A funny lesson was learned on the way to the NCAA championship

Saturday night there was a basketball game.  & I actually watched...parts of it.  Part of the reason it was on is the university next door was one of the contenders.  Another reason it was on was the underdog was our alma mater.  Let me be clear, neither one of us cared all that much about the results.  I also refuse to accept that many people care in any long term way. 

My evidence?  I have been wearing this badge on this lanyard for several years in plain view & the number of people who have remarked on it amounts to exactly two.  & they were married to each other.  & that was more than two years ago.  Since then, nothing.

Let's roll this back to a few months ago.  I posted what I thought about the education a person thinks s/he is paying for & the education s/he actually gets (& in many cases needs).  I don't care if you don't want to read it, the gist was that the lessons you get on the side are just as useful as the ones you had to sit faced forward for. 

Which catches us up to last Monday.  On that day a handful of individuals petitioned their professor for extensions, make-up exam/quizzes etc. because they were going to spend the end of the week...& the week-end...over 1k miles away.  Their team was heavily favored  & the plan was to extend this to include the final game tonight.  The argument was that this was a once-in-a-lifetime experience to be there when their team took the title & that a university education is a complete experience & being there for landmark events is part of that experience. 

As it happens, this particular professor believes that this is absolutely true.  & that part of growing up is learning to make choices & that all choices have consequences.  Sometimes you choose to skip the basketball game & study for the test & do well,  sometimes you still do lousy, sometimes you skip the test, take the zero & have a story about how you watched your team go on in victory.  All of these are choices & all of them have consequences. 

So the students went to the game & that is fine.  They took zeros on the quiz in question, but as the lowest grade gets dropped, a good student had no reason to consider that a problem.  The ones that had iffy grades (if there were any, I don't actually know) sacrificed the lowest grade drop, but it was theirs to sacrifice.  Those who decided to go made their choice:  the most important thing was to be there when their team won & went on to the final game.

The underdog won. 

I went to college for this?

It is graduation season here...not the big graduation, but still a couple thousand will get pushed out into the dark, cold world this month.  The local news programs are rolling out stories about how much debt these graduate have & how many jobs there aren't for them & wouldn't they have been better off getting these same no-jobs right after high school?  I am just a little bit burned out.

In the interest of full disclosure, I should say my husband is a professor.  Most of my friends are education-adjacent.  The town we don't live in (because we live in the small farm community next door), but rely on for just about everything is university-centric.  In sort, the education business is the business that pays our bills.  So, there that is.

Now will someone PLEASE explain to me why it is UNACCEPTABLE to go 17K in debt for a degree but the same amount & very likely more is just fine for a car?  Why isn't the car note a lead story?  I don't really have anything else to say on this one, so I am just going to move on.  Also, in a second full disclosure I should mention I have never had a car loan.  Never.  Never ever.  As a result I drove clunkers for a long time & was in my 30s when I got my first new & not just new-to-me car.  It cost $18,500 & we paid cash.  So you can see how that 17K number the students were tossing around on the radio earlier this week hit close to home for me.

If one person says "well you need a car to get to work, but you don't need a degree to do X job" I will....I don't know.  Spit, maybe. 

A funny thing happens on the way to that degree.  & I am not disputing that in many cases a person could get just as much out of life experience, but some how they never do.  Or at least not often.  Here are a few examples of things you learn in college without realizing you are learning them:

• Finish your work in on time.  This is another personal one for me because I once had an actual employee show up on presentation to the client day EMPTY HANDED.  Because he needed an extension.  & to be fair, he had a degree but it was in computer science & that particular field of study seems plagued with negotiable deadlines so he learned the hard way that in the job-world you get canned for that kind of thing.  Most people learn this in school, but fewer & fewer in K-12. 
   
• Just plain show up on time.  In job-world there are no bells.  Well, very few anyhow.  & plenty of professors don't care if you stroll in late.  Still, a surprising number of them cover crucial business in the first 5 minutes.  For example, the announcement that the final was moved from the room printed in the syllabus to a building across campus was made at the beginning of class.  Yes, it was updated on-line so someone COULD have looked it up but a surprising number did not think to do that. I have specifically asked professors of large lecture classes (where this cavalier attendance is more normal) if there is a correlation between people who wander in late to class & people who lose 45 minutes of a 2 hour exam period running to the new location & pretty much all of them laughed out loud.  I should say that the large lectures involved come with an electronic response thing for in-class participation; the questions are usually simple, & often not graded but they are a good indicator of who is sitting there when class begins & who is not.
   
• Sometimes you have to do things that don't interest you.  Every semester someone says about something "when am I ever going to use this?" & the answer might be never.  But you are going to sit through a lifetime of staff meetings & presentations & be expected to parrot at least some of that crap back before they let you leave the room so you may as well learn how now.  In job-world, if you walk into a seminar on racial diversity, say "this is bullshit" & walk out you will probably get fired.
   
• Sometimes you have to interact with people you don't like...& who may not much like you.  Every student every where has had an unpleasant, unfair, lopsided encounter with a professor.  Sometimes the professor has no idea they are treating you like crap, you are just the 100th person to walk through the door with whatever life shattering problem you have (I'm sorry but after the first few dead grandmothers, they blend).  The reality is that for your professor you are less an individual than one of a herd.  Understanding this will be helpful when you interact with your future boss who is unlikely to be your buddy & may not get your name right for the first few months. 
   
• Shut up, you might learn something.  By shut up, I also mean stop texting & pull out those earbuds.  Maybe it would be better to say pay attention, you might learn something.  In job-world a surprising amount of information is given on the fly.  E-mails have actually helped a lot with this, but plenty of people never get around to putting their instructions in writing.  The only time a you-never-said-that defense ever works is when you already have an unimpeachable reputation for being on the ball.  & there is really only one way to get one of those.

Is 17K a bit steep for these lessons?  Maybe.  But that 17K doesn't nearly come close to covering the cost of the people & the buildings & so on that are needed to teach these lessons...not to mention that actual lesson-lessons.  Sure you could learn them the way Abe Lincoln did, but will you?

As I was writing this I thought of a few collegiate lessons from my own life.  No one else's stories are all that interesting (this includes yours by the way, so keep that office hours chit-chat brief), so I will just give you the highlights:

• My last boss drank his coffee black (he called it neat) & for lunch he preferred tuna on wheat- rye if there was no wheat- with spicy mustard (WTF right?) & sliced tomato.  Under no circumstances should the pickle on the side ever touch the bread.  OKay, that pickle thing is mine, it grosses me out when the bread gets pickle-soggy.  It has been way-more than a decade since I placed that lunch order; it just might be the last thing I ever forget.
   
• When you are standing in the utility room waiting for a fax to go out or come in or binding reports or whatever, take this opportunity to restock the copier's paper trays.  Just do it.  & if you take the last thing of paper from the box, tell someone so they can order more.  If you don't know who that person is, it is probably you. 
• People who have pink eye MUST be sent home.  Even if he is the boss.  Even if he promises not to touch anything on anyone else's desk.  No exceptions.

None of these would have been covered in any college curriculum (& frankly that semester on feminist literature might have given you the idea you weren't responsible for the coffee or the lunch order, but you would be wrong.  You aren't responsible for the coffee because of your lady parts you are responsible because you are an underling.  This goes for the guys too, but in reverse.  As in you are not not responsible because you are a boy & so on), but all of them were skills that are taught on college campuses every day.  Yes, even the pink eye thing.  We can call that one Lessons in Communal Living.

What would John do?

Today, in 1925 the John above was indicted.  His case used to be, for me, the very definition of losing the battle but winning the war.  Lately though I am not so sure about the win.

