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...

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.

Varsity Drag

Paul Campos at Lawyers, Guns & Money...

...makes a hell of a frighteningly good point:

"...a huge social problem, which is made all the more difficult by a consensus, broadly shared across the ideological spectrum, that more education is the solution to an almost unlimited number of economic and social problems. For obvious reasons, those peddling these cures — which as he says is almost everybody in and around the world of education and employment policy — are not eager to consider that a large percentage of the population is not going to be helped by ever-more elaborate treatments along these lines."

Five years or so ago I wrote up a little post about one of the mortally wounded in this losing battle;

"This is the Debatable Land, the very distant fringes of the warm, sunlit uplands of education that you see in the television specials and that politicians and educators tell you is the hope of the future. This isn't Manifest Destiny, the broad horizon and limitless opportunity that the land speculators of pedagogy are selling you; this is the dark hinterlands of learning, the Mountain Meadows of education, where ignorant armies of harassed, poorly prepared, overcharged students scramble to learn by night from equally harassed, poorly paid instructors. This is the recruit depot for a beaten army, where with my jaded sergeant's eye I can pick out the walking dead from the likely survivors. This one, she wears her body bag around her head like a shawl, her puzzled eyes already glazed with the dim awareness of danger and failure around her.

She's not going to make it."

Campos points up the most damning statistic for those who want to cling to the Pollyannaish belief that enough "education" will solve the problems of capital flight and the enforced decay of the middle-class-wage jobs; that pay for college graduates has remained virtually unchanged over damn near 40 years. If a "college education" was the solution to the problem of corporate flight and the deliberate selection of capital over labor then you'd expect that that value would have risen steadily over time, as have prices, costs, and profits.

They have not.

This is not some sort of "inevitable" outcome, some sort of natural progression in the market economic cycle.

It is, instead, what happens when you choose to let the people who own businesses - including education business - do things that are in their short- (and medium-, or even long-term) interest but which are not in the interest of the society as a whole.

The implications of this slow-motion disaster seem obvious. An increasingly desperate citizenry is faced with an increasingly unpayable cost to try and grab and hold on to an increasingly unprofitable and decreasing number of jobs. This citizenry can be reliably counted on to be easily panicked by, and to be easy prey to, the least scrupulous, most vicious demagogue that promises whatever pie-in-the-sky the poor bastards think can save them and their children.

Are you scared? I'm scared.

Fuck, the whole idea is as scary as a secondhand plumber's pickup truck full of ISIS headcutters armed with nuclear machetes and hordes of venomous snakes carrying Ebola.

Why the hell CNN isn't all over this I...oh, wait.

We are so, so, so, so, so, SO fucked.

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.

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.

I Blame Al Gore

This occurred to me whilst arguing about - of all things - post office and library closings over at MilPub.

And that is; does the Internet actually make you LESS informed? Has the Internet helped make Americans dumber?

There seems to be a swathe of opinion out there that says yes. One of the commentors over at the 'Pub seems to think that closing libraries is an inevitable side-effect of electronic commerce and knowledge. My snide observation is that it does indeed seem to be an artifact of the "dumbing" of the U.S. public.

I got to wondering; I've been involved in learning and teaching (in some aspect) nearly all my adult life. What have I observed that might help in figuring out whether all this Internet-shaming is factual or not. And I came to several conclusions, some germane, some less so.

Among the less germane but IMO affecting the argument is the effect of the electronic media in general.

As little as three or four generations ago you had to have some intellectual heft to get your ideas in front of the public.

Not that you had to be intelligent, or clever, or even particularly sane. All sorts of fucking idiots got published - Ayn Rand, forchrissakes! - and still do. But the ordinary garden-variety gomer had a hard time getting his or her empty head in front of others' to spout off moronic opinions. The media just wasn't there.

But with the proliferation of electronic outlets anyone; Glenn Beck, Osama bin Laden, me, can get all up in your grille with our whackadoodle ideas. The cumulative effect is to raise the apparent Whacko Factor.

Remember that intelligence, like pretty much all other human traits, is distributed on a bell curve. So by definition half of all humans are below the intellectual mean. And nearly all of them either have blogs or seem to work at Fox News. But, again, the increase in outlets for this tomfoolery provided by the electronical internet, 24-hour-cable-news, bizarre cable channels...it's impressive, and not really in a good way.

So I think that part of this "issue" is an artifact of the fact that there are just more ways for fucking idiots to be heard, not that Americans are necessarily more fucking idiotic.

But...

I do think that in at least one aspect the Internet does contribute to debasing what intellectual content our public debate contains.

It allows you (me, anyone, everyone) to gain an nearly instant but extraordinarily shallow and facile learning about damn near anything. And I've noticed that my students - the electronic generation - are particularly bad about this.

Part of me wonders if this has to do with growing up with visual entertainment as a constant sort of intellectual elevator music in their lives. Movies and television don't encourage reflection. It requires a great deal of effort to stop a video because you want to ponder a certain point, issue, or question. From childhood we vidiots learn to suspend our disbelief to make video "work". We know that that actor isn't Paul Revere...but we go along with the gag to make the story work.

I wonder how far a stretch it is from there to hearing Rick Perry say "Fifty percent of Americans pay no taxes at all" and going along with THAT gag..?

But whatever the reason, I've noticed that an overwhelming majority of my high school and community college students over the past decade are bad; really, genuinely, extraordinarily bad at researching information.

If it isn't on Google or Wikipedia, they can't find it.

And I wonder; maybe this has to do with ONLY having used Google or Wikipedia...

As antediluvian as they are today, when I and those of my generation had to look something up all we had were dead-tree media (and microfilm...)

So we had to learn to use card catelogs. Dictionaries. Encyclopedias. Being a geologist I also had to learn to use the Science Citation Index, and the Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature, to research topics discussed in journals in my field.

All this paper-shuffling tended to make me, and my contemporaries, slower but fairly thorough (some, obviously, more than others...). And I often find that even when researching on-line I tend to do what I used to do; using one article to chase down several others from the citations, checking multiple sources to see if they confirm or contradict each other. And when I don't - for example, when I accepted a single source for the so-called "Irene Incident" in the Philippines in 1898 - I find that I make the same mistakes my students made; accepting unsubstantiated claims as facts, including interpretation in with data, and passing along outright falsehoods.

So.

Has the Internet made Americans dumber?

I doubt it. For one thing, we were never all THAT smart to begin with. We, the People, have throughout our history tended to be credulous, emotional, badly-informed, and prey to all sorts of ridiculous nonsense.

What I think the Internet DOES do, though, is let us believe that we're smarter than we really are. It lends us a superficial knowledge that allows us to make all sorts of boneheaded choices thinking we know all the answers.

When we haven't even the slightest idea what the right questions should be.

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.

(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.

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.)

Okay, here's the real bottom line.

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.

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..!