Responsibility.

Jan 10 2012

Here’s some shit I’m tired of:

The very people that seem most poised to claim that they represent and promote an ethic of “personal responsibility” are often the very same folks who most frequently jump at the chance to blame any and everything on the government. (…except that they usually call it the “gub’mint”)

Here’s the deal, civics all-stars: the gub-mint is US. In our republic, the people are the polity–the government. If we don’t like the government, lying around bitching about it is really just a simultaneous exercise in ignorance and self-incrimination. Because the government is us.

“We the people” — not “they the other people who are not, nor ever will be, us, who rule our lives without any input from our voices” created this government, and it is our role/responsibility to change it when we see fit. How? By voting people to represent us who reflect our desires and priorities for how the country/state/city/school board/etc ought to work. Don’t like it? Vote them out. Someone you think is a fool or incompetent or malicious evildoer keep on winning elections? Don’t blame him or her, blame the electorate. And then do your best to change their minds.

Because the government is us.

It’s not been that long — since 1965 or so — that the right to vote for all American adult citizens has been a tangible reality. It took us quite a while to get there. In other words, more than any other generation before that time, if the government sucks, it truly is our fault. Projecting our problems (or at least the cause of our problems) onto some distant, disconnected government, as though it were foreign to us, is lazy and willfully ignorant, at best.

A recent commentary I heard reflected that the fundamental problem with money in politics, at least for executive elections (ie, not lobbying legislatures and legislators) isn’t the money per se. It’s ignorant voters. What are all of these hundreds of millions of dollars donated to campaigns going? Generally (besides buying gargantuan quantities of pizza, according to a new story in The Atlantic), they are spent on political advertisements. How many people do you know who will admit to being influenced to vote for this or that candidate solely on the basis of a tv ad? How many more actually are influenced as such? Certainly, the second number is higher than the first. Political ads work on ignorant voters…get rid of ignorant voters — or the ignorance of voters, put more specifically and humanely, and you will greatly reduce the role of money and corporate donations in electoral politics for executive offices. When this happens, we begin to claim a government more responsive and accountable to its citizens for its actions and decisions.

In other words, we begin to get the government that we (ie, the government) deserve — which is what we’re going to get either way, so we might as well work on improving it.

Because, thankfully, the government is us, and it’s on us, and not “them”, to fix it when it’s not functioning right. To do otherwise is to point a finger at a “them” that doesn’t exist…and on and on in a spiral wherein nobody wants to take responsibility for the state of the government.

Personal responsibility, indeed.

Opinions.

Why do many people care so much and react so viscerally when someone else professes not to like the same music as they do?

I ask this question because I’m often on the offending end of this interaction. I have lots of opinions, including those about music, and I know what I do and do not like. (I also, let it be said, know what I don’t know enough about to like or to dislike…for example, 3 bands people asked me my opinion on at the bar last night). Sometimes I think people ask me my opinion about X band because they know full well that someone else in the room is a huge partisan of X band and my friend thinks I’ll provide some colorful commentary insulting the music and/or musicians of said band. Depending on the company, I’m happy to oblige.

Anyhow, the question now is more about why people seem to place so much meaning on others’ opinions on their likes (or dislikes). Maybe it’s insecurity. Maybe it’s because so much of our self-images is tied up in what we like. Maybe I fear I’m about to get too “High Fidelity” right now. I’ll stop that. Usually, I think it’s the first one — after all, if a person were confident in his opinions, why should my (equally, but certainly no more than, valid) opinion matter to him? If I think a certain musician consistently puts out over-produced, cute twee music and that I, for the life of me, can’t understand why so many of my peers/colleagues/friends/generation are so into it, then so what’s it to you? Whether or not I think it’s darling to presume to make an album about each state in the union is also immaterial. I don’t demand that others assent to my opinions; why is it so difficult for people to let me have mine in peace?

I think it’s dumb to argue whether or not a band sucks. (In contrast, I don’t think it’s dumb or invalid to argue whether, for example, Thom Yorke is a pretentious, writhing, twit–he just happens to front a band I don’t like).  It’s entirely subjective what you and I like or don’t like; it’s not really a point worth arguing. “How can you not like that?!?”, I hear from dear friends. I don’t know; sometimes I want to, but I honestly can’t and don’t like the band all of you like. It’s not for a lack of trying.

