Yet Another Thing to Get Out

July 26, 2011 – 8:20 am

Obama also said yesterday that “compromise has become a dirty word.” While compromise may indeed be a dirty word, like saying “shit” or “fuck” in church, such a statement reflects a misinterpretation of the problem.

It’s “reality” that’s become a dirty word. If, indeed, the Republicans and Democrats wanted to alleviate the burden of the Medicare/deficit ratio, they would concentrate on fixing health care system costs which contribute to Medicare costs. The CBO numbers on Total US health care spending and Medicare spending are interesting to this point.

By Steve :: Posted in Culture, Epistemology :: Comments (0)

Obama, Fuzzy Numbers, and Electioneering

July 26, 2011 – 7:46 am

These CBO projections have been going about some. They show that Barack Obama’s reference, in his speech last night, to a trillion dollar deficit projection was dishonest.

Currently we’re suffering from the consequences of perpetual electioneering. The narrative John Boehner is pushing is no better than Obama’s. The theme of spending and the contributions of SS and Medicare to the deficit are pure bunk and serve only to advance election agendas. I’m sure John Boehner’s aware of the housing crash and the cost of our so-called wars. He could simply come out and say: I disagree with Social Security and Medicare as government run programs. They’re cost may be worth it. But I disagree with them. At least this would be honest. However, such a position is not good for getting elected. This is the equivalent of a dealership that decides to put the real cost of an automobile on the window of showroom vehicles.

Anybody who has any gifts of strategy could have advised Republicans about how to manage their affairs after 2008. Simple: allow no Obama policy to see the light of day so that come 2012 they could argue his ineffectiveness. This is classic. The idea is that if Republicans supported an Obama initiative and it showed any evidence of success, then this would make success in future elections impossible, thus the irony of resistance. Strategically this makes perfect sense. But what’s good for elections is not good for voters, as even those who disagree with Medicare benefit from it, and even those who might have disagreed with a larger stimulus, most likely would have benefitted from projected employment opportunities.

Which makes Obama’s factual error stand out even more. He’s fully aware of the CBO numbers but chose to make a willful gaffe, revealing the insidious nature of electioneering. I think he’s been wrong all along to be lost following the scent red herrings. To promote them himself is yet more disappointment to this voter.

By Steve :: Posted in Culture, Politics and Economics :: Comments (0)

On the Question of Demand

July 24, 2011 – 5:30 pm

Many economists have been arguing that demand is a major contributor to our woes in the economy. I doubt that anxiety over the deficit or the myth of excessive government spending as so-called conservatives would have people believe has much to do with it.

The fallacies over the debt ceiling mount.

By Steve :: Posted in Politics and Economics :: Comments (1)

On Fallacy, Politics: or Is the Government a Mugger?

July 23, 2011 – 8:31 am

I’ve been reluctant to post here as I’ve been busy at mediaplay and the 100days project but it’s a good time to put in some thoughts.

There are a couple of critical terms current at the moment: debt ceiling, jobs, compromise, revenue, and, yes, government. The latter has become the strangest, in my opinion.

There are a couple of problems to remark on. Our troubles appear big and it’s hard to find a context that doesn’t sound or read trite. At this moment a Google search counts 25,900,000 hits for the term debt ceiling. LexisNexis is a hoard as well. But let’s develop some political context. In a very recent International Herald Tribune article, Grover Norquist, the president of Americans for Tax Reform and self-proclaimed “issues management expert,” expresses his defense of the ATR pledge in the face of pledge misinterpreters. He writes:

. . . there is some confusion these days about what the pledge does and doesn’t mean, and numerous people have tried to reconfigure its intent to somehow allow its signatories to support tax increases. But in fact the pledge has not changed – indeed, fiscal conservatives must stick to their commitment to oppose tax increases and fight to reduce the size of the federal government.

Politically this is all very interesting and will lead us into a sort of bizarre logic having to do with what I call the misappropriation of the notion of “conservative,” and, ultimately, the definition and context of government and how that word serves ideologues (by this I mean people who take intransigent positions even in the face of reasonable evidence against those position) in our current times.

