Historiann

“Cool Dad Raising Daughter on Media That Will Put Her Entirely Out of Touch With Her Generation,” from The Onion and via Fratguy:

Campbell said he has also been vigilant in ensuring Emma develops an increased familiarity with timeless classic films, a parenting strategy that will inevitably hobble her as she attempts to achieve individuation while negotiating an adolescence heavily influenced by the very latest pop culture.

Since her early childhood, a period sources said featured a Danger Mouse–themed birthday party that utterly baffled the assembled 6-year-old guests, Campbell’s daughter has been fed a steady diet of marginalizing cinematic masterpieces from the world’s very best filmmakers.

“Jean-Luc Godard, Stanley Kubrick, Billy Wilder—you simply need to know who these men are if you want to call yourself culturally literate,” Campbell said of the three iconic directors whose creations could not have less utility to his daughter as she searches for a way to achieve a sense of belonging among her fellow middle-schoolers. “Sure, she makes a face when I don’t let her see some ridiculous movie with CGI robots because it’s John Sayles Night and we’re watching The Secret Of Roan Inish instead. But I’m giving her a leg up, even if she doesn’t know it.” Continue Reading »

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Toldyaso! I SO told you so.

Guess what?  Online “academies” for K-12 students?  Not such an awesome idea!  Grace Hood has an alarming report on KUNC radio on the money paid to the for-profit company K12 Inc. to administer “COVA,” the Colorado Virtual Academy (click here to read or listen to it):

At a time when public schools are seeing deep cuts in funding, there’s a growing market for companies running online elementary, middle and high schools. The largest for-profit company overseeing these programs in Colorado is Virginia-based company K12 Inc. While public schools are struggling to survive, K12 Inc.—with the support of state tax dollars—is reporting double digit profits. Meantime, it’s not measuring up to state academic standards.

To be fair, the kinds of students who end up seeking an education online are not those who are having success in traditional schools.  But instead of spending the money on human teachers to teach classes in bricks-and-mortar schools, let’s instead send $22 million a year to Virginia for an “online academy:”

Student enrollment at COVA has grown to about 5,000 thanks in part to marketing by K12. But despite the allure of flexibility and education from home, COVA is finding a relatively high number of students are dropping out. Last year the school reported a 12 percent graduation rate. That’s compared to a 72 percent average for all public high schools statewide.

Let’s try a thought experiment that I saw on Corrente recently in a post by Lambert (sorry–can’t find the exact post):  substitute the words But despite with Because of.  So:  Because of the allure of flexibility and education from home, COVA is finding a relatively high number of students are dropping out.  Continue Reading »

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I’m sure most of you humorless feminazis have been following with unsurprised disgust all of the chatter about Ron Suskind’s Confidence Men and his “revelation” that Barack Obama White House is run more like a pickup hoops game, with women advisors sidelined and shoved into the bleachers.  (The WH’s efforts to distance themselves from Suskind’s book are at least good for a laugh!)  After all, President Obama made his basketball buddy the Secretary of Education, and those Obama golf outings sure look like photos of every other Presidential golf entourage of the past century, from William Howard Taft on.  Anyone who paid the slightest iota of attention to the gender politics of Obama’s 2008 campaign won’t be surprised, anyway–all of us “sweeties” over the age of 30 or so sure as hell paid attention.

In any case, this has got to be the absolute dumbest thing said about the gender politics of the current WH:

It’s passing strange that a man who was raised by a strong single mother, who talks affectionately about the influence of the banker grandmother who helped raise him, who married a strong woman, who lives with his mother-in-law and who has two daughters he adores, could ever create an Oval man-cave where some women felt uncomfortable. Continue Reading »

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Cookies reported as possible security threat on a Frontier Airlines flight from Denver to Detroit (via TalkLeft, which also is where I found the Cookie Monster photo):

[T----- G---] was boarding a Frontier Airlines flight in Denver a week before the 10th anniversary of 9/11 when he saw two passengers in line ahead of him hand a tin box to a flight attendant.

The flight attendant seemed surprised, but she removed the lid to discover a batch of homemade chocolate chip cookies, G— said. She thanked the passengers profusely and started eating the cookies and passing them to other flight attendants, said G—, 22, . . . a senior at the University of Michigan.

“Free drinks for you guys,” G— said he remembers the flight attendant saying to the two passengers.

G—’s thoughts immediately shifted to security. Were the cookies possibly poisoned?

“I was just so stunned by how excited the stewardess was acting,” he said. “You would think the flight crew is trained to evaluate the situation, but she blindly started eating the cookies and handing them out.

“She then goes into the cockpit to serve cookies to the pilots,” said G—, who said he watched intently from his seat in Row 5. “I go, ‘Oh, no, this is getting worse by the second.’ I am thinking something is wrong. I was pretty afraid.”

