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I just got this:

Subject: Capuchin [Monkey] for adoption [ Needs a good home ]

If you are ready to spoil her with lots of love, Then I think you are the idle person for her. Please before I proceed I will like to ask a few questions about You? Are you a Christian? Do you have kids? If yes, do they love pets? Please you get back with answers to my question because I will want to know where my monkey is going with all the love and affection.

Dr. Gordon

Oh. The message came from France.

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If you have nothing but tail ends, what better to make than soup–especially when there's snow on the ground? If you have, say, about 3 1/2 quarts of rich, gelatinous, homemade beef stock left, apply what I call the "what would taste good?" principle–but remember, most of the ingredients you must have on hand. Here's an example.

You ask yourself what soup you could make with that stock that would taste good, and for some reason, you think of cheese tortellini. Ask yourself what you don't have, and you come up with two things: Beef and tortellini. (If the list of things you don't have is longer than the list of things you have, you're cheating, so think of something else–and yes, you could leave out the beef, but your stock won't be quite so rich.)

Run to the store and get a small package of stew beef and cheese tortellini. When you get home, you're ready to throw it together, along with whatever else you may have at home.

First, get the stock out of the refrigerator and pop it into the microwave, and set it to nuke for seven minutes, long enough to melt all the grease and get the stock hot. While the stock is being nuked, cut the beef into smaller cubes (they're always too big for soup) and toss them into the bottom of a pot. Measure a quart of the stock into a glass degreaser (you know, with the spout rising from the bottom), and let it sit for a minute, until all the fat rises to the top. Pour the degreased stock into the pot with the beef, and the fat back into the remaining stock and stick it back in the refrigerator. Open a can of diced tomatoes (canned tomatoes in the three essential forms–sauce, diced, and crushed–should be a permanent part of your pantry) and toss it in with the juice, then add some basil and some oregano. Bring it to a boil, then simmer it until the beef is tender.

So what do you have lurking in the freezer? The tail end of a bag of frozen sweet corn, and the tail end of a bag of frozen peas. What's that, you have diced prosciutto and roasted red peppers in the refrigerator? Great. Add the tortellini, the peas and the corn, dice some roasted red peppers and add them, along with some prosciutto (just not too much–it can easily overpower everything else). Simmer just until the pasta is done, add salt and pepper to taste, and there you have it. Memorable soup from what you had left!

Originally published September 17 2006:

Some eight years ago, I attended a series of presentations (not by choice) given by the ed school diversity police. At one, we got the party line on "learning styles/modalities," presented with no evidence to back it up because like contrastive rhetoric, there is no evidence to back it up.

A particularly grumpy faculty member–who also happened to be a Dean at the time–asked the presenter what I, and no doubt many others, were thinking. He said, "Other than the fact that you have no evidence to support this, so what? We have material to cover. We barely have enough time as it is. We certainly don't have time to present the material in each style just to make it easier for some of the students. So what do you want us to do with this information?"

Another one of these presentations was given by the feminonsense police, and covered how men are "goal-oriented," and women are "process-oriented." She and her co-feminuts, along with a few cooperative feminized males, presented a "role play" that began with a normal, goal-oriented meeting (of men) where the problem was addressed, a solution was agreed upon, and men were assigned to implement the solution. The next "role play" was feminuts having a meeting with no goal or purpose, other than to make each other feel good, and even though it was ostensibly to address the same problem as the first meeting "role play," the feminuts ended the meeting without ever addressing a solution. Finally, there was the final, two-part "role play," in which both sexes took part. In the first of the two-parter, the feminuts chose to shut up and sit there like lumps when the men insisted on having a meeting with a goal and purpose, and tackling the problem. In the second part of the two-parter, the men acquiesced to the "process oriented" meeting, the "issues" were discussed, feelings about the "issues" were shared, no solution was ever mentioned much less discussed, and nothing was accomplished (of course). The second of the two-parter was presented as how men could be more "sensitive" to women in meetings. When confronted with the fact that the "sensitive" meeting was unproductive, the feminuts accused the questioner of being patriarchal, and avoided the issue.

Ignore the man behind the curtain!

Both of these presentations illustrate why "being sensitive to our differences" (codename: diversity) is destructive to education.

As far as "learning styles" go, the unnamed Dean said it best at the time. Unless you have very little material to cover, in which case you shouldn't be teaching the class in the first place, you don't have the time to screw with, or worry about, such nonsense–especially when it is motivated by no evidence at all.

As far as "goal-oriented" v. "process-oriented" goes, education is, by definition, goal-oriented. "Process-oriented" approaches rarely produce a result.¹ They are, by definition, unproductive–given that solving a problem of some kind is the goal of education, and if women truly are "process oriented" (and I'm not accepting that, given that there are so many logical women in the world, and have always been), then it is one purpose of education to teach them to be goal-oriented thinkers.

This "diversity" obsession is particularly destructive when it rears its inefficient, navel-gazing, narcissistic head in math education.

As knowledge systems go, math is the prototypical, linear system. Each skill builds upon others, so mastering a skill requires that one has already mastered previous skills. Math is essentially Aristotelian in nature, however patriarchal and serial raping and penis waving that may be.

Fifty percent of the reason for teaching any math skill, then, is because mastery of that skill will be required for the mastery of other skills down the road. While little Johnny may be a macaroni art learner or little Michelle may be a crayon and poster board project learner, allowing (worse, encouraging) little Johnny to solve the math problem by gluing macaroni to a toilet paper tube is counter-productive to fifty percent of the reason for covering the skill in class (and presenting Johnny with the problem). While Michelle's crayon and poster board project may be very cute and creative, she learns no useful skill from doing it, and her failure to master the skill will handicap her later down the road. Educrats will then point to evil patriarchal traditionalist math teachers, Michelle's sex, Michelle's parents, Michelle's socioeconomic status, the lack of technology in the classroom, or conservatives in general and blame them for "disadvantaging" poor little Michelle–when their own nutty educration methods are responsible. (For the latest example of fuzzy-headed, illogical educrat whining, see here.)

Repeat after me: There is no such thing as "mindless" drilling, or "mindless" rote memorization. Nothing about memorization or drilling is "mindless." Rote memorization gives us domain knowledge, with which we can build other skills. Drilling is learning. Both teach discipline, both strengthen connections (there's your neuroscience reference), and both build the skills necessary to solve problems.

When you can point to anyone in the real world solving a real-world problem by creating macaroni art, then by all means, object. I have a hard time trying to think of an example of anyone taking a complex problem and solving it "holistically," or by sitting around in a matriarchal, vagina monologues-emulating, "process oriented" meeting, much less by making a cute, creative, crayon and poster board project. But please, let me know if you can think of any examples.

Educrats are fond of throwing around the phrase, "problem-solving skills," yet seem to believe that every problem is unique, and unrelated to every other problem–as, indeed, you must believe if you think that macaroni art is, or ever can be, a problem-solving skill. We can see an example of this in this nonsense from the NEA:

A student well versed in algebra might do the following to set up the problem: p = pigs, c = chickens. p + c = 70 (heads) 4p + 2c = 200 (pigs have 4 legs and chickens have 2 legs). These two equations may be used to solve the problem. Students might solve this problem by "guessing and checking," or drawing pictures. Some methods of solving problems might be considered more "efficient." That may be true, but the correct answer can be found using multiple methods. Children think about mathematics in different ways depending on their prior experiences at home and school. By allowing students to think flexibly about numbers, we encourage them to "own" the math forever, instead of "borrowing" until class is over.

Allowing multiple methods encourages failure–because, again, math is wholly linear, and skills build upon other skills. Allowing students to "own" math means not teaching them math at all.

The linearity of math means that there is exactly one method, and only one method, for any given skill:² that symbol manipulation which must be mastered not only to solve the current problem, but to master other skills down the road. It makes no difference if little Johnny would rather glue macaroni on toilet paper tubes. It makes no difference if little Michelle is a crayon project-oriented learner. Only one method accomplishes the entire reason for teaching the skill in the first place.

But teaching math has an even more basic function than math itself, and always has: Learning math is learning that step-by-step, logical approach to problem-solving, an approach whose applications far exceed the scope of mathematics. Problem-solving is its own knowledge system, and math is the best way to learn that knowledge system. Math teaches us to take a complex problem and simplify it by dissembling it. Math teaches us to take a complex problem and by writing equivalent statements, clarify it and the path to its solution. Math teaches us the progression of logical steps (remember all those proofs in geometry?) Math is coldly and unforgivingly logical–"close to the right answer" is an absurdity in math, where there is the right answer and there is every other, equally wrong, answer–and gives us problem-solving skills we will use throughout our lives.

Mathematics has, for this reason, been a cornerstone of education since the Greeks. Crayon and poster board projects accomplish nothing other than allowing Michelle to get an A without having mastered the content.

And doing all those cute projects ensures that little Johnny and little Michelle will go through life devoid of those invaluable problem-solving skills, that Aristotelian logic, and that they will be crippled for the rest of their lives. Is making them feel more comfortable by letting them glue macaroni to cardboard tubes really worth that?

1. I'm hedging, since I do not know of one single case in which a "process-oriented" approach has resulted in a solution [back]
2. Yes, I realize that one may approach a conditional bottom-up or top-down, or that one may calculate a problem with different series of steps, or put steps in different orders. [back]

First, we had overpopulation, then global cooling and the coming ice age, then nuclear winter, then smoking, and currently, the most popular Chicken Littlisms are global warming climate change, transfats, red meat, and on alternating days, obesity and malnutrition. The latest is going to be

[drum roll]

Zits.

Follow the links.

While I was collecting NAEP data, I thought I'd see if the explosion in education spending from NCLB has any relationship to the percentage of students proficient or above in math and reading, so I downloaded the most recent data (8th graders, 2005, aggregated by state). First, though, I was curious to see if there was a statistically significant difference between the percentage proficient and above in math and the percentage proficient and above in reading, so I ran ANOVA:

Interestingly, there is not. In order to disprove the null hypothesis, p must be 0.05 or lower, and as you can see, p is 0.33381604 (alternatively, you can see if the value of the F is greater than the critical value of F, and it is not) . So we cannot claim from these data that there is any statistically significant difference between the percentage proficient or above in math and the percentage proficient or above in reading.

Let's turn, then, to per pupil spending, and see if it (our independent variable) has any effect on the percentage proficient in math or the percentage proficient in reading (our dependent variables). If we just eyeball the data it seems dubious that there is an effect:

These are the two states that spend the most per pupil, and the two states that spend the least. Note that in reading, Tennessee scores almost as high as Alaska, and note the vast difference between the two top spending states, Alaska and DC (yes, I know DC is not a state, but it's included as a state for the purposes of aggregating the data). Mississippi, which spends the least per pupil, ranks pretty low compared to both Alaska and Tennessee, but higher in both math and reading than DC, the second-highest per pupil spender. But to see if per pupil spending has a statistically significant effect on the percentage proficient or above in math and reading, we need to run regressions, first on math:

The value of p is 0.783209568, not 0.05 or lower, so per pupil spending has no statistically significant effect on the percentage of students proficient or above in math (note that the correlation coefficient between the two variables is only 0.03949115). So how about reading?

The value of p is 0.736868904 so per pupil spending has no statistically significant effect on the percentage of students proficient or above in reading (and note that the correlation coefficient between the two variables is only 0.048217771). So these data–the most recent NAEP data, for 8th graders, aggregated by state), support no statistically significant relationship between per pupil spending and math or reading proficiency.

However, one of the data tables I downloaded for these analyses included the mean NEAP math scores by parents' level of education, aggregated by state (again, 8th graders for 2005). It seemed almost a waste of time to run ANOVA on the scores for all four levels of education, so I ran ANOVA on adjacent education levels, first no high school diploma and only a high school diploma:

The p-value is 2.7727*10^-6, so the NAEP math scores for students whose parents who have no high school diploma and those whose parents have only a high school diploma are statistically significant. And indeed, we see a statistically significant difference between all adjacent groups:

So the level of parental education has a statistically significant effect on childrens' math scores even between adjacent groups. I find this somewhat surprising. I would have expected a statistically significant difference between the math scores of students whose parents who had never completed high school and those whose parents graduated from college, but these data indicate that the level of parental education has a significant effect even when comparing students whose parents went to college but did not graduate and those whose parents graduated from college.

While we see no significant effect of funding on scores, we do see a strong effect of parental education on scores. Interesting.

Yesterday, I looked at the Department of Education data on doctorates awarded from 1971 up to 2004. I was going to look at the aggregated data by discipline, but, well, first, I don't know if you've actually downloaded data from the Dept of Ed, but whoever sets up the Excel files doesn't have a clue that Excel is for analyzing data, and not making something look like a dot matrix printout. In between each column of data you have a column that's there just to put in a | so there will be a little line. Complete idiocy. Oh, and I was starving and had to eat.

When I opened the XLS file this morning, another problem (again related to idiocy) arose: The almost haphazard way disciplines had been aggregated. There were things that should not have been aggregated ("Foreign languages and literatures, linguistics" was one), which I could do nothing about, since there was no way to disaggregate the data. There were things that weren't aggregated but should have been, which I dealt with. There were disciplines that, well, I had to guess at, such as "Security and protective services," which I called forensics (I'm not sure that's what it is).

