Hi,
I'm sitting up finishing grading for my other two classes, and I will have your grades to you on Tuesday.
But then it just hit me:
If you feel adrift, like you haven't done any work, but maybe you showed up all the time, and you kindof might have learned something, but you're not really sure because you feel lack of structure in some vague, existential way, etc etc:
You can trade all your work in for this one assignment:
and yes, that means you don't have to scramble to write a paper or whatever you owe,
it's all forgiven,
IF:
CONDITIONS
- and remember, this means i expect you to:
1. actually think for hours about this,
.....maybe all weekend, fri/sat/sun, plus a Monday, then
2. to jot an outline,
3. scribble your first, substandard draft,
4. wait two or three more days,
5. fix your now near-perfect paper
......and only then,
6. turn it into me by May 2nd,
7. on paper,
8. at my office K128 if
9. not to me in person.
And the Assignment Is:
Out of the myriad things you learned from just being there this semester, pick out one way that you are changed, intellectually, for the better, from applying a skill or wisdom garnered from this class. What do you think about ownership of your own thinking process? Do you feel smarter? Is that weird? Use examples from class, the readings, and/or your own work so I can get a handle on the context from which you will be speaking.
And Another Thing:
Due credit: Your classmate Colin actually read Fall of the Faculty, thus making him three points cooler than the rest of you.
Wednesday, April 23, 2014
Tuesday, April 22, 2014
More unbelievable, Kafka-esque, Alice in Wonderland stuff:
As California's June primary draws near, the race is forcing some Asian-American voters to make a tough choice.
Ethnic Lines
One of Capitol Hill's most prominent Asian-Americans, Honda, a 72-year-old, seven-term incumbent, maintains the support of the Democratic establishment. But recent redistricting and California's new open primary system fuel the hopes for Honda's challengers.
Age is more than just a number in the start-up culture of the Silicon Valley, and tech leaders have lined up behind Khanna, a 37-year-old former Obama administration official. The Republican challengers — Singh, a 43-year-old anesthesiologist at Stanford University, and 47-year-old tech recruiter Joel Vanlandingham — are also considerably younger.
But for many Asian-American voters here, the choice will mainly fall along ethnic lines.
Given the choice of multiple candidates of Asian descent, Asian-American voters tend to support those who belong to their ethnic subgroup, according to Ronald Wong, a campaign consultant who heads Imprenta Communications Group.
"The construct of 'Asian-Americans' under an umbrella is going to be put to the test," Wong said in a phone interview. He has contributed financially to Honda's campaign.
Regardless of the outcome, this race provides a unique glimpse into a political future in which Asian-Americans, the country's fastest-growing racial group, play more prominent roles on the voting ballot and at the polls.
"This is a leading indicator of what might happen down the road in other parts of the country," said Karthick Ramakrishnan, a political science professor at the University of California, Riverside.
Ethnic Lines
One of Capitol Hill's most prominent Asian-Americans, Honda, a 72-year-old, seven-term incumbent, maintains the support of the Democratic establishment. But recent redistricting and California's new open primary system fuel the hopes for Honda's challengers.
Age is more than just a number in the start-up culture of the Silicon Valley, and tech leaders have lined up behind Khanna, a 37-year-old former Obama administration official. The Republican challengers — Singh, a 43-year-old anesthesiologist at Stanford University, and 47-year-old tech recruiter Joel Vanlandingham — are also considerably younger.
But for many Asian-American voters here, the choice will mainly fall along ethnic lines.
Given the choice of multiple candidates of Asian descent, Asian-American voters tend to support those who belong to their ethnic subgroup, according to Ronald Wong, a campaign consultant who heads Imprenta Communications Group.
"The construct of 'Asian-Americans' under an umbrella is going to be put to the test," Wong said in a phone interview. He has contributed financially to Honda's campaign.
Regardless of the outcome, this race provides a unique glimpse into a political future in which Asian-Americans, the country's fastest-growing racial group, play more prominent roles on the voting ballot and at the polls.
"This is a leading indicator of what might happen down the road in other parts of the country," said Karthick Ramakrishnan, a political science professor at the University of California, Riverside.
The most racist thing i've ever read in my entire life:
High Court Upholds Michigan's Affirmative Action Ban
The U.S. Supreme Court has upheld a Michigan ban on affirmative action in higher education. The 6-to-2 decision is likely to set the stage for further battles over affirmative action in the political arena, as well as the courts.
