Category Archives: PC

Sticks and (Rolling) Stones

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SWMBO and I have agreed to split the chores around here. She, for example, mows the dooryard with the little rotary mower every four or five days when the weather is like it is now; I mow the rest of the lawn with the diesel tractor. She does the laundry; I rebuild the back porches. She complains to her friends about all the things I have to do; I blog.

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She can fire me if I don’t take care of my responsibilities. She prolly can’t fire me if I mutter under my breath but things may get a bit chilly.

Muttering is time honored. There has never been a time that a soldier — or a husband — didn’t sit around a campfire and complain about working conditions.

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Sometimes, “I find myself on the receiving end of little burst of off-the-record trash talk,” David Brooks wrote in the NYTimes when he took a former Vermonter to task for reporting about Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s kvetching.
Imagine that. A soldier might complain about the yo-yos in his or her chain of command. Why, I simply can’t conceive the conversations between Hannibal (the Grace of Baal)’s conscripts when they had elephant duty. Except I reckon the language would have been … salted peanuts in nature. Used salted peanuts.

“General McChrystal was excellent at his job,” Mr. Brooks wrote. “He had outstanding relations with the White House and entirely proper relationships with his various civilian partners in the State Department and beyond. He set up a superb decision-making apparatus that deftly used military and civilian expertise.”

Then he called the boss a poopyhead.

Liberals, afraid of most dangers in their minds and unaware of most dangers in real life, have this mantra:

Words and poems can break my bones
But IEDs can never hurt me.

“I welcome debate among my team, but I won’t tolerate division,” Barack Obama said, showing his pettiness, his despottery, and his complete lack of understanding of either military or family life, as he relieved Gen. McChrystal as commander of American forces in Afghanistan. As an aside, I don’t think Mr. Obama or Mr. Bush before him fired enough generals. Generals need to be nervous. Generals need to work miracles or they need to get out of the way.

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So far, Gen. McChrystal did seem to be doing a better job than Gen. Bluggett. Doesn’t matter. The words around the campfire haven’t changed much.

But they will. Our army (every army) does two things very, very well: eat and gripe.

Mr. Obama had the opportunity to treat the General’s campfire griping with grace. By not doing so, he put every soldier on notice that the chain of command will punish them the first time they get caught griping.

Scary stuff, that. Scary that the Despot in Chief doesn’t understand morale in the ranks.

Mr. Brooks thinks, “The culture of exposure has triumphed, with results for all to see.”

He’s only half right.

If we all got fired for kvetching, there wouldn’t be a marriage — or a soldier — left standing.

Let Them Eat Dirt

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Want to know everything that is wrong with schools today?

Kids aren’t allowed to eat dirt.

About a century ago in news biz terms, on the Fifth of May of this year, Miguel Rodriguez, an assistant school principal at Live Oak High School in Santa Clara, CA, punished five sophomores for wearing the American flag on their t-shirts. He deemed their shirts conspicuously “incendiary” mostly because other students were wearing the red, white, and green of the Mexican flag that day.

Incendiary?

A lot longer ago than the Santa Clara wardrobe malfunction, the assistant principal of our local high school did the same thing to our daughter. We had taken our kids on their first trip to Key West shortly after we bought this house in South Puffin. The Half Shell Raw Bar is one of the favorite tourist stops there. It inhabits a building that was once a Key West shrimp packing building in the historic seaport.

The Half Shell sells t-shirts.

You know the story. “Our ‘rents went on vacation and all I got was this stupid shirt.”

[Image] Number One daughter really liked her shirt with its nubile, bikini-clad waitress, platter of oysters, and slogan. Particularly the slogan.

Naturally, her Assistant Principal went after that shirt with tar and bonfire. Number One daughter wasn’t even allowed to turn it inside out. That insidious, salacious message was still there, still capable of corrupting those innocent 1980s high schoolers. She had to call home, get a ride home, and change clothes. The school banned her from classes until she did.

Banned.

The holiday of Cinco de Mayo, the 5th of May, is not, as Assistant Principal Rodriguez and many other people apparently think, Mexico’s Independence Day. South of the Border, Independence Day is September 16. Here’s the history: Mexico was a debtor nation when, in 1861, then-Mexican President Benito Juarez stopped paying the interest on the loans. France held a lot of the notes, so they sent in their debt collectors in the form of the French army to force payment of this debt. The regional holiday of Puebla commemorates the victory of the Mexican militia over the French army at The Battle of Puebla in 1862.

So Live Oak High School wanted to punish five kids for not celebrating a battle over a loan default.