The disciplines I ended up with are: Agriculture and natural resources, Biological/biomedical/health, Business, Education, Engineering-related, Forensics, Public administration and social services, Humanities, Information sciences, Legal, Math/sciences, Phys Ed, Social sciences, and Theology and religious vocations. They're not perfect, but they're the best I could do with the mess the Dept of Ed provided (Architecture is included in Engineering-related, for example). Anyway, here are the data, sorted by the difference in the number of doctorates awarded:

And here are the top five plotted:

Note that the only disciplines that awarded fewer doctorates in 2004 than 1971 are math and the sciences. Also note that these are doctorate degrees, and with a few exceptions (some of the doctorates awarded in Biological/biomedical/health, for example), doctorates are research degrees, and have one primary job market: The university. Therefore, you can't interpret these data in terms of recent market trends (the boom in IT degrees won't be reflected here, because that boom is in Bachelor and Master degrees, and the big increase in biomedical doctorates has something to do with the boom in biotech, but because of the way these data were aggregated, we don't know how many of those biomedical doctorates are going into the private sector, and how many are going to the university).

These trends do affect the job market, of course: The university faculty job market. That's the point. And given that the retirements are underway in most departments, if these trends continue, it's not going to be a great job market for those who are just now starting PhD programs.

Bruce on Darfur:

You're living in a shack made of rags. Everyday, around 10:30 in the morning, a band of Arab militiamen rides through your "village" to rape your womenfolk, eat your food, steal whatever medicine and supplies you might have, and shoot dead any man who dare confront them.

What would you rather see in the next truckload of humanitarian relief?

A. A television news personality from Boston

or

B. A crate of AK-47's or SKS rifles with 10,000 rounds of ammo

Nothing more need be said.

This is an excellent article–though this trend has been growing for at least twenty years. Thanks to the Instructivist for making it available.

Lost In Action
Are time-consuming, trivializing activities displacing the cultivation of active minds?

By Gilbert T. Sewall

A third-grade social studies student in California builds an Endangered Species "portfolio." For the entire year. This portfolio is given over to the demise of the toucan and the Galapagos tortoise. The portfolio is brightly colored, laminated and spiral bound, containing lots of glossy photographs clipped from magazines. Each page is thick with adhesive stick-ons and glitter. The portfolio contains many, many misspelled words and exhibits almost no understanding of the South American continent's natural history.

As traditional learning gives way in a growing number of classrooms, students encounter more and more projects and activities like the one above:

The future is not bright for those of you in a PhD program, at least according to the Department of Education statistics. Here are the number of doctorates awarded nationally from 1970 to 2004:

Academics don't seem to have the smarts to understand supply and demand, so let's break it down. The more doctorates in your field, the less yours is worth in the job market. You have probably been told that in just a few years, there will be massive retirements. That is an exaggeration. The retirements have already begun, and in many departments, have already been replaced. Your odds of ending up either not being able to find a job at all or only being able to find an adjunct position are massively greater than those who completed their PhDs ten or fifteen years ago.

And whose fault is it? The universities for handing out PhDs like candy. Let's see who the worst offenders are:

Although general requirements for graduate school admissions are typically handled by the graduate school, PhD program admissions are controlled by the department committee, and data on PhD students are not publicly available. There is no way to know if departments are lowering their admission standards for their PhD programs. However, if faculty had any sense–and consistency, given their fondness for screaming about the unfairness of adjunct faculty hires–they would be admitting fewer, not more, students to their PhD programs.

Oops. That would assume these faculty had the sense to understand supply and demand, which they do not (though academic elitism, and the resulting belief that they are worth more than they in fact are, feeds this).

You're only worth what the market will bear. Your "contribution to society," or your idea of what you're worth has nothing to do with it. If there are only a few people with your qualifications, you're worth quite a bit, and if there are lots of people with your qualifications, you're not worth much. So Monday when you see your committee, thank them for the tenure you won't get.

I found this article–wait, I'm getting ahead of myself. Here are the Detroit Public Schools results for the 2002 Michigan Educational Assessment Program (MEAP):

I have no idea how these scores map onto NAEP scores (if it's provided on the site, they've hidden it well), but it seems if only 32.2% of your students score SATISFACTORY, and 40.8% of your students score LOW, there's a problem.

Now for the article, courtesy of Matt Johnson:

We have come to the conclusion that the crisis Michigan faces is not a shortage of revenue, but an excess of idiocy. Facing a budget deficit that has passed the $1 billion mark, House Democrats Thursday offered a spending plan that would buy a MP3 player or iPod for every school child in Michigan.

No cost estimate was attached to their hare-brained idea to "invest" in education. Details, we are promised, will follow.

Never mind the budget deficit. What about the reading scores? 40.8% of the students in Detroit's public schools score LOW on the reading proficiency test, and the Democrats want to buy each student in iPod? How, exactly, is that funding education?

Idiots.

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Well, that week of spring is over.

It's snowing.

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Jeff Goldstein reports:

West Virginia taxpayers may soon be paying for portly citizens to attend Weight Watchers meetings. The state claims it’s spending $100 million a year on obesity-related health care. Now, in an effort to reduce those costs, the state’s largest Medicaid provider—UniCare, a subsidiary of Wellpoint—will pony up for 16 weeks of subsidized Weight Watchers services. Wellpoint intends to establish similar payouts in 14 other states.

Unfortunately, the change in unlikely to help the bottom line. Tennessee tried a similar plan last year and boasted that the 1,400 subsidized participants lost 8000 pounds collectively. That may sound good, but it averages out to a little less than six pounds per person—not enough to make a difference in health care costs or the lives of the obese people the plan is supposed to help.

This isn’t the first time West Virginia has dipped into the state coffers to encourage dieting. In 2003 it erected billboards proclaiming “Biggie Fries = Biggie Thighs.” No statewide reductions in thigh circumference have been reported.

And Radley Balko quite correctly says:

Where, exactly, is the problem, here? Seems to me that people are making their own decisions about diet and health, and paying for the consequences of those decisions.

He doesn't get it. Obesity is a PUBLIC HEALTH CRISIS! (at least on the days when the health-related Chicken Littlism isn't POOR PEOPLE STARVING AND EATING OUT OF GARBAGE CANS! It's liberalism. It's all about having an elite tell us what we may and may not do. That's all liberalism is about, and all it has ever been about. Not civil rights. Not freedom. Just control.

But the point, of course, is that again, we have millions and millions of dollars pumped into a government program that produces no results–and as Jeffrey Quick points out, we have another here:

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The early onset of Daylight Savings Time in the United States this year may have been for naught.

The move to turn the clocks forward by an hour on March 11 rather than the usual early April date was mandated by the U.S. government as an energy-saving effort.

But other than forcing millions of drowsy American workers and school children into the dark, wintry weather three weeks early, the move appears to have had little impact on power usage.

"We haven't seen any measurable impact," said Jason Cuevas, spokesman for Southern Co., one of the nation's largest power companies, echoing comments from several large utilities.

You don't say. But no doubt it made the legislators and bureaucrats who supported the DST pushback feel good about themselves.

Idiots.

Read the whole thing (with links to the report):

. . . none of these criminals who attacked police officers was "hindered by any law–federal, sate or local–that has ever been established to prevent gun ownership. They just laughed at gun laws." The newsletter also stated, "In contrast to media myth, none of the firearms in the study was obtained from gun shows."

Wait. You mean criminals don't obey the law? Don't they know it's for the common good? Don't they understand that it's to stop the cycle of violence so we can all sing kumbayah and be told what we can and cannot do? And aren't gun shows where all those evil neo-Nazi theocrat thugs sell guns illegally to murder minorities and murder abortion doctors? My head hurts!

Okay, this is bad enough:

NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana (AP) — Five fifth-grade students face criminal charges after authorities said four of them had sex in front of other students in an unsupervised classroom and kept a classmate posted as a lookout for teachers.

The students were arrested Tuesday at the Spearsville school in rural north Louisiana, authorities said. Two 11-year-old girls, a 12-year-old boy and a 13-year old boy were charged with obscenity, a felony. An 11-year-old boy, the alleged lookout, was charged with being an accessory.

"After 44 years of doing this work, nothing shocks me anymore," said Union Parish Sheriff Bob Buckley. "But this comes pretty close."

Authorities said the incident happened March 27 at the school, which houses students from kindergarten through 12th grade. A high school teacher normally watches the fifth-grade class at the time, but went to an assembly for older students and the class was inadvertently left unattended, Buckley said.

And God forbid I might seem to be defending indefensible behavior, but as my grandfather would have said, now wait just a minute.

A teacher for whatever reason was not in the classroom and the unsupervised fifth-graders–ranging from 11 to 13 years old–decided to have an orgy in the classroom the teacher couldn't be bothered to supervise, but instead of the teacher, the fifth-graders were arrested?

What's wrong with this picture?

From CNN:

SEATTLE, Washington (AP) — A University of Washington researcher was shot to death in her office Monday morning by a former boyfriend who then turned the gun on himself, police said.

Officers responding to reports of gunfire found the two dead in an office on the fourth floor of Gould Hall, the university's architecture building, Assistant University Police Chief Ray Wittmier said.

The 26-year-old woman was granted a restraining order last month against Jonathan Rowan, according to court documents. University police said he was not affiliated with the school.

"I cannot find him but he can find me (knows my place of work)," the victim, identified by colleagues as Rebecca Griego, wrote in a restraining order petition filed against Rowan on March 6 in King County Superior Court.

About six shots were fired, and a handgun was found in the room. There were no eyewitnesses, and no one else was harmed, Wittmier said.

Lance Nguyen, who worked with Griego at the Runstad Center for Real Estate Research, said the victim had become increasingly worried about her former boyfriend in recent weeks.

"She said it's a psycho from her past," Nguyen said.

In the restraining order petition, Griego wrote that Rowan had threatened her and her sister, and said he had threatened suicide "because he couldn't see me."

Campus police were not aware of the restraining order, Wittmier said. He also said he did not think the man had permission to carry a handgun on campus, where firearms are banned.

How's that "gun-free zone" policy working for you out there? Not only did the stalker violate it, but once again, gun control claims another victim: The murdered woman who might have defended herself, had she been armed.

Oh, but I forgot the headline, just as clueless:

Police: Slain woman had restraining order

And a restraining order is supposed to do . . . what, exactly?

Idiots.

Carnival of Education is up!

Going to see Hal Holbrook do his show Mark Twain Tonight. I didn't sleep very well last night; I'd better hop up on espressos this afternoon.

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George V and George W. Get it? V W V W. Coinkidink? I think not!

On 18 December 1913 George V shot over a thousand pheasants in six hours. What Vice President does that remind you of? Coinkidink? I think not!

Celine Dion, Canada's act of war on the United States, sang the theme song to Titanic. Coinkidink? I think not!

On April 14, 2003, 91 years after the Titanic "sank," Tikrit fell to US "forces." Coinkidink? I think not!

Join the Titanic Truth Movement! Tell Rosie O'Donnell so she can SPEAK TRUTH TO POWER ON THE VIEW! NO SHIPWRECKS FOR OIL!

From Frank:

I am Huff Po.

I am flying my private plane. I am riding in my limosine. I have never ridden a bus. And the subway? Feh. That's for the little people. I am living in a gated community. I always use the VIP entrance. We'll probably never actually meet unless you're holding the door for me.

I am your flag-burner. I am your effigy-hanger. I am your high-calorie hunger-striker. I am your unshaven documentary-maker.

I am Huff Po.

I will never forget the example of the thoughtless, disruptive passengers of United Airlines Flight 93, and how racist it was of them not to just sit back on 9/11 and let the brave Muslims land the plane safely after the pilot… fell unexpectedly ill.

I will never forget those stupid, racist passengers and crew members who tackled the unfairly-accused, alleged "al Qaeda shoe-bomber" Richard Reid on American Airlines Flight 63 before he had a chance to explain that he was just using that match to find a dropped contact lens in the darkness by his feet. Perfectly understandable. Happens all the time.

I will never forget the racist over-reacting of actor James Woods, who pointlessly pestered a stewardess, claiming that several Arab men sitting in his first-class cabin on an August 2001 flight were behaving strangely. Sure, the men turned out to be 9/11 hijackers on a test run, but come ON! It was only a TEST! Who freaks out over a TEST?

I will march with a "Bush = Hitler" sign when Homeland Security officials ask me to "report suspicious activity". That'll show those Brownshirts!

I will mock my local police department's admonition "If you see something, say something". Yeah, I see something… a Nazi goon in a blue uniform!

There's plenty more. I am Huff Po.

The Titanic Truth Movement!

Still not convinced?

As of this writing, there are only two living survivors of the Titanic, and both of them claim to have been babies and too young to remember what happened.

HOW CONVENIENT!!!

Even though some of the world's richest and most famous passengers were on the ship, not a single video was made of the Titanic sinking.

HOW CONVENIENT!!!

Abraham Lincoln dies the exact same day the Titanic sinks, except 47 years prior! The Titanic had the capacity to carry 3,547 passengers aboard! They both have 47!!!!

COINCIDENCE???

When will you sheeple realize that you're being lied to? How many amateur documentaries must be made using stock footage before you believe that we're important?

Go watch the video. It convinced me.

NO SHIPWRECKS FOR OIL! TAFT LIED PEOPLE DIED . . . ER, GEORGE V LIED PEOPLE DIED! SPEAK TRUTH TO POWER!

