A few days in and it’s a wrap. Mychal Threet and “library joy” for the win.
2024 Person Of The Year
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Category Archives: Education
Merry Christmas
On School Closures
The Olympia, Washington School District has a $13.9 million budget deficit. A big number for a smallish community.
The talk has turned to school closures. Parents, students, and other community members are upset and pushing back.
Here are two sample public statements, the first mindlessly conspiratorial; the second, thoughtful and cogent.
“The superintendent and the board members who voted yes to start the 90-day process do not care about the concerns our community has voiced. It is clear that there is a biased agenda happening behind closed doors since the only option they are willing to present is school closures.”
“Our students are not a classroom, they are not data points, they are not funding dollars—they are children. And behind each one of our children, there is a family, there is a story, and there are emotions.”
Lots of emotions.
Most of the protesters say they want to work with the district to find alternatives to closures. That spirit is nice, but I don’t see any counterproposals that result in a sustainable, balanced budget.
I suspect there’s only one alternative to increasing efficiencies through school closures. Increasing property taxes.
And no one is talking about that.
Why Pedestrian Deaths Are Up In The (dis)United States
There are a multiplicity of factors, but this analysis highlights the increase in pedestrian deaths at night as a result of walkers wearing dark clothes, crosswalks being poorly lit, and a rise in homelessness.
I live 4-5 miles from a perfect storm for ped deaths. Right now in Olympia, Washington it’s dark between 15-16 hours a day. Right off a main drag, there’s a Salvation Army that is a magnet for the homeless, whom I refer to as the “walking wounded”. But they’re not always walking. I’ve seen homeless people dressed entirely in black, suddenly shoot across the street on skateboards and bikes, between crosswalks. It’s human-powered transportation Russian Roulette.
There are accidents, sometimes even deaths, but I’m surprised there aren’t more.
Be Humble, Sit Down
A fave PressingPauser of mine, well before he started calling me Kyrie Irving for not getting jabbed enough (and my ball handling skills prob), is a distinguished academic who has written extensively about the elite in the (dis)United States. He must be having a field day with the college Presidents’ Congressional testimony brouhaha, given the uber-elite law firm that prepped the Presidents before they testified; the Presidents themselves; and especially, the ultra-wealthy business titans like those on Wharton’s Advisory Board at the University of Pennsylvania. Money is leverage.
I look forward to his write up.
He hasn’t asked for my help yet, but the main take-away from Testimonygate is that Bill Ackman is a doofus who let his ego get the best of him.
Ackman, of course, is right that anti-semitism is wrong and that Jewish students should not be scapegoated for highly contentious U.S. foreign policies. They, like all Jewish citizens, should feel and be safe.
But, Ackman over clubbed big time. The New York Times explains:
“On Nov. 4, he (Ackman) wrote a four-page letter to Dr. Gay, outlining his concerns about antisemitism on campus and what he called double standards on campus for different racial and ethnic groups. He offered a detailed list of actions he wanted the university to take.”
The Times adds, “After sending that letter, he said he had minimal contact with Harvard.” What a shocker, Harvard didn’t want a wealthy alum to tell them exactly what to do. I’m sure Ackman wouldn’t mind if Harvard told him exactly how to run his business. How does someone so incapable of “reading the room” achieve Ackman’s level of business success?
Business success, of course, is relative. Ackman’s net worth is only a few billion. Dig this “paragraph to ponder” from the same story.
“He (Ackman) has given tens of millions of dollars over the years to Harvard, but does not rank among the top donors at a school that has landed numerous nine-figure donations. His largest gift dates to 2014, when he and his former wife announced a $25 million donation to expand the economics department and endow three professorships.”
Note to Bill. With a $50 billion endowment, you have to give a lot more than $25 million to get a four-page letter read.
The Times says Ackman is acting from deep-seated resentments towards his alma mater that have built up in recent years. On Twitter, Ackman wrote a four page letter of sorts saying the underlying premise of the NYT’s story was wrong, that he harbors no resentment towards Harvard. Then he details all the things that have gone wrong between the U and him. What’s a synonym for “resentment”, bitterness, animosity, enmity?
The Harvard Board, and large numbers of its faculty, have backed Claudine Gay, Harvard’s newish President. In large part, I suspect, because they think she has what it takes to successfully lead the institution going forward. But also, no doubt, to stick it to Ackman and his egomaniac billionaire ilk.
One of my favorite parts of Succession was when Jeremy Strong as Kendall Roy would sit in the back of his driver’s car and lose himself in rap music in preparation for a big board meeting.
Ackman should channel Kendall Roy. With this Kendrick Lamar chorus.