I still bank on insecurity. Why people might be so insecure in their own opinions to the extent that my expression of a contrary opinion might upset them is beyond me. Maybe I’m just missing that processor in my brain. People do it with food too; just because I think ranch dressing’s vile and one of the surest indicators of “What’s wrong with ‘merica” doesn’t mean that I care one lick if you want to brush your teeth with the stuff.

Point is: if you are going to go through the trouble to have an opinion, then have the damn opinion and don’t be so concerned that everyone agree with it. Especially if “everyone” includes me. I’m not out to be a contrarian ass just because I like to wind people up; I just happen to not care if my opinions and likes match up with everyone around me.

Still: Bon Iver sucks.

School.

Here’s what I think might help:

Some ways to make High School work better.

• Students would take 6 one-hour class periods per day, all year long. 24 credits are required for graduation.
• 4 credits each of English, History, Science, Mathematics.
• 2 credits each of arts, PE, Foreign language, and electives.
• Schools would have a vigorous vocational education program; students would opt in at the start of the 9th grade year. Vocational education students would take 12 of their total 24 units in their vocational track…3 each of the core areas and no electives. Perhaps districts could have ‘magnet’ vocational programs, where each school per district could specialize in one or two specific vocational programs. Vocational tracks will include community mentorships with local businesses/contractors.
• In this vein, school leaders would ideally and immediately also cease the refrain of “all students need to be college ready”. No, they don’t. too many students go to college, reaping no real benefits and only debt for themselves (and eventually the rest of us), honest, vocational work has been unduly and harmfully stigmatized, and the goal of public education is not to produce “college-ready” drones. Besides, if that were the goal, the current system is coming up woefully short, unless the goal is to be “ready” for 4th-rate and for-profit/online “colleges”.
• Students would have 1 hour for lunch, preferably in a cafeteria providing real, actual, nutritious food, ideally from local farms. We have a wealth of agricultural resources, and this model once worked effectively, only to be abandoned decades ago. A healthy breakfast and lunch would be provided to students who demonstrate need. Schools cannot solve the immense problems and consequences of poverty; they can work to alleviate some of its basic impediments to learning. One of these is adequate nutrition.
• All credits will be un-weighted on a 4-point scale. No matter the level of the course, a grade of “A” is worth 4, a “B” is worth 3 and so on. This will combat grade inflation, students enrolling in classes for the wrong reasons, and the endless shifting of students through and among ‘levels’. Students should be made well aware that they aren’t fooling any college admissions officer with inflated gpas.
• Eventually, letter grades altogether will be eliminated in favor of numerical averages. This will eliminate students’ slacking when they know they have little chance to reach a certain grade boundary. Further, numerical grades more accurately reflect student mastery…a 92% and an 84.5% are both “B”s, but reflect different levels of mastery.
• All school administrators will teach one academic class per year, in the field of his/her expertise.
• A much more rigorous system of administrative and peer evaluation of all teachers would be implemented; in my experience, the current system is a tragic joke helping no teacher and hindering teaching and learning. Teachers will be observed once per month for one full class period in an unannounced observation by either a peer or administrator. Meaningful critique and feedback will be shared via post-observation conference no less than one week after the observation were to take place. Teachers will be responsible to complete 5 peer observations per year, which works out to one peer-observation every two months of school. If these observations deteriorate into the current system of meaningless pro-forma box ticking, then this will be a waste of time, resources, and energy–once has an administrator has set foot in my classroom for the last three school years, which has done nothing to improve my teaching. Instead, care must be taken and oversight  provided that observations, conferences, and critiques are done in a thorough, meaningful, and substantial fashion. This sort of evaluation and assessment system will also make administrators much more able to make informed decisions about which teachers should be removed from the classroom.
