On Relationships: Jobs, Money, Bubbles

A couple of interesting relationships in the paper this morning. There’s the report on UCONN’s raise in tuition which related to the article on college students and jobs.

Nationally, we’re due for major issues in graduation rates and matches in the job market, what I’d call a sort of degree bubble, though this isn’t the most accurate description. If there are more architects graduating than there are openings in architecture firms, then the architect must either wait for an opening or try something else. May/June graduations will be spirited until reality hits. How colleges and universities react or change will have a lot to do national policy coming out of Congress, though it may not be the responsibility of the college to have to worry about it, as a multi-decade problem has been brewing over the role of colleges and universities in the ecology of “quality of life.”

In terms of education, most of the students that I know and work with aren’t really sure why they’ve entered higher ed, other than it’s something they should be doing or need to do. Or they’re fallowing a now-common life narrative of birth, school, more school, then work. At my college, the money is less of an issue than it would be at a big money institution, where the debt load can be astronomical, though for many of my students low cost still equates to big money. The narrative is important as it relates to others, such as the loss of manufacturing jobs, which provided alternative means to a decent living after WWII. Now, recent high school graduates can either stay where they are (living however they’re living) or go to school, which confuses the role of higher education from the perspective of the personal (and live according to a future vision based on what exists now or how “now” is interpreted).

I remember when I graduated from high school. I would say something like, “I have to find a job.” Most people knew what this meant: it meant “dish washing” to make money for tuition at a relatively inexpensive state university. The reality at this point is that the college degree is in high demand. Whether the degree should be high demand is not my issue in this post. But I don’t think the persistent mantra of deficit reduction at the national level has much to do with the realities of this demand. It’s a simple mantra, that federal deficit cutting with create jobs. If this is true, I have to see the working syllogism. It seems to me that the more complicated and significant question is: what future economy will create demand for people with college or university degrees?

How Can I Read Novels on My Mobile Phone

People often ask me, “How can you read a novel on such a small screen.”

I show them the novel on the screen and prove that the words are actually bigger on that small screen than on the book page, which would suggest that what they really mean is: “I am unfamiliar with this method of reading.”

The Big Lie of the Day

The big lie of the day today, this Friday the 18th, as I work with html canvas code, is the cry all over the news that the United States is broke. In this country millions of people are out at the restaurant; they’re out in their cars buying gas and going about their business; they’re at the store buying groceries (I was at the store today purchasing lettuce, root beer, and tomatoes, and saw them doing this, too, one guy at the meat counter even ordered some deli). Best Buy and the Apple Store are probably packed. If the United States were broke, none of this would be happening.

If we were broke, Congresspeople would be at home guarding their water bottles, hunkering down in their holes. The problem as I see it is that currently budget and other policy insist on the status quo. There’s very little talk of raising top tier tax rates and finding some way to lower healthcare costs, which would probably create surpluses. Politicians know this. But they don’t want to direct their attention to these small matters. In all this mix, the housing bubble and the looming new tech bubble have been shoved under the carpet. Have real wages gone up in this country? Where is the money going? Not, I would argue, to pensions.

The lie of “the busted bank” is argued as having something to do with nature not policy. It’s the alignment of the stars, some argue; it’s the way things are so we must adapt and adopt.

Is John Boehner right when he asserts that Government borrowing is taking money away private interests? How so? Interest rates argue otherwise. But the economists can settle that question. If Wisconsin (and I mean this ironically) could find a way of controlling health care costs, this other budget nonsense about the “only way to solve” the problem would probably go away. Note that was no TARP for the states.

February 11, 2011

This is a special date, as so many dates are. And how appropriate that we’re covering Romanticism at the moment in British Literature II, where we converse about Blake and others in the context of the United States, France, Haiti, and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

Here’s to Egypt.

On Demography and the Future of CT

Seems interesting appropriate for the Composition II student:

Connecticut’s leaders are understandably obsessing over the state’s fiscal crisis, but a prominent economist warned Monday that the bigger and more difficult challenge to its long-term economic health is anemic population growth and an aging workforce.

