Friday, November 19, 2010
Friday Jukebox II: I'm on fire..!
And since we're revisiting the Eighties this wet and dismal Friday, here's my best beloved Eighties pop act; Talking Heads.Need I say I pogoed to this one, too?
Friday Jukebox I: It's Not Science If You Can Dance To It Edition
When this song would come on the radio I would hop spastically around the billets in my fatigue pants and socks, or my PT shorts, as only suburban white boys can.Mind you, I still do.
Except I can't fit into my old fatigue pants anymore.
Except I can't fit into my old fatigue pants anymore.
Wednesday, November 17, 2010
Freerunning
I returned home last night to discover that my children had become traceur and traceuse.
Regardez le parcours de Portland du Nord.
Regardez le parcours de Portland du Nord.
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
Hot for Something: Hakkaa päälle 2
I should add that there's only one dream of Finland that will profit you anything
and that's dreaming like this guy.
Just some beefcake for a Tuesday night, is all.
Please return to your regularly scheduled evening.
and that's dreaming like this guy.Just some beefcake for a Tuesday night, is all.
Please return to your regularly scheduled evening.
Monday, November 15, 2010
Hot for Teacher II: Hakkaa päälle
I usually run from op-ed pieces recommending "solutions" to the "education problem" like a vampire from sunlight or a priest from a pedophilia investigation, but this article was inescapable, being as it was on the front page (above the fold) of the opinion section of my local paper.
The idea that there's a hidden key somewhere (typically Finland) that will unlock the education door and make American schools something more like the shiny, happy ideals we see in Heritage Foundation fliers and pedagogical conference brochures seems almost unkillable. Somehow our nation always seems to be At Risk; at risk of failing, at risk of falling behind those regimented Europeans and cunning Asians unless we do X. Y. and Z, at risk of economic and intellectual desuetude unless we Do Something Brilliant Now.
What's the latest flavor of brilliance?
Apparently it resides in Finland. That's where they train only the "best" students to be teachers. This is our authors' notion, while they recommend somehow magically ensuring that the number of teachers trained matches the teaching jobs available to avoid the current oversupply of discouraged teachers. Let's pay them handsomely, too, finding all those tax dollars' special secret place where the voters have hidden them, and with it we'll also somehow make all schools safe, intellectually challenging places to work. Oh, yeah, then we'll find even more money to evaluate and mentor these outstanding teachers thoroughly, and finally we'll make word "teacher" the semantic and social equivalent of "investment banker" or "major league baseball benchwarmer" resulting in all sorts of public love and respect for teachers.
What could be wrong with that?
Well, nothing, of course. If teaching were like trial law, biomedical research, or writing computer code. You'd jack the pay scale, jigger the working conditions a tittle, and the Stanford and Cornell grads would come shouting in.
But teaching is nothing like these sorts of technical professions. Teaching is, fundamentally, a mixture of performance art and artisanal craft with technical knowledge thrown in on top. It is almost entirely personal, and the ability to teach well is highly reliant on the quick development of people skills.
And, what's more, as a teacher you're working with the Great Unwashed, the Average American; many of them will come to your classroom raised on television and video games, short of attention, patience, and ingenuity, trained to expect learning to be "fun", often poorly literate and numerate, impatient with being told that their "effort" is inconsequential and that they will not be rewarded for mediocrity.
I know, because I went from being a professional scientist to a teacher and back again.
As a registered geologist I was presented with a suite of challenging and often innovative tasks to solve in company with other professionals whom I respected and who listened to me with respect. I worked closely with my peers, my supervisors, and the clients, who acknowledged me as the subject matter expert that they were paying well for an opinion. I was able to maintain a stable family life and a fulfilling work life.
As a teacher I spent the vast majority of my day with adolescents who typically considered me an mildly entertaining irrelevance at best and an irritating nuisance at worst. I barely saw my peers and my supervisors were almost invisible. My workday consisted of attempting to introduce the most fundamental aspects of my profession to an audience that generally considered the subject (when they considered it at all) an obstacle to their social lives. I had to spend a hell of a lot of my time dealing with personal issues of people whose lives had been utterly fucked up for years prior to my encounter with them. For which time I was paid roughly half of what I made previously.