I'm sure we all get phishing spam–especially the spam from banks. I just got another one, from the German American Bank, in Jasper, Indiana (that's where the bank's central offices are; I doubt that's where the spam is from):

We have been notified that a card associated with your account has been reported lost or stolen. Therefore, as a prevention measure, we have temporarely [sic] limited access to sensitive German American Bank account features.

Unless the German American Bank is a lot bigger than I thought, this doesn't make much sense. Why not use a mega-bank, like Bank of America, to maximize the chances that the target of your spam actually has an account there?

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There's so much competition, the only way to do this fairly (and without hurting somebody's feelings) is to give the big, red, rubber nose to several awardees.

This Clown Award is very special, because for the first time, we are awarding that ever so prized red, rubber nose to Brits! Give the UK a big hand, everybody!

The first goes to UK Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt. The Iranians kidnap British soldiers then parade them on television, and she's concerned, yes, very concerned, but not about them!

It was deplorable that the woman hostage should be shown smoking. This sends completely the wrong message to our young people.

That's right. She presumably doesn't care that they were kidnapped, or that they're being paraded around on television. Oh no, she's a drooling moonbat. She cares about important things–that the kidnapped soldier was seen smoking on television! You go, Patricia! Speak truth to power, girl!

The next red nose also goes to the UK, and requires a bit of explanation. Great Britain is celebrating the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade, and the tofu-brained Archbishop of York, well, I'll let you read it:

The Archbishop of York has called on Prime Minister Tony Blair to formally apologise for Britain's role in the slave trade as churches across the UK mark the 200th anniversary of its abolition today.

You have to step back and think about it for a minute before the breathtaking stupidity hits you. The UK is celebrating the abolition of the slave trade, and this moron (along with all the UK moonbats) want to use the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade to assuage their guilt. And that's not all–the race pimps are demanding reparations!

And speaking of anniversaries, the 400th anniversary of the settling of Jamestown is coming up–but the multiculturalist, bed-wetting leftists are apparently controlling the events:

The disease known as moonbattery has so twisted us against ourselves that we can no longer look back on our own proud history without neurotic shame. Alternative festivities have had to be planned to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the Jamestown settlement this year, because official events will portray the spread of Western Civilization to North America as a tragedy.

The word "celebration" has been banned from use in taxpayer-funded Jamestown 2007 events in favor of the term "commemoration." After all, as anti-Caucasian activist Mary Wade screeches, "You can't celebrate an invasion."

Exhibition galleries will glorify the Stone Age barbarians who preceded the colonists to Virginia, characterizing them as avatars of political correctness whose "advanced complex society" was "in harmony with the life that surrounds them." Actually, these saintly savages murdered 400 colonists — men, women, and children — during the Jamestown Massacre on Good Friday in 1622.

There are, however, still sane human beings in Virginia:

Fortunately an alternative event called The Jamestown Quadricentennial: A Celebration of America's Providential History will be taking place in the Jamestown/Williamsburg/Yorktown triangle on June 11–16. If we let moonbats take our history, it will be all the easier for them to take our future.

Congratulations to you all–with special congratulations to our first British winners of the Clown Award, coveted among moonbats and wackjobs everywhere! Wear your red, rubber noses with pride!

Previous Clown Award winners:

Frederica Wilson
Janet LaRue
Sheila Jackson-Lee
Madison, Wisconsin motorists

Don Surber:

Her protest is a symptom of something weird. Becoming as Michelle Malkin would say, “Unhinged” over being called a Democrat when you are, indeed, a Democrat is a sign that someone needs to step away from the computer and take the dog for a walk. A long one.

Or maybe dunk her head. Quite a few times.

Statistics are an invaluable tool for improving your teaching and making your class fairer for your students. With statistics, you can identify bad test questions and throw them out. You can identify questions many students should have gotten right but did not, and determine what went wrong. You can determine how well the assignments you give your students work, and you can determine how well you are preparing students for those state exams.

Let's start with that 100-point test you just gave. Here are your descriptive stats:

Your mean is just a little low (ideally, it should be in the mid 70s), but not low enough for concern. Your mode (most frequently occurring score) is 100, and that's always good, but your standard deviation is large: Each score on average varied 24.94 points from the mean, and that's a lot of spread. Your kurtosis is a bit low, too, and along with the large standard deviation, it looks like you have a lot of scores in the tails. It's not a bad exam from just looking at the descriptive stats, though you would have liked to have had more students clustering around the mean.

Next, look at the correlations between the individual questions and the total score (yes, I know all about collinearity, but this is justified). Let's pick two questions to look at, Question 11 and Question 35, and run Spearman correlations between the questions and the Exam Score:

When we don't see the effects of collinearity, there's a problem. Note that the correlation coefficient between Question 11 and the Exam Score is 0.02! There is something bad wrong with that question. First, pull the exam and read the question; usually, when this happens, it's pretty obvious what went wrong, often a typo or a badly worded question, but sometimes a question that goes beyond the scope of what you covered. Once in a great while there will be nothing wrong with the question. If that is the case, leave it in, but otherwise, delete it from the exam and the exam results. Note that Question 35 highly correlates with the Exam Score. Leave it in. Do this for all the questions, deleting any that have suspiciously low correlations after you read the question and determine if there is anything wrong with it.

As you're doing this, you will usually notice that there are questions on topics you covered in class that students should have gotten right, but did not. This is a pedagogical red flag (when this happens with questions only from reading assignments, it indicates that students didn't do the reading, and I find that these are the questions most students miss). How did you cover those topics? How can you change your presentation to make it clearer to your students? Go through all the questions fewer than half the students got correct, and run them through the same process. Compare the questions on similar topics. If students missed many of the questions on the same topic, that's a sign that there's a problem with the way you present the topic.

Use statistics to tell you how well you're presenting the material.

You can also use statistics to determine how effective those assignments you give your students are. Let's say you've just given your first 200-point exam, and before that, you had given several assignments (we'll look at three). Your data look like this (the table represents part, not all, of your data):

Run Pearson correlations on the assignments and exam:

If your assignments are effective (and if they cover the same skills covered on the exam), you should get at least a 0.5 Pearson correlation coefficient between the assignments and the exam score. Assignments 1 and 2 correlate pretty highly, but note the third assignment. There is nearly no correlation between it and the exam score. This is a great big red flag, so compare the three assignments. It's not enough just to ditch the third assignment and replace it with something else; you need to figure out what is wrong with the third assignment. What is different about the third one? How are the first two similar–and how is the third different from the first two? Whatever it is, it's not working.

Note that you can use exactly the same method to determine how well your assignments and exams are teaching students what they need to know by running correlations on your students class scores and their standardized exam scores. You can also determine which teachers are better preparing their students. Here are two teachers' 100-point final exam scores and the standardized exam scores (only part of the data are represented):

First, let's look at the descriptive stats:

Both teachers' scores are lower than the standardized exam scores, and this can be a good thing, provided that the class exams are covering the right material and preparing students for the standardized exam. Both have fairly high standard deviations, though the second teacher's is higher than the first, both have a low kurtosis, usually indicating more data in the tails, and both are slightly left skewed, indicating more data in the left (low) tail than the right. Note that the second teacher's minimum score is 3/100! From only looking at the descriptive stats, it looks like the second teacher probably has a more difficult class than the first. But difficulty isn't the issue; how well the teacher's class matches the state curriculum is the issue. To check that, we run correlations:

We see a vast difference between the two teachers. The first teacher's scores correlate highly with the standardized exam score, at 0.75. This means his curriculum fairly closely matches what the state prescribes. But the second teacher's curriculum doesn't correlate highly with the state curriculum at all, at only 0.17. The second teacher should sit down with the first and compare what they do, to see where he is going astray from the curriculum.

Universities often give departmental exams to large undergraduate classes. The same method can be used if you teach one of those classes to see how well you are teaching what you're supposed to be teaching.

The point I'm trying to make is that statistics are more than just a tool for research. Statistics are an important tool that tell you how well you're teaching, how well your curriculum matches the states', and how fair your tests are, and all by doing nothing more complicated than running descriptive stats and correlations. Statistics are the laser grips that allow you to shoot in the dark.

I'm going to barbecue today–pulled pork, of course (and nobody is going to be slinging her boobies around in anybody's face). Here's the menu:

Before you start, please read my article on smoking meat on your grill. There's no point in doing this if you're not going to smoke it.

Carolina Barbecue

We've been over this before. Keep the cloyingly sweet tomato sauce, thanks very much. Barbecue is all about hickory (or whatever wood you prefer; mesquite would be more traditional for Texas barbecue, though I used to get apple wood back in Indiana, and that was really good). And Kansas City barbecue? It's an abomination. In my not so humble and extremely partisan opinion, the best barbecue is to be found in the Carolinas and Georgia, where they don't sop it in heavy sauce.

As I said before, you can, of course, use this recipe to barbecue ribs or chicken. To barbecue chicken, either buy chickens split in halves (I haven't seen any here). Or split chickens in half through the breastbone and backbone yourself. Or just split chickens through the breastbone, flip them over, and flatten them by pressing down on the breastbone and breaking it, Chinese style.

Rub:
2 T. paprika
2 T. salt
1 T. black pepper, ground
2 t. cayenne, ground

Sauce:
1 1/2 c. cider vinegar
1/2 c. bourbon, apple cider, or orange juice
1 c. water
2 T. molasses
2 T. salt
1 7-oz. can chipotles in adobo, finely chopped
1 T. red pepper flakes
1 T. black pepper
1 t. cayenne, ground
1 t. liquid smoke

1 5-6 lb. pork shoulder (or boston butt) roast, or spare ribs (you're a fool if you buy baby back ribs) or 2 chickens, halved

If you're doing pulled pork and the roast comes in one of those net things like they do here, cut it off. Those are there only so when it's done, you can cut it into nice slices. Also, since it holds the roast together, cutting it off will help the smoke and flavor get into the roast better. Cut the damned thing off. Also, yes, you can use pork loin, but it's not as good. Fresh ham is great, if you can find it, but a shoulder (boston butt) is the best for pulled pork. And baby back ribs? Why? They have comparatively no meat on them; they're just fashionable because they're small, and because they're fashionable, they're ridiculously expensive. Get spare ribs.

Mix all rub ingredients. Coat the meat with the rub — and I don't mean sprinkle it on. I mean press it into the meat, one side at a time, leaving not the tiniest bit unexposed (it tends to be a messy process, but it's easy to clean up), and keep pressing the dry rub into the meat until there is none left. Cover the meat with plastic wrap, place on a plate, and refrigerate 8 to 24 hours. (For simplicity's sake, I'm going to proceed as if you're barbecuing a pork roast for pulled pork. Substitute as appropriate in the directions.)

You're going to cold smoke the pork. You'll start the fire on one side of your grill, and cook the meat on the other side, not above the flame. You'll need your favorite charcoal to start the fire, and enough wood chunks (hickory is traditional, but use your favorite — and chunks, not chips) to burn five or six hours — figure about an hour or a little over per pound. Buy one of the big bags.

Start the fire and let the coals burn down to white ash. Soak a bunch of wood chunks in water. When the coals are almost ready, drain the chunks thoroughly (be careful to drain them really thoroughly, or you'll put out the fire).

On the other side of the grill, put an aluminum pie pan below the grill to catch juices, and add a cup of water, beer, or apple cider (the primary purpose is to keep the roast moist, but it also can add a subtle flavor). Unwrap the pork (do I really need to say that?) and place it on the grill above the pie pan. Place the soaked chunks on top of the coals and immediately close the cover of the grill.

Adjust the vents or the height of the grills (or however your grill works) to keep the inside temperature between 200 and 250. Check the temperature and the fire every 30 minutes. Keep chunks soaking, and when you add more chunks, add half soaked and half unsoaked chunks (so the moisture doesn't kill the fire before the roast is done). Add more chunks as needed to keep the fire hot and smoking, and turn the roast every hour.

Two hours before the meat will be done (approximate this — an hour or so per pound), mix the sauce ingredients–adding the adobo from the chipotles (it's got a great smoky flavor). Baste the roast with the sauce, turn it, and baste it again. Repeat every 30 minutes until the roast registers 185 on a meat thermometer. Remove the roast, and let it sit for at least 30 minutes (an hour is better).

Bring the remaining sauce to a boil (there won't be much left), then reduce it by about half. With forks, pull the meat apart and put it in a bowl. Mix in just enough of the sauce to moisten it (serve the rest on the side so people can add more if they want), and serve with cole slaw, fried corn, and fried cinnamon apples.

Cole Slaw

I grew up with slaw made with cooked dressing. Then, I had this slaw at somebody's house that was so good I couldn't stop eating it, so I asked for the recipe. One package slaw mix (cabbage and carrots), one shredded onion, 1/2 cup (each_ mayonnaise and Marzetti's slaw dressing, salt, pepper, and celery seed. I don't know where the cooked slaw dressing recipe is. I haven't seen it (or pined for it) since I discovered this. Quick. Easy. And really good.

Fried Cinnamon Apples

4 T. butter
4 Granny Smiths, Jonathans, or Winesaps
1/2 c. dark brown sugar
1 t. cinnamon
2 T. water, apple cider, orange juice, or bourbon

Core, peel, and slice apples. Heat a large skillet over medium heat and add the butter. When melted, add the apple slices, and stir thoroughly. Cook about five minutes, then turn the apples. Add the sugar, cinnamon, and water, and cook uncovered until apples are soft. Serve hot.

Fried Corn

I don't know if this is an Ohio River Valley thing or not, but it's something I grew up eating several times a week (except when corn was in season, then we ate corn on the cob), and never see anywhere. Go figure.

