy comes in. “How are you doing,” he says to the counter man.  “Can you do something for me?” He sits at the bar. I can’t hear all of the request, but it has something to do with scrambling eggs with jalapenos. 

Talk at the newspaper reading table turns to a guy who says he found a full grown box turtle in a parking lot. The animal had a number 6 painted on it. The guy took it home, but it got out and wandered away in a week or two. He assumes it knew what it was doing. 

“Check,” says a chess player. 

Talk lingers over an ’89 something or other one of them has parked outside. This is not the car I noticed. That would be the 60’s Impala. Now the chess game is over. The chess players share a high five. The winner laughs, the loser says “you always way pull that … Geez!”

The effect of all this local color can only be felt, not seen, and is probably lowering my blood pressure and respiration. I feel like these guys, if someone fell over in convulsions, they wouldn’t just help them, they would be concerned. In Starbucks, you feel like there would be at least one person who would say, “Can you take of this? I’ve got a meeting.”

Deciding to stay longer, I order soup and a sandwich — the aforementioned bacon with vegetable chicken soup. The bacon is thick and crisp just like I like it, the whole wheat bread simple but tasty, the soup chunky and homemade. Overall, I feel like this must be what the Old Fort Worth was like, or what a thousand small towns in Texas used to be like, where you could stop at the local diner, get a plate of chow, talk to people, and then turn back towards the door, ready to face whatever came up, fortified with a type of communal human energy that’s pretty hard to find these days. 

The Coffee Urn, 5018 Trail Lake Drive, Fort Worth 76133, (817) 926-7660. Coffee, Burritos, Omlettes and Combos, 7 to 2 Monday Through Saturday. 

The title of this post came from a search query that led someone to our blog via Google search.  I have to assume that they didn’t find what they were looking for, since this article had not yet been written when the query was made, but I’m going to rectify that now by writing the piece that I believe they would have wanted to find. And believe me, if I had known they were going to google it I would have put it together for them sooner.

Yes, we have hip places to live in Fort Worth, but first let’s define “hip.” When searched in Urban Dictionary, the word comes out with the definition:

“Cooler than cool, the pinnacle of what is “it”. Beyond all trends and conventional coolness. Not to be mistaken for “deck.”  www.urbandict.com

Okay, so in other words, it doesn’t really have to do with cost. It has to do with understanding the trends, the things that be happenin’ here.  That considered, I give you,

THE LIST OF HIP PLACES TO LIVE IN FORT WORTH

Monticello — this rapidly gentrifying area also known as the Cultural District is being quickly bit up in price past the budget of most young professionals, not to mention working people. But there are some unusual properties here, and for the ultimate in cool real estate — which is to get a small simple property in a high-end neighborhood — Monticello is choice. For those who want to speculate on value a little more aggressively, search for properties that will be impacted by the redevelopment of the old Montgomery Wards building area or anything that touches on the Trinity River Vision project.

Downtown/Sundance — Here’s your total loft-living urban hip upscale location. The heralding of downtown as a happening zone occurred a few years after a tornado damaged the scyscaping downtown Bank One Building. The Bank One had sat around with plywood nailed all over it for years, but then was redeveloped as “The Tower” condos. Prices went through the roof. This was followed by redevelopment into apartments of a number of downtown buildings such as the Neil P. Anderson, and today, loft living is alive and well.  This is a shopping/tourism website, but it will give you some info: www.sundancesquare.com

North of Camp Bowie — this is another neighborhood with stylish real estate of wildly varying house values. You might think of it as just west of Monticello. Up near River Crest Country Club and the famous Camp Bowie Blvd. shopping strip, you can find everything from tear downs to rebuilds to huge castle-mansions to duplexes here. You’ll need to pay a fair price per square foot, but it’s said that real estate here is rock solid. Location, location, location, you know. www.historiccampbowie.com

TCU/Bluebonnet — Again as in Monticello and Camp Bowie, a wide range of housing, this time close in to the University. Basically, the farther east you run (in the direction of the railroad tracks) the less desirable the digs. And once you’re across McCart, you’re officially out of the zone. For lower values per square foot, try the area between Granbury and Trail Lake Drive.

Forest Park: The doctors and lawyers who work down town have lived with their families on this bluff by the river for about 100 years, and it probably won’t change, since this neighborhood is close enough to the hospital district to get there in a horse and buggy. Chose from custom homes, historic homes, million dollar homes, or get one that’s all three.  Forest Park probably has more traditional-style holdings then trendy digs, but then, even today, sometimes it’s hip to be square.

So now you say: Help, look at my checkbook, I can’t get into any of these neighborhoods. But you can, because I have saved the best for last. No more excuses. If hipness is your goal, it comes at every price point:

Near Southside — This is where the new urbanists are hangin, and they are working hard to redevelop this once worn-out section of town that’s been through the wealth/poverty cycle once already. Built up around the 20′s, the Southside was at first a booming family neighborhood, but it fell into disrepair as the much lamented suburban flight led workers to abandon the city. Much later, in the 80′s, an interest in vintage homes (think that TV show, “This Old House”) plus a certain environmentalist sympathy began to lead many to believe that this neighborhood had potential as a gentrified zone for downtown and hosptial workers. The struggle has been long, but seems to be bearing fruit at last, with new construction, new roads and upgrades, and better housing values. And nowhere in Cowtown has reaturants like the ones in the Near southside. For more information on the neighborhood, visit www.fortworthsouth.org