You WANT to die on this hill..?

 My Bride and the Girl are still in Teacher Strike Stasis, waiting to see if the two sides will settle today.

As I think I said earlier, the union has repeatedly climbed down from its initial (eminently reasonable!) list of objectives because the cheapskate state legislature made it clear that it's more important to hand out tax breaks to gajillionaires than to pay for 21st Century education for everyone.

The final obstacle to settlement is this: "class size committees".

Since the State of Oregon can't be arsed to pay for enough teachers or educational assistants to bring class sizes down to a reasonable level, the proposed "solutions" are to 1) pay teachers more for doing crowd control over those teeming hordes, and 2) refer the worst of the scrums to a committee at each school if the horde gets to be just too huge.

Per the link, this committee will "...negotiate how to resolve class sizes or student loads that exceed agreed-upon limits if the principal, the affected teacher or teachers and a representative of the union don’t agree on a solution."

The union and the district both agree to this thing. What they disagree on is how it should work.

For one, the district wants to appeal process to stay in-house. The union wants to be able to rope in a state-level mediator if they don't agree with the district superintendant's ruling,

For my money? I wouldn't trust the Supe, either. I'm stickin' with the union there.

But the other big disagreement?

Parents.

"Under the union’s proposal, the class size committees could include two parents if school administrators and the teachers union agree to add them."

The district didn't want Joey's mom and Andie's dad, but eventually gave in on the parents. But they want to restrict what the parents (and these committees) can do: "The committees would not be allowed to discuss and make recommendations about class size issues in specific classrooms but would instead be limited to collaborating on potential solutions regarding class sizes and caseloads at their school more generally."

So I get that the primary reason the teachers proposed this is to get public support. They look more parent-friendly if they're pushing for parent involvement.

But, c'mon. Seriously?

You have to deal with these people, teachers. Are you telling me with a straight face that you don't know who is most likely to end up on these committees?

The crank. The obsessive. A Mom For Liberty, a Dad for Anti-Vaxx, and every other socio-edu-political whackadoodle out there in every school intake area.

Oh, fine, okay. Maybe not every parent...but you know who you're most likely to end up with, right, teachers?

And you want that?

Here I just finished ranting about how in the international news governments and "statesmen" are running around wanting things that are stupid things and making plans that are stupid plans...and right here on my street there's...this.

I have no idea how the union and the district will resolve this mess.

But that they started here? That they want this goofy thing?

That's...not particularly encouraging.

Pause in Operations

I'm working on a Battles piece for Yarmouk (636 CE) - which is already way too long for the source material - but have hit a rock and can't finish up until I get my hands on more reference material.

Because there's an issue with the sources.

The Wikipedia article, standard starting point for any Internet-centric research, appears above the usual standard; well-researched, detailed, and well written. So much so that I almost binned the idea of writing this one up and turning to Frontiers 1914.

Being me, I went ahead and started pulling up as many of the primary sources as I could and ran into a real head-scratcher; nobody else I could find, and I mean NObody, provided the level of detail for the fight that characterized the Wiki article. Primary, secondary, both...nobody was saying the same stuff.

Quite the opposite, in fact; many secondary sources' central thesis was "we just really don't know exactly what happened because the primary accounts don't say or are contradictory".

Now the author(s) of the Wikipedia piece seem to have leaned heavily on the work of David Nicolle, specifically his 2000 Osprey title "Yarmuk 636 AD". So presumably Nicolle has the goods - and if he does I'm guessing they come from the primary source I cannot for love or money find on-line; the 12th Century CE/6th Century AH work The History of Damascus (Arabic: تاريخ دمشق, Tarikh Dimashq) attributed to Ibn Asakir (Arabic: ابن عساكر). 

If the stuff in the Wiki is right, it almost has to come from our boy Ibn Asakir; I've got the other major Arabic works (and the other side of the hill, the Byzantines, produced little of value I've found) and neither the Kitab Futuh al-Sham nor the Futuh al-Buldan say anything remotely close to or as detailed as the tactical-level detail in the Wiki.

I've got Nicolle on order, but it's not due in for another week or two. Until then I'm forced to suspend operations on Yarmuk.

Speaking of suspending operations.

The Fire Direction Center is unusually well-staffed right now because the employer (in one form or another) of half the staff, Portland Public Schools, is on strike.

Normally you'd think an old lefty like me would be stickin' to the union and, yes, I have a lot of sympathy there for a couple of reasons.

First, because the union position makes a lot of sense. Smaller class sizes, more prep time, increased staffing for stuff like Special Ed. Even the wage demands aren't whopping out of line given the cost of living her in Portland proper. This ain't fucking Idaho.

Second, because the District has fucked this up five ways and Sunday. They've been imitating the worst habits of higher ed, staffing up the Head Shed and shafting the troops, and then bullshitting the line dogs about that. This spring as they handed a raise to the assistant vice-superintendants with which Big Pink (the District HQ) teems they axed damn near all the lowly Educational Assistants over at my Bride's workplace.

That's just stupid.

But.

Here's my problem; the District's base position - that there's just no money for all the teachers' asks - isn't really wrong.

The State of Oregon has been chronically underfunding public schools for decades. A lot of that goes back to the anti-tax Eighties, when scumbags like Don McIntyre roamed the Oregon Earth like fatheaded dinosaurs, conning the gullible Public into cutting taxes to make sure Phil Knight could afford a second airplane.

A lot more goes to the ridiculous way that funding is allocated.

The state took over public school funding in the wake of lawsuits that pointed out - correctly - that basing school funding on county property taxes was inherently unfair and unequal. Poor people living in shit places had no money to begin with, so their schools were shit, and their kids ended up poor. Rich people? Not so much.

But then the state turned around and handed the money out on a headcount flat rate.

Every kid in your classroom got you, say, $4,000 a year. Yeah, there were some extras, including Federal dollars from stuff like Title 1, but the big slug came from the state general fund.

You see the problem there?

That's not that much better than the old system. The nice well-bred white kids in Lake Oswego get four grand each and are then backed up by Mummy and Daddy's money and tutoring and camps and enrichment and fuck-all else.

The poor kids in Southeast Portland?

Yeah.

And even within a single district that's a problem. The nice wealthy enclaves that feed high schools like Portland Public's Grant and Lincoln and (what-I-still-think-of-as-Wilson) Wells do just fine on the base handouts. 

