Thursday scan
Bookworm on Dec 18 2008 at 10:28 am | Filed under: Uncategorized
I had the luxury of a little time this morning, and actually read all my favorite web sites. I have to get to work now, but thought that, before I sign off, I’d share my favorite links with you, plus a few comments of my own.
You know a Democratic policy is bad if even Al Sharpton opposes it. Yesterday, he came out against the “Employee Free Choice Act,” an Act with a spectacularly Orwellian name, since it actually means that employee’s who don’t side with unions will be exposed to harassment and even thuggery.
If you’re in the mood for a laugh that comes complete with a knife’s edge, check out Times’ Watch’s notable quotes for 2008. A laugh, because the quoted remarks are ludicrously biased or fatuous or just plain out right; a knife’s edge because so many still view the New York Times as a genuinely reputable publication that actually purveys news and intelligent commentary.
Although Obama has managed to keep himself squeaky clean so far regarding Blago (despite Obama’s regrettable, and completely narcissistic, penchant for protective lying), Byron York reminds us that with the Fitzgerald pit bull on the case, he’s not out of the woods yet.
I tend to avoid books that receive awards. This is a reminder of why I started that policy. Another good rule of thumb, of course, is never, never to read anything from Oprah’s book club.
I’ve commented before on the fact that teacher training doesn’t seem to have given teacher’s anything beyond a cant vocabulary that they can’t remember just a few years after they leave teaching school. That is, the teaching schools don’t seem to teach the nuts-and-bolts of teaching, so much as they do an educational ideological that has little to do enabling teachers to communicate practical skills (such as reading, writing, and arithmetic) to the students in their charge. My instincts seem to be sound: it’s much better to take someone with existing skills and teach that person how to communicate them, than it is to teach the “theory of teaching” to someone who has no background skills in the first place.
And speaking of education, one of my pet peeves is the way in which school districts force children to do “volunteer” work. Funnily enough, it used to be called “mandatory volunteer requirement” until the schools realized that the oxymoron was turning their students into little cynics. Now it’s called community service, and the theory is that students ought to learn how to “give back.” I don’t think that’s the school’s business. I think that’s the family’s business, and I recent that the school is abandoning education time and trying to co-opt my role as parent. Thomas Sowell sees the Leftist scam for what it is, and I couldn’t agree with him more. Indeed, his writing is so on-point, I just have to quote it here:
There are high schools [and, in our case, middle schools] across the country from which you cannot graduate, and colleges where your application for admission will not be accepted, unless you have engaged in activities arbitrarily defined as “community service.”
The arrogance of commandeering young people’s time, instead of leaving them and their parents free to decide for themselves how to use that time, is exceeded only by the arrogance of imposing your own notions as to what is or is not a service to the community.
Working in a homeless shelter is widely regarded as “community service”– as if aiding and abetting vagrancy is necessarily a service, rather than a disservice, to the community.
Is a community better off with more people not working, hanging out on the streets, aggressively panhandling people on the sidewalks, urinating in the street, leaving narcotics needles in the parks where children play?
This is just one of the ways in which handing out various kinds of benefits to people who have not worked for them breaks the connection between productivity and reward, as far as they are concerned.
As for me, I’ve told my daughter’s school that I strongly disapprove of this practice, that I will not aid her in any way with fulfilling those hours, and that they’d better not penalize her for my stance.
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The Nazi regime held a few “elections” in which people were encouraged to vote out in the open, so that other people could observe their votes. There was a big banner with the words “Patriotic Germans are proud to show how they vote.”
I was reminded of this by the Employee Free Choice Act.
Related to “mandatory volunteerism”:The NYT had an article about teenagers feeling the crunch of their parents’ economic woes and considering (gasp) working for money.
And speaking of education, one of my pet peeves is the way in which school districts force children to do “volunteer” work. Funnily enough, it used to be called “mandatory volunteer requirement” until the schools realized that the oxymoron was turning their students into little cynics. Now it’s called community service, and the theory is that students ought to learn how to “give back.” I don’t think that’s the school’s business. I think that’s the family’s business, and I recent that the school is abandoning education time and trying to co-opt my role as parent. Thomas Sowell sees the Leftist scam for what it is, and I couldn’t agree with him more. Indeed, his writing is so on-point, I just have to quote it here:
It is all about stripping free will from the cogs and slaves, Book. How dare individuals think that their life and their time is their own, to dispense with according to their own individual vices and traits? How dare they elevate themselves to being the deciders here, Book. They are only slaves to the state and need to learn to serve at the state’s pleasure. You know that is how it is, Book.
