Arkansawyer

Here’s our last installment, and here’s today’s, in two parts:

But for math the ACCUPLACER says “you cannot go to college until you learn multiplication tables” – period. It is no wonder that many 19-year olds walk out and say “f*ck that!” and give up on college. They found their way to college, found their way through getting financial aid, got registered, arranged transportation, found the cafeteria, and yet, they are told that “college is not for them” by a f*cking computer program. And a computer program for which there is no negotiation – the advisors will never override the program – the student simply needs to go home and spend the rest of their life as an unskilled worker working for low wages.

This seems so unfair. I wish pundits would get more pissed about this as “fair access” / “social justice”.

Me, too. It’s lonely out here. And following on the heels of this:

I suggest a simple fix in the short-term and then some deeper analysis to fine-tune things.

His argument is specific to local conditions, but worth reading nonetheless.

Bonus link: Bob Moses (who is a one of my personal heros) and The Algebra Project.

Jonathan Zasloff asks a good question.

First off, I had one really neat idea, for which I’d like to get a simple implementation done quickly. I’m not sure doing so is within one person’s spare time efforts, but still, it was a neat idea. Other things:

1. The language used around data portability is confused and incoherent. Look at phrases describing data portability: take back, pull out, portable, removable, get out. Do those mean data portability meaning the ability of the user to access and copy? Or data portability meaning the ability of the user to remove–delete or make inaccessible on the original system–and transfer to another service. Data portability is itself an ambiguous term. Which of those meanings does it have for you?
2. Privacy advocates tend to believe what users say rather than what they do. I heard people argue this point at great length, at one point interpreting an experiment by danah boyd comparing perceived versus actual privacy settings for users–users think they’re much more private than they really are, boyd says–as showing users care more about privacy because they say they care more. I’ll look up her paper.
3. Many privacy issues will resolve (and have resolved) as social and cultural change destigmatize nonstandard behavior. We’ve seen this happen drastically in the aftermath of the sixties. Gay people are out of the closet all over the country. No one looks askance at a child born outside of wedlock. Just think what other changes have come, and what behavior no longer needs to be kept private. Those social changes solved many privacy issues by eliminating them.

The author of one of my favorite webcomics said something really great today. I’ve deliberately quoted it and not linked to it. You can find it and the piece it references with little effort.

I’ve had a grudge against Thomas Friedman ever since he slandered the countryside between the Northwest Arkansas Regional Airport and Bentonville as “Dogpatch”. The man doesn’t recognize working farmland and unfarmable hill country, which is bad enough, and doesn’t recognize his own failure to understand what he sees, which is much worse.

So it’s never a surprise when Friedman misses the implication of his own writing. Here he argues for his own exclusivist form of educational reform (via an exclusivist immigration policy, but let that pass for now), and comes up with these two remarkable bits:

My favorite chat, though, was with Amanda Alonzo, a 30-year-old biology teacher at Lynbrook High School in San Jose, Calif. She had taught two of the finalists. When I asked her the secret, she said it was the resources provided by her school, extremely “supportive parents” and a grant from Intel that let her spend part of each day inspiring and preparing students to enter this contest.

We’ll get back to that in a moment. Now, what lesson does Friedman draw from his night out?

Gotta say, it was the most inspiring evening I’ve had in D.C. in 20 years. It left me thinking, “If we can just get a few things right — immigration, education standards, bandwidth, fiscal policy — maybe we’ll be O.K.”

Now, did you hear that teacher say anything about education standards? No. She talked about “supportive parents” (which, for Friedman, ties into his exclusivist immigration stance), resources, and funding. Where in Friedman’s article is increasing the resources for the schools? Where does he suggest increasing their funding? Nowhere.

But that is exactly the part of schooling that can be controlled. The government can’t provide a kid with supportive parents. It can fund that kid’s schools.

Perhaps if Friedman could understand the vast sea of underserved students in underfunded schools throughout the nation as internal immigrants he’d consider giving them what they need.

Or not. After all, they’re poor.

Yesterday, on an SUV with a Tim Griffin bumpersticker, I saw this bumper sticker below it:

ECONOMIC QUESTIONS SHOULD NEVER HAVE POLITICAL ANSWERS

which is itself a political answer to an economic question.

Two quotes from this short article:

But where Bloch differed from other Marxists was in his insistence that it was not possible to simply dismiss religion as “the sigh of the oppressed creature in a hostile world” without recognising that the sigh contained the pre-illumination of a different and better world.

and

The resurrection of God presents a challenge to those such as Dawkins and Hitchens because they continue to perceive religion as an opiate which is handed out by states and their tame priests and mullahs in order to keep people quiet, rather than as a home-grown product consumed by people in order to dull the pain not only of global economic disadvantage but also of a deep, yet unidentifiable sense of loss.

Bloch’s Atheism in Christianity has been waiting its turn on my shelf for some time now. I think it just got bumped up in line.

(via CAUTE)

It’s true, and it’s a little embarrassing, but I have sometimes used class to avoid talking about race. It’s the sort of compromise that has always grit my teeth. Why do I sink to it?

(Hear that? “sink to it” There’s a moral overtone, tied up with my pride, that I don’t like there.)

When you plan, when you think into the future, again, if you aren’t thinking about race as part of that future, you aren’t going to make very good plans.

This is vision here, how you plan to instantiate the world you want beginning with the world you have. That vision has to be complete and explicit, both in its positive statement of what’s wanted and in its negative statement of what has to be abolished or overcome. Race lies at the heart of that in the United States, and a strategy for progressive change must start there.

But sometimes the people you’re up against are splitting you from the people you’re depending on with cynical uses of race. When they (whoever they is–I found it easy to locate in particular city officials and functionaries) find discussion of race useful, I’m usually in favor of dodging it. What does work, sometimes, is appealing to common interest instead, which comes down to class.

That’s a sloppy and unsatisfying compromise. Neither my ego nor my pride likes it. That’s not necessarily a bad sign.

What a sad paragraph!

The questions we ask one another are so critically important. If you and I ask each other what we believe, we will get into talking about very heady stuff. We will put forth our beliefs and then support them with evidence and argument. All too often we will end up arguing. I know. I have done more than my share.

I understand the rhetorical trick involved, balancing this paragraph against the next:

However, when we ask one another what we truly love, what we truly value, what we care about more than anything else in life, something amazing happens. We don’t argue. We listen. We connect. We discover that we love and want the same things. We care about one another. We want honesty, depth, and intimacy in our relationships. We want enduring friendships.

Two paragraphs, setting two ideas into opposition, in this case head against heart, the sad old duality that manufactures fractured lives. Where does it come from? Where does it go?

It comes from disagreement–not disagreement itself, but that it exists where one might hope it did not, where the machinery with which to deal with it is absent or in disrepair–and it ends in despair.

Let’s learn instead how to go on in the face of disagreement, how to find the things on which we do agree, how to make an argument rather than have an argument, how to not hurt each other when we do disagree. Let’s learn instead to be, as Philip Larkin says of words spoken while lying in bed, “At once true and kind, Or not untrue and not unkind.”

From Ed Whitney, commenting at The Reality-Based Community:

Well, I guess I am turning into a new kind of birther. I have no doubts whatever that Obama was born in the United States, but I am beginning to wonder if he ever lived in Chicago.