Another Katrina story

Posted on by Dale

Last night I had dinner with some people with whom I don’t want to dine again for a very long time. I don’t see them on a regular basis, but I’ve known them for many years.

Our dinner conversation turned, of course, to the Katrina disaster, New Orleans in particular, and for the next ten minutes I heard nothing but abuse of the city and its inhabitants. One person who had grown up there flatly said it should not be rebuilt, that it was a hell-hole. Others repeated right-wing half-truths that clearly had already taken root after being planted by that President’s team of spinners. No one expressed any sympathy for the people who had lost everything. No one expressed horror at the terrible catastrophe that overtaken fellow Americans. No one mentioned the failure of our national government to provide the kind of assistance before and after the disaster that is clearly its function.

Here are phrases I heard last night: “New Orleans has more public housing than anywhere else”; “Why would they go back? They were all renting anyway”; “The oil companies wouldn’t locate their refineries there because the cost of the bribery was too high”; “Everybody knew you bought your drugs from the cop. He got it free from people he busted”; “It was just a dirty place”; “You can’t tell me they couldn’t have gotten out.”

The last few times I’ve gotten together with these people I have had uncomfortable experiences because it’s been clear that they’ve drifted farther and farther to the right, but last night I was repulsed. Unable to think of anything to say without absolutely losing it or without embarrassing my hostess, I maintained a stony silence and left the table as soon as I had finished eating. This has gnawed at me; I should have rebuked them and left entirely.

These are people who are extremely active in their church. You would call them religious. The empty Baptist phrases spill out of their mouths with the ease given to the true believers. But last night, I strained to hear even an echo of “whatsoever you do unto the least of these, you do unto me,” and I failed.

I’ll tell you what I did hear, however. I heard that if some other person or group of persons is different from you, i.e., not middle class, white, and sanctimonious, if those persons are poor, or lazy, or criminal, it is appropriate and just to wish them misery, destruction, and death. If they do not fit within the narrow parameters of your narrow faith/vision, then let them die.

And what I want to know is, how is this different from those faithful who drove the planes into skyscrapers?

Theater drops Klan play | ajc.com

Posted on by Dale

It seems (Theater drops Klan play | ajc.com) that the Arts Station theatre got cold feet over hosting a staged reading of a play about Klan rallies at Stone Mountain. It seems that the opening monologue was not only “racy,” but also “inciting, and slanderous about Jews and Catholics,” according to the director. So they’ve canceled the reading.

I have some questions, since I don’t know any of the people involved, nor have I read the script. I did, of course, run the Newnan Community Theatre Company for over twenty years, so I might actually have a little insight here.

First of all, every theatre has its mission. Ours was to provide a wide variety of theatrical experiences for our audiences. Notice the plural. We didn’t have an audience, we had several different audiences. This allowed us to do whatever interested us as artists, since we were not interested in limiting ourselves to material that it was safe to bring the kids to. (I use the past tense here because of course I cannot speak for the company in any official capacity, currently led by the inestimable Dave Dorrell, but they’re doing just fine without me.)

So my first question is, What is Arts Station’s mission? Is this the kind of play they seek to do? If not, then why did they agree to the staged reading? If it is, then why back off?

Did no one read the play before they agreed to do it? Did the playwright tack on the monologue after they got into rehearsals? How did the “problem” with the monologue go unnoticed until announcements had been made?

Was this an actor problem? Did some actor suddenly decide that “he” couldn’t say those words?

Why the sudden panic over community relations? Are their audiences so generally unsophisticated that such venomous language genuinely offends them personally? Their lineup is hard to read, but it doesn’t seem to be very “hardhitting.” That’s not a condemnation, by the way; it’s all a matter of what your mission is.

Aside, re: the language issue: there’s a good young adult novel, The Day They Came to Arrest the Book, by Nat Hentoff, about the attempted banning of Huckleberry Finn on the usual bogus racial issues, and for me the climactic moment is when a young black student addresses the school board and tells them, “I’m smart enough to know when I’m being called a nigger, and that’s not what this book is doing.” I’ve always assumed any audience that I’ve attracted is smart enough to know that the language in the play is not being addressed to them personally, nor is it being delivered personally by their friends and neighbors.

