Skip to main content

Abram Friedman Adult School

One of the weird things that is hard to explain about growing up in Puerto Rico is the lack of Public Libraries. I'm a bit of a compulsive book buyer. So being able to borrow books is still a novel concept for me. Of course Universities and schools in Puerto Rico have libraries but a public library, one that's there for the community? That still shocking to me. And it's a very American thing too. Even tiny towns I've visited seem to have them and some are shockingly nice. The Oviedo Florida public library was gorgeous, and I loved to go there. The Burbank Public Library has meeting rooms you can use and a whole section for children. I tell you this because another thing that was shocking to me was the Abram Friedman Occupational Center Adult School.
From the outside it looks way worse than I was expecting. It looks like a prison, actually a juvenile detention center. No windows, painted while like a polar bear with a blue strip down the bottom. Only a government building would get away with being so oppressively inhuman. The front of the building even has an old school fire escape. But inside it's a rather small school, that smelled faintly of paint like a painter's studio or an art school. In the school there is a cafeteria, with multiple diverse classrooms and classes. I'd never a expected a school like this in the middle of downtown Los Angeles. There are ESL classes I was expecting but also locksmith, a fully working barbershop, a car garage where people were doing body work and painting and more shockingly a graphics design class in a lab with full 27" iMacs, a computer networking and repair class, and electrical installation and construction lab and a solar panel installation class too.
I want to build my own tiny house so I'm considering taking the construction or electrical installation for the insanely low price of $65 a semester... I'm paying that much in books for my Agile Management class!
It's website needs work however... maybe I should take that on as a showcase project of my webdesign skills.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Building my own home.

I've decided. I want to build my own home. There is something special about building your own things. I built a desk for my tiny room when I first moved to L.A. My room was so small that I had to sit on the bed to use the computer so I build a high desk so I could sit on the bed and work on the computer. My roommate Trentity helped me cut the ply-wood to the right side. I still have that desk. It now sits on the living room covered by a cloth hiding the surplus of costume parts my current roommate Sean uses in his creations. Learning to build and fix things continue. And the feeling of satisfaction from fixing even small things is great. So a few years ago I heard on the NPR program the Story about a couple of educators that moved to a tent in their back-yard so they could rent their house and afford to send their kids to college. They had a special type of tent called a yurt and cooked and showered in an RV they had parked next to it. I thought I could do that. Housing in Lo

Contrasting Styles of Writing: English vs. Spanish

There is interestingly enough a big difference between what's considered good writing in Spanish and English . V.S. Naipul winner of the 2001 Nobel prize for literature publish an article on writing . In it he emphasizes the use of short clear sentences and encourages the lack of adjectives and adverbs. Essentially he pushes the writer to abandon florid language and master spartan communication . This is a desired feature of English prose , where short clipped sentences are the norm and seamlessly flow into a paragraph. In English prose the paragraph is the unit the writer cares about the most. This is not the case in Spanish where whole short stories (I'm thinking this was Gabriel Garcia Marquez but maybe it was Cortázar) are written in one sentence. Something so difficult to do in English that the expert translator could best manage to encapsulate the tale in two sentences. The florid language is what is considered good writing in Spanish but unfortunately this has lead t

My Fake Resume

Inspired by the over aggrandized bio of Joseph Rakofsky I want to write my own. If you don't know who he is; Joseph Rakofsky is a lawyer who earned a mistrial for a criminal client due to his (alleged) incompetence as reported on the Washington Post . There has been quite a few commentaries on his "Streisand-house" approach of suing all the bloggers and even the Washington Post and American Bar Association for reporting his (alleged) ineptitude. ("Streisand-house" is what happened to Barbara Streisand who wanted to have a picture of her mansion removed from the internet and she sued to have it removed. Unfortunately suing requires the filing of public documents with a picture of her house. The lawsuit had the direct opposite effect it intended. Everybody now could see legally, since it was a public document, a picture of her house.) But all that internet gossip aside I'm most impressed by his resume. Here is a quote from the website: Prior to stud