This post is only for men under 35, and my brother, “Mother’s Favorite”. If you don’t fall within that demographic, stop reading.
Yes, a happy wife equals a happy life, but what if you’re single? Singleness is cool, but if you want to marry, get a passport and a library card. Traveling abroad and reading are probably optional. More advice here.
Scholarship Name: Stuck at Prom Scholarship Contest
Description: If you are a fashion-forward high school student who doesn’t mind getting yourself into a…sticky situation, then you have a good chance at winning $3,000 for college. Here’s the deal: Go to your high school prom dressed in duck tape. Yup, duck tape. Winners are picked for their “originality, workmanship and quantity of tape.” That quantity thing is a major piece of the puzzle – don’t just accessorize with the tape. Past winners went for a total duck tape ensemble, so if you’re serious about this fashion challenge, it’s best to go all out.
Award: $3,000
Awards Per Year: 1
Award is Open to: High school students
Major/Field of Study: Open
How to Apply/Contact: Take a picture of you and your duck-taped date and send it into the Duck Brand Duct Tape Stuck at Prom Contest, www.stuckatprom.com.
Paul Collier in a January 17th Guardian story.
“Humanitarian crises around the world have shown that, while disaster response is often fast, effective and well-funded, reconstruction attracts fewer resources and, in many instances, fails to deliver an opportunity for a better future. Aceh, on the tip of the Indonesian island of Sumatra and a region often taken as a model for focused development efforts after the 2004 tsunami, now faces new challenges as aid agencies reduce cash handouts and a lack of employment opportunities threatens stability.”
The media spotlight is shining brightly on Haiti just as it did Aceh in 2004. What are the odds that in six years, we will read that Haiti “now faces new challenges as aid agencies reduce cash handouts and a lack of employment opportunities threatens stability.”?
People’s recent generosity towards Haiti strikes me as odd given how little attention most people typically pay to desperately poor people and places.
In the medium and long-term, what impact can we expect an “ignore, give generously, and ignore again” style of philanthropy to make?
We need to commit to more serious and sustained global citizenship that rests on historical knowledge of colonialism, of specific places like Haiti, of globalization and neo-liberal economics, and less on one-off, media-inspired, charitable giving.
I would be more optimistic about Haiti’s future if people checked out books by Sachs, Collier, and other experts on global poverty and formed groups to debate the merits of their proposals for reducing global poverty.
If we don’t press our government to give more generously and intelligently, and we don’t consider changes in our own lifestyles, I can’t help but wonder if we give at times like this out of a sense of guilt.
Now that we’ve fixed pubic ed, we can move on to . . . yogurt.
Eating yogurt, like most of life, entails decision-making. What kind to eat?
Since Lance has recommended more pictures and you’ve been dying to know, here’s a pictorial that represents the yogurt journey I’ve been on.
Initially, my yoggie world was all YoPlait, all the time. It was ubiquitous, I was unsophisticated, and it had lots of sugar. Favorite flav was KeyLime, but French Vanilla rallied and overtook it as the #1 seed.
Everything was copacetic until the wife rocked my yoggie world one summer day by saying, “You know YoPlait has a lot of sugar.” Voice inside my head, “No duh, why do you think I like it so much.” Actual voice, “Mike said Tillamook is very good and has less sugar, maybe we should give it a try.”
And like a dairy Tiger Woods, I began eating around.
What wasn’t there to like about Tillamook? Good taste, less sugar, and two extra ounces.
It was a solid relationship, until, you knew an “until” was coming, until I started to hear repeated references to a different, more exotic and alluring yoggie. . .Greek.
I read references to it in triathlete’s blogs, I heard more and more people talking about it and got wanderlust. Because I wanted to be like the other kids, I instructed the wife to “Bring me some of this magical yoggie of which everyone speaks.”
And so yesterday, with the YoPlait and Tillamook quivering in the fridge, I assembled three versions of Greek on the kitchen island and proceeded to taste each. I was underwhelmed, whelmed, and overwhelmed.
Then I took a look at the nutritional info and understood why: blow those pics up and take a gander at the sugar, fat, protein, etc.