Never occurred to Assistant Principal Rodriguez (a professional educator) that the right principle would have been to let the kids duke it out, send them to separate corners, and use the whole experience as a teaching moment, eh?

Back to kids eating dirt.

The United States maintains a fiction that we want well educated kids. We bandy about buzz words like “experiential learning,” “critical thinking,” and “expanding horizons” while we isolate the kids from the ebb and flow of playground confrontation, intelligent decision making, or anything that might impact their self esteem. And gawd help us if we expose them to germs.

Ofttimes kids learn better when we let them be kids. That includes having the odd playground discussion over political values and eating a bit of dirt in the playground along the way.

A Perfect Ten(ure)?

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Perfect?

Tenure /TEN-yur/ n. The status of holding one’s position on a permanent basis without periodic contract renewals or threat of dismissal.

My grandfather, a full professor (Chemistry) at Temple, had tenure. My cousin, a full Professor (Wildlife Ecology) at Perdue, has tenure. My 12th grade English teacher, the one who made me memorize John Donne’s birthday, has tenure. OK, she’s dead, now, but she still has her teaching position.

Vermont and Florida are at-will employment states. Under American law, the legal doctrine simply means the employer can fire your furry butt “for good cause, or bad cause, or no cause at all,” and the employee can quit, strike, or take a permanent sabbatical with no liability. There are a couple of caveats. Tenure, an employment contract, or a collective bargaining agreement all govern the employment relationship and negate at-will laws. According to employeeissues.com, “Virtually all states are employment at-will states.”

Teachers unions love tenure.

I taught in Vermont Colleges for a number of years. I have never sought nor held tenure.

There’s no real point to teacher tenure, especially in primary or secondary schools. These schools aren’t universities where professors like my grandfather and cousin create controversy through groundbreaking research and publication. School teachers teach. They need the same level of protection against bombasts, crying parents, and incompetent bosses that any professional needs. And not a penny more.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R-CA) supports California Senate Bill 955. That bill proposes to give school administrators the ability to assign or fire teachers based on their effectiveness and to clean up the firing process itself. No longer will bad teachers get the free ride.

The legislation was quickly blasted by the California Teachers Association and by my friend Lido (“Lee”) Bruhl who thinks it a mere ploy to fire all the senior (translation: “expensive”) teachers. “I do not think a teacher should get sacked just because they’re higher up the pay scale,” he said, “and I don’t think there’s enough difference between how teachers teach for that to be much of a factor.”

Lee was born on another planet. They may not have schools there.

Public school teachers across this country receive step raises every year. Year in, year out, a teacher who does nothing but show up for work most of the 179 days in the average U.S. school year gets a raise. Exactly the same raise as the teacher who works overtime every day, brings work home on nights and weekends, attends conferences, takes extra courses, and (just as an oh, by the way) happens to have classrooms full of happy, productive students who actually learn stuff.

A Los Angeles Unified School District task force has delivered recommendations about teacher effectiveness. It’s a major push toward removing outrageous obstacles to firing bad teachers and creating a robust evaluation system for teachers.

Imagine that. Judging a teacher’s worth by his or her performance on the job. Now there is an unusual concept.

“‘Worth’ is not always easy to judge, Dick, outside of the fantasies of right-wing ‘thinkers’ like you,” Lee said.

Another planet. With neither creativity nor original thought, it is difficult to design a system that measures how well teachers teach. After all, having successful students ought not be part of the equation, now, should it? The creators of the standardized tests we all took for college and graduate-school admissions, academics to a person, all claim their tests are not “objective.” The employee ranking systems now popular with B-School grads uniformly lead to disaster in employee morale and performance. After all, it is possible to have a department full of chowder heads. Do you want to grade them on a curve? Or you could be part of a department of superstars. Do you want to end up on the bottom of that curve?

This ain’t rocket science. The appraisal criteria for a teacher:

  • must be objective;
  • must be based on an analysis of actual job requirements;
  • must be based on individual behaviors (performance) rather than personality;
  • must relate to classroom actions, not what the school board or state is doing,
  • must be measurable;
  • and must be within the control of the teacher.

This ain’t rocket science. Principal communicates the job requirements to the teacher. Teacher sets measurable goals. Principal and teacher meet every now and then to measure performance against the goals.

On the other hand, my next notion may be heresy. If we look at objective measures like today’s test scores, Lee might be right. There may not be enough difference between teachers for classroom performance to be much of a factor.

January 21, 1572

Village Bans

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Not a wedding announcement.