Still, this was just a staged reading, an agreement that you’ll give the playwright a chance to hear his words out loud, to hear if they work, and to share them with an audience who, because you’ve taught them, understand this is a work in progress. You even put up big red posters in the lobby warning them about the language and subject matter.

And if the opening monologue is too much, that’s when you work with the playwright to say that you understand what he’s trying to do, but it’s not working the way he wants it. Or something. You don’t tell him that you just can’t say those terrible words, because the time to do that was before you agreed to the reading.

And you don’t put out disclaimers that it’s the playwright and not you who’s doing the offending, because again, you agreed to an artistic partnership, and part of that partnership is that you agree with his message. You can warn people to gird their loins before the curtain goes up, but apologize for what you’ve produced? Grow some artistic balls, people. (That’s a generic commandment; again, I have no details about the situation at Arts Station, so I would not presume to issue directives to them.)

One more set of questions: Was this a board thing? Did some board member get antsy and then worry began to pile up and then panic began to set in and then “it was decided” that it would “better” if they didn’t go ahead with this thing?

Ah, well, who knows? Theatre companies are precarious, byzantine organizations, and those like Art Station who actually do provide playwrights with venues for new work are to be applauded. It’s just that when something like this actually hits the newspapers, unlike, say NCTC’s production of Pericles, which hadn’t been done anywhere in the Southeast at the time, or our world premiere of David Hyer’s Lying in State, currently playing at the Barter Theatre in Abingdon, VA, nor even our Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro, with a new translation, none of which got any coverage at all, then one does have questions.

Fun things to do with your SACS visitors

Posted on by Dale

Yes, I’ve been lazy. It’s easy to get that way when you’re at the Georgia Governor’s Honors Program for six weeks, working with amazing kids and fabulous teachers 24/7. Here’s a little stopgap before I actually get inspired.

Those of you who are not educators might like to know that every five years or so your schools must be accredited, which means we must produce reams and reams of paper that documents that we are worthy. For us in Georgia, the accrediting organization is SACS, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools. We crank out these volumes in preparation for a visit from the “SACS team,” which sweeps through like locusts in a three-day visit and not only reads our reports [::stifles snicker::] but also visits our classrooms and interviews random teachers and students and parents.

So, in order to better prepare us for our SACS visit, here are some fun things to do for your SACS visitors (Guess which one of these I actually did):

  • At breakfast, put food into your pockets, “for later.”
  • Whenever you meet a SACS team member, inquire amiably about this “SACS thing” and how they “got into it.”
  • When asked what the school’s mission is, say that it’s to “test the children until their ears bleed.”
  • Hang a black leather mask and cat-o’-nine-tails in your closet door.
  • Do the same, only in 1st grader size.
  • Whenever a team member’s back is turned, say, “Oops!” and then just smile broadly when they turn around.
  • Display the filthy limericks your class wrote on a bulletin board.
  • If asked about the emergency plan, just pat your pocket and say, “If anything comes up, I’ll know how to handle it.”
  • Replace all the alphabet charts with the Russian Cyrillic alphabet.
  • When queried about the school’s improvement plan, comment that you “don’t really cotton to all this modern stuff.”
  • Have e-Bay up on your browser, and periodically run over to check it.
  • Share with the team members your students’ exemplary ITBS score sheets, with the names obviously whited out and written over.
  • Keep the class hamster in your pocket. Or in your hair.
  • If asked what stumbling blocks you see preventing you from implementing your action plan, say, “The county administration.” Or “No Child Left Behind.”
  • Reach into your purse repeatedly and take a swig from the small bottle you keep there.
  • Say, “Class, can anyone tell me what Billy did wrong this time?”
  • Keep asking, “You’re not writing this down, are you?”
  • Give the children noogies.
  • Reward the children with skull tattoos.
  • Announce to the class, “Y’all go to the media center and read for a while. Miss _____ is tired and needs a nap.”
  • Shout “Food fight!” in the cafeteria.
  • Be showing Rambo, Part III when they walk in.
  • When asked about any aspect of the SACS report, give a wrong answer and then say, “No, wait, that was last time.”
  • Keep smiling!

