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
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)