How Standardized Testing Damages Education (from FairTest.org)

http://www.fairtest.org/facts/howharm.htm

In Texas, the majority of my children's education is framed through the TAKS tests. The entirety of their academic curriculum is structured to meassure how they and their peers perform on them. Maybe this isn't the best way to teach our student-citizens. Maybe we need more information on how these tests detemine or effect their own results of who is "exemplary," who is "good," and who is ... eh, bad(?).

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They remind me of what I've learned to forget [text follows pics]

Mumblings on the first day of school, sun-cooking, and about how my
intolerance is mine, all mine!

My kids started back to elementary school today. But it doesn’t feel like summer is over. The thermostat outside a storage facility read 104 degrees on the way to pick them up. Gaseous evaporation waves wafgled (wiggled & wafted) across the median and asphalt on South Lamar in mid-day. You could take a half-billion recalled salmonella laden eggs and make a giant inedible omelet on the streets of Austin on a day like this.


I have no tolerance for heat. My body doesn’t self-regulate temperature real well, and between that and my limbs that move like lumber, I struggle not to make everyone else as miserable about the heat as I am. Like most things that grind me down, I operate under the delusion that I can gift the folks around me with unrepercussive silence by refusing to share my suffering. This delusion is replete with crown and medals for stoic bravery and unbridled kindness.

I sat listening to an update on the “ground zero mosque” on NPR while waiting at a series of lights on my way to the school. It reminded me that, in addition to my intolerance of all meteorological phenomena that I disagree with, I also have no tolerance for other people’s failures to be tolerant. I’m a real Gandhi about accepting religious difference, a regular Albert Schweitzer about my fellow humans’ rights and liberty, a veritable Rich Little for echoing the multi-perspectival acceptance of relativism. However, I have no patience at all for other folks who flat out refuse an invitation to others for the same social privileges that they demand for themselves.

Rather than wait in the car, which quickly began to mimic a convection oven once the engine and AC was turned off, I entered my daughter’s second grade class. As if in some post-modern Deweyian mélange’ , I observed a quietly collaborative effort at clean-up being practiced by my daughter and her classmates, quickly followed by a few moments of Yoga to wind down from the day. The kids were awesome, unskeptical, eager and open to the newness of it all. My interpretive frame of intolerance seemed impossible to grok at that moment.

My son came bounding across the school’s lawn with the enthusiasm and swagger that only a fifth grader can evidence in a school that only goes through the fifth grade. The spastic sway of loopy arms cutting the atmospheric cauldron, the jangly shock of bounding wavy hair, and the broad smile on his face all worked to assure me that the day had gone well – that not only had he survived, but he had thrived and felt encouraged about his role in the universe. The car ride home involved a rushed verbal battle between the kids to please me with recounts of their many uniquely fascinating experiences at school, and specifically, examples of being in league with others learning.

While they both plugged into homework and snack, I returned to my earlier musings on intolerance. I’ve learned how to hate certain things. Stuff like heat and stoplights. Circumstances like waiting without a chair and standing in a check-out line. People who deny the science of climate change, stem-cell research and evolution. Groups who espouse cultural segregation and are satisfied with inequity in basic human and legislated civil rights. I’ve been a damn good student, given myself ribbons and trophies for “doing the right thing,” and gathering facts to avoid hypocrisy. Now, I really need to learn how to make sure my kids end up just like me, only way better.

Location, Location, Location

 
A soul is awkwardly placed. Lovingly recollects and hoping about the unknown. Assumes use for amusing concerns about forever.
 
He built a house for his soul to visit. Left a key under a rock in case he needed to get in. For long periods he’d forget which rock the key was placed under in the garden. Sometimes he’d grow furious at his forgetting and spend hours lifting rocks and sieving through the yard for the key. Then, seemingly out-of-the-blue, he’d recall that the key was not under a rock, but rather, at the bottom of an empty planter in the corner of the front porch.
 
Henry Ford kept the wax-sealed jar he’d used to collect Edison’s last breath. The jar is carefully labeled and rests on a podium in the middle of a museum that also collects the progressive histories of washing machines, automobiles and office furniture.
 
For forty days and forty nights, the rain was falling. Each drop like mercury crashing, beautiful for destroying or a purification. 

For forty years wandering the desert, disappointed and hoping for gifts or clarifying explanations on how the past might make a sense of the future, presently, hoping each mirage might know a more fulfilling place. 

