Sep 17, 2008
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I was thinking earlier today [as I fried 12oz. of bacon and topped it with sharp cheddar, which I write to induce "Americans are so fat" deprecation so the foreigners will feel better about what follows] if there’s any group of people, any country, any anything in the world about which my feelings oscillate so often and so quickly. I mean rapid shifts like those in sports - he’s a hero when he hits a home run and a bum when he strikes out - but about more rational subjects.
No - the Brits win the prize. I can go from thrilled and proud to eyes-closed-and-shaking-head in about 3 minutes.
Boris Johnson, the recently elected mayor of London, is a Brit I’ve loved for many years. He’s sharp, funny, too honest and too open. He wrote a piece on the BBC licence fee that Wikipedia describes:
“In the United Kingdom and the Crown dependencies, a television licence is required to receive any publicly broadcast television service, from any source. This includes the commercial channels, cable and satellite transmissions. The money from the licence fee is used to provide radio, television and Internet content for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), and Welsh-language television programmes for S4C.”
I think it’s about 150 GBP right now - or about $275 USD.
Boris introduced his editorial, which advocated relaxing gripes about the fee, by saying:
“Treachery, thy name is Edmonds. After decades in which his hairy chops have been clamped about the hind teat of the BBC, Noel Edmonds has announced that he will not pay the licence fee, and I can imagine that some people will declare him a hero.”
And that’s why I love Boris Johnson.
Then some dolt of a [retired] professor has to muck it up by suggesting we throw out spelling and apostrophe rules to improve literacy, which I wrote about over at the GlobalScholar blog.
At least it’s not as bad as the imposition of sharia courts in the UK.
You guys drive me mad.
Aw, I can’t stay mad at you.
Sep 16, 2008
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Your assignment: Anti-Palin research. The WorldNetDaily piece didn’t explain well what the purpose of this English class was - just that the Professor Andrew Hallam, his assignments and his approach are unacceptable. The classroom environment seems to have a bit of tension, too:
“When Hallam handed out the Palin writing assignment, the students reported “he said he would give the Republicans a chance to speak about it and asked who in the class was a Republican. Five of us raised our hands. When we did, [one other student] … said ‘F*** you!’ Mr. Hallam did nothing about this. At the end of the class period, after a lot of the Republicans had voiced their side of the issue, another kid said, ‘They’re full of s***, but we let them talk anyway.’”"
I had an incident like this once - and in an English class, too. I said something, though I forget what, and a student stood up and yelled, “You’re a bastard!” The teacher did nothing.
The next day, that teacher apparently felt guilty. She announced that the following day would include a few minutes for anyone in the class to speak on the “disturbance.” A couple kids talked about how we needed to respect one another and not lash out.
I came prepared with photocopies of my birth certificate and my parents’ marriage license. I passed them around, explained the timeline, and assured the class that I was not, in fact, a bastard.
Hallam teems with professionalism, class and scholarship:
“The students had documented a series of incidents in which Hallam reportedly told his class, “Bush-bashing is one of my favorite things to do.”
In another class, the students report, Hallam said he loved swearing and the f-word was his favorite word.”
Does he mean frak? I bet he means frak.
Sep 15, 2008
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Working on other projects. I still read, though.
“Democrats are Standing up to the Teachers Unions: Can this be True?” asks little Ed over at Ed is Watching. Maybe he’ll get some answers on September 19th [if the event doesn't run past his bedtime]. Yet another thumbs up for the DFER folks.
From RightWingProf, who came across this dandy fop opining out of San Diego: “Sarah Palin often uses lots of notes when she speaks, even going so far as to use tabs and different colors of notecards. This is just so unbelievably tacky and small town I am considering killing myself.” Yipes. I know that frustration, though. I see it every time I obliterate, shame, or otherwise invalidate an argument made by someone who has contempt for ignorant, small town rubes [like me].
Brown University reformed its curricula in the late 1960s. I wouldn’t have done it, and not the way they did, but no one asked me then. They’re reforming things now - and ACTA says that it’s not perfect, but that it’s a step in the right direction.
Mike S. Adams has founded F.A.S.H.I.S.T. at UNC-Wilmington - Faculty Against Sexual Harassment Initiatives and Sensitivity Training. He asks whether “mandate” is sexist, and then says, “Five years ago the administration chipped in $60,000 to help bring Ludacris to campus. He sang a lot about hos. Shouldn’t we be forcing the administration to attend mandatory sexual harassment training not the other way around?”
Haaaaaaaaaaaahahahha. Awesome.
An interesting video about Senator Obama and edu-huckster extraordinaire, Bill Ayers.
The Onion: The Word “Presumptive” Prepares for Another 4-year Hibernation.
BIG NEWS: Detroit Superintendent hung up the phone on someone. My school board members barked at me like junkyard dogs, used school facilities/organizations to campaign against me, and school employees used in-house computers to suggest that I was a drug dealer. I don’t hang up on anyone [nor do I take or sell drugs].
Today is Battle of Britain Day in the United Kingdom. British resilience is a trait I love, and one that we in Upstate New York share. Let us hope that steely resolve makes a comeback in the wake of Sharia law.
Sep 12, 2008
Posted | 6 comments
I’m working on a redesign, so posting will be light.
In the meantime, here are a few things that you, as a blogger, can do to make our lives as readers a little easier:
- Let us subscribe to comments. We’re a lot more likely to discuss something if we can keep up with the discussion. Reloading a page 20 times a day to see if there’s anything new is a real pain. If you’re using WordPress, consider a plugin like Subscribe to Comments.
- Publish a full RSS feed. I use Google Reader to keep track of over 400 blogs. Publishing a full feed instead of just a few sentences - or even worse, just the title [this means you, Teacher Magazine] - makes it a lot easier to keep up. If I wanted to load a page to read every article, I wouldn’t bother using an RSS aggregator.
- Check your feed’s formatting. Rule #1: Subscribe to your own feed. You’ll see how it appears for other people, too. If your feed mashes together paragraphs into one huge block of text, no matter how long the article, consider checking that formatting. We want to read things smoothly and easily, not sift through text.
And a couple smaller things:
- Don’t use CAPITAL LETTERS for EMPHASIS. Using the right words in a well-constructed argument makes THIS TACTIC irrelevant. Furthermore, it’s an offensive gesture. Do you really think your readers are too dumb to seize on key words and recognize their importance? If you NEED to do this, you’ve failed already. The alternative - and it’s a good one - is to use bold sparingly to catch attention.
- Strikethroughs. This unbearably banal charming addition to the blogosphere irks me. We have no gripe when it’s used properly as a copyediting mark; it’s instructive and honest, two pillars of blogdom. However, most of the time it’s used to denote cheap snark and cheaper sarcasm. There are less obnoxious ways to go about this.
Any others?
Sep 12, 2008
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The contest to name those ‘paternalistic schools’ is over. I’ll save you 4 pages and just tell you the winner:
No Excuses Schools.
It isn’t new, but it works.
My suggestion was to call it “school.”
