Algebra and AP: No, Not For Everyone

Jay Mathews, the outspoken Washington Post writer and frequent advocate for increased early enrollment in algebra courses, apparently needs eyes in the back of his head this week because of the backpedaling he’s having to do on his previously-held assertions.

To Mathews’ considerable credit, though, he’s the first in line admitting his position was wrong, and I respect his integrity in doing so:

Now, because of a startling study being released today, I am having second thoughts.

Tom Loveless, director of the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution, has looked at the worst math students, those scoring in the bottom 10th on the National Assessment of Educational Progress eighth-grade test. He discovered that 28.6 percent of them — let me make that clear: nearly three out of every 10 — were enrolled in first-year algebra, geometry or second-year algebra. Almost all were grossly misplaced, probably because of the push to get kids into algebra sooner.

The problem with Mathews is that he doesn’t go far enough in examining his other assertions about increasing enrollment in other challenging classes, specifically Advanced Placement courses. Mathews has repeatedly asserted a position on AP enrollment that essentially amounts to “the more, the better,” arguing that all students would benefit from AP courses regardless of their previous preparation or ability. Many people — including me — would love it if Mathews were to apply his new realizations about algebra to his earlier assertions about AP and ask, “Say, am I wrong here, too?”

The More Child , a marvelous blog on giftedness and education, quotes Dorothy, a commenter on Mathews’ articles in the Washington Post on the issue of pushing kids into AP courses and increasing AP enrollment in general. Dorothy stated,

…I have been corresponding in email with Jay …Jay refused to budge. Said that as long as the AP exam is required, teachers *never* water down the curriculum. …Since it is a College Level Course then it must Be Real Hard And Rigorous! Told me flat out that Finn doesn’t know anything, as all he did was go to a focus group. Jay on the other hand, has been studying AP for 20 years all over the country and knows best.

Well, hey. I haven’t been studying AP for 20 years all over the country. I’ve just been teaching in my little corner over here, and not for 20 years, at that. Still, I may have some insights.

Here’s one: Jay is wrong.

Here’s why: Jay is right in asserting that the AP test drives the curriculum. However, what happens when you pack an AP class full of a substantial percentage of students who aren’t prepared to understand the material because they lack native talent, previous exposure and practice, or dedicated effort, teachers have little choice BUT to water down the curriculum.

I know AP English best, so let me talk about that a bit — my examples are going to be better than if I tried to pretend I actually knew anything about, say, AP Calculus. Hypothetically speaking, let’s say you had a class in AP Literature and Composition. What most AP Lit teachers know very well is that the AP basically has only one main question, and it is this: What is the author’s point, and how does s/he use language to get us to see it?

What do you do, though, with a class who has a hard time comprehending the notion of “an author’s point”? What do you do when those students assert, “The point of Romeo and Juliet is to show love and suicide” (No, those are some of the topics of Romeo and Juliet, not the point of the work), or “The point of Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ is to show depression” (No, again, depression is an element in the work, but it is not the author’s judgment, opinion, or insight into human nature, all of which are what is meant by “the author’s point”)?

If you’re like most teachers, you teach and teachandteachandteach and explainexplainexplain what the author’s point is; you give example after example to illustrate the differences between theme and topic, between theme and sub-theme, between a small-scale insight-with-a-lowercase-i and large-scale INSIGHT-with-a-capital. You do this because, like most teachers, you want your students to succeed, and dangit, if they don’t understand this fundamental, foundational, crucial, elementary concept, the rest of the course just doesn’t matter. It’s like trying — well, it’s like trying to teach algebra to people who haven’t got a strong grasp of the fundamentals of math.

Too many students are “grossly misplaced” in AP courses of all kinds, and this gross misplacement happens for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that the College Board has begun utzing schools to “eliminate barriers to AP.” In the past, if you wanted AP you had to, you know, be qualified for it. In most cases, you had to have As in your previous English courses, or be recommended by your teacher, or maybe even take and pass a pre-test to demonstrate that you were prepared for the difficulty of the material. No longer.

The College Board casts its actions as a Politically Correct Crusade, positioning themselves as breaking down those MEAN, MEAN, discriminatory walls erected against otherwise-talented and academically successful students who would all get “5″s if only their intellectually elitist, latté-sipping MEAN-ASS teachers would Just Let Them IN.

Um. The fact that the College Board makes eighty bucks every time a student takes an AP test would, of course, have nothing to do with this push to increase AP enrollment at all. Not at all. Nopeitty nope-nope.

Jay, I’ve got news for you: It’s not that simple. See, I’m guessing that most AP teachers, latté-sipping or no, don’t give a rat’s caboose about a student’s race, gender, religion, ethnicity, or socioeconomic status. If those teachers are anything like the ones I’ve met and talked with and read about and dealt with in a variety of ways both personal and professional, what they care about the most is whether or not the student can do the goddamned work. The student doesn’t even have to know a whole heck of a lot on the first day of class: s/he just has to be willing to put in the hours, days, and weeks that are required to catch up. The problem is that most often, they’re not. Too many of them think that succeeding in AP is just a matter of believing you can do it if you want to.

See, it’s what I call the Sarah Palin problem. When McCain asked her to be on his ticket, Palin stated that she “didn’t blink” when the job of being second-in-command to the leader of the most powerful nation in the world:

“I didn’t hesitate, no,…I answered him yes…because I have the confidence in that readiness and knowing that you can’t blink, you have to be wired in a way of being so committed to the mission, the mission that we’re on, reform of this country and victory in the war, you can’t blink. So I didn’t blink then even when asked to run as his running mate.”

What Palin is discovering is that “confidence” isn’t enough. Attitude is no substitute for experience and education and ability. As the delightful mockery of Palin and Clinton on SNL accurately and brilliantly suggests, just because you “want something” — even if you want it REALLY, REALLY BADLY, it doesn’t mean you’re going to get it.

Bottom line, the worst disservice being committed here is not just to the students who are completely overwhelmed with material that they don’t like, don’t understand, and won’t study. When too many administrators of those teachers pressure them into “helping students to succeed” *coughinflatinggradescough* and students with As in class end up with 1s or 2s on the test, this is hardly helpful.

And of course, pushing for AP enrollment, even when students are “grossly unqualified” has NOTHING to do with some school administrators wanting to score high on the Challenge Index, a ranking of high schools based on the simple calculus of the number of graduating seniors divided by number of AP tests taken…a report invented by — you guessed it! — Jay Mathews.

Nope. Nopitty-nope-nope. Not a thing.

Needless to say, though the Challenge Index is theoretically intended to suggest that the schools scoring highest on the Index are more academically demanding and intellectually rigorous than others scoring lower, the Mathews ranking doesn’t waste its time looking into such irrelevancies as the number of students who actually PASSED the AP with grades of “3″ or better. Theoretically, anyway, a school could have 100% of its seniors take various AP exams and fail them all, and end up waaaaay high on Mathews’ Index.

Good idea.

Packing AP courses with unqualified, unwilling students hurts more than those students alone. It’s also a huge disservice to the students with genuine commitment and talent. AP has frequently been touted as the reason it’s not important to have gifted education at the high school level — the idea being that AP is so demanding that it in itself provides gifted education.

Again, it’s not that simple. When a significant number of students in a class do not understand fundamental concepts, this is not gifted education because the teacher cannot proceed beyond the very bottom of the Bloom’s taxonomic pyramid: there’s just no point in building a house on a foundation of quicksand. When the teacher of the AP course has to de-select materials, questions, or passages because s/he knows those items will simply be beyond the capacity of many of her or his students to understand, this is not gifted education either. When the teacher has to explain and explain a fundamental concept over and over, AP isn’t gifted education.

Actually, the word would be…”remedial.”

Thanks, Jay.

Note: I just found another teacher’s reflections on this same issue at The New Intellectual Pursuit.  DEFINITELY worth reading!

White America…

White America!
I could be one of your kids.
White America!
Little Eric looks just like this.
White America!
Erica loves my shit.
I go to TRL, look how many hugs I get!

Look at these eyes, baby blue, baby just like yourself,
If they were brown Shady lose, Shady sits on the shelf,

But Shady’s cute, Shady knew Shady’s dimples would help,
Make ladies swoon baby, ooh baby! Look at my sales!
Let’s do the math: If I was black I would’ve sold half,
I ain’t have to graduate from Lincoln High School to know that…

– Eminem, “White America”

I’m going to reprint this piece by Tim Wise in full (with pictures added by me for illustration’s sake).  Wise’s essay is an astonishing eye-opener and it deserves to be passed around to pretty much everyone.