In his first effort to summarize his efforts, Norquist writes

There have been four main challenges to the pledge and what it means. The first is to charge that it gets in the way of a deal to allow a debt ceiling increase. But that’s not the case at all. John Boehner, the speaker of the House, has repeatedly stated that the House would grant the president a debt ceiling increase of $2.5 trillion if Mr. Obama would sign a deal to reduce government spending from his planned levels by the same amount or more.

This seems fair enough. Back scratch stuff. Obama can have his “debt ceiling,” which is just something he wants and doesn’t need, for something Boehner wants but may or may not need, which is, of course, unclear. It would appear that this might be the way deals are made but not really, as there is a difference between the debt ceiling and government spending reductions in terms of their equitable value. When I go to the local market and barter, I barter with things of equitable value. The shop person with whom I currently barter for cows never says: give me your house and I’ll give you two cows and that’s my final offer.

What is Norquist’s description of the current problem? He writes

The problem to be solved is not the deficit; it is overspending. Federal spending in the 2008 fiscal year was $2.9 trillion, and Washington will now spend $3.8 trillion in the fiscal year that ends on Sept. 30. Raising taxes is what politicians do instead of reforming and reducing the cost of government. Advocates of larger government prefer to talk about deficits rather than spending. Why? Because there are two solutions to a deficit problem: spend less or raise taxes. The issue, in other words, isn’t the pledge; it’s Washington’s inability to deal with its own overspending. There is only one fix for a spending problem: spend less.

There are several rhetorical issues here. Norquist’s use of the term “cost of government” is interesting. He presumes that the 900 billion difference between fiscal 08 and 2011 is a large number. He fails to provide a microeconomical equivalent, such as the difference of cost between my oil bill in fiscal 2008 and fiscal 2011. The math is pretty simple: it would be the equivalent of a three trillion dollar difference. In addition, Norquist never explains what he means by the cost of “government.” The cost of government is somewhat more complex than the cost of heating my house. House here, to use a Snickety sort of phraseology means, the thing I live in. But I also live in the USA, which is a body of government. “Cost of government” is an often tossed phrase that’s rarely defined within the context of federalism, which should be a concern of “conservatives.”

Additionally, Norquist presents a case dependent on the begging the question fallacy, as he assumes prior to proof the truth that the problem is overspending. In good argumentation, one should always prove that the problem to be solved is indeed the problem. This fallacy leads to questionable conclusions, such as: “Raising taxes is what politicians do instead of reforming and reducing the cost of government.” The writer here creates an image of devious people all around the country cooking up schemes to raise taxes because they think it’s fun. It may indeed be fun for current employers in Connecticut to start paying interest on unemployment benefits back to the Fed, but I doubt it. This leads to a recomplication to Norquist’s poor attempt at simplifying the meaning of government. According to Matthew Sturdevant of the Hartford Courant, there are about 120,000 people in CT getting unemployment assistance. The “cost of government” to them can be life line. The other fallacy here is the either/or fallacy known also as the false dilemma fallacy, which is a fallacy of limited choices designed to fool people.

Advocates of larger government prefer to talk about deficits rather than spending. Why? Because there are two solutions to a deficit problem: spend less or raise taxes.

Economist provide a whole host of solutions to deficits, some having to do with monetary and tax policy and increasing demand. There are more than just two solutions, and, indeed, neither of these two solutions is as simple as Norquist presents them. But, yes, indeed, raising taxes is a solution. The problem for Norquist, in my opinion, and for Congressional Republicans, is that a no tax pledge requires an equivalence between revenue (if any) and spending (if any): you can only spend what you make and if you can’t make more then you can’t spend more. I would love to live by this principle but free market people probably wouldn’t as the principle itself requires profitability but then eats the notion of profitability. Unfortunately, winter snows will come soon and I will “need” to pay the oil company. The oil company will not reduce the price of oil to a level commensurate to my current pay. I could certainly stop buying food in order to make up the difference but that would be impractical.

Government as a problematic object for Norquist is an easy mark. Since it’s difficult to define, it can be easily rendered into an object of scorn, ridicule, and inaccurate metaphor. Norquist writes

The theory is that any dollar the government failed to take from you in taxes had in fact been given to you in a spending program. By this reasoning, the deduction-killing Alternative Minimum Tax is not a tax hike — a cruel joke on the millions of Americans who get hit by it every year. When a mugger passes you on the street leaving you unmolested, he did not in fact give you your wallet.

