Category: quote of the day

Could these boxes be uglier? Can something have a negative aesthetic score?

Link: Who thought it was a good idea to make things worse for generations yet to come?

We’re doing to higher education what we already did to secondary education; private schools, and public schools barely scraping by with lower standards, with smart people knowing that that’s not where you send your kids if you value education, except that we’ll want those public university students to take out lots of loans.

Think about that. These people

• earn bachelor’s degrees, maybe even a masters
• spend their own money on materials for their workspace, sometimes even on food for the children in their care
• can’t even go to the bathroom when they need to
• sit at kids’ tables in empty classrooms or in staff rooms (if there is one) to eat their lunch in 20 minutes or so
• can never meet a friend for lunch unless they work in the same building
• can’t run errands during the day
• can’t make appointments during working hours or take phone calls
• deal with kids who don’t know why they are there
• and don’t make nearly as much as people think.

And the hours? Not much different from regular office workers: 7 or 8 to 5, some more, some less. It’s not 9-3 unless you think the classrooms clean themselves, that materials are made and distributed by fairies, that curriculum planning is easy, and that managing kids, their learning styles and needs, is trivial. Add to this the bureaucratic overhead and the constant attacks by people who haven’t been inside a school since their own unsuccessful school days and it’s a wonder anyone bothers with it as a profession. 

Most days the kids make it worthwhile, bless ‘em. 

Some people swore that the house was haunted. We never believed it but we were happy to let others think so.

The house’s appearance helped. It was right out of the props department of a movie studio. A tall, narrow, wooden house with shutters hanging by a corner, swinging and slamming in the slightest breeze, slats missing, standing alone on a treeless hill at the end of a street. Rotten steps leading to a front door that was missing most of its paint. Broken windows, loose trim, odd sounds and smells. Some said there had been trees near it at at one time but they got scared away.

OK. Not all of that was done by supernatural forces. Unless you count teenage boys and girls. The windows were broken as far back as I remember. And the strange smells could be from garbage — or worse — thrown through those windows. We never figured out where the sounds came from but we never looked that hard. No one I knew ever went into the old place.

The history of the old place went back a few generations, with the usual story of well-heeled gentry building a house to match their status followed by the family slowly slipping down the ladder of respectability. Throw in a few cases of madness and it’s a cliched pulp novel. But this family didn’t dwindle into obscurity. They just vanished. They had been seen out and about in the town one day, with dinner and some shopping in the evening, and the next day they disappeared. No wagon came for them, their own carriages and horses stood waiting. The servants came to an empty house that morning but never returned, not even to collect their wages.

There it stood for years, decades even, brooding and deteriorating on its empty hillside, its only companions bats, pigeons, stray cats, bored teenagers.

Then one day a car drove up to the old house, an old car no one could recall seeing or even identify, long, black, curved, with wire wheels. It drove slowly through the town, whining in the wrong gear as it were being punished for wanting to go faster, and turned down the road to the house. We followed as closely as we dared, on foot, on bicycles, wondering what this was about.

We waited at the end of the drive, sitting, squatting, hiding behind our bicycles and each other. The car lurched to a halt and backfired, so loud we could hear it echo. The driver got out, so tall he unfolded as he came, and turned to open the rear door. After a pause, he closed it again, straightened his coat, and walked up the steps, his hands folded behind his back. The front door opened as he was halfway up the stairs and he walked in, closing it behind him.

Half the watchers left, as fast as they could go, mumbling to themselves and waving away things only they could see.As the rest of us watched, the house seemed to shimmer and blur ever so slightly, and as we looked it got straighter, taller, less slumped. Windows were opened and were once again windows with unbroken glass. Lamps were lit, and loud thumps and deep vibrating hums came from the earth under and around the house.

When we saw the trees slowly walking across the hillside, slumped as if in shame at their faithlessness, we all backed up slowly and made our way back to town, never once turning our backs on the house.

Nothing was ever the same again after that.

I wonder:

• How many school-age kids regularly see a parent or role model reading, be it Rolling Stone, Sports Illustrated, the NYTimes or the PennySaver  
• How many books kids have at home
• How many cable channels kids know by name and number 
• If children watch TV or listen to the radio with adults 
• If they are read to, even if they can read already

Modeling the behavior we want to see is so important. 

A good reminder: In education, tests are the thermometer, not the weather http://bit.ly/a6QRkc #becivil

Katherine Poythress (@ktpoy)

If I read this right, the recent remarks by @PressSec Robert Gibbs were directed at the embittered rump who never let go of their dreams of President Hillary Clinton and at those who thought they could see Dennis Kucinich in the White House.

But Kucinich was instrumental in putting Obama on the road to victory by throwing his support to him instead to Hillary or keeping his campaign alive for ego’s sake. So those Kucinich supporters who claim their man is all principle and no pragmatism need to think that through. Or maybe the ire is because Obama owes his success to a compromise: which is it? The act or the man?

And the PUMAs who see the White House as Hillary’s entitlement for the rough ride she endured in the 90s may want to consider how lucky we are not to have Caribou Barbie a heartbeat away from the noo-kyoo-lar button. I don’t know how a McCain/Clinton matchup would have come out but I’m glad we didn’t have to find out.

Neither Clinton nor Kucinich are bad people, poor politicians, or bad Democrats. Far from it: they have both sacrificed personal ambition — no easy thing for the narcissistic personality required of successful politicians — for the greater good, for an end to the destructive policies of the first 8 years of this century that would likely have been followed or made worse by McThuselah and his sidekick.

And then there’s the pundit class whose very existence depends on attacking both sides, undermining any success, and generally doing whatever it takes to get on teevee, write OpEds and self-serving books. These people make their living stirring it up: political uproar is not incidental to their work — it is their work. These modern-day apparatchiks, like yesterday’s pols but unlike today’s, are friendlier to each other in their off-hours than when we can see them but just like today’s pols have nothing in common with the people who allow them a living.

The people who knocked on doors and collected signatures and manned phone banks and drove voters to the polls and who know that hard problems many years in the making are not solved with the stroke of a pen were not the target of Gibbs’s remarks: it’s the nattering nabobs of negativism, to coin a phrase, the naysayers who think clapping harder and wishing gets it done. Reagan/Bush pére/Clinton/Bush fils all contributed to this mess and if you’re giving up after 18 months after all these achievements, you’re letting yourself and everyone else down. If you don’t realize, after all this, that compromise and horse-trading, accepting that progress is a journey, not a place, you’re never going to be happy.

As Faulkner said, “The past is never dead. It isn’t even past.”

I JUST HEARD THAT OBAMA IS GOING TO IMPOSE A 40% TAX ON ASPIRIN BECAUSE IT’S WHITE AND IT WORKS.

[From gopgreenhouse aspirin – Twitter Search]