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A Thomas Friedman op-ed piece in the New York Times brought tears to my eyes. It concerns a SEED Academy in Baltimore that allots place by a lottery, and a recent placement round saw over 300 hopeful applicants vying for just 80 places. It was this quote in particular (and no, it wasn't the grammatical sloppiness of it): If you think that parents from the worst inner-city neighborhoods don’t aspire for something better for their kids, a lottery like this will dispel that illusion real fast. Ms. Lewis said she’s seen people on crack walking their kids to school. “We had parents who came into our office who were clearly strung out,” she added. “They could not read or write, but they got themselves there and said, ‘I need help on this application’ for their son or daughter. Families do want the best for their children. If they have a chance, they don’t want their kids to inherit their problems. ...
I can't say I like the title of this blog, but the content really is exciting. Pretty much every article has something to think about, or an idea to use, or at least something you can agree with - erm - passionately. So with a name like "Creating Passionate Users", what is this slickly designed, mostly well-written blog about anyway? To me, it seems to be about the psychology of technical design and documentation, especially documentation. The focus is on things like manuals, tools and presentations, and two articles I have chosen to showcase give you an idea of the scope and quality of the writing. The one that first caused me to whack this blog onto my bloglines feed was "Don't expect employees to be passionate about the company" by Kathy Sierra. This happened to pop up in answer to an unrelated search at the very time that I needed to read it to clarify some silent. gnawing fury with the management of my own workplace. The one I just read yesterday, by the same author, is titled "Too many companies are like bad marriages" and concerns the massive gap between the high bucks and emphasis on sales (the courtship phase) and the measly budgets and kludgy values of customer service (the post-honeymoon shock). And of course this article is written from the point of view of American companies - they should get a load of the typical British company, where crap customer service is not only a finely honed skill set but also a hallowed national institution. Other excellent articles include "Are our tools making us dumber?" and "Marketing should be education, education should be marketing". This blog is worth setting aside some reading time for.
Wikipedia: The tragedy of the commons is a class of social trap that involves a conflict over resources between individual interests and the common good. The term derives originally from a parable published by William Forster Lloyd in his 1833 book on population. It was then popularized and extended by Garrett Hardin in his 1968 Science essay "The Tragedy of the Commons". However, the theory itself is as old as Aristotle who said: "That which is common to the greatest number has the least care bestowed upon it". I have been accused by DH, who is very literate, fairly widely-read, and by no means ill-educated (although he is a university dropout, and he tends to zone out whenever a conversation takes a philosophical turn) of elitist language in using the phrase "tragedy of the commons" in my WWW article below. I would appreciate feedback on this, as I thought it was a fairly well-known concept but maybe I really do live in my own little ivory tower as my dear Mum always said. I have edited the article to place the possibly offending phrase in quotes.
Excerpts from a follow-up story to the recent court decision (see previous post) knocking down a school district's policy of teaching ID as science:
Both sides are looking to Kansas as the most likely new battlefield in the culture war over education. Last month, the state's education board voted for new teaching standards, redefining science to include the supernatural [italics mine - because I am just dumbstruck] and encouraging Kansas science teachers to question the validity of evolution in their classrooms. If a local authority within the state accepts the board's recommendation and changes its school curriculum to play down evolution, it could trigger another legal battle.
Steve Abrams, the Kansas board chairperson, told The Associated Press that the Pennsylvania and Kansas cases were very different. In Dover, science teachers had been made to read out a statement in biology class pointing to holes in evolution theory and recommending pupils look into an intelligent-design library textbook called Of Pandas and People.
Abrams said the Kansas board was not specifically advocating intelligent design, only questioning evolution. . .
Meanwhile, a federal appeals court in Georgia is considering the case of an Atlanta suburb that had stickers put into biology textbooks, describing evolution as "a theory, not a fact".
Trust Georgia to take the lazy way out. Stickers in textbooks! When I was in the Georgia schools, they would have suspended you for doing that, and now the administration is doing it, and smirking behind their hands at the heathens in the "fed'ral gummint".
Good news, good sense. I reckon that "intelligent design" is not false on its face, the way hard-core believers in the religion I call scientism believe. But it is not science. And it is not religion either. It is something almost unheard of in the 21st century, a little thing the ancients used to call "philosophy". And Grid knows, we can't be teaching that in the public schools. Wouldn't that be confusing?
