ivan

well put don

is this a fancier way of saying bullshit? i was not immediately making the connection between me and members of the artiodactyla order... no, it's just a fancier way of (jokingly) accusing you of having predilections similar to those of Dru and his countrymen. well, after reviewing the list of creatures in said order, the only one i felt a slight movement south of the border for was the vixenous central asian red deer - i've always had a thing for asians

is this a fancier way of saying bullshit? i was not immediately making the connection between me and members of the artiodactyla order...

orwell's society was one where the citizens couldn't complain though, one where the very language spoken rendered political speech impossible, and that was the foundation upon which everything else in his dark vision stood - americans have been bitching and bitchign and bitchign since at least de tocqueville's time, and there's no sign of that slacking nor any government program that will be able to stop it. times and technologies will change, and we shouldn't necessarily fear them, so long as we continue to rudely inspect and bitch about them all. paranoia is a healthy instinct, but then cancer is also a result of a healthy bodily function can too far, no?

the bigger a mountain, the less precisely meaningful the grade

jeebus...maybe i need to start soaking my hands in formaldhyde? tc's the only place i've ever taped and thought it mandatory- layton and i only had enough to do half our hands, and i recall bleeding like a stuck pig only 10 feet off the ground. i am, of course, a cheap hack though and make no claims to master tech-nique! tc's is certainly much grittier and coarse than the basalt of the portland area or the smith gorge. it seemed like god had just gone over all of the basalt blocks wiht a great big sandy paint brush.

i really don't think crime or criminal behavior has much link to genetics - it's mostly environmental/social. the law can forbid government or business to use genetic information to discriminate. it seems common sense to make it easier for the state to be able to catch rapists and murderers, who often leave dna evidence of their crime, but nothing else. explain to me more clearly what dangers you see in the government having my genetic code? and how hard is it for anyone to take that from me w/o my knowledge anyway - i leave it everywhere completely unknown to me.

i wasn't saying i couldn't come up w/ one - i'm sure what i'd come up w/ wouldn't be popular though and therefore wouldn't be accepted. the major problem in evaluating teacher though, i think, is that teaching is largely an art - and so evaluating it becomes much like evaluating any other art form. folks who get evaluated poorly get pissed and sue, and the court tends to suppor them unless there's something really concrete for the school to hang its hat on. in every district i've taught it, it seems it has been practically impossible to get fired, save for an act of gross stupidity, and usually only then after 300 warnings.

2 of the only things still made in this country! hey, at least i'm trying to stimulate the local economy

i, thought; that was waht ms-word! was for?

i haven't been to indian creek - is the easiest climb there a painful 5.9? there's only 1 clmib at that grade at TC i recall, then everything else goes to .10 and above, and all on incredibly painful rock where taping is a must!

jeebus - trout creek really ain't that great a place to LEARN how to jam!!!

geoff and i are going to ozone this afternoon bill - should be there 'roudn 3 - i gotta split by 615 though...

think i've been pretty flame-low on this thread. i don't see the union as being your biggest opponent or enemy on many of your listed items. i don't happen to put a lot of stock in a teaching certificate either, mostly b/c the process of getting one is pretty bureaucratic and meaningless, as is the process of re-newing it. most education classes are circle-jerks and utterly worthless. so, to your list: 1. i don't run rough-shod over my admin now, here or in any state. my last school in particuliar had a very strict, command/control style leadership taht was highly effective for the inner-city environmnet it operated it. do you think teachers/unions are in charge? the reality varies from school to school. in my current school, the rich parents pretty much own/control everythign. 2. i don't mind being evaluated by my peers, but they'll have to come in for observations, which is extra work for them and will require substitutes. the reality of a teacher's life is we pretty much all work in obscurity - that is, no one really knows what the hell i'm doing or how good i am b/c they're all busy working in their own rooms w/ their own kids during the school day. 3. i don't mind some small evaluation from my students/their parents either 4. i've already said standardized tests are fine as a part of evaluation. 5. i already take on "project kids" each year, and for that to be meaningful, it can't really be evaluated - the kids i try to take special interest in are deeply damaged or deranged, and the succes of any strategy of dealing w/ them heavily governed by chance. if you evaluate someone on this, they'd game the system and pick easy targets, ignoring the kids who truly need them. 6. you're mistaken if you think all kids are being pushed towards college. the esd i'm in has a very strong skills center program, and our career center in my school works very hard to put kids in all kinds of apprentice programs and highlight non-college pathways. that said, i believe the stats show an increasingly huge divide between the eventual salaries of folks w/ college degrees and those w/o. 7. you want teachers to have the right to strike their kids? i certainly wouldn't mind whaling on some of my charges, but in case you haven't noticed, society at large has turned its back on CP as a discipline tool, for better or worse. 8. you want to pay male teachers more than female teachers in order to recruit them more heavily? uhhh, okay. i'm sure that won't piss off a huge # of folks. at any rate, i don't see the need. at least in high school, there are already a large # of males. my humanities department is more than 50% male. assuming we're still somewhat stuck to that 20th century notion as the male in a family being the chief bread-winner though, it makes sense that men would prefer something more high-paying then teaching. 9. WA state already requires all teachers to have credentials to teach w/n their subject area. 10. cut admin pay? okay. their high pay is necessary to attract competence too of course. even if you pay them the same as teachers you're not reintroducing that much money into the system. i don't see that much "fat" walking around my school. most staff members are doing something useful that directly involves kids. that may not be as true at the district level admin, but then i have no real sense what the hell at all those folks are doing. 11. this point is not a suggestion, but does explain why schools are always going to have problems, no matter what you change. schools are mirrors - they reflect society. you can distort the mirror all you want and it doesn't change reality. 12. i'll take 100k$ a year and certianly think i'd be good enough to earn it. someone more math-happy then myself can figure this out, but assumign that salaries for teachers makes up the principle cost of education, adn seeing as how 100K is at least twice as much as the current average, are you prepared to increase spending on schools that much? regardless, unless the compensation is made more attractive to attact a much larger pool of qualified teachers, you're not going to improve a damn thing. no one will swim through an ocean of shit for a pair of plastic earrings. my recommendation, at least for high school - make the kids have to earn their place. kids who can't maintain an acceptable gpa or discipline record should be shown the door. public schools are instead essentially jails, housing a huge population of disaffected, disinclined dipshits who divert me from my purpose. feel free to have "work camps" on some sorta ccc-model for those who can't make the schools work for them so you don't have a large teen-gang element on the street. i'm tired of having classes where 50% of the kids are failing and damn near 90% are proud of never studying and never working.

