Better spell it out for them!

Saw the pilot for the "V" re-launch and found it somewhat laughable although it had some good points (very creepy villain and new sleeper-cell plot). The math teacher in me was very upset with one scene: an FBI agent is telling her partner about how terrorist chatter has all decreased since the aliens arrived save for one group, whose chatter has increased significantly. We get a view of her laptop screen and sure enough, most of the graphs trend downward steeply. But one graph has increased and to make sure ALL OF US IDIOTS understand this, somebody added a little caption to the graph on the laptop screen saying "SIGNIFICANT INCREASE". Check it out:

There's a lesson in the math book I teach out of that involves reading graphs to tell if there's an increase, decrease, or no change. I usually skip that as it's a joke and most of my students will tune out at its simplicity. Nice to see that TV creators think more poorly of their audience.

One way to legalize it?

Something I frequently hear my students talk about is the hope that marijuana will be legalized one day. I've tried to tell them that they have some control over this in terms of registering to vote and electing legislators who will do so. However, I'm not sure this will work as there's a social stigma about weed that needs to be lost before legalization happens.

For a while I thought that it was only a matter of time before all the collegiate pot-heads would become respectable citizens who would hold office. When that happened, they would naturally legalize drugs because it was something that didn't have a bad effect upon them. I've come to realize, however, that the roadblock to this is the image of the tree-burner: the slacker, the dope-head, the fool who laughs at paint drying. This is not a good wage-earner or tax-payer, this is someone that our American Puritan work ethic always frowns upon. Alcohol, on the other hand, is seen as something that you earn with hard work ("It's Miller Time!"). So what the hippie lettuce lovers need is a "I'm a pot-achiever!" campaign. They need to prove they won't just waste away on their couches if they have a chance to smoke all they want.

Can this happen? I don't know; my own experiences w/ people smoking MJ are more along the lines of Cheech and Chong but I respect that people can use but not abuse. One way that the pro-chronic crowd can get their foot in the door may be thru selective legalization. Recent studies that it helps fight Alzheimer's could be seized upon to allow seniors to use it. This could have appeal to the American public: who deserves to light up more than those who have contributed so much to our nation? And while I have no data on this, I get a sense that the the plea to let the dying to have a toke is the argument most appealing to John and Jane Q Public, especially when those dying with great pain are brought up. Perhaps the folks at NORML should talk less about the drug war and more about grandma's suffering.

Mongoloid

Recently I and my fellow faculty were given a lecture by a (retired) veteran teacher. He seemed a nice enough guy and obviously has many years of teaching experience under his belt but his lecture was little more than inspirational phrases that had little narrative connection between them. This is not unusual in education.

What is unusual in education is when he used the term 'mongoloid' to describe a hypothetical student that could not be educated. I found this a little troubling and was surprised to find that many of my colleagues did not know the term. Happily, they all agreed that any term that is used both for people with Down syndrome and those who are ethnically southeast Asian is an offensive term.

You down with LHC? You know me!

One life-changing moment I had back in the 80s involved watching an episode of PBS' great show Nova entitled 'What Einstein Never Knew'. It was a great encapsulation of advances in physics following his last great work in the 20s and included brief overviews of things like string theory and the high-energy physics work at the Large Electron Positron Collider at CERN. This episode fascinated me so much I even sent away for the transcript and began to follow some of the topics in the news. I was disappointed when the Superconducting Super Collider was canceled but finally a similar project, the Large Hadron Collider, is now coming online.

Check out the cool LHC photo gallery and then get down with the incredible LHC rap that is referenced within. If you want to worry, you can read what's troubling some folks but keep in mind that some predicted such results with the atom bomb.

A conversation with a student

"Teacher, I got in trouble again. The suspended me for 2 days this time."

"What happened?"

"They caught me smoking off campus... but it's not fair, I have two kids, I should be allowed to smoke!"

"Well, it is still illegal for you to smoke. But at least you weren't smoking around your kids."

"Yeah, I know... but my kids are in foster care and I don't want to get caught up. I have to show them I can be a good mother."

Students' views of college

Kids at my school have a weird view of college. They've heard something of my extended trip thru higher education and are amazed that somebody could choose to stay in school for longer than all people are required to go to school. When they here I went to a big school they immediately light up and figure me for a former drunken party animal as they've heard how great those college parties are. I try to use the opportunity to tell them that, yeah, I had a lot of fun at some parties but it wasn't all the time; there was a lot of hard work to be done, too, and the partying came after that.

But the other day a student asked me, "Do you get into trouble if you get in a fight in college?" I explained that yes, you'd get in trouble with the police, but the question was just weird; the kid had no idea that the adult world is what he'll be in after high school. He gets into a fight at school now, he's home for a few days; why shouldn't college be any different?

Spelling

The Dean's Letter is really painful for me to read. I have gotten a number of memos at my school from people who have teaching credentials but don't know how to spell or use syntax properly. The admin staff (that is, secretaries) always spell things perfectly and have an idea on how to structure sentences despite some of these people not finishing a college degree. On the other hand, I've gotten a few memos from my site union rep (a credentialed teacher of many years experience) that I've wanted to mark up w/ my red pen and send back for revisions.

And as I went to post this, I got an email from my US representative that included this line, which probably was just part of an incomplete cut-and-paste job: "While it would appears that all these bills would aid in increasing renewable energy production, legislation often changes a great deal during the committee process."

Geography skillz

In one of my recent busywork teacher classes, a social studies teacher pointed out that she was amazed when her middle school kids didn't realize that Madagascar was, in fact, an island and not just a name made up for a movie. As we all shared another one of those 'aren't kids silly' laughs, a classmate (that is, another who is in this teacher-prep program) mentioned that she didn't learn that Kazakhstan was a real nation until after she had seen the Borat movie.