Barry Bluestone of Northeastern University told a Hartford audience that the state must continue smart-growth zoning policies that encourage denser, less expensive housing–a key factor in attracting a younger workforce.

While politicians often focus on taxes and a regulatory environment, a chronic labor shortage is ultimately more destructive to a region’s business climate and its fiscal stability, Bluestone said.

“Demography is destiny,” he told a forum organized by the Partnership for Strong Communities: “How the States Will Fight for Young Workers and Economic Growth.”

But we also shouldn’t forget about the seasoned workforce.

Another Best Buy Trip: Or, Are Public Ed Solutions Easier Than We Think?

Since education is much in the news, here’s another interesting Megan article that might reveal much. She reports:

The legislature’s higher education committee discussed several bills Tuesday that it hopes to raise in the current session, including one that would enable the tracking of individual students through college.

Here’s the breakdown of significant items

The committee also discussed bills that would:

*Address the Connecticut State University System. Exactly what this bill would do has not yet been decided because legislators are waiting for a report from the state’s program review and investigations staff that is expected to assess the operation of the system.

*Address the agreements among the state’s public colleges and universities to ensure the easy transfer of credits from one institution to the next.

*Work toward the elimination of sexual violence on college campuses.

*Require institutions of higher education to provide financial counseling to students receiving financial aid.

*Require early childhood educators to have either a bachelor’s or associate’s degree by 2015.

*Address the University of Connecticut Health Center. This bill is also uncertain and will depend on what the legislators learn during hearings about the next step for the proposed renovation and expansion of the health center. Late last month, the state learned that it would not be getting a $100 million grant from the federal government for the work.

*Help prepare students to join Connecticut’s manufacturing and technological workforce.

*Create a strategic plan for higher education.

A couple of comments: Connecticut, therefore, does not have a “higher ed” strategic plan. CT will be hiring more financial aid staff. CT will grow Early Childhood ed programs. CT will explore its manufacturing and tech workforce, whatever this may mean. But this might be a hint. CT will persist in the “transfer” problem for yet another legislative round. Furthermore, Megan reports

State Sen. Beth Bye, D-West Hartford, and the committee’s co-chairwoman, said that the bill — which is still in the “concept stage” — would tag students with a “unique indentifer” so that their records could be followed at any public or private college or university that receives government funding.

“A high number of our students need remediation,” Bye said. “This will give us a way to understand where students are coming from, how can we support them … so community colleges aren’t using so many resources on remediation.”

Technically speaking, this “tracking” is not so difficult. It wouldn’t even require a “unique [sic] identifier.” All the state would have to do is ask for the numbers. The real problem is what the numbers will say. The legislature is actually after information that is readily knowable now: we know where students are coming from and we also have a pretty good idea why students need “remediation,” which is a word I don’t like, as the root “remedy” is improper. Enormous scholarship exists on the problem. Community college teachers teach these students and our professional staffs have much knowledge about them.

From my perspective, the early years of college should be the equivalent of “intellectual bootcamp.” The concepts, knowledge, and frameworks of higher education have developed from thousands of years of knowledge in philosophy, science, ethics, and language. To be successful, a student must be mature, patient, resilient, and curious. But the solutions to our current “public” education problems are actually simple to fix but impossible at the moment to make real, and, of course, they’re arguable:

1. A 1:10 teacher-student ratio across the board
2. Intuitive learning spaces for all students
3. Grueling study in knowledge frameworks for teachers, with plenty of flexibility for their own research and initiatives
4. Integrate all schools into their communities so that it’s difficult to see where the school starts and the community begins
5. Make real alternatives to higher ed so that the “Everyone needs a college degree” philosophy isn’t necessary. If high school has general rigor and can be viewed as “terminal” and someone can seek good quality of life with the high school degree, is this not a good thing?

I assume a general agreement with the above by most people. But if the money can’t be found, then “weaker” solutions should simply be seen as “workarounds.”