Till next time!

At last it can be told

Posted on by Dale

You know, that son of a bitch George Lucas would never return my calls, and now he’s finished up the whole cycle with bunches of light sabre fights instead of a deeply mythical twist.

Disclaimer: at this point, I haven’t seen Episode III. I am satisfied that it is better than the first two (I believe Buckaroo Banzai is better than the first two, and that is one lameass movie!), but my current rant has not been influenced by anything so vulgar as actually having seen the film.

So how should it have ended?

First of all, we have to go back and change Episode II as well. That movie was interesting for about ten minutes, when Count Dooku told whoever he was torturing, was it Anakin or Obi-Wan?, that he had built the clone army to fight against the Sith, since the Jedi Council was so obtuse. There was an interesting plotline: three sides to the upcoming cataclysm, one of them a renegade Jedi. Is he fighting for or against the Sith? Is he or isn’t he a Sith himself? You see the suspense that we could have been treated to, not only in Episode II but through much of Episode III as well. But no, Dooku was lying, of course, and the whole movie deflated.

Instead, imagine we’ve plunged into Episode III with this massive round of combat, intrigue, and betrayal going on. You got the Sith Lord, the Senate, Dooku and his army, the Jedi Council, replete with Yoda, Obi-Wan, Anakin, Mace Windu, Datare Gister (the “Fat Knight”), and the whole gang. Padmé and Anakin are married, secretly, and she runs to hide (on his orders) from the carnage as one Jedi after another is betrayed.

Things get more complicated till we get to where we need to be, i.e., Palpatine is Emperor and Sith Lord, Dooku is defeated by Anakin, and finally we have Anakin fighting two of the remaining Jedi, Obi-Wan and Datare Gister, on the edge of the volcano. He taunts them with the classic “No man may hinder me,” and of course Datare Gister, the Fat Knight, pulls off the Darth-Vader-like mask he’s always worn, and of course it’s Padmé, fat because she’s gi-normously pregnant. She stabs at him, he falls in, she goes into labor, wrap it up quick and leave it there. We don’t have to see it all, George. We know what happens after that. We saw Episode IV-VI, remember?

So anyway, I’d like to thank the Academy, and all the little people.

Reading the frogs

Posted on by Dale

Ponder this:

I mean, what the hell, right?

This object was discovered in our local Big Lots, where truly one can find some beautiful things. This was not one of them.

It’s plastic, of course, and it was made in China, of course. But why? Bear with me here, there’s a lot to unpack.

If you go to Big Lots or Wal-Mart or Target looking for a spatula, you will find spatulas in varying shapes and sizes. A spatula’s a spatula, and the amount of thought that goes into the design varies with the presumed “reader” of the spatula. Basic flat spatule, metal or plastic, slotted or not, depending on the intended use; basic stem; basic handle. It is a utilitarian object, one that does not require a lot of thought as to its design. Design has to be deliberately applied to a spatula above a certain level (and I’m ignoring industrial design here, humor me.)

For example, beyond the basic metal spatule/black plastic handle concept, you may get different colors as we move up the design scale, in case your kitchen utensils need to contribute to the ambience. And sometimes, you may get that frisson of delight as you come across Michael Graves’ stuff in Target: oh, look, he’s designed the spatula. Isn’t it pretty? And if you move on up to Restoration Hardware or some other really trendy boutiques, the spatula is no longer merely an utilitarian object, it is an objet.

But for it to get that far, someone has to push it. The spatula doesn’t require that level of design to exist. No one has to suffer any artistic angst to get it out the door.

This is not the case with our little frog friends. Our little frog friends are not utilitarian in the least. They are, as hard as this might be to believe, decorative. There is not a reason in the world for them to exist, except for one: someone thought that people would want to buy our little frog friends in order to bring beauty into their lives.

Well.

