Personal Musings category archive

Baseball.

In the Guardian, Walt Gardner looks at the history of “pay for performance” for teachers.

Early in my career with the railroad, I learned that, if one employee contravenes a policy, the employee is likely culpable; if the majority of employees contravenes a policy, the policy is likely wrong.

Aside from the overtly criminal (embezzlers, ponzi scheme managers, and other fraudsters), most working persons do not go to work planning to defraud their employers by performing their jobs badly. They may be intending other forms of misconduct while on duty and on the property, but they aren’t thinking something like, “I’ll just stock all the merchandise on the wrong shelves today.”

I’ve long had qualms about “pay for performance” for teachers and most of the other education “reform” schemes based on testing. As my mother, a math teacher, once said to me, “How can we expect them to read if there isn’t a magazine in the house?”

The reports of “teaching to the test” and fudging students’ scores are so numerous and so frequent as to indicate to me not a failure of school teachers and administrators, but the failure of the strategy.

Pay-for-performance began in England in about 1710, when salaries were based on test scores in reading, writing and arithmetic. The rationale was that it would help keep students from poor families in school, where they could learn the basics. The plan became part of the Revised Education Code in 1862, and remained on the books for more than 30 years.

The trouble was that the strategy sucked the creative life out of classrooms, as teachers became obsessed with the code. When it became apparent that the approach demeaned education, it was dropped in the 1890s. Pay-for-performance re-emerged briefly in Canada in 1876, but it ran into similar difficulties and was terminated in 1883.

Afterthought:

Ever notice how many bad ideas’ reason for existence is summed up in, “But we have to do something?“

Someone who must deny science to protect his or her faith has not faith.

The writers for Criminal Minds are some sick puppies to come up with the plots they do.

But Garcia runs Linux, so they are forgiven.

Listening to this, I wonder why the phrase “in this day and age” in a statement so often presages something blitheringly idiotic?

Depressing.

AT&T Inc. (T) surged in early U.S. trading after agreeing to buy T-Mobile USA from Deutsche Telekom AG (DTE) for about $39 billion in cash and stock to create America’s largest mobile-phone company.

I’ve been with T-Mobile since before they were T-Mobile (they became T-Mobile when Deutsche Telekom bought Voicestream).

Their network wasn’t as big as the networks of some of the other carriers, but their customer service and support have always been excellent and their pricing reasonable, and roaming works when out of the network.

In contrast, At&T is AT&T because Southwestern Bell had to change its name to Cingular had to buy the AT&T name to escape its reputation for service.

Wonder whether my Android works with Credo?

Bagels and pimento cheese.

Yums.

Literalist Christians are their own worst advertisement.

In fact, words fail them. Or they fail words. Or something.

Frankly, I think literalists should be required to learn Greek, Aramaic, and Hebrew, so they could be literature literalists. Maybe then will they get a clue (emphasis added):

The 2011 translation of the New International Version Bible, or NIV, does not change pronouns referring to God, who remains “He” and “the Father.” But it does aim to avoid using “he” or “him” as the default reference to an unspecified person.

(snip)

Before the new translation even hit stores, it drew opposition from the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, an organization that believes women should submit to their husbands in the home and only men can hold some leadership roles in the church.

(snip)

At issue is how to translate pronouns that apply to both genders in the ancient Greek and Hebrew texts but have traditionally been translated using masculine forms in English.

(The “Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood” could probably better be described as the “keep ’em in the kitchen and bedroom” party.)

Follow the link to see some samples from the text. Some of them are, indeed, awkward, but, really, this is much ado about not much of anything, for God did not spake in Elizabethan English in the first place.

Republicans are fond of saying “The federal government is broke.” I just heard one say it on the Magickal Talking Box.

They don’t admit that they broke it.

How long before Wisconsin Republicans seize the radio and television stations (at least the ones that aren’t already Fox), declare martial law, and announce the coup?

If every shopper returned his or her grocery cart, rather than leaving it in the parking lot, the effort would likely reduce obesity by 9.63%

Spring must be near.

The joggers are in bloom.

The Oldsmobile was a middle-of-the-road middle of the price range car, sort of a Pontiac without any of that GTO pizzazz.

The Oldsmobile is no more. So too is your father’s Republican Party.