I did teach some great students, and agree that with good students teaching is among the most rewarding of tasks. But I also spent a ton of time on "classroom management" - in a setting with gave me a tenth of the tools I had had as a drill sergeant while expecting me to accomplish twice the instruction.
And possibly the worst part was the parents; many of whom didn't care or didn't know what their children were doing. many of whom were manifestly overwhelmed by their children, almost all of whom were struggling desperately under loads of work, family, debt, and a crippling lack of time and intellectual resource.
So the notion that somehow we can just wave a magic policy/money wand and make every public school Saddle River Country Day School?
Well...I think the key here is to look at the examples used in the article.
Finland
South Korea
Singapore
All of them relatively tiny, homogeneous, intensely urbanized and highly urbane polities, typically with cultures that emphasize unity, conformity, hard work and achievement. You might as well start making plans for American public schools in urban Detroit, Seattle, and Los Angeles by looking at the systems currently working so well in Grosse Pointe, Scarsdale, and Beverly Hills.
Of course the educational systems in Finland, Singapore, and South Korea work well.
Given the starting points, you'd have to be a thermonuclear-grade moron to fuck them up. I'm just guessing here, but I highly suspect that it has as much to do with the qualities of the Finns, Singaporeans, and South Koreans in the classroms as it does with picking teachers from the top 25% of the ACT and putting scented piss-pucks in the boys bathrooms.
In 1965 the Coleman Report identified economic class as the single largest factor in predicting academic achievement.
That conclusion has never been refuted.
If you take a look at "failing" schools identified by the NCLB, most of them are in urban or rural poor areas. It's the same here in Portland; our "good" schools are in the parts of town that look like Finland or Scarsdale (wealthy, white) - Grant, Lincoln, Wilson. The marginal ones - Madison, Franklin, Cleveland - are in the browner, more marginal parts of town. The "failing" ones - Roosevelt here in our NoPo and Jefferson - are in the hood, either Hispanic as up here or black in the case of Jefferson. This despite a PPS policy that has been in place for years to encourage the better teachers to choose the tougher schools.
They don't - no one would. Because an American classroom in a tough neighborhood is never going to look like Singapore. Or Sweden. Or fucking Finland.
In fact, I'm going to now suggest a goddamn federal law banning on any educational nostrums, prescriptions, seminars, or on-line classes that mention the fucking word "Finland". Or "Singapore". You want to suggest a fix for education? Take something more like us or go to jail, dammit.
I suggest Brazil, maybe.
And this "education problem" isn't going away any other way, either. Income disparity in the U.S. is rising, and the percentage of people falling behind is growing, at a rate we haven't seen since the end of WW2. And the current political climate makes the notion of raising tax money to help the schools where the new underclasses will be warehoused somewhere south of unlikely and a quarter to "ain't ever gonna happen".
So, sorry, boys. I agree we can do better with our schools - though I will argue that they're not as bad as they're made to be, given the available cash and the human timber we're starting with. I won't argue that there needs to be better teacher training, testing, and mentoring, either.
But it doesn't have as much to do with finding the academic superstars as it does the great actors, improvisational standups, skilled craftsmen, and savants. I can teach math to a great teacher - I can't teach a great mathematician how to teach.
And let's face it - there's no way in hell the teacher training schools will cut back their numbers and the American public ain't gonna vote the money you'd need for all this stuff, anyway. Your little piece was a nice dream. But it was a dream.
And dreaming of Finland isn't going to solve our problems. Hell, dreaming of Finland isn't even going to lead you to the right problems.
The idea that there's a hidden key somewhere (typically Finland) that will unlock the education door and make American schools something more like the shiny, happy ideals we see in Heritage Foundation fliers and pedagogical conference brochures seems almost unkillable. Somehow our nation always seems to be At Risk; at risk of failing, at risk of falling behind those regimented Europeans and cunning Asians unless we do X. Y. and Z, at risk of economic and intellectual desuetude unless we Do Something Brilliant Now. What's the latest flavor of brilliance?