____________________________________________________________

For those who still can’t grasp the concept of white privilege, or who are constantly looking for some easy-to-understand examples of it, perhaps this list will help.

White privilege is when you can get pregnant at 17 like Bristol Palin and everyone is quick to insist that your life and that of your family is a personal matter, and that no one has a right to judge you or your parents, because “every family has challenges,” even as black and Latino families with similar “challenges” are regularly typified as irresponsible, pathological and arbiters of social decay.

White privilege is when you can call yourself a “fuckin’ redneck,” like Bristol Palin’s boyfriend does, and talk about how if anyone messes with you, you’ll “kick their fuckin’ ass,” and talk about how you like to “shoot shit” for fun, and still be viewed as a responsible, all-American boy (and a great son-in-law to be) rather than a thug.

White privilege is when you can attend four different colleges in six years like Sarah Palin did (one of which you basically failed out of, then returned to after making up some coursework at a community college), and no one questions your intelligence or commitment to achievement, whereas a person of color who did this would be viewed as unfit for college and probably someone who only got in in the first place because of affirmative action.

White privilege is when you can claim that being mayor of a town smaller than most medium-size colleges, and then governor of a state with about the same number of people as the lower fifth of the island of Manhattan, makes you ready to potentially be president, and people don’t all piss on themselves with laughter, while being a black U.S. senator, two-term state senator and constitutional law scholar means you’re “untested.”

see Sarah Palin pictures

White privilege is being able to say that you support the words “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance because “if it was good enough for the founding fathers, it’s good enough for me,” and not be immediately disqualified from holding office — since, after all, the pledge was written in the late 1800s and the “under God” part wasn’t added until the 1950s — while believing that reading accused criminals and terrorists their rights (because, ya know, the Constitution, which you used to teach at a prestigious law school, requires it), is a dangerous and silly idea only supported by mushy liberals.

White privilege is being able to be a gun enthusiast and not make people immediately scared of you. White privilege is being able to have a husband who was a member of an extremist political party that wants your state to secede from the Union, and whose motto was “Alaska first,” and no one questions your patriotism or that of your family, while if you’re black and your spouse merely fails to come to a 9/11 memorial so she can be home with her kids on the first day of school, people immediately think she’s being disrespectful.

White privilege is being able to make fun of community organizers and the work they do — like, among other things, fight for the right of women to vote, or for civil rights, or the eight-hour workday, or an end to child labor — and people think you’re being pithy and tough, but if you merely question the experience of a small-town mayor and 18-month governor with no foreign policy expertise beyond a class she took in college — you’re somehow being mean, or even sexist.

White privilege is being able to convince white women who don’t even agree with you on any substantive issue to vote for you and your running mate anyway, because all of a sudden your presence on the ticket has inspired confidence in these same white women and made them give your party a “second look.”

White privilege is being able to fire people who didn’t support your political campaigns and not be accused of abusing your power or being a typical politician who engages in favoritism, while being black and merely knowing some folks from the old-line political machines in Chicago means you must be corrupt.

White privilege is being able to attend churches over the years whose pastors say that people who voted for John Kerry or merely criticize George W. Bush are going to hell, and that the United States is an explicitly Christian nation and the job of Christians is to bring Christian theological principles into government, and who bring in speakers who say the conflict in the Middle East is God’s punishment on Jews for rejecting Jesus, and everyone can still think you’re just a good churchgoing Christian, but if you’re black and friends with a black pastor who has noted (as have Colin Powell and the U.S. Department of Defense) that terrorist attacks are often the result of U.S. foreign policy and who talks about the history of racism and its effect on black people, you’re an extremist who probably hates America.

White privilege is not knowing what the Bush Doctrine is when asked by a reporter, and then having people get angry at the reporter for asking you such a “trick question,” while being black and merely refusing to give one-word answers to the queries of Bill O’Reilly means you’re dodging the question, or trying to seem overly intellectual and nuanced.

White privilege is being able to claim that your experience as a POW has anything at all to do with your fitness for president, while being black and experiencing racism is, as Sarah Palin has referred to it, a “light” burden.

And finally, white privilege is the only thing that could possibly allow someone to become president when he has voted with George W. Bush 90 percent of the time, even as unemployment is skyrocketing, people are losing their homes, inflation is rising and the United States is increasingly isolated from world opinion, just because white voters aren’t sure about that whole “change” thing. Ya know, it’s just too vague and ill-defined, unlike, say, four more years of the same, which is very concrete and certain.

White privilege is, in short, the problem.

Why We Love Palin.

Amazingly enough, this is a post that has to do both with giftedness and politics.

I’ve speculated for awhile about just what it is about Sarah Palin that people seem to love, and love so vociferously.  I think I’ve figured out just what it is.

It’s not experience, because if Obama’s experience is slim, hers is positively anorexic.  You’d be hard-pressed to convince anyone but the real nutjobs that she’s ready for Hillary’s (in)famous 3AM phone call, and I noticed that she didn’t really touch on such could-be-the-Prez issues during the RNC such as her detailed plan for the economy.

Naah.  So why do we love Sarah Palin?

Because Americans don’t actually want the most qualified, intelligent person for the job of President.  Eight years of Bush should be enough to convince us that this is so.  See, if we did, we’d hold it to be of supreme importance that our future president should be extremely knowledgeable about one or more areas of crucial competence to a world power such as foreign policy, economics, diplomacy, management of a large-scale and complex organization, or hell, even basic geography.

Nope, Americans don’t want those skills in a President.  They just don’t want to feel stupid, which suggests even to the most mind-blind among us, that Americans operate under an enormous inferiority complex – an inferiority complex that is so vast that it’s the elephant (or the donkey) in the room, an inferiority complex caused by the fact that we have good, solid reasons to believe that no, we are not the best nation in the world any more.

We used to be.  But we’re not.  Not any more.  Or if we are the best nation still, we’re well on our way to blowing it.

Oh, sure, you can argue till you’re blue in the face that we have the best nukes.  Absolutely.  We have weapons of mass destruction up the yin-yang and we could blow the crap out of everyone else.  Sure.

However, I’m not sure — at least for me — that might makes right, or even that the nation with the best nukes is the bestest of all possible worlds for the people who live there.  If so, if we’re to judge a nation’s quality this way, then we’re down a dark path indeedy.

Judged by measures of quality of life such as infant mortality rates, the happiness of one’s citizenry, the excellence of our children’s education, the length of the people’s lifespans, a modest gap between the wealthiest and the most impoverished, or even our freedoms of speech and press for which we’ve energetically congratulated ourselves for the years since Joe McCarthy died, we’re not doing so well at all.

Why? 

Let’s take education as a starter.  See, as many readers of this blog know very well, studying in school is really hard.  It’s not nearly as much fun as…well, fun.  Studying takes hours of your time and ultimately demands of the individual student that she or he confront not the areas in which she or he is strongest, but the areas in which s/he is not, and this kind of confrontation with our weakest and dumbest areas is a confrontation from which we all want to shrink.  The difference is that the devoted students ultimately face their fear.

It’s hard to achieve on your individual merits, which is why we as Americans love those stories about people who achieve for no reason whatsoever or by getting unearned, undeserved wealth: by winning the lottery, by eating cockroaches, by being randomly chosen from the audience, by selling drugs or yourself.

We love celebrity, but we really love it when it comes unaccompanied by any actual talent, because when that happens, well, then anyone could be a celebrity.  You, me, Kim Kardashian, Lindsey Lohan, the entire lineups of any given American Idol, America’s Next Top Model, or So You Think You Can Dance?

See, not everyone can get into Harvard or Yale.  We despise Obama for the former, but have you ever thought how much we love Bush for the latter?  At the very least, we conveniently ignore the fact that he is a son of privilege whose influential, wealthy father got him into Andover, one of the toniest prep schools EV-AH, and from there into Yale.  We love Bush because, in our hearts, we know he is a mediocrity who never could have gotten further than the student cafeteria without his father’s legacy and influence, and once there, never got much better than “gentleman’s Cs,” those inflated grades given to the sons of fathers you don’t want to piss off.  Like ones who head up the CIA.

The unforgivable thing about Obama is that he just might be more intelligent, diplomatic, and genuinely educated in the old-school Thomas Jefferson sense than is the average Joe Sixpack.  Unlike McCain, he probably knows what countries border Iraq and unlike Palin, he believes in teaching science in school, not science fiction.  The worst thing, though, is the fact that he’s an intelligent, educated (ssshhhh!!) black man — an idea that is abhorrently offensive to those people whose only claim to supposed “superiority” in the entire world is their fair, white skin. 

