Why Don't People Learn?

Our media is continuing to cover President Trump in the same way that he's been covered since the 2016 campaign, the same way that has contributed to his ability to continue to get away with ethical, legal, and personal transgressions. For anyone who understands that media coverage of the 2016 election was a big part of the problem, this is frustrating.

There is no question that the media covered Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump differently during the 2016 campaign. A study from Harvard found that, not only was Clinton covered more negatively than Trump, but also that the overwhelmingly negative coverage for the entire campaign meant that someone like Trump ("a charlatan") had an advantage. When all the media coverage is negative, a liar will have a distinct advantage.

I'm tired of the "horse-race coverage" that the media relies on so heavily, especially when they're measuring their success in clicks and likes. I don't care who's leading in polls; I want to know their ideas and policies, their plans, and their positions. Unfortunately, the media are showing very little sign of changing how they cover elections, so it's going to be up to the candidates, themselves, and their parties.

I want Trump to lose in 2020. So, I propose that every Democrat who gets in front of a reporter and/or a camera from now until November 2020 starts by saying something like, "It took the Trump administration SIX WEEKS to respond to the coronavirus, SIX WEEKS during which people got sick, people spread the disease, and people died." It should be pretty easy to focus on Trump's response to the coronavirus since it's likely to still be relevant in the summer and fall. There is plenty to criticize in his response, or lack thereof, and Democrats could score lots of rhetorical victories if they had a single, unifying message.

Yes, I know it's a negative message, which is something Democrats seem to shy away from in campaigns. But honestly, isn't it also a unifying message? Don't the majority of people think Trump wasted those six weeks, when he could have gotten the country on better footing for dealing with this virus? We could have worked harder and faster to develop tests, which are still lacking! We could have gotten Congress together earlier to develop a stimulus plan! We could have collaborated with other countries to distribute supplies and share expertise! We could have accepted the WHO's offer of testing kits!

Mission to Mars

It can be difficult to listen to the daily news when you see things from a different perspective. Somehow, I got saddled with a global view of things, a "big-picture perspective," and it's very hard for me to shake. I'm being genuine when I say that I often wish I could look at things on a much more local, individual level. I'd be a calmer, quieter person. I wouldn't be such a pain in the ass. 

For example, yesterday, as I was driving home from work, I heard a story on the radio about an effort involving students at some of our top universities (Duke, MIT, Stanford, UConn) to send a time capsule to Mars. They are now engaging in crowd funding this project, which will cost an estimated $25 million. The plan is to send a satellite, with the time capsule, on a rocket that is scheduled to launch in 2017. Now, I am normally a strong supporter of science and research, because I recognize that all of the world has benefited from the technological advances that came about from ideas that were once perceived as crazy, or at least impractical. And, maybe this is just a case of me getting old and jaded, rather than of me looking at the big picture. But, I couldn't help but feel a little exasperated when I heard this news story.

Seriously? This is what we're going to do with $25 million dollars? We're going to send a bunch of photos and videos and recordings of ourselves to Mars, where they will sit, untouched, forever because...wait for it....nobody lives there!?! Nobody even visits there! 

Setting aside the fact that time capsules have always seemed to me to be nothing more than ego stroking, I'm floored that a collection of brilliant young people would want to spend any of their intelligence on such a ridiculous project. There must be some important scientific knowledge that will be gained from this that I just cannot see. I'm not a scientist and I don't have the training and understanding that scientists have, so I must be missing something. Please, tell me I'm missing something!

When I heard they were raising $25 million from people paying, $1 at a time, to send their photos to Mars, I immediately thought of the Central African Republic, where a sectarian war has been raging for over a year, leading to a million displaced people and thousands of deaths. Today, about 20,000 people are trapped in 16 different communities because, if they leave their homes, they could get attacked before they can reach safety. Could we use $25 million to get these people to someplace safe, help them get re-settled, help them find jobs and get their kids in schools? Maybe.