Apparently it resides in Finland. That's where they train only the "best" students to be teachers. This is our authors' notion, while they recommend somehow magically ensuring that the number of teachers trained matches the teaching jobs available to avoid the current oversupply of discouraged teachers. Let's pay them handsomely, too, finding all those tax dollars' special secret place where the voters have hidden them, and with it we'll also somehow make all schools safe, intellectually challenging places to work. Oh, yeah, then we'll find even more money to evaluate and mentor these outstanding teachers thoroughly, and finally we'll make word "teacher" the semantic and social equivalent of "investment banker" or "major league baseball benchwarmer" resulting in all sorts of public love and respect for teachers.
What could be wrong with that?
Well, nothing, of course. If teaching were like trial law, biomedical research, or writing computer code. You'd jack the pay scale, jigger the working conditions a tittle, and the Stanford and Cornell grads would come shouting in.
But teaching is nothing like these sorts of technical professions. Teaching is, fundamentally, a mixture of performance art and artisanal craft with technical knowledge thrown in on top. It is almost entirely personal, and the ability to teach well is highly reliant on the quick development of people skills.And, what's more, as a teacher you're working with the Great Unwashed, the Average American; many of them will come to your classroom raised on television and video games, short of attention, patience, and ingenuity, trained to expect learning to be "fun", often poorly literate and numerate, impatient with being told that their "effort" is inconsequential and that they will not be rewarded for mediocrity.
I know, because I went from being a professional scientist to a teacher and back again.
As a registered geologist I was presented with a suite of challenging and often innovative tasks to solve in company with other professionals whom I respected and who listened to me with respect. I worked closely with my peers, my supervisors, and the clients, who acknowledged me as the subject matter expert that they were paying well for an opinion. I was able to maintain a stable family life and a fulfilling work life.
As a teacher I spent the vast majority of my day with adolescents who typically considered me an mildly entertaining irrelevance at best and an irritating nuisance at worst. I barely saw my peers and my supervisors were almost invisible. My workday consisted of attempting to introduce the most fundamental aspects of my profession to an audience that generally considered the subject (when they considered it at all) an obstacle to their social lives. I had to spend a hell of a lot of my time dealing with personal issues of people whose lives had been utterly fucked up for years prior to my encounter with them. For which time I was paid roughly half of what I made previously.
I did teach some great students, and agree that with good students teaching is among the most rewarding of tasks. But I also spent a ton of time on "classroom management" - in a setting with gave me a tenth of the tools I had had as a drill sergeant while expecting me to accomplish twice the instruction.
And possibly the worst part was the parents; many of whom didn't care or didn't know what their children were doing. many of whom were manifestly overwhelmed by their children, almost all of whom were struggling desperately under loads of work, family, debt, and a crippling lack of time and intellectual resource.
So the notion that somehow we can just wave a magic policy/money wand and make every public school Saddle River Country Day School?
Well...I think the key here is to look at the examples used in the article.
Finland
South Korea
Singapore
All of them relatively tiny, homogeneous, intensely urbanized and highly urbane polities, typically with cultures that emphasize unity, conformity, hard work and achievement. You might as well start making plans for American public schools in urban Detroit, Seattle, and Los Angeles by looking at the systems currently working so well in Grosse Pointe, Scarsdale, and Beverly Hills.
Of course the educational systems in Finland, Singapore, and South Korea work well.
Given the starting points, you'd have to be a thermonuclear-grade moron to fuck them up. I'm just guessing here, but I highly suspect that it has as much to do with the qualities of the Finns, Singaporeans, and South Koreans in the classroms as it does with picking teachers from the top 25% of the ACT and putting scented piss-pucks in the boys bathrooms.(True fact: the boys bathrooms in the high school I taught in stank like year-old piss. One of my classes started with the idea of raising money to put those disk-shaped odor absorbers in the urinals to help make the bogs a little less nasty, assuming that the lack of pucks was a budget problem. We were informed that, no, the practice had been intentionally halted because of the number of times the pucks had been stuffed into toilets and plugged them up.Okay, here's the real bottom line.
Think about that for a moment; what sort of human fishes in a public urinal for a piss-soaked disk to then shove into a public toilet.
Hmmmm.)