I believe that many persons, especially older persons (a demographic that includes me) who consider themselves Republicans (a demographic that excludes me) don’t realize how little today’s Republican Party shares with the Republican Party of their upbringing, the party that included Everett Dirksen, John Heinz, and Edward Brooke, just to mention a few.

I sense a longing for their fathers’s Oldsmobiles among leading members of the professional commentariat, especially the two Davids (Brooks and Broder).

Broder, indeed, has given a name to an condition: High Broderism, a syndrome which includes the willingness to sacrifice moral outcomes on the altar of the appearance of conciliation. As the Booman points out, High Broderism postulates that compromise is a one-way street: Democrats give; Republicans take.

Nothing I have read recently so illustrates how delusional is their faith in the existence of their fathers’ Oldsmobiles than Shaun Mullen’s remembrance of Russell W. Peterson, Republican Governor of Delaware from 1969 to 1973. Shaun’s conclusion:

Russ Peterson was 94 when he died on Monday night at his Wilmington home. It is sadly ironic that as a moderate Republican he would have stood no chance of being nominated today in a state where Christine O’Donnell was the party’s 2010 standard bearer, let alone become an environmental torchbearer for a party that eschews moderation and is an avowed enemy of the environment.

Several years ago, before it became a real prospect, I heard someone propose, “General Motors should just stop making Oldsmobiles and see whether anyone notices.” (Eventually, General Motors did and car buyers didn’t, but that’s another story.)

The Republican Party no longer makes Oldsmobiles and lots of folks still haven’t noticed.

80 Fahrenheits, open windows, and short-sleeve shirts in mid-February are Just Not Right in This Part of the World.

If a bad film is released in 3D, does that make it three times as bad or only half again as bad?

Last night, I saw Neil Sedaka (who is by any standard a great talent and a classy guy) on an Infomercial selling oldies from the 50s and 60s.

He looks like Ed Asner.

But he still sounds like Neil Sedaka.

In Media World, if it snows in Washington, D. C., and New York, New York, it snows all over the world.

I don’t know enough to comment on it. My knowledge of Egyptian history is probably slightly more than that of the average American, what with being trained as a historian, but that delineates the difference between somewhat ignorant and profoundly ignorant. I do know not to base my opinions on anything in Raiders of the Lost Ark or The Jewel of the Nile.

I do recall that, back in the olden days, when computers had tubes and took up entire buildings, an Egyptian medical doctor gave a talk on Egypt to the older grades at my elementary school (the local hospital welcomed immigrant doctors looking earn licenses in the States). At the time, Nasser had been in power for about a decade.

The doctor told us (I’m paraphrasing),

In Egypt, we have democracy, but it’s not like your democracy.

We do not have candidates running against each other. We hold up a candidate for president and say, ‘Do you want him?”

If the people say “No,” we hold up another candidate.

Even then, that sounded fishy to me, so fishy that I remember it almost five decades later.

I’ve learned not to believe what I hear in the news when events are moving quickly on the other side of the world, or even next door. Remember all the lies about New Orleans during the Katrina Army Corps of Engineer Floods–I fell for those and once bitten etc.

It’s not that I think major news organizations are falsifying stuff, but that, in the rush to fill airtime and column inches, they can fall into the trap of relying on guesswork, rumor, and wishful thinking.

This is certainly the case in the blogosphere, left, right, and middle. Andrew Sullivan’s giddiness over the Green Revolution in Iran, which petered out to nothing, amply illustrates this. (Indeed, a friend of mine with Iranian friends tells me that they have told her that the level of repression in Iran is now far greater than it has been in years.)

Sullivan’s changing his website’s banner to green as a show of solidarity had little effect on guns and beatings half a world away.

In reporting fast-moving events, an unverified twit may be worse than no twit at all.

Nevertheless, I know enough about American history to pretty much agree with the Rude One: our history of supporting dictators in the name of realpolitik has repeatedly come back to bite us in the behind and that laying low and letting events run their course is probably the best policy for the United States (Warning: Rudeness at link).

For an unusual perspective on events in Egypt, see the Linux Outlaws special podcast. It’s weighted towards reviewing the influence of “new media” and the internet in events in Egypt (two Linux geeks podcasting internationally via Skype and an internet connection–what else would you expect?). It also provides some international perspective Americans are unlikely to get first-hand, as one of the podcasters is from the U. K. and the other is from Germany.

The discussion of Egypt starts about 13 minutes into the broadcast.