For all magician's stories end the same, the audience pleased at their own faith in the promise of mystery:  for ten years, missing between key events;  for rocks leapt up off of into heavens; for fat bellied smiles and celestial sized phallus pleased;  for pews and bended knee;  for davening under the weight of of memory and ritual, or water dipping away congenitally seized sins;  for soured grapes, special cups and sacred shawls; for colored sand mandalas, breath blown meticulously out of creation;  for sacrifice, admissions of self-doubt and point of view;  for prayer and the need or want that supposes the necessity of prayer;  and for the work of trying to figure it all out.

For we, together gathered disparate, are here and now. 

Photo-memoir: My Experience of Thinking about the BP Gulf Oil Spill

Kagan Vs. GOP Revisionist Senators: U.S. Senate Hearings of 06/29/2010, on Supreme Court Nominee Elena Kagan

"Grey skies are gonna clear up
Put on a Happy Face.
Brush off the clouds and cheer up
Put on a Happy Face.
Take off the gloomy mask of tragedy,
It's not your style;
You'll look so good that you'll be glad
Ya decide to smile." (Lee Adams & Charles Strouse, 1960)

Codes of Conduct: McChrystal, Spitzer and the Battle Between Thinking and Acting Bad

Yesterday, I got to read and watch all about General McChrystal's resignation from his post as the top US and NATO military commander in Afghanistan. President Obama's rose garden address carefully laid out the breach in millitary code of conduct that McChrystal (and his staff) opened in publically deriding the civillian leaders who set policy for the war back in Washington D.C.. Seems that the rules about this are pretty clear and without dispute. All the pundits have left to wonder about is, "what was he (McChrystal) thinking in flagrantly articulating doubt and critique about the administration" during his interviews with RollingStone magazine. I won't pretend to get inside his or anyone else's head and try to construe their thoughts around actions that lend themselves so readilly to getting busted, but it all seems a bit too obvious to me. McChrystal's bad actions seem motivated out of a want for things to change from how they are, to something they are (as yet) not. Well, it worked. Perhaps General Petreus will have a more successful time in helping the administration and the public understand what Afganistan means. Perhaps not. What is clear is that General McChrystal was unable to effect change through discourse with the administration, and instead, offered public critiques that he had to have known would burst the very codes of conduct about how we talk about war when we are a participant in it. Part of me wants to thank General McChrystal. Last week, nobody was talking about Afganistan. This week, everybody has an opinion on it. If this is the direct result of McChrystal's code breach, then Bravo! War is nasty, and anyone who invites us to regularly reexamine our policies and actions regarding it needs to be applauded. I doubt General McChrystal sat down and mapped out a strategy for how this would all unfold. I also doubt that his breach of the military's code of conduct regarding how millitary leaders talk about their civillian leaders was an accident. War is nasty and messy business. People die. Our people and their people die. Today we are talking about Afganistan.

CNN's announcement yesterday that Former NY Governor Eliott Spitzer will be cohosting a primetime news show is sure to tickle the fickle and rankle the rogue. I've seen a number of Spitzer's analytic contributions on MSNBC over the past several months, and have always found him to be smart, pleasant and persuasive. However, I never seem to be able to push aside my recollections that when he was Governor of New York he got busted for paying hookers (or a hooker) to have sex with him. I swing pretty far left, as do most of the folks I associate with, but nobody I know has ever shared with me that they pay hookers to have sex with them. My friends and familly are no prudes, but sex for money is a breach of social conduct that never seems to need reexplaining to anyone I know. I have never been to, or with, a hooker. Hell, the few times I've been to a strip joint all left me feeling sad for the girls who work there. But ... I often like hearing that other people (especially famous people) jeopardize their positions and their famillies by risking getting caught doing something that they know they shouldn't. I'm not really aiming at anything here other than to identify that last week I didn't consider the subject of politician news commentators hanging out with big-boobed hookers and this week I am. Thanks CNN.

My kids were grounded yesterday. Stuck for a full day in their rooms to ponder their conduct breach of avoiding physical conflict with eachother. What was worse, is that they were at the neighbors house when their wrastling and horseplay stopped being playful and led them both to come whinning home about how the other had acted bad. My wife and I agreed on the "grounding" and held firm. Fortunatly, both kids (ages 10 and 7) came through with flying colors and faced their punishment with only a modest amount of "boredom" complaints. Further, by this morning, they were happily playing together in a wonderfully (if not perplexing) collaborative manner. Hurrah! They learned a lesson about how not to problem solve and I got a day off from shuttling them around to friends, pool and play. Sometimes the benefits of bad behavior revise the way we think about the good things we want.