Here “government” is a “mugger” and “molester.” But Norquist doesn’t present a set of arguments for why the AMT is an act perpetrated by a mugger or a molester. If he disagrees with the tax he should present effective reasons why he thinks it’s horrid. Some of the history would be nice too. Indeed, if effective, people should be provided with the chance to agree or propose counterclaims. There are many things about the tax code people don’t like. It’s worthy debate material but simply issuing a blanket restriction on tax hikes and taxes in general doesn’t make for intellectual inquiry because it diminishes the act of inquiry itself.

Conservatism should not be about diminishing the act of inquiry.

By Steve :: Posted in Politics and Economics :: Comments (0)

A Note on Economics and Policy

July 7, 2011 – 1:48 pm

I’ve been reading lots of John Taylor recently. But a couple of issues come to mind in some of his recent post that perplex me, as we’ve been talking a lot in my writing course about standards of evaluation and evidence. In this post on renewing principles, he writes:

With strong economic growth and control of government spending the budget moved into balance. As the 21st century began many hoped that applying these same principles to education and health care would create greater opportunities and better lives for all Americans.

But economic policy went in a different direction. Some public officials found the limited government approach to be a disadvantage; they wanted to do more—whether to tame further the business cycle or increase homeownership.

There are a couple of gaps that need development here: who are the “many” who were hoping, and the same issues goes to “public officials,” which seems to over-simplify. Where do recents wars factor into economics here? What other factors are at play in Taylor’s analysis?

In another post on effectiveness of the stimulus, Taylor writes:

As early as the summer of 2009 it was clear that ARRA was not working as intended, as John Cogan, Volker Wieland and I reported. Research since then has uncovered the reasons why. One reason is that very large stimulus grants to the states did not go to infrastructure spending as intended, and that’s what Ned Gramlich found out about Keynesian stimulus packages thirty years ago. (links in original)

So why not try a stimulus with requirements that the money go to effective application. This doesn’t seem to be a critique of ARRA, but a problem with application. I’m interested in clarification.

By Steve :: Posted in Culture, Epistemology :: Comments (0)

After-storm Burger Poem

June 10, 2011 – 4:13 pm

We lost power yesterday and were a little leery of the burgers. Story follows.

Yesterday, before the storm, we rounded up some 80 percent meat, mixed in some onion, butter, salt and pepper then cut some generous chunks of bleu cheese and wrapped them in two handmade big burgers, a few others for those in the family who don’t like this kind of cheese. Then we had to toss them out because we lost power and I don’t like to worry about prepped grub that may or may not be quite so fresh. So, we tried again today, rounded up some more meat and opened a crisp bottle of Sauvignon. Same recipe.

I let the grill cool to about 450f and did about 3 minutes per side with the lid closed on each turn. The butter makes for even cooking and provides a medium for the onions to soften. We let them rest a few moments on a covered plate. We split the burgers in the buns and let the molten cheese ooze out for dipping onto the plate.

It was something else.

By Steve :: Posted in Food and Drink :: Comments (0)

Post-semester Impressions and Questions

May 19, 2011 – 8:05 am

It’s that time again for a semester review.

I come out of this semester with certain typical impressions of my courses and the people in them. I also come out with lots of questions.

Firstly, every semester is interesting and different. There are some things that are always the same. I always meet interesting people, and they’re always different. The students in my courses always impress me with their individual stories, struggles, and successes. In this vein, I’m particularly proud of certain students who met minimum requirements after struggles and, on the other end of the spectrum, people who kept to a habit of excellence, the kind of excellence that would be judged so at any college in the country. Some of my students, who are very good, maintained a certain inconsistency in their work that I hope they will try to overcome: it comes with discipline and concentration on the matter at hand (yes, I think weddings should be put off till after the work is done). Sometimes this can be difficult at a college where people are often seeking to get the gen eds out of the way and don’t feel challenged by a specialty.

Secondly, the question of bad habits is more interesting than good habits when it comes to thinking about necessary adjustments for the future. In many cases this semester I was left scratching my head at behaviors that seem more inherent to childhood than to college contexts. Most noticeable was the problem of attendance and the cliche email request: “Did I miss anything important?” I had students who missed a month’s worth of classroom sessions, where, yes, much of importance happened. Unfortunately, once something is missed it’s almost impossible to gain back. In addition, bad attendance records mar in-class work, as I depend upon a frisky crowd to get the juices going. A college classroom is a place where people are supposed to gather to engage the world; this engagement is the most important part of college, in my view. The other paradigm is the Einstein one, where an absent student might indeed pass a course by submitting a portfolio of writing that does meet the requirements. But in this model, Einstein was engaging the world intensely. I often found this semester that because of in-attendance, I simply could not conduct several class sessions because content was unavailable or students had not prepared.