• The school year will be expanded by 5 days per year for 4 consecutive years, so that by the end of the shift, students will attend school for 200 days per year. This number still places US students at the low end of their international competitors in other industrialized nations regarding numbers of contact hours in school, but it’s a start.
• The summer break will be contracted to  six weeks, with three other two week breaks after each grading period. Eventually, this will shift to four two-week breaks after each grading period, once the 200 day school year is fully in place. The current system reflects grossly perverted priorities and an antiquated, century-old paradigm wherein a majority of students were needed for family agricultural labor. This is no longer the case, our students — especially poor students — suffer academically because of it, and such a change is very long overdue.
• The federal department of education will set clear, specific, and detailed national curriculum standards for each subject. This will be one of the two primary roles of the Dept of Education. It will be up to state and local governments to decide how to meet these standards.  Students will take nationally standardized tests once in each of their core subjects (4 total). These tests will be low-stakes tests viz how they are figured into students grades/graduation. “Test prep” in its current incarnation will consist of zero school days. These tests will be written by a national panel of current and retired classroom teachers. These tests will contain no multiple-choice questions and will rely on subject-appropriate assessments. For example, literature students’ assessment would be writing/analysis centered; science students’ assessment would require a written understanding of the scientific method as applied to their specific subject. These standardized assessments will be the same from state to state and will not be used to judge the performance of specific schools or teachers; they will be used to gauge student progress and mastery in the specific subject tested. These standardized assessments will not be created, scored, or generated by a for-profit company; this is the current practice and has had only deleterious effects on the educational culture of the US for the last 15 years.
• Beyond the two roles (creating national standards and overseeing the creation/administration/evaluation of nationally standardized tests) of the department of education noted above, all previous roles of that department will fall to state governments.
• The system of teacher seniority and tenure will be changed. Based on the full and good-faith implementation of the observation/evaluation system proposed above, principals will have greater hiring/firing power of his/her teachers and administrative team. Tenure will be much more difficult to obtain, changing more to a ‘master teacher’ status, gained as a result of the aggregation of many years of superior performance evaluations by peers and administrators, an active pursuit of meaningful professional development in his/her content area and pedagogy, and contributions mentoring inexperienced teachers. A helpful and most successful model of this sort of change is seen in the PAR program, successfully implemented in cities such as Rochester, Minneapolis, and Cincinnati for decades (see: http://www.gse.harvard.edu/~ngt/par/). This program was supported by candidate Obama in 2007; sadly, his dept of education and Sec. Duncan have generally supported programs and ideologies quite to the contrary.
•   Further, teachers collectively will have the right to remove their administrator(s)  with a 75% or greater vote of the full faculty of the school.
• Many of the traditional gateways to individuals wishing to enter teaching will be discarded. No longer will an undergraduate education degree suffice or be acceptable (elementary schools excepted). All individuals will have at least one degree (bachelor or master) in his/her specific content area, an overall college g.p.a of 3.0 and a subject g.p.a. of at least 3.2, complete a 12-week paid student teaching/mentorship program, and pass a criminal background check to be considered for teaching jobs. Beyond these criteria, all hires are subject to principal discretion.
• Funding for the above initiatives will come primarily from the state government and state taxation, in order to ensure equality of opportunity for all students in a state, regardless of the tax base in his/her specific community. Gross inequities between school systems are most immediately due to discrepancies in the local tax-base.
• Stop expecting schools to fill roles they were institutionally not designed to fill. These include, but are not limited to: everything besides equal opportunity for teaching, learning, and success. Also: scapegoat for all of the US’ problems.
• Further, stop expecting/demanding schools to solve problems not of their own creation. This includes, but is not limited to: broken families, poverty, dysfunction in the home, poor priorities, and poverty. Yes, twice.