In 1965 the Coleman Report identified economic class as the single largest factor in predicting academic achievement.
That conclusion has never been refuted.
If you take a look at "failing" schools identified by the NCLB, most of them are in urban or rural poor areas. It's the same here in Portland; our "good" schools are in the parts of town that look like Finland or Scarsdale (wealthy, white) - Grant, Lincoln, Wilson. The marginal ones - Madison, Franklin, Cleveland - are in the browner, more marginal parts of town. The "failing" ones - Roosevelt here in our NoPo and Jefferson - are in the hood, either Hispanic as up here or black in the case of Jefferson. This despite a PPS policy that has been in place for years to encourage the better teachers to choose the tougher schools.
They don't - no one would. Because an American classroom in a tough neighborhood is never going to look like Singapore. Or Sweden. Or fucking Finland.In fact, I'm going to now suggest a goddamn federal law banning on any educational nostrums, prescriptions, seminars, or on-line classes that mention the fucking word "Finland". Or "Singapore". You want to suggest a fix for education? Take something more like us or go to jail, dammit.
I suggest Brazil, maybe.
And this "education problem" isn't going away any other way, either. Income disparity in the U.S. is rising, and the percentage of people falling behind is growing, at a rate we haven't seen since the end of WW2. And the current political climate makes the notion of raising tax money to help the schools where the new underclasses will be warehoused somewhere south of unlikely and a quarter to "ain't ever gonna happen".
So, sorry, boys. I agree we can do better with our schools - though I will argue that they're not as bad as they're made to be, given the available cash and the human timber we're starting with. I won't argue that there needs to be better teacher training, testing, and mentoring, either.
But it doesn't have as much to do with finding the academic superstars as it does the great actors, improvisational standups, skilled craftsmen, and savants. I can teach math to a great teacher - I can't teach a great mathematician how to teach. And let's face it - there's no way in hell the teacher training schools will cut back their numbers and the American public ain't gonna vote the money you'd need for all this stuff, anyway. Your little piece was a nice dream. But it was a dream.
And dreaming of Finland isn't going to solve our problems. Hell, dreaming of Finland isn't even going to lead you to the right problems.
Sunday, November 14, 2010
The Devil at 4 O'Clock
You'll have to excuse me; the rainy season has begun and I'm feeling curmudgeonly.
Or not. Feel free to curse, revile, and heap obloquy upon me. I'm not feeling particularly accomodating at the moment.
One of the especially frustrating things about living in a polity whose fundamental tenets are completely subject to the intelligent participation of its citizens in the political, social, and legal life of the Republic is the moment when you are confronted with the reality that a hell of a lot of your fellow citizens are volatile, credulous, irrational, prejudiced, and even foolish and willfully ignorant yahoos.
The past election was one of those moments. This is another.
Now most of you know that I am completely uninterested in who puts what in whom and why. You want three husbands, sweetie? Knock yourself out. What to marry your cousins? Whatever. Live in a big well-oiled heap of transgendered bliss? It's your life.
I have two rules; don't do it if it injures someone, and everyone has to agree to it.
That knocks "pedophilia" in the head right there. Because a child, any child, regardless of how sophisticated, depraved, or carnally inclined, cannot "consent" in any sort of informed way, to physical congress. As a sexual act I lump it in with fooling around with animals - it's not so much "wrong" as just unconscionable. One of the supposed participants isn't a participant but an object, worse, a living object that can be hurt and more than hurt.
You want to poke something that doesn't know how to protest? Here's a melon baller and a cantaloupe.
Go wild, Romeo.
But.
As morally out-of-bounds the act of molesting a child is, the THOUGHT is not legally actionable. More than that; in a land where the free expression of ideas is legally sanctioned, it MUST be legally and politically out-of-bounds to run the nasty old perv out of the public square for stating his nasty, pervy ideas in public.
So while I think that the publisher of "The Pedophile's Guide To Love And Pleasure" could have plausibly red-lighted the pervy piece of shit, and the owners of Amazon.com might have been well advised not to carry it, and the outrage of the citizenry that caused the bookseller to eighty-six the damn thing was a fairly natural reaction to the entire notion of publishing and selling a user's manual to kinderfucking, I am fairly disgusted at the entire notion that this bizarre incident means that we need some sort of official censorship and the abandonment of the rules of civil law that make the U.S. part of the endowment of intellectual liberty begun in the Enlightenment.