Another issue has to do with the myth of hard work. Some people in my courses still think that simply working through the problem is enough. The question here has to do with “how much is learned through the work.” One thing that people learn in college is their threshold for difficulty and that time and work are subjective. Some people might need several months to grasp a concept or to demonstrate their understanding of relationship between argument and paragraph, while others will be able to develop their concepts only to worry about the strength of their understanding and the depth of their knowledge.

College is difficult. But it’s not difficult just because. Here’s an example. Most humans are storytellers and storymakers. Much of our relations throughout the day demonstrate the depth of storytelling as a means of framing our presence to others. “What did you do today?” and “Why do you want that?” are basic schema. But, this doesn’t mean that people grasp storytelling elements objectively with any ease. Some people may feel that articulating an argument is easy. But, I would argue that this is the equivalent of saying: “Sure, just point and shoot and you’ll have a fabulous photograph.” No, to do something well takes much time and effort. And if everyone is an excellent photographer, as a friend of mine once said, then every photographer is average.

I try to stress to my students that degrees of learning come with degrees of responsibility and awareness of ethics. We can see this today in the Mississippi basin region where learning has been applied and continues to impact everyone. Blowing the levee requires a great deal of knowledge. Not everyone needs to have that specific knowledge, though, but those who do have a tremendous responsibility. Is the control of water sound, ethical, and wise? That’s being debated. In literature, we would call this a theme. We must know what a theme is, find them, and then understand them not just in literature but in the work of engineering corps.

Humans have derived massive systems and technologies. Are they hard? They are complex, and understanding this complexity requires lots of work. So, yes, college should be hard. I have a story that illustrates my view on the question authority:

When the doctor needs expert advice on what to grill, he asks Joe the Butcher. But who does Joe the Butcher ask for advice when he cuts his thumb off with the meat slicer? They are, in my mind, dependent on each other.

As an ability-based thinker, I consider how my examinations, paper assignments, and classroom pedagogy shape what people think about in their efforts to learn. I’ve learned a lot about this in my efforts at the guitar. I’ve been practicing the instrument for a few weeks over a year and am still mystified by the mechanics, the structure of music, and the shape of my body. It’s been lots of hard work but I still can’t really play the guitar and song that I started playing many months ago still give me headaches. I ask several questions: shouldn’t I be better by know? Shouldn’t I be able to press a simple C note easier with my 1st finger? These are complex questions. I don’t have good answers. I keep practicing because I want to learn to play the guitar not because someone else wants me to. But I do know that I will never be as adept as many of my students and friends who play. That’s not the point. One thing I know is that this doesn’t make me less of a human being (though I may feel that way).

This is a significant lesson that has nothing to with grades. It goes to the notion of determinism and the system of ethics we work with in institutions that are “deterministic” in nature. Consider A, who is a student in new media. Let’s also consider B, also a student in new media. B, after several weeks, drops the course because this or that concept is difficult to grasp. Maybe he’s new to the media arts. Why doesn’t really matter. In culture, B would be judged as “dumb” versus A, who turns in her stuff and it works just fine. Why “dumb?” Let’s change the context and go back to 5th grade, where I remember a certain student, B, having to do the 5th grade again, requiring an entire year of retake (did he need the whole year again; yes, according to the cause/effect rules). As kids, we thought B was “dumb.” We might not have known that B was building a timemachine in his backyard and thus had no time to learn spelling. Maybe B had to take care of a sick parent. We, of course, only saw B through the institutional (our view of childhood was partly shaped by school) lens. Every time a student leaps to their death because of bad grades or whatever reason, they are working in an established system not outside of it. I’ve learned over the years that rebels exist just as much as believers do inside existing systems. What defines, for example, an atheist?

