Life In Scottsdale

Drive a couple miles west down McDonald from Scottsdale Road and you will be at the base of the north side of Camelback Mountain.  I always tell friends that this is the best 1 mile hike in the country.  I try to take everyone who visits me from out of town up the mountain, and my visitors are always happy they went.  The hike is actually in Paradise Valley and Phoenix, but Camelback Mountain is probably the most noticeable geographic landmark in Scottsdale, arbitrary city borders aside.  The trail is very steep - despite being only 1.25 miles, even the most well conditioned athletes in the city take about 18 minutes to get up, and an average person can expect to take 45 minutes to an hour to get to the top, and another 35 minutes to get down.  Over the course of 1.25 miles, you’ll be going up 1200 feet, which is about 1/4th of a mile.  That makes for an 18% grade, if my math skills still work.  The hike is great exercise and a lot of fun.  Ath the summit you will find a nice plateau where hikers tend to relax and enjoy the view for 10-15 minutes before they start heading down. 

The hours of operation are 530am to 730pm between May 1st - September 30th, and 7am to 530pm from October 1st to April 30th.  If you are there after hours, no one will punish you, don’t worry.  But it will probably be dark, and this trail is not safe in the dark.  So be careful.  The parking situation is always messy - in a ridiculous shortsighted and selfish plan, the town of Paradise Valley refuses to create more parking spots and makes it illegal to park on nearby streets.  If you want to hike the Echo Canyon side on a nice day, expect to wait 15-30 minutes, or park more than a mile away and walk to the mountain.  Either way, its worth it.  You get several 360 degree views of the entire valley (and after this hike, you will have a better understanding of why it’s called “The Valley.”).  The views are beautiful.  It’s always fun to admire the $5-20 million resort style homes that surround the base.  The trail is always packed with people of all ages and backgrounds.  Everyone is friendly and talkative.  Make sure you bring some sunblock and water, because you’ll be in the sun and there is no water once you leave the base.

The hike is dog friendly, although it is a challenge and very small dogs and out of shape dogs will probably struggle.  If you are out of shape, don’t be afraid to give the hike a shot.  If you get too tired, you can always turn around and walk back down to the bottom.  You won’t get stuck anywhere.

Here is the City of Phoenix’s informational page on the trail s: http://www.ci.phoenix.az.us/PARKS/hikcmgud.html

Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camelback_Mountain

Sting Ray on Scottsdale is a popular local sushi place. It’s located between 5th and 6th avenue on Scottsdale road. The restaurant has a mom & pop feel, although they also own a restaurant down the street named Drift. Sting Ray has a nice outdoor patio that sits directly on Scottsdale Road, right in the heart of old town. It’s a fun place to eat, but if you sit there be prepared to be involved in a semi-back and forth conversation with people on the sidewalk and cars stopped at the light. Especially if you are a good looking girl or are with good looking girls. Regardless, the patio is a fun place to eat and right in the mix of the city. Sting Ray is always packed on Friday and Saturday night. The inside of the restaurant is about half bar, half restaurant, and it’s designed with a modern Japanese feel. The sushi is great, and so is the rest of the menu. The staff is almost entirely female, and fairly attractive. Last time I went there I was waited on by 5 different waitresses and a friendly hostess. It was a bit of a battle to order in such a confused situation; I ordered 4 Saki & Sapporo, and I only ever received 2. Additionally, the sushi menu doesn’t delineate the raw / cooked items. Since I don’t eat raw fish that is a bit of an issue for me.

The bottom line is that Sting Ray has great sushi (it’s well loved among the locals), it’s a fun place to hang out, and the atmosphere is a little more down to earth than Ra and the other trendy Japanese places in Scottsdale.

From the website - www.stingraysushi.com - Only at Stingray will you find a unique blend of upbeat energy with a spirit of Japanese cuisine and tradition.