Book, you need to slap the teachers with a law preventing them from taking summer vacations when school is out. The teachers and the school board Presidents and bureaucrats should be forced to “give back” to the community. Right along with their slaves. Maybe by sharing the misery, people can begin to understand the truth.
Pain is always a great communicator, Book. Far better than words ever were.
“Since the 1990s, many affluent children seeking admission to selective colleges have been discouraged from paid work, and steered instead toward volunteer service projects”…and at the same time, many internships available to college students are moving toward the “unpaid” category.
Both of these trends provide considerable advantage to those from affluent families, and hence act to foreclose class mobility. Indeed, the whole higher-education complex as it now exists tends toward the formation of a permanent aristocracy.
Power corrupts, David, and it also tends to want to congregate towards large pools of itself.
Our duty is to force the power from the hands of the corrupt and the few and make it flow downwards and outwards.
Indeed, the whole higher-education complex as it now exists tends toward the formation of a permanent aristocracy.
Sarah Palin: Wrong accent, wrong education background, wrong politics, wrong state, wrong family.
Caroline Kennedy: Right accent, right education background, right politics, right state, and right family.
We all can see how this is the American dream.
Another good rule of thumb, of course, is never, never to read anything from Oprah’s book club.
Here are some authors in her book club:
Certainly these are some of the authors of the Politically Correct. Wally Lamb, for example, cannot write a novel that is not also a didactic exercise in instructing the yahoos on some politically correct topic. He appears to spends as much time in researching a topic as he does in writing a story. Wait a minute, sounds like I read it.
While I disagree with many or most of the political positions of Isabel Allende and Gabriel García Márquez, I consider them good storytellers, and have read almost all of their works in Spanish. While Isabel was first cousin first removed to Salvador, thus endowing her with some inherent bias, in her works she also acknowledged her maternal grandparents’ opposition to him. I found some of Isabel Allende’s PC injections to be rather comical. In one of her novels she talks about the racism of whites in 19th century towards the Chinese. While on the one hand she is correct about 19th century white racism towards Chinese, on the other hand she ignores the ethnocentricism ingrained into Chinese culture. Gwei-lo, anyone?
Here are some more authors from Oprah’s book club:
Book, by virtue of having read these authors, I wager that you have unintentionally read some of the Oprah’s book club selections. Well, maybe not Bill Cosby
Certainly one should not confine one’s reading to Oprah’s book club. I am neither recommending nor disparaging her book club. As the years go on, her selections have become less politically correct. My book club reads “classics,” at least very few books that were published fewer than 40 years ago.
Most of your comments in this posting are spot-on. Compulsory “volunteering” takes the magic out of it. Your comments about teachers and expertise, likewise on two points. First, as a former teacher I can testify to the ineffectiveness of the ed schools in instructing the nuts and bolts of instruction while they devote too much effort to the politically correct concern of the month. For those who have experience in the real world and a modicum of information-seeking skills, the politically correct conjectures masquerading as fact that the ed schools peddle are easily seen for the nonsense that they are. Only in Ed School did I have the experience of considering some of my instructors to be utter fools, at least in some regards, an attitude I never had towards college-level instructors of other subjects.
Secondly, your statement about subject expertise trumping pedagogy also rings true. This also parallels the experience of setting up “expert systems.” It has been found more effective to teach the experts the rudimentary of computer systems and software, than to teach computer experts the information that the experts have. This is not to state that pedagogy is unnecessary: on the contrary. If you don’t know how to present your knowledge to your audience, you are lost as a teacher. The previous sentence came from the school of hard knocks.
It’s interesting to speculate about what a *serious* course in pedagogy would look like…I suspect it would be quite unlike the stuff taught in most education schools.
For example, suppose we have good mathematician or historian who has never taught. What could we teach him in one semester that would make him a good teacher? I bet there is a lot of useful, *practical* stuff, without the overhang of theory and indoctrination that now seems to pervade most teacher training.
David Foster: It’s interesting to speculate about what a *serious* course in pedagogy would look like…I suspect it would be quite unlike the stuff taught in most education schools.
The Alternate Certification programs, which I recently read account for around a quarter of new teachers ( don’t ask me where), may provide examples of that.
I suspect that the lower one goes on the Ed School prestige chain, the more practical will be the pedagogy. The Ed School of Flagship State U will tend to have more theory nonsense than that of State College. And at the “top” of the chain, even more burdened with the theory nonsense: Columbia et al.