EducatingMe

I was in a conversation with a gal the other day and she was asking me questions about why Oklahoma is in such a bind when it comes to education. She went on to say she passes by several schools on her drive and they are adding on or building up the school. Her question was - how do we have money to build and not the money to pay teachers? I had to explain to her that unlike personal banking accounts where she can decide if she has a vacation fund or pay the bills fund or buying a new pair of shoes fund. In the financial world that the education system must live in, you cannot take from the vacation fund to pay your bills. If you have a vacation fund, you go on vacation and let the water and electric get shut off. You buy the shoes and let the house go to repo. She was pretty upset at that point. She (the lay-person) was not informed as to how the situation worked.   As a typical human being with typical senses (who may have also survived the single semester of personal fi

This is really nothing more than a quick shout out to my new friend Josh Flores I absolutely love when worlds come together. In the past couple of years, I have kinda run in the same circle as the #OklaEd staple in Josh Danger Flores. For those of you that don't know him to well because maybe your circles haven't collided, he is a beer drinking, blog and podcasting sonofvagun with a love of coffee and education. We have tweeted back and forth and narrowly missed each other at conferences (actually, I did sit in for like 15 minutes of his Evernote presentation at Recharge in Clinton last summer). Today however, we sat down to get to know each other the only way two people really can...with microphones shoved in our faces for an actually listened to podcast. Joking aside, he was great. We shared the love of a few different things, namely professional development, coffee and teaching. I was at ease the whole time. Josh had a way of not letting it feel like we only knew e