Education in Connecticut: or the $50 Best Buy Trip

A couple of articles of note in today’s paper. Connecticut, apparently, lags in post-secondary education. Kathleen Megan writes

“This is a race at which everyone is getting faster for the most part,” said Higher Education Commissioner Michael P. Meotti. “So your speed is not the key. It’s your acceleration that is the key. … Our speed is going up. … The problem is our acceleration ranks us 34th out of 50 states.”

Meotti said that if the state remains “in the bottom third in terms of our rate of growth” in the attainment of post-secondary degrees, “then we are heading for a really difficult situation over the next 10 and 20 years in terms of the overall quality of the workforce.”

Megan never really explains why “lower education attainment” is a negative outcome and Meotti seems to suggest that simply growing degrees is by nature a good.

Meotti said this rate of growth is especially important for Connecticut because “we are in a sense a higher education-sensitive economy, so for us this is like the oil wells in Saudi Arabia. They do not only need to pump oil, they need to pump more oil. … Our education level of our work force really defines the Connecticut success story of the 20th century. That is in great jeopardy.”

It would be interesting to identify where current and recent graduates are and what they are doing in the state.

But then comes the interesting paradox. Don Stacom writes

NEW BRITAIN — After losing about 50 teachers to budget cuts last year, the city’s financially battered school system faces the prospect of laying off another 100 or more this summer, the board of education said Wednesday night.

The system faces a projected $11 million gap in the coming budget, the result of a staggering reduction in federal grants and the likelihood of bare-bones funding from city government, board members said.

To close about $6 million of that deficit, the board unanimously agreed Wednesday night to cut 105 jobs in the 2011-12 budget – including dozens of teachers along with administrators, school secretaries, vocational counselors, maintenance workers, a computer technician and others. The reductions take effect after the new fiscal year starts July 1.

The final paragraph of the Megan article makes this interesting:

To improve Connecticut’s performance, Meotti said that attention will have to be paid to improving college retention and graduation rates. A key, he said, will be ensuring that when students arrive at college, they are prepared to do the work.

Rick Green mentions the Board of Governors’ report and a blog commenter lists community college graduation rates, calling them “frad” rates, and then blames something called the “education industry” and “shady admissions councilors.”

It’s logical to assume that if a school system has no money to pay for talent and buildings, then talent and buildings can’t be paid for. This, of course, is circularly expressed. If I go to Best Buy with 50 dollar bills, I can’t purchase the 800 dollar TV. But, as a faculty member at Tunxis Community College, it is frustrating to repeatedly read that while a group may want to confirm the existence of quarks, they refuse to purchase the proper collider to do the job, assuming the collider requirement in the first place. I also understand, however, that numerous people are also looking for solutions.

Most people who work in Connecticut education can do the math. But here are some questions:

1. If Connecticut elevates graduation rates to 25 or 100 per cent, what will the graduates do?
2. If high schools see layoffs, will students be prepared for college work? Are they prepared now? Were they prepared in 2007?
3. Who will provide the “resourceless model” of education that will sustain Connecticut’s present and future ecology or will these contributions come only from people who can pay for the privilege?

Often arguments about education attainment are couched in the rhetoric of passive observation. Most people have heard or have said something like this:

Wow, look at that person. He doesn’t know how to spell or behave or do the task assigned or do “fill in the blank.”

Models of good education are everywhere, really. They begin with the person doing the observing, offering the critique, as they are obviously the one in the know. Where did they go to school? How did they learn what they know?

I’d lay good money on the bet that shrinking schools these days will not generate stars at the college level. I might assert this as a fact. But then, so much for the report and what good it might do.

One Reason why “Job-Killing” is Bad Language

AP has an interesting report today on the use of statistics.

A recent report by House GOP leaders says “independent analyses have determined that the health care law will cause significant job losses for the U.S. economy.”

It cites the 650,000 lost jobs as Exhibit A, and the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office as the source of the original analysis behind that estimate. But the budget office, which referees the costs and consequences of legislation, never produced the number.