The Gainey Village Class Schedule has been nearly impossible to access via Google since they “upgraded” their site, so I figured I would throw it up here.  Their website is www.villageclubs.com, but I defy you to to find a schedule of classes in under 10 minutes on the site.  I will write more on Gainey Village when I have the time.  I probably have 4000 words to write on that place.  (In case you are wondering, they will all be positive.)  In case this text is too hard to read, visit the page on their site directly at http://www.villageclubs.com/class_schedules.php.  You can view the Camelback Village Class Schedule and DC Ranch Village Class Schedule at that link as well.

I hate to do it.  I do.  The employees are usually so nice, harmless, and downtroden (a female employee randomly told me that she was a recovering heroin addict — inappropriate, unnecessary, but not at all unexpected for Coffee Plantation).  I really don’t like beating up on them.  But I have to say it.  COFFEE PLANTATION IS AWFUL.  The coffee is just so disgusting.  It’s always cold, bitter, and dirty.  I usually feel like I am drinking something horribly tainted and give up on my drink half way through.  The employees are dirty.  Just unclean, unshaven, dirty, and nasty.  Often I have to wait for 3 minutes to be served even when there are only 2 customers in the store.  The store itself is old, dungy, and dirty.  The bathrooms are unclean.  I don’t understand why it’s so hard to make fresh, good coffee and have a clean store.  It’s coffee!  Your customers are addicted to the product!  Brew good coffee, keep the store clean, and you will make money.  In their defense, the employees are almost always very nice.

Visit their site at: http://www.coffee-plantation.com/

In Summary: Beware a real estate crash.

There are certainly some deals out there.  Foreclosures, while not as prevalent in Scottsdale as the rest of the valley, are still at historically high levels.  Inventory is up, home sales are down.  Some people feel that we are reaching a bottom, and that it’s a great time to buy real estate in Scottsdale because it can only go up.  I disagree, although I am willing to admit that Arizona’s enormous growth (3% per year, 2nd fastest growing state in the country) offers a significant hedge against a further real estate slowdown.  Additionally, most people who move to Arizona end up wanting to move to Scottsdale, because Scottsdale is the nicest part of the state.)  Anyway, here is why I think the market hasn’t bottomed out:

1) Home prices in Scottsdale are way beyond what anyone earning even $150,000 per year can really afford.  A nice place in most of Scottsdale costs over $1,000,000 - a mortgage payment of $75,000/year, $110k pretax.  If someone making 150k/year can’t afford a nice house in Scottsdale, things are in trouble.  There just aren’t very many jobs in the Phoenix area that pay over 150k/year, and while there are some small business owners and wealthy individuals who have moved here, it just doesn’t add up to the number of houses over $1,000,000.

2)  Home prices have gone down because they were overvalued and people couldn’t make the payments.  So prices are down 15%.  Add in the fact that this has happened over a nearly 2 year period, and that the natural state of things is for real estate to appreciate 4% per year, home prices are really down more like 23%.  Still, the market was more than 23% overvalued.  So I do think that just based on the market being overvalued, there is more room to go down.  But again, that is somewhat hedged by the rapidly growing population of the state. 

3) Here is what I consider the overriding factor: the recession has not yet hit in full force.  And if you don’t think the recession is coming, think again.  100k jobs are being lost per month around the country.  And that’s just the start.  Inflation is out of control in China, and the Chinese Yuan is getting devalued against the rest of the world even while it gains value against the United States.  This means that a manufacturer of say a steel knife in China faces the following problem: 1) their cost of steel has gone up 15% 2) US currency is worth 15% less.  Ultimately, this means that Chinese products are going to start costing way more for Americans.  Since everything we use is made in China, get ready to spend a lot more of your money on cost of living stuff, random appliances.  Not to mention that the ethanol craze is driving up the price of food.  Anyway, what I’m saying is that a recession is coming, and *everything* is going to get more expensive.  People are going to earn less, and what they want to buy will cost more.  This will leave way less money for buying houses.  So what’s going to happen?  REAL ESTATE WILL GO DOWN FURTHER!!