1 large package frozen corn
1 stick butter
salt and sugar (see below)

Melt the butter over medium heat in a skillet. Add the corn, turn the heat up to medium high, and cook it, stirring frequently, for about fifteen minutes. Salt to taste. Depending on the sweetness of the corn, you may want to add a pinch or two of sugar–contrary to popular belief, the sweetness of corn depends as much on how quickly it was picked, cut and frozen as it does the type of corn.

Coconut Cream Pie

Sure, I love chocolate. But my very favorite sweet flavor is coconut. I love coconut. I love coconut anything, even savory coconut. This, by the way, is my grandmother's recipe.

1 pie shell, baked (see below)

Filling:

3/4 c. sugar
1/2 t. salt
3 T. cornstarch
2 T. flour
3 c. milk (or half-and-half, or 2:1 milk and cream, if you want it richer)
5 egg yolks, beaten
1 1/2 c. sweetened coconut

Meringue:
5 egg whites, room temperature
1/2 c. sugar
1/4 t. cream of tartar
1/2 c. sweetened coconut

Preheat the oven to 450.

First, the pie shell. If you use one of those supermarket pie shells you unroll, you'll have to roll it out some more, because they contain too much fat and they shrink. Roll it out enough that you can lay it in the pan and crimp a substantial rim around the outside.

Mix the sugar, salt, cornstarch, and flour together in a heavy pan. Over medium heat, gradually blend in the milk. Cook, stirring constantly, until it thickens. Quickly beat a couple of spoonfuls of the hot filling into the egg yolks to temper them, then mix them into the filling, and cook, stirring constantly, for three minutes. Turn off the heat, add the coconut, and pour into the pie shell.

Make the meringue. Start beating the whites in a clean bowl. Add the cream of tartar, and beat until foamy. Start beating in the sugar, a couple of tablespoons at a time, and beat until the whites are stiff and glossy, but not dry. Plop the meringue all over the edges first, then the middle. Seal the meringue to the edges of the crust (or the meringue will weep), then smoosh it around with a spoon so it covers the whole pie. Use the spoon to swirl it all over, then sprinkle the coconut on top. Bake until the meringue is golden (watch it closely). Let the pie cool at least an hour before you eat it (or try, anyway).

from Andrew Bolt. African leaders confirm: concern for the human rights of blacks is a white thing.

Jonah Goldberg laments that Rome is filming no new seasons. I think that's a good thing.

Don't misunderstand me: Rome was one of the highest quality shows on television. And those who disliked it because of the adult content, like Jonah's correspondent, well, all I can say is if they had read Cicero or Suetonius, they wouldn't complain about Rome. I'm glad they won't film more seasons because the second season wasn't as good as the first, and because, well, where would they take the story?

Understand the second season was, for television, excellent. It just wasn't as excellent as the first. During the first season, I thought it brilliant that the writers took two characters briefly mentioned once in Caesar's histories (Lucius Vorenus and Titus Pullo), created stories for them, and wove their stories among historical material. It made Rome distinct from, say, I, Claudius or another historical drama by adding the perspective of the common Roman. And in the first season, the balance between historical and fictional was perfect: The first season was a historical drama with fictionalized elements.

The writers lost that balance in the second season, which was more a fictional drama with historical elements. Lucius Vorenus's and Titus Pullo's storylines diverged from the historical story and became subplots, and at least it felt like their stories were given more weight than the history. While the first season was about Julius Caesar and the historical characters that surrounded him, the second season was about Lucius Vorenus and Titus Pullo, with Octavian and Mark Antony as historical characters in the background.

The first season covered a much shorter time period than did the second, and this created a problem that the writers did not resolve. Although there were a few time gaps in the first season, they were short enough that the writers could present the episodes as if they were continuous. But the second season covered a much longer time period and some of the gaps in the storyline were years, yet the writers saw no need to try to convey this. The result, even for those of us who know the history, was that from time to time, the story seemed jarring until you thought, "Oh, but ten years has passed." The problem is (read through the discussion boards on the HBO site–there was one thread complaining about changing the actor for Octavian, but of course they had to, since he was much older) that you needed to know the history to realize that time had passed because the writers made no attempt to convey it. At times, the historical elements of the story seemed rushed–such as the last two episodes–because the timing was never communicated well by the writers.

Yes, they diverged from history–though far less than movies and TV usually do. Some were justifiable, and if anything, made the story more interesting, such a beefing up Atia and Servilia to make them major characters. Others were annoying, such as the incest between Octavian and Octavia in the first season, or turning Octavian into the Marquis de Sade in the second. Others, such as the creation of Timon's character, worked well in the first season, but seemed gratuitous and unconnected in the second.

Overall, however, only the most pedantic history nut could object to the series.

The problem with doing more seasons is what they would do and where they would take the story. Augustus reigned for 41 years, but what events during his reign would a third season cover? And given that he reigned over a largely peaceful and prosperous empire, it would be difficult to pick a storyline that would be dramatically satisfying.

A third season could, of course, skip ahead to Tiberius (uneventful and dramatically dull), Claudius (except that's been done), Caligula, or Nero, or even further. But that would entail all new characters, which viewers would not like. And I don't think HBO or the BBC could resist the temptation to degrade the series into one bloody, sex-ridden scandal after another. If they wanted to jump ahead, they would be well advised to make a distinct break with Rome, by calling it something else.

It's a good thing they won't, because the second season was noticably weaker than the first, and any additional seasons would likewise be weaker than the second. That's my suspicion, anyway.

This is disturbing:

A father-of-two hanged himself live over the internet in Britain's first 'cyber suicide'.

Kevin Whitrick, 42, took his life after being goaded by dozens of chatroom users from across the world who initially believed he was play acting.

But as they watched in horror, Mr Whitrick climbed onto a chair, smashed through a ceiling and then hanged himself with a piece of rope.

I don't know which is more disturbing, that he hanged himself online, or that his audience cheered him on.

Another user who did not wish to be named said: "When Kevin stepped off the chair and was left dangling, the mood in the chatroom changed and people began to realise what they had just seen.

I suppose it's something that these amoral morons were horrified when they realized what they'd seen was real, but what kind of sick SOB would be entertained by watching "simulated" suicide? Of course, if you call it "performance art," then you can get a grant to hang yourself in Times Square. All the cultural elite with tastefully applaud as you swing from the rope, you'd get live coverage on NPR, and a multi-page glowing review in the NYT.

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Professor W. Stephen Wilson did an interesting cursory study (the PDF is here). Professor Wilson is a math professor at Johns Hopkins. He obtained the SATM scores for his Calculus I for the Biological and Social Sciences students in 1989 and 2006, and gave his 2006 students the same final exam he gave his 1989 students. The percentage of the students taking the class was essentially the same in both semesters, as were the SATM scores (although the number of students applying and accepted to Johns Hopkins had increased from 1989 to 2006 by roughly 146%).

The final exam scores were significantly lower in 2006 than 1989:

The 2006 Calculus I class took the same 77-point final exam as the 1989 class. The content of the Calculus I course has not changed, and, mathematically, using the old exam was completely appropriate.

The scores on the final exam were markedly different. The average of the 1989 scores was 48.4, with a standard deviation of 14.4, while the 2006 class average was 42.5, with a standard deviation of 11.3. The 5.9 point decrease in the average is a 12.2% decline. Daniel Naiman also ran the Wilcoxon test of significance on these two distributions and found a p-value of .001 for the two-sided test. [The p-value of less than 0.05 tells us that the difference is statistically significant, that is that it is not due to random variation.]

Here is a histogram of both semester scores showing the distribution:

He compares this difference to a similar difference in SATM scores to make his point:

How significant is this change educationally? Contemplate a similar drop in SATM scores. SATM scores range from 200 to 800. If there had been a 12.2% drop over the 17 years from the recentered SATM score of 662.3, the 2006 class would have an average SATM score of 605.9 (= 662.3 - .122 x (662.3 - 200)).

But the interesting thing (to me, at any rate) is that the SATM scores did not drop from 1989 to 2006:

The average SATM score for the 1989 Calculus I class was 662.6 with a standard deviation of 6.8. For the 2006 Calculus I class it was 664.9, with a standard deviation of 6.3. In the mid-1990s, SATM scores were “recentered,” [Rec07]. After recentering the 1989 class’s SATM scores, the new average was 662.3, with a standard deviation of 6.5.

Professor Wilson discusses the possible causes for this discrepancy, but what interests me is that the calculus final exam scores dropped significantly while the SATM scores did not. The distinction between the two exams Professor Wilson focuses on is that the SATM allows the use of calculators while the course final exam does not. I'm not sure this factor all by itself can account for this difference, because using calculators on exams is like looking things up on an open book exam: You lose what you gain because of wasted time.

How similar is the calculus content on the SATM and the content of the final exam? The SATM is a more comprehensive exam, and cannot devote as many questions to calculus. A fairer comparison (if it were possible) would be to somehow score the calculus questions on the SATM and compare those scores to the final exam scores.

Yet this decrease in final exam scores should have been reflected to some extent in the SATM scores. I have to wonder if this "recentering" of scores is somehow responsible for this. Of this topic, Diane Ravitch says:

For many years the College Board insisted that the Scholastic Assessment Test was "an unchanging standard." But no more. The latest SAT scores, released last week, are the first to be graded on a new curve–one that destroy's the test's "unchanging standard."

Two years ago, the College Board–decided to "recenter" the scores by arbitrarily declaring that the 1990 scores on both the verbal and mathematical portions of the test would serve as the new average. The fairly robust math score of 475 was transformed overnight to a 500, and the anemic verbal score of 424 also was lifted to 500. With the stroke of a pen, extremely poor performance on the verbal portion of the test was turned into the new norm.

So "recentering" the scores was inflating them. This would at least partially explain why the SATM scores did not decrease while the final exam scores did.

Still, university faculty, secondary school faculty, parents, and yes, College Board should be concerned about this difference. Somebody should research this, find out if it is a national trend, and if so, try to correct it.

because you're not going to expect this. I like both Betsy Newmark and the Anchoress, but, well, let's tackle Newmark first:

When College Board announced that they were adding a writing component to the SATs, critics alleged that there was no way to legitimately grade the writing of that many essays each year and that the test would devolve down into writing formulaic essays. Well, now an MIT professor has written a paper outlining what students need to do to game the test and present the illusion of good writing.

I have no debate with this. Anything that encourages the mindless five-paragraph essay (which I spent many hours railing against when I coordinated that ESL writing program) earns my ire. And I used to be a certified GED essay grader and have also graded essays for ETS; I know all about idiotic, formulaic, content-free writing.

But this is nonsense:

Here is an example from the paper to demonstrate how the student can get the facts wrong but still impress enough to get them a good grade.

And the Anchoress says much the same nonsense:

Good writing skills go hand-in-hand with good reading skills, and with critical thinking.

In an ideal world, yes–though in the real world, no (there are plenty of excellent writers with foggy brains who spout nonsense). In fact, her teacher friend, or rather those she was talking about, were correct:

Because essays are subjective, we’re not supposed to consider content in the grading

Exactly so. Determining the validity of the content of a history paper is the sole domain of the history professor. Writing assessment must assess only writing skills, or it's not writing assessment. If the topic were an essay for a history exam, then absolutely, content is vital. But it isn't a history exam (or a philosophy exam, or any topic exam): It's the writing component of the SAT. It's sole purpose is to rate writing proficiency.

Also, students are given a topic, which introduces yet another reason content cannot be used to rate writing proficiency on the SAT. What do you do with the student who shows an excellent grasp of history but cannot write his way out of a paper bag and the student who knows little history but is an excellent writer? If you're evaluating writing proficiency, the better writer gets a higher assessment than the poorer writer, regardless of his grasp of history.

But then we have this:

I know this is true because a teacher pal of mine shared this story with me.

Well no, you don't know anything, except that a person told you a story. Anecdotal evidence is an oxymoron.

Rather, students are being taught “to the test,” and for that, neither thinking nor information need be clear.

Well no, that's nonsense. Teachers aren't teaching content in class, so to make up for it, they're drilling students before tests. Teaching the content is teaching to the test.

This whole issue is first old, old, old news, and second, it's a non-issue. If you want student writing to be assessed on content as well as form and rhetoric, then mandate area exams for topics. Otherwise, it's not going to happen–because you'll no longer be evaluating writing skills.

There's always Herwig's. I give them major thumbs-up for the food.

A year ago today, I posted this rather sad bit of news:

State College has no steakhouse—and no, Outback doesn't count. Let me rephrase that. State College has one restaurant that bills itself as a steakhouse, Down Under Steak House at Toftrees. We'll see. We're going there tonight for my birthday dinner.

It's the only place in town I've found that has ribeyes on the menu. Did you catch that?

Well, there's Kelly's Steak and Seafood, which bills itself as a steakhouse. It's not. They only have three or four steaks on the menu, though the prime rib there is top notch. But that's why I'm skeptical about the Down Under.

Like I said, we'll see.

This is where I'd prefer to go for my birthday dinner:

T-Bone Porterhouse Sirloin for Two Sirloin for Three Chunks of Sirloin Filet    Super    Petite Rib Eye    Center cut only New York Strip Gypsy Steak Kabob    Served flaming

24 oz. 28 oz. 36 oz. 52 oz. 16 oz.   11 oz. 7 oz. 18 oz.   16 oz. 10 oz.

