P.S. A Column On Things

Green Gulch

In part on a whim, in part because I found meditation helpful when I was at the weight loss clinic at Duke this summer, my wife booked us for a hotel in Larkspur Landing, CA, near Muir Woods and the Green Gulch Zen Center. We walked through the Marin farmer's market, then drove to Muir Woods, where we spent an hour walking among the redwoods at sunset. The day was topped off with a lovely sushi meal at a little Japanese restaurant across the street from our hotel.

We went to Green Gulch the next morning; it is a LOONNNGG way down the road, so much so that I was afraid we had missed the turn. If only I had put it in my GPS. We did find the turn eventually, thank goodness. Green Gulch was a beautiful place, although useful signage was non-existent.  There were signs; they just didn't tell us anything. Fortunately, we got there early, so we managed to find the Zendo by 8:15. I did not wear my coat. I should have. Marin may be hot in the afternoon, but three miles in from the ocean it is bitterly cold in the morning, and in the unheated Zendo. We learned to meditate Green Gulch style (eyes open, among other unusual attributes), then walked through the associated organic farm. There was a talk at 10:15 by the president of the San Francisco Zen Center, which owns Green Gulch, followed by a lunch that was a localvore's dream; bread, salad and soup, all made from ingredients we could have walked outside and touched. We concluded our day with the 40 minute walk to Muir Beach. Alas, Muir Beach is too short to walk, in addition to being tiny and WINNNDDYY! It was 35 mile per hours if it was anything.

Inspired, in part, by our time outside, we put up fairy lights and marquee lights when we got home, and ate our second outdoor meal in two weeks--and probably our third or fourth since we moved into this house in 1997. What a great weekend!

Reminders of Death

So my dad died on Aug. 21, and of course, when someone's life is integrated into yours, it takes a while to disengage. I had a friend who was working on his partner's estate, which reminded him EVERY DAY of how much he missed his partner. It is not quite that bad with me, but for the last few months of his life, instead of taking a daily newspaper, Dad had me bring him a few days of newspapers when I came to visit. One day this week, I realized I wasn't stockpiling newspapers any more. Also, for the last 10 years, every time I finished reading my copy of Private Eye, the British humour magazine, I would mail it (or, for the last 15 months, carry it over) to Dad so he could read it. It was one of the strangest things I did for him; on multiple occasions, he told me he enjoyed it. He didn't, generally, display much of a sense of humor, or, for that matter, any sign of Anglophilia, but then how well can we ever know another person, even someone we have know our whole adult lives? The answer: not that well. In any case, I don't need to send them to him anymore. I've found another passalong home, but it is weird not to share them with my father.

Chicago Teachers

First, let me say I have not examined the situation in depth, so I am not sure of the details. Secondly, let me say that, in places where there are NO teacher unions, teachers are underpaid, overworked, maltreated and fired arbitrarily. I know this to be a fact. Teachers are the most important government workers in the world, but that are not treated as such in this country. Ninety-nine percent of the population will never need a fireman, and, traffic violations excepted, 90% of us will never need a policeman. Ninety-nine percent of the people with a child (excepting only home schoolers) needs teachers to educate their children. Their work is critical.

The radio news coverage I have heard indicates the strike is about teacher evaluation, not salaries. Do unions do absurd things to protect bad teachers? Yes they do. Do principals fire good teachers for no reason in places where there are no unions? Yes they do. It is like the criminal justice system. Which would you prefer, a few guilty people going free or a few innocent people convicted? I know which system I prefer: the American system, where we have a few false negatives, rather than a bumper crop of false positives (as, for example, in the Soviet Union).

I have said both of these things before, but I will say them again. Number one, every principal and every teacher in every school I have ever been familiar with knows the bad teachers and the good teachers. The middle is fuzzy, but the top and bottom are as clear as a bell. In most schools, the bad teachers are self-culling. Even in a unionized district, there isn't a teacher on the staff who couldn't make more money in some other line of work. Therefore, we aren't doing it for the money. We can't afford to do it for nothing, but we aren't maximizing our profits either. If I were full time, it would be a 50% pay cut from my last job. Since I teach half-time by choice, it is a 75% pay cut. I think teaching is important, and I enjoy it. Lousy teachers don't enjoy it. Most of them leave. It probably takes them longer than it should, but just as it takes a few years to develop a good teacher, it takes a few years to develop a bad teacher. I'm not saying teacher evaluation isn't important; quite the contrary, it is very important, and should be done regularly, by in-class observation.