And thus the official position of lifeinscottsdale.org: The Real Estate Crash Is Coming.  Or at least The Real Estate Downturn Of 12-18%.  We’ll find out in 2 years if I was right.  Goodnight!

The past 4 years of crime data can easily be looked up in Scottsdale: http://eservices.scottsdaleaz.gov/dmc/crimes/default.asp

It requires installing a few ActiveX controllers (whatever the hell that is).  This is a map of the Scottsdale Rd / Indian Bend Intersection and surrounding areas for the entire year of 2007.  Despite all the police reports (at least one of which was caused by me), it’s a pretty safe area.

http://www.supreme.state.az.us/publicaccess/notification/search.asp

Want to know who has trial for what?  Who was convicted of what?  Check this out — it captures virtually every court in the State of Arizona.  A quick search of one of my less favorite suns (mostly due to jealousy), Dan Marleje, shows a squeaky clean lifestyle.  No cases! 

Next, I looked up my favorite Sun, Amare Stoudemire.  3 cases.  Not so great, Amare!  I clicked on one and it was a traffic violation, and I imagine the others are, too.  I haven’t heard about him getting into any serious trouble.  While I’m on the subject of my man Amare, what a beast! 

www.azsexoffender.com - this is a great site.  I really don’t know how useful it is, after all, if a convicted sex offender is living near you, what the hell are you going to do about it?  Tell your kids to stay away from him?  Everyone on the site actually looks like a sex offender, so I don’t think that any normal kid would get within 100 yards of one of these people anyway.  What else are you going to do, move?  I guess that is viable, but there is a general safe bet in life: the more you pay for your house, the fewer sex offenders will be nearby.  One benefit of the site is humiliation and embarasement of sex offenders.  A fair punishment, for such an awful crime.  Personally, the fear of being on the site is enough to prevent me from even looking in the direction of a 17 year old girl.  And the site is an interesting look at our society’s underbelly.

The graphic above is a picture of the 85253 zip code.  It’s almost entirely clear, aside from a few blips east of Scottsdale Road.  Check out an old town zip code like 85251 for more frightening stuff.

One of the great things about the Internet is the ability to gather information.  No place is this easier than in Arizona.  One of the most usefull tools is the Maricopa County Assessors website.  You can find out who owns every house in the county, and how much they paid for it.  Even better, you can search by a persons name or by an address. 

http://www.maricopa.gov/Assessor/ParcelApplication/Default.aspx

Unfortunately, some clever individuals own property under the name of a corporation, making it harder to search for their homes by name.  If you know an address, you can search for the company owner on the Arizona Corporate Commission Business Entity Search page (http://starpas.azcc.gov/scripts/cgiip.exe/WService=wsbroker1/connect.p?app=names-report.p), but doing a reverse search to find a person’s home I haven’t figured out yet

Anyway, most people, even high profile people, don’t think to hide their name on their real estate purchases.  The key to the search, which the site doesn’t reveal, is that you can search by last and first name.  Just type in the last name, a space, and then the first name.  Or just letters.  Searching for Charles Barkley’s house, you can enter “Barkley Charles” and find out that he paid $2,000,000 for his house and it’s on xxxx Doubletree Road.  Will I be giving out his address?  Nope.  But you can find it easy enough.  When you stop by, tell him and Maureen that I said hi.

Zillow (www.zillow.com) is one of my favorite real estate tools.  It is never going to be completely accurate, because there is simply no way for it to know when a house has been remodeled.  Despite this limitatino, it is still surprisingly useful for scanning neighborhoods to look at home values.  It was right on the money on my neighborhood for about a year, but lately it has been showing values about 100k over the actual selling price due to some sort of strange readjustment.  Regardless, it’s still a neat tool and its a great way to scan for houses for sale.  Lately many more realtors have clued in and have been listing their houses here.  It has some neat tools, for example, I can see that the medican price of a home sold in Scottsdale in the past 12 months was 432.5k (versus 207.5k for Mesa, 210k for Phoenix, and 1.583 Million for Paradise Valley).