(Hence the astoundingly retro comment from Georgia congressman Lynn Westmoreland the other day that Obama and his wife were members of an “elitist-class … that thinks that they’re uppity.”  When asked if he really meant that, Westmoreland said, “Yeah, uppity.”)

We love Sarah Palin for the same reasons — not because she’s experienced, because it’s absurd to suggest that someone whose entire state population is less than that of Tucson, Arizona has gotten much experience at all for the fewer than twenty months she’s been on the job — but because she’s “just like us.”

She’s a “hockey mom.” She wears her baby in a sling. She breastfeeds. She’s a pitbull with lipstick — how cute is that?  She looks and sounds like Tina Fey auditioning for a part in Fargo: The Return of Wood Chipper Guy.  She’s so normal. Rather than elitist, intelligent Obama, she went to the absolutely-unremarkable University of Iowa or Idaho or Indiana and majored in journalism, one of the least-demanding subjects besides education and P.E.

Oh, sorry.  Was that elitist of me?

In the eyes of many, Sara Palin’s very lack of qualities ironically qualifies her to be President, because many of us, as Americans realize in our hearts that we’re second-best and this offends us to the core.  To see a second-bester rise to the position of world power pleases us no end, because of course, we think we can do that too.  Hell, apparently anyone with more responsibility than is given to a P.T.A. member can apparently consider themselves ready to take the helm of the free world.

Color me elitist.

Every single parent of a gifted child knows all about the charge of “elitism.”  Every single parent of a gifted child knows that it’s absolutely wonderful-peachykeen-fine if your child is beautiful or athletic, because plastic surgery and drugs can do a hell of a lot towards closing that gap, and if those don’t work, then just wait: time tends to work its own ravages on beauty and strength.  Many women who used to wish they “looked just like Elizabeth Taylor” now can say in all honesty that their wish has come true. 

It’s not so fine when someone else’s child is just. plain. scarysmart.  Not just hothoused.  Anyone with flashcards, time, and the determination of a lipsticked pitbull can hothouse.

Smart can’t be bought.  Smart can’t be conferred with a few strokes of a surgeon’s knife or a shot of steroids.  Smart is what can’t be forgiven.

See, I like intelligence in my world leader.  I like experience.  Given a choice between the two, I’ll take intelligence, because intelligence learns from experience, but experience doesn’t always confer intelligence — nor even wisdom.   If it did, we should elect Dick Cheney.

Ultimately, I DON’T want someone who’s “just like me.”  I want someone smarter than me (…um…than I…) to be heading up the most powerful office in the free world.  I want someone with diplomatic experience, or at least diplomacy.   I want someone who knows that Fannie Mae isn’t a kind of candy, and I want someone who did a little better than graduating 894th out of 899th in his class, no matter how smart that makes me feel.  I want someone who did BETTER than I did because they have a far more important job than I do.

Conclusion: It’s a lot easier to shit on quality than aspire to it. 

 

Break the Rules. Just Do it Well.

Ah, the new school year looms…

I found out that I’m teaching freshmen next year (insert evil cackles of glee right about now), but one of the reasons I’m looking forward to it a great deal is that a largish chunk of those pee-wees should, in the fullness of time, be my AP students of the future, so by teaching freshmen now, I’m basically vertical-teaming with myself — which I’ve found is actually the most effective method of vertical teaming.

Anyhoo, I have found that my AP students fall into two very general groups as writers: Group One and Group Two. The papers of Group One students invariably include a thesis statement in the expected location; they include exactly the amount of evidence you told them to include; they provide 1-2 sentences of explanation of that evidence, and their papers are largely free from mechanical, grammatical, and structural errors. They’re also more boring to read than the illicit love child of Eliot’s Middlemarch and the U.S. Revised Tax Code.

Then there’s Group Two.

Group Twos are not always to be found in AP. In fact, many of them have been in remedial English not in spite of their Group Two-ness, but ironically because of it. They’re the kind of kids who start off essays like this:

“Nietzsche observed that out of chaos comes order — or maybe it was Stewie on Family Guy. I forget. In Pride and Prejudice, though, it seems that out of order comes chaos, which proves definitively that Jane Austen was, like, the anti-Nietzsche. But I digress.”

I believe I forgot to mention that, just as student writers fall into two groups, so do teachers. Group Two teachers will immediately recognize that this student, though not a perfect writer, is a gem. For one, cutting to the very obvious, she’s getting to her point immediately: that in Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, chaos ultimately rises out of order. She hasn’t defined (yet) what she means by either of those two key terms, but that’s okay — reading this writer, you’re confident that she knows she needs to do that.

Conversely, a Group One Teacher will notice things also, but they’ll be different things. They’ll notice that the reference to Family Guy is largely irrelevant to the author’s point, that there are other irrelevant first-person comments (”I forget…but I digress…”) and worst of all, she started a sentence with a “but.”

The Group One teacher, if she allows rewrites, will get something like this:

“Nietzsche observed that out of chaos comes order. In Pride and Prejudice, out of order comes chaos.”

Though technically “correct” and much pithier, the composition now is well on its way to being suckworthy. The Group One teacher has managed to take filet mignon and turn it straight into Spam. Gone is that elusive quality of composition known as “voice,” that element of writing that allows the reader to hear the reader’s authentic voice as if she or he were speaking right in your ear, using all the unique, quirky, comedic, sardonic, or vivid language at the author’s disposal. It “sounds like” the real writer — and no one else, any more than Hemingway sounds like Poe or either of them sound like Annie Dillard.

Kids in Group One get along well with Group One teachers, as you can imagine. Group One teachers tell students a set of comforting rules that, if followed, will result in an acceptable composition, just as a recipe will, if followed, result in a decent meal. Group One students, because they basically enjoy rules and enjoy following them, and want a checklist of things to do so that they can do them, are comfortable with Group One teachers.

The Group Twos? Suffice it to say that they find the experience soul-crushing. It doesn’t take long before they realize that the elements about writing they love the most — the search for le mot juste, the allusion to an unusual or unexpected source, a pairing of apparently unrelated ideas to tease out a non-obvious conclusion — are precisely those qualities that will be invariably and inevitably red-penned by the Group One teacher. If Picasso had had a Group One teacher, she would’ve told him to quit putting the eyes on the same goddamned side, already.

All that Group Two really needs from a writing teacher is a checklist — a “shopping list” of writing tasks that need to get accomplished in some reasonably logical order before the end of the composition. The “shopping list” usually looks like this, and yeah, the order’s reasonably important:

1. Author and title of the work in question
2. The main point you, the writer, are making about that work
3. The major ways in which you’re going to prove your point to be true
4. The hard evidence that supports that point
5. The context — the who, what, where, when, why of the evidence
6. The explanation — why the evidence proves your point, what specific words “lock it in.”
7. The conclusion

For freshmen, who are basically writing paragraphs, I simplify this a lot, building on an idea I found on the AP’s English listserv. The technique I teach for paragraph structure is called “SQuEES,” and it’s short for Sentence (topic sentence with the author’s name and title and main point being made), Quotes (the hard evidence), Explanation (the who, what, where…), Elaboration (the explanation why the evidence proves the point) and Sentence again (a transition to the next paragraph).

Group Two students know, usually through the osmotic wisdom of having read a great deal themselves, that they must accomplish these tasks. What they want is the freedom to do them in the way which works best for them as writers.

That’s why I end up giving two completely contradictory pieces of advice to my students. I’ll explain about Group One and Group Two. “You yourself know which group you’re in,” I’ll say. “If you’re reassured to have the SQuEES technique and always follow it and find it comforting, you’re probably in Group One, which is fine — if you follow those rules, you’ll end up as solid, competent writers. On the other hand, if you’re sitting there thinking, ‘NOOOOO!!! These arbitrary rules! Aiee! They crush my voice — they will not let me SING!’ then you’re most likely in Group Two. Where you are is up to you to determine, and you get to change that at any time. If you’re a One and decide you want to be a Two, you have my blessing.

“Group One, I want you to follow the rules, which you want to do anyway. Group Two, I want you to break the rules, which you also want to do anyway. The only proviso is this: If you’re going to break the rules, you’ve got to do it well.”

I’ve been happy overall with the quality of writing I’ve gotten. Ironically, even though you might think that the Group Two people would end up writing disorganized crapola that’s all over the map, they really don’t. Surprisingly — or not — they get everything done, and ironically (or not) in the same SQuEES order I’ve taught them at the beginning of the year.