Many have suggested that the short title of the bill is a bad idea because of the use of the word “killing.” More to the point, the question might be, instead, thoughtful titles in official work by Congress. To inject vehement language into a title is cynical, and, as AP confirms in this case, incorrect. How would it play, for example, if the bill to amend the law used the words “health care law” without use of “Job-Killing”?

One reason: the bill would be a irrelevant. “Job-Killing” in this case is meant to “prove” that facts have been verified by evidence. Is this intentional “error of fact” or the wishful thinking fallacy.

Let’s assume instead a need for a higher burden of proof to write legislation.

Tone, Discourse, and that Dreaded Rhetoric

I’ve read lots of “tone” in today’s papers. Civility, responsibility, guns, blame, and civil discourse have been the themes of the last week or so. Consider David Brooks in his essay titled Tree of Failure. In the column, Brooks’s tone can be considered civil and thoughtful. Here’s how he begins

President Obama gave a wonderful speech in Tucson on Wednesday night. He didn’t try to explain the rampage that occurred there. Instead, he used the occasion as a national Sabbath — as a chance to step out of the torrent of events and reflect. He did it with an uplifting spirit. He not only expressed the country’s sense of loss but also celebrated the lives of the victims and the possibility for renewal.

He calls Barack Obama’s memorial speech “wonderful” and “uplifting.” He characterizes Obama’s approach as “an occasion as a national Sabbath.” The subject of the essay is his take on the “roots” of civility. He writes

Civility is a tree with deep roots, and without the roots, it can’t last. So what are those roots? They are failure, sin, weakness and ignorance.

Brooks ties these ideas to “modesty” and a need to re-carve it into our relationships: “Most of all, there will have to be a return to modesty,” he writes. He places “modesty” in contrast to “narcissism.” The frame for this “modesty” is wrapped in the language of Genesis: “But over the past few decades, people have lost a sense of their own sinfulness.” Finally, Brooks calls on the words of Reinhold Niebuhr to make his final appeal, which is an interesting choice.

In addition to Brooks, I took a look at Paul Krugman piece entitled A Tale of Two Moralities. I did this because I also read Charles Krauthammer’s piece Rabid Partisans Hallucinated Shooter’s Reasons and I wanted to see why he comes down so hard on Krugman, which, of course, simply led to the reading of the essays.

Krugman begins his piece this way

On Wednesday, President Obama called on Americans to “expand our moral imaginations, to listen to each other more carefully, to sharpen our instincts for empathy, and remind ourselves of all the ways our hopes and dreams are bound together.” Those were beautiful words; they spoke to our desire for reconciliation.

Krugman’s thesis has to do with his difficult reconciliation might be given divisiveness. He writes,

But the truth is that we are a deeply divided nation and are likely to remain one for a long time. . . . For the great divide in our politics isn’t really about pragmatic issues, about which policies work best; it’s about differences in those very moral imaginations Mr. Obama urges us to expand, about divergent beliefs over what constitutes justice.

The nature of this division, according to Krugman, has to do with points of view that can’t be squared. Here’s how he characterizes the differing views:

One side of American politics considers the modern welfare state — a private-enterprise economy, but one in which society’s winners are taxed to pay for a social safety net — morally superior to the capitalism red in tooth and claw we had before the New Deal. It’s only right, this side believes, for the affluent to help the less fortunate.

The other side believes that people have a right to keep what they earn, and that taxing them to support others, no matter how needy, amounts to theft. That’s what lies behind the modern right’s fondness for violent rhetoric: many activists on the right really do see taxes and regulation as tyrannical impositions on their liberty.