I also thought of Syria. More than 6 million people have become refugees or been displaced by the civil war in that country. It's clear that $25 million would be a drop in the bucket to help those people, but gosh, it's better than nothing, right?

And, it's not just about the money, is it? I fully support space exploration. I support nearly all scientific endeavors, so it's painful for me to say this, but...shouldn't we be putting our great minds to work on clean water, healthy food, renewable energy, carbon-emissions reduction, and health care to every person on the planet? I mean, we should have nailed these things down by now, right? Hell, there are still people in the US that don't have the health care they need, while our politicians raise billions of dollars every year to get elected so they can go to Washington and make sure that those people continue to not have the health care they need! My perspective makes it hard for me to support any politician. When I look at one of them, all I see is someone who wants power in order to be powerful, not to help anyone. I don't see people who want to make things better. I see people who want to be powerful and rich and in charge. 

Are these the kinds of questions that philosophers wrestle with? Does anyone actually know a philosopher, someone who, when you ask, "What do you do for a living?" answers, "I'm a philosopher"?

Of course, it doesn't help that the Time Capsule To Mars web site declares that, "A focus market for educational engagement will include K-12-aged kids from all over the world." I've known for a long time that there were many people and organizations that viewed our public schools as opportunities to make lots of money, and I don't oppose making money, in general. We enjoy our standard of living because we have had generations of Americans who have focused on making lots of money, so I'm behind capitalism. I just don't like seeing people referring to students as a market, especially at a time in our history when our schools and the people who work in them are under attack. I became a teacher in 1987 and it's pretty much been a constant stream of attacks from politicians, business leaders, and pundits. My sister, Maggie, warned me about the damage Reagan would do back in 1984. I didn't realize that it was a turning point for public education. Maggie, you're like a prophet.

I seriously want a new perspective on things. Scientists, please help me see the value in this time capsule thing. Point out to me how I'm looking at it the wrong way. 

Extremism and Poverty

I’ve been particularly appalled by recent events in Nigeria. Boko Haram, a terrorist organization, has kidnapped hundreds of girls from their school and threatened to sell them. The Nigerian government has, so far, had little luck in finding the girls. Their efforts are hindered, to some degree, by the fact that many people in the area where the girls went to school support Boko Haram. Many others are indifferent. Although I’m sure nearly everyone would agree that it is wrong to kidnap people, attitudes toward extremist groups are often complex and difficult to navigate.

There’s so much in this issue to address, and I’d love to hold forth on how easy it appears to be for many people in the world to treat girls and women as property. But, that’s for another day. Right now, I’m thinking more about the relationship between extreme poverty and extremism/terrorism. For a long time, I thought I knew what poverty was and I felt grateful to have escaped it. After a little research on life in Nigeria and in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), I have revised my understanding of poverty. I know nothing about true poverty.

In Nigeria, most people are illiterate and hardly anyone goes to school at all. The average life expectancy in Nigeria is 52 and almost half of the people don’t have access to clean water. Electricity is just a dream to most Nigerians. Diseases that we thought were gone, such as polio and cholera, are still public health concerns for Nigerians. And yet, the country has the 30th highest GDP in the world and it is the second largest economy in Africa. People often live in mud brick houses, but there are also plenty of multimillionaires in Nigeria, including the President. So, there is a chasm between the wealthy and the rest of the Nigerian population.

Life has been difficult in Nigeria for a long time. It was a British colony from 1914 to 1960, when it gained independence. However, a series of military coups in the 1960s and military juntas through the 1990s left the country poor, underdeveloped, and divided along ethnic lines. Recently, there’s been significant economic development, but most elections are seen as fraught with fraud, and corruption continues to be pervasive. Child marriage is common and slavery still exists within Nigeria.