The feeders for our daughter's Roosevelt, or Jefferson? Given their huge population of poor kids and English-as-a-Second-Language-kids and kids with family problems and learning issues?

So ideally places like Jefferson and Roosevelt and their feeder junior highs and elementary schools would be on a "base x 1.3". And real snakepits (Hi, George Middle School!) would be on a "base x 1.5" that would provide the extra staffing and teaching (and social work and community support) they'd need to help get those kids through K-12 and out with something like a 21st Century education.

So ideally both sides of this strike - District and teachers - should be on one side of the picket line and the State government on the other. The solution isn't in rearranging the deck chairs; it's in rebuilding the fucking boat.

But that risks getting the Oregon Taxpayer - that skittish, ignorant, tightfisted sonofabitch - worked into a snit.

The GQP, of course, will fire off every flare in the "taxes are theft" pyro locker, because they hate non-Jesus schools anyway.

And the Richie Riches who pay most of (but not really enough of) the taxes will squeal like piggies in a sty because their money is going to Those People, when government's only job is to keep Them far enough away from Us so that we don't have to deal with Them.

(see: "Homeless Crisis").

So the problem is that there's no obvious solution to the strike between the striking parties. To get there requires Oregon to choose to put money into poor people and brown people (and troubled people) and the nice wealthy white untroubled people who HAVE the money would sooner eat dirt.

WASF.

That's cheery, isn't it? Yeah, and I'm not even going to get started on fucking Gaza.

Lemme see if I can end with something cheeery.

Oh, yeah; these came in the mail:

I ran into this little manhwa (the Korean version of what in Japan would be called "manga", a serial comic) several years back and was utterly delighted.

It's a silly and funny isekai-type romance; our heroine (who's kind of a glum college student IRL) is in proper fantasy fashion somehow transported into the world of her favorite bodice-ripping novel...but as one of the minor characters.

Which is just as well, because the protagonist - the eponymous "Duke" - is kind of scary and obsessive about the heroine. So our girl Ripley - at least, now shes "Ripley", the redhead in the picture - just decides to get drunk and have fun at the party scene she's emerged into. Which is fine....

Until she wakes up in bed with Scary Duke Zeronis, the two of them having just had both of their "first night" (which Ripley has no conscious memory of - girl, you gotta know when to stop drinking!) and thus, at least to the Duke, having plighted their troth and consummated their bond and become mates and holy shit is she in trouble now.

Anyway...our heroine desperately tries to find ways to convince her new inamorato that She's Not The Girl He's Looking For...but in ways that don't trigger his touchy pride. 

And he, meanwhile, is being slowly gentled and broadened by this red-headed whacko by whom he's being led around.

It's all very cute and funny and sometimes touching and mostly just vastly entertaining.

The Webtoons site went sorta dark after the end of the online series; sometimes the stories do that - my guess it's related to where the artist/writer is hoping to sell a print version like this. So I had been stymied when I'd hoped to re-read some of my favorite bits.

Until now! So, yay!

Something to curl up with now that the rains have returned. At east until Nicolle shows up.

And speaking of things showing up in the mail, this:

I think I mentioned that one of my retirement hobbies is returning to a sport I played decades ago, the Japanese fencing called kendo.

I'm not very good, mind. My body is damaged and so I'm both slow and clumsy. Small children can beat me.

But it's not about winning; it's the discipline and training, trying to be the best kendoka I can be.

The thing in the center of the photo is a shinai; a wooden "sword" made from bamboo staves used to practice the parts that involve actually hitting people.

(There's a different sort of wooden sword, called a bokken or bokuto, that's actually shaped like a katana, the "samurai sword" you think of when you think of this stuff.)

The bamboo version is supposedly the result of an Edo-period sensei trying to come up with a way of training sword-fighting that didn't involve clubbing the living shit out of students with a heavy wooden stick.

When I picked the sport back up a year ago I dug up my old shinai from back in the Nineties. It was a bit dry but still serviceable, quite the tribute to the makers, whoever they were.

But the poor thing is getting worn out with new use. So I finally retired it and got a replacement.

It feels very new and lush after my old stick. Now I just need to do all the sanding and oiling and suchlike that you're supposed to do to prepare for simulated combat.

Somehow the idea that you have to break down something brand new and fiddle with it to make it work right seems very old and "traditional", so properly kendo, which is about as "old and traditional" as it gets.

So I've got to break out the sandpaper and furniture oil and sit down with it. Very satisfying in a sort of tactile way. Go figure; I'm just like that.

Now if I can just recall the sequence of the Bokuto Ni Yoru Kendo Kihon-waza Keiko-ho...

Whisper of the axe

 

Well, the news was bad.

My Bride's position will be cut. We just don't know how hard.

Mind you, she was just one of the three out of ten people who got the axe today. She described it as "Body after body goes into the principal's office, shuts the door, comes out sad."

It's worth noting that the heaviest cuts fell on the most junior, lowly-paid staff. Which is pretty infuriating when you think that the body of one Assistant Deputy Superintendant For Paperclip Procurement would probably keep four of those people at work in the trenches where they will be doing some good.

But that's the way outfits like public schools work, and the deal we made.

The real problem now is that we don't know how hard this will hit us.

If she gets knocked back to 0.8 or 0.6FTE? It'll be hard but we can probably make it for another five years until my Social Security kicks in.

But if it's 0.2FTE? Fuck, we're hosed.

So the bottom line is that I may have had the world's shortest retirement.

That sucks. But what can you do? We can't bargain or appeal; the District will do what it will do, and we wil have to suffer what we must.

UPDATE 2/3/22: Well...the bad news is...less bad than we feared.

The Bride's position is being reduced to 0.5FTE. That lets her keep our major medical - which means losing vision and dental; a shoutout to the "best health care system in the world", what, eyes and teeth aren't "heahtcare" you sorry fucks? - and she might have another 0.1-0.25FTE as a "float".

That's bad. But it's not "the worst", it's not the 0.2FTE that would sink us.

So while it's bad we all have the Plague...at least we won't have the Plague AND be living out of our cars.

