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.

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.

Shuffling off this digital coil

If I knew the author approved of embedding, you’d be seeing it without clicking.

(Note: Why did I leave this in draft form for eight months?)

Okay, I’ll bite. The ten(nish) books that most influenced me are these, which I read well before I turned twenty-one:

1. Billy Bass, by R. W. Eschmeyer From this book I gained two things in particular: The “fact” that fish don’t feel pain and a visceral revulsion toward pollution.
2. The Golden Treasury of Natural History, by Bertha Morris Parker, and The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments, by Robert Brent and Harry Lazarus Our friend and veterinarian Doc Sturdivant gave me the Treasury when I turned six, and I discovered the Experiments in the St. Paul’s library in second grade. I still have my original Treasury. My parents gave me (over time) two copies of the Experiments; I know where one page of one copy is.
3. The Freddie the Pig series, by Walter R. Brooks These books fueled my imagination, with the Federal Animal Republic, the clockwork boy, the overt anti-communism, the whole enchilada.
4. Marie Curie, by an author I can’t place I also discovered this at St. Paul’s Lutheran in second grade and it’s stuck with me over time. One dreadful detail of fact haunted me for years: jura Znevr erprvirf Cvreer’f rssrpgf, vapyhqvat gur pybgurf ur jnf jrnevat jura ur qvrq, fur pbzrf npebff n fpnes ba juvpu cneg bs Cvreer’f oenva unf pehfgrq. (to translate)
5. Stranger in a Strange Land and The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, by Robert A. Heinlein These books bent my mind, in both good and bad ways, and the traces remain to this day.
6. The Year’s Best Science Fiction, 7th Edition, edited by Judith Merril There are about a dozen pieces in this anthology who helped shape my thinking: Fritz Leiber, Shari Tepper, Fredrick Pohl, Cyril Kornbluth, Mack Reynolds, James Blish, Leo Szilard, Cordwainer Smith, Maxine Kumin, Edward Gorey, Kit Reed, Anne McCaffery, Lawrence Durrell, Alice Glazer, Merril herself. All Merril’s anthologies were good, but this one was great, at least for me.
7. The Wanderer, by Fritz Leiber, and Dhalgren, by Samuel R. Delaney These two books, as different from each other as War and Peace from Ulysses,  were the earthier side of my Heinlein obsessions.
8. Sometimes A Great Notion, by Ken Kesey It’s the best novel written in English in the twentieth century, in my opinion.
9. First Course in the Theory of Equations, by L. E. Dickson, and Calculus, third edition, by George B. Thomas These books opened my mind to higher mathematics. The Dickson book was a way of thought that I’d never before encountered; Thomas developed basic calculus in a way that eventually made real analysis much easier and much more meaningful.
10. Another Roadside Attraction, by Tom Robbins Robbins’ unashamed sensuality and iconoclastic sensibility fit me perfectly at the time, and I hope does to this day.
11. Illuminatus! by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson and Masks of the Illuminati by Robert Anton Wilson Books full of lies, truths about lies, lies about lies, lies upon lies. Truly a case of the abyss staring back.

There are other, possibly more disreputable books I could put on, but this is my list. I’m not sure where I’d cut it. It seems Mad Magazine and The National Lampoon should be on there, too. There are also books I read much later which are, in their way, influential on me. What we read when we’re young, though, that’s what grooves into our brains. ”What is patriotism but the love of the food one ate as a chlid?”

“America the Beautiful”, known between Quincy and myself as “Oh Beautiful”
“My Ride’s Here”, which didn’t have a name I can think of tonight
“Come As You Are”, which Quincy asked for as “Drenched in Mud”

I’ve sung others, but those over and over (and I never really got tired of them).

…to keep you healthy.

That is all.

Mr. Obama said a lot of stuff about staying in school and studying, I guess like I do with my nice tutor, and Dad says that’s fine for me, as long as I don’t miss sports practice, but if those other kids do he won’t be able to hire them at his business and we won’t have anyone to clean our pool and mow the lawn and stuff.

Here’s the story as told by power:

Dropping out of high school costs the students future income and society the taxes from that income, but efforts to keep kids in school show limited results.

And on:

“They simply don’t have the skills to compete in the 21st century,” Ritter said.

Gone are the days when a person could graduate from high school, find a job and do reasonably well in life, he continued.

“The manufacturing jobs that paid well and offered a man a job for life don’t exist anymore. They have been outsourced,” Ritter said.

(Oh, the irony–Ritter’s job is financed by the Walton Foundation.)

And on:

“We aren’t going to have economic growth without a more educated workforce. We have to have more kids graduate from high school and college if we are going to compete economically,” said Linda Auman, chief academic officer for the Fayetteville School District.

Aren’t you glad the chief academic officer is thinking about the workforce, and not silly stuff like the value of education to one’s life as a citizen?

And here’s the story as told by the object of power:

“I want to be a teacher because I believe if people had cared when I was growing up, I wouldn’t have been in all the trouble I was in,” Foster said.