I despise MLS, so anytime a new realtor begins listing on Zillow, I am happy.  Realtors hate Zillow, of course, because they don’t like the price estimates it gives.  But I hate realtors, so I guess it’s natural that I like Zillow.

There are currently 1996 homes listed for sale in Scottsdale, for a Median value of 746k.  Hmm!  746k Median sale price, 432k Median Sold Price.  This most likely means that more expensive homes are more likely to be listed for sale on Zillow, although I’d like to think it means that people need to lower their prices!. 

In looking at philosophies of curriculum from two different traditions, Perennialism from the Conservative tradition and Experimentalism from the Progressive tradition, there are far more differences than similarities.  In fact, once we get past the idea that both must be responsive to the learner, society and subject matter, the screen through which these two filtered curriculum and how it determines the teacher’s role and classroom objectives seems to have produced philosophies with little in common.  Where they appear to share some similarities is in their mutual intents to educate students to become citizens of a democratic society.  While perennialists look toward encouraging students to become careful, critical thinkers, experimentalists’ goals are to instill skills and attitudes that promote reflective thinking.  Since critical thinking involves reflective thinking and reflective thinking by nature is critical, it appears that their goals here are common ones.

     The two take a very different view of subject matter.  For a perennialist, curriculum is subject centered with teachers acting as guides that stimulate and assist, but the subject matter is considered the true teacher.  The subject matter reflects a belief in the knowledge and wisdom of western humanity and promotes unchanging universal truths.  For perennialists, diversity is of no importance, because learning is about training the mind, the will and the character through permanent study.  Therefore they see vocational education and performing arts as unessential, referring to them as anti-intellectual frivolities.  The perennialist philosophy seems to assume that all of our students will be on college track and should therefore be educated accordingly.  I feel that this mindset is counterproductive if the goal of our society is to educate all citizens.  We must offer the type of education that will best serve the whole society.  Many high school students would not stay in school if it were not for the classes that they feel teach them the things that they will use in the real world, for many those are the vocational classes that perennialists view as frivolities.  If we do not do all that we can to keep our students from dropping out of high school, how can we claim that our curriculum is addressing the needs of our society?

     The word that I found most significant in the experimentalist view of subject matter that shows it to be at odds with the perennialist was responsive.  The idea that the subject matter would actually take the students’ personal and socio-civic experience into consideration demonstrates the belief that the whole child must be educated, not just the mind.  Experimentalists, who also hold all truths up to ongoing inspection, embrace diversity.  I come away with the impression that the perennialist philosophy views the acquisition of knowledge important because knowledge itself is important, while the experimentalist philosophy sees knowledge as significant for its contribution that it makes to students’ behavior.

     As a high school math teacher, I am sure that I am at odds with most of my colleges when it comes to the philosophy that I align with.  Most project an alliance to Perennialism, where I find myself more in tuned to experimentalism.  The emphasis on subject centered curriculum that embraces universal, unchanging truths lends itself to a mathematical mindset.  Of course, I still find myself fighting my own default pedagogy that would match the beliefs of Perennialism but, just because that was the way I was taught, doesn’t mean that it would best serve my students.

     My first couple of years of teaching, all my focus was on the subject matter.  Having all the state mandated standards that needed to be covered along with district established pacing guides kept my thoughts on a subject matter driven curriculum, perennialism.  As I interacted with my students and got a clearer picture of how I needed to react to their needs, my thoughts moved to a progressive philosophy, experimentalism.  The idea of educating the whole child overrides the need to address each and every standard.  I make sure that my lesson plans can cover all key standards, but I have found that my students benefit greatly if I am more receptive to what Eisner referred to as expressive outcomes.  My class load consists of mostly at risk students and second language learners.  The need for the curriculum to be responsive is, I feel, vital.    As a teacher, I often find myself the student, as my kids time and again open my eyes to the fact that the universal, unchanging truths from my educational background are not always that universal or unchanging.