But that's over 500 miles away, and choices for serious carnivores here are oddly limited. There's Kelly's, and while it really does serve very good food, it ain't a steakhouse (though the prime rib seriously rocks the house). There's the Down Under Steak House, which again isn't, where we went last year only to find they had just taken the ribeye off the menu (like I said, it isn't a steakhouse if it doesn't serve ribeye). I was more inclined to try it until we ate Thanksgiving dinner at Toftrees, and if that was a valid indicator, they're highly overrated.

There's Alto, where we haven't yet eaten, but Italian isn't my first choice for a birthday meal, it's chi-chi California pinkie-up pseudo-Italian like Faccia Luna (which everybody here loves for some odd reason–they're impressed that they make their own pasta, like I could care less about that instead of the quality of the food) and I'm suspicious of an Italian restaurant that can't spell "gnocchi." I've heard good things about Finelli's, but that's a 40-minute drive from here, though you can tell by the menu it's a real Italian restaurant, and not some "Italian bistro" restaurant.

I'd like to try Duffy's in Boalsburg. It reminds me of the Wayside Inn in Middletown, Virginia. We were going to try it last Memorial Day when we were at the Memorial Day celebration in Boalsburg, but it didn't happen.

We'll see. Definitely not the Outback, though (Mr. NYC Educator will be glad to hear that.)

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An update on that Charleston poll:

And Pajamas Media finally decided to add Fred to their poll:

Interesting.

I thought this was about Battlestar Galactica. After all, the title is "I Can't Wait Until 2008″ and it links to a video.

Thanks a lot, Hugh. I'll be in therapy for at least ten years after that.

I saw a news blurb on TV yesterday that said the illiteracy rate was higher in DC than the rest of the nation. Then today, I saw this:

Yesterday, DC Public Schools announced "major" changes to their high school curriculum. At a time when high schools across the country are focusing on improving rigor, offering college credits through early colleges, and holding schools accountable for preparing today's students for tomorrow's jobs, DCPS has decided to take a slightly different tact — devalue high school by letting students choose a four or five year track for completion.

Brilliant. One has to wonder if the administrators of the public schools share that unusually high illiteracy rate with the rest of DC.

The Carnival of Education is posted.

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I saw this on Photon Courier:

But parents are not simply shirking their own responsibility, they are encouraging kids not to take any. "There is a tutor culture [of] parents who don't let their children fail once in a while. They're scared it'll look bad on their record," says Caleb Rossiter, a professor at American University, who has noticed this trend even on the college level. This semester, he gave a failing grade to a lackadaisical student. The girl's mother, a lawyer, immediately phoned: "She said, 'We want to challenge this grade. My daughter can't afford to flunk.'" When Mr. Rossiter declined to change the girl's grade, the family asked about finding a tutor. "I said, 'I am her tutor,'" he laughs. "I have office hours. You're paying $40,000 a year, and yet your daughter has never once come to see me."

You'll find that overall, there is a lot less hand-wringing about helping students at the university than the secondary school. Students are taking their first steps as adults, after all.

You get the full spectrum. Extremely bright students who work hard. Extremely bright students who don't work much. Extremely bright students who don't work at all or come to class, and feel that they're entitled to an A. You get their fairly dim counterparts. And you get the counterparts from the middle of the intelligence range, students who aren't the brightest bulbs in the chandelier, but aren't at the low end, either.

My least favorite students–and that's the understatement of the decade–are the extremely bright students who do nothing and don't come to class, then invariably complain about their grade and demand that you change it. You can spot them the first week of classes: They're the ones with the Attitude (that capitalization was intentional), crossing their arms and rolling their eyes. You usually don't see them after the third week of classes, which is a Good Thing (that capitalization was also intentional).

I feel sorry for the dimmest students, no matter how hard they work. They just don't belong there, and no matter what they do, they're going to fail. I don't let them drop by the side of the road. I do as much for them as any of my students. But semester after semester, it just gets sad. I often wonder why they're on campus (then, I think of the disasters in the first round of American Idol auditions, and understand that nobody has ever sat them down and tried to guide them into something they could do).

My favorite students are the average to not too far above average intelligence students who are motivated and work their butts off. I'll do anything to help those students succeed. They know they're not at the top of the intelligence curve, they know what they want, and they're willing to work extremely hard to get it. They were the reason I went to that classroom day after day.

These are the students that in many classes fall through the cracks. Many faculty tend to focus on the brightest students and teach to them. The result is that the average, motivated student has to work harder than he should. Most of these students won't go to graduate or professional school, but they will carry that motivation and work ethic out into the world when they leave the university, and I feel obligated to do what I can to help.

These are the students who come to office hours, and not just before an exam or assignment due date. They have no sense of entitlement, and even when they don't understand something fairly basic, they really want to understand. So here are some ways I've helped them.

Never discuss other students with students

Make no remarks about other students, even in passing. And certainly never make remarks about any student's intelligence, be it one specific student or the whole class. It's disrespectful, it's unprofessional, and it's disrespectful.

Do refer to problems students are having, and do so frequently. Make it known that if one or two students are having a specific problem, the odds are that many more are as well.

And while I'm on the topic, never discount or dismiss a student's question, no matter how stupid it is (and of course there are stupid questions–we hear them all the time). Answer all questions clearly, plainly, and respectfully.

Students who aren't bright know it. They don't need you to remind them.

Office hours are paramount

It depends on the department, but most require expect ask faculty to hold 2-3 office hours a week. Expand them to 4 hours a week. And if students show up right at the end of office hours, don't look at your watch and say, "Sorry! Come back next time!" Welcome them in, and work with them as long as they need.

That shouldn't need saying, but believe me, it does.

Pay close attention to the problems your students have

Use your students' problems to diagnose what you're doing. If your students are having trouble understanding, say, Chi-square, ask yourself how you could address it in class to better help them understand. If something works in office hours, start using it in class.

Listen closely to your students when they explain what they don't understand. Sometimes, what they don't understand is more fundamental than they realize–or you would realize if you just answered the question. If that's the case, address the fundamental problem, then work your way back to the original question.

One thing needs to be said. Every teacher's private hell is when he can't comprehend why the students doesn't understand. It happens. Sometimes, you can eventually get over the problem by using a shotgun approach and just randomly trying different explanations. Other times, you can't. But never assume that's the situation you're dealing with unless you have evidence. Probe. Ask. Dig.

Cover high school if you have to

More and more over the last ten years, students have been having problems because they lacked basic math skills. The real problem wasn't that they couldn't understand what a NPV was, but that they didn't have the basic math skills and understanding to understand it.

If that's the problem, then you have to become a remedial math teacher (or whatever). If your students lack the algebraic skills necessary to learn in your class, you have to teach them those skills. I have had to stop and quickly run through the basic order of precedence because of course Excel does the same, and students won't know how to do it in class if they don't understand it in the first place.

And yes, it is your job. It's certainly also the job of the teachers they had before, but that's past, and they're your students now (and if you need to be angry, then be angry at the school system, not the student). Do what you have to do.

Collaborative office hours

If you have several students who want to see you, don't see them one at a time (unless, of course, the students would prefer to see you alone). My office hours were one big party, with the howling wolf candy dish full of Hershey's Kisses, M&Ms, Snickers bars, and of course, a big jar of cashews. I'd have them all into the office and encourage them, as I addressed questions, to interrupt with either questions or solutions. You'd be surprised how much insight students have into other students' heads.

Sometimes, they'll surprise you by coming up with the best explanation you've encountered. Other times, they'll suddenly put their finger right on the core problem when you didn't see it.

A secondary advantage is that students appreciate a personable, friendly faculty member who shows that he cares about them and wants them to succeed. Having everybody into the office for office hours and encouraging them to participate sends that message.

Guide!

Student participation and cooperation in office hours works so well because you are there to guide them. I'm a big fan of collaborative and cooperative work in class, provided that it's applying something they've learned and not "discovering" it on their own, but provide guidance.

Students at the top of the intelligence curve don't do badly with unguided collaborative work. Students at the center and below are not going to gain much unless you are there to guide the collaboration. If you assign group work, don't sit at your desk and watch them. Migrate from group to group, listen, and respond. If they're on the wrong track, guide them back.

The problem is that while extremely bright students can usually perceive when they are on the right track, most other students cannot. That's why you're there. If you're doing collaborative work, it should be a lot of work for you. If it isn't, you're wasting your and their time.

Hold help sessions

Reserve a room and hold help sessions. How often depends on how much your students are struggling. But you shouldn't just have help sessions only right before exams or project due dates, because doing so reduces the help session to a practice session for that exam or project.

Hold those help sessions before exams, too. Just call them something else, like exam practice sessions.

Teach to the middle

Yeah, I know, this is going to make people howl, but I'm talking about the university. Students at the low end of the curve are going to either flunk out or drop out. Also, if you're teaching a grad school seminar, this obviously doesn't apply.

You (should) want as many of your students as possible to succeed, and in order to accomplish that, you have to teach to the center. When you craft your classroom rhetoric–not what you teach, but how you present what you teach–think of the center, and not the high end of the curve. As those bright students progress through their classes, they'll get plenty of chances to be the center of attention.

Give your class continuity

Start every class by recalling something you learned earlier that relates in some way to what you're going to introduce. Provide overt connections; don't rely on students to make them. As you introduce new material, keep referring back to relevant concepts they've already learned. Your presentation of the material should be recursive, repeatedly referring back to previous concepts and using them to explain current ones.

By doing so, you provide your class with continuity and cohesiveness, you reinforce earlier concepts, and you make learning new concepts easier.

Always work from the familiar to the unfamiliar

When I reworked the materials, one of the things I changed first was the pattern used for introducing new material. Yes, it's a business class, and yes, eventually we'll get to the business. But you can't assume that a classroom of freshmen know what NPV is, much less how to calculate it.

Teaching stats provides an excellent example of my point. When introducing descriptive stats, use grades, grade scales, and grade curves. Students are intimately familiar with all of those contexts, so use them. It's much easier to explain standard deviations in terms of exam scores than revenue stability.

Once students understand the concept, then move outward to the unfamiliar. But always provide familiar contexts when explaining new concepts. Always.

Never suppress students from asking questions or challenging you

If you teach in primary or secondary school, at least the first part of this shouldn't be news, but you'd be surprised how many university faculty discourage questions in one way or another. Some do it by setting up a highly rigid class format. Some do it by maintaining an overly formal, distant relationship with their students (remember, I said professional, not unfriendly or distant). Some mow down students when they ask questions in class. But however they do it, the result is less learning than could have been.

Make sure students know you want to hear their questions, whenever they have them. Undergrads, freshmen particularly, find the university classroom intimidating, and you need to do whatever you can to relieve that.

Also, make sure students know they can challenge you. Students respect professors who not only respect them, their learning, and their opinions, but encourage discussion and yes, even dissent. Let's face it. If you're so insecure about your own knowledge of the topic, you shouldn't be teaching it.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again. Treat your students with respect, and they'll treat each other and you with respect.

Never lie to your students

If you don't know the answer to a question, say that you don't know. Tell the students you'll research it and get back to them–then research it, and give them an answer. Never try to weasel your way out of a question you can't answer. Students always know you're lying. Always.

I've seen faculty members who didn't know the exam date give a date off the top of their heads–the wrong date–when students asked when the exam was. The result of that particular stunt can only be described as disastrous.

Carry office hours and help sessions into class

Helping students is a learning process. You learn what works and what doesn't, and with what types of students. Just because you understood a particular example or definition doesn't mean your students will; use them, and not your own experience, to judge how comprehensible your classroom (and office hours) rhetoric is. Don't view office hours and help sessions as "class for dummies," but take what you learned and apply it in your classroom. The more you teach, the more you learn from students, and the more of that knowledge you can apply to make your teaching more effective.

Use the explanations, examples, and definitions that worked best with students in the middle of the curve. That way, you'll get the maximal comprehension.

If students still need help, give it to them

University faculty are salaried employees. We get a specific salary, with no overtime, no calculation of hours, and no sick leave. We are expected to do however much work it takes to get the job done (and thankfully, the academy has so far rejected the "union mentality" as unprofessional). We do not get extra pay for service to the university, the department, the school, or helping students.

If you have students who come to class, work their butts off, come to office hours, and are still struggling, set up additional hours to help them–even if they are students at the low end who will probably drop out before the end of the year. It's why you're getting paid, after all. I've had students I had into the office after class every day, on top of office hours, because they needed it.

Give frequent assessments

Assessments are more than just grades. Assessments let students know how well they understand the material. Yes, students will often groan, but assess them as frequently as you can, and get them graded and back to them in very short order.

Students often think they understand something when they do not. Frequent assessments make it obvious to students that, in fact, they do not understand, and encourage them to get help.

Don't handhold, but . . .

Freshmen, and to a lesser extent, sophomores aren't upperclassmen. Upperclassmen know how the university works, and tend to be jaded. Freshmen and sophomores, especially freshmen, have been plunked down in a completely different learning environment from what they're used to. The classes often number in the hundreds. They don't go to class every day, or see the professor every day. They often (more often these days) have to deal with a sudden, marked increase in class work and reading assignments.

Freshmen are unsure of themselves or what's going on. They need to be eased into the university classroom.

Do everything you can to show your students you care. Students aren't idiots. They know you're human, and you have bad days. But always be personable, friendly, welcoming, respectful, and yes, professional. If students know you care, they're more likely to come to you for help when they need it. If they know you want them to ask questions, they're more likely to come to you for help. If they know you graciously and professionally respond to challenged and never lie to them, they're more likely to come to you for help.

