Every summer, a vacant lot near Boston’s Chinatown Gate becomes a free, outdoor theater, showing Kung-Fu and classic Chinese-language films under the stars. Organized by “friends of the site”, you should go!
For more info see www.filmsatthegate.org.

I write quite a bit about the web and design matters here, but not as much about why I love teaching and how I got here in the first place. In 1994, I went to down to El Salvador to learn Spanish and to be an International observer for the Salvadoran presidential elections. The school I went to was the Mélida Anaya Montes Spanish School in San Salvador. At the school, learning the language was not separate from the cultural context of the Salvadoran country and political environment. In addition to traditional methods of learning vocabulary and grammar, the central method for learning was through conversation. The difference between this method and the way I had learned language in the past was the breakdown of the walls between the student and teacher. When we had conversations we talked about the lives of our teachers and they heard about ours back home.

I had never “learned” like this before, but it worked better than anything I had ever experienced. After 4 or 5 months of class and after the elections were over I and a few other of the current students were approached by the head of the school asking if we’d like to be teachers in a pilot English program. None of the group had ever had any official teaching experience before: we relied on some generic lesson plans and our recent experience as students.

My class consisted of 4 students and all were absolute beginners. Looking back on it I wonder why I wasn’t more daunted, the potential for failure seemed high and even obvious: in the end you can either comprehend and speak a language or you can’t. However, the power and support of the organization’s teaching model was very strong. My students ranged in age from 18 to 30 and had lived most of their lives under a repressive and brutal regime while fighting a civil war. This meant they had stories to tell and I was asking them to do it in English.

It became my job to give them the tools they needed to begin conversing, reading and writing. As I was learning how to teach, I was humbled by their stories and more motivated than ever to get them to the next stage. Every day was exhilarating and often frustrating. In the end though, all 4 of my students stayed through the entire program and when they graduated, the pride I had for them was overwhelming. It has been about 15 years since that class, and both the English and Spanish programs appear to be thriving and I would highly recommend either (or both!) to anyone. For me, the lessons I learned that year have helped shape my philosophy of education and style as a teacher. The image below is one of the few I have that completely captures my joy of the moment.

My bank USAA recently announced they would be updating their iPhone app to allow users to deposit checks by taking a picture of it and uploading to the USAA service. It so happens that I hit the sweet spot, not only must you have (obviously) an account and an iPhone but they currently only allow customers who have insurance through USAA to make iPhone deposits. I fit this profile so I decided to give it a shot. To make a long story short, it worked great, but here are some of the details:

1. Once the USAA app is open, logging in with my name, password and pin turns out to be the most difficult step. Because I use a fairly long and ornate combination of numbers and letters (due to it being my financial information and all), I was stuck tapping back and forth between the iPhones number and letter keyboards.
2. After that ordeal, I chose to deposit into my Savings Account  (I could have also deposited into Checking). You can see here I deposited a whopping twelve cents. (Why do I have a pitiful 12 cent check lying around?  The irony  is that this was a credit from Sprint after I canceled my cell phone service.)

   

3. Next I was asked to take a picture of the front of the check. This was the part I was most worried would fall apart, merely because I have a second gen iPhone therefore no autofocus. But I framed the check as best as possible. After taking the picture I was given the chance to redo or submit the image. I went ahead and submitted.
4. Next I needed to take a picture of the back. They gave me instructions on how to sign the check including the standard practice of adding my account number.

   

5. After submitting the photo of the back of the check I was given a thumbnail preview of my two images and asked to verify them. The thumbnails looked pretty dim to me, but I submitted anyway. As the images were uploading and going through whatever verification process they needed to on USAA’s side a message appeared asking me not to “navigate away from this page, answer calls, or allow your device to auto-lock”.

   

6. The deposit was accepted! I was now 12 cents richer and ready to paint the town red on Sprint’s dime (literally). I also was reminded by USAA to immediately write VOID on the check and then either destroy or file the check away.

   

Conclusions: Depositing my check via iPhone rocked. USAA’s only branch is in Texas (I live in Massachusetts). They’ve apparently been on the forefront of remote depositing for  few years, I usually use a “home deposit” service that requires a scanner, but using the iPhone is actually faster, more fun and will likely be my preferred method from now on. I don’t quite understand what’s happening on the backend, is there some sort of character recognition software involved or perhaps a real live “human” double-checking the numbers? Whatever the case, it makes my life easier, so I’m on board.

World Science Festival 2009: Bobby McFerrin Demonstrates the Power of the Pentatonic Scale from World Science Festival on Vimeo.