I am talking about the Scopes Monkey Trial.  The gist was the state of Tennessee had made it illegal to discuss evolution in any publicly funded classroom.  If this is sounding a bit samey, that might be because Tennessee has more recently made it illegal to discuss homosexuality in elementary & middle school (apparently by high school the kids can handle it).

You don't need me to walk you through the ins&outs of the trial itself.  The highlights are:

John Scopes was a high school teacher who was aware of the law (the Bulter Act to be precise) & may not have even violated it but had said he thought it was a bad law & agreed to violate it.

He was defended by Clarence Darrow who came in the door with a...let's call it diverse...legal background.  A whole lot of other famous people passed in & out of that courtroom, but I will spare you the list of attorneys at either table.

The trial was a good old fashioned circus & was intended by both sides to be just that.  One side wanted that law struck down & the drafters ridiculed, the other side thought it was about damn time someone took a stand against this anti-bible science nonsense.  At least that is how I remember it.  The ACLU had been looking for a "test case" & this one was tailor made. 

The whole business was famously covered by H. L. Mencken & if you don't know who that is look him up.  If you don't want to look him up, imagine a 24-hour news cycle hairdo who spends her/his spare time translating Nietzsche, writing books on ethics & generally contributing to our society more than his own short-term bank balance.  Yes, I am talking about you Hairdo who spent actual news bytes promoting your country music album.

John Scopes lost & was ordered to pay the fine ($100), went on to the Tennessee Supreme Court where the conviction was overturned (the technicality:  the jury should have decided the fine, not the judge) but the law stood.  Until 1967 when it was repealed more or less just in time as the US Supreme Court ruled the following year that a ban on speech based entirely on religion was indeed a violation of the First Amendment.

But all of that was yet to come, in the past.  Today we celebrate the day John Scopes was indicted.  Picture your high school science teacher.  He has been taken out of his house & down to the station & is being booked.  He is about to lose his livelihood & ultimately will choose to live in another country on another continent.  But today, he thought it was still important enough to move a specific religious doctrine out of the classroom & open the door to alternative.

Something to do

This is a monster big weekend around these parts. 

First it's graduation which means a lot of people coming & going which is good for local businesses (& hard on local-locals).  But unless you re a graduate or related to a graduate or otherwise student involved, you are not going to make a special trip for that.

Well, this is also my favorite weekend of the month:  the weekend the antique rose place is open.  They only do this once a month because they have other pay-the-bills jobs but once a month it is like a little rose festival.  This is where I got I got my Reve D'Or.  They are out of stock today, but keep checking they are worth it. 

& finally it is the Tree City Quilt Guild's every other year quilt show.  It is not a huge show, but it is still interesting.  There are a lot of outstanding local quilters & what with snow birds, there are a few outstanding not-always local quilters.  Also that snow bird thing means techniques from other parts of the country seem to make there way here & sort of mix together.  Whatever the reason, despite being a local guild show, there is usually something new to me every other year.

Prayer in school

I occasionally see the bumper sticker:  as long as there are tests, there will be prayer in school.  I always want to ask the driver if they really meant to link up prayer with cheating because most teachers with tell you that so long as there are tests, there will be cheating in school.  I realize it was almost certainly not what they meant, but maybe it was, what do I know about the kind of person who wants that to be the message to all the random other people who share the road.

I wish I could find the article, but it was ages ago (before the interwebs, girls & boys) about a teacher, a devout Christian or so she described herself, who was so bothered by the mandatory prayer thing that she began having the students read prayers from other religions during this allocated time.  The upshot was her school district had a hard time explaining that when they said "prayer" they meant only their prayer, the prayers of the majority of attendees who wanted to pray (which was not incidentally a majority of attendees).  The teacher, who was born again - I remember because this is the moment when I learned a born again person's definition of "born again" - felt that jamming prayer down everyone's throat, even if it was good for them, was not the way to become born again.  Apparently there is something voluntary there, like needing to ask forgiveness before being forgiven.

It has been years (over a decade) since I read the little human interest thing about this teacher.  Alas, I have NO IDEA what part of the country she was even in as in those days I did a lot of traveling for work & newspapers are often complimentary.... 

Ah well, wherever she is or was, here it is the countdown to the final.  I have bitched before about people who use their religion as a get-out-of-exam free card, but that is actually less common at the student level than the administration level.  Among the students it is dead grandmothers & cheating.  All of this kind of brings us to the saint of the day (it has been a long time, hasn't it?  Or is that just me?):  Wolbodo of Liege.  How can you not love that name:  Wolbodo. 

He was born in to a wealthy Flemish family, which I also love.  It is so hard to find someone who calls themselves Flemish.   & he died of natural causes, which always peak's my interest.  In between he was the Bishop of Liege.  Wolbodo was big in caring for the poor, not so much in regional politics, thought there should be more emphasis on the saints (I presume he didn't know he would be joining them) & is one of legion Patron Saints of Students.  What really caught my eye was that his name has been taken by the Menschen Vereeniging Wolbodo, a group founded by catholic students who for whatever reason did not want to join the other catholic students in their official catholic students group.  This group effectively left the church less than ten years after they formed & went in, well, a different direction.  No, not satanists.  More humanists.  Or contemporarists.  They have been strongly identified with hippies, but that was when most hippies were still students.  Wolbodians are more about the present than anything & don't worry too much about what you are either.  Funnily enough, their patron had that same reputation.

So if you are going to pray to someone during finals, why not Wolbodo?  At least his followers look interesting.

Another problem with don't ask, don't tell

The first exam is in the rear view mirror, the second exam is two weeks away & the final is just around the corner.  It should come as no surprise then that the cheating season is upon us.  It used to be dead relatives, but now it is way too easy to check what with obituaries being on-line.  I know an employer who likes to trip people up with details that were included in the obit that a person actually related would know ("it must be interesting, your grandfather having been rescued in the raid on Entebbe...so sorry it was the Achille Lauro, wasn't it"; if you have to study that hard you may as well just show up for work).

So, now it's mostly cheating.  The old stand-bys make an appearance, of course, but crib notes are both better & less well concealed what with cell phones, sophisticated calculators, water bottles, etc.  One of A's favorites is people who write up the formulas & then paste them, writing side in, behind the water bottle label; since he hands out a page with such information to every student, the value is only in the act of writing (which is not without value, just maybe they would have not tried so hard to fit everything on such a cramped piece of paper).   He has also become an avid reader of reddit which helps ferret out a few more techniques every year.

On the flip side, when it comes to cheating, the advantage is definitely with the student these days.  I know another professor-not my husband, let me be clear- who was threatened with an official reprimand when he refused to back down on handing a ZERO to the guy who copied & the guy who let him copy when he busted them during the exam. They did not even deny it, just laughed & said "oh you caught us" type things until he took away their exams & tore them up in front of everyone else.  The university (part of the UTexas system, if you are curious) agreed that cheating probably had taken place & then it was confirmed it HAD taken place, but the administration felt that the prof was over reacting.  They backed down when same prof offered to contact potential employers via a local television station & explain that while only a few graduates had not earned their degree, the whole student body was suspect because the university wanted to keep cashing those tuition checks.  Guess who didn't get tenure; guess who didn't want to stay anyhow.  Because it is a small, small world I later met one of the undergrads who was also taking that exam.  He described the two as "frat-boy assholes" & remembered them being surprised they did not have the sympathy of the room when it all happened.  Mostly he & the other students were aggravated by the distraction of the floor show.  In a not-so-funny sidebar, I know an exam proctor (also in the UTexas system but different campus) who got into similar trouble when he called out cheaters during the exam.  I think he asked them to change seats or something & they went batshit & so he asked them to leave.  Which it was later determined he did not have the authority to do.  The cheaters got to retake the exam; he doesn't know how they did.