I'll leave you with this thought: You're not being paid to teach classes. You're being paid to do everything you can to help your students learn. If helping your students isn't "in your job description," you have no business being allowed anywhere near a classroom.

The nutty SF Board of Supervisors took time out from passing bills proclaiming solidarity with head-chopping terrorists to fight a true enemy: Plastic bags!

Legislation to require the use of compostable or recyclable bags by grocery stores in San Francisco was expanded Thursday to cover large pharmacy chains operating in the city.

Extending the reach of a grocery bag ordinance introduced by one of her colleagues, District 2 Supervisor Michela Alioto-Pier won approval of an amendment Thursday to cover drugstores as well, saying she wanted to eliminate most of the 180 million plastic bags distributed annually in the city by markets, pharmacies and other businesses.

Awful! But wait:

At the meeting Thursday, District 4 Supervisor Ed Jew said he opposes the legislation because any added costs it imposes on grocers and drugstores would be passed along to consumers.

"Many people in my district can't believe we are spending so much time talking about plastic bags," he added.

Stop the presses! There are rational human beings in SF!

And in other Bay Area news of moonbattery:

Last year, the University of California announced that it was going to build a new athletic training facility next to Memorial Stadium at the eastern edge of the Berkeley campus. Unfortunately, in order to build the facility as planned, the University must remove several oak trees that are currently growing on the site.

For reasons that are not entirely clear, local activists have seized on the fate of the "Memorial Oak Grove" as the cause du jour, and a vigorous campaign has been launched to stop the project and save the trees. To that end, protesters have been actually living in the trees since December of 2006, alternating in shifts every few days or weeks. The controversy has received an inordinate amount of media coverage.

Having spent many years in Bloomington, I am quite familiar with moonbattus treesquattus, commonly known as the tree-sitting varietal of envirowackjob moonbat. They usually take moonbatty names, like Tracy "Dolphin" McNeely, who was one of the Bloomington nutjobs' heroes after perching in a tree to stop low-income housing from being built (trees are so much more important than people, particularly in Bloomington, where there are so damned many trees you could cut every other one down and nobody would notice). However, as far as I know, they never decided to hug trees naked in Bloomington.

They did at Berkeley (and no, the link isn't work safe). And if you think this is a joke, the TreeSpirit Project website is here.

I'm starting to think maybe there should be a law against going to college before you turn thirty.

Jules Crittenden proposes Moron Offsets–and gives a long list of candidates.

Thanks to Don Surber for pointing out this poll (still open):

Hmmmm . . .

It's unlikely that you'll find yourself in southern Indiana. Most of it is accessible only from two-lane state highways, and these days, nobody goes anywhere unless there's an exit off an interstate. That's really too bad, because southern Indiana is beautiful, and there are some great places to eat there.

If you're down by Amish country in Daviess, Martin, and Orange counties, head down through Loogootee (that's pronounced luh-GOH-tee, not lu-GU-tee) toward Washington (watch for buggies). Halfway between the two is a small town (population: 368) named Montgomery. Montgomery is home to the Gasthof Amish Village, where you can buy quilts and furniture (yes, of course, it's authentic). There is also a restaurant there, with amazing food (make sure you do not miss the pie), open seven days a week. Because of Amish religious restrictions, Mennonites staff the restaurant (you can tell, you know, by the clothing, particularly the style of cap women wear). Astoundingly great food.

Should you find yourself in Dubois county further to the south, head to Jasper, home of the largest gun club in the state of Indiana (also home to the largest car dealership in the state of Indiana, Uebelhor Motors–pronounced EE-bel-hor,), and a city by the standards of that part of Indiana (population: 12,000). If you're there in the first week of August, go to the Strassenfest. While you're there, you might want to check out St. Joseph's, one of the three large Catholic churches in Jasper; it was built on a foundation of four huge trees, one at each corner. Jasper is a beautiful town, sparkling clean (not that I want to promote stereotypes or anything), with lovely homes. Do not leave without a trip to the Jasper City Bakery, at least for a loaf of the rye. When you get hungry, turn toward Ferdinand from downtown Jasper, and on your left is the Schnitzelbank (or the Schnitz, as the locals call it). The decor is pure kitsch, but the food is remarkable. I always get the sauerbraten, and the German fries are just like we ate at home (anywhere you stop to eat in that part of Indiana is likely to have both American fries and German fries on the menu; American fries are fried potatoes, and German fries are fried potatoes with lots of onions in them).

Speaking of German fries, fried in general, and Dubois county, the best fried chicken in the world is in Ireland, just down the road from Jasper, at the Chicken Place (really). The German fries are as good as those at the Schnitz, and the German potato salad is even better. Being Germans, they serve beer in ridiculously large quantities. Try it in a schooner.

Mathies (no website) in Dubois (population: 1600), halfway between Jasper and French Lick, also has great fried chicken and steaks. They also serve beer in ridiculously large vessels.

The Benedictine Archabbey at St. Meinrad, south of Jasper, is worth the trip to see the church alone (try to stay for Mass; hearing the monks sing Gregorian chants is a heavenly experience). The archabbey is self-supporting, and the monks used to make and sell a huge variety of regional German sausages and cheeses. I am sad to report that they no longer do. If you go to the archabbey, be aware that many groups (even Protestants) from around the state go there for retreats, and you likely won't be the only visitors.

We used to eat at the Villager in French Lick (actually it's in West Baden, but only locals know the difference) partly because it was one of only three local restaurants (except for the hotel), partly because it was the best of the three, and partly because my parents were good friends of the owners. They always did have good, homestyle food there, but I can't vouch for it because I haven't eaten there in . . . oh . . . over thirty years. But it is still there.

If you like the outdoors, visit Patoka Lake, about halfway between French Lick and Jasper (it's visible on the map below). Our farm (well, we sold it) was right on Patoka, lakeside property. Next to the Patoka Lake is Tillery Hill, one of the most popular destinations for hunters in deer season. Both the French Lick and West Baden hotels have been renovated, and are open. I haven't seen the renovated French Lick hotel (it never went out of business like the West Baden hotel did), but the West Baden hotel is something to see. And if you're into that sort of thing, there's a casino there.

If you're interested in visiting the area, click on the small map below to get the large readable one (the red stars mark Montgomery and Jasper). Be aware that the terrain is very hilly, and the roads are curvy and tend to be narrow–and locals drive 70 on them (just in case you wonder why people are whizzing past you when you're driving 30).

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How do I now? Because he said this:

I think I need to reach for the duct tape and wrap my head, because if I see one more editorial calling for someone to figure out what practices help schools succeed, my head is going to explode.

And the duct tape meme is Beck's. Read the whole thing: We know what works!

Yesterday on a tip from Rory (by the way, if you didn't hop over there and read his article, you really should do it now to see what an insufferable bozo Superintendent RainSpirit is), I saw that Superintendent SnowJob claimed that he had eradicated the white/minority (or should that be non-minority/minority, or perhaps privileged/minority?) achievement gap in Madison's schools, and being the skeptical sort (particularly when it comes to Wisconsin and education), I hopped over to the state ed site and found the data, just to check, mind.

To refresh your memory, this is what I found:

Or for more "visual" learning types:

Not being the sort to toss around value judgments–because that would be judgmental, and I am never judgmental–I suggested that perhaps Superintendent SnowGlobe stop smoking whatever it is he's smoking and take a refresher course in third-grade arithmetic (there was another suggestion, but for the life of me, I can't remember what it was).

This morning, I realized that my thinking had been sorrowfully linear, and I fear not very nuanced, because after all, it's quite possible that there is no achievement gap in Superintendent RainGoddess's perception of reality. So I sought to discover Pope Superintendent RainTree's perception of reality, in order to discover the root cause of why he would have made such a claim (other than trying to get a little press and more money, that is).

I rejected the patriarchal, thrusting, penis-waving, serial-raping rational weltanschauung I so lamentably held, and got in touch with my inner Mother Earth Goddess and that matriarchal, nurturing, feelings-based, victimized, non-linear mode of thought. And when I finally had become one in spirit with my Inner Lesbian Earth Goddess, I realized that perhaps what Superintendent RainGaia had meant to say was that compared to the state of Wisconsin, he had singlehandedly (apparently with some divine inspiration) closed the gap. So back to the site I went, in search of the demographic data for the whole state of Wisconsin (same year, same grade level, same reading proficiency score):

See? I was right, and so was Superintendent Snowjob! Just look at the chart:

Er, wait. It looks like my Inner Treehugger led me astray somehow (funny that–I wonder why?) Still being in touch with my Inner She Yoga Guru, I again searched for the greater truth of Superintendent RainSpew's narrative, and realized (again rejecting that penis-thrusting linear thinking for more nurturing nuanced thinking feeling), I had an aha! experience while singing a rousing chorus of We Shall Overcome! and wishing that I had a vagina so I could "dialogue" with it, you know, like in the Vagina Monologues (yes, I could "dialogue" with my penis, but that would be rude and patriarchal and linear, and who talks to his penis, anyway?)

"I know!" I thought felt, "Our Divine Lordship Superintendent SnowBunny has closed the achievement gap in retention!" (Yes, it did occur to me that "achievement" and "retention" are two different though related things, and that Our Good Superintendent should have said "retention gap," but that's perilously close to thinking linearly, and we need nuanced thinking feeling.) So I looked up Madison's retention rate data (here for all grades, 2003-2004) and found this:

Or for the numerically-challenged:

Hmmmm. That can't be it, can it? Notably fewer white privileged students were held back retained than minority students oppressed students the victims of our racist, classist, patriarchal, institutionalized oppression.

This Inner Earth Mother stuff just wasn't working, so I got back in touch with my Inner Duke Lacrosse Player, ditched the nurturing feelings, and went back to thinking. And I think I was on the right track yesterday.

Put the crack pipe down now, Superintendent RainSpout, and back away from the drugs, slowly. When you get out of rehab, you're going on lithium and doing a stint in Miss Apple's third-grade math class.

Oh. And this guy is on the same drugs.

There has been much ballyhooing and moaning and sobbing and blubbering lately about this:

BOSTON (Reuters) - Harvard University's undergraduate tuition will rise 3.9 percent next year to $31,456, increasing at a pace nearly double the U.S. rate of inflation, a Harvard statement showed on Wednesday.

The total cost of tuition, room, board and student services fees at the Ivy League school will rise 4.5 percent in the 2007 academic year to $45,620, Harvard said.

The total cost for a year at the oldest U.S. institution of higher learning is almost double the average undergraduate tuition at a private U.S college, according to figures compiled by the U.S. Department of Education.

So? It's Harvard, not Bumwad Community College. If you can't afford it, go someplace else. Oh but wait. You probably can afford it:

More than two-thirds of Harvard's entering class receives financial aid including scholarships and loans, while more than half qualify for scholarship assistance and an average total aid package of close to $34,000.

That brings the average cost of a Harvard tuition down to about $12,000, the Cambridge, Massachusetts university said.

I doubt you can find a state-supported school that offers financial aid to two-thirds of its entering freshmen. But from all the blubbering, you'd think people are entitled to go to Harvard (instead of Bumwad Community College) if they want.

Harvard gave no reason for the higher tuition.

Good for Harvard. They owe nobody an explanation. Harvard is a private school. They can charge whatever they like. Certainly, they can price themselves out of the market, but they have quite a way to go before that happens.

What a lot of whiny drivel.

Ken sent me these data. Observe:

And for chart fans:

Disclaimer: The raw reading score is meaningless to me. However, I think the contrast is fascinating. Draw your own conclusions.

On the dependably nutty Slate magazine: The Hostile New Age Takeover of Yoga. No, I'm not making this up–go see for yourself. Why make anything up? These nutcases parody themselves. Slate is an endless source of amusing moonbattery.

Oh, I love the subtitle: "There's nothing worse than narcissism posing as humility." What could be more narcissistic than squatting in an incense-filled room contemplating the waves of chi energy emanating from your belly-button chakra as you search for self-enlightenment?

AUM!

Now, where did I put that patchouli . . .

Update: Link corrected (thanks, Rory).

I saw this over on Rory's site:

Today, [Superintendent] Rainwater said, no statistical achievement gap exists between the 25,000 white and minority students in Madison’s schools.

Given the apparent inability of Wisconsin's educrats to interpret data (see here and here), I thought I'd check for myself–after all, that's quite a claim the superintendent is making. It took a few minutes to find the data (they aren't on the download page with the other data, but with the reports), but find it, I did–and these are Wisconsin's data (which no doubt explains why the data for each group don't add up to 100%):

Let's look at Superintendent Rainwater's statement again:

Today, [Superintendent] Rainwater said, no statistical achievement gap exists between the 25,000 white and minority students in Madison’s schools.

And let's compare it with the data. Only 54% of the black students are proficient or above. Only 55% of the Hispanic students are proficient and above. And only 91% of the white students are proficient or above.

See? No achievement gap!

And for those who really love charts (since the data didn't add up to 100%, I subtracted % proficient+ from 100 to get % proficient-):

So unless Superintendent Rainwater has some special definition of "statistical achievement gap" or "minority students," I'd say he needs to put down the bong and retake third-grade arithmetic (and perhaps Wisconsin might stop hiring educrats named Rainwater, Dolphin, or SpiritWomon). Of course, that's a friendly suggestion, and not a value judgment. I would never make a value judgment. That would be judgmental.