I'll grant that those are both a little obscure but it reminded me of a story a colleague told about how, while in Italy teaching young and rich Americans, she overheard one say to another that 'I may go to Ireland this weekend, I think it's a short train ride away.'

Great Idea: Soldiers as teachers

Sitting bored in one of my teacher credentialing classes one day, I had a Great Idea: what if we helped encourage members of the armed services to become secondary and elementary school teachers? My experience in attemtping secondary education has taught me that in-depth knowledge of subject matter isn't the most important thing that makes for an educational experience. Not only do contemporary teaching materials provide so much (teacher's editions from my day just had answers, today's provide entire lessons) but lots of teaching is accomplished in getting the students to focus on the subject matter. And who would know more about learning focus than a trained soldier? The teachers who have in-depth knowledge of the subject matter can be moved away from the remedial classes (of which there are many) and back to the higher-level courses.

Offer people a free credential program and $20k/year stipend (for student teaching time) if they survive, er, complete a normal stint in the armed forces. The G.I. Bill was a huge success and made for more college-educated people (who tend to be liberal). Who knows, it might help raise recruitment rates at the same time it combats teacher turnover.

A Short Note

Great news here at the high school: we shut down unlimited internet access. Now kids won't be able to just goof around when they're supposed to be working on their reading, math, etc. However, as I learned soon after, the kids find other ways to avoid work. This document is an example of what they'll do when bored. The student was not prompted to do this, it wasn't for any assignment, and didn't seem to be done with any sense of irony. FYI, Inglewood is a city in L.A. about 100 miles from here (to the west of Compton) that some of the kids seem to want to go to and live the life of a pimp/gangbanger. It's a little more upscale from Compton as it's closer to LAX, but still a place where all the nice post-WWII homes have bars on the windows. And two of my grandparents are buried there (Mom tells me that when she was young, her mom told her that someday they'd move to Inglewood "if we can afford it").

Close encounters of the Crip kind

The kids these days are talking a lot about Tookie Williams, who may be executed next week, depending on The Governator's decision. It's interesting to see these kids aware of current events, for once.

While reading some about Tookie, I learned that I associated with some gang members back when I was in high school. For the first year and a half or so of my high school career (before I got my license), I had to take public transit to my high school. The bus line I took started in the hood and ended up in a nicer area, so some of my fellow riders were rough-looking types. I remembered they called each other "cuzz" and talked a lot about "bustin' up some slobs" over the weekends. According to Wikipedia's Crips entry, that identifies those fine fellows as Crips (and the "slobs" are Bloods). Those were very educational rides.

Anti-Drug Murals

The other day here at school the kids got to have a contest drawing murals on the ground with chalk (ah, memories of Douglass College) with an anti-drug theme. As part of the faculty/staff, I was asked to take part in the voting we did after school. While voting, me and a few of my colleagues were a bit troubled by what we saw: two of the six murals included a marijuana leaf in the artwork. What's more, it was a well-drawn leaf (obviously something kids these days practice... I guess monsters are out of style?) and they were the two best drawn murals. One of them did have a thin red line drawn thru the leaf in what must have been a half-hearted act. But sadly the best drawn murals were not winners this day.

ID cards

This year the students all have to wear ID cards that have their pictures on them when they're on campus. Today a girl came in with her mother in tow. I had to get the girl's ID# to fill out some paperwork so I asked to see her ID card....

"Oh, do I got to?"

"Yeah, I'm required to check it."

"OK..."

She shows me her card and I notice that the picture of her face is covered up by a sticker of a (cartoon) monkey's head. Such alterations aren't uncommon, but mostly I've seen students cover their mug-shots with better pictures of themselves. What surprised me more was what her mother then said:

"It looks JUST LIKE HER."

girl: "No it don't, I'm beautiful!"

mother: "It looks just like you!"

me: "It doesn't look like you."

girl (to me): "Thank you!"

mother (breaking into laughter): "No, it looks just like her!"

(and yes, the student and her mother are African American)

Did my first round of electronic voting the other day. It wasn't any more difficult than the punch cards or pulling the levers, but it's tough not to be suspicous of electronic voting. I'm still looking forward to Instant Runoff Voting. It was nice to see Arnold's propositions all rejected, although I'm a little troubled that my county was for the parental notification for abortion. In other political news, I took the test at Political Compass and learned that I'm Economic Left/Right: -7.25 and Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -5.33, which puts me in Dalai Lama territory.

Kids taking vocabulary tests today. One was stumped at the following:

Distress means: a) success, b) trouble, c) permission

He asks me, "Is 'distress' the opposite of 'stress'?"

A shocking discovery

A student checked out today and left me his textbooks. While filing them away, I thumbed thru the pages briefly to make sure that all pages appeared to be there, there weren't any pages made illegible by scribbling, or that nothing was left in the book. What do I find but an ad for the Playboy Cyber Club! It's not a magazine ad but appears to have been printed by a computer printer but obviously wasn't done on campus as that site is blocked (trust me, I tried). Still, it features images of playmates Teri Harrison and Carmella DeCesare in states of undress. I wonder if the student wanted it for the pictures or for the names; a Google search of their names can produce pictures of naughty quality (I especially like how there's Polish text at the bottom of that page -- I know a Goat that could translate that!). Probably not, students only do searches for celebrities, from what I've noticed...

All in a day's work, testing the computers to see if they can keep childrens' minds safe.

Titty

Here's probably the current best story from recent months...

In a high school computer lab, one student was doing a job search. He was looking into work at Best Buy and was reading thru a job description when he got stuck on a word and asked me for help...

"What's 'titty' mean?"

"I'm sorry?"

"What does 'titty' mean??"

"Uh... could you spell that for me?"

"T - I - D - Y"