Mountebank Blog

A great quote, passed on to me by one of my students:

The past is never dead. It’s not even the past.

SI.com – Magazine – SI Flashback: Tillman’s intensity made him the heart of Arizona State’s defense – Friday April 23, 2004 12:04PM.
I’d never heard of this fellow, but this is a great profile, well-written and inspiring–even though there are large parts of it which I can’t understand at all. Football, it seems, is a different language.

What makes it even more poignant is that Pat Tillman (the player profiled) was killed in Afghanistan this week.

I’ll give the strange meme a try:

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 23.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

The nearest book at this moment is Axelrod and Emmens’ Exotic Marine Fishes.

A broad shallow tank is best as it gives the greatest area for the exchange of gases at the surface of the water, but such a tank is not very nice to look at.

Mari Matsuda has a terrific short essay in this week’s issue of The Nation.

She’s exactly correct about the problem of far too many liberals (not to mention conservatives–we don’t expect any better from them), who don’t send their kids to their neighborhood schools because they imagine the schools are “bad.” (Which usually means “black.”)

We marched for civil rights, linked arms to stop eviction, sang “We Shall Not Be Moved” with tear-stained conviction and then walked quietly away from public schools. In the beginning it was called white flight, but the friend who writes to me is not white, and neither are the peers he is talking about. In my DC neighborhood, black parents as well as white choose against the local school.

She’s right that it’s not even just white flight anymore, because it’s some black parents, too. Class certainly plays a role, but the core of the problem, usually, is racism, whether internalized or not. And it’s based (as racism so often is) on ignorance.

Here is what you don’t see if you are not inside that school: heroic teachers and real learning occurring alongside unconscionable neglect of human needs. Because I see many strengths still intact, my children remain in neighborhood schools. I deploy privilege from my back pocket to help make those schools work and, I confess, to retain the exit option if it comes to that. A plea to my peers: Before you pull out, make sure it is as bad as you are imagining it is, and do the impossible. Cleanse your imagination of racism.

She also makes the point that the schools suffer, that the flight or the avoidance of the privileged (white or not), means that the political power and resources fly away, too, making bad situations worse.

But it’s the kids of those flying-away white (or not) parents, too, who suffer. They absorb (don’t think they don’t!) their parents’ ideology that there’s something dangerous, or at least undesirable, about the schools which their parents (with their mouths, but not their feet) claim to support and care about.

How much stress can an 8-year-old stand? I spent this morning listening to stories of third graders vomiting, crying, sleepless, completely stressed about these dreaded citywide exams.

Parents are paying thousands of dollars to tutors, kids are worried sick, and why? No good reason at all.

I might be singing a different tune if my own child were really in danger of failing, but I do feel confident that the exam tests third grade work, third grade learning, and if these kids are in third grade, they’ll be able to handle the exam.

I heard about one teacher who’s been telling her students “this test is harder than any of the work I’ve given you! You’re going to have to do better work than you’ve ever done before!”

Now what’s the damn point of that? It’s not only not true, but it’s completely unhelpful.

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Working on setting up the wiki, and I finally got it up. Still needs some configuration, but it seems to work. I’m very proud of my php and mysql mastery–especially since it’s way way way over my head.

I read a lot of posts in various forums with people saying “I work in dangerous areas” or “I carry a lot of cash” or “I have a lot of enemies” so “I need to carry a gun for self protection, for my own safety.”

But this really makes very much sense to me. For “safety” or “self-protection” a gun is probably the worst tool. Although it may be that these people walking around armed are actually safer because they’re exercising the real safety tool…their own alert senses. Maybe the fact of having the gun makes them aware and in touch with what’s around them.

On Brooklyn’s late-night streets I see far too many people who don’t have any idea who or what they’re walking past. They’re in a daze, in their own world, and that’s always asking for trouble.

When I’ve “worked in” or “walked through” dangerous areas, I’ve never had a bit of trouble, and I’ve spent plenty of time in plenty of the various worst areas (never mind why). I’ve never been armed–but I’ve been awake. That means crossing streets when necessary, walking around the block, looking at, or looking away from, potential threats.

In Tunnel in the Sky, one of Heinlein’s “competent survivor” types makes this speech…
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What is it about “Tears, Idle Tears” and “The Road Not Taken?”

They’re both fine poems, but they’re not the finest poems in the English language. But students continually choose them when they’re given a choice.

They must be coming up first in some kind of search engine, because even Chinese students, with no exposure to English poetry at all, always seem to want to choose them.

I’m giving them the Academy of American Poets website as a possible resource, so they must be searching for some keyword consistently that’s bringing up these two poems. But what?

I could ask them, of course, but the ones who are choosing these poems are also the ones who are having the most trouble even communicating with me in spoken English.

I do want to give them free choice, but I also want to push for a little more variety in that choice!

Well, it turns out the favicon problem I was having with bloglines was their bug, not mine! But they fixed it! Hooray!

The 2004 “Muzzle Awards” from the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression have been announced. They’ve got some real recognition-worthy acts of censorship, and some great epigrams for each one, too.

For example, “To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.”–T. Roosevelt.