Culturally and socially, we struggle with human character and ability and have a habit of judgement that is unnecessary to creative solutions to problems. Some students may be disinclined to the kinds of things college covers in its complex spectra. Some students may require more or less time to learn. But our system is fixed and inflexible where it does not need to be so. In our search for ordered passage up the ladder to “jobs” and “careers,” we’ve perhaps not thought hard enough about how other kinds of creativity can be fostered. We will be reading more on the graduation bubble.

I wish my students luck, especially those who are struggling with the requirements. Now I have to think about certain adjustments. The thinking continues.

By Steve :: Posted in Culture, Epistemology, Teaching :: Comments (2)

A Few Weekend Notes

May 14, 2011 – 5:41 pm

1. We need rain.

2. Too much detail work is making my eyes hurt. (Better note: Pages is best for creating pdfs.)

3. Paying close attention to union and state deal, helpless to do anything else.

4. Made bbq chicken. It was very good.

5. Readying myself for the last assessment go round and a week of prep for the summer.

6. Gearing for 100 Days.

7. Summer work looks like: book making, poetry writing, revising pedagogies for writing courses as I am stymied, writing software in rails, and doing some test teaching and gardening.

By Steve :: Posted in Culture, Epistemology :: Comments (0)

On the James Tate Case: well, not really

May 13, 2011 – 10:13 am

Connecticut has this weird issue with students in high school, rules, and processes. The latest is Shelton High student James Tate and the case of the Sign and the Prom. Others include, of course, Doninger v. Niehoff.

What’s running here is the easy story arc, apparently made for national television and Youtube. A man buys a hat to impress the boss. Unfortunately, the company has a no hat policy. The boss is indeed impressed with the hat, then says, “But you’re fired, Hank.”

The “bad guy” in the “true” story is headmaster Beth Smith, who now has the full weight of the mayor and other state legislators against her. Even an alderperson has something to say on the matter

Shelton Alderman John Finn said Wednesday that Tate has “done nothing wrong” and that he thinks Smith will “lose a lot of respect over this.”

Of course, in the Hank story above we learn later in his story that the aforementioned rule may not be a rule just a “practice,” which leaves wiggle room, because the rule only applied to hats with brims. The world erupts, The Boss is now in a situation where face will be lost. The truth of it all will be sorted out sometime in the future.

And, of course, students will continue to graduate from high school with deficiencies in expected ability, but at least love lives on, legislators with “write a law,” and everyone will live happier ever after.

By Steve :: Posted in Culture :: Comments (0)

How Should Students do Research Then?

May 13, 2011 – 7:15 am

On certain rounds this morning, I followed a ProfHacker post to The Full Wiki, a site that tells people:

Students, we find sources for your essay,
so you don’t have to.

Additional explanation goes:

We find similar sentences to those in Wikipedia, complete with their citations for you to paste into your essay. It’s the easy way to branch off to find authoritative sources and relevant quotes to deepen your research.

I don’t know what these mean. “We find sources” and “We find similar sentences” is confusing. Why not “We find similar paragraphs or phrases”?

I did some digging on the site and quickly found myself trapped by its method of using links, going from directories (search results) to domain switches, such as quiz. . . and then being harassed by popups. The site aims to parse Wikipedia articles by source. Again, I have a hard time understanding what this means, as it would seem to over-complicate the process of research and make the structure of Wikipedia content ambiguous. To be fair, I watched a video explanation of the site and it was useful in understanding the functionality and intent of The Full Wiki. But this only served to make the front page information somewhat misleading.

I followed through to the Narcolepsy example. I moved the mouse over the second sentence highlight and a list of “citable” links to articles appeared. I clicked on the first listing and encountered this message at the destination: “We are sorry but the article you are looking for cannot be found.” The second link took me to a definition of rabies. In addition, I placed the current Narcolepsy article at Wikipedia against that produced by The Full Wiki and the side by side didn’t match.

The Full Wiki is still in beta so perhaps some of this “intelligent” sourcing will be fixed.

Such a service illustrates something about teaching and doing research in an academic context. I think Wikipedia is a tremendous resource. Articles at Wikipedia point to good references and provide general interest information. The problem with Wikipedia for student researchers is that Wikipedia articles are not intended to play the role of a source, as Wikipedia articles are meant to be altered, edited, and continually reviewed, hence citing an article will likely lead to holes, as citations in research are meant to be traceable and show how ideas are augmented, supported, or related. They are also supposed to show the “legacy” of ideas, providing authoritative grounding to the writer.