This brings me, in roundabout fashion, to talk about how I was a real idiot: I turned into a Group One teacher with my own favorite pupil.

Child has been taking a distance ed. ninth-grade class through Generic Midwestern University for a month or so now, and unlike Child’s previous distance ed. class, this one requires a heck of a lot more writing — about nine paragraphs per lesson or so. Realizing that what was called for was a writing technique that would give him/her some more structure to his/her writing, I taught Child the basic SQuEES technique. S/He figured it out, wrote about three paragraphs that way without much difficulty, and then seemed to hit a COMPLETE. BRICK. WALL.

Every writing assignment became a grueling match of patience versus procrastination. Child would delay starting the writing even after reading the selection, taking notes, brainstorming, doing all that good lay-the-ground prepwork writers (in whatever group) need to do before they have something to say. He/She would definitely have an opinion about the work, which I would encourage him/her to put in. Dickering and delay would follow, with maybe one or two desultory sentences squeezed (or SQuEESed) out at a time with painful slowness and constant encouragement.

Finally, this all came to a head when we read an O. Henry story which Child had read before and loved. The assignment was simple: Discuss how O. Henry uses suspense.

Child took notes on suspense in the beginning, middle, and end of the story. At the end, he/she produced a composition that sounded a lot like a Group One piece of work:

In “The Gift of the Magi,” O. Henry uses suspense throughout the story. At the beginning of the story, O. Henry uses suspense when Della wonders what to give Jim for Christmas….”

It was perfect…if you were a Group One teacher.

Problem was, where was the soul?

I came to the conclusion that we were in over our heads. We shouldn’t've skipped eighth grade English, I figured, even though seventh grade had been easy. We should back out now. Just give more time, more experience, more room to season her/his skills, to read more, to take the pressure off. The best thing to do would be to quit, or at least to put the course on hold, if we could, and come back to it at a later time. He/She just didn’t seem to be getting it and this struggle was becoming painful.

But when I was driving, I wondered, What if he/she’s…? Could it be that the problem was…?

I went home and told Child a version of what I tell my students about Group One and Group Two and the two sets of rules. “But what about if it’s too long?” he/she asked.

I was heartened. This is a classic Group Two question.

“So it’s too long. We’ll email the teacher and ask. In the meantime, to heck with the rules. The only thing you have to do is write about how O. Henry uses suspense in this story. That’s it. However else you want to do it, you go for it. You want to be funny? Be funny. You want to make comparisons to other things? You do that.”

The composition Child wrote is on the refrigerator now. When I read it, I laughed so hard I cried. Sardonic, smartalecky, quirky, it focused on O. Henry’s suspense throughout — ironically or not, with quotes, with explanations, with all the other stuff on the “shopping list.” It sang with voice.

Um.  Yeah, I was an idiot.

Suffice it to say that I now have more sympathy for the Group One teachers who don’t recognize Group Two students. At least from personal experience, I see why those folks are easy to miss. Even a fairly open-ended method like the SQuEES technique can seem scarily rigid to someone with perfectionistic tendencies who’s more panicky than the average bear about making sure it’s done “the right way,” even though they’ve internalized already what “the right way” is and just need the freedom to play with it. It’s like this: Even though you’re good at eating and knew instinctively that there were an optimal number of times a given piece of food should be chewed before being swallowed, wouldn’t it make you paranoid if you thought someone was counting — and judging you?

Yeah, that would suck a lot of flavor out of my personal burger.

The problem is, fear of failure can look a great deal like lack of mastery, which we all know from having had the guy from the DMV sit next to us in the passenger seat. To a reasonable teacher, it can look like there’s no compelling reason to accelerate a genuinely gifted child to a class where they’d be appropriately challenged. If the parent doesn’t have any independent evidence to present — and sometimes, even if they do — they basically have nothing in their hand to show a reluctant teacher, principal, or school official…and then the kid gets relegated to doing activities s/he mastered years ago, and no one learns jack, least of all the kid.

That’s why I’m writing this: to show that it’s THAT easy to miss — but that easy to fix, too.

We’ll Always Have Paris…

Oh, if only I had written this brilliant post.

This is a delightful excerpt from John Cates’ blog, www.johncates.blogspot.com

Saturday, August 02, 2008
Celebrity President? Over My Dumb Body.

Ever since Barack Obama announced his bid for president, I’ve been paying pretty close attention to our candidates and what they mean to me and my country. I, like most, became enamored with Obama’s speeches and message of hope, because, why not? Sounds plausible. Hope didn’t sound that expensive the way he described it, and I didn’t see where a little hope might change my daily routine too drastically. I tried to give John McCain the same amount of attention, and really learn what he’s all about, but I have to admit that I don’t think I’m smart enough or politically savvy enough to understand what it is he plans to do. Even when his confusing and inconsistent views of a world that sounded completely unlike the one I read about and lived in started to make a little sense to me, his impatience and condescension reminded me that I have no business trying to understand a mind like his. I wish I could, but I went to public schools, and I need things explained to me with a little more detail and, well, in grammatically correct English if possible. So, by default and as a result of my own limitations, I became an Obama supporter. I voted for him in the primaries, and planned to vote for him in the general election as well. I really appreciated the efforts John McCain made to inform my decision, and I wanted to believe him when he slipped on his $500 shoes and boarded his wife’s private jet to travel the country and remind me that Barack Obama is an elitist. But again, my sub-par education must be failing me, because it’s obvious that the meaning I had always assigned to “elitist” is completely wrong. Shucks. I wish I was smart enough to understand all of that stuff.

But then McCain did something that shook me out of my silly, overly-positive admiration for my candidate by doing what any great leader of a nation of simple folks would do to save me. He dumbed it down. I hadn’t even realized how close I was to casting a vote for my own destruction until I saw this…

Barack Obama is the BIGGEST CELEBRITY IN THE WORLD?

What the Sam Hill? When in tarnation did this happen? I had seen the crowds, and the constant attention, but I guess I read it differently than I would my favorite gossip mag. I thought he was running for political office, something that I don’t care about because it doesn’t really affect my life at all, but I NEVER thought he would be trying to take the place of my favorite celebrities! And right there, in the first few seconds of the ad, I realized how bad I had let it get. Beautiful photographs of two of the most regal celebrities in the world, Britney Spears and Paris Hilton, reminded me of how seriously my priorities had been damaged. What frightens me most now as I remember the first time I watched this illuminating ad, is that in one second, in one split unforgiveable second, with the sounds of Obama’s voice ringing in my ears, I realized that I didn’t know Britney and Paris anymore. I had almost…I shake as I type this…forgotten about them. In the last year I have spent so much time following Obama’s speeches and interviews and frivolous talk about taxes and increasing my family’s income and ending some war or something, that I had completely neglected my fascination with the real heroes of this country, our celebrities.

In a panic, I began to quiz myself.

“Is Paris in rehab now, or out?” I didn’t know.

“Are Britney’s kids old enough yet to ride around on the hood of car the way she likes them to?” I had nothing.

“Are they even her kids anymore or are they with Kevin?”

Oh my God! Where is KFed!

I looked around for a People, or an US, anything to get my bearings and convince myself that I hadn’t completely lost touch with what is truly important, but all I could find was an OK from June. Of 2007! Lindsay Lohan probably has a half a dozen drunken sex tapes that I don’t know about, and I’m sitting here in my living room watching an African-American Jr. Senator from some Midwestern state speak to 200,000 people in Berlin. Wherever that is.

How did he do it? How did he successfully pull off this celebri-coup? I spent the better part of last night googling phrases like, “Obama Rehab Escape”, “Obama Lip Sync Scandal Fat Dancing” and “Upskirt Obama No Underwear” and I found nothing that could explain how he has earned this title. Biggest Celebrity in the World, how dare he even try. So what is Kirstie Allie then?

McCain has been right all along, and I wasn’t smart enough to see it. Obama’s rise to the top of our nation’s most sacred form of worship is the most diabolical form of terrorism. There is no better way to completely destroy our American way of life from within than to distract us from what makes us who we are, and what makes us better than everyone else, by making us turn away from Entertainment Tonight and pay attention to politics.

And to think it almost worked. I feel so dumb.

Why CAN’T We Prosecute Bush for Murder?

I’m asking this as a serious question — and so is former prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi.  As you may remember, Bugliosi was the prosecutor responsible for putting Charles Manson behind bars, and his record as an L.A. Country prosecutor is equally impressive: out of 106 cases, he won 105, and out of 21 murder cases, he won them all. 

