GOP should hush the out of touch

The U.S. political pundits are busy this week trying to determine “what we can learn” from the presidential election.  So far they have determined that there is a “new reality” in American politics based on the increased number of new voters: some young, some Hispanic, some Asian and some black. Old-time Republican Party members are using their loss as a lever to try to convince all Republican members of Congress not to let the ultra-right wing, fundamentalist views of the Tea Party control their votes.

What the Republicans should also learn is that it is time to kick a few of their more familiar, influential commentators to the curb.  Carl Rove was a kingpin in the Bush administration and continues to be a far-right mover and shaker in the Republican Party. The sight of him on Fox Network continuing to insist that Ohio could still go for Romney after all the networks and news organizations, bolstered by over seventy percent of the votes being cast and multiple polls, had declared Obama the winner was pathetic.  He blustered and blubbered in such a strange, disjointed way that even the other Fox commentators were incredulous.  Kick him to the curb.

Right wing commentator and broadcaster Bill O’Reilly concluded that the election was lost because the new voters were weak, uninformed, selfish creatures who knew nothing about politics or economic reality and voted for Obama because they were only interested in irresponsible spending and acquiring “things, more and more things.” Apparently the intellectual and moral superiority of millionaire O’Reilly insulates him from the moral deterioration that results from acquiring “things.”  Or perhaps when the things one desires to acquire are very expensive like the things that O’Reilly can afford, one remains untouched by the plague of moral decrepitude that infests the lower classes. Kick him to the curb.

Then of course there is staunch Republican and mega-entrepreneur Donald Trump who announced to the world in several Tweets when Obama took an early lead: “Lets fight like hell and stop this disgusting injustice. He lost the popular vote by a lot and won the election.  We should have a revolution.”  He determined this because Obama at the time was ahead in the Electoral College vote, but behind in the popular vote.  Not only were his Tweets irresponsibly worded (not to mention seditious) but they show a complete lack of understanding of the American electoral process and history. (His buddy George W. Bush won his election over Al Gore though 500,000 popular votes behind) Kick him to the curb.

Until the Republican Party learns to disavow babbling self-promoters like these, the political new reality will forever elude them.

No Zero Earns a Zero

The recent case of the teacher in Edmonton, suspended by his school board for assigning zeroes for assignments that were never completed, is a classic example of education theory clashing with class room reality.  Popular education theory today requires that the public school system assume responsibility for student success.  Student failure is the system’s failure.  Teachers must find ways to “empower” students to achieve, well, something.  The reality is that many students have reaped the benefits of this theory because it has virtually eliminated their own responsibility for choosing to do little or no work.

            While school counsellors and administrators continually talk to students about the consequences of bad choices, the reality is that the system has continually postponed or eliminated the negative consequences of bad choices.   Schools in B.C. for years have been forbidden to put failing grades on report cards, replacing the “F” with an “I” for Incomplete.  The concept of failing was considered too harmful to student self-esteem to be countenanced. The Edmonton school board has expanded the definition of what is harmful to include zeroes for work that was never completed.

The policy came from a basically sound concept: Academic grades should be determined solely on the quality of the students’ work, not other factors.  This grew out of the practice many teachers had of docking marks for assignments that were late, for students being late to class, for missing planned tests or quizzes without a note from home excusing them, etc. Reduction of students’ marks was a form of punishment designed to alter their behaviour.  However, awarding zeroes for assignments not done is not a punishment of student behaviour. These are marks based on the students’ work, or in this case, the absence of it, just as students who leave questions blank on tests are given zeroes for those blanks.

The apologists for the No Zero policy excuse the students who fail to hand in assignments by saying that there are factors in their lives that prevent them from doing the work and that to give them a zero is penalizing or punishing them for those contributing factors.  The apologists conveniently fail to appreciate that those zeroes are in fact in keeping with their own definition of what a grade should be: an appraisal solely of a student’s work. A failing grade indicates that the work was not completed at a satisfactory level.  Not doing it at all falls within the definition of not completing it at a satisfactory level.  Grades are not measurements of potential, student ability, effort, personality, character or anything other than the work itself.  When no work is done, a zero is the only accurate numerical indicator.