It's a long way from when I was an undergrad.  I once took a discussion class on John Milton (riveting stuff, the cataloging of angels & so forth), which unsurprisingly was not a very large class.  I mean there were five of us.  Five.  Imagine my surprise when there were almost twice that many there to take the final.  Then the prof refused to give an exam to any student he did not know.  Just plain wouldn't give it to them.  When one of the MIA-students got snotty, same prof told him to take it up with the dean, who would be very familiar with the issue as apparently prof did this every time he taught a discussion class.  As a result, he maintained a balance of A+ to FAIL roughly on par with any other class.  It's just that in his discussion classes, there was never anything in between.

There have been quite a few truly creative plots to bring in banned material or phone-a-friend equipment, & one outstanding attempt to steal the exam the week before the exam kicking around A's department, but the latest cheating scandal is a bit strange  So strange, in part because it might not actually be a cheating scandal.   Here's the story:  prof gets a phone call in his on-campus office.  Person gives the name of a student in class & says s/he has been doing homework for student but now feels...remorse?  Same person gives own name, but as it is not a name of a student in the prof's class, it is as good as unverifiable.   So.  Now what?  There is no proof just the word of one person against another, even if it is true, which it might not be.  Alas this same prof has been stalker&stalkee-adjacent too many times to take anyone's word for anything anymore & in this case the two parties are a male & a female (not that there isn't such a thing as same-sex stalking).  Right away he gets twitchy. 

If the cheating did happen, it highlights a flaw in the system, but not one he can do anything about.  After all, students have to be able to turn in assignments completed outside of class, right?  Each person can (& often is) given a slightly different set of parameters so direct copying is rarely an option, but if a 3rd party is willing, even temporarily, to do the work what can the prof do about it?  & then there is the reverse:  what if the student did NOT have any third party help & this is just someone making trouble?  Or what if cheating did happen, but the person who reported it had nothing to do with it?  If that last one seems extreme I myself have been witness to an instance where one person claimed a friend's husband made pass at her; he HAD made passes at other friends of his wife & she figured she would not be believed unless she had first hand experience.  As it happens, the couple is still married & the women have completely lost touch.  Or even what if the cheating did happen, the names given are all involved, but the person calling is not actually one of the people, just using the name?  Most of all, whose responsibility is it to investigate the whole thing?

Another funny trend pointed out on reddit re: cheaters.  Many people are appalled at how  unobservant the teachers are, how unwilling they are to pursue the cheaters.  My response to that is actually a question: how many people go into teaching because they want to fight crime?  & when students & their parents & their attorneys get involved, how many of those teachers do you imagine are just THRILLED to spend their time & money defending themselves (if you think parents don't call an attorney, think again.  & who can blame them, since as far as they know their little darlings are being railroaded)?  The answer is not many & for those teachers that are, the cheating scam has to be pretty egregious, obvious & provable.  This almost never happens.  But when it does, yes that can be fun to watch.

//I wrote this in parts, ready to post last month.  The Monday before I had scheduled to post, I happened to get in touch about another matter (yes, quilting) with another friend who teaches in a business program at a prestigious eastern college (all of the above examples came from different parts of the country, but in liberal arts programs, which have the reputation -deserved or not- of taking themselves too seriously)  & this latest cheating incarnation came up.  She told me how last semester she caught a student handing in paper that was verbatim what had been handed in the year before by a different student.  She knew last year & this year that the paper had been wholly copied from a website.  She even knew which website.  She was directed by her department's documented policy, both times, to return the paper, ungraded & ask the student to try again because the school's honor policy does not provide for any other recourse.  She went on to complain that she has to carry on her person, at all times a clunky pager type piece of equipment to activate the copiers in the department, the library etc. because so many people were stealing copies.  There used to be a jar for people to put their change in when they made a copy but people rarely did, also the jars keep getting stolen.  Her argument is if we cannot trust these same people to pay for a ten cent copy, why do we assume they wouldn't cheat to get a better grade (this is peeve of A's too, actually-where is the beloved honor code when it comes to photocopiers?)?  She can also do a many-minute rant on the university that bends over backwards not to ruffle the feathers of anyone who pays them but can make things damn inconvenient over any fee they might have to pay, even just ten cents at a time.  The class she teaches is not ethics although this would be a very funny story if it was.  She currently teaches marketing.  Or branding.  I forget which.  Anyhow, I pulled the post until  had time to add that postscript.

/// & then this post hit another bump.  The night before it was rescheduled, the prof got notification that campus PD had indeed become involved in a harassment complaint.  Since then there was another contact from the person claiming to be the person who did the homework, who may or may not be who they say they are, in any guise.  That person wanted to know what was being done by to punish the cheater & was irritated when told that information was confidential.  It was suggested that person come on down & file a formal complaint so naturally has not been heard from since.  On the other hand, I decided to pull it until enough time had passed that the events were semi-common knowledge on the campus involved.

What would Arthur do?

Every few years I am forcibly reminded they no longer teach The Crucible in high school english class.This rather astonishes me on so many levels:  Arthur Miller was an american playwright, writing about an event in american history that had strong tie-ins to what was at the time of writing american current events.  Also, even though there was already a french film version, they made it into a movie with Winona Ryder & Daniel Day-Lewis & it has been my sad experience that some english teachers like to set up a movie JUST IN CASE someone in class could not be bothered to find the crib notes.  Also, in the case of one friend's english teacher it meant she (the teacher) could nap peacefully in the dark while the kids are more or less occupied; I LOVE teachers but there are a few bad apples in there.  Or maybe they are just tired.  It has been a long, ugly haul for teachers here in Fladidah.

The american movie is not bad, actually.  It takes a few side roads from the play, mostly because it can (a change of scenery does a body good after all & just imagine a movie that remained set in what a stage could manage in scene changes).  If you are someone who does not much care for reading plays (it is a learned skill & even then you may not develop a taste for it), go ahead & watch the movie.  Netflix even has it on Instant View in time for the Hallowe'en season, & really what is scarier than Salem witches at Hallowe'en?  Turns out the day-to-day Salem townsfolk are pretty damn frightening themselves.

The gist of The Crucible in a paragraph is this:  for a variety of motives, the best of them being religious zealotry, the people of a village start accusing each other of witchcraft.  Once accused, you are more or less condemned....unless.....you can give the people accusing you another name.  Doesn't even have to be all that plausible; just say "yes, but I was lured & so-&-so lured me".  You will get a slap on the wrist, lose your property (maybe) & be shamed & ostracized (becoming a member of a group almost as large as said village, so that's not so bad, really).  Then of course you have to live with yourself, forever after, knowing that you are responsible for whatever happens to the next person.  & the next.  & the next.

If it all sounds a bit familiar, it was meant to.  When The Crucible was written, the Salem Witch Trials were common knowledge.  So was McCarthyism, whereby people were called up before a senate committee, accused of Communism & sentenced to jail, blacklisted, whatever.  Pretty much the only way to ease your situation was to say "yes, but I was lured; so-&-so lured me".  Some people resisted & their lives were ruined, Pete Seeger famously resisted & his life sure looked like ruined for a few years, but he who laughs last & all that.  I suspect few people on this earth will ever laugh so completely as Pete Seeger, in a completely not-malicious, laugh-along-with-me kind of way.

Late in their cycle, when the popularity wheel was rolling away from them, the McCarthy-ites turned their attention to Arthur Miller.  He was, at the time, married to Marilyn Monroe & most historians agree the accusation was almost certainly a ploy to grab some headlines rather than a sincere attempt to isolate the most dangerous communist in the country.  Unfortunately (depending on your perspective), Miller's response to the McCarthy spotlight was to write the most damning criticism of the work of the committee.  Double unlucky, it is one of the most famous pieces of writing in our american history (it lives right up there with a few others some people spend  a lot of time misquoting).  The Crucible has long held the distinction of being the most widely read & performed american play outside of this country.  It is all so interesting (truly) & you can find whole volumes on the subject; you can take classes on the struggle between Arthur Miller & Joseph McCarthy, on the widely predicted & very very wrong death of Death of a Salesman as a result of McCarthy et al.   But enough about Arthur Miller, lets talk for a bit about Lance Armstrong.