Bugliosi may not be an expert on nuclear physics or on hip-hop dance stylings, but as an expert on criminal prosecution, you’d be hard-pressed to find someone with more experience or more success. 

Therefore, when Bugliosi seriously asserts in his newest book that the President of the United States should be tried for the  murder of over four thousand American soldiers in the war in Iraq, I’m inclined to treat this assertion with a considerable degree of gravity.

Before I bought The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder, I read a sampling of Amazon customer reviews, which are really always very interesting especially when you put on your waders and tread through the ugly dark side known as the “1″ section, the most negative reviews of a given book.   I figured that if the book were a complete Democratic polemic, the liberal equivalent of another cloacal spillage from the entirely estimable Ann Coulter, I wouldn’t bother.  There are plenty of polemics out there.  What there aren’t enough of are fact-based arguments where the facts come from reputable primary sources available to anyone to review.

I first became convinced that this book might be worth buying when I read the first negative customer review, courtesy of an Adam J. Schmidt of Washington, D.C.

Haven’t read it and don’t plan on reading it. The premise is simply silly. Congress authorized the use of force (Public Law 102-1) so it doesn’t really matter who said what to the public. Last I checked lying to people isn’t a crime. We’re not talking about perjury or lying under oath here, just lying in general. Not a crime. Besides which, I don’t even agree with the assumption that we were lied to. Intelligence is inexact and in the confused aftermath of a major terrorist attack we decided that we couldn’t take any chances on what else might be a threat. So we assumed the worst and planned accordingly.

 

 

 

To recap: silly premise, won’t read.

 

 

 

 

You’ve got to have a soft spot in your heart for a person who thinks that lying isn’t a crime (ever heard of fraud?) and that it doesn’t matter what Bush told the American people as long as Congress gave him the okey-doke on the Iraq war.  Oh, and when he admits that he hasn’t even read the book.  That makes me take him very seriously.

Well, what about the second negative review?  This one came from “Trapper” of Washington State:

Its very title reveals that this is a slanderous insult on the President of the United States, and it does not deserve to be opened, let alone read. It belongs in the garbage. I gave it one star because at least one star is required and there is no minus ten stars available.

You’ve got to have another soft spot in your heart for a person who doesn’t know the difference between slander and libel and who — going Adam Schmidt one better — didn’t even OPEN the book.

What I’d love to do, and I mean this seriously, is ask any Bush supporter out there who has read the book and considered its arguments carefully to discuss one question with me here on this blog:

Why CAN’T we prosecute George W. Bush for murder?

Bugliosi makes a strong case for this very idea, basing his claim on a few key points, specifically that Bush sent American soldiers into Iraq with a willful and reckless disregard for their safety, and did so under false pretenses.  The reasons Bush gave Congress and the American people for going to war against Saddam Hussein were either distortions of the truth or were entirely false, in stark contradiction to the intelligence presented to Bush at the time about the level of threat Saddam Hussein presented.  Bush gave two central reasons why war in Iraq was necessary, if you’ll recall:

1. Saddam has WMDs and presents an imminent threat to the United States, and

2. Saddam is affiliated with al-Qaeda, who attacked us on 9/11.

If those two reasons Bush gave for going into war can be proven to be false, Bugliosi argues, and if it can be proven that Bush knew they were false at the time but proceeded anyway, knowing he was lying in order to begin an unnecessary war that would result, quite obviously, in American deaths,  then he is responsible for the deaths of the four thousand American soldiers who died in Iraq.

To many people, though, the notion of prosecuting an American president for murder is simply inconceivable.   In a June 19, 2008 interview with The Nation, Bugliosi stated,

The average American instinctively feels …that if an American President takes his nation to war under any circumstances, he can’t be prosecuted for murder. Related to that, people find it very hard to believe that an American President would engage in conduct that is so extremely criminal. You just don’t expect that of a President.

Americans just can’t believe an American President would engage in conduct that smacks of such criminality, and thus the whole notion of taking the President to court for murder is a revolutionary one.

Nevertheless, this is precisely the case Bugliosi makes.  Quoting further from his interview with The Nation, here is Bugliosi’s comment — one that gives an interesting and representative sample of his argument from the book:

In order to make the legal case for murder the prosecution, you write, would have to show that George Bush had a criminal state of mind–in legal terms, “malice aforethought”–when he led the country to war. That strikes me as no easy task. Can you explain how exactly you would go about arguing such a mindset?

To satisfy the main elements of murder–murder being an unlawful killing of a human being with the requisite state of mind–the following question would have to be answered: Did George Bush, or did he not, take the nation to war in self-defense, as he claimed, as a pre-emptive strike? Bush said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and was therefore an imminent threat to security of the country, so we had to pre-emptively go to war against him. If the prosecutor can show that President Bush did not take the country to war in self-defense but instead under false pretenses, then all the killings that have taken place would be unlawful killings, and therefore murder.

Without getting into legal complexities and technicalities, which I do in the book, let me give you just one example of the kind of evidence that could be used to make just such an argument. In President Bush’s first speech to the nation, on October 7, 2002, from Cincinnati, he told the American people that Saddam Hussein was great danger to our nation, either by Hussein attacking us with WMDs, or by giving these weapons to a terrorist group to do so. Bush said this attack could happen on “any given day,” meaning that the threat was imminent. The only big problem for Bush in a trial is that on October 1, just six days earlier, the CIA sent Bush its 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, a classified, top-secret report, that represented the consensus opinion of all sixteen US intelligence agencies on the issue of whether or not Hussein was an imminent threat to the security of this country. On page 8, it clearly and unequivocally says… that Hussein was not an imminent threat to the security of this country; that he would only be a threat to us if he feared that America was about to attack him. So we know–not think, but know–that when George Bush told the nation on the evening of October 7, 2002, that Saddam Hussein was an imminent threat to the security of the nation, he was telling millions of unsuspecting Americans the exact opposite of what his own CIA was telling him. Even if we have nothing else at all, this alone shows that Bush took this nation to war on a terrible lie, and therefore all the killings of American soldiers in Iraq were unlawful killings and therefore murder.

I’m serious, though, about what I said earlier: I would be eager to discuss with any Republican who’s actually read the book and is willing to analyze the evidence Bugliosi presents — evidence which is available to you, to me, to anyone — I would very much be interested in a politely-conducted debate here on this blog about the facts and what they imply. 

To me, this is not an issue of conservative-versus-liberal or Democrat-versus-Republican.  I’ll say for the record that a president — ANY president, whether Democratic or Republican, should never cause the reckless deaths of people who were willing to lay down their lives for this country.  To me, and I’m sure to a great many people, regardless of political affiliation, this is a tragic slap in their faces that shamefully makes a mockery of those people’s sincere willingness to protect a country they were fraudulently convinced was in danger.  For those wrongful deaths, justice needs to be served, or at least what form of justice is available to those soldiers and their families under American law.

I’ve discussed this book online with a few Bush supporters already, but what’s disappointed me greatly is that so far, all they’ve come up with are bald-faced assertions like, “I KNOW Bush didn’t know Saddam wasn’t a threat!” without either a) presenting the independent proof, document, interview, or credible piece of evidence to explain why this is true and Bush didn’t know, or b) attacking the credibility of the evidence I myself presented. 

I admit, it’s very disappointing.  I’m certainly willing to give credence to a valid argument, though.  I have every confidence that there are intelligent, thoughtful supporters of Bush or of the war in Iraq who are willing to consider the factual evidence Bugliosi presents regarding Bush’s decision to go to war with Iraq and discuss it with me here, so that’s why I’m giving the shout-out.

 I would say “bring it on,” but that’s been done.

Looking forward to it,

Adso

Homeschoolers, Help Me!

I saw this cry of help over at Alasandra and the Cats, and because I love Alasandra’s blog, I thought, “How could I resist?”

Long story short, HW over at I’m Just Sayin’ published a post last week in which she expressed some concerns about homeschooling:

I know a few homeschooling families and I think it is a wonderful option. I respect the reasons for which they’ve made that decision. What I don’t respect is the judgmental attitude they have toward those of us who do not home school.

One of the problems HW has with homeschoolers is their attitude to public school, and I just wish I could wave my magic wand over here and ask her not to take homeschoolers’ attitudes about public school as a personal diss on her, because it’s really not.  Many homeschoolers — dare I say almost all — are former public schoolers themselves or have had their kids in public school.  In fact, that may be a central reason why they chose to homeschool in the first place.  Ultimately, though, as I say below, with the exception of a very few people, most of us just try to do the best by our kids — and homeschooling is not necessarily the “best” option for everyone universally throughout time.