Teachers of high school academic courses are already giving students more than ample opportunity to complete their work.  Teachers provide extra help when asked, accept late papers, allow students to rewrite assignments, provide alternate assignments for those with academic challenges, and offer unprecedented numbers of options for special projects and term papers.  Schools offer different levels of difficulty in English and Math courses, and a variety of Science courses and alternate electives.  As well, the requirements for graduation from high school have been made much easier than ever before.  In large part, the many options offered to students have been created to accommodate their varied interests and abilities.  An unintended by-product has been that the responsibility for student success has been shifted more and more away from the student and placed on the school system and on teachers. By prohibiting the use of the zero to indicate that no work at all has been done, the system has finally assumed total responsibility for that success.  The system now refuses to admit that students are capable of doing nothing, but instead will find some way for those students do something.  The nature, importance, seriousness of the work they end up doing, its quantity and quality, its relevance and significance may be questionable, but they will find a way to replace that zero with a real number.  Many high school students will applaud this final surrender of their responsibility.  Unfortunately, it is a corruption of educational theory that will provide only the illusion of success and confirm in the minds of the public that public education has lost its way. 

The No Zero policy truly deserves a zero.

Buying passing grades? Congratulations!

The June 18 Vancouver Sun front page story “Struggling students buying passing grades” should come as no surprise.  Public education in B.C. and indeed in all of Canada has long since adopted the U.S. concept that education is a business that should be managed and regarded like any other commercial enterprise.  School administrators, ministers of education, trustees and even teachers frequently refer to students as clients or customers, learning as the education product and teaching as a service to be delivered. Who then can fault schools that seek the ultimate business goal: profit? Indeed, school districts have used foreign exchange students for years as a source of income. Each exchange student must pay the full cost of his or her education to the district, some $8000+.  Schools with declining enrolment have attracted students by becoming specialty schools, providing hockey instruction or some other extra-curricular attraction.  With each full-time student comes additional government funding, a good business practice.

Of greater importance is that this shoe-horning of public education into a business model has led to the adoption of corporate management strategies.  Decisions are made at the government level without consultation and handed down through the corporate hierarchy to school boards, superintendants, principals and finally teachers.  The only determination of school success is what can be measured: test scores, drop-out rates, dollars spent, percentage of graduates, etc.  These can be graphed, plotted, analysed and then used to develop ways to adapt business practices and develop strategies to improve them.  Individual districts have tried to follow Covey’s sure-fire practices for improvement, have fiddled with the “culture” of the schools, and held hundreds of hours of consultations with “stakeholders;” all of which led to no measureable improvement in anything, or indeed any change at all.   The Province has altered course requirements, refocused the curriculum on career planning, increased emphasis on the accreditation process, and then decreased it (too expensive).  Still the Ministry of Education demanded statistical improvement, requiring schools to develop plans to achieve it and even employing four Super-Superintendents to ensure success.  The result? No real improvement, only more emphasis on those practices designed to give superficial proof of success. Poor statistical achievement at the Grade 10 and 12 level?  No problem. Schools pad classroom marks so that when combined with the government exam marks at those levels, the overall student marks look better.  At the Grade 4 and 7 levels, schools find ways to keep low achieving students from taking government assessment tests so that the school shows improvement, or they simply provide special assistance to those students.  Since drop-out rates can be a problematic statistic, secondary schools all have special programs for students who “can’t handle” regular classroom situations.  These programs all consist of watered down courses that students complete by doing a series of worksheets or computerized courses, the content of which is a fraction of the regular classroom course.  They miraculously achieve B’s and A’s on courses that they previously failed.  And if you can’t complete courses by the time you are nineteen, don’t worry, the adult requirements for graduation are only two-thirds of those for normal graduation; just sit tight and you can graduate without nearly as much work, and the school will use your success as a positive statistic. 

The serious issues facing public education -- issues of relevance, the use of technology, student achievement – are beyond the scope of the current corporate business model to deal with. As long as the policy makers try to impose flawed, business model solutions to public education from the top down, they will continue to be stymied. But since the alternative is a model of collegial cooperation and consensus building with the only people who really understand how to create positive, successful learning environments, the teachers, the likelihood of that changing soon is remote.  Until then, the Ministry of Education should congratulate those private schools making money by fudging marks; isn’t profit the point?

Cowboys know that April is Poetry Month

April is Poetry Month, a sure indication that poetry is in serious need of life support.  Whenever an entire month is devoted to something, one can safely assume it is not a mainstream idea, subject, issue, or movement.  For example, poetry shares April with Irritable Bowel Syndrome Month and National Oral Health Month.

Aficionados of poetry are desperate to create a love of poetry in the multitudes. Unfortunately, the poetry that they love does not appeal to the vast majority of North Americans: it doesn’t rhyme and has no regular rhythm.  North Americans like a beat and at least an occasional rhyme, a tendency perhaps inherited from the Anglo-Saxons a thousand or more years ago who wrote their epics with a heavy beat and lots of alliteration. 