Earlier this month, Lance Armstrong said (I paraphrase) "I am sick of fighting it, I have a life to live.  You want my Tour de France wins back?  Take 'em".   For those who don't know, Armstrong has been denying allegations of doping for years.  It's interesting they keep coming back, in light of the complete lack of medical evidence etc.  I am not saying he wasn't doping, although as a reader of The Crucible I cannot help but wonder.  Particularly as his most ardent accusers have been other athletes who have actually been caught & then parlayed an easing of their punishment if only they can bring in the big fish.  I think Brit Hammond said it best:  "To me it says if you cheat and lie about it for several years, and then drop somebody else in it, you'll be alright".

Which brings us back around to what Arthur has done.  He has told us more about our system of justice than maybe we want to know, not because it is so awful but because it is so universally human. 

The 9 minute 1/2 mile

I still have not broken the 18 minute mile consistently; I can average it but not maintain it (there is always one set that runs a shave longer & one or two that run so much shorter).  I am still doing walking intervals every 4, 5, 6, 7 8 or 9 minutes though, so that probably explains the drag.  What I do know is that the two quickest half miles are absolutely covered in 9 minutes or less....each.

I realize of course that predicting the miles in general by the fastest half mile is absurd.  A funny thing about that--many many years ago (yes, we can say decades) I was briefly involved in collecting data about how children learn (specifically how they learn to express themselves).  My end of things was interviews designed (not by me) to elicit precisely the same response in terms of perspective, but record the different ways it was expressed.  By the parents.  I asked questions & parents answered knowing full well they were being recorded & these recordings would be seen & heard by the people who cared for their children & so, naturally, we expected lies about the home routine & BOY-O-BOY did we get them.  Seriously parents, the people who take care of your kids upwards of 4 hours a day know more about your life, including details of your sex life, than you do; they don't WANT to know, it just happens.  There is almost no point in telling these people anything that isn't true..

That is all an aside.  I am more interested these days in the data collection that was going on in the next office & by "office" I mean cubicle & by "next" I mean we shared a computer table that had a cardboard screen propped between the two monitors; our chairs were side-by-side.  There was roughly the level of privacy between us as there is between your child & the person changing your child's diaper.

What they were tracking was standardized test scores.  In those days, standardized tests were just a blip on the horizon.  When I was a high school freshman, our class was given a test along with a handful of other districts around the state.  As I understand it, the schools involved largely volunteered.  I have no memory of ever being given an all-students style test again.  Anyhow, the results of the annual volunteer tests were being gathered together & used to determine averages, highs, lows, etc.  I remember one memorable fall semester when for whatever reason a certain chunk of the test taking schools failed to forward their tests in time for the scores to be calculated & entered into the system before the student slave labor let for winter break.  Someone made the ingenious decision to just go with the test results they had in-house & for several years (& maybe still, I graduated after all & never looked back), it was the high water mark of standardized testing, as the averages of the class of  1988 were noticeably better than all the others.  It turns out, though, that schools that can turn in paperwork on time generally have higher scores on these things than schools that get bogged down.  Also shocker of shockers, schools that volunteer for these kinds of tests often have significantly higher scores than schools that don't.  Soooo, it seems that basing an average on the higher end of the performance scale may not be the best way to motivate everyone else to do better.

& we are back at my 9 minute 1/2 mile.  In short, it does not an 18 minute mile make.  Still, I am covering more ground in less time. 

Caveat Emptor

It is back-to-school time here in the Land of Flowers.  On Thursday, campus was a mob scene, I am told.  I missed it because I was chasing a cow across my neighborhood.  Yes, I am fully aware that if a student gave this as an excuse for missing an exam A would probably not believe her.  On the other hand, pretty much whatever your cockamamie excuse, you can get on the list for the make-up at the end of the semester which is convenient for no one (being slam before finals when, if you are taking any other classes you probably have other stuff to do), so you would be crazy to miss an exam for no-good-reason & burden yourself with the make-up, but whatever.

What was I saying?  Oh, right, Let The Buyer Beware.  Over at Poodle (and dog) a discussion has sprung up around a class action lawsuit wherein the students of a law school are suing the school for misrepresenting employment numbers for previous graduates.  Let me break it down:  the kids say the school told them they would probably get jobs after graduation because X previous students have gotten jobs & it turns out X is not a real number.  I mean an truthful number; X is of course a real number in that it is a number of quantity in a continuum blah-de-blah-blah.  The students are not alleging that X is the square root of a negative number, but that the school more or less made X up to make their degrees appear more desirable to the individual about to go in debt to the tune of tens of thousands (if not hundreds of thousands) of dollars.  Got that?  Good.

So the discussion begins & there are a few different perspectives.  J** expressed it as an irony (I could be wrong, but I think it is actually satire because of the whole opposite-juxtaposition thing, but I might be wrong & also she is a nice person so I didn't go there on her blog but somehow felt compelled to mention it here.  Yes, I'm a bitch).  Next up was a recently graduated student who was not jazzed about the "There are too many bottom-feeders already & I do not mean catfish" tone.  J** was very polite to her (I think a "her", I could be wrong, what do I know); more polite than I would have been.  Suffice to say she did not respond with "Oh Kitten, if you cannot take the heat from a blog about family pets maybe you should get out of the courtroom".  The follow-up has been less sympathetic.  One person (not me) pointed out there has been a well-documented glut of lawyers so how could a person applying to law schools not realize this would be a factor, regardless of where they went?  I don't know the source but my own research (commercials on tv mostly) would indicate there do seem to be a lot of lawyers out there, but they also seem to have healthy advertising budgets so business is.....good?

I told you that story to tell you this one.  A used to (& will again, no doubt) teach a large seminar class taken primarily by future engineers.  There were a lot of them (there still are) & they were a mixed bag in the way all large groups are.  Among those in the bag were the handful who materialized at the end of every semester having blown off homework, labs, flunked exams etc. wanting to negotiate their grade.  By & large they were not so successful; with such a big group of students, the guidelines for how grades are handed out are largely determined by the department, or departments in a cross-discipline class.  That guy you are giving such a hard time to has not-so-much control over your grade as a real number, but PLENTY of control over what he puts in the letter of recommendation you will so foolishly request when applying to grad school (this actually happens; so far he has resisted the temptation to write:  she was a mediocre student who couldn't follow instructions & got pissy when she didn't get her way).

As for the rest of the students, so long as they work within the existing framework, things go much smoother.  The school will even let you take the class over&over&over again until you get the desired grade & each time your improved grade will overwrite the previous one, so only a review of your semester-by-semester transcript will show that you have ever been there before.  That and your bill.