In a further act of reasonableness, HW asked this week if the homeschoolers out there could just answer a few questions.  I probably burned up all the available space on her blog’s Comments section, but here were my answers if anyone’s interested:

Thank you so much for asking and being willing to hear and consider the answers of other people. I’ll be glad to answer your questions.

1. What was your motivation for homeschooling?

Primarily, our motivation for homeschooling had to do with the fact that our child was a very early reader who read at the 2nd-grade level by about age two and a half. It became clear that some kind of accommodation was going to be necessary in school, but we weren’t sure if we were going to get any kind of meaningful differentiation or whether we’d get written off as “THOSE parents,” i.e., horrid hothousers.

When we spoke with the assistant principal of the school for which we’re zoned, his attitude was clearly quite condescending — he flippantly said, “Well, if your child is readin’ at the fourth grade level by the time they’re in kindy, we’ll just get the fourth grade books.”

Um. Sure. What will you do when our child hits first grade and is reading fifth grade books? Your school only goes UP to fifth grade.

Naaah — it was clear that they had no real plan and no real intent to differentiate. Rather than beat our heads against a wall trying to get subject acceleration or a grade skip, we just decided to BE the school. Red tape’s easy around our house!

2. Don’t hate me for asking this. How to you handle socialization?

In the course of the week, our child deals with other kids often, actually–at the library, at the gym child care, at our religious service, or through family. We’re also active in a homeschool group that meets once a week for homeschool science, which is a mixture of ages from 7-12.

At the risk of angering some of your readers or you, I think socialization is a problematic issue, but maybe not for the reasons you do. I don’t think it’s a stretch to observe that kids often bully each other or communicate attitudes that are…well, let’s say “problematic.” It’s a problem for everyone, homeschoolers included, but I think it’s exacerbated when they’re with other kids for a huge portion of the day with only one teacher or a teacher and aide to mediate or observe. Teachers can only hear so much and do so much — and that’s not a diss on teachers, just a truth about human beings. I think it’s healthier if kids have some exposure to other kids, but not as much as they do at school, and under more supervised conditions until they’re older and more mature all around.

3. Do you use the public school system for any part of your child’s routine?

No, not really. We may consider high school in a few years, depending on the principal’s willingness to consider having an exceptionally young student.

4. Do your children begin and end school at the same time each day?

It’s not as much “schedule” as it is “routine.” We wake up and eat breakfast and then do most homeschooling stuff in the morning. We’ve found that morning works best for teaching, especially harder-level concepts such as logic or mathematics, and that the afternoon works better for hands-on projects such as science or music. However, some days, we’ll really become interested in pursuing a science topic and leave history until tomorrow, for instance, or we’ll get passes to the museum to see the “Crime Scene Insect” exhibit. It’s routine, but has inherent flexibility.

You asked, “If not, when/how will you transition your children into following a more rigid schedule – awaking at the same time each day so that they can follow a routine outside of the home like for college and work?”

I’m fairly sure that won’t be any more difficult than any other child who’s learning to do the same thing when s/he first goes to kindergarten — and in some other ways, it’ll be easier.

5. How many spelling bees has your child won? Oh, I’m kidding. We all know most of the recent national spelling bee winners have been home schooled children. I just wanted to throw a little funny in there?

Actually, although this makes me look like a candidate for the “A Homeschool Family” video, version 2.0, our child WOULD like to participate in the National Spelling Bee, for real.

6. Do you have a sense of humor? It’s probably a little late for me to ask that but…

*Snort* Hope so!

7. Where do you find your curriculum? Do you shop for it and order it? Do you create your own?

Yes.
Sorry. Just being humorous. Seriously, though, a great deal of the curricula we use has been found through a wonderful company, Rainbow Resources, which is a company that sells an enormous variety of homeschool curricula at substantially reduced cost. Their catalog, with extensive reviews of the materials’ positive and negative traits, is one of the main sources we use for simply finding stuff.

Often, if we’ve been having an issue or problem with an existing curriculum, asking around on the Net has led to some fabulous suggestions. We also use a high school distance education course through a major university for our child’s English/language arts study.

8. Do you have any worries at all about teaching your teenagers the higher level math and sciences?

Yeah, that is a concern — specifically with higher-level math and science. I’m hoping that the HS principal is receptive to an accelerated student, but if s/he is not, we plan to use distance education or private tutoring.

 
9. What bothers you the most about the reputation home schoolers have?

That we’re all fundamentalist Christians who are teaching our kids that dinosaurs were planted in the earth by Satan to trick us into EEEEEVIIIIIL.

What things do you hate to hear people say about you for your choice? I really hope you don’t say that it’s my previous post.

Luckily, I think most of the time, people tend to say negative comments out of my hearing, to be honest.

10. Be honest, do you, at least in your mind sometimes, judge those of us who choose public school? Do you ever think we are making a bad choice for our children? Are you vocal about that disapproval?

I don’t judge the people who choose public school nearly as harshly as I judge public school itself. Full disclosure time: I am also a full-time public school teacher who splits homeschooling duties with my spouse.

I went into teaching because (not surprisingly) I love teaching — and it’s the same reason, among others, that I became a homeschooler: it was a natural extension of my parenting. However, I’ve come to believe that the system itself has serious flaws, and that ultimately, it’s not designed to do the one thing it should be devoted to doing heart and soul: educating all students. Instead, public school has a boilerplate, factory-line mentality that forces too many kids into an intellectual Procrustean bed that’s either too short or too long — and the result is what we see: that they lose interest and motivation, that they don’t see a connection between school and life, and that they don’t care about what they’re learning.

As far as the parents, I think that with only a few rare exceptions, we all want to do well by our kids. Homeschooling isn’t for everyone and it’s not a panacea for the world’s educational ills. I’m first to say that no, not everyone can or should homeschool. For some kids, public school is a godsend — and I’m not just talking about impoverished kids from undereducated families, either. In short, the education needs to fit the child, not the child the education.

11. Is “home school” one word or two? I’ve seen it both ways. With spellcheck, it shows it as ONE word when used as a verb, but two words when used otherwise. Please enlighten me.

I usually say “homeschool.”

Um…that’s it. I look forward to your responses. And if you have any homeschooling friends, send them on over to weigh in.

 I will!

Some People are Idiots.

Okay, the first idiot I’d like to talk about this week is — who else? — Michael Savage.

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For those of you who don’t know, Michael Savage, a conservative radio talk-show host, recently made a series of somewhat incendiary remarks regarding children with autism last Wednesday. Accusing medical professionals and Big Pharma of creating what he called a “national panic” and over-diagnosing autism or autism spectrum disorders, Savage went on to say:

What do you mean they scream and they’re silent? They don’t have a father around to tell them, ‘Don’t act like a moron. You’ll get nowhere in life. Stop acting like a putz. Straighten up. Act like a man. Don’t sit there crying and screaming, you idiot.’

Yeah. That’s all that people like Daniel Tammet or people like this guy on a British public service announcement about autism needed: a daddy with a big mouth on him. I guess that must be the big secret that doctors and pharmaceutical companies and Rain Man are keeping from us all — good ole-fashioned parental discipline just like Back Then when they didn’t have autism. All I want to know is this: If that’s all it takes to cure autism, why the heck isn’t Jim Carrey stepping up to the plate and giving Jenny McCarthy’s kid a good man-swat in the ass?

According to Perez Hilton, whom I treasure because he soils himself with celebrity culture so the rest of us only have to read the digested version — really, I think of him as the shabbes goy of celebrity journalism — Michael Savage is experiencing an immediate and (dare I call it “savage”?) backlash from people who tend to think that autism might be a mite more tough to cure than by calling someone an idiot. Specifically, a seven-station network in Mississippi is dropping Savage Nation, Michael Savage’s radio show, and he’s losing the endorsement of AFLAC, an insurance company.

Good. Actually, I think Savage should experience much more retribution, but losing seven stations and AFLAC is a decent start.

Now, what I should always avoid doing when I go to Perez is looking at the comments, but they have the irresistible pull of an intellectual vacuum there so huge it qualifies as a quantum celeblog singularity, what with people basically posting that they’re “first” (Who cares?) or that Perez is fat (Uhhh…so?) or that they still want Hillary to win (HAHAHA!). However, some of the comments there were just so far beyond the pale that I had to respond somehow, somewhere.

How ’bout here?

