Job Opening
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Sentence of the Day
It’s still early on the Best West Coast, but it’s going to be very difficult to top this, from Katy Waldman of Slate:
“It is such an odd, ubiquitous detail—that Trump is ‘enraged.’ He is apoplectic, incensed, irate, vexed, sore, peeved, tantrum-y, mad online, mad offline, mad in a boat, mad with a goat, mad in the rain, mad on a train.”
How to Get Rich in America
The Economist explains. From the last pgraph:
“. . . the simplest way to become extremely rich is by being born to the right parents. The second-easiest way is to find a rich spouse. If neither approach works, you could try to get into a top college. . .”
I don’t know this to be true, but I suspect for the top 1% of Americans, their investment or “passive” income rivals or exceeds their job-based income. It’s as if they’re getting paid for two jobs despite just working one. Pieces like this make me wonder why are income and wealth so often conflated? There’s a correlation sure, but it’s nowhere near 1.0.
Higher Ed’s Ultimate Paradox
The vast majority of its inhabitants are progressives who advocate for a much more egalitarian society, country, world. And yet, if would be difficult for those same people to organize themselves in any more hierarchical manner.
Allowing for small variations at different institutions, behold the standard hierarchy:
Upper administration—President, Vice-Presidents, Provost
Tenured professor with endowed chair
Tenured professor
Tenured associate professor with endowed chair
Tenured associate professor
Assistant professor—tenure track
2 year visiting assistant professor—non-tenure track
1 year visiting assistant professor—non-tenure track
Contingent faculty—Adjunct professor, lecturer, clinical professor—typically hired on a semester-by-semester, course-by-course basis (often no benefits)
Staff
Plant services
Custodians/housekeeping
New Education Blog
By Fredrik deBoer. One recent post, The Official Dogma of Education (version 1.0) makes it bookmark worthy. I’m especially down with numbers 6, 16 and 17.
The Difficulty of Evaluating Teachers
Colorado case study.
“It’s tough to measure the success of the law objectively, though no one seems to be claiming it had the dramatic effect that many hoped for back in 2010. Naturally, different stakeholders have different prescriptions for how to improve it. Dallman wants to reduce the role of testing; Stein says the rubric is too cumbersome; Boasberg argues there needs to be more room for subjectivity and professional judgment.”
Meanwhile, more Colorado high school graduates need remedial classes.
“The number of Colorado high school graduates who needed to take remedial classes in college . . . increased slightly in 2015-16 over the previous year from 35.4 percent to 36.1 percent.”
How Homeownership Became The Engine of American Inequality
Turns out the NYTimes can still bring it on occasion. Inequality is an abstract concept, but not in Matthew Desmond’s hands.
On the mortgage interest deduction:
“. . . we continue to give the most help to those who least need it — affluent homeowners — while providing nothing to most rent-burdened tenants. If this is our design, our social contract, then we should at least own up to it; we should at least stand up and profess, ‘Yes, this is the kind of nation we want.’ Before us, there are two honest choices: We can endorse this inequality-maximizing arrangement, or we can reject it. What we cannot do is look a mother like Diaz in the face and say, ‘We’d love to help you, but we just can’t afford to.’ Because that is, quite simply, a lie.”
Read it in it’s entirety.
Weekend Reading
There will be a quiz on Monday.
- The chaos of urban school reform.
- Life-long learners versus life-long test takers.
- Grade anxiety and felony burglary at the University of Kentucky. What do you propose as punishment?
- Can science help marathoners break the 2-hour limit? Truly excellent breakdown. Fav sentence, “Basically, in the marathon, there are a lot more pipes that can burst than, say, in a mile or a 5K.” The attempt is in Italy Saturday morning at 5:45a, tonight at 8:45p PDT, 11:45p, EDT. I do not expect to see a sub two hour marathon in my lifetime; however, I do hope to break two hours in my first stand-alone 10k in ages tomorrow morn.
- The real reason Clinton lost. Prediction: Alison will disagree. Vehemently.
Sentences Worth Re-reading
A horrendous sentence by an exceptionally good writer. Pulitzer good. I proceed knowing full well that kharma is going to kick my ass sometime soon.
Kathryn Schulz in Polar Expressed:
“The Greenland Ice Sheet, which is more than a hundred and ten thousand years old and covers six hundred and sixty thousand square miles of the Far North, has shed two hundred billion tons of water a year since 2003.”
Three references, each one extremely difficult to picture, taken together, laughably incomprehensible. Can you picture hundreds of thousands of years or square miles? What about 200,000,000,000 tons of water (or 444,000,000,000 lbs)? We need the equivalencies. For example, six hundred and sixty thousand square miles, or the size of “x” number of Western states. Or two hundred billion tons of water or enough water to fill “y”. The best writers sometimes swing and miss, just a lot less often than the rest of us mortals.
An exemplary sentence by Zoe Heller’s in her review of Sally Bedell Smith’s new biography, “Prince Charles: The Passions and Paradoxes of an Improbable Life”.
“Too physically uncoordinated to be any good at team sports, too scared of horses to enjoy riding lessons, and too sensitive not to despair when, at the age of eight, he was sent away to boarding school, he was happiest spending time with his grandmother the Queen Mother, who gave him hugs, took him to the ballet, and, as he later put it, ‘taught me how to look at things.’”
One sentence, seven detailed references about Charles, resulting in genuine insight into his personality. Brilliant.
And another Heller gem from later in the same review:
“Even Charles’s love life was choreographed for him with the sort of elaborate care and tact usually reserved for pandas in captivity.”
A master lesson in how to make your readers smile.
World Naked Gardening Day
Sadly, this month’s most important celebration is crowded out by holiday stalwarts like Cinco De Mayo, Mother’s Day, and Memorial Day; not to mention, lower profile ones like May Day and Teacher Appreciation Week (8th-12th).
Are you ready for World Naked Gardening Day this Sunday? “It’s not about exposing your body to other people,” the founder explains. “It’s about body acceptance and being one with nature on your own.”
With apologies to Elaine, I’m in. Skin cancer be damned.
Pressing Pause 