This is obviously a rough work in progress.

up next: why it’s ok if I don’t like the same music you like.

 

Irony.

In my rush to walk with haste back to my apartment to use the toilet facilities, I failed to watch where I was stepping and landed my shoe in a mound of dog poo.

 

That, Alanis, is true irony.

Resilience

I feel like I used to be quite resilient. Now I’m quite not, it seems.

 

I’m not sure what happened, if anything, to cause this. I feel like my armor is thinned.

 

I’ll come back and edit this when I lack this degree sleep deprivation.

Virtue.

While in downward-facing dog this afternoon, I began to question the virtue of virtue. To myself, of course.

I know and interact with lots of people on a daily basis – surely more than the average person.  Besides the fact that this saps me and my introversion, it also presents me with a rather broad spectrum of exhibited virtue. To the extent that I can judge, the virtue of some folks I come across is rather thin. Why should I care? (caveat: I don’t have children, so I’m not talking about people who interact with my children..and I’m not talking about my relatives, who are generally and almost always virtuous).

Then, though (or in downward facing dog, as it were), I have to stop and question myself about why I care about the lack of virtue in others. I do get personally offended, but why? Is it that I believe others owe me a specific amount of respect and politeness? I suppose, but is this in and of itself a virtuous belief? Should I care? I know that many people would say that their concern is for society as a whole, and at some level(s), I fully agree with this view…we should treat each other well because it is better for society writ large. I believe this, and yet, when I examine it, I also doubt how much it matters in the long run. It needs to go deeper than “be nice”.

 

Put another way: Why do I care that assholes sometimes live charmed lives? Especially if it doesn’t at all directly affect me?

Jealously, I imagine. I feel like I’m usually not an asshole, so therefore I somehow deserve to live a more “charmed” life than people who exhibit (to me) less virtue than I do.

Unfortunately, sometimes the net effect of these thoughts is to make me regret past virtue on my part.

 

This isn’t really going anywhere – but I don’t intend for it to. Just thinking about it.

Neck.

Sometimes, I feel like my head is held upon my shoulders by a serpentine choke of dried rope.

Macro-children.

One of the manifold things that frustrates me in the current debates (sic) over current educational issues is a fundamental failure to grasp that not all ideas are scalable (though it does seem that the bad ones catch on writ large more than the good ones).

Obviously, parents want was is best for his/her child(ren), and education is central to many of these desires. The problem comes when what many perceive as best for their child and what is best for an effective educational system in the macro- sense come into conflict, or are not compatible. To me, this is the fundamental issue on why many meaningful reform ideas don’t get very far.

The current slogan-long and ideas-short fad of touting charters and/or vouchers and/or privatization as the next in a long line of educational panaceas (what do they all have in common through the years? They don’t work) is a good example of this. It’s fairly easy to create an excellent school or handful of schools. Concentrate the resources, most talented/motivated students, most active parents, and best facilities into a small place. Bingo! Students there will succeed by any given measure and certainly teachers there will be deemed masters.
One of the many problems with this perspective is that it simply isn’t scalable to schools on a broader level. If improving all schools to an excellent standard is the goal (and it’s not the goal of the groups listed above–dismantling or fatally crippling public education to leave more room, money, and rationalization for their pet programs generally is), there are a number of discongruities.  When private or charter schools boot out a kid, where do they go? To their local public school, who doesn’t have the option to remove a student who is poor, underachieving, special needs, a troublemaker, or has apathetic parents. The reality is that some students come from homes with some or all of these disadvantages, and a system designed to create a few excellent schools cannot and will not address these needs. What is best for my child, ie creating a great school for her to attend, may have morally/structurally neutral consequences, at best. If this model is projected on a large scale, though, a greater concentration of human, financial, and educational resources will become concentrated in schools where parents are most motivated. Good for those parents and their children.  However, we ought not create and encourage the persistence of systems wherein the children of absent, apathetic, or too-busy parents are consigned to sub-par schools with the least experienced or least ambitious teachers, few resources, and little community support.

A bit less selfishness greater breadth of view from those seeking a few great schools would be a great boon to those children, and to society as a whole in the long-run.

Judge.

What is the proper way to say “get your shit together”? I often want to tell a person that their problem is simply a need to get his/her shit together. However, of those people, only a select few are able to hear me tell them this sentiment in so many words and not get bent out of shape. What is the proper way to say this? “I wish you would try harder at life”? “Why can’t you pay attention to the world”? “Can I help you be a grown-up today”? None of these sound very helpful either.

(nb, I am reminded of the conversation between Tony and Stephanie in Saturday Night Fever…I’m just not going there right now)

I digress:

Is my kindness toward others predicated on becoming a less judgmental person? Do I have to become less judgmental in general, or only in specific to a person to whom I’m attempting to show kindness? Is it a sliding scale, where my capacity for kindness toward others is greatest when my judgmental attitudes are minimized or eliminated. I don’t know what to think about any of this.

