My wife, Anne, and I live in rural western Indiana. Our relationship is "a mixed marriage." Anne is a computer and network troubleshooter for a large midwestern banking corporation. She recently finished her Novell CNE (Certified Novell Engineer) and thrives on the challenges of her job. Possibly her biggest challenge is being married to a Mac columnist! We've been married 13 years, making us relatively newlyweds:-).

Our 100 year old, large, rambling house borders a nature preserve that is part of Hoosier Energy's Merom Station Generating Plant. There is plenty of room for the times when our children or grandchildren visit. There's always plenty of repairs and chores to be done as well. The dogs and cats have lots of room. The creek is just a short walk down the road or through the woods, with Turtle Creek Reservoir just a bit further. While computers are a passion, I enjoy fishing, photography, gardening, and stargazing as occasional hobbies.

Bucking the usual educational trend of moving from special education to regular education, I went the other way and spent my last ten years in the classroom teaching children with learning disabilities. It was a great cure for teacher burnout. The challenges of special education revitalized my teaching and whole approach to education. The View from the Classroom series of columns chronicles some of that story. What it doesn't tell about is seeing the moment when a child finally comprehends that those black ink splotches are letters with sounds that make words with meaning. On days like that, teaching is the greatest job in the world. Some of the View columns do tell of the frustrations of too many kids with too many desperate needs and too little time and help to meet those needs.

When I started the new job, I found myself without adequate materials and few funds to purchase what was needed. I did, however, have an old LC III that went with the job, so I began writing materials specifically tailored to my students' needs. Later, I purchased a Performa 575 for use at home and turned the ideas into what I hope are now organized instructional units. The MATH DITTOS 2 series is the result of those efforts. It was originally written entirely on the 33 MHz Performa 575. After many upgrades to the 575, I moved to a beige Macintosh G3 Minitower which speeded a lot of the work. The G3 remained my main computer for six and a half years until I briefly moved to a highly upgraded Blue & White before finally purchasing a dual G5 Macintosh tower.

Writing

In August, 1998, an invitation to join the MacTimes News Network as a contributing editor launched my "professional" writing "career." I wrote a weekly features column, That Other Steve..., posted daily news, and generally kept things stirred up there for six months! After leaving MacTimes, I continued to post occasional columns to my Busman's Holiday independent series, which began while I was at MacTimes and continues to this day as my main outlet for personal online columns.

The following fall, I started a new series, View from the Classroom, which appeared for its first year on the Low End Mac site. During its first year (1999-2000), thirty columns appeared under the View banner. As I evaluated those 30 columns, I found that I could only remotely connect seventeen of them to educational computing. The remainder were general Macintosh computing or antique Mac columns. The next year I took View to our then new mathdittos2.com domain and limited that series to educationally relevant articles. The absence of column deadlines, along with crushing caseloads and diminishing administrative support at school probably were responsible for far fewer columns appearing over the last few years, but the quality of columns was considerably enhanced.

During the 2000-2001 school year, Anne and I decided to make a commitment to give a take-home computer to each of the part and full-time language arts students in my special education classroom. Eventually, that commitment morphed into all of our students. Over four years, we placed over 60 older Macs in the homes of my students. Doing so opened doors with students and parents that are traditionally closed to teachers. Several View columns have been devoted to the giveaway.

Towards the end of the 2001 school year, we launched the Educators' News web site, originally just to take up the slack when Tom McKenna ceased updating his excellent G3 All-in-one Stop Shop site. EdNews supplied a daily dose of education news, reviews and analysis of current educational issues, information on the latest freeware, shareware, and commercial educational software, and a good bit of subjective commentary on educational issues in general. While generally well-received by educators, the site took almost all my free time, and ad revenues usually provided just enough to cover a couple Tootsie Roll Pops each quarter. Exactly two years to the day after its launch, we closed up EdNews...other than an occasional posting just for the fun of it.

Writing for Hire

On the last day of the 2003-2004 school year, I submitted my letter of retirement/resignation to our school superintendent. It was time to go. After only four months of retirement, I went to work for a college K-12 outreach program as the manager of their "Teacher-Leader" groups. As grant funding for the program dwindled and the teachers' groups went away, I found myself writing web site documentation for the program. I got to do lots of other things there, including creating graphics, brochures and flyers, training materials, PowerPoints, web page tutorials, and lots of "customer service" with teachers. My last assignment there was to create and teach a distance education course on how to use the Moodle Course Management System. The flip side of all of the writing-for-hire was that very little got posted to mathdittos2.com for three years. Now that I'm once again a "free agent," I hope to be more active writing for this site.

Plants

I grew up in Indianapolis, but even as a kid had a garden in the back yard. My one summer of "early retirement" that I didn't spend preparing for the next school year, we had one of our very best gardens ever, with lots of broccoli, cauliflower, lettuce, peppers, green beans, and sweet corn.

My interest in flowers and gardening has always had a way of transferring to the classroom. When I was teaching general education social studies and science, a lot of biology got taught with our plants. The flowers below were grown from seed in the classroom. The kids and I snapped these pictures with my old Canon AE-1.

These flowers are gloxinias. They're easy to grow and gorgeous. We actually hand pollinated them using Q-Tips, with some of my future comedians buzzing like a bee while doing so! The resulting seed proved viable and produced some beautiful strains of flowers not present in the original seed (picture on right). It was a great science lesson! The resulting plants often went home as Mother's Day gifts. Our original seed came from Stokes Seeds in New York and Park Seed from South Carolina.

We grew a number of different plants in the classroom over the years. Of course, sometimes you get a surprise:

STUDENT: "Gee, Mr. Wood, that sure looks like one of my dad's pot plants."

TEACHER: (quickly looking over his shoulder for the principal, police, or DEA agents) "No, that's a sensitivity plant (mimosa pudica)."

Seriously, sensitivity plants also make great classroom plants. They're never very pretty, but the kids love touching them and watching the leaves and branches fold up. Come to think of it, so do I. The seed is quite inexpensive. They grow well and quickly. We used to grow enough to let the kids take a plant or two each home every other year. (Can you guess that I used to be a science teacher?) And...yes, inverted Frisbees make great plant trays!

Photography

Having worked a few years as a wedding and portrait photographer, I'm thrilled that digital photography has made the whole experience so easy for everyone. While most of the MATH DITTOS 2 site suffers from neglect, one relatively new page still gets a good bit of attention, Desktop Photos. After several years of digital and film photography, I finally collected enough lucky, good shots to put up a page of photos to share with the world. My most recent favorite shots are of some double rainbows and of the hummingbird that dominated our feeder this summer.

Sometimes I miss a photo that turns out to be better than I originally thought or later acquires added meaning. The double rainbow shot show above left was taken in the rain at a baby shower for one of our daughters. The host and hostess were very good friends to her, and the hostess passed away last year in a tragic auto accident. The photo, now named Tess's Rainbows, makes me remember how one or two people can make such a difference in the world, one person at a time.

I ran across the shot below when hunting for something to fill out a row of pictures on the desktops page. After adding it to the site, I cropped and sized the photo as an afterthought and threw it in with my collection of desktops here at home. When it came up for the first time, I was surprised at the vibrancy of the colors. It's quickly become one of my favorite shots.

At 59, I'm not sure what lies ahead. I've had a good life with lots of friends and varied experiences. Annie and I are looking forward to "real" retirement someday, but that is a ways off. I'm currently exploring other work opportunities (20K PDF document).

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