Peeking into the rock

. . . today I was told not to bother applying for the children's center permit, as I do not need it to get hired. No, I should wait and take the two administration classes I need to qualify for the site director's license, because all the licenses cost the same: I can always "just teach" with the admin license: and the state funding for continuing education is higher for people with higher licenses.

Okay.

Both of the jobs I am most likely to get one of would allow me to take night classes at the community college for the first time in a long time. (If you work closing shift in a center that is primarily a child care center and therefore leave at five-thirty or six, it is next to impossible to get to a class that starts at six or six-thirty on the other side of the county). The admin classes are given during night shift.

The jobs and my likelihood of getting them keep morphing, so there will be no specifics here until I have one of them in hand.  Suffice to say that all the jobs I'm paying serious attention to are the kind I like to do.

On another front: peas and lettuce soup turned out . . . not bad, exactly, but bland, even with all the herbs I put in, and iceberg lettuce should cook much much longer than butter lettuce, actually longer than cabbage. I may try something like it again, but not soon, as I have almost a gallon of this stuff left to get through. The whey part of the soup is actually pretty nice, as weird as that sounds. I mentioned I might have use for more sour milk and the world has told me there may be more sour milk in my future. The ricotta I made, I think I will use in making a lasagne-like concoction based on the half a butternut squash in the fridge. ut not until after I eat up most of this damned pea soup and the rest of the garbanzos and lentils.

I missed Gray Bears due to an interview but it doesn't matter: the fridge is full of vegetables, so I can easily wait. I am some months behind in some of my bills, but the mortgage gets paid and I have more free veggies than I can casually eat, so I guess it's okay that it's taking a while to get a job.

Read this, and then also, follow the link.  A friend of mine is examining Bill Gates' (and others') "philanthropy" and what it actually entails, and what it costs us.

And then, read this response from Frank:

I don't think you should combine the vaccine controversy with the education stuff, because the vaccine issue is a lot more arguable. The plan of trying to get people to invest more in vaccine technology by making vaccines more profitable to distribute is not secret, nor is it unambiguously bad. It isn't like the educational leveraged philanthropy, where people extracting money from the process leads to worse outcomes for everyone who matters. The vaccines do exactly the same thing and work exactly the same whether the price is high or low or negative. Just as they work exactly the same whether the price is paid by the families being protected, the states those families are citizens of, or private foundations.But if you're relying on the private sector to research vaccines, as we apparently are, then I don't really see any alternative to what Gates has proposed. There is a pile of money that acts as price subsidies so that the money pharma corporations *receive* for their vaccines is larger than the amount individuals and countries *pay* for them. This encourages people to get vaccinated and encourages corporations to continue investing in future vaccines. I am really not sure what else philanthropic donations could possibly hope to accomplish on the world vaccination front. Maybe pay for direct research and hope it pans out?

The Republican Party has a plan. The plan is to destroy everything. Look at these things (not in any order):

-- destroy the ability of working people to act in their own behalf
(abolish collective bargaining rights)

--destroy education
(abolish public schools)
(oppose national funding for school construction)

-- destroy modern medicine
(defund CDC's center for injury prevention and control)
(defund health care reform, but it goes farther than this)
(prevent vaccinations)
(disallow life-saving medical procedures for women)



-- destroy protections for children
("modify" -- that is, repeal -- child labor laws)
(oppose school breakfast programs in the name of economy)

-- destroy the environment

(really, so petty: end the capitol's own compostable dishware program)
(stop protecting wild lands from exploitation)
(redfine rape so it means nothing) (they backed down on this. Voluble outrage can make a difference!)

I can't do this anymore. But you get the picture.

It's not just that the Republicans don't have out best interests at heart. What they have at heart is actual harm and ultimate destruction for everybody and everything.

They want us to be poor, uneducated, ill, without rights or prospects. The war on women is part of a larger war on everybody.

I have my ideas about the ultimate motivation for this, but I am not certain of it. Perhaps it is the mindless instinct of a foul, dying beast, determined to take everything and everyone down with it.