I can be a frightfully judgmental person…not in the “I think you’re going to hell if you play poker” vein, but more that I’m usually hyper-aware of what’s going on around me. Coupled with a mental landscape that is littered with an amazing number of “oughts”, I can find lots to judge. Not that I’m proud of it…it’s usually a pain in the ass, and an involuntary one at that. Sometimes I think I’m doing a public service in my judgments, especially of shitty drivers…my thought is that I’m judging someone for being careless with the lives of others; what could be wrong with that? Does that prohibit or inhibit my kindness to other drivers? To others in general? I do know that I really like when I see kindness given, received, or reciprocated on the road…the offering of the ‘hand of conciliation’ is a keen example of this. I think this is only fair for me to recognize such a positive trait in fellow motorists.

Anyhow, I digress. I’m judgmental in other, non-asphalt related areas too. I just walk around with so many rules, and oughts, and thoughts about how people should treat each other — most of which I genuinely believe to be right and good and at their hearts beneficial to society (after all, I still think etiquette to be about putting others before oneself). For example, if a person were to have an appointment with me, but found himself to be running late, I would think it right to give a call saying that he was going to be a bit tardy. I can be harsh on those with a lax attitude toward punctuality (after all, I was taught that it’s the highest form of arrogance to keep someone waiting, implying that their time was less valuable than yours), but I do understand that sometimes, unforeseen things can arise. In that scenario, I think it’s necessary, out of courtesy and care for others, to let the waiting party know that one is going to be late. Failure to do this is self-centered and lazy. I had someone 15 minutes late to meet me, out of concern for his safety that he had not called, I called the person (wondering if he was ever going to contact me, or leave me waiting and hanging indefinitely), who said he was running behind. No shit, center of the universe. Anyhow, he never showed up, which he told me an hour later in a call. Should I hold a grudge against this hypothetical person? No. Will I harbor judgmental feelings about him? Yes. Is this a problem? This is what I don’t know. From a psychological point of view, this person has conditioned me to expect inconsiderate behavior. That much is true. Maybe I’m guilty of taking the golden rule to its converse conclusion. Or is it inverse? I don’t know.

In other words, is it unkind, or prohibitive of kindness, for me to have judgmental or harsh feelings towards others’ shows of unkindness/disrespect/discourtesy/etc? Or does it show that I greatly value kindness and courtesy and care for others? Are they mutually exclusive?

I have intentionally left the topic of the behaviour of other peoples’ children in public for another time. I do not have children, but I observe an inordinate number of them, and I harbor lots of opinions/judgments about other peoples’ parenting — lots of them positive, many of them not. That’s a discussion for another time.

Karamazov.

This is a placeholder for me to write some profound reflections on the monumental novel I just finished.

Just finished reading, that is.

Who saw that ending coming? More to come.

 

_______________________________________________________________

 

Ok. Real quick like this:

I finished the book 2 days ago and it’s still marinating on my brain, which might indicate the depth and profundity of the work . Knowing where Dostoevsky is generally coming from viz. human nature, faith, neighbourly relations, etc etc helps ground the work a bit, though I think I’d have enjoyed the book just as well had I not known. The way he crafts the epilogue and makes his final statement is really quite exceptional in that he’s able to make a very large statement in a very small way — small in the same way that I find Graham Greene’s works small in the very best sort of intimate way.

Comparing it with Crime and Punishment, which I read last year, is tough. That book feels more like a character study than a carefully crafted discussion of explicitly ‘big questions’ — not to say that there aren’t ‘big’ questions raised in Crime, but those are less explicit and more focused. Crime and Punishment’s perspective is generally inside the head of the protagonist, which becomes familiar space by the end of that novel to the extent that I would walk through the mall thinking (if not empathising with) “what would Raskolnikov do?”. The novel I just finished feels more epic in every way — scope, ideas, lingering aroma — etc etc. That doesn’t mean that I necessarily prefer one over the other, but it does mean that they have an almost sensory difference between them.

Pardon if this is phenomenally vague, but I’m trying to be a non-ass spoiler preserver, which is not always a role I embrace with much adeptness. The point is to say that I very much am glad that I read these two books, and Karamazov most recently, and appreciate the ways that I’m invited to think during the process.

Plus, I think I finally understand these Russian patronymics.

 

(Special shout-to-the-out to Russian Standard brand vodka, which accompanied me through certain bits of this novel – by no means all of it, to my liver’s relief. Made in St Petersburg of hard winter wheat and glacial water…it’s the first vodka I’ve voluntarily enjoyed)