FIRE, FIRE! (followed below by a day-in-the-life "snapshot" of one of my SQU classes)

By now many of you have received emails about the San Diego Area fire that my sister Ann and her husband Cameron lived through earlier this week. If so, part of this will be reheated news, but a lot of it is fresh.

I had been aware generally of the many catastrophic fires raging in Southern California the last week but hadn’t been too concerned. Most of the people I know live closer to the coast, and the fires are usually in the mountains or on the far east side of inhabited LA. Ann and Cam live in the open country east of Fallbrook and just west of the 15 Freeway, the main road through central San Diego County, so fires rarely get that far west since it’s hard to jump the very wide freeway there.

Then Tuesday a neighbor here with good cable TV texted me that she had seen fire personnel interviewed in Fallbrook. That got my attention! I hadn’t even heard there was a fire in that area. I went to the Web and tried to find out more detail about the path of the fire. What I read really sobered me. All the streets around Pamela Drive, where Ann lives, had been in the burn area. A family just west of them up E. Mission Drive was interviewed at the burning embers of their home in a feature news story. If west of them had been so badly burned, what must have happened to Pamela Drive?

(To put it in perspective, not only would it be a loss of their home but a nearly complete loss of all of our parents’ 40 years of art objects, travel mementos, and family slides and photos stored in Ann and Cam’s garage waiting for the day when she and I could divvy up their earthly possessions. The prospect felt like we were losing Mom and Dad all over again.)

I called Ann up about 7:30 am Tuesday their time and got a very groggy and raspy Ann on the phone. They had been evacuated and were at a hotel in Fallbrook but they – and Cat – were fine. They hadn’t been allowed to go back to the house yet, so they didn’t have any news on it. I didn’t have the heart to tell her what I’d been reading on the Web. She’d find out eventually.

I was hugely relieved to get an email Wednesday from Cam’s sister-in-law Gaby (also in San Diego County) saying that the house was OK.

Most recently, I spoke to Ann on the phone Thursday and got some more details. It had been a very close call. Apparently, their home was saved by fire fighters, who managed to rescue all the homes on their little cul-de-sac (Pamela Drive) except the house next door, at the top of the hill, which was a total loss. Ann and Cam are downhill a bit from that, but not very far. I was incredulous that the fire didn’t jump the bushes and burn theirs; I’ve been there and know how tiny their back yard is in that direction.

The firemen protected the houses (and Ann’s Toyota) with hoses but let their storage shed burn. However, many, many other homes in the area, including many on E. Mission Drive, the only road Pamela Drive connects with, were burned to the ground.

Ann described how little time they had had to evacuate Monday. The Rice Canyon Fire was already burning across the 15 Freeway with winds blowing 40+ mph, moving very fast and ready to jump the freeway. A fireman (or was it sheriff?) knocked on their door and gave them about 10 minutes to clear out. Cam was home from work that day sick with the flu – a good thing, too, because otherwise Ann would have had no transportation out. Her SUV was on the fritz and pretty much useless parked there in the driveway, so thankfully, Cam had his pickup there.

They drove into town (Fallbrook) and spent the night at a motel, where they’ve been holed up ever since, since the house has no utilities at the moment like a lot of San Diego homes right now.

POWERPOINT OMAN

Lest you think our dishdasha- and abaya-clad young Level 4 students are writing on slates with chalk in a dusty courtyard somewhere with the noise of chickens and goats in the background, let me give a little picture of a “day in the classroom” in Dr. Sundberg’s class at Sultan Qaboos University:

For the final project for the Independent Study class, my 20 students are giving Microsoft Powerpoint presentations on their area of research over the last eight weeks. Sample topics: Alfred Nobel, Car Accidents in Oman, Cyclone Gonu (which hit Oman hard in June), the Compass, Mobile Phones, the Television, and the Internet.

A month ago, I had thought that giving them a quickie introduction to Powerpoint would help make their final class presentations more interesting and give them a skill they could use the rest of their professional lives. (EVERYONE uses Powerpoint these days – good or bad? Discuss among yourselves …) But after my bland kindergarten-level mini-workshop, 90% of them were zipping around the program adding garish colors, special letter effects (enter from top, bottom, left, right and reassemble on the line), images and annoying animated gifs that whirl and flash ad infinitum. (Hmmm. Something tells me this is not their first time at the fair …)

One student asked permission to do his team project in Macromedia Flash (a high-end, time-consuming application I studied for one semester at UCLA extension). “Keep it simple,” I advised him. A number said they had their Powerpoint slideshows done already. “What?! But you haven’t even written a final outline for your presentation yet! Focus on the CONTENT first. CONTENT!”

Anyway, the day of the presentations, they all brought in their flash memory sticks (the modern version of the floppy disc) and uploaded their presentations onto one student's brand new Toshiba laptop, which was connected by VGA cable to the wall which connected to the ceiling projector. (Many US university classrooms don't even have this set-up.)

Many had big, attention-grabbing graphics and images that really added to their presentation - stolen from some website somewhere, no doubt. (“Fair use” law allows us a one-off use for educational purposes.) The pictures of Gonu, especially, brought home the violence of those few days in Oman's history earlier this summer. But my students had refrained – as advised – from writing an essay-worth of text on their Powerpoint slides, whittling things down to bullet points as they were supposed to. And many presented very confidently (in a SECOND language, let me hasten to remind you – you try doing this in your HS Spanish!) with good interactive – almost TV host style and poise. Most didn't even need to read much off the screen to say their points - clearly practiced and memorized at home! I had to say I was impressed.

OK, there were still the garish colors, the web design flaws so big you could drive a camel through them, the annoying animated gifs (hearts and flowers - even what looked like dripping blood, dripping, dripping ...) – and one slide with an image of a baby camel caught on the hood of a pickup truck in some lurid traffic accident that popped in from the left side of the screen in the middle of a bland talk on car accidents, and worked its way up to the top of the screen and disappeared. (The Powerpoint equivalent of a naked streaker jogging through a garden party. Try keeping a serious “teacher-evaluator” face while watching that!) But all in all, they did a commendable job for first-timers, especially in their second language. "Bravo 'alayhum!"