Bang Bang Crazy (GFT Edition - Uvalde, Part 1)

 

I'll be back with some thoughts on the latest watering of the Tree of Liberty, but let's get this out of the way first - here's an observation from an old GI:

 

A school shooter - hell, almost any "shooter" in a civilian setting - is pretty much the exact equivalent of an "ambush" in a military setting.

You're doing the civilian equivalent of diddy-bopping down the trail - studying, serving macchiatos, shopping - when someone does the equivalent of blowing the claymore and opens up from the tules and you're caught in the dead center of the kill zone. 

 

You - unless you're insane-grade paranoid - are completely unprepared both physically and mentally to respond with quick, accurate, deadly force. So - like the GIs inside the ambush kill zone - what you pretty much almost always do is; die.

 

So the people who are running this "arm and train" level of bullshit aren't telling you that to "arm and train" anyone, be it teachers, bank tellers, grocery clerks, won't do more than provide another target. 

 

Because the third part that has to follow "arm" and "train" to make a difference - the part that they don't want you to hear - is that these armed and trained people would have to walk around like a grunt in a weapons-free ROE combat environment; on the immediate, hair-trigger edge of a violent response to the slightest hint of danger.

 

Now think of your fourth-grade teacher being there through the whole fucking school day.

 

And...seriously?

 

(Next: To Protect and to...what? Are you fucking nuts..?)

Into the minefield, ready or not

 Ah, yes…vaccination.

Y’know, I’m absolutely pleased that my son can have at least some of his senior year back at Roosevelt.

I’m excited that my daughter can see her freshman friends again.

I’m very, very glad that my wife working as the school secretary at Astor Elementary is fully vaccinated against the return of students.

So it’s difficult to express how absolutely, completely, incandescently furious I am that within a month these three will be returning home from interacting with who knows how many COVID-infected randos and bringing who knows how massive a viral load to me, who at 63 is NOT vaccinated and, more to the point, cannot GET vaccinated in time to escape the path through this fucking plague pit because my state government apparently considers me expendable if it means getting the schools open.

At least when I was a GI the Army got me a yellow fever shot before sending me out into the mosquito-infested cuna grass.

I checked everywhere. Under 65? Nope. "Multigenerational household"? Nope. There's just no route for me to get protected from this goddamn disaster. I just have to hope like hell my family doesn't bring home a round for the revolver as we begin to play "COVID Roulette" or dance to "The NoPo Minefield Tango"

I don’t expect anyone in the state government to do anything to help me protect myself, since they obviously knew this would happen when they reopened the schools in March rather than next fall and decided in a very Trumpy way that satisfying the people who have been grousing about online teaching (which DOES suck, I get that...) was worth people like me “taking the (fucking) punch”.

But it doesn’t make me any less furious at the whole pack of sonsofbitches that after nearly a year of me being extra careful and doing all the right public health things I was asked to do that this fucking COVID crapshoot is their gift to me.

Sorry. I’m more than a bit irked with my supposed “leaders” at the moment.

Straining at bullets, swallowing glaciers

A friend of mine linked to this video:

Fighting Back Against A School Shooter

Fighting back against a school shooter:

Posted by TheBlaze on Monday, March 7, 2016

It's apparently a clip from a much longer training film that argues for a more active, aggressive defense against school shooters.

And y'know what? In a perfect world I'd be all about this.

For one thing, the whole "duck and cover" response to danger kind of pisses me off. Run away? Fine. Fight? If you want to. But cowering in hopes of being overlooked? Seems like a pretty miserable way to die, if that's how you're gonna go.

But.

We don't live in a perfect world. We live in a world where we have to make choices about how we spend our resources.

And I have two problems with this little video.

First of all, it's a school shooter video. It assumes from the jump that school shooters are a thing, a horrible, omnipresent, immediate, clear-and-present danger thing that must be aggressively confronted. I talked this to fucking death damn near ten years ago, but as horrible as the cable news people try and make it, the simple fact is that mass murder just isn't that big a threat in the US in 2016. IT's not like dying of dysentery was on the Oregon Trail back in the day.

You're more likely to get run over by a bus than you are to be killed by a madman with a gun in your school, kids. Seriously; Uncle Chief has done the math. Turns out that about 14 kids a year get squarshed by those ol' yella-dog buses. But about 297 people total - that's adults AND kids - got shot in school between 1980 and 2012 when Sandy Hook brought the whole "school shooter" thing back into fashion. That's about 9.3 people a year; the third of a person was either a really little kid or possibly a Donald Trump voter, but, whatever.

So throwing a lot of money at school shootings is like throwing money at ballistic missile defense or alien invasions; not a good return-on-investment thing.

Second of all, while it looks and feels nice, I think it completely mistakes the point of the "lockdown huddle".

The trainer of the video assumes that the point of the huddle is "protection" or something. He's right...assuming that the "main problem" is trying to cut down the casualty count and not actually control the kids' panic.

If I had a bunch of troops I had confidence in, and felt were both cool-headed and trusted each other I'd use his methods. My problem would be that...that's what I'd do with trained, confident troops. I'd trust them to stay still and silent until they had to take aggressive action. That's what good troops do in an ambush drill, which is basically what this is; a plan to ambush the shooter.

My problem would be that if I didn't trust my troops, or trust them to trust each other, spreading them out makes it much more difficult for 1) them to combat their own panic and 2) me to control them and prevent them from doing something panicky and dangerous.

So spreading them out makes it MUCH more likely that the most panicked one will bolt for the door and try to escape, or start screaming and crying, thus both alerting the nutter that we're there in the room and, possibly, unlocking the door for him.

It's a great idea, but it requires a HELL of a lot of training and a really high level of confidence and aggression in the kids.

Meaning that to do this successfully you'd have to...you knew it, right; spend a hell of a lot of time and money training kids and teachers to do this.

It seems to me that for some reason We the People are more and more inclined to do this stuff; worry and fret ridiculously about madman bullets, tiny, horrible problems that have a miniscule probability of harming us...while ignoring things like the melting glaciers that warn us of global climate change that have a real serious likelihood of fucking up our entire world.

I don't know why we do this. It kind of pisses me off, and I wish we'd stop. But it seems to be a people thing and no amount of pissing and moaning on my part will do anything about it.

Funny Shit My Kid Says (Slightly Ominous Edition)

So the Boy is sitting watching television the other evening in a classic young-adolescent-boy pose; scrunched down with his bare legs thrown over the side of the armchair.