In 2006, Michigan voters, by a margin of 58 percent to 42 percent, passed a referendum to amend the state Constitution and ban any consideration of race in college and university admissions. A federal appeals court invalidated the ban, citing earlier Supreme Court decisions that prevented restructuring government to disadvantage minorities.
On Tuesday, however, the high court reversed the lower court decision and reinstated the affirmative action ban. Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote the lead opinion for the court, but no one justice's legal reasoning commanded a majority. Kennedy stressed that Tuesday's ruling is not about how the debate over affirmative action should be resolved, but about who should resolve it. And here, he said, the voters were perfectly free to get rid of a voluntary affirmative action program without interference from the courts.
Reactions
Despite Kennedy's protestations to the contrary, Harvard Law School professor Mark Tushnet says the decision in fact telegraphs something important about the court and affirmative action. "It is clear that five justices are either extremely uncomfortable with affirmative action or believe that affirmative action programs are automatically unconstitutional," he says.
A somewhat different take came from Harvard Law School professor Charles Fried, who served as solicitor general in the Reagan administration. Fried says Kennedy's opinion "deftly negotiated" some tricky legal territory to reach the right result. "The outcome, I think, is completely correct because otherwise you would have the mad result that affirmative action is on a ratchet," meaning that once a voluntary affirmative action plan is adopted, it would be unconstitutional to withdraw it.
In upholding the ban on affirmative action, Justice Kennedy's opinion also cut back on the so-called political process doctrine under which the court for decades has eliminated barriers to minority participation in the political process.
His opinion, however, was joined in full only by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito. Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas would have struck down the political process doctrine entirely. And Justice Stephen Breyer, normally a liberal vote on racial matters, had a yet different approach.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in an impassioned dissent she read aloud from the bench, said the Constitution does not guarantee victory in the political process for minorities, but it does guarantee that the majority may not stack the deck. And here, she said, by amending the state Constitution, the referendum had rigged the rules, making it impossible for minorities to engage in the kind of lobbying for preferences that everyone else can engage in at the legislature or the board of regents. Sotomayor's dissent was joined by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Justice Elena Kagan was recused from the case.
Decision's Implications
The high court's decision is likely to provoke more battles over affirmative action in the states. Seven states, including Michigan, now have bans on affirmative action in higher education, some enacted by referendum, and some by executive order of the governor, as in Florida.
The experience with the ban in California "has been difficult because immediately following the ban on race-conscious affirmative action, the enrollment of African-Americans and Latinos plummeted in the selective higher education institutions," says Christopher Edley, former dean of the UC Berkeley law school. He adds that the school "has yet to fully recover."
Other states with bans have had similar precipitous drops in minority enrollment, but some have seen minority enrollment stay steady or even climb.
Whatever the merits of Tuesday's ruling, many see it in a broader context.
"I think the framers would be shocked by the direction that the Supreme Court has taken with regard to race," says Louisiana State University law professor Paul Finkelman, one of 75 historians and law professors who filed a brief in the Michigan case. "The court has essentially said that the Constitution does not provide a mechanism for preserving and creating racial and ethnic equality in the United States."
Harvard's Tushnet looks at the history of the last 60 years and sees a court that used to protect minority rights now nullifying measures like the Voting Rights Act, a law passed by Congress to prevent discrimination in voting. "When you look at the court's decisions on issues of race over the past probably decade, it is interesting that the beneficiaries of the race-related decisions are basically, not to be too crude about it, white people," he says.
To that, the court's conservative majority might observe that we have an African-American president and increased minority voting, sometimes at higher rates than whites. In short, that there is nothing to fix anymore, and that "the way to stop discrimination based on race," as Chief Justice Roberts once put it, "is to stop discriminating based on race."
WHAT??!! Next thing you'll tell me, the president of GM makes more than his secretary!!!!
This is what npr decided is front-page, second headline "NEW"s:
of agenda setting.
Right?!
Monday, April 14, 2014
from her letter
"Along with the salary issue, ethically, I can no longer work in an educational system that is spiraling downwards while it purports to improve the education of our children.
I began my career just as No Child Left Behind (NCLB) was gaining momentum. The difference between my students then and now is unmistakable. Regardless of grades or test scores, my students from five to eleven years ago still had a sense of pride in whom they were and a self-confidence in whom they would become someday. Sadly, that type of student is rare now. Every year I have seen a decline in student morale; every year I have more and more wounded students sitting in my classroom, more and more students participating in self-harm and bullying. These children are lost and in pain.
It is no coincidence that the students I have now coincide with the NCLB movement twelve years ago–and it’s only getting worse with the new legislation around Race to the Top.