Research methods courses teach students about the publishing ecosystem. This is not an easy thing to do. I have a terrible time introducing methods to students in composition courses as the expectations of these courses exceed student training, a problem I don’t understand as most students come to college with high school degrees. These degrees, however, are structurally inadequate. By structural I mean that high school content no longer prepares students for college. This would imply that high school pedagogical frameworks find college expectations out of reach.

Then again, the methods of a composition course aren’t rocket science. Student ability to learn how to search a research database makes interesting and appropriate content reasonably available. What to do with content is the hard part and forms the core pedagogy of writing courses.

By Steve :: Posted in Epistemology, Teaching :: Comments (0)

On Enjambment and Other Horrors

May 11, 2011 – 11:49 am

My students are having horrible troubles with the notion of enjambment. Well, not really, but they think they are. It’s important for students of writing to understand the techniques of any given form not so much for the use of those techniques but to understand how meaning is made possible and how language can be shaped. Most technique is transparent. In film, editing techniques are often meant not to be noticed.

Here’s a section of Anna Barbauld’s The Epiphany

Deep in Sabea’s fragrant groves retired,
Long had the Eastern Sages studious dwelt,
By love sublime of sacred science fired:
Long had they trained the’ inquiring youth,
With liberal hand the bread of wisdom dealt,
And sung in solemn verse mysterious truth.

That first line is significant. It provides us language about place, which is a typical routine of the phrase. It provides context. But I doubt the poet is offering that first line as a complete unit of meaning, hence we can say the line is part of an enjambed unit. The punctuation doesn’t matter. The reader is meant to follow the next several lines to the noun and verb: sages and dwelt. Of course, it’s important that the sages have had a lot of time invested in Sabea’s groves. They’ve been in there a long time, which is suggested by the words “deep” and “retired” in line 1.

Enjambment as a poetic technique can be interpreted in many ways because of the way poetic lines can be conceived. If cummings could write “i thank You God for most this amazing / day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees” we have to be able to infer that he worried about the meaning of the line break and avoided placing the word “day” beside “amazing.” The metrical unit doesn’t need to matter, nor does the foot pattern, as in disyllabic (iamb) or trisyllabic (anapest). But it can matter, also, depending on the sense of lines, as in Barbauld’s poem above. In the cummings example, the speaker says “i thank you God . . . ” This, of course, is a clause, but it isn’t the unit of meaning of significance in the sense of a poetic line, though it might be fine as a church utterance. If the significant unit of meaning crosses lines, then we have enjambed examples.

In the history of poetry, the identification of the technique, calling it by name as a technique, might not really matter but then again it might, as techniques need abstraction. It depends on language, too. One of the things I don’t talk about in English Literature course are things like the greek ictus, which is the first beat or first syllable of a metrical foot. In the classic dactylic hexameter, which can be difficult to understand, because metrical types can be interchanged ( a spondee for a trochee–I think I’m recalling that right), the ictus is incredibly important. I would also suggest that the phenomenon is important to cummings and other poets who care about entering lines with something sharp and progressive (which I’m finding significant in music, but in the way of lines) but also as a means of distinguishing lines and making images with them.

When Frost writes in Mending Wall “The work of hunters is another thing:” he’s using critical method to control what the reader does with the lines that came before.

By Steve :: Posted in English literature, Fiction and Poetry, Teaching :: Comments (0)

What is a Sensible Education Policy?

May 8, 2011 – 7:20 am

Reading the paper this morning was somewhat frustrating and dismaying. This year, Connecticut will see perhaps some of the deepest cuts to public education in a long while. Some people see this as either sensible or just the way things must be.

I disagree. Schools will shrink; higher education institutions will be required to cut services and programs; many graduates in education will be unable to fill those spaces left by retirees.

The opposite should be the case. If the current system of education remains (this is a qualifier) then more recourses should be provided to schools; programs and services of higher education should be expanded, and, not only should retiree positions be filled, current gaps in teaching resources should grow to meet demand. This all sounds counterintuitive, of course. There’s a budget crisis, after all; the economy has tanked; thousands of people can’t find work.