These “characterizations” are generalized and I don’t necessarily agree with their implications. Having “a right to keep what they earn” doesn’t necessarily lead to charges of “tyranny.” In the first, “liberal” characterization, one doesn’t necessarily need to view a “progressive tax code” in context with “welfare state.” To place them back into Brooks’s scheme, we would need to ask “Who’s the narcissist?” which doesn’t seem like an appropriate question. In any event, it is possible to not to react with spleen to Krugman but to build an argument in disagreement. He ends the piece with this:

It’s not enough to appeal to the better angels of our nature. We need to have leaders of both parties — or Mr. Obama alone if necessary — declare that both violence and any language hinting at the acceptability of violence are out of bounds. We all want reconciliation, but the road to that goal begins with an agreement that our differences will be settled by the rule of law.

Here’s my disagreement. Developing the two sides and their points of disagreement would have been more helpful, especially on the technical nature of the issues, to Krugman’s thesis. Is it naive to say that we don’t spend enough time examining and debating whether this is that bolt size will do the job better? I think this Krugman’s point.

Charles Krauthammer’s Rabid Partisans Hallucinated Shooter’s Reasons attempts to make the case that blaming Sarah Palin and the Tea Party for the Arizona tragedy is unsupported by evidence and that those who do so are evincing their own style of “hallucination.” He begins the essay in a legal frame:

The charge: The Tucson massacre is a consequence of the “climate of hate” created by Sarah Palin, the tea party, Glenn Beck, Obamacare opponents and sundry other liberal betes noires.

The verdict: Rarely in American political discourse has there been a charge so reckless, so scurrilous, and so unsupported by evidence.

To bring the point home, Krauthammer identifies those he believes have made the “charge” and then rounds things off with a repetition of the thesis

Not only is there no evidence that Loughner was impelled to violence by any of those upon whom Paul Krugman, Keith Olbermann, The New York Times, the Tucson sheriff and other rabid partisans are fixated. There is no evidence that he was responding to anything, political or otherwise, outside of his own head.

Krauthammer goes on to explore the apparent issue with the shooter, Loughner, and his mental health problems and then places martial metaphors in their context. He writes

Finally, the charge that the metaphors used by Palin and others were inciting violence is ridiculous. Everyone uses warlike metaphors in describing politics. When Barack Obama said at a 2008 fundraiser in Philadelphia, “If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun,” he was hardly inciting violence.

Why? Because fighting and warfare are the most routine of political metaphors. And for obvious reasons. Historically speaking, all democratic politics is a sublimation of the ancient route to power — military conquest.

When profiles of Obama’s first chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, noted that he once sent a dead fish to a pollster who displeased him, a characteristically subtle statement carrying more than a whiff of malice and murder, it was considered a charming example of excessive — and creative — political enthusiasm. When Senate candidate Joe Manchin dispensed with metaphor and simply fired a bullet through the cap-and-trade bill — while intoning, “I’ll take dead aim at (it)” — he was hardly assailed with complaints about violations of civil discourse or invitations to murder.

The above is a long quote, as I want to illustrate Krauthammer’s method. He ends the piece with a pointed expression at Krugman: “The origins of Loughner’s delusions are clear: mental illness. What are the origins of Krugman’s?”

I would make the case that Krauthammer’s fundamental point may be correct: that Loughner’s motivations might have been spurred by mental illness rather than by “politics.” I write “might” because the facts are actually not in as of yet. Krauthammer’s method, however, falls flat and makes his conclusion, which may indeed be hasty, very difficult to take as serious polemic. It would’ve been entirely agreeable to simply disagree with Krugman (or The New York Times, with what exactly about it’s reportage?) straight down the line instead of accusing the opposition of being delusional and “rabid” which draws in the specter of unnecessary ad hominem and a reflective charge of being “rabid” also. Why? Because it is possible to be incorrect without being delusional. Indeed, the approach should have been to establish exactly where the disagreement is because in Krauthammer’s case, as in Brooks’s and Krugman’s, it’s difficult to agree on the precise issue at hand.

Guitar Adventures Part 2 (Notes on Learning)

My guitar adventures continue. It’s now been nine months since I began and have a few tunes, chords, and scales under my belt. As with anything worth learning, I’ve had to do research and reading on the instrument and music in an attempt to understand the big question “Why.”