I don't recall what the hell he was watching (which reminds me that I need to really do a Kid Vid update with the latest kiddo faves) but it was probably something loud and irritating like Spongebob or the even-more-loathsome "Uncle Grandpa".

Anyway, I'm over working at the laptop about five feet away, so when he talks I can just barely hear him over the ruckus of the damn boob-tube, but he says almost to himself:

"A 15 millimeter sniper rifle is the intercessional tool of my life."

Yeah, I had to look it up, too;

in·ter·ces·sion [in-ter-sesh-uhn] noun
1. an act or instance of interceding.
2. an interposing or pleading on behalf of another person.
3. a prayer to God on behalf of another.
4. (Roman History) the interposing of a veto, as by a tribune.

I'm not sure what the Boy meant and I'm not really sure I want to know, either.

Meanwhile, Fifth Grade is becoming something of a struggle.

The Boy has always been a sort of slap-dash kind of kid. He'd rather do something, anything, really, half-assed and quickly rather than spend any sort of time on it and do it well. He's managed to slide through the first four grades on pure smarts, - because he IS a smart kid - and charm, the goodwill of his teachers. And because the first five grades in Portland Public Schools don't get A-F marks for their work.

But in Sixth Grade all that nonsense stops. And this year he's got a teacher that has been pounding on his tendency to turn work in late, or not at all, and half-ass his way through what he does turn in because she's telling him that next year he's going to get pasted with F's for that.

The Bride and I are trying to hammer it into his hard little head - because he's ALSO a hardheaded little bastard - that, in the immortal words of Dean Wormer, "Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life, son..." And that he will soon find out that you tend to get out in grades what you put into your schoolwork in intelligent effort.

Right now, things aren't looking good. He's fighting this hard. He doesn't WANT to work, and for some reason seems to believe that some kid magic will see him safely through.

I hate seeing this, because this was me forty years ago. I took damn near a quarter-century to get my shit together and on the way took some damn hard hits, some of which are still with me, limiting my options and choices to this very moment.

I don't want to see my own son repeat my mistakes - real intelligence is learning from the mistakes of others - but I have yet to figure out how to convince him of this, and I'm not sure he will be convinced short of some teacher's intercessional tool putting one right in his ten-ring.

Too little to fail

So it turns out that - surprise - after former Superintendent Michelle Rhee threatened her teachers and their principals with the axe if they didn't get their students' test scores up (and the students were largely the usual inner-city no-hopers) they did what any sane human being would have done. They cheated.



Sigh.

What the fuck, people? Have I been talking to the goddamn wall here? We've been over this again and again and again; if you make MY success dependent on YOUR performance I will do my best to help you succed. But I will proceed to flog and beat and generally fuck you up if you fail.

And if you are a congenital fuckup to begin with, then I will lie and cheat my ass off to get past your deadweight ass and save my livelihood. I will recognize that I am better off taking a chance by cheating than to trust my future to you.

Anyone who doesn't believe that is true is a fool, or a grifter, or too good for this world.

Michelle Rhee is either one of those, or a bit of all of them.

And I am neither surprised nor disturbed by these "revelations". They were foredoomed from the moment she decided to put the livings of the people who worked for her in the hands of their students.

Walt Disney's "Those Wacky Glands!"

Back in 1970 this is likely to have been what the girls got to watch when we had to go to the gym and watch the filmstrip about how beating off would make us go blind and retarded.

But if memory serves me the whacking-off filmstrip was at least more watchable than this. I honestly couldn't figure out how to make the whole business of fertility seem both boring and sqwicky. But this little treasure manages. Nice, Walt, nice.

Eeek!

Again with the fucking lice!

This time it's got both of them; the Boy with nits, the Girl with both nits and active lice. When last heard from my bride was dunking Missy in preparation of going in under a hail of prescription lice-bane shampoo and the various debriding combs.

Plus the usual house-wide scouring of every bloody thing and washing of bedding and the immense menagerie of stuffed friends in both the Girl's and Boy's beds.

Fucketty fuckollaly fuck what a fucking nightmare.

Goddamn it, people, clean your goddamn house and keep your damn kids' heads clean. How freaking hard it that?

Grrrrr.

Don't Fear The Reaper

The summer has finally arrived in Portland.

Now generally this is a Good Thing. For all that we made our bones being cold and rainy, we Stumptowners like the warm sun as much as anyone. We like trading our raingear for shorts and T-shirts, and our boots for flip-flops and topsiders. And especially this year, with the winter SO wet and lingering so long.

The only downside is that the grass then begins to grow.

And in the fertile valley at the end of the Oregon Trail, the bastard doesn't just grow. It metastasizes like a frigging green melanoma; a verdenoma that goes utterly bugnuts when the sun arrives to warm the rich soil and all that rain-soaked vegetation.

And this is what has happened to the little "Rain Garden" at my kids' elementary school. By last Saturday the grass was, in some places, two feet high.

Now that in itself is kind of sad.

First, take a look at the linked page to see what the big deal about this "Rain Garden" is. When we first moved here the courtyard between the wings of the school was this fugly asphalt rectangle; awash in the winter, baking in the early autumn and late spring, and just butt-ugly all year round.

The school district took about $100,000 and ripped out the asphalt and made the thing over into a garden designed to work in Portland's cool-wet-winter-hot-dry-summer climate.

The idea was that rather than a typical lawn (which, around here, would be dead grass and dandelions by August) the thing would contain "...trees, shrubs, grasses, and wildflowers selected for their tolerance to dry and moist soil conditions."

Here's a picture of what it looked like when it was finished.

And here is was Saturday afternoon:

The first couple of years a group of parents who were involved in the construction continued to look after the Garden; weeding, watering in the summer (since despite what the brochure says the "hand pump" was never installed and the cistern was used as a compost bin, so the watering required City water), raking leaves in the fall.

But after their kids moved on to middle and high school that group fell away. Last Saturday there were four adults there to try and attack the mess; Mojo, and myself, and two other moms.

And it IS a mess.

Three years without attention and rough field grass have overtaken the native plants almost everywhere. Weeds - especially our hated Himalayan blackberry - have grown up in the planters. The mound at the west end - what I call "Hamburger Hill" - is covered in knee-high grass that makes walking or sitting on it a chore.

