Regulation

Here’s an odd article in the paper this morning called Charter School’s Preschool at Risk. It’s an example of dropped balls and waste regarding licensing law and categories. For several reasons.

The issue has swept Jumoke into a legal battle that could have ramifications for all charter schools in the state. Although under state law charter schools are now subject to the licensing process for day-care programs, they usually did not seek a license because they assumed that, like public and private schools, they were exempt, Sharpe said.

Reasons are provided how the issue erupted:

State law says day-care programs run by a public school system or a private school acknowledged by the state Department of Education don’t need a license to operate.

That law would seem to allow day-care programs run by charter schools. But a different law defines charter schools as “public, nonsectarian school(s) … operated independently of any local or regional board of education” — thus making them a separate entity from public or private schools.

One answer is to require a license. The other is cut and paste the language of exemption from public schools to charter schools and to justify the shift without muddling the categories. But CT will take the more painful route of adding a licensing burden to charter schools, mucking up simplicity, and complicating attitudes against “regulation.”

In any event, why did the charter schools “assume”? And why did the state overlook the subject in the first place? Why are public schools exempt from licenses?

Popularity

Obama’s press reactions have been in the news a lot. I wish someone would do something about what happens to people in the public eye. I’ve heard the claim that if celebrities don’t want the exposure then they should get out of the business. This is bunk and always has been.

Consider an actor who happens to make it huge. When we break down the condition, we have an actor in a movie (or a man who’s voted into office), a person who maybe loves what they do, and can move on and do greater and greater things. Etymologically, celebrity has to do with amount of time (how many times you are aware of another person or place) and fame, thus kin to reputation in oral culture and heroism. But as people, we lose nothing in letting people get on with their business, especially now, when “getting on with business” in a post-ideological fashion might make some sense.

He can’t have his Blackberry and GW couldn’t email his kids. Shameful. One reason it worries me is because we have a lot of work to do and to let sham justifications bar solutions and decisions amounts to cracking more hulls. The cracks are widening and the water’s rising enough already.

Process

I don’t know why, but this bit from Dave Winer got the juices going.

Technology is a process, an evolution . . .

I don’t know about the Scoble part of the blog post, but this little sentence has significance beyond the original context.

Why did it get me thinking and about what? Well, poetry and prose storytelling, whose loads come via the deep technology of language of whatever flavor. Poetry “is a process, an evolution . . . ” This is an interesting teaser.

In another direction, people in education often judge technology as a cumbersome accumulation. “Oh, yet another technology I have to learn or add to the plate” and so forth down the road of dismissal or disuse, while the “process” proceeds into profitable areas of research, question, or creative accumulation and application and interesting changes to thinking. On relevant reason to “dismiss” technology is its cost. These are real in the economic ecology of the classroom and physical plants. We need to think differently about the money is spent in the context of research, question, and creative accumulation, and especially change to the institutional thought. Soon, this will be out of my hands somewhat, which is good, and the older pursuits where I can apply what I’ve learned over the last five years with begin to evolve.

My head is playing with enthymeme’s at the moment. If this then that.

McEnroe to Stare at Sky

I’m saddened to read that Colin McEnroe will be going off the air at WTIC.

McEnroe, a Courant columnist, began with WTIC in 1992 with a morning show and began his afternoon show 12 years ago. He said he planned to take a few weeks off to “stare at the sky” and did not have any plans for any other radio position at the moment.

Radio layoffs, the report claims. I suggest a podcast format. In any event, this changes the afternoon AM format.

I enjoyed the show. Thanks Colin and good luck.

On Reading

I’m currently reading Maryanne Wolf’s Proust and the Squid. It’s a book that sets up a major goal and I wonder if Wolf can meet the expectation: to expose the neurological reading process without remaining too anecdotal. We can describe reading experiences and expose brain function. But is this satisfying enough?

One expectation I have is some connection between screen and link reading and page reading. More coming just because I’m curiosity.

Kuglemass on Undergraduate Curricula

While I think that Joseph Kuglemass generalizes on Aristotle and Critical Thinking in this article at Inside Higher Ed, it’s well worth the read. He writes:

From the middle of the last century until fairly recently, the idea that the purpose of undergraduate education is to foster “critical thinking” has had a virtual monopoly in both academic and popular circles. This goal has been institutionalized around the globe, wherever students are tested on “critical reasoning” skills.

It is an answer I myself have given on many occasions, and it holds up well for an old chestnut. It is a difficult code to enforce in a humanities classroom. It is a concept best suited to the inspection of evidence. Education researcher Lion Gardiner described critical reasoning as “the capacity to evaluate skillfully and fairly the quality of evidence and detect error, hypocrisy, manipulation, dissembling, and bias.” Unfortunately, presented with something like a Max Ernst painting or a Martin Luther King speech, students will be hard-pressed to find error, hypocrisy, or bias. Critical reasoning will not help them to “unpack” the text, as we say in the humanities, though it may help when they are called upon to construct a rigorous argument.

The article originally appeared at The Valve.

Here’s where I think the major generalization happens:

Teaching a class too much in this mode produces an unhappily smug series of field trips through “our stupid popular culture,” “our stupid political landscape,” and so on, along with the depressing feeling that nobody, the instructor included, will follow through in practice on the overwhelmingly negative evaluations of culture that the “critical thinking” method produces.

Maybe in some cases “the negative evaluations” come as a result of a semester’s practice, but how is this an imperative of a whole?

Tinderbox and Poetry

tinder1.jpgTinderbox is proving most helpful for organizing my ideas in “futures.” Note that this is a tentative title. The title will come from further link mining, where the writer, through rewriting and rereading, finds more and deeper relations in the text.

Thus far the poem is developing from 1) inferred links and 2) natural narrative logic. Inferred link development is pretty simple. As the poet scans a stanza or line, a word may suggest a connection or another body of lines or stanzas. This is a potential pitfall in that once the poem develops the link may not make sense anymore or may emerge in some other section of the origin space. Natural narrative logic is what a poet senses or feels “should follow” either into another text space or as a continuation of language. It’s kin to syntax or diction. Is it a red dog that caught the ball you see bouncing down the sidewalk or

A blue ball bounces
followed by Mandy
the neighbor’s angry setter
downhill fast
toward traffic . . .

Of course, I’m just naming two thought processes here. Whatever the convention, I’m using Tinderbox adornments to collect pieces of the poem into clusters for visual sorting. It will be interesting to visualize how these adornment clusters may change after common word searching.

It’s now time to start eliminating text by shedding flimsy images and hindersome nothings.