In layman’s term, you could eat the nonfat like it’s Hagen Daz, empty the cartoon, and barely move the needle on the scale. In contrast, you gain weight from the regular, which overwhelmed me, just by glancing at it in the fridge.
But this isn’t a problem, the wide range of choices is quite nice. This morning I ran 10k and then swam 3.5k. I sucked down some regular guilt free. Tomorrow morning, when I won’t have time to workout before teaching, I’ll apologize to my taste buds and probably go with the non-fat.
Imagine if life was so accommodating. I’m sure my wife would love it if she could alternate among three of me. When she hears me pull into the garage, she could say I want non-fat Ron so “Just zip it and listen to me all night.” Or regular Ron, “Okay, talk to me, engage me, make me laugh.” Or low-fat Ron, something in between.
Wondering about the Mountain High? It’s the (mostly summer) smoothie workhorse that the wife gets at the hippy co-op. It’s okay with some of the wife’s all-world granola, but it’s most at home in the blender with ice, fruit, and juice.
First and last sentences from an article in today’s WSJ titled “Even-In-A-Recovery-Some-Jobs-Won’t-Return”.
Even when the U.S. labor market finally starts adding more workers than it loses, many of the unemployed will find that the types of jobs they once had simply don’t exist anymore.
. . . Harvard’s Mr. Katz warns that past experience suggests. . . conjecture is likely fruitless. “One thing we’ve learned is that when we attempt to forecast jobs 10 or 15 years out, we don’t even get the categories right,” he says.
In other words, the economy is so fluid, it’s illogical to plan on having any particular job.
So what are young people to do?
I have lots of thoughts on the subject, but I’m curious about what you think?
Appears as if Randi Weingarten is a reader.
Washington’s gov has had meetings with the state’s top ed officials to see if they can tweak state policy so that they might qualify for a couple of hundred million of the Obama admin’s “Race to the Top” funds. Among other things, they’re talking about instituting a teacher merit pay plan to gain Washington’s favor.
Here’s the context of those discussions. The following cuts have been proposed in the gov’s supplemental budget, which deals with an anticipated $2.6b shortfall:
• cut preschool for 3 year-olds in low-income areas ($10.5m)
• increase class size in K-4 ($110.6m)
• suspend the money the state gives to districts that can’t raise much through property taxes ($142.9m)
• eliminate gifted ed ($7.4m)
• suspend all day Kindergarten for students in schools with the highest poverty levels ($33.6m)
Given this context, I worry any merit based pay system will involve slicing the existing $34,237-$64,531 pie differently.
For example, take ten first year teachers salaries, throw them in a pot totaling $340,237. Establish the rules of the game.
Say we end up with three winners who see a 15% pay boost, three losers who lose 15%, and four status quoers. So now the salary range is $29,101-$39,373.
Does anyone believe border-line poverty (for a family) is a great motivator?
If I was a unionized teacher, I would never sign on to a “slice the existing pie differently” plan.
If states want to see stronger candidates enter the profession, retain the best teachers, and revitalize the profession, they have to make public schooling an even higher priority and find ways to pay bonuses to teams of teachers or entire schools for improved attendance (teacher absenteeism is a serious problem in places), improved student attendance and achievement, and for working for half the summer on curriculum planning and related professional development activities.
The “conventional wisdom” problem I outlined in the last post is not the problem in my view. Children are not like cars or hamburgers. Some aspects of our public life, like health care and education, are too critical to our well being to allow for losing schools.
Drum roll. . . I will now concede a few points often communicated by conservative critics of public schools. Teacher unions will generate more good will if they work together with school boards, districts, and administrators to not only make sure all teachers are given due process when evaluated and conceivably terminated, but also to develop more rigorous criteria for continuing employment so that more (1% would be a large increase in some districts) consistently ineffective teachers are let go. Emphasizing due process almost exclusively has proven counter-productive.
Also, thanks to M.A. for turning me on to Atul Gawande, surgeon/genius health-care writer for the New Yorker. In the December 14th issue, in an article titled “Testing, Testing” he makes a very convincing argument that the best way forward in health-care, is for bottom-up, grass-root pilot studies of medical care, insurance, and related innovations.