Jewish Studies thru Zoology

It was graduation weekend here last weekend; we are still recovering.  The graduating undergraduate class of the college of liberal arts & sciences is so large that, although the ceremony is held in a largish space, they still have to have to hold two ceremonies.  Physics comes in the second wave which begins with Jewish Studies & ends with Zoology.  This particular college within the university also has the largest number of non-majors taking classes within it (the cutbacks in public education that have been happening over the past several years means that even the cream of the crop don't have some of what used to be basic college-entry-level skills; the smartest person in the world cannot learn to read if he never sees a book).  The average undergraduate here takes five years to get out

In other education news this week, the rule designating the percentage amount to come from an individual teacher's paycheck to a retirement fund over which they have no control, no say & no oversight took effect here in Florida.  In our case, this means the man who is part of a team of three faculty members responsible for a lecture, office hours, online homework etc. for 600+ pre-med students per semester, as well as raising through grants & other funding sources enough cash to cover his research (equipment, graduate student salaries, etc.), his own salary if he expects a check during the summer & let's not forget the 40% allocated to the university for administrative support, space, electric, etc. just took a 3% pay cut.  I know things are tough all over, but the in this country educators make on average exactly the same amount they made in 2005, no cost of living increases, nada.  From 2000 to 2005, teachers were lucky to get cost of living raises which might explain why only one teacher out of every three teaching in 2000 was still teaching in 2005.  I could not find stats on those still teaching in 2010, but it is I doubt that many returned to teaching even with the economic downturn.

OH & it is Teacher Appreciation Week.  Trust me, they are feeling the love...all the way to another profession.  Except for the ones who are taking jobs in other countries.  Right now, the single biggest next-employer for former colleagues we know is South Korea.  If you think your healthcare is expensive when you are being gouged by US companies, wait until you get the bill when another country holds the patents on your diabetes home test kit, cholesterol medication, etc.  As for everything else, most states are already lowering the education requirements for public school teachers.  It turns out you cannot require a person to pay $$$ out of pocket for a job that pays less than $.  Which means that chances are good that the teacher who stays in teaching is making money someplace else.  Maybe it is from a spouse, maybe it is from patent licensing, maybe it is from dealing in crystal meth.

Kansas troubles

Around the middle of March I got ensnared in a completely asinine conversation with my mother-in-law, the gist of which was how she resented paying higher taxes for other people's kids to go to school & not learn anything because the schools are completely broken.  While I do have issues (many, many issues) with the state of public education, I had never entertained her solution-that the whole system should be privatized or pay-as-you go.  My only response (I was a bit unprepared- not that I couldn't anticipate her opinion but that her son would ditch me with her for so long) was that didn't she think it was good thing that the person who handed her her medication could read?  She countered that no, she did not think that was important because the doctor can read & the pharmacist can read & she can read & papa can read & they can all check that the medication is right.  OKay then.

What she mostly kept flapping on about was some internet e-mail thing-y of an exam students used to have to take to graduate high school.  I cannot link to the original for you to view because the document was formatted landscape but my in-laws printed it portrait, making the headers & footers & therefore the source unreadable to me.  As for what did print, they could only read that mostly because the type was waaaaaaaaaaaaaayyyy oversized (but they don't need glasses, no sir).  The whole thing boiled down to her assertion (& that of the chain letter, I gather) that no one could answer these exam questions today & therefore public education was completely decayed & should be trashed.

For future visits to my in-laws, I am thinking of carrying a copy of the equation sheet given to students taking today's FCAT so the two of them can use it while they answer those questions on-line (I am not printing the whole test & killing all those trees just to make a point that will not be taken), but on the day itself I was lucky enough to spot the one & only complete question (completely printed question, that is):  Discuss the origins of the State of Kansas.

It was a gift, I tell you.  I (& pretty much every other person who has ever had a glance at a quilt history guide of any kind) can do 15-45 minutes on Kansas...Kansas Troubles that is.  & it all began today in 1803 with the Louisiana Purchase.

I will spare you the history highlights & get straight to my favorite part:  the quilt blocks.  That is except to say I think the intention of the original exam question was to probe the students' understanding of the ratification of an abolitionist state that could have gone either way (free or slavery I mean).  I can do neither the history nor the quilts justice, but you can see quite a bit more here if you are interested (& you should be, it is interesting).

Kansas (OKay, a few more highlights are necessary) went on to make itself miserable, while trying to achieve a higher moral standard through narrow definition of the idea "high moral standard", by maintaining prohibition way longer than any other USState.  Voters approved the state constitutional amendment 30+ years before the change was made to US constitution & kept it on the books until after WWII ended.  Much more restrictive laws than any other state were still enforced well into to 1980s.   It is just the shortest step from prohibition to Carrie Nation & her legendary hatchet.  I have the vaguest recollection that the Kansas Troubles block is intended to represent her (hatchet, specifically), but I promise my mother-in-law was not listening any longer anyhow & never did get the quilt block connection.  Also, I think I might be wrong & the hatchet of the block is actually...something else.  History by quilt block is not an exact science.

Anyhow, we now arrive at the Carrie Nation quilt block, which looks like a cross between Puss in the Corner & Jacob's ladder to me, but hey, why not?  There are all kinds of other temperance related quilt blocks including the Temperance T & Drunkard's Path.  You could spend quite a while on this branch, but let's get back to Kansas, shall we?

There are other lovely Kansas-specific quilt blocks; Kansas Star is one of my favorites (although I did not know it was called Kansas Star until I started writing this blog entry-kind of like a FBQBS member who works for The Hartford but did not know the block she had chosen was called Hope of Hartford, not that I think the quilt block is about the insurance company).

It is hard to know exactly why quilting & Kansas are so linked; I know the Kansas City Star was one of the primary sources for quilt patterns (newspapers with declining subscription rates today don't have to buy a clue-I give them this one for free).  It was probably one of those crucible things.  For whatever reason, the Kansas City Star pretty much set the high-high standard of quilt patterns for decades & not surprisingly named many of the blocks after, well, Kansas & things Kansasian...Kansasite?    If I really wanted to know (& I do, now, kinda) I could get the book by Barbara Brackman.

Finally, I decided I should make some Kansas blocks of my own so I went to Quilter's Cache & printed the directions for Kansas Trouble (sic) & the variation & made one of each.  They are constructed on the same 4-patch idea with the swinging hatchet look.  I (& again, most contemporary quilters) can see how the variation could become more popular with the tools & techniques currently in favor, but I think I prefer the look of the traditional block.  To make the original, make four of the block on the left, to make the variation, make four of the block on the right.

Mystery, what?

I am a huge Huge HUGE fan of the Modern Scholar Lecture Series.  Our library gets them on the little digital playaways & I do not leave home without them, well not by plane anyhow.  Just last night I finished the most recent (to me):  Detective Fiction.  & I think it just might be my most favorite of all.

As for the playaways...  It is no secret to anyone who has spent anytime with me recently that I am not sleeping.  I think my sleep patterns were disrupted for much longer than I realized while Farley-boy was waking me to let him out.  I am one of those lucky people who can get out of bed, walk through a cold, cluttered house more or less without light, more or less without hurting myself, stand in a open door waiting for an old dog to finish his business, get back into bed & immediately sleep.  A once suggested this was sleepwalking, but I promise it isn't;  I AM awake.  If I have to, or if I am startled, I can be truly fully awake. Or I can just glide thru whatever routine I am in & then slide back into sleep.  While Farley-boy was still self-mobile, I might get up two or more times a night; it is hard for me to be sure really.  Now that there is no Farley-boy at all, I find myself reaching to the floor (he slept next to my side of the bed) & when I cannot find him I am am instantly, completely awake.  The other thing I catch myself doing is waking up to realize I am standing at the back door, resting my head against the glass waiting for....waiting for a dog who is never going to come back in again.  I mostly find myself this way on cold night, so I think I might do it most nights, but only wake up when it gets cold enough to rattle me.

This is where the playaways come in.  I keep one on the bedside table & I can "read" myself back to sleep without turning on the light & waking A, who really does need his sleep what with his having a day-job & all.

This is only the third or so bout of insomnia I have ever experienced.  Yes, of course I have not-so-easy to sleep times in my life, but whatever it is that causes them (deadline, bad clams, etc.) the whole thing ends just on the other side.  Only once have I asked for a scrip for sleeping pills & was given what I late learned was a dose that could be doubled with no ill effects; no matter it did what it was supposed to do.  I almost regret not refilling it, altho those pills would probably be dust by now if I had.  So playaways it is.