I have sweet, incredible, intelligent children sitting in my classroom who are giving up on their lives already. They feel that they only have failure in their futures because they’ve been told they aren’t good enough by a standardized test; they’ve been told that they can’t be successful because they aren’t jumping through the right hoops on their educational paths. I have spent so much time trying to reverse those thoughts, trying to help them see that education is not punitive; education is the only way they can improve their lives. But the truth is, the current educational system is punishing them for their inadequacies, rather than helping them discover their unique talents; our educational system is failing our children because it is not meeting their needs.
Instead of weeding out the “bad” teachers, this evaluation system will continue to frustrate the teachers who are doing everything they can to ensure their students are graduating with the skills necessary to become civic minded individuals. We feel defeated and helpless: If we speak out, we are reprimanded for not being team players; if we do as we are told, we are supporting a broken system"
I began my career just as No Child Left Behind (NCLB) was gaining momentum. The difference between my students then and now is unmistakable. Regardless of grades or test scores, my students from five to eleven years ago still had a sense of pride in whom they were and a self-confidence in whom they would become someday. Sadly, that type of student is rare now. Every year I have seen a decline in student morale; every year I have more and more wounded students sitting in my classroom, more and more students participating in self-harm and bullying. These children are lost and in pain.
It is no coincidence that the students I have now coincide with the NCLB movement twelve years ago–and it’s only getting worse with the new legislation around Race to the Top.
I have sweet, incredible, intelligent children sitting in my classroom who are giving up on their lives already. They feel that they only have failure in their futures because they’ve been told they aren’t good enough by a standardized test; they’ve been told that they can’t be successful because they aren’t jumping through the right hoops on their educational paths. I have spent so much time trying to reverse those thoughts, trying to help them see that education is not punitive; education is the only way they can improve their lives. But the truth is, the current educational system is punishing them for their inadequacies, rather than helping them discover their unique talents; our educational system is failing our children because it is not meeting their needs.
Instead of weeding out the “bad” teachers, this evaluation system will continue to frustrate the teachers who are doing everything they can to ensure their students are graduating with the skills necessary to become civic minded individuals. We feel defeated and helpless: If we speak out, we are reprimanded for not being team players; if we do as we are told, we are supporting a broken system"
teacher's resignation letter citing failed system goes viral
teacher's resignation letter citing failed system goes viral
Written by / Special Guests Pauline Hawkins
April 14, 2014 / America's Newsroom
ADVERTISEMENT
A Colorado teacher who made headlines when her resignation letter went viral appeared on "America's Newsroom" Monday to explain why she believes she can no longer be a part of education standards that punish students instead of help them.
English teacher Pauline Hawkins told co-host Martha MacCallum that thanks to Common Core, teachers from kindergarten through high school are being boxed into "rigid" lesson plans that take the emphasis off individual learning.
"It's become a right answer rather than a way to think, a way to open up your mind to figure out answers for yourself," the 11-year education veteran said.
"We are just inundated with data collection. We have to constantly fill out forms and collect data on students and collect data on teachers. It's taking up a lot of time; it's creating a lot of stress -- time that we could be spending with our students or creating lesson plans."
Hawkins said the problems started when the new curriculum left her third grade son struggling to keep up and coming home in tears. She is set to vacate her teaching position at the end of the school year. Her resignation letter has over 700,000 hits since it was posted on April 7.
Friday, April 11, 2014
Saturday, April 5, 2014
Thursday, February 20, 2014
Tuesday, February 18, 2014
Newspapers
Newspapers: still the most important medium for understanding the world
Once new media themselves, newspapers have gone on to outlast cinema and television – but for how long?
BY PETER WILBY PUBLISHED 12 FEBRUARY 2014 9:26
Hold the front page: rail travellers in 1850. In the 19th century it was predicted that newspapers would become “the greatest organ of social life”. Image: Time & Life Pictures/Getty.
The Invention of News: How the World Came to Know about Itself
Andrew Pettegree
Yale University Press, 448pp, £25
Andrew Pettegree
Yale University Press, 448pp, £25
The News: a User’s Manual
Alain de Botton
Hamish Hamilton, 272pp, £18.99
Alain de Botton
Hamish Hamilton, 272pp, £18.99
Anybody who says they can predict the future of newspapers is either a liar or a fool. Look at the raw figures, and newspapers seem gripped by terminal illness. Since 2000, the circulation of most UK national dailies has fallen by between a third and half. The authoritative Pew Research Center in the US reports that newspapers are now the main source of news for only 26 per cent of Americans against 45 per cent in 2001. There is no shortage of Jeremiahs, particularly from the wilder shores of digital evangelism, who confidently predict that the last printed newspaper will be safely buried within 15 years at most.