Here's one example of what I mean, a post by a ferociously intelligent and usually skeptical adoption mom who states that she left her profession because she had to provide legal representation to scummy pedophile sex predators.
I have no doubt that representing scummy pedophile sex predators was revolting. But our entire justice system depends, indeed, demands, that these scum get the best legal counsel that they can.
Because have we gone so far down the memory hole that we've forgotten the scummy pedophile Satanist predators that ran the McMartin preschool? That were pilloried based on an accusation by a schizophrenic drunk woman and perpetuated by hysteria and public outrage into the most expensive trial in U.S. history? That ruined the lives of dozens of people and turned out to total bullshit?
I can only repeat what I replied to the post:
But the intellectual liberties we share as citizens of this country, and as denizens of the West, are exceptionally unusual; for most of history a combination of religion, fear, ignorance, political repression, and public mobocracy have made the free expression of ideas - even, perhaps especially, vile ideas - anywhere from difficult to impossible.
We live in a nation where intelligent discourse, always a premium and often absent, has again become rare, where foolish and vile display has become the prime fodder of the public infotainment industry, where more people know who was Dancing With The Stars than who was torturing prisoners and stealing public wealth, where the powerful and wealthy can lie, cheat, and swindle with impudent ease because the public is ever more indolent, badly informed, easily swayed, and foolish.
Mind you, it has been ever thus. But we are now the sole remaining superpower. Our public acts are the 21st Century equivalent of a vermilion degree, "swaying the wide world". Add to this the power, the incredible power, of the electronic media, and you have a hell-brew that can sicken vast swathes of the Earth.
We owe it to ourselves, we owe it to those whose lives we bend to our whim, we owe it to the world itself, to be smarter, more judicious, more thoughtful than we could be. Especially when dealing with this very sort of matter, more explosive because of the visceral disgust most of us feel towards the subject.
We should be as careful in dealing with this issue as if we were juggling nitroglycerine because, in a sense, we are. If we drop the vial of free expression - even expression of this vile notion - then the resulting explosion could very well destroy the very stage we stand on.
I seem to keep posting this video clip and, yes, I know the real More was a Catholic fanatic who burned heretics. The point here is not the historical More but Bolt's More, More as the Voice of the Enlightenment, as spoken by the wonderful Paul Scofield; a voice that is increasingly hard to hear amid the din and babble of foolish popular hysteria.
Or not. Feel free to curse, revile, and heap obloquy upon me. I'm not feeling particularly accomodating at the moment.
One of the especially frustrating things about living in a polity whose fundamental tenets are completely subject to the intelligent participation of its citizens in the political, social, and legal life of the Republic is the moment when you are confronted with the reality that a hell of a lot of your fellow citizens are volatile, credulous, irrational, prejudiced, and even foolish and willfully ignorant yahoos.
The past election was one of those moments. This is another.
Now most of you know that I am completely uninterested in who puts what in whom and why. You want three husbands, sweetie? Knock yourself out. What to marry your cousins? Whatever. Live in a big well-oiled heap of transgendered bliss? It's your life.
I have two rules; don't do it if it injures someone, and everyone has to agree to it.
That knocks "pedophilia" in the head right there. Because a child, any child, regardless of how sophisticated, depraved, or carnally inclined, cannot "consent" in any sort of informed way, to physical congress. As a sexual act I lump it in with fooling around with animals - it's not so much "wrong" as just unconscionable. One of the supposed participants isn't a participant but an object, worse, a living object that can be hurt and more than hurt.
You want to poke something that doesn't know how to protest? Here's a melon baller and a cantaloupe.
Go wild, Romeo.But.
As morally out-of-bounds the act of molesting a child is, the THOUGHT is not legally actionable. More than that; in a land where the free expression of ideas is legally sanctioned, it MUST be legally and politically out-of-bounds to run the nasty old perv out of the public square for stating his nasty, pervy ideas in public.