This week in the right to bear arms

I avoided talking about the shooting in Tucson because my opinion was so very very predictable I figured why fill space with that noise, right?  & so let me assure you that aside from that sentence just then, my chatter re: Tucson ends now.

Which brings us to much more pedestrian/garden variety/everyday joe gun fun here in Fladidah.  I could open with the guy last month who opened fire on a school board meeting, but I thought I would try to limit myself to just 2011.  We opened with a news item regarding the shooting surrounding FSU.  No not the old shooting, the new shooting.  The short version on this one: Ashley Cowie died because a guy who had experience with hunting rifles, etc. was showing a "new accessory"" to some friends.  Hey that's the kind of thing that could happen to anyone, right?  Anyone who brought a loaded rifle to a fraternity gathering & started showing off that is.  & if one random person has to die, well such is life.  Or death.

Of course, a second life is also as good as over: the shooter, remember the shooter?  Exorcising his Constitutionally protected right to bear arms, he accidentally killed someone which means he gets charged with manslaughter.  That means five or so in with career criminal types who have not actually been convicted for killing anyone.  Anyhow, we opened the week with more stories about what an upstanding citizen he is & how it is a damn shame this happened.  I'm sure he will be just as good a guy when he gets out.

Next we had the gun in the backpack.  No, not the one that the kids dropped on a desk & shot two of his classmates, that was in Los Angeles.  Here at home, our local PD is hosting two kids from an adjacent county who brought a gun & a knife to school  Everyone thinks it is important to stress that the kids just had them.  There is no clue they were bullies or being bullied or any sign that they were planning a school shooting.  School just seemed like a good place for one to hand-off the gun, removed from a parent's closet, to the other.  Well that's a relief, isn't it?

Finally there is the bill introduced to allow guns to be carried on Fladidah campuses, legally that is.  When is that ever not a good idea.  As the wife of a physics professor (the secondary education gunmans' favorite target), maybe I have a kind of skewed perspective.  I know, I know, if people keep aiming at physics professors, they must deserve it on some level.  After all, the classes they teach are hard &, if you are pre-med or an engineer, required.  & it turns out the laws of physics aren't like, say the laws of poetry (my own area of study) & there really is a right answer.  Like I said, hard.

Of course, our campus has the extra party that comes with all those football fans.  The locals get fringe benefits out the drunk & disorderly visitors (those fines add up), but I'm not sure they'll be so gung-ho about arming them.  Especially as they barely want the campus police armed after that whole shot a guy in the head because same guy -unarmed- threaten to kill himself.  Nothing says don't kill yourself like a bullet in the brain.

Naturally A himself has a point of view on this whole "bring your gun to campus" thing.  He mused that perhaps he WOULD start bringing a loaded gun to school, maybe leave it there, in plain view, while he teaches or even during office hours & exams.  Sure it will probably make it hard for students to concentrate with the muzzle pointing across the desk, but since when has what happens in the classroom been about them?

Mother Madeleine Sophie Barat

Today is assigned to many saints, including both Conon the Elder & Conon the Younger, a father & son who were both hermits which interests me for all the wrong reasons; John de Atares, another hermit & possibly the first I found way-back-when-I-first-started-with-the-saints-in-my-blog who managed to die of natural causes; Raymund who may or may not be several different men, it really was not clear; two different men named Maximus, one of them must be the subject of an obscure-or-not Monty Python sketch; Richard Thirkeld who I actually kind of remember from studying Tudor England; the Martyrs of Toulouse; two different inquisitors; the list goes on.

May 29th gives me plenty to choose from & I choose the one that does not belong: Madeleine Sophie Barat. The day of Madeleine Sophie Barat is actually May 25th but for a very long time, the calendar has had her listed on May 29th.

Madeleine Sophie Barat dedicated her life to the cause of educating young women after herself having been discouraged from becoming a Carmelite nun.  So instead, she founded her own order.

In the interest of protecting her from the worldly-world, her brother brought herself with him to Paris. Strange choice, I agree. Especially when you factor in this was closely following the La Terreur. According to every source I found, her brother had an unusually strong influence on her life. Eleven years her senior, he was a professor & also her godfather & was directly responsible for her being an educated person herself.

Mother Barat was the patroness of the school she founded, but was neither a mother, Mother, nor the patron saint of anything at all. At least officially. Unofficially she is widely accepted as the Patroness of School Girls. She shares this seat with other founders of orders, such as Saint Ursula, who actually covers all juvenile students, in general, which she (Ursula) has to share with Thomas Aquinas, who oversees students of all ages. & presumably all genders, although I doubt he saw it that way.

But let us get back to Madeleine Sophie Barat. I cannot get past her first ambition: to be a Carmelite, being thwarted & deciding to actively recruit (members & sponsors) for her own order. Carmelites, for those who do not know (which included me, until I started to look into this) are not what you would describe as 'outgoing'. They are 'retiring', their big calling is to contemplative prayer, not fund raising. That she was successful in her empire-building is proof that Mother Barat probably would have been an unhappy Carmelite.

It gets stranger.  I usually ramble on & on about Roman era saints- so much less documentation so I can embroider as I like OR Medieval saints -so much conflicting documentation which is kind of better.  Mother Barat did her recruiting, cloistering  & educating during the French Revolution, in France.  Of course the French Revolution was in France; I mean so was she.   According to the sources I found, the Reign of Terror was particularly hard on the church, & maybe it was.  I would have thought it was rather harder on wealthy landowners.  Oh wait, I see it now!

I had a history professor who lamented that we (USAmericans) did not study the French Revolution more closely.  We treat it like a footnote in our own history.  He thought we, as a culture, had a lot to learn about sending more & more people to a centralized, rarefied location to govern making only cursory visits to the countryside & vastly underestimating the variety of opinions outside of the Beltway.  I mean outside of the court of Louis the four-thru-sixteenth.

So, Madeleine Sophie Barat, today is not your day.  Today is not the day we should, according to the calendar, honor her memory & sacrifice by promoting education for those with less access to education & in her day that meant those with vajayjay.  We should have been doing that four days ago, but we missed it & now there is nothing to do but wait until next year.

National Lab Day

I know you have been looking forward to it for months & months:  National Lab Day.  No, not labrador retrievers, science places.

When is National Lab Day exactly?  Well...apparently that is a secret.  & I am sorry to say secretiveness is a big part of what keeps citizens away from science guys.  They have a reputation for liking to make things harder to understand just for the sake of it & I am here to tell you some of them do do that.  Most of the time though, it is because it is just that hard, the first time.   & so it was with National Lab Day, once I tooled around the  sight a few times I found a link that implied it was May 5th, but then I found a sentence that stated it was May 12th. 

Thus we have a window into why science education is falling behind in the country. No I do not put the blame on the guys who thought up National Lab Day, I put the blame on the guys who are responsible for the marketing & administration of science.  & no I do not think marketing &/or administration are evil or bad; I DO think they should be subordinate to the actual mission of science, but they never are.  Frankly, I think marketing might be the reason science has any life left; English took the academic high road & has not been heard from since.

I recently sat through almost the whole speech by a state legislator bemoaning the fact that USschools in general & Fladidah schools in particular are unable to keep the science teachers they have, never mind acquire the teachers they need for the future.  I had so many problems with this speech it is hard to know where to begin.  I should perhaps start at the outer rings & work my way in:

Even if Fladidah had science teachers camping out overnight for the chance of a job, they could not hire them-the schools have no money. In addition to having no money, they DO have a myriad of hoops that a potential/current/future teacher needs jump through every day (more on specific hoops in a moment) that make the job very, very unappealing. 