So my daughter has to take this physics class. She has to buy a two hundred dollar textbook. She can't share, or use a second-hand book, because the class also requires a thirty-dollar clicker ( a thing that you use to answer quizzes in class and to participate in various class exercises), which cannot be registered without the book. And in order to have the homework count, she has to pay another thirty dollars or so to register at the publisher's website.

This is an introductory physics class. It's a crucial class for, I think, most of the science majors.

Her textbooks, all told, come to over six hundred dollars. Did I ever tell you that at UCSC students take only three academic classes a quarter, because the quarters are so short, and the classes theoretically therefore so intense?

The kid has financial aid that covers all this, mainly because she lives at home.

Now imagine you are a young person whose family does not reside in town. Imagine that you are a good student but not the very best and not the cleverest at getting financial aid -- maybe the higher ed tradition is not so strong in your family and you're piecing this together with some financial aid and some low-wage kid jobs and you're living in a room somewhere -- maybe two or three students to a room in a house on the bus line, or maybe in a dorm or the "University Inn." Imagine what it means to you to be told that you have to spend over two hundred and fifty dollars on a single book and a bit of technological gimcrack that probably costs three dollars to assemble?

What do we think the physics department was thinking when they adopted a two-hundred dollar textbook for a class in Newtonian physics? ("ooh, shiny," most likely)

They sure weren't thinking about the much-talked about mandate to recruit and retain more science students from underrepresented groups, like, for example, students from working-class backgrounds.

Buck up!!
A friend sent me this:
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/092204W.shtml

Onward:
Tuesday night is Bingo Night. I sell pull tabs -- a kind of side game -- to mostly old ladies for fifty cents or a dollar each, to raise money for stuff like band uniforms and trips to perform. Sometimes I work with the father of the cherubic blond twins who play horn and cello. He works at a middle school here in Santa Cruz. (I don't work, currently: I'm looking for a non-teaching job for now) Another mom was working who is an elementary school teacher in Salinas. I've had conversations just like the ones I had tonight with teachers all over the area, in all grades.

The state test has imposed a dumb, stultifying, ineffective curriculum on the teachers and students. Teachers don't teach math anymore, for example: they teach "skills" which are "aligned" to the state tests. Students arrive in middle school and high school having no sense of what the math is all about, because all of the programs which were based on what the mathematicians and the math teachers recommended were thrown out. Kids don't get their hands on stuff: they get drill papers. They get example sets which are complicated and badly worded, which are supposedly more rigorous than the investigations they were doing in the past.

All the "frills--" music, art, cooking, field trips, anything hands-on, second language instruction, most science, most social studies -- have been cut to nothing or nearly nothing in a large number of elementary schools. The "integrated curriculum," a fad of the past, is in the trash bin, although every school I know about still claims to hold it as its value and teachers are expected to provide evidence of doing it. How can they do it?

In elementary schools, teachers have a regulation number of minutes each day they must spend on a "language arts" program that comes out of a box. They have another regulation number of minutes that they must spend on the math program,which also comes out of a box. These programs are mandated by the state. They are highly scripted. And they leave about an hour a day in which to do everything else. Physical education, which has mandated minutes per week and no funding: science, social studies, each of which have programs which come out of a box "aligned" with the state test: art, music, discussion, "character education" (another fad highly approved of by both left and right, though they had different ideas about what this was supposed to mean), anything spontaneous, announcements, conflict resolution, handling paperwork (not schoolwork) . . .

It's not testing per se that I mind. It's not standardized testing per se that I mind. It's not a state-mandated curriculum that I mind. What I mind is a stupid state-mandated curriculum "aligned" with an idiot test, with high stakes riding on it. It's got a built-in failure mode. Success on the state test is not judged by actual skills or knowledge of the students. No. It's percentile ranking. In the current system, the whole state could test out at 90-100% of the questions right, and the schools that consistently got 92.3% of the questions right would be penalized.