For the last hundred years, poets in North America have drifted away from rhyme and a regular rhythm, relying for impact on other, less discernible poetic devices, the ones that your English teachers in high school tried to get you to memorize (simile, caesura, onomatopoeia, etc.), all of which you quickly forgot.  The last great poet who used regular rhythm (meter) and rhyme was Robert Frost; he was also the last great poet who was admired by the average North American.  Frost famously said that writing free verse, poetry without rhyme or meter, was like playing tennis without a net.

The irony is that the poetry that today’s poets have derided, or at best acknowledged without enthusism, have prospered: rap and cowboy poetry.  While most contemporary poets struggle to find an audience, rap and hip hop artists fill stadiums and cowboy poets perform before enthusiastic audiences at events throughout the West.  The two genres could hardly be farther apart in most ways: rap, along with its variants, is urban, raw, profane and often violent or sexual in content; cowboy poetry is rural, bucolic, nostalgic and a celebration of human virtues.  What they have in common is that both have a very regular beat and rely on rhyme for emphasis, cowboy poetry in particular usually  rhymes at the end of each or every second line.  This is a notable feat since it is difficult to find words that rhyme with “horse.”

No matter what your taste in poetry, however, and no matter whether you prefer, Keats, Frost, Buckshot Dot or LL Cool J, find a little time to dig out a book or CD and read or sing along in celebration of Poetry Month.  Better yet, write your own.  Your old English teachers would be proud.

Falling through the crevasses in Vancouver

The issues surrounding the death of three men in an illegal rooming house in Vancouver in 2010 were all put to rest this week when Vancouver’s City Prosecutor dropped all charges against property owner Choi Leong.  The three men, Stephen Yellowquill,  Dwayne Rasmussen  and Garland McKay died when, according to fire inspectors, a faulty string of Christmas tree lights set the ramshackle house they rented on

Pandora Street

ablaze.  I took an interest in the case when it came to light in 2010 because Garland McKay was once a student of mine. I liked Garland when I taught him in Grades Nine and Ten.   He was quiet and didn’t care much for homework, but he had a sense of humour, and he was clever.  He could draw well too.  Though I liked him, I have to admit that he was responsible for one of the three occasions when I lost my temper at school.  I caught him playing Tarzan on the stage curtains in the gym just before a drama production I was directing.  I blew up, called him an idiot. I saw him in the hall after the production was over, apologized and extended my hand.  He took it and smiled a little. I think that was the last time I spoke to him.

The coroner said Garland and the others had six to eight times the legal limit of alcohol in their bodies when they died.  I don’t know what kind of a person Garland was in the end.  The newspaper stories never commented on that.  Like so many people living in squalor in Vancouver and every other large city, Garland became anonymous, just another cipher, statistic, digit.  The woman who owned the house that he rented didn’t really care what he was like either, as long as he paid the rent.  According to an article by Michael Mui in Canoe.ca, landlord Choi Leong said she collected $1400 to $1600 a month from the five men who lived in the illegal rooming house.  She admitted at the inquest that was held that she had been instructed to make many repairs to the old, decrepit house in order to make it safe and habitable, but she had ignored them. 

The city didn’t seem to really care much about McKay or the others either.  The laws, by-laws, rules, policies and procedures that are supposed to prevent landlords like Leong from taking advantage of indigent tenants are rarely enforced.  Conflicting jurisdictions, levels of authority, agencies and bureaucrats cite all kinds of transgressions and infractions, but men and women like Garland are never really served.  The expression is that they “fall through the cracks” which implies that only a very few, particularly thin individuals apparently end up being taken advantage of.   In truth, the cracks are crevasses and as usual those with lots of money and power, and no conscience or character, find the weak and vulnerable easy and profitable targets.  For the last couple of years, whenever I have heard politicians talk about how much better life would be if only government at all levels would just “get out of the way” so that free enterprise could make the nation prosper, I have thought of Garland and people like Choi Leong.

Garland and his friends no doubt had their reasons for drinking themselves into oblivion one last time, but no matter how dark and troubling those reasons may have been, the darkness wasn’t total: they had hung a string of Christmas lights.  The irony that those faint lights caused their deaths is perhaps the saddest part of the story.

I wonder if Ms. Leong had any Christmas lights hanging in her house.

