Field Report: Balticon
I just got home from being the musical guest of honor at Balticon, an annual science fiction and fantasy convention run by Maryland fen. If you’ve never been to a fan-run convention and you’re not too far from Baltimore next Memorial Day weekend, Balticon would be a great place to start. It’s big enough (about … Read More
Mom Loves Best
Seventeen years ago(!), Best Beloved did what a lot of first-time moms do: she bought about a dozen books on how to raise Boy Genius the RIGHT way and read them cover to cover. One would think all those experts (after all, they wrote books!) would have some kind of consensus about how to do … Read More
New website coming soon…
Sometime in the next month or two, you will find the look of our website will change quite a lot. We will still have all the great music etc, but after five years we’ve had some feedback about how to better serve our users. Highlights will include: The music page will actually be the home … Read More
Field Report: JoCo Cruise
For the first time in a long time I took a whole week off from both work and family, and I just got home from something totally different. One recent trend in big-ship cruising has been to organize a cruise around a particular theme in order to draw a clientele that might not normally choose … Read More
Putting the A in STEAM, Part 2: The “One More Thing” Thing
An occasional series on science, technology, engineering, arts, and math. A number of organizations, including GriffinEd, serve schools for free; but money is not the only thing our schools are short on. When I was a full-time teacher, if you had given me a choice between more money for field trips, supplies, computers, etc. or … Read More
Watch GriffinEd Live At Kulak’s!!!
Okay, we’ve got ways to do this; hopefully at least one of them will work. If you are on FaceBook, go to the GriffinEd FB page (click LIKE while you’re there!) and we will be webcasting live there… we think. If that does not work, try the website for Kulak’s Woodshed. If neither of these … Read More
Putting the A in STEAM, part 1: the Myth of Expertise
When I started using music and the other arts to help my Title-1 students in LAUSD learn science and math 25 years ago, I hadn’t heard about STEAM yet; I’m not even sure STEM was a thing back then. Now that it’s trendy and more of the muckity-mucks are saying everyone should be doing this … Read More
Fast Pitch is done!
Well, that was a pretty intense eight-week journey. I did about thirty drafts of my pitch, practiced it about a zillion times, made some new friends and a lot of contacts, and honed GriffinEd’s message about what we do and why it matters. Definitely time well spent, and I am extremely grateful to the Social … Read More
Fast Pitch!!!
GriffinEd is terribly excited to announce we have been chosen as semi-finalists in the Social Venture Partners’ Fast Pitch competition. Think “Shark Tank” for nonprofits with grant funding for prizes and, more importantly, a chance to build relationships with various philanthropic organizations. I will be participating in a lot of coaching and mentoring to tune … Read More
Why music?
I spend a lot of my time explaining to people that GriffinEd isn’t about teaching music, but is instead a program for teaching STEM and other subjects using music as a fun and effective tool. This is an important distinction for a variety of reasons; one of them is that GriffinEd does NOT replace actual … Read More