But that's not what the argument in Chicago is about. The argument in Chicago is about whether the student test results should be 20% of the teacher evaluation or 40% (figures made up, but you get the idea). Which takes me to the second thing I've said before (admittedly a quotation from my first principal): All the STAR tests (California's annual high stake multiple-choice testing regimen) do each year is reconfirm the fact that high socio-economic students do better on standardized tests than low socio-economic students. That goes for our district versus Oakland, and for the children within our school who are the children of two professors or two lawyers, versus the students who are the children of  single mothers in low-paying service jobs. Of course there are exceptions, many of them, and they give me hope for the future. But the single best predictor of student achievement on a high-stakes standardized test is NOT the quality of the teaching, it is the quality of the home. Plus, teaching is cumulative, so the STAR test results my class achieves each May are only partly up to me; they also reflect the students' 5th, 6th and 7th grade teachers as well. This is particularly true  in California where History, unlike Math and English, is only tested once each three years. How would you have done on a final exam in your Senior year in college which tested, in detail, what you'd learned in a Sophomore course outside your major? I hope you see my point.

No Child Left Behind deserves its nickname, No Child  Left Standing. My previous comments can be found here. Suffice it to say that standardized testing is pernicious and pointless, and measures neither student  achievement nor teaching ability. Yes, we need accountability. I don't deny it, never have. But this isn't it. In Moraga or Chicago.

Political Briefs

Greed and Debt: The True Story of Mitt Romney and Bain Capital by Matt Taibbi
The linked article about the looters from Bain is in the spirit of Hunter Thompson who covered the 1972 campaign for Rolling Stone.

"By making debt the centerpiece of his campaign, Romney was making a calculated bluff of historic dimensions – placing a massive all-in bet on the rank incompetence of the American press corps. The result has been a brilliant comedy: A man makes a $250 million fortune loading up companies with debt and then extracting million-dollar fees from those same companies, in exchange for the generous service of telling them who needs to be fired in order to finance the debt payments he saddled them with in the first place. That same man then runs for president riding an image of children roasting on flames of debt, choosing as his running mate perhaps the only politician in America more pompous and self-righteous on the subject of the evils of borrowed money than the candidate himself. If Romney pulls off this whopper, you'll have to tip your hat to him: No one in history has ever successfully run for president riding this big of a lie. It's almost enough to make you think he really is qualified for the White House."

• Romney And Ryan Attack Truth And A Higher Power
• The Fed Violates Its Own Charter By Favoring Companies Over Workers 
• Political Control 
• Why The Deficit Should Stay High Until Employment And Manufacturing Recovers 
• Romney's Wife to join debates
• NYT Whitewash 
• Romney Not Ready, Disqualifies Himself 
•  Banks: Simple Regulation or Complex?

To Catch A Dollar

3 stars out of 5
I went to see a documentary about microfinance because my older daughter is interested in the field. This is the fascinating story of the attempt to take that Third World concept and plant it in Queens, New York. Interesting concept, interesting characters, and both educational and entertaining. What more could you ask from a documentary?

Ruby Sparks

6 starts out of 5.
Regular readers will realize I am quite a movie fan. In the last 50 years, I am certain I have seen 1,000, perhaps nearly 2,000 movies. The number of deeply original scripts I have seen can be counted on one hand. Groundhog Day, Memento, a couple of Charlie Kaufman scripts. I am sure I am leaving one or two out, but I am in awe of  Ruby Sparks, an incredibly original work by Zoe Kazan who also stars with her boyfriend Paul Dano. If she never writes another screenplay, she will still, like Danny "Groundhog Day" Rubin, live forever in the annals of great, creative screenwriting. The premise, which anyone can tell from the previews, is that a writer manifests his imagined dream girl. The scenes in which they are growing apart made me squirm, as they perfectly captured what I remember of growing apart from my last girlfriend, 35 years ago. I wouldn't have thought I could be touched there after 31 years of successful marriage, but there you are. Some things you never forget, at least at the emotional level. The futility of attempts at control, the ephemeral nature of love, the whole, "If you love her, let her go" ethos are captured here. I bawled like a baby. Since this blog began in 1998, I have never given a film more than five stars. I gave this one six because that's how much I want you to go see it.

Enemies of the Internet, Bob Newhart on Psychotherapy, Jon Carroll, Maple Syrup, Robot Legs, Dan Grobstein File

Who knew that Iran has more cyberpolice than China? The Enemies of the Internet infographic, that's who (Syria: 250,000, China: 30,000 according to the famously reliable Wikipedia; apparently China is better at automating its censorship).  It also suggests that SOPA and PIPA are the first steps towards putting America on the list of Internet Enemies which includes China, Iran, Syria and North Korea. If those countries sound familiar, it is because they also top the list of countries using the death penalty. Distinguished company for sure.

Bob Newhart, one of my favorite comedians, did a sketch on the old Fox show, MAD TV, poking fun at psychotherapy. As the husband of a therapist and the friend of others, it tickled me.
 