Because of the uninhabitable condition the teachers have stopped using the Garden completely. Mojo did a quick survey two weeks ago; not a single teacher was interested or willing to use the Garden in its existing condition.

For all practical purposes, over one hundred thousand dollars and hundreds, probably thousands, of parent, teacher, and donated contractor work-hours are, at present, utterly wasted.

My bride, lovely woman that she is, has taken an interest in this patch of weeds. She, and two of Missy's kindergarten pals moms, hauled me and the kiddos over on Saturday and began to hack away at the rampaging sea of grass with hand tools and a tiny residential trimmer.

I could have sat down and cried.

First, because there are something like 500 kids at Astor Elementary school. Assuming that half of them have two involved parents the potential labor pool runs to about 750 adults. And yet here were four people giving their time to try and rescue this expensive, wasted space. We were not just the 1 Percent; we were the 0.53 Percent. Of the some 750 parents with children at that school no more than four - and two of those parents of the same kids - could find time on a weekend to pitch in to gift that school some of their time and labor.

And, second, because much as I admired the gals' intentions, I couldn't believe their methods. Faced with a weedy Hannibal running wild they were trying to beat him by picking off one Carthaginian at a time with a boot knife.

Well. Sod THAT for a game of soldiers. The Army didn't teach me tactics and logistics for me to pull grass one clump at a time.

I told them flat-out that I had no intention of squatting on my hams like Luke the Gook pulling one clump of grass at a time.

And than I drove up to Columbia Boulevard and rented a big-ass gas-powered weed whacker, returned that afternoon and waded into the grass with my wailing scythe and reaped the damn stuff like Alaric.

So now Hamburger Hill is mown as level as a fairway, and the remainder of the Garden is flat as a putting green.

Until the next time.

Because there is still nobody at Astor in charge of the place. There is nobody to coordinate, implore, cajole, and direct volunteers, like me, to continue to maintain the place. There is nobody to coax teachers into using it, or children to visit it.

So while it has been reaped, there is still nothing in place to sow the future of this once-lovely little Garden. Instead it lies fallow, slowly deteriorating under the warm early summer sun.

And I put it to you that the story of the Reaper in the Rain Garden is one of America, circa 2012, writ small.

Begun with great publicity, on grant money and borrowed labor, and then thrown away through a combination of inattention, mismanagement, carelessness, and indifference. What might be a pretty little place for learning gone to waste for the lack of people who care enough to get off their dead asses and do some work for the common good, and "leadership" that would rather preen and posture than get down and do the hard work of getting those dumb bastards to understand that if we don't hang together we will surely, at the pleasure of our corporate masters, hang separately.

And while today our work on the Garden has reclaimed it, for the moment...

...the patient grass grows tall again as you read this. And we are still without a plan.

Mailbox Monday: Bratz

While not neglecting the really important things in life - our under-construction raised raspberry beds and the current state of the Portland Timbers - I wanted to take a moment to mention this interview with Ed Luce in Foreign Policy.I don't agree with all of it. Starting with the title; "A Nation of Spoiled Brats"? C'mon, Foreign Policy - that's the best your editor could do? Ranger Rick magazine could beat that. Christ.

But outside the bitching I have two main problems with Luce's ideas as expressed in the interview, both of which seem to proceed from his spouting "conventional wisdom" without having any real grounds for believing it.

Specifically;

1. I think Luce (the interviewee) is just bloviating wildly about

"...the swing towards celebrating the child, elevating the child, over-praising the child, boosting constantly at every opportunity the self-esteem of the child, assuming the child is a fragile little eggshell that can be broken at any moment..."

that is supposed to be the cause of educational decline in the U.S. I have kiddos in school AND have taught at several levels and that's, frankly, horseshit.

I honestly think this whole "A Nation At Risk" crap is, well, crap. And, especially this "Nation At Risk From Self-Esteem" crap. I think the problems we're seeing in education - and I think those problems are a lot less significant than they're commonly made out to be - have a LOT more to do with a combination of a) educating more of our population than at nearly any time in our history, and b) the thirty-year cramdown on middle and lower-middle class wealth.

Because the bottom line on education is this;

- Not all kids can "do" a pre-college curriculum, yet that is the current U.S. standard. Prior to about 1975 the kids who couldn't usually simply dropped out, or were shunted aside into vo-tech tracks. Today we're still dropping them out, but a hell of a lot more kids who would have otherwise have been slotted into what when I was in grade school we called the "'tard school" (since non-mainstream kids were retards, see?) are being mainstreamed. I don't know of any parents who want their kids to get a shiny pretty "A" for doing "C" work. But the whole point of a bell curve is that you're going to get 10% of the students in the top 10% of grades. To assume that everyone who breathes can do algebra at a high level? Quit kidding yourself.

- The tighter the household budget, the tougher for the kid to do well.

We've known this since the 1965 Coleman Report. Economic class has always been the single largest factor in predicting academic achievement. There's a number of reasons for that, but as a factor it has never been seriously refuted.

Over the past three decades times have gotten tougher for pretty much everyone outside the 1%, and definitely for those below the top 25%. So I'm not surprised that their kids are not as singleminded about school success. The correlation do well in school (regardless of where you start from) = do well in life just doesn't hold up anymore, and more and more parents, and kids, can see that. IMO that still doesn't give you an excuse to stop trying. But I can see how it would increase the "bad outcome" sort of data.

Either way, I just don't buy this "OMFG, the Republic is collapsing because our schools are shit!" meme. There's no question that we have problems in teaching and learning. But I don't think those problems are anywhere near as simple as over-worked mommies and daddies insisting their speshul snowflake get preferential treatment.

2. Luce seems to start from the conventional wisdom "global is good". At least, that is the implication of his statement here: "...if globalization were put to a referendum in America, it would lose -- which is troubling, and it's one measure of the degree of alarm and distemper felt out there, which I come across the whole time whenever I'm outside of the Beltway." Now, I'm sorry, but I don't understand this whole enthusiasm for "globalization" as an economic religion.