Thanks to Ms. Cornelius, I saw this:

Yesterday, the St. Louis City Public Schools was officially stripped of its accreditation and placed under the control of the state.

But it gets . . . interesting:

St. Louis school students ended their five-day sit-in at City Hall this afternoon after announcing they would take their concerns to Jefferson City this week.

Is it not, uh, telling that the students were having a sit-in for five days instead of being in class? You don't think there could be a relationship between students' having a sit-in instead of being in class and the city's schools' losing their accreditation, do you?

Ms. Cornelius has this to say:

Some teachers and adults supported the sit-in, apparently as clueless as the students themelves about the fact that the STATE Board of education, not the mayor of St. Louis, makes decisions about accreditation.

But if you're passing joints and singing kumbayah at a sit-in instead of going to class–or if you're a teacher and you encourage your students to pass joints and sing kumbayah at a sit-in instead of going to class–why would you know anything except all the words to Imagine?

Interestingly, the sit-in ended before this week's spring break holiday from classes.

I believe this is known as being "socially aware." So to speak.

Jules Crittenden is insensitive–entertainingly so.

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Free Born John says from across the pond:

300 the movie continues its surge at the box office:

… the battle epic "300″ took the No. 1 spot for the second-straight weekend with $31.2 million, according to studio estimates Sunday.

The Warner Bros. movie, the story of vastly outnumbered Spartans defending against Persian invaders, shot past the $100 million mark after just a week in theaters, bringing its total to $127.5 million.

Note to British film industry - make a fucking action film.

Is it just me, or is it hard to wrap your brain around the concept of a British action film? The closest thing I can think of is MI-5 (Spooks in the UK), and by "action film" standards (or in this case, "action TV" standards), it's pretty tame. In fact, that's the only British show I can think of in which I've seen an armed law enforcement officer — I mean, I like Waking the Dead, but cops who are scared to death of guns? And when one of the characters gets killed, the show completely misses the point that had she been (ahem) armed as law enforcement officers are supposed to be, she would probably be (ahem) alive?

Good morning, Britain! And was your coma restful?

Jonah Goldberg:

Edwards is a saint when he drops out. Edwards is a saint when he doesn't. I don't have a major problem with the sentiments of either post taken individually, but taken together, we can now see that the intervals between self-contradictory statements by Sullivan has fallen to a mere 22 minutes. Pretty soon the ends of his sentences will contradict the beginnings.

The government encouraged them.

Susan Estrich remembers Cathy.

And I'm not exaggerating. You've been warned.

Why the death penalty needs to be expanded beyond murder.

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If you recall, I ran a statistical analysis of Wisconsin's reading proficiency stats, and found that Madison's Reading First schools could not validly claim that they had raised their proficiency levels. That analysis, of course, rested upon the assumption that Wisconsin had not changed their standards between 98-99 and 04-05, an assumption Ken DeRosa challenged:

As the NAEP data clearly shows, the Wisconsin's proficiency exam standards did change between 1998 and 2005. NAEP scores declined slightly, while the Wisconsin scores magically skyrocketed. Suspiciously so.

So I went in search of the NAEP data. All I found were reports (though as SLOOOOOOW as the website was responsing, by the time I found the reports I had lost patience with finding raw data):

And the descriptive stats for the data Wisconsin reports:

Note that we're dealing with two different variables here. The NAEP reports scores, while Wisconsin reported the percentage of students who scored in the different proficiency levels (I analyzed proficient and above). So these data are not directly comparable.

However, this discrepancy is troubling. It appears that Ken is right. The only way we can reconcile the drop in NAEP scores and the increase in proficiency levels in Wisconsin is to assume that they changed their standards (definitions of proficiency levels).

Unless Wisconsin has another explanation (and I cannot think of one), it appears that they fudged their data.

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Cathy Seipp has passed away.

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I've been a cop show junkie since we used to watch Joe Friday every week, and yet another cop show has gone off the deep end: Cold Case.

It never was a great show. It's always been a gimmick show (far too many, too long flashbacks for no reason at all, except to be a gimmick), though the plot was usually good enough to offset any gratuitous flashback irritation.

You noticed the tense of that verb, yes? Was. Past tense.

Each episode goes something like this: Somehow, the squad picks up another cold case. They start with the most obvious person (prior investigation suspect, last person to see the victim alive, victim family member, you get the idea) who will talk to them and as he remembers, we get one of those long, pointless flashbacks that tell us nothing we couldn't learn just by watching the interrogation. Anyway, the recollection always points to somebody else who might have done it, and the investigators follow the lead and talk to the second person, who as he remembers triggers another pointless flashback, which points to a third person, and so forth, so they end up talking to four, sometimes five people.

The writers for this show have always been lazy. They have introduced irrelevant, uninteresting personal storylines about the squad just to avoid having to come up with an intriguing plot–in most cases, incredibly stupid personal storylines, too. Are we supposed to care that Lily has a cat with one eye, and why did we spend a total of twenty minutes in three episodes discussing it? Or whatshisname's schizo girlfriend. Who cares? And thank God she killed herself, or so I thought at the time, so we wouldn't have to watch any more of that nonsense, except of course, we then had half a season of whatshisname's personal trauma because his schizo girlfriend had killed herself.

Then there's the other annoying time-wasting element. They always have an extended musical postlude (this obnoxious practice started on CSI: Miami), always in slowmo (because in slowmo, you can waste even more time that otherwise you'd have to fill up with, you know, substance), with the "ghost" of the victim appearing to the squad, again, to avoid having to actually work on the plot. I guess it's supposed to be "artful" and "creative," combining the pointless postlude with the equally pointless flashbacks for that episode.

And did I mention that the intro theme starts of with this godawful yowling, rather like the sound of somebody committing seppuku with a dull sword? I suppose it's supposed to be "artistic," or something equally stupid.

Of course, I watch it. It's a cop show, even if it is annoying as hell. And it's full of guilt-ridden hand wringing that makes it even more annoying than the dying cow yowling or the idiotic personal storylines or the pointless flashbacks. But sure, I watch it.

The last three episodes can be described as highly unlikely, bizarre and illogical, and wholly unbelievable.

Three weeks ago, we had a plot about a houseful of ex-hippie anarchists, who had been responsible for one of their own dying while trying to bomb a university building. The first problem was that they felt guilty about the guy dying, but not about bombing the building — and they were supposed to have been grown up. But the highly likely part came with the twist at the end. One of the female characters supposedly managed to set off a bomb to kill her husband, then take the identity of the other female character staying in their home. Given that all this character could do was talk about orchids, this was extremely unlikely, one of those shows for which the only response is, "Yeah, right."

The next week we had a plot that, well, made no sense at all. We had an unwed pregnant teenager who was murdered at a Catholic home for wayward girls. There was, of course, much moaning and groaning and other expressions of collective guilt about how repressive it was not to think unwed teenagers should just spread their legs and start squirting out babies by the thousands, but I digress. It turned out the teenager was murdered by another unwed teenaged mother because . . . well, we didn't quite ever figure that out. I think we were supposed to believe she was jealous because the other one was going to keep her baby and run off, so that's why she murdered her? Illogical. Bizarrely so.

Then last week, we had a kid whose brother murdered him because . . . well, again, it wasn't quite clear, but I believe that the older brother killed his younger brother because he gave up and his younger brother didn't, and was going to become a dancer. I think. The whole thing was unbelievable — even the pointless personal storyline, where a veteran cop put the investigation of his wife's murderer in jeopardy by going to see the guy at a bar.

The writers have gone from lazy to lethargic. Thank God I fast forward through the yowling at the beginning and the musical postlude at the end.

Populism.

You've got to be kidding:

CULLMAN, Ala. (AP) — A woman who breast-fed her baby in a barbecue restaurant said a worker placed dirty dish towels over the child's head to keep other diners from seeing what was going on, prompting her to stage a protest.

The owner of Johnny's Barbecue, Gary Wiggins, denies that the mother or child were mistreated. He said some customers were upset after seeing Elizabeth McDowell of Cullman breast-feeding her baby inside the restaurant last weekend.

And of course, we have howls of protest from the "I can haul out my boobie and swing it around in your face any time I want because I'm liberated" crowd:

McDowell planned a demonstration of as many as 30 breast-feeding moms at the restaurant on Thursday, but only three showed up. Instead, the restaurant parking lot was full of cars driven by customers showing their support of Wiggins and co-owner Ronald Dunn, The Cullman Times reported.

Thank God somebody has a bit of sense — not to mention taste and decorum:

Nurses Deb Singleton and Lisa Pugh said they both supported the managers' decision to ask McDowell to cover up.

"This establishment has been in business for 40 to 50 years, and a lot of elderly people eat here. This is disrespectful to them," Singleton told the newspaper.

Katrina James said she is the mother of an infant, and she doesn't have a problem with public breast-feeding as long as women are discrete.

"I just don't think you should do it in the middle of a restaurant where people are eating," she said.

More common sense, please. Thanks.

Courtesy of Andrew Bolt:

When the editorial pages of The New York Times accuse the BBC of anti-Western bias it is worth taking notice. It is a little like Osama bin Laden accusing Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of being a bit harsh on the Jews.

Here's the NYT editorial.

Periodically, the topic of teaching statistics in the primary and secondary schools comes up at Kitchen Table Math. I'm torn on the issue. If you're going to teach something, then do it — that's the general way I feel about teaching anything. And that's exactly what they're not doing in the primary and secondary schools (statistics is more than means, medians, modes, and graphs). On the other hand, kids are coming out of schools without basic arithmetic knowledge, so why waste time on statistics, whether you really are teaching it or not?

However, there are times when something makes me feel nobody should be allowed to graduate from high school without statistics. The new Colgate ad campaign is one of those things.

If you haven't seen it, they claim on their ads that dental health has been linked to cardiac health (and something else), implying that if you buy Colgate and brush your teeth with it, you won't keel over dead from a heart attack at age fifty.

That's crap — and let me show you why.

Let's say we've got this study of 100 test subjects, and two variables for each: dental health index and cardiac health index. The first problem is that both variables are actually groups of related variables. How many times you brush your teeth each day and for how long, whether you floss or not, how many cavities you've had, these and other things comprise the dental health index; family history of heart disease, what you eat, how much you exercise and how, these and other things comprise the cardiac health index.

So our data look something like this:

We calculate Pearson correlations, and see this:

Wow, look at that correlation coefficient! There has to be a relationship! Obviously, if you brush your teeth a lot you won't get a heart attack!

Er, wrong. Because researchers are often academics, and because that old adage about academics' lacking common sense is more than just a little true, and here because Colgate wants to sell you toothpaste, research sometimes draws bizarre and unwarranted conclusions. Forget statistics. Step back for a minute and ask yourself this: If there is a relationship between dental health and cardiac health, does it make sense to say that brushing your teeth will stop heart attacks?

Of course not, unless there is some dental health gene and some cardiac health gene and the two are somehow linked. So what common sense reason is there for this correlation?

Well, there's a third variable: How many loads of laundry you do a week. Here is the correlation matrix:

And fancy that! The correlations between how many loads of laundry you do a week and the dental and cardiac health indices are almost as high as the correlation between the two health indices! Do more laundry and you won't die of a heart attack!

Ask yourself this: What do people with good dental health, good cardiac health, and who wear clean clothes have in common?

They take care of themselves.

So the next time you see some article or commerical about a study, before you swallow it undigested, step back and apply a little common sense.

I can hear you now. That's ridiculous. Nobody would make such a claim. Really? How about this, then?

Chew on this next time you're idling in the drive-thru line: Cars on U.S. roads must burn nearly on billion additional gallons of gas a year because of overweight drivers and passengers. That was the conclusion of University of Illinois computer science professor Sheldon Jacobson, who, with colleague Laura McLay, used a mathematical model to combine federal data on gas consumption and weight gain from 1960 to 2002. They found that the average American's weight jumped by more than 24 pounds over the period and that as a group, we now pump at least 938 million more gallons a year than we did in 1960. A relative drop in the gas bucket (about three days' worth of passenger car consumption), but it's unnecessary. Want to do something today to boost fuel economy? Eat fewer cookies.

Apply common sense liberally. Thanks.

Hat tip to Melanie Phillips for this uncharacterstic display of honesty:

Philosophers and practitioners of science have identified this particular mode of scientific activity as one that occurs where the stakes are high, uncertainties large and decisions urgent, and where values are embedded in the way science is done and spoken. It has been labelled ‘post-normal’ science…The danger of a ‘normal’ reading of science is that it assumes science can first find truth, then speak truth to power, and that truth-based policy will then follow.

Self-evidently dangerous climate change will not emerge from a normal scientific process of truth seeking, although science will gain some insights into the question if it recognises the socially contingent dimensions of a post-normal science. But to proffer such insights, scientists - and politicians - must trade (normal) truth for influence. If scientists want to remain listened to, to bear influence on policy, they must recognise the social limits of their truth seeking and reveal fully the values and beliefs they bring to their scientific activity.

Translation: "Global warming" isn't science, and scientific research will not bear it out. It's politics, nothing more and nothing less.

That's not news, though coming out and admitting that what you're doing isn't science is unusual. Look for the environmentalists to admit that environmentalism isn't about the environment, but crusading against capitalism and technology, sometime this summer.