Yet one of the few reliable laws of history is that old media have a habit of surviving. An over-exuberant New York journalist announced in 1835 that books, theatre, even religion “have had their day” and the daily newspaper would become “the greatest organ of social life”. Theatre outlasted not only the newspaper, but also cinema and then television. Radio has flourished in the TV age; cinema, in turn, has held its own against videos and DVDs. In the first eight months of 2013, US hardback book sales rose 10 per cent while ebook sales fell. Even vinyl records have made a comeback, with sales on Amazon up 745 per cent since 2008.
Newspapers themselves were once new media. Yet as Andrew Pettegree explains in an elegantly written and beautifully constructed account, it took several centuries before they became the dominant medium for news. This was not solely because producing up-to-date news for a large readership over a wide area became practicable and economic only with the steam press, the railway and the telegraph. Equally important was the idea that the world is in constant movement and one needs to be updated on its condition hourly (or even monthly) – a concept quite alien to the medieval world and probably also to most people in the early modern era.
Now, we expect change, as Alain de Botton argues in his playful inquiry into how we read and use the news, to be “continuous and relentless”. We think some extraordinary development may alter reality: a proposal for a new motorway or railway, a cure for a disease previously thought untreatable, a revelation that a once-admired celebrity molested under-age girls. To our ancestors, the only realities were the passing of the seasons, punctuated by catastrophes such as famine, flood or disease that they had no reliable means of anticipating. Life, as de Botton puts it, was “ineluctably cyclical” and “the most important truths were recurring”. Even if regular access to news had been possible, the medieval world wouldn’t have seen the point of it.
This is not to deny that details of new laws and taxes, armies and their movements, or who was in or out of favour at court were eagerly sought. Travellers were closely questioned as to the news they brought. But it would have been perfectly normal and acceptable to say, as a BBC announcer did on Good Friday 1930 (to much subsequent mockery), “Ladies and gentlemen, there is no news tonight, so here is some music.”
The medieval world received news orally. First-hand information from people who had witnessed important events was highly prized, at least by those, such as merchants and property-owners, who had some interest in its accuracy. To larger audiences, news might be conveyed by drama or song. Written accounts were mistrusted because the writer was not usually available for cross-questioning. This helps explain why, despite Gutenberg’s invention of moveable type in the mid-15th century, the development of newspapers was so slow.
The first commercial news services, which emerged in 16th-century Italy, were confidential weekly handwritten briefings, known as avvisi, sent to selected subscribers including many of Europe’s rulers. They still dominated the Italian news market in the early 17th century. These avvisi possessed, Pettegree writes, “a subtlety and flexibility lost in a public printed document”. The scribes who copied them out doubtless felt as insecure in their employment as today’s newspaper journalists. But the apparently obsolete means of production guaranteed their exclusivity, their intimacy and, in the eyes of their readers, their reliability.
Early printed newspapers, though they had the potential to reach a wider audience, tended to imitate this elite form of communication. Most of their news was foreign; domestic news carried too many dangers of attracting government censorship or worse. They rarely attempted analysis or comment. For readers ignorant of leading European political figures, shifting international alliances or the geographical location of German principalities, they offered little assistance. To many readers, newspapers must have seemed to offer, as Pettegree puts it, “an undigested and unexplained miscellany of things that scarcely seemed to concern them at all”.
For most of the two centuries after Gutenberg, the news pamphlet was a more successful medium. It appeared sporadically when, in the publishers’ judgement, a big news event created a significant market. At its best, it could present news as a coherent, connected and complete narrative, without the half-truths, unanswered questions and loose ends that always characterised even the most high-minded newspapers. Pamphlets allowed readers to dip in and out of the news as they chose, opting for subjects that piqued their interest or seemed to affect their lives. Above all, they reflected the incontrovertible and eternal truth, almost entirely lost to our own age, that news is more urgent at some times than others.
Newspapers, by contrast, offered mostly routine and unresolved events: as Pettegree describes it, “ships arrive in port, dignatories arrive at court, share prices rise and fall, generals are appointed and relieved of command”. Is that so very different from the celebrity relationships that today’s downmarket papers so painstakingly report? Or the daily ministerial and opposition manoeuvres that form the daily diet for broadsheet readers? Is the latest shift in Labour social policy or the latest boyfriend of a minor Coronation Streetactor of any greater importance to readers than developments in the Muscovy court that early modern papers faithfully reported?