Once the science teacher does get hired, there are the third party requirements (& no I do not think the legislature should dictate the standards because they pay the bills, they don't pay the bills.  I don't just mean that in a leaving a check on the table kind of way -which happens- I also mean it in a it is not the legislators' money kind of way.  They are the trustees, not the beneficiaries).  This is all before the teachers even make contact with their students.

Let me give you an idea of what these requirements involve:  physicists are being asked to include creationism in their teaching of the physical world & laws; biologists are being asked to compare & contrast evolution with creationism; ditto botanists; & so on.  Is it really such a surprise that hoards of individuals that hold the tenets of their fields close to their hearts are choosing not to teach in Fladidah public schools?  I would like to see classes in evangelical schools interrupted & the instructor asked to give equal time to animism; to compare & contrast funereal rites of ancient Egyptians with our own (after all we have no proof they were wrong, do we?), etc. 

Actually what I would really like is an explanation of how homosexuality is decried by the bible & therefore evil, despite references being subtle & few, but money lending has apparently been rehabilitated.  Every bible I ever came across was clear-as-crystal on money lending being a bad thing; money lenders were driven from the temple remember?  There is no passage describing driving all the single adult men with exquisite fashion sense from the temple.  I am not saying I am going to give up credit cards, I just do not understand how they are not an abomination but gay marriage is; I am quite sure credit card debt ruins more families than same sex marriage ever could.  But I digress....

Where was I?  National Lab Day, that's right.  Well today might be National Lab day or it might be next week. In this house, every day is Lab Day, so it is hard to get all that worked up.  Also I am not sure the cookie-cutter day adored & reviled by secretaries, wept over by mom's, acknowledged by dad's....& who ever else gets singled out for a "day" is really the way to attract people to science.  but unlike almost everything else being done, it can't hurt.  At a minimum, it might help science teachers feel less alone.

It's Earth Day....again

So another Earth Day is here.  Much harder to miss this time around.  I don't know about where you live but where I live there are a number of events planned. My favorites are the anti-Earth Day rallies.

For myself, I plan to spend Earth Day at the Herbarium where I have been slowly working my way through an out-of-date filing system (think index cards), cross-referencing specimens & updating everything in a new computer database.  This has less to do with Earth Day then it does with Thursday.  This is what I do most Thursdays.

In previous posts, I have been quick to point out the corporate sponsors, so this time I thought I would let you in on who is sponsoring the Earth Day network, some of them might surprise you.  NASA caught me by surprise, but they really should not have.  When I think about NASA I usually think about giant explosions needed to lift massive machinery & personnel out beyond, well, the earth.  It is easy to forget that the earth is a planet & there are a lot of other planets.  Some of them might even have clues about how to make things better here.

Scientists often get bad press from both sides of any issues:  they love & want to help animals, they want to torture animals & study the impact; they spend money in pursuit of information that will be years & years before it is useful, they did not do the kind of research we really could have used like whatever it would have taken to be on the way to curing cancer (because if they did,  we would not still have cancer, right?); they live in a rose-colored never-never-land that is completely out of touch with how real people live, they are completely corrupt & taking advantage of guileless taxpayers.  Scientists get it coming & going.  Lately they get it from swathes of people who really like their lives just as they are, despite their bitching to the contrary, & don't want to make any changes that might not make them happy.

I do not remember when exactly, it was sometime between 1998 & 2008, if that helps, but there was some discussion among physicists about how to better acquaint the average person with what it is exactly a physicist does.  A was one of the people talking about it & he thought that rather than spending actual cash dollars on a  "physics is good & good for you" type ad campaign, they should take their promotions budget & make SchoolHouse Rock style vignettes, although to be fair I do not think he used the word "vignettes".  This was actually a compromise idea from his original "Let's call NOVA"  which was itself a scale back from "how can a room with this many jews not have a single person who knows Steven Speilberg"?

I do not know what the physicists did with their promotions budget in the end.  I can tell you they did not hire private yachts for illegal fishing trips or host bondage parties.  I doubt they even went anywhere special to have their meeting; even when they do, they tend to miss the point of the locale.  Physicists like to tell stories about how the last time they met in Las Vegas, the hookers went on vacation.  & A's former roommate, also a physicist, once  missed his flight to a national meeting, caught another routing through a different airport &  knowing he had a tight connection was very impatiently waiting for the airline staff to work their way to him & let him know what gate, etc. when he decided instead to follow all the guys with pocket protectors.  Guess who made his flight, no problem.

Maybe some one did call NOVA.  There certainly has been an adjustment to the science:engineering ratio (all to the good from my point of view) in more recent programming.  How much good it might do, though....  Earlier this month a program about plants which included a UF researcher & was filmed, at least in part, in the Herbarium (I recognized the cabinets) did not help the Botany Department one iota.  That is because there no longer was a stand-alone Botany Department at UF; it had already been folded into Zoology, among other cuts to earth education. 

Happy Earth Day.  & many more.

What would Thomas do?

I (& the rest of the US) have been watching while text book publishers struggle with the demands of the Texas School Board & will no doubt partially implement them.  The only good thing I can say about this is it is about damn time.  I remember attending TASBO conferences back in the day:  oceans of people who part their hair in the middle (which kinda creeps me out right there), who have mistaken their numbers for authority & the word Texan for unity.  This particular body has been swinging punches at education for a long time & finally the rest of the country noticed.

What seems to have gotten the most attention is today's birthday boy:  Thomas Jefferson. And while he said a lot of things that could make a 21st century student think he is the I Ching, the one that might get him booted from history classes across the country was:

But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.

There are many things to dislike about Thomas Jefferson but this is not one of them.  Let me walk you through a few of my favorites.

When I was in school, the big thing about Jefferson (& a measure of his greatness) was that upon his death, in his will even, all his slaves were to be freed.  But they were not, nor is there any evidence he intended they should be.  They were sold to settle his debts.  That's right, after living as large as he could manage with slaves, he never freed them, as the myth relates.

He was not a particularly good father, even to the two daughters he acknowledged. As for those other children, their descendants went on to sue the DAR & won the right to be members despite the color of their skin.  My gut tells me Jefferson would have liked this, although he probably would not have done anything to help.

Which brings us to the whole Sally Hemming's thing.  I am not going to go into that here: I think Chris Rock has covered it most effectively.  What could I say anyway, that he was no different from other Massas?  Isn't it amazing that this is NOT what might get him knocked off the Uncle Of Our Country pedestal?

Other things not to admire: he was not a savvy or even attentive businessman.  He had little patience for anyone he did not like & even then he was not what anyone would call charming.  The list goes on.

But to his credit there is one thing Thomas Jefferson probably would do.  He would probably ask why he gets so much more press than other signers of the Declaration of Independence, After all, what do we know about John Hancock except his name now means "signature" & is most closely associated with a financial institution founded in 1862 & not even by his descendants?  Would it be better for everyone if we all knew, as a matter of course, the he was actually the First Presidential-type front-runner & fully expected the nomination but his fellow representatives did not think the Southern delegations could get behind him, that whole anti-slavery thing, & nominated George Washington instead?  I think it might. 

Or what about Roger Sherman, always a favorite of mine?  He was part of the delegations from Connecticut, a truly self-made man trained & worked as a cobbler (think Manolo Blahnik, but more useful), taught himself mathematics, classics, etc.  Sure this mostly meant he read about them in books but he had to lay his hands on the books to read them.  Then he studied law, & then he...it goes on. He is also the only person to have signed all four of the key documents:  the Continental Association, the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union and the Constitution.  If you only know what two of these are, maybe you should be asking yourself why that is.