The DRC has been described as the “rape capital of the world,” which gives you an idea of what it’s like to be female in that country. Economically, the Congolese are among the world’s poorest, with the 4th lowest GDP per capita in 2013, according to the World Bank (the CIA puts it at 2nd lowest). There have been ongoing armed conflicts in the country since 1998 and, although there have been some recent signs that the government is gaining control, there are still armed groups in the eastern region of the DRC. Because of the conflicts, there have been few opportunities for children to attend school and 5.4 million Congolese have died since 1998, mostly due to diseases brought on by the unsanitary living conditions of displaced persons. Half of all children under the age of five are malnourished. Less than 10% of the country has electricity and most do not have clean water.

The DRC is also a former colony, although it belonged to Belgium. In 1885, King Leopold II of Belgium took control of the territory and named it the Congo Free State. He set up an administration that was brutal in its treatment of the people and ruthless in its extraction of natural resources. In 1908, Leopold’s rule was ended by the Belgian Parliament. Eventually, the DRC was created when it gained independence in 1960. After armed struggles for control, the country came under the leadership of President Mobutu and changed its name to Zaire. Mobutu was forced out of the country in 1997 by Laurent Kabila’s forces and Kabila declared himself President and renamed the country the Democratic Republic of Congo. He has been president ever since.

In both Nigeria and the DRC, armed conflicts continue due to terrorist or insurgent groups in parts of the countries. What the groups are trying to achieve varies, but their goals are generally related to their ethnic or religious affiliations. In both countries, colonization meant that disparate ethnic groups were brought together in a newly created territory with foreign leaderships. Some of these groups had been hostile to each other prior to colonization. In some cases, those hostilities continue today. But the difficulties in these countries today aren’t caused exclusively by ethnic conflicts. 

Extremist groups continue to recruit, mainly among those living in rural regions. Some of these recruitments are forced, with some groups using children as soldiers. However, not all of them are forced. So I wonder why someone would choose to join an extremist group in an armed conflict. What I’m left to conclude is that abject poverty is the main reason. Poverty in these countries is so extreme, so different from what is currently poverty in the US, that it may be hard to really imagine what life is like for the poor in Nigeria and the DRC. 

Imagine you are a woman in your 20s living in a town in the north of the DRC. You have not attended school, you cannot read or write, and you live in a tent. Your tent is located in a small collection of tents of other families. You have no running water, no electricity, no mode of transportation. You have a young child. Your husband has left you to raise the child alone. Every day, you must walk to get fresh water and haul it back to your tent. You farm and gather food without any equipment. You wash your clothes by hand. There is no reliable local government, so no police force to help you when a soldier in the army comes to your tent one night and rapes you. The people around you see the rape as somehow your fault and tell you to be embarrassed by it. 

Would you be angry? Would you feel hopeless? Would you want revenge against the government that employs the soldier who raped you? The government that is full of corrupt individuals who are rich because they have taken the funds that could have been used to give you an education? The government that is led by people who have electricity, running water, all the food they can eat, and transportation? The government that allows you to live in fear, without a reliable source of food and water, without any health care? What kind of justice would you want?

This scares me, because I can see a possible future for the US in which economic disparities worsen, corruption worsens, and extremist groups get more powerful. Given the number of guns in the US that are not owned by our military, this could create a horrible situation in which there are multiple, well-armed extremist groups around the country. It would take a while for things to get that bad, but it could happen. If we don't change how we treat people who are poor, and if we don't change the rules that have made it so hard for people to get ahead, it could get very ugly, indeed.

Poverty is a terrible thing. Extreme poverty is dangerous. When people don’t have hope, they become desperate. Desperate people do dangerous things.  

An Awesome Weekend

I saw Rhett Miller perform on April 5th at Cat’s Cradle in Carrboro. This was, I think, the 4th time I’ve seen him performing solo and, as usual, he was great. He really throws himself into his performances and he’s got a charming stage personality. He did several songs that will be on the new Old 97s album and they sounded fantastic. I had a great time.