In order for our frogs to exist, someone had to think, “Out of all the limitless possibilities of the universe, what I think would be best to create would be three puffed up toad-frog-things, in diminishing sizes, made of transparent injected plastic. Hollow, yes, that’s good. And gentle, anthropomorphic smiles on their faces. But otherwise not really recognizable as any member of the genus Rana as we know it. And to make it really pretty, tint the plastic so that it goes from apple green on top to chartreuse on the bottom. We’ll have to handpaint the eyes and lips, though.”

Lips??

So the artist goes to work creating this objet, and then all the terrific machinery of industry has to swing into action to create the molds, the plastic, the assembly line, etc., etc., and then the Midwestern Home Products company of Wilmington, Delaware, has to import them and distribute them. The questions still crowd in: did these go straight to Big Lots, or did they try their fortune in some tonier place first? Did Midwestern HP (of Delaware), purveyor of other fine products, cause this to be created? (There is some evidence that they did.) And if not, then who in China thought that the American public had a heretofore unidentified need for plastic frog triplets?

There is much about our little frog friends that might be understandable, if not forgivable, if they had been made by some artisan, hand-made-by-hand as we used to say in the costume shop: their squalid cheerfulness, the inexplicable bloated forms, the bizarre, hedgehog-like warts. If we knew that this was one of a kind, or maybe one of a limited series perhaps, from the hands of a not-very-competent glassblower, for example, we could wrinkle our brow, smirk in a self-satisified and über-conscious manner, and let it go with a knowing laugh. The creator hit a dead end. He screwed up. It happens, and you shouldn’t put it out there to be bought, but there it is.

But it’s not. It’s mass-produced. There have to be hundreds of these things, if not thousands, that were stamped out of the assembly line and shipped off to beautify the world. I for one cannot comprehend this.

It produces in me the same feeling I get when my wife and I go antiquing. There, on dusty and unregarded shelves, are legions of tschotschkes produced by the same inexplicable process that produced the frogs. They are without merit, and they are abandoned. No one is going to buy them, ever again. They have no cachet, they are not collectable, they are not even kitsch. They are, to be unkind, jetsam.

This has always caused me a little distress, seeing all this junk just sitting around these shops. It’s not that I empathize with the tschotschkes, you should know me better than that, it’s just the whole Darwinian waste of it all. It’s as if society, in the hopes of achieving some items of permanent beauty, spawns all this crap just to make sure that something survives.

And there’s the appalling thought that for these things to have arrived in the junk shop, someone had to buy them first. That is, someone once thought these little pieces of landfill were beautiful enough to bring into their lives to enrich them. And then someone thought they were beautiful enough not to throw away, but to buy, at whatever discount rate, in hopes of reselling them in the shop. Merciful heavens. What would dear Oscar say?

Still, I suppose I could look at it optimistically: so strong is the creative spirit in humans, that even people who are hopelessly second-rate artists force out these pitiful objects in the belief that they are beautiful. Do they ever realize that they’ve failed? And the people who buy them: are they abject Philistines, or is the human need for beauty so strong that people respond to it in even the most feeble embodiment? Should this objet distress us, or should we rejoice in our little frog friends as representative of humanity’s most divine impulse?

When Gwinnettians attack

Posted on by Dale

Kevin demanded that I respond to this article:
Gwinnett teacher who refused to alter grade is fired | ajc.com

Well.

This is very messy, and everyone involved deserves a spanking.

The football player should be spanked (Let me! Let me!) for falling asleep in class. And also for not taking his lumps like a man. Little punk.

The teacher should be spanked for using academic grades as discipline. That’s a no-no, county policy or not. Is everybody listening? Grades are a poor reflection of the assessment of a student’s knowledge in your class, but that’s what they must be a reflection of. Not “effort,” not “notebook keeping,” and certainly not behavior.

If you want to teach students that behavior has consequences, then either use the regular disciplinary procedures of the institution or institute a “life skills” grade in your class, if that falls within board policy. But don’t alter the record of a student’s achievement in your class just to get back at him.

We used to have attendance committees in this county, back when we were taking another stab at doing something about kids who didn’t come to school. Every semester, we’d meet and look at appeals from kids who had missed too many days of school and who were thereby automatically flunked. One young lady appealed her automatic failure in this one class, pointing to the A’s she made on all of that teacher’s exams. We gave her the grades: if she could miss half that teacher’s classes and still make A’s on the exam, somebody wasn’t doing their job, and it wasn’t the kid.