Bitch, be humble (hol’ up, bitch)
Sit down (hol’ up, lil’, hol’ up, lil’ bitch)
Be humble (hol’ up, bitch)
Sit down (hol’ up, sit down, lil’, sit down, lil’ bitch)
Sometimes There’s A Breakthrough
The final paper. A self-assessment of one’s writing progress. Which admittedly, is a bit presumptuous.
A fave excerpt from one student’s paper.
“But this prewriting is different than what I thought it would be; my prewriting involves putting my professor into a (metaphorical) box, and I put that box into another box. Then, I put that box in the garage and forget about it. Only at this point do I return to my brainstorming and drafts. I have learned that if I do not do this I expend too much energy trying to inject the professor into my creation. Once I realized that my writing is for myself, not the professor, I found that writing is an engaging process of self discovery and growth. This is most evident in my penultimate paper on the concept of soulmates.”
Typically, academic writing is an impersonal jumping through hoops, with students preoccupied by grades. Students inevitably develop a teacher-centric orientation when writing in school, asking themselves, “To get the best grade possible, what and how am I expected to think and write?”
If I could only get all of my students to put me in a box, inside a box, in a garage. Yes, I would prob suffocate to death, but I would die happy.
Overheard
Fall semester is a wrap, well, except for all the grading. Last day of classes. Two dudes in the hallway. “If I’m ever a teacher,” the first says, “I’ll probably be the worst of all time.” Second, “That’s terrible self talk.”
You Will Never Guess The Biggest Threat To Our Future
Me.
According to emeritus professor John Ellis in the Wall Street Journal, who contends, “The biggest threat to our future isn’t climate change, China or the national debt. It is the tyrannical grip that a hopelessly corrupt higher education now has on our national life. If we don’t stop it now, it will eventually destroy the most successful society in world history.”
He wrote this before yesterday’s Congressional testimony about hate speech that no doubt thrilled him.
All is not lost though. Ellis has a solution:
“. . . the only real solution is for more Americans to grasp the depth of the problem and change their behavior accordingly. Most parents and students seem to be on autopilot: Young Jack is 18, so it’s time for college. His family still assumes that students will be taught by professors who are smart, well-informed and with broad sympathies. No longer. Professors are now predominantly closed-minded, ignorant and stupid enough to believe that Marxism works despite overwhelming historical evidence that it doesn’t. If enough parents and students gave serious thought to the question whether this ridiculous version of a college education is still worth four years of a young person’s life and tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, corrupt institutions of higher education would collapse, creating the space for better ones to arise.”
Never mind his assumption that parents of graduating high schoolers are thoughtless, did Ellis just call me closed-minded, ignorant and stupid? That is one hurtful trifecta.
I should probably come clean, but I’m not the one who used “Jack” as his stand in high school graduate, as white and middle-class a pseudonym as there is. I would’ve used Karl as a nod to Marxism, or maybe Friedrich, or better yet, a more inclusive gender-neutral name.
Ellis is old even relative to me, and retired from the classroom, so every day I skillfully weave references to class relations, social conflict, the means of production, and the need for a proletarian revolution into my writing and multicultural education courses, I extend my victory over him. Scoreboard Ellis.
And thereby, become an even greater threat to our future.
2023 Word Of The Year
Rizz.
From the New York Times.
“It’s official. Oxford University Press, the world’s second-oldest academic press and the publisher of the Oxford English Dictionary, has rizz.
Or at least, like the rest of us over a certain age, it’s trying to get some. ‘Rizz’ — Gen Z (or is it Gen Alpha?) slang for ‘style, charm or attractiveness,’ or ‘the ability to attract a romantic or sexual partner’ — has been named as Oxford’s 2023 Word of the Year, beating out contenders like situationship, prompt, de-influencing and (yes) Swiftie.
‘Rizz,’ a shortened form of ‘charisma,’ emerged out of internet and gaming culture, according to Oxford, and was popularized in 2022 by the YouTube and Twitch streamer Kai Cenat, who posted ‘rizz tips’ videos online. It went viral in June, after the actor Tom Holland, in an interview with Buzzfeed, said: ‘I have no rizz whatsoever. I have limited rizz.'”
The GalPal says I have “rizz to spare”. Maybe I should share some with THolland.
St. Olaf College For The Win
Must have been a kick-ass search committee because the new President is a red-headed cyclist. Rundell-Singer taught biology on the other side of the Cannon River for three decades. This hire is a major win for Jeanette Byrnes and a devastating blow to Alison Byrnes. Deep down, Rundell-Singer knew, the best uni in Northfield was up the hill.
Pressing Pause 