Beyond School

"Go, Tom, Go" (Clay, 2d from left, joins Redskin Cheerleaders to cheer Tom's latest post)

Look, I know I plug Tom a lot on this space, but it’s because he can make me laugh at the madness of public schooling like nobody else.  Ever since discovering Nietzsche 20 years ago, I’ve sided with laughter over solemnity, with gods that can and do dance over those that can’t or won’t.

Here’s Tom’s latest dance: “Do It the Right Way, not the Wong Way.” Send it to any first-year teacher who’s been force-fed Wong’s First Days of School.

It’s not unusual to be smart. It’s not unusual to be funny. But to be smart and funny? Not so easy. That’s why I like this guy.

–that, and that my heart goes out to any NY liberal transplanted to teach in a small Southern town in Virginia - Camp Joy territory in spirit, if not geography.  There should be a sitcom.

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Photo: littlerottenrobin

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1. Pew News IQ Quiz: America’s college graduates score a D- (61%) on basic news knowledge.

(click for larger image)

Take the Pew quiz here. It’s only 12 questions.  It raises a few questions, among which these interest me most:

a)  I haven’t lived in the States since ‘98, and haven’t consumed any mainstream US news or TV as a habit since then.  I get my news primarily from political and cultural blogs.  Yet I scored 11/12 correct, compared to 7.4/12 correct for US college graduates.  The question:  What does this say about the US mainstream media’s performance in contributing to an informed citizenry? (I assume most Americans still watch and read mainstream US news.  Maybe I’m wrong.)

b) How does our e-blogosphere and -twittersphere measure up against these results?  If we educators are similarly uninformed, are we connecting at the expense of staying informed?

The State of the Republic reflected in these results makes the following two entries a bit more understandable:

2. Texas Board of Education Approves Bible Study Elective Class

Here’s FOX News on the story

(Historically-informed people will notice that the blond “expert” perpetuates the fallacy that America’s founding fathers were Christians, when many of them were either partly or fully Deist, believing little of the miracle stories or other magical claims of the Church. And she’s going to be teaching the classes )

The New York Times adds this bit of research, to pre-empt the “there’s nothing wrong with teaching it as history” argument:

Mark Chancey, associate professor in religious studies at Southern Methodist University, has studied Bible classes already offered in about 25 districts. His study found most of the courses were explicitly devotional with almost exclusively Christian, usually Protestant, perspectives. It also found that most were taught by teachers who were not familiar with the issue of separation of church and state.

Since Texas shares with California the biggest sway in national education issues, this bit of nose-thumbing at the Constitutional separation of Church and State is not trivial - instead, it’s a retreat from the third millennium to the first.

Secular and non-Christian parents in Texas must be thrilled to pay for religious indoctrination in their schools.  And perhaps the money should go instead to basic geography and geopolitics, as the next item shows:

3. McCain Looks at “Struggle” on the “Iraq-Pakistan Border”

So okay, forgive him on his internet illiteracy, his fifth-from-the-bottom GPA from the Naval Academy, his admitted “need for education” on economics.  As he says, he’s still better at foreign policy, right?

I hate to say “wrong,” but jeez, watch this 20-second interview clip and tell me how not to?

McCain: We have a lot of work to do. It’s a very hard struggle, particularly given the situation on the Iraq-Pakistan border.

–what else can I say, as a social studies teacher, but sheesh: wrong.  There is no Iraq-Pakistan border. (Unless he plans to create one by occupying Iran - surely the most justifiably nervous country on the planet. Sandwiched between the US occupation of Iraq on the west and of Afghanistan on the east, and sitting on some massive oil deposits, wouldn’t you be paranoid about your defense?)

Defenders will say this was maybe a slip-up, or his advisers are there to save us from his “knowledge”-base, or whatever, but I don’t buy it for two reasons: first, we’re seeing a pattern and a history of what I’ll politely call “deficient understanding of basic things” in this candidate; and second, we ignored similar warning signs from the last president and elected him based on his persona instead of his intelligence - and look where that got everybody.

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I always tell people who tell me that I’m going to hell for being decidedly skeptical about myths from pre-scientific times that a) I’ve read the Bible in its entirety three times, and studied world religions and Church history enough to feel 99% certain the myths are simply myths (and that 1% of doubt is simple intellectual honesty, since I know there’s no absolute proof any god does not exist); and I tell them, b) “If Jesus knew me, he’d think I was a pretty okay guy, because I’m typically not an ass, try to help people, and agree with him that ‘the kingdom’ is already within us, if we’d just wake up to it (not a far cry from most religious messages, read metaphorically instead of literally).”

I’m pleased to announce that I was just told by the Seven Deadly Sins Quiz,

Your sin has been measured. Happily for you, your sin profile leaves room for forgiveness. Your full sinful breakdown below shows you the areas that you must improve, to save yourself from an eternity in hell.

In the spirit of spiritual transparency then, dear reader, I will now share with you a view into the window of my soul, and the degree to which each of the Seven Deadly Sins has possessed it:

Take the Seven Deadly Sins Quiz

A naturalist at heart, I’m actually proud that good old natural “lust” - what science and my old dog Fritz would understand as a healthy reproductive instinct, an innocent enough thing when the super-ego* is stronger - is my greatest “sin.” I’m pretty proud - oops! - of the rest of the results. I can forgive myself for them, since I’m human, animal, and naturally far from perfect. (In fact, if I recall correctly, “sin” is based on a Greek word for “missing the target” and thus making a mistake, being imperfect, which has nothing to do with “demons” or “ee-vil,” damnation or salvation, and everything to do with being simply human. In that respect, the results above actually get it pretty right. I do screw up sometimes.)  [UPDATE: Be sure to check out Larissa’s corrective comment on the origins of the word “sin” for an even more interesting twist, and call for philological help from Biblical scholars on the Hebrew/Aramaic/Greek story of the word ulitmately translated as¹ “sin.”)

Another “fluff and fun” voluntary meme for our idle summers in the devil’s workshop. If you play along, please drop us a line with your results.

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*Pre-emptive snarky-comment-prevention strike: I’m not a card-carrying Freudian. Just playing around. Call the super-ego “conscience,” “social decency,” or “humanism” instead, and I won’t protest.

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1. Old English [↩]

Just kill me. From the Telegraph:

Senator John McCain, the Republican presidential candidate, has admitted that he never uses email and that his staff has to show him websites because he is only just “learning to get online myself”.

When asked if he went online himself, the Arizona senator responded: “They go on for me. I am learning to get online myself, and I will have that down fairly soon, getting on myself.” . . . .

“I don’t expect to be a great communicator, I don’t expect to set up my own blog, but I am becoming computer literate to the point where I can get the information that I need - including going to my daughter’s blog first, before anything else.”

And the poor guy who has to cover McCain’s gaffes? No whiz himself, as this attempt shows:

“John McCain is aware of the Internet. This is a man who has a very long history of understanding on a range of issues.”

You can’t make this stuff up. He makes Bush look geeky for using “the Google.”

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Just doinking around with Mystudiyo. They say they’ll never make me pay for this when they leave beta, which is cool - but I always wonder what will happen to this sort of work if the company goes out of business. Is all my labor lost?

That being said, I love the ease of use. [UPDATE: Two things: h/t to Steve Dembo for sharing this tool; and note that you¹ can add their own quiz items to this quiz.]

Have at thee, geeky wordsmiths. Fastest guns score highest.

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1. and students [↩]