I won't argue that "trade" is usually beneficial for those who engage in it, but how does that follow that it's good for, say, industrial workers here in the U.S. to be pitted in a wage-race-to-the-bottom with industrial workers in China, where cost of living is a fraction of what an American would consider semi-human, where acts that would cost U.S. manufacturers millions - poisoning and killing their workers, dumping hideous shit into the air and water - are simply part of doing business, and where crony capitalism is enjoying a Golden Age (where here it's barely getting back to the Silver standard of our Gilded one...)?

Luce seems to deliberately elide the fact that the greatest period of growth in the U.S. coincided with the time that the rest of the world was either a) walled off from U.S. markets by tariffs, or b) bombed into the Stone Age.

You can make all sorts of arguments about trade and tariffs, but to assume that a reasoned dislike for the sort of unequal playing field inherent in "globalization" as it currently exists is some sort of "troubling" attitude on the part of U.S. citizens is to assume that U.S. citizens are fools with no sense of self-preservation.

Which is often true! But not in this case, I would opine.But...overall the interview is damn well worth reading. Luce has some terrific observations about U.S. politics and economics, and in particular the way the U.S. seems to be politically incapable of either recognizing, or dealing, with the fairly obvious things that are bludgeoning it at the moment; social and economic stratification (and especially the grossly skewed distribution of the "recovery" since 2008), political distemper, and military hubris. And the problems he sees looming like icebergs ahead because of these. So while he's not perfectly correct I think he sure has some scary ideas, and ones that seem to fit what I see around me.And, sadly, I find myself shaking my head especially ruefully at his final paragraph:

"I hope that in the near future America will be able to remind itself that strength comes from its domestic economic muscularity and the degree to which America can again be a beacon to the world, a model worth emulating, rather than by the range and deployment of its weaponry, or by the spending power of those at the top. But I'm not optimistic -- given the trajectory of the debate today and in recent years -- that things will necessarily shake out that way. I wish I could see more cause for hope."

Because from where I see it, it is by our own goddamn feathers, and not by others' shafts, that we now stricken.

Topsiders, Duct Tape, and the National Dilemma of Wealth

I finally broke down and got a new pair of shoes last week. The old ones had become so worn that the sole had actually come loose and was flopping around like one of those clown shoes and had to be held in place with duct tape.Now here's a funny thing; when I was a college kid the whole duct-tape-on-the-Topsiders was considered the height of studly cool in some quarters.

Specifically, preppy quarters.

Remember "preppies"? There was a whole little cottage-industry of preppy-this and preppy-that in the late Seventies and Eighties, if I recall correctly. The whole plaid-skirt and penny-loafers for women, khakis and Lacoste shirts for men (and crew-neck sweaters for both, of course...) was the popular image of the thing. Labrador retrievers were involved, too, I think (or maybe Goldens. It was a while ago, c'mon).Now I was no different than many young people in their early twenties. I had just outgrown my childhood but was fitting badly into adulthood. I was turning and tapping bits of myself to try and see how to make them fit. I invented bits of this and lies about that to try and make myself seem...cooler, more interesting, different, more exciting.

But what I more than anything else wanted was to fit in. To be part of the accepted center of my then-life, a small, undeservedly-snooty Eastern liberal arts college. And a huge proportion of the "accepted center" of that place were the young people who had come from the private schools of the U.S. Northeast.

I don't really have any sense of the breed today, but in the Seventies the products of the Peddie School, Deerfield, and Lawrenceville Academy were the most upper of upper-middle class America. They had spent a dozen years acquiring not just a private-school education but a private school "manner" and part of that manner was the clothes they wore.

Now I was too callow to understand that a dozen years at the Peddie School would do more than teach you how to wear a polo shirt inside a button-down shirt under a crew-neck sweater. But that fashion was the only thing I could understand, and so it was the fashions I aped.It is more than thirty years since I left that place, and my sense of person has expanded to fill the inside of my head since then. I no longer feel any particular need to dress, or be, anyone to please anyone other than myself, my bride, and my children - all the public I need at this point in life.

But some things linger long after the reasons for them have fled, and I still find the Topsider shoes the most comfortable and easy to wear of any men's footwear.So when my old shoes finally died it wasn't a huge surprise that they were made by the folks at Sperry, or that I jacked some tape around them to hold them together before they went to their reward. If it worked in 1977...But I got to thinking, as I painfully parted with the cost of new shoes, that the people whose style I still walked in would have thought little and cared less for the expense.

And that really means something.

Because for most of us, for most Americans, for most people, life centers around the arithmetic that Dickens describes as "Income twenty pounds, expenses nineteen pounds, eleven shillings, sixpence, result; happiness. Income twenty pounds, expenses twenty pounds sixpence, result; misery."

I'm not saying that most of us are poor. What I'm saying is that most of us need to watch what we spend and what we save. We have to worry about things like getting sick. Or getting fired or losing our jobs. Of our roofs leaking, or our cars breaking down, or our taxes being screwed up and costing us penalties and interest.

And the one thing I've noticed now - especially this election year, but for quite some time now - is that the people our political class has chosen to "lead" us seem somewhere between somewhat to utterly clueless about that life.This year's poster boy, of course, is Willard Romney, who can and did talk about "firing" his insurance company.

That's really all you have to know about "Mitt" (a preppy nickname if ever there was one and, sure enough, Willard attended the Cranbrook School in Michigan [his wife prepped, too, at Kingswood]). Most of us don't "fire" our insurance companies; we hope instead that we don't get sick enough that our insurance companies don't force us into bankruptcy and then fire US. That Willard thinks such a thing tells you that the man had lived his entire life swathed, wrapped, bathed, and laved in what in the Army we used to call "fuck-you money".

And you know what?

Damn near all the other pols I can think of are, too. And that's no surprise, because for all we like to pretend it's not true, it's nearly impossible - and by that I mean 99.94% impossible - for a poor or even a modestly wealthy person to run for high office in this country.

Because I've thought about running for office. I'm a pretty smart, well-informed guy. I speak well, I write well. I understand the principles of this country and I think I have a good sense of what is in the best interests of most of its people.

But I can't afford to run.

I can't afford to lost the time I'd need to spend schmoozing the local Democratic Party, volunteering, getting to know the Thrones and Dominations. I can't afford to spend the money I'd need networking, or the lost work time in commuting to Salem or to various meet-and-greets. And if I GOT elected I'd have to constantly fundraise because I couldn't then afford to lost my government job and go BACK to my work as a geologist; I'd simply be too old, too disconnected, too...well, I'd be unemployable. So I'd have to slime my way back to Salem, or D.C. as some kind of lobbyist. Or think-tank scum. Or "consultant"...And that's really sad, and wrong.