The teacher should also be spanked for not recognizing that insubordination is pretty cut and dried. You’re ordered to comply with well-established policy, you refuse, you’re fired. What a maroon. He should have done himself and his students a favor by knuckling under, then circling back around and gutting the football player another way.

The administration of Gwinnett County School System should be spanked, and probably for more reasons than this. Why did they allow this to get out of hand? Why did they expose themselves to the suspicion that after ten years of turning a blind eye to an outstanding teacher’s lameass grading policy, they suddenly pounce when a football player’s grades are in question? The article doesn’t say, but I’m betting that the episode threw the kid’s eligibility into jeopardy. And we all know that’s a no-no.

Above all, Gwinnett County, you don’t throw out perfectly good science teachers. You probably need them.

So, Kevin, spankings all ’round. And then after the spanking…

Turtles all the way down

Posted on by Dale

I was going to write about King Lear today, and I may yet, later. But in the meantime, eyes must be rolled and lips pursed over the state board of education in Kansas, hosting a little show trial for creationists before they vote to allow Genesis to become part of the state’s science curriculum.

But no, I hear them say, they’re not creationists. Oh, no, they’re proponents of intelligent design. G*d didn’t create the world… but it couldn’t have happened without him. Her. Them.

Honey, please. I am not about to get into arguments pro/con on this blog, because the whole thing is preposterous. But two comments made by the creationists testifying before the Kansas board bear examination.

One is the whole “teach the controversy” shibboleth. Charles Thaxton, creationist chemist and author of a book that says so, said, “There is no science without criticism.” He and his cohorts are described as arguing that Darwinism has become a dangerous dogma, and they are simply open-minded.

Fooey. Anyone who believes that Darwinism isn’t constantly examined and challenged by scientists of all stripes needs to vote Republican. All science is constantly critiqued. That’s what experiments are for. That’s what peer-reviewed journals are for. Biologists and their compeers have been bickering about the details of the evolutionary process since before Darwin sailed on the Beagle.

But suggesting that science should include ideas that cannot be tested is not open-minded, it is lame-brained.

Witness the other statement, by another chemist, one William S. Harris. He and his fellow travelers had been dazzling the Board with the complexities of RNA and all that jazz. “You can infer design just by examining something, without knowing anything about where it came from,” he said. Referring to the scene in The Gods Must Be Crazy in which the Bushmen marvel at a Coca-Cola bottle thrown from a plane, he said, “I don’t know who did it, I don’t know how it was done, I don’t know why it was done, I don’t have to know any of that to know that it was designed.”

Well. That was not exactly the Bushmen’s response, was it, Dr. Harris? If they had thought like that, they wouldn’t have assumed it was from the gods, would they? They would have realized it was a man-made object, albeit one from a society whose technology they could not fathom.

No, the Bushmen did not infer design. They inferred divine intervention, and that’s exactly what the intelligent designists want us to infer as well, despite their disingenuous pose.

Not only that, but while the complexities of life on this planet may cause some of us to infer an intelligence behind it all, they do not necessarily imply that at all.

One day an incident occurred in my elementary media center that put this in perspective for me. I was working at my table on my spiffy PowerBook laptop, using my graphics tablet pen as a mouse, when one of our special education students stopped by to watch in wonder as I worked. Finally she asked, “Mr. Lyles, is your computer magic?” I gently explained that although it looked like magic, it was just a very complicated machine, and demonstrated the tablet for her.

These people fall in the same category: it’s too complicated for us to explain, so it must be the work of powers beyond our comprehension. It is a lazy, intellectually dishonest way of looking at the world.

Turtles, all the way down.

Education research

Posted on by Dale

I just completed a course in education research. Well, technically I haven’t completed it, because my main project, if it’s accepted by the instructor, can’t even take place until this summer, but in any case the course is over.

Here’s what I’ve learned: all data is bogus.

