What, Why, Who?
Mostly Retired
Unlike many, I am actually not looking for new business. I am mostly retired from business pursuits. However, if you are struggling to fix a WordPress website and your mission is to help humanity, wildlife, democracy or the planet, I may be interested.
Make the Web a Little Better
Over twenty years ago, some were saying that “www” stands for “World-Wide Waste.” In some cyber lands, it’s far worse than that now. People are tracked, tricked, and exploited in ways that were impossible before the Web. While fixing that is complicated and probably a never-ending battle, I know enough to have saved people from a few outright scams. However, that is not my general focus.
I want to help people who are using the Web to help. I have studied accessibility issues and, although I not an expert in that area, I know enough to find some obvious accessibility problems, especially related to navigation and page structure, and I know how to fix them. I know how to fix a lot of other problems as well, especially related to CSS, JavaScript, PHP, WordPress, and WordPress plugins.
I like puzzles, so if your WordPress site is puzzling you, you want help, and your cause is good, contact me. You don’t have to represent a nonprofit. I will consider small businesses offering products or services that help people or the environment.
If you want ongoing maintenance, sorry. I’m already doing enough of that. Look for someone who specializes in maintenance. There are two basic approaches there: pay each time you need maintenance, or pay a monthly fee for regular things like keeping plugins updated, regular backups of the site, and broken link checking. A monthly maintenance agreement may or may not include an extra charge for things that come up beyond that, depending on how high the maintenance fee is to begin with.
If you maintain your own site, I’m happy to help. I love teaching people how to do it themselves.
Who Am I, Anyway?
I became an adult half a century ago, and I still don’t know the answer to that question. I am not what I have done, but I have done a lot of different things.
I was a mainframe programmer/analyst. What’s a mainframe, you ask? I don’t even know if any computers are still called that. In the 1980’s they were relatively huge computers, many made by IBM, that were mostly used for calculating and storing data and formulas. Then came mini-computers, which, like mainframes, allowed multiple “dumb” terminals to connect to them at the same time. And PC’s, many of which ran on the MS-DOS operating system that made Microsoft and Bill Gates rich and famous. The mouse and computer graphics became ubiquitous a few years later.
Before I learned programming, I was our agency’s liaison with programmers, end users and vendors. I developed specs for programmers to use and gave training to staff. I was good at it. They wanted to promote me. I didn’t want to go into management. I thought I’d go into education instead.
I was a teacher for a little while. Shortly after I got my teaching certificate, I took a job not as a teacher but as an educational assistant in a (mostly) self-contained special education classroom for children with severe physical disabilities and some apparent or imagined mental disabilities as well. I had worked with special needs kids at Camp Easter Seal some years before and I wanted to experience what was going on in special ed before I committed to studying for a special ed endorsement to add to my basic K-8 teaching certificate (with K-12 endorsements in math and biology).
Although I returned to programming for money, that experience led to my involvement for five years with a young man with severe cerebral palsy who had a wicked sense of humor and who was quite smart, but whose body made showing that very difficult. I learned as much as I could about communication systems for people who could not talk and could not point (even with eye gaze direction). I developed a low-tech communication system with him which was essentially a menu system whereby he could listen to choices of words and phrases and pick the ones he wanted to say. He was much better at it – and more invested in using it – than most of the people around him, for a number of reasons I won’t get into here, except to say that a major factor was simply how long it took for him to communicate that way. Regardless, he proved he was as smart as some of us suspected he was. His mother had known that for certain since he was six years old, with personal evidence. Before that, she suspected. He was starting to learn to spell, and picking up phonetic spelling very quickly. It would take a book to explain why that’s as far as he got. Suffice it to say for now that his health took a turn for the worse, and so did his mother’s, and his family life was complicated. He passed away shortly before his eighteenth birthday.
My interest in special ed also led me to Montessori, as I discovered Montessori can work wonderfully well with special needs kids. I taught in a private and a public charter Montessori school. I left both, largely for health and other personal reasons. In between those two jobs I taught science workshops for kids and gave some science parties. I don’t live close enough to where I was giving the workshops. I got tired of loading and unloading the car and then driving for as long as the lessons lasted.
I should mention that I also became a Microsoft Office trainer and then did Microsoft Office custom coding, especially for Microsoft Access but also for Excel, Word and Outlook, beginning in 2001. At the same time, I started learning to develop websites, mostly for my own businesses. Eventually I got into WordPress and doing websites for others. I could say more about all of that but I’d rather talk about education, because that’s more where my heart takes me.
I admire Montessori teachers, but I am philosophically even more aligned with democratic free schools. I wish there were one near me; I would volunteer.
There is Diablo Valley School in Concord, California, which is a two hours’ drive each way, so not practical for me to get involved with. It is based on the model of the much older Sudbury Valley School in Massachusetts.
When I visited Diably Valley School over ten years ago, it was already well-established. I loved it. I recommend that anyone interested check it out. It’s near enough to the BART transit system to bring in children from all over the San Francisco Bay Area. It’s private, but they have a lower price for low-income folks that may make it affordable.
Programming is much easier for me than is teaching a large classroom. I can do programming when I am tired and my back hurts. Logic challenges wake me up and take my focus away from my body, which is good for finding solutions but not always so good for my body. Being around crowds when I am tired does not work for me. I decided my body could not take another year of teaching.
The requirements made of first-year teachers, at least in California public schools, are ridiculous. Other professions expect people to improve over time with experience and additional training. Other professions start you out with a lighter caseload than they expect you to take on once you’ve been there a year or more, regardless of your academic training. Public education seems to expect all teachers to know everything from the beginning and be as excellent at teaching as a 20-year veteran teacher who has won awards.
To address the problem of the stress experienced by beginning teachers, many school districts have come up with, not real support, but more content for teachers to study and hopefully, apply. Perhaps that makes logical sense in a system based on the belief that learning is only about acquiring content knowledge, but I found it most unhelpful. It’s a lot cheaper for the district than, say, lowering the class size for new teachers. Lower cost doesn’t necessarily mean greater efficiency or quality, however. Where I taught in a public charter school, I was expected to study extra materials at night and attend weekly meetings as part of the school district’s program for beginning teachers, which took time away from my lesson planning, without any additional help in my classroom to make up for the lost time. Worse, the materials did not align particularly well with how Montessori teachers teach. Some school districts have you attend similar training but in the summer when you don’t have a classroom of kids to worry about. That would have made a lot more sense.
Huge numbers of new teachers leave within the first three years. I was one of those. Professionals burning out is not good for the children in school, but teachers are treated as replaceable commodities.
Unfortunately, other professions seem to have moved in that direction as well. The gig economy, which promised everyone could be a solo entrepreneur, has contributed. Everyone has been reduced to a product or machine. Everyone can be swapped out. Heck, now we hear that AI robots will replace us all. (Their “intelligence” may be on par with the loudest propaganda found on social media. Humans may be doomed – or perhaps humans will yet save humanity.)
So much for some of what I’ve done. At core, I’m a human, and we may be more alike than many of us would care to admit. I am still learning what a human is.