Maybe what Thomas would do is ask us to ask why we already don't know much about anyone or anything except a few cherry-picked characters.  I also think he could offer a suggestion to those trying to keep his ideas front & center:  hold your press conferences in front of his monument.  Make sure everyone knows that building behind you is dedicated to the intellect of a man your local government does not want you to know about.  Nothing tempts like forbidden fruit; Mr. Jefferson knew that, too.

This is what happens when you get edumacated in the Magic Kingdom

Not quite ten years ago nineteen people took over four airplanes & flew them into buildings in New York City & Washington DC & a field in rural Pennsylvania & for a long time after that, no one wanted to get on a plane.  Yes, I know there were a lot of other things that came of it, but for the purposes of this story....

Here in Fladidah, we make a lot of our operating cash off of people who do not actually operate here.  This business of not getting on planes was a big big problem because no one brought their money here & the industry (& I do mean INDUSTRY) that revolves around the practice of overcharging touristas was feeling the pain.  Along with many many other such entities, Disney's Epcot Center threw open their doors & offered state residents significantly reduced entrance fees during specific week-days. 

I am not now & was not then a particular fan of Disney.  I am naturally suspicious of any large corporate entity.  Also I was not crazy about the mickeyfying of every story (Scrooge McDuck?  Really?)

Still we thought, lets see how Disney educates the youngsters.  Well, it was quite the eye opener.  & the biggest eye opener of all was the Monsanto Loves the People of the Earth exhibit.  It would be correct to say it kind of made my skin crawl.  Even A, who is not so likely to get amped up as me, kept shaking his head at the people lining up to hear a commercial (because whether there is a amusement park ride involved or not, endless platitudes about the wisdom of spraying your crops with Monsanto products is still a commercial).

We left the Agriculture-is-your-friend-so-long-as-you-are-on-the-other-end-of-a-large-piece-of-machinery Pavillion & went to have lunch.  In France.  A funny thing about France, a friend of mine teaches middle school to the Epcot employed offspring & she tells me she has a hard time convincing her students the the countries that border each other in International Plaza do not actually necessarily border each other in real life.  She discovered this was a problem when talking about World War II;  there was some confusion about Germans having to travel through Japan & Morocco to get to France.  I do not remember much about lunch except we were served white bread.  I have been to France.  I do not think they know what white bread is. They also served wine, which is how we happened to settle on France.

A while ago, another friend was doing an installation in one of the Epcot places-something to do with language & soy sauce...  Anyhow, he told me he often had lunch in Germany (where they serve beer) & then take a short walk around the plaza.  Although I cannot find it on the map he swears that Israel was somewhere near Norway (which I do kind of remember myself, you know, from geography class)  & one of his great joys was to watch the young Arab men pass by the blonde beauties of the Land of the Midnight Sun that are the stock-in-trade of international consumer marketing & make straight for the Israeli girls, who clearly had been chatted up by every Arab male over the age of five in the park & were frankly ready for something completely different.  He swears it happened every day & he was there for months.

So it seems there are some things you cannot teach people to buy, even in the Magic Kingdom.

What would Sandy do?

I come from a family of avid & yet moderate Red Sox fans.  What does that look like?  Well, during the regular season it is Red Sox all the way.  & this years post season, they rooted for the Yankees because they are the same division.  That's right, no rabid saliva streaming "Yankees must die" rants.  It is just we would rather see the Red Sox lose, after all they choke with such style, than the Yankees win but if it is going to be the Yankees well it is going to be the Yankees.


Some of my fondest baseball-listening memories are of listening to Yankee games on the radio (baseball is just better on the radio).  Fondest retrospectively anyhow.  At the time, Phil Rizzuto's rambling about nothing happening on the field for inning after inning could get old. He would yak yak yak & then get around to giving the score, which was nowhere near what it had been.  I still remember the day he & his co-broadcaster (I think it was Bill White) disagreed about something & the other guy asked if Rizzuto was going to have some of his Money Store buddies talk with him.   Lately though, the Yankee I have been thinking about is Sandy Koufax.  & wondering what he would do.

Within days of the final exam date being assigned for A's class this semester someone observed it fell on one of the nights of Chanukah, neither the first nor the last, but one of the other six.  There was concern what this might mean for those students who could not be asked to sit an exam during a religious holiday.  This was a kind of funny concern, especially  1) Chanukah begins the day before exams begin & ends the day after exams end;  there is no such thing as an exam being given this semester that is NOT on a day of Chanukah & 2) of the three professors responsible for this particular large lecture, two of them are Jewish.  So far the administration has not suggested they sit out exams as well.

Sandy Koufax, for those of you not in the know, missed the opening game of the 1965 World Series because it fell on Yom Kippur.  So we know what Sandy did.  Still, what would Sandy do?  Because  Yom Kippur is a very big deal & Chanukah is just plain not as important.  Also, Sandy made it to the second game of same series; he did not sit out the whole thing.

So what to do for the (potential) student who says he cannot take this (or any) exam because of  Chanukah?  The clincher might have to be: what did he do for the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th & 7th nights of Chanukah last year?

I had to look it up, but for those nights of Chanukah in previous years, one of the two Jewish professors in this fable kept his office hours, attended his lectures & even proctored an exam.  If anybody did not take that one because it was Chanukah, he never mentioned it. 

//One of my brothers has a special name for the Red Sox:  Lords of the Rookie Mistake.  Someday I will write a novel & that just might be the title.

Martin de Porres

I have been watching the education arguments for & against extending public school unfold & it seemed like a good time to introduce Martin de Porres, the patron of public schools (& some other timely patronages which we will get to when we get to them).

I think it is only fair to lay my bias right out there, just in case anyone is new or somehow missed it: although we have no children, we are big big believers in public education. Not because A is a professor at a public university. Once upon a time he worked in the private sector & still believed in public education. While I would agree with Bill Maher that if you want the village to help raise your child you should check with us before you reproduced, once the kids are here we have to deal with them. In this & so many other ways I find myself in direct opposition with anti-choice abortion activists; as far as I can tell once those kids are born they are someone else's problem, but I digress.

Every day I marvel that our culture expects to go into debt to get a car or a more upscale roof over their heads (I have relatives who actually took out a loan to pay for their wedding), but an education should be paid for out of taxes people are proud to cheat on. The arguments my kids are already through school/go to private school/I don't have kids just will not fly with me. Last time I checked it was a good thing when the cashier at the pharmacy could read, that the day care center attendant could do basic math, that the traffic cop could write legibly. Yes, even that last one is a good thing. Whether or not you are or were a direct consumer of public schools, you are an indirect consumer every day of your life & probably a few after you are gone &/or before you ever got here.

Which brings me to today's feastee: Martin de Porres. Trust me you are going to love him.

Martin de Porres is the son of a Spanish noble & a freed slave. Now would be the time to mention he is the patron of bi-racial & mixed race people. He went to work at a young age where he begged professionally. The sites call him an almoner, but the definition has changed since the 16th century. In Martin de Porres's time the almoner was expected to raise his own funds. The money was then distributed to the poor & he is the patron of poor people. He was so effective at this, so unrelenting in his work ethic that the Dominicans decided to drop the stipulation that “no black person may be received to the holy habit or profession of our Order”. This is also how he comes to be represented symbolically as a broom. A new broom. A new broom sweeping. Are you hearing me?

Martin de Porres established an orphanage & a children's hospital in the slums of his hometown (Lima, Peru) & is also the patron of public health. He went on to set up animal shelters for the cities stray dog & cat population. Another of his official representations is a dog, a cat, a bird & a mouse eating from the same dish.

Martin de Porres is invoked by those seeking social justice as well as those seeking inter-racial harmony. He is also patron of some less explicable things: television, hairdressers & Biloxi, Mississippi. Oh & those seeking public option health care, they pray to him, too.