Electric Josh

Clinton
For no reason at all, the 42nd President's wife is in the news. It is reminiscent of when his mistress was in the news a lot. Bizarre.
[permalink | reply | tb ]

FCC redux
While we're thinking nervously about the disappearance of independent voices from the press, the Atlantic points us at three pieces from its archives:

1. The Media Barons and the Public Interest: An FCC Commissioner's Warning (1968)
2. The Television Overlords (1969)
3. The American Media Baronies, a modest Atlantic atlas (1969)

Like Thomas Pynchon said: Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you.
[permalink | reply | tb ]

School
The Globe tells us about super-homogeneous classrooms in Cambridge---that is, intentionally mixing kids of all abilities into the same class. This is a horrible idea. They tried this on me in Oklahoma when I was in fifth grade. I was thrown onto a group project with one smart and two really stupid partners. The other smart kid was so offended that she left the classroom (a well-behaved ten-year-old walked out and sat in the principal's office!) rather than suffer the indignity of being grouped with kids who could barely understand the assignment, leaving me to my first teaching experience. I learned nothing about the assignment itself (something about what passed for word processors on 1983's computers), but learned a little about how to pretend to be dumber than I actually was, too late not to make the other kids feel bad about themselves.

For this reason alone, I'd never, ever move to Cambridge unless I could afford to send my own kids to a decent private school.

The goals of heterogeneous classrooms are laudable, aimed at reversing a pattern in which Cambridge's white students -- the minority in the school -- were succeeding while African-American and Hispanic students were falling farther behind. But the process is a painful one, with teachers grumbling, retiring, and just plain quitting. Bright students are bored. Lagging students are lost. Parents are grousing, and some who can are turning to private schools.

Well, duh! Note that the best way to narrow the academic gap between students is to get the smart ones drunk, or medicate them, or confuse them on purpose; ergo, narrowing gaps between students is not its own worthwhile end.

I'm actually getting mad reading this article.

Lang's biggest complaint is the one that's echoed around every school -- the unevenness of the teachers. Some of the older teachers came to heterogeneity having taught either the honors track or lower level students, and now they're struggling to teach both at once. "The worst are the ones who try to teach to the middle," says Lang. "Because there's no one there."

Read up before the it vanishes behind the paywall.
[permalink | reply | tb ]