By the way, G. Trudeau has a really trenchant observation on the implications of disbelief in evolution. Perhaps, in the trenches of medical care, there are nothing but atheists? (Another negative consequence of the death of philosophy, imho.)
A Guardian comment piece, The rise of Tony Zoffis, shows just what an appallingly un-democratic thing is going on, has been going on since 1997, with New Labour's education policy. Now the naked power play is in the open, with ennobling of Andrew Adonis to be supposedly a junior minister in education, but obviously he is still calling the shots, "ensuring total obedience from his nominal boss, Ruth Kelly", as Francis Beckett says in the Guardian. Unlike in America, where the legislative and executive branches are completely separate and the President appoints the entire cabinet from non-elected citizens, in Britain all cabinet members must be members of one of the houses of Parliament. This means that non-MPs must be brought in through the Lords. The really sick thing about this, is that even if Tony B. is ousted soon from power, and Adonis's moment of cabinet glory is decently brief, he will always be Lord Adonis, and always eligible to sit in the House of Lords, exerting some power however limited over the people who never elected him and never would have done.
In some ways, this is the most frightening of all the stories in the grim saga of America's War on Terra - er - Terror. At Rio Rancho High School in New Mexico, the prinicipal commits an egregious violation of the First Amendment rights of the whole student body. It all started with an extracurricular club of students learning to perform in "poetry slams" and the very successful reading by one girl student of a poem critical of Bush administration war policies and education policies. The principal of the school and its military liaison then went on a massive witch-hunt, firing the teacher advising the poetry group, banning all teaching and reading of poetry in the school, tearing down posters and art-work they deemed "un-American" and subjecting the students to patriotic assemblies where they were told to "shut their faces" if they disagreed with the prinicipal's politics. The mother of the offending student poet, also a teacher, was ordered to destroy her daughter's work, which she refused to do, also being threatened with dismissal. (Note: I have been meaning to post this for a few days and forgot. Thanks to my non-blogging friend James who sent it to me in an e-mail and prodded my memory.)
City Pages of Minneapolis features a good expose of the cynical initiative that is bold-facedly called "No Child Left Behind". By a fantastic coincidence, this is just a sort of worst-case scenario version of what the New Labourites are accused of doing with their obsession with targets and tests and league tables.
Greg Palast was fired up at G W Bush's mention of the "no child left behind" pledge in his State of the Union address to write this scathing editorial.
You know and I know the testing is a con. There is no "better option" at the other end. The cash went to eliminate the inheritance tax, that special program to give every millionaire's son another million.
You know and I know that this is not an educational opportunity program - because you offer no opportunities, no hope, no plan, no funding. Rather, it is the new Republican social Darwinism, educational eugenics: identify the nation's loser-class early on. Trap them, then train them cheap.
No Child Left Behind is of one piece with the tax cuts for the rich, the energy laws for the insiders, the oil wars for the well-off. Someone has to care for the privileged. No society can have winners without lots and lots of losers. Thanks to my non-blogging friend Joani for e-mailing this link.
From Ellen and Robert Kaplan, founders of "math circles", a charming
anecdote:
"Take the counting numbers, which go on past any number of particles in the
universe, past any span of time you can conceive of," Robert Kaplan says.
"Is there a last counting number? In our math circle, it is a question that
I will ask of our class of six and seven-year olds: 'Is there a last
counting number?' Once a little girl said: 'Yes.' I said: 'Good, what is
it?' She said: '23,000.' 'Ah,' said I. 'Hmm.' A little boy said: 'What about
23,001?' And she said: 'Well, I was close.' " More about the Math Circles (or Maths Circles in the UK) here.Books by Robert and Ellen Kaplan : The Art of the Infinite: Our Lost Language of Numbers and The Nothing That Is: A Natural History of Zero.
Ryan's Class Act, with an unhappy ending worthy of GB Shaw. This just infuriates me. There is something so - I can't think of a word, but it makes me cringe, whatever it is - about the British attitude towards race and class, and yet most white Britons are convinced that they are so very, very racially tolerant compared to Americans. More like so very, very, utterly clueless about how arrogant and condescending they really are.
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