Category: observations

The Trayvon Martin story has now developed into two narratives: one, that neighborhood watch captain trigger-happy goon George Zimmerman shot and killed an unarmed 17 year old for being in the wrong place (at any time) or two, that Zimmerman, by carrying a gun in unlawful pursuit of an unarmed 17 year old, provoked the youth and killed him for being in the wrong place (at any time). 

In both of these narratives, who Stood Their Ground? The youth who refused to run? Or the chickenshit vigilante with the gun? The youth who fought back after being unlawfully harassed? Or a grown man with delusions of adequacy — and a gun?

The moral of this story is Stand Your Ground but Be Armed. We’re back full-circle to the Black Panthers enforcing their 2nd Amendment rights and the state of California (under Sainted Ronnie Reagan) signing gun control laws.

In the wake of the midterm elections, how long do we wait for the new leadership to fix everything they think Obama has neglected?

The new session will begin in January 2011. I say we give them til April 15 (a date that reminds us that we own a piece of this enterprise). If we don’t like what we see, we start writing letters, emailing, and calling these public servants to find out what the hold-up is. Where are the jobs? Why is the deficit still so high?

They claim to have the answers: let’s find out.

Found out this afternoon that the email gurus at the local institution where I have an account don’t understand or don’t care about security: asked why, after a maintenance outage, I was unable to read email and an insider sent me a new server name I could use but told me that imap is going away as it doesn’t support encryption, sends passwords in the clear.

Really?

[/Users/paul]:: openssl s_client -connect mail:993
CONNECTED(00000003)
[ handshaking omitted ] 
SSL handshake has read 1272 bytes and written 328 bytes
---
New, TLSv1/SSLv3, Cipher is DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA
Server public key is 1024 bit
Secure Renegotiation IS supported
Compression: NONE
Expansion: NONE
SSL-Session:
    Protocol  : TLSv1
    Cipher    : DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA
    Session-ID: B448E7A7B703C73C57BC7FA7E8D4E30F8B67DC76E4868C17C16AC2E48B88C642
    Session-ID-ctx: 
    Master-Key: 076960369DEDC2E9A2B8BC70D2FF070277D1E440CB2B5D1B0F5AA3770B48BB115FF61DDDF81E39CA23387186C0510F38
    Key-Arg   : None
    Start Time: 1310532030
    Timeout   : 300 (sec)
    Verify return code: 18 (self signed certificate)
---
* OK [CAPABILITY IMAP4rev1 LITERAL+ SASL-IR LOGIN-REFERRALS ID ENABLE AUTH=PLAIN AUTH=LOGIN] Dovecot ready.

Hmm, that seems to work.

openssl s_client -connect some.email.host:993
connect: Operation timed out
connect:errno=60

That doesn’t look like they’re listening on that port.

openssl s_client -connect some.email.host:143
CONNECTED(00000003)
49016:error:140770FC:SSL routines:SSL23_GET_SERVER_HELLO:unknown protocol:/SourceCache/OpenSSL098/OpenSSL098-35.1/src/ssl/s23_clnt.c:607:

So no SSL on the server.

Huh. If I was going to hazard a guess here, I would say that it’s not that imap is busted or insecure but that someone’s doing it wrong. When I pointed out that imap wasn’t to blame, it turns out that they did try requiring SSL 4 years ago but when it turned out that a lot of the user base didn’t have client software to support it, they turned it off. That’s actually worse: to know that the security of your communications is no better than the worst email client out there, with no standards or requirements, would be a fireable offense in some workplaces.

Grammar (Time, one hour)
1. Give nine rules for the use of Capital Letters.

Arithmetic (Time, 1.25 hours)
1. Name and define the Fundamental Rules of Arithmetic.

U.S. History (Time, 45 minutes)
1. Give the epochs into which U.S. History is divided.

Orthography (Time, one hour)
1. What is meant by the following: Alphabet, phonetic, orthography, etymology, syllabication?

Geography (Time, one hour)
1. What is climate? Upon what does climate depend?

This is the eighth-grade final exam from 1895 from Salina, KS. USA.Each of these sections had about 10 questions. There were no multiple choice answers. 

8th Grade Exam

Schools are finally realizing if you don’t have standards-based grading you really do not have a standards-based education.

No More A’s for Good Behavior – NYTimes.com 

This seems like something that should have been figured out some time ago, that grading and assessing mastery is more important that deportment and compliance. Maybe this is the first step to identifying kids whose lack of compliance — missed homework, inattention — is due to their not being challenged. 

Link: What Makes a Great Teacher?

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/01/what-makes-a-great-teacher/7841/

Just as soldiers know best what works on the ground, perhaps our educational system will re-focus on tactics instead of strategy. The top-down approach doesn’t work, given the sheer number of entities — school boards, citizens groups, unions, legislative committees, PACs, thinktanks, textbook publishers, test administrators — who have an axe to grind. As the old saying goes, everything works in Theory, but we don’t live there. 

Roger Ebert reports on the human condition.

The bottom line is that so many of you were betrayed by life before you really even got started. How must it feel to be told by a parent that you are stupid, ugly, worthless? To be struck by such a parent? To be hated by the supreme authority in your young life? And then often begged to forgive and understand them? What’s that about? The cruelty is clear cut. But the pleas for remorse must inspire pity and contempt. The lesson is that people can be shabby and mean, and not to be trusted. People can be evil. No wonder you live in a shell. I still remember hurts and wounds from my early years, and know they were trivial. How must it feel to be struck by a parent? How can a parent be so cruel?

[From A meeting of solitudes – Roger Ebert’s Journal]

I could write a bunch on this, but I think his questions are better than my answers could ever be. You can imagine how it feels “to be told by a parent that you are stupid, ugly, worthless.” But I don’t have to imagine it.

I know the answer to his penultimate question (“How must it feel to be struck by a parent?”) but not the last one. Better to ask how people like that willingly become parents and don’t see the things they do and what they mean.

From an Anne Geddes book in a waiting room.

Thinking more on the idea of readiness for school. 

How do we make the change from five years old as the ideal time to enter school to either making as assessment of each child (complicated) or making more pre-K opportunities available for all young students? 

Assessing each child is too risky: those who are found wanting are starting out behind and they or their families may be the least able to cope with that. I’m sure in many cases, getting a child off to school is considered liberating. Maybe not ideal but it is what it is. So making sure they’re ready makes more sense. 

So what does an incoming kindergartener need to know? 

• their letters, both as memorized symbols and as sounds. We perhaps forget that singing the ABCs is nothing more than memorization without any real value beyond that. 
• numbers: 1-10 or 20 is good. Surprising how many get tripped up on fifteen as it breaks the naming pattern. And simple addition/subtraction as well: if you have seven pieces of candy, I have three, and I give you two more, how many do you have and how many do I have? 
• shapes and colors are also valuable. These can be combined with the numbers, as in “bring me three red shapes” or “bring me six triangles.” 

Doing some some interviews with K/1s today, I was glad to see so many enjoyed math games and simple math work. The challenge is to keep that going: mathematics is a language and the only way to master a language is to use it. Written and oral language will come, unless there is some profound learning disorder or impairment but math can easily be neglected. And with math comes science, another subject that got a lot of interest. 

Do they need to know how to read? No, though some can. But a mastery of the fundamentals, of letters and sounds, and the idea that those arcane squiggles make up words and sentences and books is important.