However, will diminishing the system solve the above problems? Will, as Brian Clemow argues in this article, cutting union bargaining power solve the problems that tax payers face (assuming that government employees are not tax payers), which is the language of divide and conquer? Unfortunately, we won’t know this from reading the article, which amounts to little more than a complaint that union members just happen to be energetic voters.

Private sector unions are active in politics, too. However, their influence is much less, in part because only about one in 10 workers belong to a union, while all but a handful of state and local government employees in Connecticut are unionized.

More important, private sector employees don’t have a say in who becomes the CEO or board chairman of their company. Public sector employees do, in effect, and this has resulted in their obtaining benefits that the average taxpayer can only dream about.

Interesting enough, Clemow never steps back and asks whether private sector workers should have a voice in “who becomes the CEO.” That 50,000 workers control who “becomes CEO” is strained logic for obvious, arithmetic reasons. In addition, the author provides zero evidence to prove a cause and effect relationship between control of elected officials and benefits. He may want to believe this, but wanting doesn’t make it so. It’s also unclear from the article from whence the unions will get “billions in wages and benefits to avoid layoffs . . .” Which brings me back to my original point.

It is indeed possible to find the saving Clemow wants. A more progressive tax code might be a start, as I’ve argued before, or some acknowledgment of the housing bubble and healthcare costs. Another scenario might be to simple divorce control of educational services from government’s role. Yes, the government might simply legislate the responsibility of educating the citizenry from its responsibility, just as it might legislate away the requirement of a balanced budget or taxes on yoga.

Come Fall 2011, no schools. Thus no burden on the taxpayer.

Of course, people will say: “Come on. That’s extreme. That’s not what we mean.”

My question will be, “Well, what do you mean then?”

It may be that the entrepreneurs will show up ready to purchase all the buildings and the neglected equipment and open up shop, hiring out-of-work ex-government employees and many faculty and staff from private schools and colleges (most people don’t have the time to do this and teaching human beings the art of learning is not easy, as most parents and fiction writers know). What they will quickly find is that their business plans don’t add up and that the per-pupil cost of education at the moment is actually an understatement not just of dreams and fantasies but of “reality.” We could always try this and assess whether the forecasts were honest accountings.

Rather, I would suggest that if solid education is the goal then we should strive to do the best job possible not the job we currently do, which is working for high ideals on a fraying shoe string. This would require, however, some rethinking:

1. Sufficient staffing and resources
2. Raising the expectations of teaching degrees
3. Rethinking the “grade system”
4. Integrating schools into the hum and beat of their communities so that they are less schoolish and more bent toward creative problem solving and learning
5. Rethink managerial elitism, expertise, and hierarchies

I may be wrong, but my theory is that the more robust the learning (rather than technical schooling), the more beneficial the system is to society. But maybe I’m wrong.

By Steve :: Posted in Culture, Epistemology, Teaching :: Comments (0)

Why Write Poetry?

April 28, 2011 – 8:04 pm

This semester in “school” has been all about language. I’ve been tinkering with a poem about Kansas, for example. The first part goes like this:

They say Kansas is flattest
But that just means
there
people see farther

The problem I’ve been treating is the word “there” and where it should be put. It’s an indicator of place. You know, as in: over there. But not really. There, in this sense, is meant as a synonym. There = Kansas. You know, that place.

But it’s not a place. It’s a word. And the problem is where it should it go.

One way of treating the problem is to use the pre tag in html to make sure that the thing goes where I want it to.

It may be true that in places with less stuff in the way, like mountains or tall trees, people can indeed see “farther.” But what does that mean? And what would people who can see farther than people in New England, who can only see tree trunks or cars, think about differently than people who interpret distances differently?

That’s a rhetorical question.

Does seeing farther imply more wisdom? Et cetera.

In New Media the students are still struggling with the difference between reality things and digital things. In the Ruby programming language we define an object class this way:

class Poem
end

and inside the class Poem we can manipulate or definine its elements

class Poem
def line
@line
end
end

But nothing here has anything to do with a poem, at least as far as the computer is concerned. The computer just thinks that the class Object is expecting to extend to an object called Poem. But Poem needs something like @line to make it work. Kind of like the indefinite “there” as Kansas. In Inform, moreover, stairs give students all kinds of problems.

How do I program stairs?

John and I laugh at these kinds of questions. But we shouldn’t. The student might as well ask: how do I create a tiger in photoshop?