I know you’ll find this difficult to believe, but scientific research can’t seem to pin down what works and doesn’t work in our schools. “Smaller class size,” says the Kentucky study. “Not really,” says a study from London. “Accelerated Reader,” says Renaissance Learning and all its ‘research institute’ fronts. “Not likely,” says other studies.

“Read to your kids,” says all kinds of studies. “Nope,” says a study released today by the feds, which says nothing parents do makes as much difference as how much money they make and how much education they got before having children.

Well.

What’s the deal here? Big Pharma does this all the time: control group, test group, crunch the numbers, and hey presto! reliable data. And Vioxx.

So why can’t education do the same thing? This is an easy one: they can’t control the variables. Ever. In any way. Sure, you can “take them into account using statistical methods,” like chicken feathers and eye of newt, I suppose, but the problem there is garbage in, garbage out.

However, there is a bigger problem with educational research, and that is measuring results. Scratch a study and you’ll find they’re all about the same thing: increasing student achievement.

Quick: what is “achievement”?

You see the problem. Even if we all agreed that “student achievement” was properly measured by the standardized tests we have or might develop, which we don’t, by the way, the problem remains that the variables going into the results of standardized tests are just as squirrelly and uncontrollable as those skewing the study itself.

Here’s a direct quote from the horrible, horrible textbook from the course which just ended: “Of course, if the mechanisms underlying the creation of academic achievement were understood completely, and if each of the variables was measured well, then a longitudinal survey… could provide adequate information on causal effects.” [Haertel, G. D. & Means, B. (Eds.). (2003). Evaluating educational technologies: Effective research designs for improving learning. p. 196-7]

This of course is the classic Ham & Egg routine from vaudeville: “If we had any ham, we could have ham and eggs, if we had any eggs.” But nobody’s laughing, somehow.

Until we all agree on what achievement is, until we have a universal standard to measure and ways to measure it, then all educational research must be regarded with suspicion.

An amusing little contretemps

Posted on by Dale

Here’s an amusing story from the New York Times, today, May 5, 2005, p.A11:

“American officials rushing to start small building projects in a large swath of Iraq in 2003 and 2004 did not keep required records on the spending of some $89.3 million in cash and cannot account at all for another $7.2 million, a federal watchdog reported yesterday.”

Well.

You might think that I, liberal as I am, might choose to rant and rave about this. After all, can you imagine the wingnut echo chamber’s rant if Head Start couldn’t account for $96.6 million? What would Rush and Sean and Anne say? I think we can agree that they’d be apoplectic.

But I’m not.

It’s not that much money, is it?

See, here’s a $100 million. (I’m going to round up for tidiness’ sake.)

It takes ten of those to make a billion dollars.

And what has Iraq cost us so far? Can we be charitable and agree on about $190 billion? I mean, that’s not even $200 billion. Then we’d be talking real money.

So here’s that amount. See if you can find our $96.6 million.

See, $96.6 million is just not that much to get excited about, is it?

What to do with smart illegal immigrants

Posted on by Dale

You will want to go read this article: La Vida Robot. Go ahead. I’ll wait.

Wasn’t that the most wonderful article? Did you click on the scholarship link before you came back here?

This would be the best part of having won the lottery, reading a story like this one, and before you even get to page 2 of the story, click on that scholarship link and donate your little heart out. I could not only pay for their education, but pay for their access to appropriate legal counsel, and perhaps alleviate some of their families’ problems. And what would it cost? Not even half a million. If I just paid for their school, it would only be about $200,000. I’m assuming their legal counsel would add another $100,000, lawyers being lawyers.

Incredibly, there are those who read this story and who have a different reaction. There are those who read this article and take umbrage that anyone would want to allow these illegal immigrants access to American education. Why should we allow these wetbacks to take one of the limited state school slots in place of one of “our own”? Why should we spend our tax dollars on these people, these undocumented losers who sneak across our borders and steal jobs from honest Americans?

Or, to put it another way that probably the wingnuts wouldn’t, why would a nation like ours seek to embrace the best and brightest minds we can find and provide for their future, here, with us?

I put my money on the future with the best and the brightest.