A couple of evenings ago, I watched Charlie Chan in Egypt, from 1935. A few weeks ago, I watched Charlie Chan in London, from a couple of years earlier. (I’ve been a mystery fan since I bought my first Perry Mason Pocketbook for 35 cents in Thalheimer’s Department Store in Richmond. I understand that Thalheimer’s is long gone.)

There were some interesting contrasts between them. (We shall leave aside any debate over whether the Charlie Chan series was inherently bigoted; I shall observe only that Keye Luke did not think so.)

In Charlie Chan in London, several of the characters display disdain and contempt for (and in the case of one maid, fear of) Chan because he is of Chinese ancestry, though many of them, especially the officials who know that Chan is an Inspector of Police, treat him quite normally. For the time, it was a rather bold statement about bigotry, for the audience’s sympathy was certainly with Chan.

Charlie Chan in Egypt is set against the background of an archaeological expedition exploring an Egyptian tomb, as were many B movie thrillers of the 30s. Remember that the discovery of the tomb of King Tut and the rumors of a curse were recent history; thrillers set against tales of Egyptian exploration and artifacts were all the rage.

The “comic relief” in Charlie Chan in Egypt was provided by Stepin Fetchit, who played a driver for the expedition.

What struck me was not so much the character that Stepin Fetchit portrayed (it was his typical burlesque of white folks’ idea of black folks: dimwitted, fearful, superstitious, and ignorant–see his bio linked above), but how shoddily his character was treated by the other mostly American and British characters.

True, the Egyptian characters fit common stereotypes of the day–inconsequential subservient workers and lackeys for the Brits and the Yanks, but, even in the film, they were treated with at minimum brusque courtesy and, in the case of the police, the druggist, and the doctor, with quite normal courtesy.

Indeed, in the cast of characters, Fetchit’s was the only one without even a name, having just a nickname (“Snowshoes”).

Throughout the file, his character was treated with the harshest discourtesy and abruptness. His employers did not request (and a request from your boss is still an order), they ordered, and in the nastiest tones. The contrast with the treatment of the Egyptian servants (properly, the actors, including a young Rita Hayworth, who played Egyptians; there probably wasn’t an actual Egyptian with 4,000 miles of the sound stage) shocked.

And here’s the point of this rambling post:

“Snowshoes” was irrelevant to the plot. He was the comic relief. His mistreatment did not advance the story.

Rather, the differential treatment given him was likely not even noticed by the white American movie-going audience.

It was considered the normal and proper way to treat black folks.

It still was by many when I was growing up (fortunately not by my parents).

And there are those who want those days to return.

And that stinks.

On the Media takes a look at government use of leaks and the effects of mendacious government leaks on persons’ lives. From the website:

Brooke takes us on a walk down bad memory lane when it comes to the media and inaccurate sources.

Follow the link above to listen or read the transcript or listen here (MP3):

A snippet:

BROOKE GLADSTONE: The stakes can even be higher than that. Yellowcake uranium from Niger, aluminum tubes for centrifuges, hidden biological weapons labs in the Iraqi desert, all sanctioned leaks or official statements, all policy-driven, all wrong, formed the pretext for going to war. And it has been forever thus.

CLIP: PRESIDENT LYNDON JOHNSON: My fellow Americans, as President and Commander-in-Chief, it is my duty to the American people to report that renewed hostile actions against United States ships on the high seas in the Gulf of Tonkin have today required me to order the military forces of the United States to take action in reply.

[END CLIP]

BROOKE GLADSTONE: The Gulf of Tonkin – epically bad official information. It’s exactly like bad food, sometimes deliberately poisoned, sometimes spoiled by accident or happenstance. And it should be treated like food, with some knowledge of its provenance and nutritional value, consumed only after judicious prodding and a good long sniff, because you need it to live but the bad stuff can kill you.

I remember Johnson’s lie statement about the Gulf of Tonkin attack and I remember my teen-aged boy reaction:

The U. S. Marines will show them!

Well, the U. S. Marines and Army and Navy and Air Force did not show them, and in the process of not showing them hundreds of thousands of persons died and were maimed. Friends of mine were scarred irreparably.

I no longer believe that solutions invariably lie with the fist.

Nor do I believe that politicians are necessarily truthful, though some are more truthful than others.

What happened?

I grew up.

On the topic of the military, our national leadership on either side of the aisle still thinks like teen-aged boys.

Case in point.