The coolest part, though, was that I got to meet him - twice. During the opening act, I was second in line for the bathroom, when who should come out but Rhett, himself! I was so surprised I just stared and yelled, “Oh my God!” The woman who was in front of me didn’t even seem to notice and just went straight into the bathroom. But I was dumbstruck. He was very nice and smiled and held his hand out for me to shake, saying, “I just washed my hands,” which was nice but I really don’t think I would have cared either way. I actually was able to speak after a few seconds, at least enough to answer him when he asked my name and to ask him if he was sick (his voice sounded hoarse). I then switched from fan-mode to mom-mode and asked him if he would be going home soon, because he needed to rest. Yes, I really did. Full-blown, dorky, mom-mode. He said he was flying home in the morning after a 2-week tour. I said, “You must really miss your kids.” Yes, I really did. He was very nice and didn’t seem to mind that I was acting like his mother and agreed that he did, indeed, miss his kids quite a bit. Awwwww!

After the show, he stuck around so that fans could get his autograph. Andrew was wonderfully patient and stood in line with me,even buying me a t-shirt (after I did some shameless whining) while we waited to get our picture taken with him. When it was our turn, I walked up and was going to re-introduce myself, but he looked at me and said, “You again.” Clearly, I had made a wonderful impression. Anyway, I did introduce Andrew to him and he even smiled for our picture, because he's just a great guy. 

So, I've had another brush with greatness. As I said to Andrew, now I've met Walter Payton and Rhett Miller. Not too shabby.

Have I mentioned, by the way, how much I love my husband? He puts up with my nerdy enthusiasms so patiently and in such good humor. The next day, when I insisted on sticking around in Chapel Hill until my favorite store, Office Supplies and More, opened at 1:00 PM, Andrew didn't complain at all. He even took our daughter to Subway for a drink so I could have time to browse alone. I got a Lamy Studio fountain pen in Imperial Blue. I've been wanting one of these pens for a while, so I think it was an outstanding weekend.

It's Music, Teacha!

What is it about music? It goes so directly to my emotions and memories, physically. It moves me and makes me move. And this seems to be universal. Everyone I know can identify some songs or music that are meaningful, that evoke moments or sensations. Some songs are triggers for me and can immediately make me melancholy, thrilled, wistful, randy, or whatever my association is. I’m like a dog hearing a bell and salivating because I associate it with being fed.

Thinking about something like this makes you realize how close we are to other animals. The difference is just that we have the ability to reflect on our reactions, although I guess we don’t know that other animals don’t also have that ability. Who can say what goes on in the mind of a dog or bear or elephant or ferret? 

My younger daughter has always been able to sing. When she was a toddler, before she could talk, she could sing along with songs she’d heard at home or at pre-school, even though she didn’t pronounce the words accurately and she had no idea what they meant. One of my saddest memories of her is sitting with our family in the food court of a mall while the song “Standing Still”, by Jewel, was playing, and hearing her sweet little voice singing along with it. Even though it made me unbelievably sad, it’s one of my most precious memories of her as a child. Just beautiful. 

She still sings, and now she can also talk. We know that music is an effective way to teach children and, in my daughter’s case, it worked pretty well. She learned songs and, eventually, the words transferred to allow her to communicate with people. But, it all started with that musical beginning; I think it was an emotional connection. Did she need to feel the emotional piece first, before she could understand or see the reason for speech? No idea, and I’m getting a little carried away here, starting to sound like one of those mystical, “I might not be religious, but I’m spiritual” people. I’m neither, but I know that there is a direct line between music and emotions and it’s great and powerful and terrifying. Educators should use it more and music should definitely be part of everyone’s schooling. Teachers have been told for years that their students will need to feel an emotional connection to them and to the content in order to learn deeply, so why not use music to help with that? When I was a teacher, I used music, albeit not as much as I could have, to teach culture and to help my students reflect and make connections. I was surprised, more than once, but the reactions they had, which were sometimes intense, sometimes disdainful, and always interesting.