This is actually never done. A tiger has never been in Photoshop, just as Orcs are not really in Tolkien.

In Tinderbox, we write notes. At least we fool ourselves into thinking this, as the numerous notes we might write in Tinderbox are not really notes at all but digital representations of phenomenon we call up as notes. Let’s say we peal a yellow piece of paper off a stack and say, here’s a note.

Well, this isn’t a note either.

So, so what if

Kansas is flattest

No, here’s what I have thus far:

A Poem about Kansas (though I’ve only driven through it)

They say Kansas is flattest
But that just means
there
people see farther

Say in Libya
If I’m stomped on by a tank
will I feel my tibias crack
before the crushing of my skull

It’s just a question I have no answer for
It’s more a question about the pain of fossils
And empty tar field air
As I sink through, touching for the bottom
with my fingers

of words like Lybia
and Saudi Arabia
and Casuistry

and blood
wishing that flattest
might mean I could be flatter
than the width of red and blue
between stars

I want to be bigger
than the tip of a rhino’s horn

By Steve :: Posted in Epistemology, Fiction and Poetry :: Comments (2)

My Fight Against Critical Thinking

April 25, 2011 – 2:37 pm

As an explicit ability that is. At the college we’re still going around in our determination of what constitutes an educated human being, at least as defined by a community college where we’re referred to typically as a two year college. This isn’t always accurate but the “time-definition” does provide a framework for a stage of appropriateness. But it may be wise to consider that “schooling” in learning might take a few hours for one person and a few years in another.

That aside, it might also be wise to assert a definition of critical thinking as an abstraction for things like methods of reasoning and judgement, particular kinds of mindedness or mindfulness and awareness, recognitions of phenomena and their contexts, and the application and interpretation of systems. I’m reminded, for example, of a place in Plato’s Republic where Socrates reasons through wisdom as depending on a kind of knowledge because wisdom itself can’t depend on ignorance. This is an example of critical thinking but in the abstract. More precisely, it’s Plato using generalized deductive reasoning.

Let’s say we say something like this: students at college will graduate with good critical thinking skills. Let’s assume the above to be true as a given and then assert the dimensions of critical thinking instead of the broader abstraction, such as interpreting the relevance of numerical information in a variety of contexts. We could jack the requirements up by writing this: the student interprets the relevance and value of numerical information in a variety of contexts using a variety of tools.

Of course, students could use lots of methods to show or demonstrate the above.

Claiming that Einstein was a good critical thinker just doesn’t seem to capture the essence.

By Steve :: Posted in Epistemology, Teaching :: Comments (0)

The Darkling Thrush and Corpse Metaphors

April 17, 2011 – 2:56 pm

One of my favorite poems is Thomas Hardy’s The Darkling Thrush. Why: because with Hardy’s language we can think about how poets think about language in a specific historical space. Hardy has inside him an ear for language specifically bent on what he would term poetry. It’s a different poetic language than Wordsworth’s or Keats’s. Consider the famous corpse metaphor:

The land’s sharp features seemed to be
The Century’s corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
Seemed fervourless as I.

One issue that draws me here is the size of the image. It’s the “century’s corpse.” This is pretty big. 100 years. A whole of a specific time, part of which Hardy has no experiential knowledge, and his knowledge of yesterday would, of course, be as questionable as mine is. He was born in 1840. Still, he has a sense of the size of a century, as do I but not really. This a secret sense, a feeling of width, grandeur, and abstraction in the form of time span. But let’s consider the word “outleant,” which describes the shape of the century. This is a bothersome word, the kind of word poets love but dictionary writers and linguists hate. It goes with the first line of the stanza. If Hardy can say “The land’s sharp features seemed to be” and then follow this with “outleant” then he’s certainly drawing a massive image that forces our eye to edges, lines, surfaces that just don’t stop; they blend into all, which is the landscape, everything, including the speaker. Thus “outleant” is full of motion and energy: it’s going out, it’s leaning, outleaning, leaning out, spreading and stretching. This is a “compounding” term, packed with a poetic sense of compression.

And it’s a corpse. But it’s also a century. But it’s also not a century at all. It’s an impression of a moment in time. Five minutes later the speaker might be having a nice warm tea and thinking about butter or cake and or, best to him, pea soup with ham.

By Steve :: Posted in Fiction and Poetry :: Comments (0)