Looking around it seems like we're beavering away trying to institutionalize not just bad governance (although God knows we seem to be doing that) but bad, clueless, craphanded, entitled governance. The kind of governance that fusses about "Islamofascism" but not unemployment, about deficits but not bankruptcy, homelessness, and civil rights.

And it may be a coincidence - but it seems unlikely - that it also seems nearly impossible to find anyone in, or running for, public office from local to state to federal who is intellectually anything other than a Lacoste-and-topsiders-or-plaid-skirt-and-pearl-wearing-variety, clueless, craphanded, entitled preppy asshole.And then we wonder why it seems like the world wags towards them and not towards us.

New Math

So I was helping my oldest kiddo with his homework tonight.

Homework? I hear you say. Homework, in second grade?

Yep. Welcome to the brave new world of American childhood.

The Peep brings home one of these four- to five-page collections of foolscap every Monday and has to turn them in Friday morning. They are typically composed of a page of writing work, another of reading-and-comprehension, a couple pages of math, and a front page for the boy to record his reading, which is set at 20 minutes a night.He's terrible about it, of course, as you can probably remember from your school days. There's always something better to do than homework - blogging, for example - and the seven-and-a-half-year-old mind is a gossamer and flittery thing. So Mojo or I usually have to wrestle him into submission to get the work done. It is a process that all parties genially dislike.

Tonight we did the math worksheets.

I realized after I started that this was actually pretty sophisticated math for second grade. The sheet header showed a variety of domestic pottery labeled with prices in cents. The teapot is 72 cents, the glass 18, the frying pan 57, and so on. Down the page were a series of written questions, such as; "Alisha has 50 cents. She buys a glass. How much money does she have left?"

I sat down with the Boy and we looked at the first problem. We read it over. I looked at him.

"I have to think." he said. I waited. He thought.

"What should we do to start?" I asked.

"I'm thinking." he replied.

I waited.Finally I pointed to the example the sheet provided. "Look how they set up this problem. How can we do that here?" I asked.

"I'm still thinking." he replied. "It's time to stop thinking and do the problem." I hissed, at which he protested "I'm thinking! Mister Chun says we need to think about the problem!". His mom added that he was right, and he was told to think about the problems. I looked down at the page, frustrated.

"Do you know how to do this math problem, buddy?" I asked as neutrally as I could.

He frowned at the page. "I think I do." he said uncertainly. "Then what are you going to do?" I asked gently. He wrote down a number "nine" in the box with the problem. "That's the answer." he announced, in defiant hopefulness."No, it's not." I replied. "You don't know how to do these, do you?" I asked, wondering at the sort of math class that would start a kid on double-digit addition and subtraction without showing them how to convert tens into units.

So I showed him how, while you couldn't subtract the 8 from the 0 in the units column you could "break" a ten and convert it to ten "ones", then add the ten to the 0 and make it 10...then subtract 8 from 10 to get 2. And then you made a little mark striking out the tens value and reducing it by the one "ten" you moved. And subtracted the tens.

Little man was resistant at first until he saw how this method actually worked better than guessing or whatever sort of computation he was doing initially. By the time we reached the bottom of the second page he was anticipating me in "breaking down" the tens, converting single digits to teens, adding and subtracting.

The thing is, it took me a bit of thinking to remember how I do simple double-digit addition and subtraction; it wasn't nearly as intuitive as I thought it was. And explaining it to a second-grader was almost as difficult. But perhaps the most difficult part was understanding what it was he didn't understand and why. What seemed obvious to me was completely opaque to him; he couldn't make the cognitive jump from the written description to the setup of the numerical problem, and he couldn't do the simple unit addition and subtraction in his head as I could. It was difficult not to see his incomprehension as stupidity, and his math errors as carelessness.But he kept at it; he slowly worked through the word problems, set up the numerical problems, corrected his math errors, and carefully wrote down each answer. I don't think he ever enjoyed the process, but I think he got some satisfaction from doing the work correctly and well.

And then he hopped up and bounded happily down the hallway to the tub to splash and play with his toys, leaving me tapping the eraser of my pencil on the paper covered with childish handwriting, cartoon cups and plates, and wondering just what we had accomplished.

Tradition!

Big Boy came home this week with something called "Thanksgiving Homework" from his second grade class.

This consisted of a two-page (double-sided) sheet with some fairly incursive questions about what he had done for T-giving and things like his personal favorite sights, smells, sounds, and tastes of the holiday. Oh, and he had to draw a family tree.The question that stumped us, though, was regarding "family traditions".

Because, you see, we're the very worst sort of rootless, mongrel Americans. Homogenized, pasteurized, bland...our families got to this continent and dropped their old customs and mores like a live grenade.

And we have so far successfully resisted the late trend for "re-traditionalizing" families and holidays. We gesture towards the occasion, but, really, I am an utter pagan and Mojo, who does randomly lurch towards some sort of holiday spirit now and then, is really too slothful to complete the effort.

So we sat there, the three of us; the Boy poised with his pencil and his shining evening face looking for parental guidance, and my bride and I, utterly clueless. Bereft. Vacant of inspiration. Utterly gobsmacked.We could not think of a single, solitary family "tradition" - for Thanksgiving, or for any other holiday, for that matter. We were adrift in a sea of postmodern American anomie; we had no traditions.

Finally, in the way my mind always works, it drifted from trying to think of a family tradition to the notion of tradition in general and from there to historic quotes regarding tradition, and from there to Winston Churchill. And that's where I came upon a suggestion for the Peep.

"Rum, buggery, and the lash?"

Mojo and I were forcibly struck by the likely reaction of Peep's very dignified second-grade teacher confronted by this as a family tradition, and spent the next four minutes or so snorting and giggling.

The Peep was NOT amused. He had no idea what the three things were, but he knew that his parents were being irresponsible, and refused to write it down. I think he settled for "Eating Thanksgiving dinner with family".Smart boy.

I suspect that if one of our children turns out to be a serial murderer or a Wikileaker no one at the elementary school will be surprised. We're such bad parents.