For all the cacophony of information that surrounds us, no medium now reliably performs the service of the early modern pamphlet, giving us narrative news with a beginning, a middle and an end. In January, the journalist Ron Hall, a founder member of the Sunday Times Insight team in the 1960s, died. In its early days, Insight’s job was to give a context to the week’s news, often challenging conventional wisdom about what it signified. The Times obituary said of Hall that he was “a master of reductive research, assembling as many sources as possible, eliminating redundant information, then focusing on the shaping of the core story”. Sunday newspapers no longer have sufficient resources (or perhaps sufficient journalists like Hall) to do such a job with conviction. “Instant books” – of which the Insight team produced several – have largely gone out of fashion, as have TV news documentaries such as World in Action. The closest approaches to news narrative at its best come from radio (particularly Radio 4’s Analysis) and the weekly or monthly magazines.
If de Botton’s frustratingly diffuse book has any central theme, it is this: that, as he puts it, “news as it exists is woefully short on the work of coordination, distillation and curation”. Nothing can be discussed or reported calmly. Read any British daily paper (with the sole exception of the Financial Times) and you are assailed by examples of cruelty, injustice, falsehood, hypocrisy, greed and incompetence, sometimes in a single story. The “fury” expressed by somebody or other – often the newspapers themselves – spills over into radio, TV and social-media sites. There is no hierarchy of rage, no modulation of tone, no admission of uncertainty. As de Botton observes
We are in danger of getting so distracted by the ever-changing agenda of the news that we wind up unable to develop political positions of any kind. We may lose track of which of the many outrages really matters to us and what it was that we felt we cared about so passionately only hours ago.
A good test of the truth of this observation is to take a random sample of ministerial resignations from more than few months ago and then try to remember why the minister had to go.
Today’s news is full of loose ends. Is anybody now following what the government or the EU is doing about bankers’ bonuses? Or what has been established about British complicity in the torture of suspected terrorists and who was responsible for it? Or what is being done by whom about global warming? Or what is happening to newspapers themselves in the wake of the Leveson report? If people are increasingly cynical and apathetic about public affairs, the responsibility lies with the news media as much as with politicians. De Botton writes:
There are dynamics far more insidious and cynical still than censorship in draining people of political will; these involve confusing, boring and distracting the majority away from politics by presenting events in such a disorganised, fractured and intermittent way that. . . the audience is unable to hold on to the thread of the most important issues for any length of time.
In Pettegree’s account, newspapers, which eventually came to be seen as part of the natural order of things, struggled for a long time to find a role. Journalism as a full-time trade from which you could hope to make a living hardly existed before the 19th century. Even then, there was no obvious reason why most people needed news on a regular basis, whether daily or weekly. In some respects, regularity of publication was, and remains, a burden. The daily paper’s pagination – usually dictated by advertising rather than editorial requirements – or Newsnight’s 50 minutes to fill each weekday night requires sustained drama and urgency, which cannot be varied according to events.
Online news sites avoid the rigidity of periodical publication. Particularly if access is free, readers can dip in and out according to how they perceive the urgency of events. Increasingly sophisticated search engines and algorithms allow us to personalise the news to our own priorities and interests. When important stories break, news providers can post minute-by-minute updates. Error, misconception and foolish speculation can be corrected or modified almost instantly. There are no space inhibitions to prevent narrative or analysis, and documents or events cited in news stories can often be accessed in full. All this is a world away from the straitjacket of newspaper publication. Yet few if any providers seem alive to the new medium’s full potential for spreading understanding and enlightenment.
The anxiety is always to be first with the news, to maximise reader comments, to create heat, sound and more fury and thus add to the sense of confusion. In the medieval world, news was usually exchanged amid the babble of the marketplace or the tavern, where truth competed with rumour, mishearing and misunderstanding. In some respects, it is to that world that we seem to be returning.
Newspapers, Pettegree speculates, may have become established only because, at some stage in the 18th century, they became a fashion accessory – a badge of status for the country squire in Somerset or physician in Montpelier, previously deprived of knowledge of what happened in circles of metropolitan power. But they have never been very good – or not as good as they ought to be – at telling us how the world works. Perhaps they now face extinction. Or perhaps, as the internet merely adds to what de Botton describes as our sense that we live in “an unimprovable and fundamentally chaotic universe”, they will discover that they and they alone can guide us to wisdom and understanding.
Peter Wilby is a former editor of the New Statesman and the Independent on Sunday
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)