Here are some songs that always get a strong reaction from me and what I associate them with:

• “Reach Out, I’ll Be There”  - The Four Tops (love, but the really intense first-time-falling-in-love kind that is also really scary)
• “April Fools” - Rufus Wainwright (happiness that comes with setting out on a vacation or road trip)
• “Papa Was A Rolling Stone” - The Temptations (fear)
• “Unsatisfied” - The Replacements (this one used to make me feel like the future was wide open and I had unlimited potential)
• “Freeze The Saints” - Stephen Malkmus (wistfulness)
• “You’re My Favorite Waste Of Time” - Marshall Crenshaw (bliss and love)
• "Summer Breeze" - Seals & Crofts (confusion and trepidation)
• “Brown Haired Daughter” - The Old 97s (sex, sorry if that creeps you out)
• “Every Line Of A Long Moment” - Roddy Woomble (I don’t know what this evokes in me. It’s sort of a painful kind of happiness? A slightly violent transcendence?)
• “This Will Be Our Year” - The Zombies (thrilled, like when someone whispers something really sweet in your ear and you get chills down your spine)

The Meaning of Grades

The Wake County Board of Education recently considered instituting a minimum grade of 50 (out of 100) for assignments that students failed to turn in, and limiting the penalty for work turned in late to 10% of the grade. They were concerned about the practice of teachers giving zeros for missing assignments and taking significant points off of late assignments. Wake County Public Schools is the largest school district in North Carolina, so this policy change would affect a lot of students. Some of the teachers in the county didn’t like the idea of the Board dictating their grading procedures, so the Board has dropped the idea of a mandate and has switched to making these ideas their “suggestions." While I understand and sympathize with the teachers’ discomfort with such specific grading requirements from the Board, I share the Board’s concerns when it comes to grading.

I am totally opposed to giving students zeros. I am also opposed to automatically subtracting points for late work. Allow me to explain.

I believe that, as teachers, we should be concerned with helping all of our students learn what we are trying to teach them. I don’t believe we should be concerned with making sure that they all learn it at the same speed. We know that people are individuals and learn at individual rates, in individual ways, and require individual supports at times. Yet, for some inexplicable reason, we insist on assigning grades to everything and we base our education system on the assumption that all students require one year or one semester to master whatever content we decide to throw at them. Does anyone else see a disconnect there?

First of all, grades are unnecessary and dehumanizing. No, that is not an exaggeration. We can determine whether a student has learned what we wanted him to learn without assigning an A, B, C, D, or F to him. We can simply say “Yes” or “No.” Why do we insist on this obsession with categorizing people, ordering them from best to worst, over and over again? We don’t need grade point averages or class rankings, either. We can eliminate the whole idea of the high-school class valedictorian without causing any harm to the well-being of anyone. Some school districts have already done this, and their students are doing just fine. In fact, I’m guessing it would help us all much more than it would hurt us to stop grading everything. It would put the focus where it ought to be — on the learning, on the skills, on whether students can do things with what they know.

When a student gets a zero, whether because he does a very poor job on an assignment or because he doesn’t do an assignment, what purpose does it serve? If the student’s grade for the course is based on cumulative points or weighted points, which most grades are, a zero can create a situation where, no matter how well he performs on every task remaining in that course, he will be unable to earn a grade that accurately reflects his level of knowledge and skill. Teachers who use 100-point grading scales should never give grades lower than 50, logically speaking. After all, the difference between an A and a B is 10 points. The same holds true for the difference between a B and a C, and between a C and a D. It is nothing more than excessive punishment when a teacher gives a student a zero for a missed assignment. Douglas Reeves wrote an excellent explanation of this in his article The Case Against the Zero.

Regarding penalties for late work, I can only ask again, why? What is the purpose in taking points off of a grade because the student turned it in late? What does this accomplish, other than punishment? If a grade is meant to communicate something about a student’s skills and knowledge, what does it communicate when you lower the grade for tardiness? That he learned too slowly? That, no matter what his work actually showed, he only learned, at most, 90% of what he needed to learn? The most common argument I hear from teachers about this issue is that they are using the late penalties to teach students the importance of respecting deadlines and of responsibility. To which I always want to reply, “Do you meet every deadline you’re given? When you’re late turning something in to your principal, are you penalized 10% of your salary? Or, are your evaluation ratings dropped by 10%?” Just because banks and libraries charge late fees doesn’t mean we have to do it, too. As educators, we should be more reasonable than that.

