Lucinda Surber 4th grade teacher Barron Park Elementary School 800 Barron Avenue Palo Alto, CA 94306

Teaching 4th grade at Barron Park Elementary School keeps me pretty busy:
     Room 17 Website
     4th Grade Student Projects

Other serious professional-type stuff I managed to find time for:

• Webmaster for Barron Park School
• Webmaster for Partnership for Student Success in Science
• Webmaster for PAUSD Science On-Line Guide for Teachers (K-6 Science)
• Internet Resources for Teachers
• Webmaster for Palo Alto Educators Association
• National Board Certification
• Math Lead Teacher
• Technology Lead Teacher
• IRL Technology Learning Coordinator (MultiMedia Projects)
• Apple MultiMedia Teacher
• District Technology Committee
• Building for Excellence: Planning and Review Committee, Elementary Design Guidelines Committee, A+ Project (Art and Architecture), Barron Site Committee
• Teacher Advisory Panel for Intel Museum
• Teacher Consultant Team for "The Changing Image of California," a CD-ROM project for the Stanford Art Museum
• Each summer I help teach the Power Up for Classroom Technology workshop for Palo Alto teachers.

If you are like me and have had trouble for the past 20 years remembering that Neptune (right) had replaced Pluto (left) as the furthest planet from the sun, you'll be glad to know that as of February 11th, Pluto reclaimed its rightful place as the way out planet. And it will stay out there for awhile;

I grew up in Lakeport, a small town on the shores of Clear Lake in northern California. (MAP) My parents still live in the same house. (Here are some Lakeport pictures.) I moved to the Bay Area to attend Stanford University and have been here ever since. I now live in Menlo Park with my husband Stan, two cats named Tisiphone and Finnegan, and a tank of tropical fish with a few frogs for fun. I still miss our cat Bill who died this year; he taught me all I know about HTML. We had a Chilean Rose tarantula named Spootnik and would like to get another one. My step daughter Emily is a design planner for Steelcase in Grand Rapids, MI.

West Bay Opera

Our first experience at West Bay Opera was learning to run the supertitles for Il Trovatore. Then we were in charge of the ghost words for The Turn of the Screw. And then I learned to run the Sound Board for The Italian Girl in Algiers. Then came the ill-fated (for me) production of Carmen, followed by The Consul featuring the nerve-wracking (for me anyway) phone rings. In Madama Butterfly I got to fire the cannon that signals the return of Pinkerton's ship, but I didn’t have much to do in Cosi fan tutte except bliss out on the music. I learned what a bandoneon was in The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny and used hot pink spike tape in La Traviata.

I am trying to learn to animate gifs, but I haven’t made much progress so far…

	This is what we call a Maya Sneech, an icon I drew for our Maya Calendar HyperCard stack.
	This is Orlovsky, the icon for a partition of my computer. I didn’t draw this one, but I did wiggle his eyestalks and learned how to make him crawl across the screen.

Digital Pix

We collect pictures of Red Stuff we have seen.

I still haven’t quite finished our NYC vacation pictures.

And right now I am busy organizing the pictures of vacations to Santa Fe.

Tulip	Sparrow	Insight
After 23 years I finally said good-bye to my trusty Toyota truck. I wanted an electric Tulip (but they aren't sold in this country for some reason) or an electric Sparrow (but they only have three wheels) so I finally ended up with this adorable hybrid Honda Insight, codenamed Zorb, which gets great gas mileage and is lots of fun to drive.

Hobbies and Special Interests

• Pottery: Wheel thrown gas-fired “useful pots” are my specialty.
• Gardening: I grow my favorite foods: tomatoes, red and yellow peppers, lima beans, asparagus, kiwi, pomegranates, and raspberries. Sometimes I even let other people eat a bit of the harvest.
• Reading: Fiction, fiction, and more fiction!
• Opera Travel: During Summer Solstice 1997 we visited St. Petersburg, Russia and Savonlinna, Finland for the White Nights Festival. I learned a bit of Russian and brought home a Moomin souvenir from Finland. We usually travel to Santa Fe, New Mexico, for the summer opera season and spend Spring Break in New York City for as much opera as we can cram into 8 days.
• Zuni Fetishes: I collect Zuni fetishes (carved stone animals). My favorites are bears and frogs because I like the body shapes. I also have a few mountain lions, an eagle, a porcupine, and a tiny beaver.
• Snorkeling: My favorite sport is snorkeling in tropical waters. We sometimes celebrate Winter Solstice by traveling to the Cook Islands for a second Summer Solstice.
• Wallace and Grommit is my favorite cartoon. I like the evil penguin and Shaun the meek but resourceful sheep. I especially love the train sequence from The Wrong Trousers.

Why I Didn’t Go to Work Tuesday (2/3/98) Tuesday morning we found a line of mud on our sidewalk and debris all over the street. (Luckily my digital camera had arrived on Friday!) Monday night San Francisquito Creek, which divides Palo Alto and Menlo Park, flooded its banks and the streets in our neighborhood. Some parts of the creek bank collapsed, and tree parts collect in piles. Our flower beds looked more like ponds than earth. Luckily our house was not flooded, but we could not drive very far away from home. Many of our neighbors had to make sandbags to protect their houses. 101 South was closed; cars were drifting in the middle of the freeway. University Avenue was completely deserted except for items deposited by the flood. And Hoover School was closed for the first time since the Loma Prieta Earthquake of 1989!

Lucinda’s 4th Grade Classroom.

Copyright © 1996-2008 Lucinda Surber. All Rights Reserved.