“Jo” had a comment that was fairly representative:

Just because Savage said something that is shocking doesn’t mean he should be censored and taken off the air in specific markets. That is censorship plain and simple.
That is what the Chinese gov’t does. We should be able to take his comments for what they are worth, someone’s opinion, then choose to either continue to listen to him or choose another station.

Or “Jenni,” another poster, stated, “Whatever happened to freedom of speech?”

Jo, Jenni and any other slow-moving homunculus who thinks that Savage suffered any abrigement of his freedom of speech for his Wednesday diatribe, let me tell you about the First Amendment. Here’s what it says:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

You’ll notice that the first word says “Congress.” Like, the government.

In other words, freedom of speech is guaranteed in this country as a right that the government cannot abridge except in specific circumstances (i.e., the famous fire-in-a-crowded-theater example).

A MISSISSIPPI RADIO NETWORK IS NOT THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT. Get that?

When a Mississippi radio network finds a radio talk show host’s comments insulting and derogatory enough to fire him, this is called “free market in action,” not “infringement of First Amendment rights.” Somehow, Jo, Jenni, and a host of others have got it into their heads that any condemnation of another person’s comments or ideas or any reasonable consequences resulting from that person’s free speech constitutes — somehow — an abridgment of their First Amendment rights.

Wrong. That’s called a reasonable consequence for violating the common sense rule that “a closed mouth will gather no foot.” If you’re not sure, why don’t you just call your boss a rectal sphincter and see what happens?

When you’re fired, that won’t be an abridgement of your free speech rights either.

It’s also not censorship.

Censorship, according to this definition, “is the suppression of speech or deletion of communicative material which may be considered objectionable, harmful or sensitive, as determined by a censor. The rationale for censorship is different for various types of data censored. Censorship is the act or practice of removing material from things we encounter every day on the grounds that it is obscene, vulgar, and/or highly objectionable.”

Guess what? Savage wasn’t “censored.” His reactionary comments, on the other hand, were broadcast across the nation from sea to shining sea in their unfiltered trogloditism and repeated throughout various media outlets — again, with every precious, cretinous word completely intact. The closest Savage got to uttering a censorable obscenity under FCC rules — well, besides the obvious intellectual obscenity of declaring utterly without data of any kind that “99%” of autism cases are bullcrap — was the Yiddish word “putz,” which, although it literally means “penis,” was not censored by the FCC in any way.

Nope. Losing your job for opening your mouth does not equal “censorship.” It’s called “consequences.” See above about calling your boss a rectal sphincter.

As anyone who’s watched Spider-Man and understood it without Cliffs Notes can tell you, with power comes responsibility, and one consequence of possessing the power of freedom of speech is the concomitant responsibility for speech. That means that yes, you can say what you want. And if you do, you can be fired.

Added:  Courtesy of Media and Mayhem, I have a list of the advertisers who advertised on Savage’s show on Diss Autism Day:

Digital Media Inc., U.S.A.

Nevada State Corporate Network, Inc.

Roger Schlesinger, the Mortgage Minute Guy

Effectur

Geico

Home Depot

Wachovia

Gold Bond

FreshStart America

Heritage Foundation

Debt Consultants of America

DirectBuy

WebEx

Good Option for Gifted Kids

It’s not exactly a revelation of stunning originality to point out that if you’re the parent of a child who basically doesn’t fit the school system’s age-grade lockstep plan, it can be challenging to fit an education to your child. There’s no sense in trying to fit your child to the education that’s available.

On that note, really, thank God for distance education. BYU, the University of Indiana, Stanford University’s EPGY program, and a host of others provide distance education options for university classes, of course, but what some folks might not know is that they also have classes at the high school and middle school levels as well — and best of all, they’re accredited, which means that if you’re a homeschooling parent whose child may (at some point) want to attend high school in the future, she or he won’t have to sit through Freshman English again if they’ve passed their distance ed. coursework in that area.

Best of all, for parents of gifted or profoundly gifted children, none of these programs gives a rat’s caboose about the child’s age.

This is really a miracle when you think about it, given the fact that basically no school system would even consider the kind of radical acceleration some gifted kids genuinely require. I’m not talking about one or two grades: that’s relatively easy and it happens (usually with politely pitched battles between parents and administrators) from time to time. Instead, I’m talking about six or seven grades, and that ain’t gonna happen in public school, no how, no way. Pleasantly enough by contrast, when we registered at Distance Ed for freshman English and gave the date of birth, the person registering didn’t so much as blink (or appear to blink; this was on the phone). It was no longer the Dreaded Birthdate of Doom.

Interestingly, the Distance Ed. course uses the same textbook as I’m supposed to be using for a class I’m teaching at Techno High School in the fall, I was amused to see. The teacher assigns a boatload more writing than I assign…I’m thinking of doing the same and seeing if I can get away with it. Anyway.

I find myself wondering what people did before the invention of the Internet and the popularity of homeschooling. I have a feeling that most of them probably did nothing — not because they didn’t want to do nothing, but because there was a dearth of options. I’m fairly sure that a parent whose kid needed radical acceleration — especially in a “fuzzy logic” area like English — was probably given the usual host of excuses: “Well, Billy can read very well, and yes, he’s read Romeo and Juliet before, but he’s never read it with me. I’m sure he’s going to get a lot out of the class,” or “Elizabeth seems to have a good grasp of the material, but her organizational skills and handwriting really need work, so I think we’ll keep her where she is right now.”

And, though some parents fought the system, most probably figured out it was a losing battle and told their kid, in whatever way they told them, that they’d basically have to put up with it, that this was the fate of being an academically able kid in a system that essentially doesn’t want or care about the academically able: sitting in class, making no waves, and just enduring it until it passes, like labor pains.

Thank God those aren’t the only options now.

Yeah, there are some down sides to distance ed for gifted kids, to be sure. One of the most unanticipated (okay, unanticipated by me…) issues was one of worldly experience. For instance, one Distance Ed prompt for an English journal assignment asked the student to explain about a time when they’d felt betrayed by a friend. Depending on the child’s age, that simply may never have happened. As a result, the child will basically have to a) draw upon vicarious experience gleaned from reading, or b) use her or his imagination. The other down side is that, like most distance education, the parent has to do the bulk of the actual teaching. The distance ed. people provide you the “bones”; that is, the textbook, the assignments, the course goals, and some skeletal explanations, but for the most part, the discussion of the actual material, that give-and-take of initial understanding, clarification, examples, elaboration — that job is left up to the parent. That’s not much different from homeschooling itself (and it’s actually less work than homeschooling overall), but the parent needs to know about the subject matter in decent enough depth so that they can work with the material.

Overall, it’s a good deal.

Perfect, Charming, Adorable, Delightfully Klutzy

I’ve been enjoying myself this morning.

A few weeks ago, I ran across a term I hadn’t heard of in the one-star Amazon.com reviews of Twilight, a term used to describe Bella Swan, the heroine of the series: “Mary Sue.” Okay, bias alert time: because the series is notable for its chaste longing (and absence of sex), I assumed wrongly that the term “Mary Sue” meant something like, “Prissy, nonsexual, goodie-two-shoes heroine who is a perfect exemplar of 1950’s-era femininity.”

Wrongo. Damn those preconceptions, anyway.

The term “Mary Sue,” according to Wikipedia, source of all wisdom (well, all of MY very dubious wisdom, anyway), is vastly more entertaining and useful than my original misunderstanding:

Mary Sue, sometimes shortened simply to Sue, is a pejorative term used to describe a fictional character who plays a major role in the plot on such a scale that suspension of disbelief fails due to the character’s traits, skills and abilities being tenuously or inadequately justified. Such a character is particularly characterized by overly idealized and clichéd mannerisms, lacking noteworthy flaws, and primarily functioning as wish-fulfillment fantasies for their authors.

I admit, I had never heard that term before, although it’s apparently been floating around for, oh, the last twenty years or so, give or take. The problem is, it’s been floating around in the weird and often wonderful (or sometimes freakish in a sex-at-the-car-accident kinda way) world of fan fiction, a world with which I’m only passingly familiar, and mostly because of my friend Michelle, who was the kind of person who would go to the Star Trek convention dressed in a custom-made outfit.  HARD CORE.