If grades are supposed to communicate accurate information about how well the students mastered the content, then that’s all they should be about. And, if grades don’t actually communicate accurate information about how well the students have mastered the content, because we have lowered the grades for late or missing assignments, then we need to stop giving them at all. This is where it becomes obvious that, although most teachers are trying to educate their students, a few of them are more interested in wielding power and doling out punishments than they are in pedagogy. They cling to the ideas of the zero and late penalties because they grew up with them and because they like having that power. They will claim it’s about integrity and life lessons, but it’s really just about power and hierarchy. The way our schools are structured only reinforces these dysfunctional power relationships and it is up to us, as the adults in the room, to be the voices of reason. We need to refocus the entire endeavor on the students and their learning, not on ranking and punishing them. 

It's a Family Affair

I don’t normally do this kind of thing, but I am moved to express my gratitude for my sisters. I'm thinking about what I would say to them if I knew it wouldn't make me burst into tears. This is why I don't say these things out loud - fear of crying in front of people. Anyway, I'm going to take advantage of technology and post here things I'd like them to know.

My sisters have been one of the major influences in my life. When I think back on my childhood, I first think of my sisters, not my parents. They were always much more prominent in my life than either my father or my mother and they, in many ways, raised me. I learned more from them than from anyone else.

Annie

Annie is the sister who always took care of me, taught me to have a sense of humor, and made me love silly British humor (think Monty Python). She inspired me to think about things like politics and social policy from a very young age. She was always the epitome of "cool" to me. None of the other 5th graders in my school had t-shirts with the NORML logo on them! It was never easy to find privacy in our house and there wasn't a lot of individual attention available. But Annie would take me with her when she went out on errands so it was just us, and she would let me sit with her and her friends when they were hanging out at our house. She was such a role model for me that I never looked anywhere else for examples of how to be a woman. Annie is the voice inside my head that stokes my ambition and makes me work hard. She also taught me to have fun and to find humor, even in very trying circumstances. She's a model of forgiveness and love and hope. She showed me how to be both openly emotional and strong, and I will forever be grateful to her.

Maggie

Maggie is the sister who, in many ways, is still a mystery to me. She taught me to read, one of my greatest pleasures in life, and wore me out on long walks. She is usually the first sister I mention when people ask me about my family because I'm so impressed by the major mid-life career changes she has made. Through her example, she showed me how to engage in intellectual and personal exploration. As a child, I always thought of Maggie as perfect, the ideal. She was always being pursued by boys and seemed to just know things about life. This made her seem distant from me, since I was swimming in imperfections and, being 5 years younger, knew next to nothing about life. But, just when I would be feeling like I would never understand her, she would reach out and connect with me. I could never predict what would make her laugh, and Maggie laughing is a pleasure to see. She’s a very serious person, but her smile transforms her face. I will always be grateful for her.

Katie

Katie is the sister I played with, fought with, and stuck to throughout most of my life. I guess sharing a bed with someone for 12 years creates a bond. She's opinionated, active, and thoroughly engaged in her life. She's the person who reminded me that I should bake cookies with my kids, carve pumpkins with them, eat meals with them, take them to festivals and shows, and make sure they had the resources they needed to pursue their passions. (Yes, I needed reminding of all of that.) Katie has made me a better parent than I would have been without her influence. I haven't always appreciated her as much as I should have and we've had some wicked arguments. But I know the ways that she has shaped me. She has been the force that has pulled me out of my own head and into the world, and I will be eternally grateful for her.

My sisters are so important to me that I named my children after them. That’s about the highest praise I can offer. So, as Thanksgiving approaches, I’m stating publicly that I am grateful for my sisters.