Our Voices Exposed, a group of Enosburg Falls, Vermont, High School students met with the village Board of Trustees there a couple of weeks ago to ramp up the board about the negative impact of second hand smoke. On Tuesday night, the board passed an ordinance that bans smoking outside in the village’s two parks. The ban goes into effect on June 12, right after the Vermont Dairy Festival.

It would be bad politics — not to mention a financial disaster — to undermine Dairy Days in this state.

That vote comes on the heels of Burlington’s outdoor smoking ban enacted late last month. Burlington’s ordinance comes with hefty fines for those caught lighting up in city parks and on beaches: $50 to $200 per offense. Burlington also bans idling cars or trucks in the city.

Nannies.

My friend Rufus called them “ninnies. Imposing their stupidity on us.”

I can make all the cases against smoking. I started as a kid, filching Pall Malls from the long drawer atop my dad’s bureau. King size. Unfiltered. When I started buying my own, I switched to the smooth, mild Chesterfield. Ronald Reagan sent cartons of Chesterfields as Christmas gifts for “all my friends” in the ads he made. It is the smoke of True Romance. It wasn’t enough, though, so I eventually switched to the stronger, manlier Between the Acts. Now that little cigar was great for my cough and the smoke could clear a room faster than a dog fart.

I quit in 1976. See, I’m cheaper than I was cool and the carton price was about to hit $5. It was time.

Still, I understand why people smoke and why they want to. And I understand the dangers of second hand smoke. I don’t see much science behind a danger that says three parts per billion of tobacco tar in the atmosphere will cause global warming. Or hiccups in rats. Or something.

That’s political science.

I suspect that this Generation of Don’t wants to carry the nation to a total ban of smoking. They can’t get that passed, so they are nibbling away at it park by park. Starting with Vermont.

Maybe Rufus ain’t wrong after all.

Rum and Kook a COLA

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There is no inflation. The Cost of Living hasn’t risen for several quarters.

Cost of living is by definition the cost of maintaining a certain standard of living.

Employment contracts, pension benefits, and government payments such as your Social Security check can be tied to a cost-of-living index, typically to the CPI or “Consumer Price Index.”

The CPI reports the average price of a lot of stuff — what is called a constant “market basket of goods and services” — purchased by average households. According to Bloomberg Business News, the CPI wonks add up and average the prices of 95,000 items from 22,000 stores and 35,000 rental units. Those prices are weighted by assuming that you distribute your spending along strict percentages. Housing: 41.4%, Food and Beverage: 17.4%, Transport: 17.0%, Medical Care: 6.9%, Other: 6.9%, Apparel: 6.0%, and Entertainment: 4.4%. Taxes are exempt from the CPI totals so when your property tax or sales tax or income tax or Cadillac health care tax or gasoline tax or telecommunications tax or blue cheese tax rises, it doesn’t actually cost you any extra.

In calculating the CPI, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics uses a formula that reflects the fact that consumers shift their purchases toward products that have fallen in relative price. Although this substitution game means the BLS reduces what we pay by “living with” store brands instead of name brands, BLS says my analysis is incorrect. Their objective “is to calculate the change in the amount consumers need to spend to maintain a constant level of satisfaction.” As long as the BLS gets to define “satisfaction.”

Where, oh where is Mick when we need him?

The Social Security Administration writes, “Since 1975, Social Security’s general benefit increases have been based on increases in the cost of living, as measured by the Consumer Price Index. We call such increases Cost-Of-Living Adjustments, or COLAs. Because there has been a decline in the Consumer Price Index, there will be no COLA payable in 2010.”

  • Campbell’s Cream of Tomato soup costs between 80 cents and $1 per can in most markets today. Do you remember when it was 40 cents? I do. But the Cost of Living has declined.
  • A five-pound bag of flour costs about $2.49 in most markets today. Do you remember when it was a buck? I do. But the Cost of Living has declined.
  • Gasoline costs between $3.50 and $4 per gallon in most markets. Do you remember when it was $0.999? I do. But the Cost of Living has declined.
  • According to USAToday, health insurance premiums cost about $13,375 per annum last year. (And despite the new law, insurers say they do not have to cover kids with pre-existing conditions.) Do you remember when a family policy cost $2,500? I do. But your premiums will still go up. And, of course, the Cost of Living has declined.
  • Milk costs between $3.50 and $4 per gallon in most markets. Do you remember when it was $1.75? I do. But the Cost of Living has declined.

I wish stuff didn’t cost so much but even more I wish our “leaders” didn’t lie to us about stuff costing so much. Oddly, I cannot vote myself a raise.