There is a higher ed angle to this story, of course:  it’s not the passenger who complained to the TSA.  No, it was his helicopter mother, who of course wasn’t even on the flight in question: Continue Reading »

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Miss Susie had a baby, she threw it in the well

The baby went to heaven, Miss Susie went to HELL-o operator. . . Continue Reading »

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Done your back-to-school shopping yet?

Busy day here at the ranch, but there’s lotsa news and views in the education world.  Read on to hear more about online education, the availability of technologies like pencils and crayons in some Colorado classrooms, and the aggressive pR0nification of student life at some elite colleges:

• Via Inside Higher Ed, It turns out that you can’t fool more than a third of the general public all of the time, but college presidents are much, much better at fooling themselves.  According to a Pew Research Center study on “The Digital Revolution and Higher Education,” here’s the verdict on “[t]he Value of Online Learning. The public and college presidents differ over the educational value of online courses. Only 29% of the public says online courses offer an equal value compared with courses taken in a classroom. Half (51%) of the college presidents surveyed say online courses provide the same value.” 
• But of course, it’s possible to have “Excellence Without Money,” right?  The State of Colorado and a “scholar” at the Hoover Institution argue that money can’t possibly fix the problems we have with P-20 education.  They’re shocked, shocked at the implication that money has anything to do with the quality of education we offer through our schools and universities!  (Funny how money fixes problems for banks, and car manufacturers, and hospitals, and no one ever patronizes them by calling it “throwing money” at their problems.) 
• Meanwhile, back in Colorado’s rural elementary schools, here’s just one fourth-grade teacher’s lived experience:  “Some of the most compelling testimony for the plaintiffs came from Matthew Keefauver, a teacher in Cortez who choked back emotion at times describing how poor his students are and how his district doesn’t have enough resources to help them.  The free lunches and breakfasts at school are frequently the only meals they have, he testified.  ‘They actually race to the classroom in the morning for breakfast because some of them are so hungry,’Keefauver said. Continue Reading »

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Living in the present reality is just too, too sad. Not for me personally, but for the Republic at large, and it just seems strange that summer is all popsicles and bike rides and the adult equivalent of day camps for me. (More on my recent summer adventures tomorrow, I hope.) So instead of ranting about all that again, how about a little fun? That’s right: the guy you know who just can’t lose. (Was I the only person who actually rooted for Ms. Musso and his sister?)

If only we could all be like Parker Lewis! And the lead actor, Corin Nemec, is still a working actor, so good for him. Continue Reading »

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Writing about parenting decisions on the internet is hazardous if you are a mother.  It doesn’t matter that the mistake in question wasn’t yours, and that instead it was a nurse’s fault that your child received the wrong vaccine.  If you are a mother, you will only be attacked as a neglectful mother/helicopter parent/narcissist/etc.  (Don’t believe me?  Just skim some of the first comments, if you dare.  I’m still trying to wrap my head around her being called both neglectful AND a helicopter parent.  Awesome!)

If you as a mother simultaneously transfused blood into your child WHILE lifting a burning car off of her body, you’ll still be told U R doin’ it RONG.  You’re a helicopter (or Jaws of Life) parent!  Parents do too much for their kids these days!  What a narcissist–why would you write about a private trauma like that?  It was dangerously irresponsible for you not to call 911 and let the paramedics handle that!  Take take take–that’s all they’ll ever learn if you do everything for them!!!!11!!!1!1!

It’s difficult for me to imagine that a father who wrote a similar essay would be subject to such patronizing, dismissive, and nasty lectures from anonymous (and not-so-anonymous) commenters and tweeters.  In fact, in the world I inhabit, I think it’s quite plausible that he’d be offered warm, gooey cookies for an essay like that, even (or especially?) from feminist writers.  Continue Reading »

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Architect friend MBB forwarded this intel on yesterday about the American Institute of Architects’s Barbie Dream House competition:

At the convention, there was a lot of buzz about Mattel’s Barbie® I Can Be™…Architect. Please help us continue the buzz by sharing the following with members so they can vote for their favorite dream house.

Check out the designs–the one with the pool slide from the runway is really tempting, but I think I like the Eero Saarinen-esque one the best. At least, I can see myself living and working in those airy, sunny pods quite easily! You can review them all and vote for your favorite, too. Continue Reading »

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Here’s to 235 more, if we can keep our republic.  Famille Historiann made it out of the wilderness and back to Durango last night, so today is a travel day for me.  For a remembrance of Independence Days past, here are a few posts from the past that capture the spirit of 1776:

• I’m in a roadside motel again like last year, and like last year, HBO is running a John Adams miniseries marathon again.  See my review from last year here.  (Short version:  if you want seasonal entertainment, watch the musical 1776 instead.  My prediction is that HBO’s tedious verisimilitude won’t wear nearly as well as the sunny song-and-dance version.)
• Here’s my review from 2010 of Marla Miller’s Betsy Ross and the Making of America.
• The history and politics of “tea-drinking” and U.S. diplomacy are discussed here in this post from 2009.
• Scenes from a small town rodeo, from 2008.

Continue Reading »

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