Flakcheck Offers Hope

All right, I admit to being snidely critical of the world of Twitter Text and the cult of Face Tweet.  I continue to search for that glimmer of hope, however, that the techno-revolution will have a positive effect on society beyond enabling our youth to instantly communicate to hundreds of “friends” where they ate lunch.

The use of cell phones and the Internet during the Arab Spring is encouraging, of course, but on Sunday I saw a glimmer of hope that was a little closer to home. On Bill Moyer’s weekly show on the U.S. Public Broadcasting System he interviewed  Kathleen Hall Jamieson about the website www.flackcheck.com created by the Annenberg Public Policy Center (APPC) at the University of Pennsylvania. Fed up with the hostile, negative and factually wrong political campaign ads being run during the current presidential campaign, the APPC created Flackcheck to point out exactly where the campaign ads were factually incorrect.  Not only that, but they encouraged viewers to e-mail and Tweet the candidates responsible demanding that the incorrect ads be taken off the air.  In effect they are doing in a systematic and serious way what Jon Stewart on The Daily Show does for comic effect on late-night TV. It is actually working; they have forced the removal of several ads across the country.

Canadian politics has not yet sunk to the depths of American political bad taste, but the success of attack ads down south has infiltrated our campaign processes. A Canadian website like Flackcheck would go a long way to halting that slow erosion of public discourse and would force politicians to argue policy differences on the basis of real facts and authentic issues instead of absurd exaggerations like those of Conservative MP Vic Toews.  You remember his blustery tirade, don’t you?  He stood in the House accusing the NDP, and by implication anyone else who was against his legislation, of “making things easier for child pornographers.” To the credit of Canadian observers, Toews was castigated for his comments, whereas I doubt that such remarks made in the U.S. House or Senate would have even been reported down there, unless it was to praise the politician making them for putting those godless, elitist, left-leaning so-and-so’s in their place.

If a Canadian Flackcheck website were to be created, then who knows, maybe it will lead to real political debate and a time when anyone who dares try to bamboozle voters with negative ads will be handsomely defeated in an election, not rewarded with victory.  If so, our youth will have to be commended for rescuing the political process.

Or maybe the lackadaisical Twitterfacers will be too busy texting about their lunch to care.  Time will tell. Meanwhile, the glimmer abides.

Of Oscars and Cheeseballs

I always watch the Oscars.  My wife and I joined two other couples for a night of ogling the great and near great while dining sumptuously on a variety of appetizers.  It is as close to Royal watching as we get in North America; we even dress up for the occasion, modelling the finest in Grand Forks chic.  I was nattily attired in my best blue jeans, black turtle neck and twenty year-old tweed sport coat (real English lambs’ wool).  My wife focussed on bling, donning a pair of four inch, dangling, faux ruby and cubic zirconium earrings.  Brad and Angelina looked downright dowdy in comparison.

The Oscars went according to the usual script: Billy Crystal told jokes, the winners cried or squealed sincerely, the losers looked happy for the winners, and the various husbands, wives, girlfriends and relatives beamed proudly or looked annoyed.  The only variation from the script was the absence of Jack Nicholson who was missing from the front row.

Actually there was another variation.  For the first time that I can recall, we were given a glimpse into an aspect of acting that we normally do not think about. Brad Pitt, Robert Deniro, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, and the chunky kid from Moneyball whose name I can never remember all related how disquieting it is to put everything you have in a role, without having a clue whether the movie you are making will be a hit or a flop. 

As the Oscar awards point out, the audio, the cinematography, the costuming, the make-up, the directing, the editing, all are vital to the success of a film. Of course, all the performing arts are collaborative, but in all the others the performers have an idea of the quality of the finished product because the performances are done live, as a complete unit.  Movie actors shoot scenes out of sequence, with multiple camera angles often shot for each scene.  They don’t know what shots will be chosen or if the original script will even be followed; they certainly don’t know what the finished product will look like. The movie won’t appear on the screen for months, and sometimes never makes it to theatres at all. The finished product isn’t their job.  Their job is to play the role convincingly.  That is why some actors, like Johnny Depp, never watch their own movies.  Their work, the part that is of interest and importance to them, was over months ago and now they are involved in creating different characters in new projects. 

After that part of the broadcast, I actually felt some sympathy for the over-paid, over-indulged actors who all received Oscar goody bags worth an estimated $50,000.  Then Tom Cruise came on, reality returned, and as I turned back to the table of appetizers, I felt both foolish for having felt sympathy and at the same time delighted in the delightful aroma arising from the platter of chicken wings and the delicate flavour of  my wife’s handcrafted cheese ball.