do you make the sytem then one that's just based on a kids ability to think and reason critically? shit - the dirty secret about that, i've realized after a decade of teaching, is that no one can really "teach you how to think." it's pretty much an inate ability that a teacher can encourage, much as a farmer waters a seed. but if a kids a goddamn stone, you can water and fertilize all you want and it's still jsut a fucking lump at the end of the day, no?

other questions re: merit pay how is it a fair system if the students and parents aren't held accountable too? if you're going to base my pay on the kids passing a test, then they damn well better have a serious incentive to pass too, like tying it to their graduation. but, as i've found in the states i've taught w/ that have such barriers, there becomes a huge incentive for the state to lower the bar for passing, so they aren't barring thousands of kids from graduating - the last year i taugh in virginia was absurd. i was proud that i got 100% of my 120 kids to pass a standardized test in world history (especially since the school was 100% free/reduced lunch, therefore very poor)...until i found out the state had decided that any score higher than a 35% would be considered passing! for fucks sake, if you just put "c" down for every answer you should get at least a 25%!

i agree that the concept of merit pay is anathema to many in the union world, but that is not the case w/ me, in part b/c i've taught in states that had merit pay systems and i'm in fact quite good at getting kids to pass standardized tests, which is what they base the merit pay on. that said, i don't know if you or anyone really has a good functional idea of what you really want to base your merit pay on and not end up w/ more of a monster than you started with. for example, if you make the standards based on just passing the class, don't i respond by just passing everyone? if its getting kids to memorize facts, don't i do just that to the detriment of writing essays or working on cause/effect thinking skills? how is this a fair system when i pull a group of students one year who have totally shit parents and shit attitudes that are impervious to my best teaching methods? how is this fair when i teach in a shit district or shit state? how are you going to make your merit system fair, meaningful and manageable? and just how lucrative are you going to make it? i am not opposed to the theory of merit pay - far from it. for fucks sake, i was a fantastic student. i'm good at doing academic stuff, so if that's the standard i'm paid on, i'll embrace it wholeheartedly b/c i stand to profit from it. but how is it going to work?

hey, there you go - higher standards -> higher pay. but most private schools aren't elite, and they pay less. uh, SC - did you sleep through your russian history classes? when they weren't busy fucking their lifestock or killing their children, they were busy making war on all their neighbors - the vikings and mongols were excellent teachers.

or better, didn't call for this kinda thing to be done to their awful teachers (for making them question god too there, kk!)?

Article regarding GAO Report on D.C. Voucher System

there's been some decent tr's...my eloquence has waxed

nope - the last time i rode a bike was 7 years ago - it was san francisico - 3:15 a.m. - 14 hrs in the bars - a sport bike w/ tiny pedals and a nut-crushing seat - me in flip-flops - hadn't been on a bike in a decade before - hills - rain - cold - vomiting in the presido ah, freedom...

how do you consolidate schools in the sticks? or even really give them a private school option when there's not enough customers to warrant entering the market? what happens to neighborhood schools, especially for little kids, when you consolidate? private schools generally pay much less to teachers - are you really expecting that will improve their quality? are there examples in otehr industries of workers taking pay cuts and responding positively? the kids who are getting the worst schools are suffering not so much b/c the schools suck, but because they're living in demilitarized zones w/ awful economics. take the d.c. example - they've just finished a big experiment w/ vouchers and it didn't do a damn thing towards improving kk's vaunted ROI

man - sucks!

my objection to vouchers is much more based on 1st amendment church n' state concerns than on union ones (but then i am a radical christian-hater). assuming the total pool of money invested will be the same though, its really hard to see how a public school is going to get any better when its funding is cut.