Firstly, the guitar is such a physically demanding object. It’s not heavy, but it demands that the whole body be engaged to hold, cradle, and play. In addition, the instrument physically changes the player. The first few months of practice is difficult because the strings of an acoustic guitar require calluses on all four digits of the left hand (right for left handers). The strings are also difficult to press down. The player must then develop physical strength in the fingers, wrist, and thumb. The physical strength has to be accompanied by precision or fine manipulation of the strings. I came to this thinking that all I would need was to play notes and chords, but certain chords, such as A7, require the avoidance of a middle string as well as other strings that should not be played or the A7 chord might become an E. After a time, the calluses, strength, and precision develop but at first even the C major chord seemed impossible, let alone moving from C major to F and then to the multitude of G chords.

The last physical problem to overcome was the ability to stretch the fingers over four or five frets on the board with a certain degree of comfort, while the thumb remains fixed behind the guitar neck, and to do so with speed, which involves strength and flexibility. I don’t have the largest of hands, but the B chord illustrates the problem. The first finger must depress all of the first five strings on the second fret, which is the F# fret. The second, third and fourth strings must be depressed on the G# fret or fourth fret by the remaining fingers, including the pinky.

The instrument also alters the brain. It’s simple enough make the C shape and then to strum with the right hand. After a few months I was able to go quickly from C to F and then to G or something else and strum this progression to a strict beat. But the fingers of the right hand also have to pluck according to patterns, which often involve plucking a string with the pointing finger and the next string with the ring finger, assuming that the left hand has also depressed the string corresponding to the pluck (unless the player is plucking an open string). But then the question is “Where do I look? At my right hand or my left hand?” Guitarists must do as pianists do: train their brains to work both hands in codependence. I still find this immensely difficult as my brain has forty four years of training not to work this way, as in typing, where one letter is made after the first. Nobody types simultaneous letters on a keyboard. Remember the trick where one hand pats the head while the other circles the heart?

The other issue here is with fingernails. I’ve grown the nails of my right hand as I’ve chosen to learn music where plucking is the principle means of making noise. The nails aren’t enormous but they would be long enough to paint. So, the left fingers are calloused at the tips and the rights are long-nailed, but I persistently break my pointing finger’s nail (because that’s the finger I use make holes in my walls, apparently), which makes for strange sounding plucks with that finger.

Secondly, the fret board of the instrument (and sound in general) is bizarre. This problem has to do with the intervals between the Major notes, say from A to B or G to A and how these intervals translate onto the machine. The open string of the guitar’s first string is E. The first fret is F and the third fret is G. But where’s A on the first string if one wants to go from E to F to G to A and then to B. This required study, as all Major (7 tones) and Minor (5) tones can be played on every string. The open 3rd string of the guitar is G but A happens on fret 2, so A is two frets up from G on the first string. This was my first big “Why” question, which required a few books for assistance, one of which is Kadmon’s Guitar Grimoire, which is about as serious a book on scales and modes as I could find. With it’s help I was able to learn tone intervals and how to visualize them on the fretboard. But Kadmon has also confirmed the notion that this is all bizarre.

John Timmons has helped a lot and I’ll continue to pester him (he was also kind enough to provide me an instrument that’s a little easier on the hands, which was an amazing gift), and with these books I can persist without too much guess work.

So, at this point I have a few songs, a few chords, and some chord progressions to work on. I’m in a constant state of relearning. But I don’t play the songs all that well and my brain is still fighting me because of this relearning. In Taoism, our relationship to nature is a significant issue (this was Keats’s problem with birds and their ease with songmaking). In this mode of thinking about things, being able to do something “without thinking” is a principle goal. After lots of hard practice, we learn to walk pretty much without having to thinking about it. One measure of human transition has to do with becoming aware of what was once hidden behind the wall of habit and expectation. Purposeful learning should, therefore, tend toward disawareness. Language acquisition is similar. My goal, therefore, is to practice enough so that play happens “naturally.” At the moment, I’m far from this “state of being.”