Jon Carroll, America's greatest newspaper columnist, wrote about Carpe Diem 17 years ago. I probably read it at the time (although itg was over Christmas, when I was often out of town). In any case it is worth rereading. I was reminded of it by the Bob Greene item in the Dan Grobstein file.

My friend Kevin Sullivan writes:

I'm just amazed that this story hasn't achieved more traction, considering how sticky it is! I know it will appeal to your journalistic appetite. And as a commentary on the efficacy of the Mounties, how hard can it be to find  a gang of overweight bandits with a mile high stack of pancakes, and a truck load of Egg-Os ?

When I reviewed Robot and Frank, I included a remark from a dimly remembered college lecture about the superiority of wheels over legs for robots, in part because walking is so hard and rolling is so easy. Craig Reynolds checked in:

I must have had different professors. Where did you go to school again? :-)  Wheels are fine for the corridors of CS departments, and roads, and yes, the bottom of Martian craters. but how would a wheeled robot have ascended that incredibly steep staircase in Frank's house? Who has driven to the peak of Everest? A relatively small part of Earth's surface is accessible to wheeled vehicles. Note that since our college days, there has been impressive progress in legged robotics. Work at places like Boston Dynamics makes me confident that robust, agile and highly capable legged robots are right around the corner.

BTW, as far as I could tell in a few minutes of Googling, while the rover will reach the lower slopes of Mt. Sharp, "The inclines are too steep for Curiosity to reach the peak..." (http://www.spacepolicyonline.com/news/a-voice-from-mars-as-curiosity-gets-ready-set-go-corrected) If only it had legs!

BTW, a recent video from Boston Dynamics

Like any complicated issue, there are lots of good answers. If you are comparing energy efficiency for say moving a given weight along a smooth corridor floor, wheels are much better than legs.

I stand corrected. I forget who told me that "legs are an inefficient means of getting around," but it must be the same professor who told me "Modem speeds will never get over 3KB, because you can't put 10 pounds of (poo) in a five pound bag."





Dan Grobstein File

• Jeb Brovsky (@JebBrovsky) 9/3/12 11:07 AM You can tell Monopoly is an old game because there is a "Luxury Tax", "Community Chest" and the Banker can still get thrown in jail.
• Good point about population density. An an expensive energy future the subsidized expenses of the sprawl will really cost us.
• Michelle: serious and humorous.
• Clinton: The Corpus Callosum of Politics
• Voter Supression
• smartMeme (@smartMeme) 9/7/12 6:14 PM 10 ways to tell if a terrorist is white by @jricole bit.ly/UyBxhu 
• Everyone knows who is running for president & has an idea how they're going to vote.  It's the downticket races that are easy to sway with the flood of money coming in. The radio and tv ads around election day get really crazy. There is very little coverage of most races unless you make a point of going to look for it so low information voters will vote for the last shiny object that they've seen. I wonder if the Republicans don't care if Romney loses. They work better throwing sand into the gears and will shirk any responsibility for any bad outcomes.
  Democrats: where do you put your money?
• Disliking Bob Greene. Still. 10 years later.
• Two Centuries of Creating U.S. History
• David Kurtz (@TPM_dk) 9/14/12 9:07 AM oh my RT @meredithshiner: "Let's have a hand for the cute and curvaceous Jennifer Granholm!!" youtu.be/b4FJIP-eZCA #TheDatingGame

End September 17 Column

Annals of Teaching

My later mother told me there'd be days like this. She taught high school and was accosted, in a good way, by former students until her dying day. In any case, I just received an email  that went something like this:

"Dear Paul - You were an inspiring teacher for my son, at a time when he wasn't paying too much attention to school. He is now 22, a very thoughtful adult, and studying at Cal State.  So first of all - Thank you! You showed him the world outside Moraga - which intriqued, comforted, and inspired him. You were a BIG part of why he made it through those tough years. Thanks for ALL you do!"

This must be why I'm in it; it certainly isn't for the money; I took a 75% pay cut when I left journalism for teaching. And I've never (well, hardly ever) regretted it. For more than a minute or two

Political Briefs

• The Dressage Queen Speaks
• Ranting Speaker 
• The Best Democracy Money Can Buy 
• Romney Trailing Most Popular Inanimate Object Since Dukakis 
• Let's repeal this aspect to ACA/Medicare and institute a rule banning higher cost payments when lower cost service is available in the community outside a hospital setting; in short, unless the patient had to be (for some other reason admitted to a hospital for an overnight stay) there is absolutely no reason to conduct an echocardiogram in a hospital and incur the inevitable higher overhead cost involved)
  Why The Waste? Who Is Setting Reimbursement Rates? Where Is The Antitrust Division Of The Justice Department? 
• Capacity Certified Decreased By Official World Inspectors; Journalists' And Politicians' Failure To Understand Calls Their Own Literacy Into Question