Ed reformers would be well served to follow suit. Of course there’s a lot of innovative magnet, charter, and other public schools-within-schools, the challenge is scaling up what works in one context to another. But I digress. Even though schools are not car dealerships and restaurants, we need to free schools up to innovate and distinguish themselves one from another so that families can comparison shop. Families that consciously choose a school are far more committed to it.
To paraphrase from Deborah Meier, we need to provide families choices among small, distinctive, public schools.
The trend is the opposite, the pendulum has not only swung towards standardization in assessment, curriculum, and teaching methodologies, but it’s gotten stuck.
The record on charter schools is terribly uneven, some are exceptional, many are not. I’m not enough of an expert to know how to tip that balance, but my guess is greater fiscal and curricular accountability.
Back to “the problem”. Recent commenters, “Mom’s Favorite” and Lance (also a fantasy appellation), are both right. We need to find ways to attract especially strong candidates to the profession. What do I mean by “especially strong”? For starters, solid academic background, caring, and interpersonally skilled. And we want people motivated more by improving their communities than by enriching themselves.
Right now beginning teachers in Washington State make $34,237 and the scale tops out at $64,531 so we have a lot of room to increase pay without altering the tremendous altruism that motivates most teachers.
Until recently, I taught one course a year in an International Studies program that tended to attract especially strong students. Bi and trilingual, strong writers, confident discussants, serious international experience, ambitious, socially aware. The exact type of people I need applying to the teacher certification program I coordinate, but for the bulk of them, $34,237 is insufficient. After three years of law school they can triple it (leaving aside the fact that a lot of lawyers don’t like lawyering).
Stay tuned because the next question is whether merit pay (yes, I’ll get back to it) means dividing up the same $34,237-$64,531 pie differently or whether there are ways to increase the size of the pie, and as the cliche goes, have a rising tide lift all boats.
First things first, what’s the problem we’re trying to fix? Arne Duncan, as a high-profile representative of conventional wisdom, would probably answer this way. “The problem is motivating teachers to work harder so that we can close the achievement gap between more and less wealthy students, improve graduation rates, and hold off our traditional economic rivals, Japan and Germany, and our emerging ones, India and China.”
So here are the assumptions: 1) teachers don’t work hard; 2) because teachers don’t work hard, we have a pernicious achievement gap; 3) schools exist to help us maintain our relative advantage in the global economic race.
Conventional wisdom suggests teachers don’t work hard because their pay is predetermined based upon their educational credentials and years of service. That combined with tenure translates into educational malaise. This is a deeply held view by many Americans who view business model principles as immutable.
Business model peeps reason schools are like car dealerships and fast food restaurants. There’s no point being sentimental about shuttered dealerships and restaurants because they are a natural byproduct of intense free market competition. Keep your consumer eyes on the prize, a wide choice of affordable, high quality cars/food.
If unfettered competition is the economic magic bullet, no reason it can’t be the educational one too. Schools in a given locale don’t fear one another enough nor do teachers within individual schools. The proliferation of student test scores enable us to keep score between schools and teachers within individual schools.
Before I proceed, is that the problem merit-based teacher pay is supposed to fix?
Swimming—283.5k—88h (time estimate). All-time high. Most memorable swim(s), Haag Lake 2k and 4k.
Cycling—4,163m—238h (time estimate). All-time high. Most memorable ride, late summer Carpenter Loop club training ride, bridged to Wentz, solo break, exchanged blows with Lance. Cutter pride.
Running—1,255m—162h (time estimate). Lowest total since 2000. Most memorable run, tie, Oly Half with the principal and mid-November 12m Seattle Half Marathon training run with very hard final four.
Year went almost exactly as planned. Before it began, I decided to turn up the S and C dials and turn down the R. After a calf problem in January, I was fortunate to be injury free. Also very fortunate to have such great training partners.
S/C/R total=swimming miles x 4 + run miles + cycling ÷ 4=3,000. 2nd highest total ever (2005, 3,225, sabbatical/two marathons). I haven’t planned 2010 out as carefully as normal. Hope to swim about the same amount, cycle a bit more, and run about the same distance.
Daylight Savings countdown, 68 days.
Backyard, mid-fall. Credit, the wife.
Pressing Pause 