“There’s going to be some kid out there that’s just like me and needs some guidance. If no one is there to lend a helping hand or just listen, we are going to have more children fall through the cracks. I want to take what I learned the hard way and help someone else before they fall through the cracks like I did.”

If you read her story, you see she didn’t fall, but was pushed:

She dropped out in eighth grade after an argument with her principal. Foster recalls the principal told her she was a troublemaker and would never amount to anything.

She said her parents threw her out of the house, and she ended up living on the streets. She supported herself by waiting tables and any other job she could find.

Of course, there’s always an ignorant someone to carp in the comments:

Good story but don’t claim to “fall through the cracks” when you are a drop out. Congrats on having the guts to better yourself and best of luck!

Someone needs a remedial reading course, or maybe a song.

It’s distressing when a right-wing figure is involved in a sexual pecadillo, just as it was with Mark Sanford.

First come the left-wing homophobes, explaining that he’s obviously a closeted gay. Next the gloating over hypocrisy, which (unlike the gay-baiting) has an ethical leg to stand on, until the glee begins to wear on me. Finally, the crowing over the usual resignation, or the indignation over staying in office, whatever, is okay when you’re making a moral stand on someone else’s failings:

Talking tough is easy when it’s other people’s evil
and you’re judging what they do or don’t believe

This morning, I stumbled onto someone who found the empathy for Mark Sanford I’ve been looking for:

He begins to feel that his life has no integrity, no meaning.  Everything seems flat and tasteless.  He endures this condition for months, then years.  He thinks he will never be vital and alive again, as he once was. There was a time when he had dreams, when life seemed full of possibility, but now he plods ahead, one foot in front of the other, one day at a time, day after day.

Then Mark Sanford meets Chapur.  They have a few drinks.  She smiles.  She listens.  She touches his hand.  Both his body and his emotions respond, and he is swept into a new world, a world where the flesh is tied to spirit, and he feels regenerated.  The life force that he thought was gone forever has returned, in spades.  He knows only that he has to be with Chapur.  Nothing else matters.

Not that it keeps him from ruin, but perhaps ruin is what he needs. Everyone suffers:

I had a dream; aw shucks, oh well
And its all fucked up, its shot to hell
yea-eah, my shit’s fucked up
It has to happen to the best of us
The rich folk suffer like the rest of us
It’ll happen to you.

And so what should Mark Sanford do?

I think he should choose life.  I’m not sure if Chapur is that new life, or just represents it, but he has been dead, and he has a taste of what it means to be alive, and he should follow that leading…

Right now Sanford is torn and confused.  He has to choose.  He may think that his choice is between two women, but this is not the case.  His choice is life, or not-life…

It’s a well-said piece, kind to Sanford but not uncaring about his family. Read the whole thing.

As you can see from the Michael Yates post I linked to yesterday, many of us on the left are rooting for the people of Iran who went out in the streets to protest what they believed to be a stolen election.

Now, here’s a thought experiment for you: What do you think would have happened in 2000 if we here in America who believed our presidential election had been stolen had done the same thing?

In a very thorough post by Middle East expert Juan Cole, he gets around to that sort of question:

Moreover, very unfortunately, US politicians are no longer in a position to lecture other countries about their human rights. The kind of unlicensed, city-wide demonstrations being held in Tehran last week would not be allowed to be held in the United States. Senator John McCain led the charge against Obama for not having sufficiently intervened in Iran. At the Republican National Committee convention in St. Paul, 250 protesters were arrested shortly before John McCain took the podium. Most were innocent activists and even journalists. Amy Goodman and her staff were assaulted. In New York in 2004, ‘protest zones’ were assigned, and 1800 protesters were arrested, who have now been awarded civil damages by the courts. Spontaneous, city-wide demonstrations outside designated ‘protest zones’ would be illegal in New York City, apparently. In fact, the Republican National Committee has undertaken to pay for the cost of any lawsuits by wronged protesters, which many observers fear will make the police more aggressive, since they will know that their municipal authorities will not have to pay for civil damages.

The number of demonstrators arrested in Tehran on Saturday is estimated at 550 or so, which is less than those arrested by the NYPD for protesting Bush policies in 2004.

I applaud the Iranian public’s protests against a clearly fraudulent election, and deplore the jackboot tactics that the regime is using to quell them. But it is important to remember that the US itself was moved by Bush and McCain toward a ‘Homeland Security’ national security state that is intolerant of public protest and throws the word ‘terrorist’ around about dissidents. Obama and the Democrats have not addressed this creeping desecration of the Bill of Rights, and until they do, the pronouncements of self-righteous US senators and congressmen on the travesty in Tehran will be nothing more that imperialist hypocrisy of the most abject sort.

Now, does anyone want to try this trick at home?

If so, and I think you’re serious about making an unlicensed peaceful demonstration, I’ll help you organize it. If you’re in my neighborhood, I’ll be there. If you get carted off for it, I’ll get carted off with you.

We’ll need a slogan, and here’s the one I suggest:

Fair Elections and Freedom of Assembly are Human Rights, from Iran to the United States, from Tehran to <your hometown here>!

I think that’s worth getting arrested for.

Don’t forget to bring your kids. After all, civics classes aren’t what they used to be.