So while I think that the publisher of "The Pedophile's Guide To Love And Pleasure" could have plausibly red-lighted the pervy piece of shit, and the owners of Amazon.com might have been well advised not to carry it, and the outrage of the citizenry that caused the bookseller to eighty-six the damn thing was a fairly natural reaction to the entire notion of publishing and selling a user's manual to kinderfucking, I am fairly disgusted at the entire notion that this bizarre incident means that we need some sort of official censorship and the abandonment of the rules of civil law that make the U.S. part of the endowment of intellectual liberty begun in the Enlightenment.
Here's one example of what I mean, a post by a ferociously intelligent and usually skeptical adoption mom who states that she left her profession because she had to provide legal representation to scummy pedophile sex predators.
I have no doubt that representing scummy pedophile sex predators was revolting. But our entire justice system depends, indeed, demands, that these scum get the best legal counsel that they can.Because have we gone so far down the memory hole that we've forgotten the scummy pedophile Satanist predators that ran the McMartin preschool? That were pilloried based on an accusation by a schizophrenic drunk woman and perpetuated by hysteria and public outrage into the most expensive trial in U.S. history? That ruined the lives of dozens of people and turned out to total bullshit?
I can only repeat what I replied to the post:
"Those damn pedophiles! Let's string 'em up!The outrages of sick kiddie-raping bastards will be with us always; there is no sexual act so vile that some humans will not attempt or perform it.
Those damn pornographers! Let's string 'em up!
Those damn Satanists! Let's...
Oops.
Remember when everybody and their dog in the daycare trade were evil Satanists and were molesting kiddies? Except they weren't. Remember when the evil Obama Negroes attacked the poor McCain woman? Except they didn't. Remember when we interned all those Japanese who were spying for the Emperor?
Except they weren't, didn't, and we effed their lives up based on lies, fear, and racism.
So you were well within your right to refuse to represent people who you despised, Lorrie.
But what happens to the law if everyone who breaks the law doesn't get a lawyer?
No question that the publisher should have redlighted this book and the seller should have chosen not to sell it. But that's a world of difference away from the adversarial justice system and the need for attorneys to represent, yes, even the most vile of human beings. Because without that it becomes not justice, but vengeance."
But the intellectual liberties we share as citizens of this country, and as denizens of the West, are exceptionally unusual; for most of history a combination of religion, fear, ignorance, political repression, and public mobocracy have made the free expression of ideas - even, perhaps especially, vile ideas - anywhere from difficult to impossible.
We live in a nation where intelligent discourse, always a premium and often absent, has again become rare, where foolish and vile display has become the prime fodder of the public infotainment industry, where more people know who was Dancing With The Stars than who was torturing prisoners and stealing public wealth, where the powerful and wealthy can lie, cheat, and swindle with impudent ease because the public is ever more indolent, badly informed, easily swayed, and foolish.Mind you, it has been ever thus. But we are now the sole remaining superpower. Our public acts are the 21st Century equivalent of a vermilion degree, "swaying the wide world". Add to this the power, the incredible power, of the electronic media, and you have a hell-brew that can sicken vast swathes of the Earth.
We owe it to ourselves, we owe it to those whose lives we bend to our whim, we owe it to the world itself, to be smarter, more judicious, more thoughtful than we could be. Especially when dealing with this very sort of matter, more explosive because of the visceral disgust most of us feel towards the subject.
We should be as careful in dealing with this issue as if we were juggling nitroglycerine because, in a sense, we are. If we drop the vial of free expression - even expression of this vile notion - then the resulting explosion could very well destroy the very stage we stand on.I seem to keep posting this video clip and, yes, I know the real More was a Catholic fanatic who burned heretics. The point here is not the historical More but Bolt's More, More as the Voice of the Enlightenment, as spoken by the wonderful Paul Scofield; a voice that is increasingly hard to hear amid the din and babble of foolish popular hysteria.
Friday, November 12, 2010
What not to do...
...when a dead whale washes up on your beach.Don't blow it up!
h/t to my friend Meghan, who culled this from a bit of little-known Oregon history
h/t to my friend Meghan, who culled this from a bit of little-known Oregon history
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