Yep. The schools will be penalized if they don't improve fast enough. Right. If they don't improve fast enough. Teachers and administration will be fired or redistributed, districts will go under receivership (that's where the COunty Office of Education or the State take over the running of the district), and schools will lose funding. They will lose funding. The schools with the kids who are lagging behind, the kids who don't have anything to begin with, the kids who have to come to school with no breakfast (because this same school reform movement and cost-cutting frenzy has eliminated most of the school breakfast programs and the ones that remain often give out peanut butter bars and doughnuts), the kids who have to go to school in unsafe buildings that leak and sit in chairs with exposed bolts -- these are the schools which will lose funding under the current system (it does take a while to get in the position of losing funding).

And remember that when funding for the schools is cut, the testing requirements are not. The students don't just take the one battery of tests (was there ever a more appropriate term?). Honestly, I've lost count of how many tests they take -- the high school I worked at last year had three weeks devoted to testing, and the elementary schools have more tests than that. So there's this horrendous amount of testing, sucking money out of the schools -- to go to, by the way, private, profit-making companies (and here is another bipartisan boondoggle: bunch of Democrats were in on this too) -- and the teacher-pupil ratio rises and rises.

This is not new. Education is always treated like this in California. It's a wonder we can read at all (we do kind of okay compared to other states, but some of those other states don't have the resources that are here somewhere being diverted away from education)

People might remember how a few years ago the then-governor (Wilson, Republican) and legislature abruptly instituted a wildly disruptive and costly "clas-size reduction program." Districts had about three months to come up with a plan to get their primary classes below 18 (not average: each. If there was one class with 19 students in it, your district failed). It was voluntary, and it came with not quite enough funding to cover the expenses, which was scheduled to arrive several months after the change was supposed to be made. All the local districts went for it -- with open eyes, knowing it would cost them a bundle because it was severely underfunded -- because they'd been wanting to have small classes for a long time: research indicated that that's good for students. And the classrooms are built for smaller classes anyway. They're dreadfully crowded with big classes in them.

The result was that upper grade numbers swelled. They had to. Even converting libraries, administrative offices, nursing stations, stockrooms, and cafeterias into classrooms didn't give them enough space to hold all the classes. Even hiring uncredentialed or other-credentialed teachers didn't give them enough teachers on the first day of school.

Okay, now, that's in the dustbin too. And schools have fewer and fewer aides -- mostly, except for the aides which are specifically attached to certain kids (mainstreamed special ed, etc), there are none. And oh, yes, those undercredentialled teachers hired for clas-size reduction? They have to go, now, because the same people who made their hiring necessary in the first place with their short-term deadlines have decided that the credential is the big predictor of teacher success(don't get me wrong, I think there's something wrong when there are a lot of uncredentialed or differently-credentialled teachers too. I'm just saying, these guys made the problem and then got all high and mighty about it).

I know I've been going on for a long space here and I'm not done yet. But, the point is, a lot of these teachers have independently come up with the idea that they're not supposed to succeed. They've been shackled in so many ways; an entire body of teaching strategies has been made against the law, against the state constitution, not because it's cruel or ineffective, but because it's bilingual: the curriculum has been made more "rigorous" only by making it more difficult, less beautiful, less fun, less accessible, and less intelligible: the rules the teacher must abide by get stricter, and also change, every year, and sometimes more than once in a year: every scrap of extra money is gone, and even some of the money which is not extra: time has been taken from the school calendar to ad more testing instead of more instruction: an assessment system has been put into place which is confusing, defeating, unrevealing about a student's abilities: and a system of sanctions has been put into place which is unhelpful, threatening, and demoralizing.

Clearly, the people who designed this mess do not want public schools to work. They want to point to a generation of badly-educated young people and say "See? It doesn't work. Let's -- privatize it! Yeah! Give the school infrastructure away at bargain basement prices to my uncle Moe and his corporation and let them make a profit on it! That'll make it better!"