Ken DeRosa took a journalist to task for inaccuracies in her article about four Reading First schools in Madison, Wisconsin (go here for all the relevant information) then pointed me to the reading proficiency data the state of Wisconsin reported for all schools (the Wisconsin data are here). I downloaded the data, cleaned them up in Excel, and ran the stats, comparing the 98-99 and 04-05 school years. They reported four proficiency levels: minimal, basic, proficient, and advanced. We are interested in the percentages testing proficient or above (proficient+ in the tables below), so I added the percent proficient and percent advanced, and analyzed those data.

Before I go on, let me quickly address why we must analyze the data statistically, and cannot just report means. If we gave the same kids the same proficiency exams on two different days, say only a week apart, their scores would be different. Anytime we see a difference between scores, without statistics, we do not know if those differences are due to random variation or not. We cannot without statistics point to two different scores or means and say, "See? The scores increased!"

Also, let me mention a few crucial points.

• The more data we have, the more reliable our statistical analysis will be (this will become an issue later on).
• Means (averages) alone do not give us a complete picture, particularly when they are means of aggregated data, as these are (this is why I look at other descriptive statistics).
• Statistics always deals with probability (uncertainty), and we calculate our statistics to a specific probability, 95% here (sometimes statistics are calculated to a 99% probability). This is the level of significance (alpha), here, 0.05, or 5%.
• We are assuming here either that the proficiency exam standards did not change between the two years or that the proficiency reports for the two years are comparable (if they are not, then Wisconsin cannot make any statement about their proficiency levels over time — and we will address this later).

Yes, it's still snowing.

Tim Blair:

• Al Gore visits England to talk about global warming; the Gore Effect kicks in immediately.

• Al Gore returns to the US to testify about global warming; a familiar coldening results.

One of the commenters suggests Al-Gore is a Martian. Perhaps he's right. Tuesday, it was 64. Last night, it started snowing. It snowed all morning. It's still snowing. It's supposed to snow all night and all day tomorrow.

Please don't come here, Al. We don't need any more cold — or snow.

I didn't get around to reading the Wall Street Journal yesterday, so I missed this:

In Kenya, where more than half of the rural population has no access to clean water, the Atlanta beverage giant brought water-purification systems, storage urns, and hygiene lessons to 45 schools in a poor western province. Children learn how to use a chlorine-based solution to kill diseases that come from contaminated, muddy pools or remote wells — and are taught to teach their parents.

In Mali, Coke is helping extend municipal water taps beyond the country's capital of Bamako. In India, where the company has been accused of draining water from poor communities for its own use, the company is building rainwater-harvesting structures to help alleviate chronic water shortages. Coke's bottlers are also implementing water-efficiency measures.

More than 1.2 billion people lack access to safe drinking water, and 2.6 billion — about 40% of the world's population — lack proper sanitation, resulting in waterborne diseases that infect and kill about two million people a year, according to the United Nations. And global population growth and rising industrial production are increasing competition for the world's freshwater supplies.

Coke has some 70 clean-water projects in 40 countries, a service it hopes will eventually boost local economies and broaden its consumer base. But the efforts are also part of a broader strategy under Chairman and Chief Executive E. Neville Isdell to build Coke's image as a local benefactor and global diplomat. "You have to be an integral and functioning part both in perception and reality in every community in which you operate," he said in an interview.

[ . . . ]

Working with public-health experts in the Millennium Water Alliance, a group of nongovernmental organizations, Coke identified the schools in the Nyanza province and, with CARE, launched water-treatment and hygiene-education efforts in 2005. The company funded the cost of a mold to make small packages of the chlorine-based purifying substance the schools needed to clean the water, and new clay storage pots to be designed with a small neck so the clean water wouldn't be recontaminated. When it learned the government agency charged with drilling wells had equipment but no money, it paid for the work. While the company hopes such steps will help improve local economies enough eventually to build a new consumer base, it isn't looking for that right now, Mr. Egbe says. For now, he says, sales of Coke products in such areas are "minimal to nonexistent."

Coke hasn't limited its largess to digging wells and buying clay pots. The company also spent $2 million last year to help create the Global Water Challenge, a coalition of corporations and organizations that is based at the United Nations Foundation. Coke also helped to entice the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to award a $9.5 million grant to CARE and other organizations to expand on the Kenya schools project, implementing it in as many as 1,500 more schools over the next five years.

In India, the company is installing 270 ponds, containers and other devices to catch monsoon-season rainwater. Jeff Seabright, who leads Coke's environmental efforts, says 50 more water-catching devices will be installed this year. Coke says it is also distributing a new kit on improving water-use efficiency to its bottlers.

Of course, that doesn't stop the greeniemorons from whining:

While Coke has won some praise from global water experts, others complain that it could do much, much more given the company's huge size and insatiable thirst to convert consumers in developing countries into Coke drinkers. Coke's water efforts are "nothing more than a public-relations exercise," scoffs Amit Srivastava, director of the India Resource Center, one of the most vociferous critics of Coke's water use in India.

If you don't think they're doing enough, do it yourself — or shut up.

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Those who have studied German will have more appreciation for this gem, though it's quite humorous if you know no German.

The Awful German Language
Mark Twain
from A Tramp Abroad

A little learning makes the whole world kin.
–Proverbs xxxii, 7.

Mark Steyn says:

I love that “IMAGINE PEACE” sticker because it advertises a total failure of imagination – a failure to imagine that there could be anything out there that might ripple one’s complacent parochial self-absorption.

At least when it comes to government. Here's one example:

In what had become a grammatical Gordian knot, the Arkansas Senate supported a resolution Tuesday declaring "Arkansas's" the correct way to write the state's possessive case.

The Senate vote came after a few groans and an introduction by Sen. Jim Hill, who said he studied the history surrounding "the much-debated apostrophe-s."

After receiving a single question, the Senate approved the resolution on a voice vote, although a few "no" votes could be heard.

Hill, D-Nashville, lamented the lack of enthusiasm on the floor.

Who, other than a politician, could get enthusiastic about legislating a correct possessive — as if that is going to have any effect on whether people use it or not?

But you know that's not the only example (hat tip to Betsy Newmark):

Joint House Memorial 54 was introduced by representative Joni Marie Gutierrez, who represents Dona Ana County. It states that Pluto, the recently demoted object, "be declared a planet and that March 13, 2007 be declared 'Pluto Planet Day' at the legislature."

Yes, that's right. New Mexico's state legislature not only declared a "Pluto Planet Day," but decided to declare that Pluto is a planet — as if the astronomers of the world could possibly care what the New Mexico legislature thinks about Pluto's planetary status.

There's nothing new about governments wasting tax money on issues that are none of their concern, of course; it's what governments do. In the 80s, we had all these "Sister City Resolutions," usually with the cities in left-wing tyrannies with the bloodiest human rights abuses (but that was "progressive," you see). Or the recent anti-war resolutions across the land of nuts and burned-out hippies, Vermont.

Every day, I come closer to thinking we should elect these people, then lock the doors so they can't vote, can't talk, can't meet, or can't do anything — but keep their mouths shut and mind their own business.

You bring the tar. I'll bring the feathers.

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I just got off the phone with eight other ed bloggers and Sen. Lamar Alexander about the America Competes Act. I'll report tomorrow. My eyes hurt.

And in the spirit of American literature, I offer one of Mark Twain's cruelest, funniest, and most dead-on accurate essays.

Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses
by Mark Twain

This started as a comment, on an article at Huffenglish, where Dana proposes an excellent idea:

On World Book Day in the UK (March 1, 2007), over 2000 Britons voted for the books they couldn’t live without.

I don’t remember any such research done for our own counterpart in America, Read Across America (March 2).

My list is too long for a comment, so I'm posting it here (and I hope Dana will see it). I didn't just haphazardly toss together a list, though. Instead, I started from the title, "Books America can't live without," and used it to restrict and define what would go in the list.

I've confined myself to American authors (others will add British authors, I'm sure — and it pains me greatly not to add Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness). I chose based on literary importance within the American literary canon (Dead white male alert!), and included historical documents every American should read.

I stayed away from the current, trendy authors, some of whom I would have gladly added in other circumstances, such as Toni Morrison; these days, everybody focuses on current authors, so they won't be overlooked, I'm sure. I did not include one-hit wonders, like Alice Walker (though she falls in the trendy current author category, so I wouldn't have included her anyway — and before somebody screams in protest, The Color Purple is a brilliant novel, but sorry, every word she has written other than that has been mediocre at best).

Speaking of one-hit wonders, some authors are prolific, but have only two or three works that stand head and shoulders above everything else they wrote. Other authors wrote quite a few literary masterpieces — these are the authors that when you list them make you think, "So which novels do I include, and which do I leave out?" William Faulkner and Mark Twain would be examples of the latter.

I made a conscious attempt to include authors who have fallen out of favor in this PC read-only-oppressed-authors-no-matter-how-dreadful era, though only if they are historically important as literary figures. Actually, there are a large number of women authors on my list, believe it or not. You will notice that I included Eudora Welty, only because she is surely the most underappreciated genius of 20th century American literature.

I do not necessarily like all of the works I listed (I detest both Stephen Crane and James Fenimore Cooper, for example — God save us from Natty Bumpo! — and I abhor Walden) But they belong on the list, whether I like them or not, because of their importance to the American literary canon.

I did not include playwrights or poets (my, then we'd have a list, Sandburg, Dickinson, e.e. cummings, Frost, Emerson, the list goes on and on). I wasn't going to include any non-fiction at all other than historical documents, but how do you compile a list of works America can't live without and not include Paine, Thoreau or Emerson? So there are a few essays listed.

I tried to work backward chronologically. Of course, I'd suddenly remember something and put it in, so don't expect an exact chronological list (I was thinking centuries, and not years, anyway). I ended with the historical documents.

And I'm sure this list will give away my age. Oh well. Also, I'm sure I've left many important titles off the list. Please comment if you have additions. The list is below the fold. Apologies if you're offended that I didn't italicize titles. It was way too much of a pain.

I would have crawled under a rock if my parents had put one of those "My Kid is an Honor Student!" bumperstickers on the car. I hate those more than even "Visualize World Peace" or "Free Tibet" bumperstickers.

Thanks to Born Again Redneck, I found this page of antidote bumperstickers. Some of them are fairly stupid, but there are a few funny ones:

• My kid sells term papers to your honor student
• If the kid is an honor student, he must not really be yours
• My chihuahua is smarter than your honor student
• My Marine can pick off your honor student at 500 yards
• Your child may be an honor student, but you're a moron

And I saw the perfect bumpersticker for anybody who lives in Bloomington, Indiana: "Forget word peace. Visualize using your turn signals."

Happy Pi Day! (it's March 14 — 3.14 — get it?)

From NYC:

March 6, 2007 — A renowned hedge-fund honcho hatched a heinous revenge plot against his former mistress by posing as her on the Internet - saying she wanted to be kidnapped and raped as part of a sicko sex fantasy, officials said yesterday.

Albert Hsu, 43, a wealthy, married dad of two and former Cub Scout leader, posted his fiendish ad on a hardcore, S&M Web site, Connecticut authorities said.

He allegedly included the woman's name, photo, address, license-plate number, train schedule to and from work and even the rail car she usually sits in.

And I thought this kind of thing only happened on Law and Order. Hat tip to Ace, who lists several other disturbing crimes.

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Do check this out.

K-Lo:

John McCain to skip another conservative event. Perhaps he'll appear on American Idol instead.

She is, of course, referring to this:

PostWatch:

The Second Amendment–and I think more broadly, the Bill of Rights–informs the world of pre-existing rights that the government is not authorized to seize. Defending your own life is about as elemental and pre-existing as it gets, which is why we have a Second Amendment and also why it's not called the Bill of Privileges.

And no more need be said.

From IMAO:

Another one:

"A professor at North Idaho College says it's all right to talk about executing "anyone who's ever voted Republican" as long as it's said with a smile.

The belief was expressed by instructor Jessica Bryan when her comments were challenged by a student, Linda Cook, who served as an aide to the late U.S. Rep. Helen Chenoweth, R-Idaho, and is a longtime supporter of the Republican Party.

Cook wrote to the school asking for a refund on fees she paid for a course taught by Bryan, after she withdrew because of the instructor's comments. Cook told the Spokane Spokesman-Review that Bryan used every class period in the English composition course to criticize and disparage Republicans, including the suggestion of the death penalty for everyone who chooses to support a Republican with a vote.

….Among the allegations: Bryan reported President George W. Bush won the election "because people … can't read," and, regarding the death penalty: "First we line up everyone who can't think and right behind them, anyone who's ever voted Republican."

…Bryan said she thought Cook had enjoyed the "debate" of the classroom, but Cook said she chose not to confront the teacher during class time. "If someone's suggesting you just be killed you don't sit down and say 'let's talk,'" Cook said.

But of course the moonbat is claiming to be the victim:

Bryan's perception is that she was the one who was hurt.

"I do see it as an insult, personally and professionally," she said. Bryan told the Sentinel she believes Cook is making a "mountain out of a molehill."

The department syllabus notes that English 102 teaches "critical thinking" as well as essay and persuasive writing."

But the real point here — do note the moonbat's response, bolded above — is that "critical thinking" is now learning to repeat leftist horse excrement. It has nothing to do with thinking, unless you consider groupthink and parroting the left-wing PC party line to be thinking, and it certainly isn't critical. It has nothing to do with logic, syllogisms, or anything you may assume it means.

It's barking at the full moon. Like this idiot English professor.