03.30.07
Posted in News at 10:18 am by Joe Blubaugh
No, not in the Ice-T way, but the way it happens most in this country: Cops Taser, then kill at point-blank range an unarmed civilian. You tell me how someone who’s been tasered three times and is lying on the ground in his own vomit poses an ‘imminent threat’ to nearby officers. Disgusting.
A representative of the police department also had the temerity to say,
“In a sense, [he threatened the officers] when he did not comply with their commands.”
Passive resistance - or non-resistance, as in this case - is not threatening. A person lying on the ground is not threatening. I don’t know what kind of meatheaded idiots they’ve got for cops these days, but they seem to believe that civilian failure to comply suddenly invests them with the authority to shoot them. Welcome to the future.
Permalink
03.05.07
Posted in Personal, News at 11:21 am by Joe Blubaugh
Or: I keep saying Oprah is evil.
Oprah, the you-too-can-be-a-winner symbol of our cultural descent into madness, is hawking a new book that is even more vacuous than the standard hyper-materialsitic palliatives that she pushes to middle-aged women across America.
The Secret is a New-Agey, phony self-help system that makes you believe it’s All Your Fault: you are poor not because of a combination of your birth circumstances, education, work ethic, pay rate, and high heating costs, but because you are “blocking the money from coming to you” with your bad thoughts. Thinking about weight gain causes weight gain, according to The Secret. It’s one of the least veiled examples of the culture that America lives in now, one of easy, institution-supplied answers, where we no longer search for the meaning in our lives, but receive it prepackaged from American Jesus and Dr. Phil. It’s what Peter Birkenhead calls “Oprah Culture.”
The Salon article makes me want to cry out in despair. I know these people. They’re all around me, buying ‘books’ instead of books and trying so, so hard to believe their lives into goodness. They’re living their Best Life Now.
Permalink
03.02.07
Posted in News at 5:04 pm by Joe Blubaugh
Or: My town still stinks
Bosse HS has the worst test scores and lowest proportion of students going to college in Evansville. When I lived there, very few people were impressed with Bosse, and a lot of students would try to transfer to another public HS if they could.
Bosse recently fired a chemistry teacher who had started teaching chemistry after a long career in chemistry research. He said that he decided to teach because of the declining quality of his interview candidates, especially in their ability to analyze and solve problems. By his own admission, he wanted to shake things up with his class, because he believed kids were being taught to “to pass a test and then move on to the next chapter.”
Bosse students have voiced very strong support for this teacher - they feel engaged and motivated in his course. Unfortunately, I suspect that the guy probably isn’t following the NCLB-geared curriculum that is being deployed in Evansville, since he specifically mentioned his distaste for teaching to tests.
It’s strange, how at odds NCLB seems to be with legitimate educational interests all over this country. The use of statistical methods to measure teacher quality may seem like a cool toy, but I think that there are too many qualitative factors in whether one is well-educated to ever measure them with a standardized test. NCLB assumes that principals and school districts are not competent to assess and measure their school performance independently, and must submit to an over-generalized stat monster. It’s sad to see another teacher bite the dust because of it.
Permalink