Saturday, April 30, 2011

Facebook Fishbowl

I'm taking courses in how to teach online. This is part of my retirement plan, such as it is. (Teachers don't all get big fat pensions, by the way. Republicans lie a lot. But that's the topic for another post.)

Part of the current course has us exploring Facebook as a teaching tool. Apparently this is a great ploy for motivating middle school kids who are more easily seduced into education if it seems like something else. For my community college students, and myself, I worry about conducting class in public to such a degree. You can hide the posts from random googlers, I realize, but not the names of your "friends." Maintaining privacy on Facebook can be done, sort of, with the use of an alias that they don't want you to use and have software to spot. (Sybil Drinkwalter got past their radar, but Grammar as a first name did not.)

But you have to be savvy to stay in control of your privacy on Facebook, more savvy than most of my students, among them people being stalked by vengeful exes, young people with double identities (gay with conservative immigrant parents is one example of the complex scenarios that develop. Or a woman from a strictly traditional Muslim immigrant family whose friends and activities have become a bit more Americanized than others in her family realize). There are people with political and legal histories that provide any number of reasons for preferring privacy. And not one of them will want a prospective employer who googles them five years from now to see what their English is like now.

And I get nervous, too, viewing the spread of photographs on my new Facebook page in my legal name ... "people you might know" ... you betcha. There they all are, lined up in random order, Witches, occultists, community college students, community college administrators, my sister in Tacoma, my born again cousins in Texas, people from my high school class whom I haven't been in touch with for nearly half a century, and if it's been that long there obviously have been reasons why not. Of course, I don't have to friend them all, but if they want to friend me, it seems rude to ignore them. And it's disconcerting to know that there is software out there that can so instantly determine that I "might" know them all.

Sunday, April 17, 2011

Why Easter Is So Late

"Easter falls on the first Sunday following the first ecclesiastical full moon that occurs on or after the day of the vernal equinox."

And what is an ecclesiastical full moon, I hear you ask?

The web page I got this definition from, (http://aa.usno.navy.mil/faq/docs/easter.php), does not explain except to say that an ecclesiastical full moon is not quite the same thing as an astronomical full moon, but that they are pretty close. I am sufficiently annoyed by the presumption of Christian ecclesiastics in setting up their own full moon, different from everybody else's, that I have not pursued the matter further.

Anyway, this year the moon was full only a few days before the Equinox, and will not be full again until the wee hours of the morning tomorrow, which is a Monday, putting off Easter until April 24th.


Easter is actually a perfectly good word for either holiday--ask your Christian ecclesiastics where the word comes from. Don't ask our fuzzier-brained Pagans, actually, many of whom are pretty sure it has to do with Ishtar. That similarity in sound is apparently pure accident, English and ancient Semitic languages not being very closely related. "Easter" does derive from a Germanic Goddess of the dawn.

The Christian scheduling strategy was to give their God the last word in the days when people were still talking to more than one. However, I think it was a miscalculation on their part to allow for quite so much lag time. This way the Pagans get the last word with May Eve, one of our real blockbusters, less than a week after.
And it is an inconvenience for us when the Spring Equinox and Easter are so widely separated in time, because Safeway doesn't have Easter candy for Pagan children.

My schoolteacher problem is that the spring break is always the week before Easter, even though probably no more than ten percent of my students celebrate it (most of them being Buddhists and Muslims). I am accustomed to a spring semester rhythm in which we do midterm exams just before spring break, take a week off to reflect on the implications, then come back and really get down to business. This year it looks as though we will be getting down to business far too late.

Kathy Mar has a wonderful song called "Everybody's Moon." For just $.99, download and listen to the whole thing.