Hot For Teacher Testing

When I decided to leave consulting and become a teacher (note to self: in a lifetime full of errors, bevues, and regrets, this had to be one of the real keepers...) Oregon, and the nation, were in the midst of the fervor for "high-stakes testing".

Part of this was the whole Bush "No Child Left Behind" thing, but a lot of it goes back to the "A Nation At Risk" kid-brain-missile-gap hysteria and the usual need for the usual suspects to Do Something About It, or at least to be visibly seen Doing Something.In our case we had an assessment at 8th Grade, and then another in 10th, called the CIM or "Certificate of Initial Mastery". The theory was that in 12th grade the kiddos would take a CAM or "Certificate of Advanced Mastery" - what my father and mother had taken in high school in New York state in the 1940s and had been called a Regent's Exam.

The idea was the same; to use the test to certify that the kids had learned their lessons, at least the ones the state felt they needed to learn.

Well lots of schools torqued their entire curriculums around to fit this damn thing. For example, because the 10th graders had to take a History CIM the entire freshman year social science was taken up with something called "World Studies A" and "WS-B". And because the CIM started with questions about the Industrial Revolution, we started in September with the Industrial Revolution. And from there on to WW1. And from there on to the Russian Revolution. Why Russia? Who the hell knows? Especially since in 2002 teaching the Russian Revolution was like teaching buggy-whip making. The damn ramshackle Soviet ediface had just come tumbling down - who the hell cared about the Aurora and Kerensky and the Five Year Plan and Lenin.

Though my students loved the hell out of Boney M's "Rasputin":

"Rah Rah Rasputin
Lover of the Russian queen
There was a cat that really was gone
Rah Rah Rasputin
Russia's greatest love machine
It was a shame how he carried on..."

Ahem.

Anyway, have you ever tried to teach history to 14-year-olds? It's like teaching sudoku to a cat. You will only frustrate yourself and the cat doesn't give a shit. Not surprisingly, for most of the kids WS-A and -B were a total wash.

Except maybe for Rasputin. They liked Rasputin.

But whether the little buggers learned history or not wasn't the point. They HAD to get the history fed them in 9th grade so they'd be ready for the Big Dance in 10th. God forbid that a teacher, or a school, or a district, flushed the CIM. You might never get funded for so much as a new Habitrail for the biology classroom again...

But I always looked at it this way; if you make me take a test and my welfare depends on it, I will likely try and do well on the test, or at least as well as I can. If my paycheck, or my standing, or my future employment rests on doing well on the test, I will bust my hump to make that happen.

But if YOUR welfare depends on MY performance?

Ha.

You'd better be a pretty sweet pal, or have some sort of serious threat to hold over me. Because otherwise, Giacomo?

You could kiss my ass. Why should I bust my butt for you?

So when I read that there was a study that concluded that "There is also little or no evidence for the claim that teachers will be more motivated to improve student learning if teachers are evaluated or monetarily rewarded for student test score gains.", among other things, I had to laugh. This was a surprise?

Teaching is an odd thing. There is tremendous power there. Forget the "classroom discipline", the power game between adolescent and adult that characterizes a hell of a lot of American high school classrooms. No, it's the tension in the relationship between the teacher as possessor of knowledge and the student as seeker of knowledge as old as Plato. The student has to learn as much as the teacher has to teach. The failure of one is the failure of both...so the teacher's power is shot through with faults and weakness.

And it's not really a science and its not really an art. If anything, teaching is a sort of craft, where you learn people like a carpenter learns wood, feeling the grain of them, searching for the places where the gouge will pare away smoothly, where it will bind and crack.

So when you reduce teaching and learning into the kind of test you complete by filling in little ovals with a number 2 pencil...well...let the researchers explain it: "As we show in what follows, research and experience indicate that approaches to teacher evaluation that rely heavily on test scores can lead to narrowing and over-simplifying the curriculum...provide disincentives for teachers to take
on the neediest students (and) also create disincentives for teacher collaboration."

Or, as one of the commentors on this study said over at Crooked Timber: "...it seems like it would make kids, particularly difficult to teach kids, my adversaries in a sense. If they do not improve, then I get fired. It would be so hard to keep my eye on a student’s well-being in that context and not see them as little performers who hold the key to my future. If I suspect them of being unable to help being underperformers, there’s the risk I would start to resent them."

Mmmmm.

Y'think..?

And y'know what?

I could have told you that twenty years ago, and saved a lot of money I spent on getting a teaching certificate. Because when I was an Army sergeant part of my evaluation was a graded exercise called an ARTEP. Several months before the ARTEP I would gather my squad for a friendly talk.

“We’re about to do this graded field problem” I would explain. “We will be graded as a squad but the grade will only reflect on me. The graders will not listen to my explanation of how many of you are gimps, wheezers, chronic self-abusers, morons, gomers, mouth-breathers, learning disabled products of the union between a Marine and a gorilla, the offspring being, of course, a retarded gorilla. They will not believe that the reason we fucked up were because you oxygen thieves were unable to learn. They will blame it on my being unable to teach you.

Therefore, I will carefully explain everything we will do. I will show you how to do it. I will coach you through it. You will then do it for yourselves, with my direct supervision and correction. Finally we will do it at combat speed.

After that you have my personal assurance that any subsequent failure on your part, however small, will result in your horrible lingering death, probably involving a red-hot poker and one or more of your bodily orifices, or a transfer to a posting on the Korean DMZ, whichever you fear more.”

Now I never failed an ARTEP. But this is, in effect, what high-stakes testing will do for teachers and students; make the student fuckups the teachers' problem.

Mistakes? Mistakes are good. We learn from mistakes. But fuckups? As a teacher I can deal with fuckups.But the fuckups won't like it, and neither will I.

This doesn't seem like a good way to teach, or a good way to learn.

But I have to tell you; I'm not sure if a lot of people really understand how to do these either, and that will be the subject of some of the next posts.

Oh, and just as a note?

The Oregon Department of Public Instruction never fully implemented the CAM and abandoned the CIM several years ago.

But CIM or no CIM I wonder if my students still remember Rasputin?

"Rah Rah Rasputin
Lover of the Russian queen
They put some poison into his wine
Rah Rah Rasputin
Russia's greatest love machine
He drank it all and he said "I feel fine"Oh, those Russians..!