A couple of speeches you might want to watch before the one tonight

Martin Luther King
"I Have a Dream"
August 28, 1963

Part I of JFK's Acceptance Speech at the Democratic Convention, 1960.

Part II. As John Harvey reminded me this morning, he gave it at a large stadium, the Memorial Coliseum, in Los Angeles.

Blackberry Trellis

Just built the blackberry trellis, finally. My fingers hurt from training the stalks along the cable. Thorny boogers. I've got the plants too close together, but I'm just that kind of guy. According to the experts, blackberry stalks can grow 100 feet long. This setup is seven feet high, and they should fill it up in a couple of months. We got a few blackberries this year, but we should have loads next year, even after the birds have their share.

RateMyProfessors.com

I have been pwned by many disgruntled students at RateMyProfessors.com

This teacher is the most boring teacher i ever taken he only gives u 5 essays to do. however he grades hard so make sure ur essay is good. i wont ever take him again too too boring all we did was read at home and go to class and talked about the story we read i don't recommend him at all.

Maybe I need to wear more flair. I am sarcastic (see previous sentence), professional, cruel, easy-going, too hard, easy, I return papers slowly, and I return papers quickly. I have a zero rating on my Hotness Total.

My online students are particularly peeved, and have more to complain about. I got into the Distance Ed thing after other profs had established turf rights to the regular semester fiction (2342)sections, so I teach what's called second start. It begins six weeks later than the regular semester, so students don't get their first grades back until close to the "drop" deadine. I teach three of these sections, which means I begin with 96 students in just those three classes. My other three classes (1301 comp/1302 rhetoric) are face-to-face and begin during the regular start date. I usually have about 60-70 students in those at first. I spend about 20-30 minutes grading each essay (which is slow), so I am slow to get essays back. The online students are justified in being frustrated. The only ways I could get them back more quickly would be to pull all-nighters (not going to happen) or to grade each essay more quickly (not going to happen). Online enrollment numbers, for me, drop substantially after a few weeks.

The hand written EOI's (evaluation of instruction) I get routed back to me from my f-t-f students are, oddly, all positive. Every single one of them. I think my department chair must be weeding out the bad ones to boost my self-esteem.

George Will on Education

"Where Paternalism Makes the Grade"

Paternalism is the restriction of freedom for the good of the person restricted.
. . . . . . .
Unfortunately, powerful factions fiercely oppose the flourishing. Among them are education schools with their romantic progressivism -- teachers should be mere "enablers" of group learning; self-esteem is a prerequisite for accomplishment, not a consequence thereof. Other opponents are the teachers unions and their handmaiden, the Democratic Party. Today's liberals favor paternalism -- you cannot eat trans fats; you must buy health insurance -- for everyone except children. Odd.

All we need to do, you see, is to apply this administration's philosophy of the unitary executive (greater empowerment of a benign and protecting leader at the expense of civil liberties) to the classroom. This authoritarian model will make up for what Will sees as an epidemic lack of qualified teachers in the country. In his example, he suggests mandatory uniforms, the prohibitions against jewelry, makeup, slouching, holidays, etc., are responsible for student success, and casually notes that the teachers at this school are from places like "Harvard, Dartmouth, Oberlin, Columbia, Berkeley, Brown and Wesleyan."

I've been in the dysfunctional high schools of inner-city Houston, especially those in the low-income northeast side, and the campuses look like prisons. The kids wear uniforms. There are plenty of security gaurds, assistant principals walk around with bull horns, and the teachers' main priority is discipline. The teachers are not from Harvard and Dartmouth. Just maybe, more capable teachers than those we have could be drawn into education by paying them salaries comparable to those of other valued professions.

Most educators, even while they quarrel among themselves, will agree that a genuine commitment to any one of a number of different solutions could help enormously. Most agree that although money can't by itself solve problems, without money few problems can be solved. Money also can't win wars or put men in space, but it is the crucial facilitator. It is also how America has traditionally announced, We are serious about this!

If we were serious, we would raise teachers' salaries to levels that would attract the best young professionals in our society: starting lawyers get from $70,000 to $80,000 [in 1993]-why don't starting kindergarten teachers get the same? Is their role in vouchsafing our future less significant? And although there is evidence suggesting that an increase in general educational expenditures doesn't translate automatically into better schools, there is also evidence that an increase aimed specifically at instructional services does. Can we really take in earnest the chattering devotion to excellence of a country so wedded in practice to mediocrity, a nation so ready to relegate teachers--conservators of our common future--to the professional backwaters?

George Will is not serious. Barber's essay is a classic, and worth a read.

Molly Ivors on Distance Ed

"I've Got My Notebooks And I'm Going Back". Her husband, Thers, teaches English, like me. He and his wife share that Whisky Fire blog. He's hilarious, and you should check him out.

Anyhow, I teach DE for half my classes.

Jameson's Birthday

Russia, Georgia, and the USA

Billmon

Zuzu and Grandpa are bringing Jameson home today

We are happy. While he was gone, we took down his crib and put a big boy bed in his room. The next few nights should be interesting.

Starting to Get the Idea

Byron York: The Left and Plans for "Nuremberg-Style" Tribunals for Bush Administration Officials

He shouldn't just be worried about what kind of accountability an Obama administration might pursue. International law was broken.

It just keeps coming

EXCLUSIVE: To Provoke War, Cheney Considered Proposal To Dress Up Navy Seals As Iranians And Shoot At Them

I guess the surprise is that they decided not to do it. Instead, they've gone with supporting what are essentially Al Qaeda groups inside Iran. Which plan do you find more absurd?

Anthrax, Iraq Propoganda, and ABC

Glenn Greenwald.

We now know -- we knew even before news of Ivins' suicide last night, and know especially in light of it -- that the anthrax attacks didn't come from Iraq or any foreign government at all. It came from our own Government's scientist, from the top Army bioweapons research laboratory. More significantly, the false reports [anonymously "leaked" to ABC] linking anthrax to Iraq also came from the U.S. Government -- from people with some type of significant links to the same facility responsible for the attacks themselves.

Surely the question of who generated those false Iraq-anthrax reports is one of the most significant and explosive stories of the last decade. The motive to fabricate reports of bentonite and a link to Saddam is glaring. Those fabrications played some significant role -- I'd argue a very major role -- in propagandizing the American public to perceive of Saddam as a threat, and further, propagandized the public to believe that our country was sufficiently threatened by foreign elements that a whole series of radical policies that the neoconservatives both within and outside of the Bush administration wanted to pursue -- including an attack an Iraq and a whole array of assaults on our basic constitutional framework -- were justified and even necessary in order to survive.

ABC News already knows the answers to these questions. They know who concocted the false bentonite story and who passed it on to them with the specific intent of having them broadcast those false claims to the world, in order to link Saddam to the anthrax attacks and -- as importantly -- to conceal the real culprit(s) (apparently within the U.S. government) who were behind the attacks. And yet, unbelievably, they are keeping the story to themselves, refusing to disclose who did all of this. They're allegedly a news organization, in possession of one of the most significant news stories of the last decade, and they are concealing it from the public, even years later.

They're not protecting "sources." The people who fed them the bentonite story aren't "sources." They're fabricators and liars who purposely used ABC News to disseminate to the American public an extremely consequential and damaging falsehood. But by protecting the wrongdoers, ABC News has made itself complicit in this fraud perpetrated on the public, rather than a news organization uncovering such frauds. That is why this is one of the most extreme journalistic scandals that exists, and it deserves a lot more debate and attention than it has received thus far.