For those of you who are basically clueless, like me, fan fiction is the writing of noncanonical stories or longer works of fiction starring the characters from a television series, film, or book. The great green granddaddy greatspawn of fanfic is probably Star Trek, but X-Files, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Harry Potter, and a host of others have engendered their own sources of fan-written fiction, some of which is awesome and some of which is positively dreadful. The virtue of fan fiction is that it allows fans to explore possibilities inherent in the characters or the basic setup of the story that the writers themselves didn’t choose to explore, didn’t think of, or just plain couldn’t explore given the limitations of television or film censorship.  Of those, my personal favorite is surely the fanfic exploration of this eternal question: What would happen if Kirk and Spock were abandoned by the Enterprise on an alien planet and Spock went into Pon Farr, the Vulcan urge to mate that must end in sexual satisfaction or death?

Um…interesting question. If you were Kirk, what would you do?

And therein lies the problem, at least for many people, with fan fiction: in asking the question “If you were in the Star Trek (or Buffy or X-Files or Lost or Vampire Chronicles) universe, what would you do?” the answer is too often, “Create a placeholder character in which I can insert myself!”

Enter Mary Sue.

From the Wikipedia article, I stumbled upon the delightful essay, “150 Years of Mary Sue” by Pat Pflieger in which Pflieger sets out the essence of what makes a Mary Sue character so incredibly annoying:

She’s amazingly intelligent, outrageously beautiful, adored by all around her — and absolutely detested by most reading her adventures. She’s Mary Sue, the most reviled character type in media fan fiction. Basically, she’s a character representing the author of the story, an avatar, the writer’s projection into an interesting world full of interesting people whom she watches weekly and thinks about daily. Sometimes the projections get processed into interesting characters, themselves. Usually, though, they don’t.

Many hate her, but she is alive in every fandom. She fences with Methos and Duncan MacLeod; she saves the Enterprise, the Voyager, or the fabric of time and space; she fights with Jim Ellison in defense of Cascade; she battles evil in Sunnydale alongside Buffy Sommers. She impresses the heroes of both The Girl and The Man from U.N.C.L.E.; she makes Ben Stone and Mike Logan of Law & Order go weak at the knees; Ham Tyler of V marvels at her strength; Jasper Jax of General Hospital is captivated by her; Benton Fraser of Due South palpitates when she is near; she rules the night of the Vampire Chronicles.

Though she doesn’t mention Bella Swan — the essay was written long before Twilight — Pflieger’s description not only fits Meyer’s heroine precisely, but encapsulates so neatly a quality that I’ve found grating for years.

(At this point, I can hear some Gentle Readers banging their heads on the keyboard, thinking I’m about to excoriate young adult fiction again and hold up Pride and Prejudice as the symbol of All That Is Better, but I swear I’m not.  Oh, FWIW, I’m sure there’s Pride and Prejudice fanfic out there too.  Naturally, I’m sure that otherwise straitlaced Austen fans indulge their fantasies involving some — ahem — persuasion between Darcy and Elizabeth, or, more entertainingly, between Darcy and Mr. Bingley.  The one I really, REALLY want to read, though, is Collins and Lady Catherine.)

I was just amused as heck with the Pflieger essay because as I read her description, I kept thinking of all the Mary Sues I’ve encountered in “mainstream” fiction over the years. Here are some of my favorites:

1. “I am Ayla, Hear Me Roar”

Okay, I loved Clan of the Cave Bear, and seriously, I must have read that book a zillion times from adolescence until a few years ago. Rich in its research, unpredictable in its plot, and haunting in its ending, it’s a book that keeps grabbing me even now…and I cannot say earnestly enough that Jean M. Auel should have STOPPED THERE and never written one single word more.

It’s not enough that Ayla learns survival on her own (in the first book) and teaches herself to hunt with the sling (in the first book), but Auel goes on (and on and on) in the subsequent books to have Ayla do all of the following:

• Invent the domestication of the horse, wolf, and feline
• Invent the medical practice of stitching a detached muscle
• Be co-inventor of the atlatl
• Invent rapid firestarting using iron pyrite and flint
• See into the future

2. Jennet, the Brilliant Female Scientist

This heroine of James Morrow’s The Last Witchfinder is a brilliant young scientist in the late 1600s to early 1700s, and despite the fact that she’s a girl, her equally brilliant, rich, and accomplished Aunt Isobel teaches her all about science, including how to read Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica in the original Latin. Additionally, Jennet…

• Lives with the Native Americans, whom she (of course) regards from a modern politically correct perspective before she escapes from them
• Meets a group of escaped slaves on a desert island, whom she (of course) regards them from a modern politically correct perspective before she leaves the island
• Seduces the young Ben Franklin and has a child with him
• Writes a monumental scientific treatise

Unfortunately, the book owes more than a little debt to the far more entertaining (and far funnier) novel Fanny: Being the True History of the Adventures of Fanny Hackabout-Jones, by Erica Jong. Note: This book is…ah, well, suffice to say it’s written by Erica Jong. Don’t expect it to be a read-aloud at storytime unless your family storytime is a lot more interesting than ours is. Contains the best (and laugh-aloud funniest) catalogue of 18th-century terms for the pudenda ever written.

I know I kvetch too much about fiction, but bottom line, I guess some of my kvetching comes from the fact that I often feel cheated. I don’t have a hell of a lot of free time, so when I do, I don’t want to spend it reading about how delightfully charming someone is (when she’s not being adorably klutzy and adored by all the men — and some of the women — around her). I don’t really need my protagonists to be bland inserts for the reader or stand-ins for the author unless the author is prepared to deal with him- or herself honestly (or at least uniquely), not as an idealized tabula rasa on which both s/he and the reader write themselves.  Hell, I suspect that Philip Roth and John Irving have been doing little more than that for the entirety of their careers, and you can throw in J.D. Salinger on top of that pile as well, but what’s different about these characters is you could never call Alex Portnoy an idealized anything, nor would you confuse him with Irving’s Garp or Holden Caulfield.

Mostly, I feel deprived of a character’s unique voice in a Mary Sue story, you know? Has anyone else noticed that all too often, these characters speak with a cocky know-it-all bravado that even Will Smith would be embarrassed to read aloud? Pflieger comes up with some great examples here:

Mary Sue is the toughest character who ever lived — when she doesn’t exude whimsy. Janaris has delicate hands, but Methos has “seen deadly accurate knives thrown with this hand, necks broken with this hand, and dozens of Immortals lose their heads to a sleek, savagely swift blade gripped in this hand. … Jana was more than capable of taking care of herself.” And she has, killing “one of the best — and most treacherous — Immortals in the Game.” In Florida, Callisto has slain worse vampires than Buffy Sommers does in California: “Miami has it’s share of vampires, but they tend to be more evil.’” Rowan Michaels twice slams her dislocated shoulder back into place, each time staggering and swearing like 15 drunken sailors; she almost emasculates Methos when he calls her “girl”: “‘Never.’ she whispered in the silence of the room, as she slowly released her grip on his crotch. ‘Never call me *girl* again.’” She is all-too-familiar with “that icy cold spot she always felt just before the shit hit the fan”. Fearing that she’s “becoming terribly predictable,” she is reminded by a little nagging voice in her head that, “Predictable CAN get you dead.” Her mere presence bodes ill: seeing Rowan come into his bar, Joe Dawson cringes: “‘Ah, shit.’ he moaned under his breath and waited for her. *This is gonna be bad.* he thought.”

This is almost as wretched as the incredibly talented, born-on-a-battlefield-and-undiscovered-queen-of-the-planet Athyn Blackmantle in Blackmantle, Patricia Kennealy-Morrison’s disastrous sci-fantasy roman a clef, a heroine who declared something to the effect of, “In my culture, we don’t turn the other cheek — we snatch off both of yours.”

Reading that, I’m painfully reminded of a story told by one of my friends in the Society for Creative Anachronism.  We were sitting around one day when she told me that one of her friends had been returning from fighter practice when she was assaulted in a park. I now realize this was a Mary Sue story in the guise of an Amusing Anecdote. “Little did he know,” my SCA friend said — and I think she really did say “Little did he know” — “that this mugger was assaulting a Grand Edgemistress of the Seventh Level, a Knight of the Realm…” or whatever title she mentioned (I don’t really remember what it was; for all I know, it could be Knight of the Hollow Coconuts), “…and so Mary Sue fearlessly unsheathed her two-handed Claymore, which of course weighs something like thirty pounds, and said, ‘Have at thee, varlet!’ and he was SO AFRAID to see a Claymore — what amounts to thirty pounds of a sharpened steel bar — pointed at his chest that he ran away screaming…”

Blah, blah, blah…Your balls clank much?

I could go on, but I’d rather hear from other people. Whom should I add to this list? Who are some other notable Mary Sues in “mainstream” fiction?

Oh, and because I couldn’t resist, enjoy this picture: