Pork Brains

http://thisiswhyyourefat.com/post/81700285/pork-brains-in-milk-gravy

Studying World Languages

In case you needed another reason to study languages,

Long Sequences of World Language Study Significantly Better
Research data bear out that in order to achieve equity for all students, increasingly longer sequences of study are essential to the acquisition of second language proficiency. As part of the 2002 AP French, AP German, and AP Spanish language exams, survey data support a strong connection between the length of study (in years) and students’ scores on the corresponding AP Examination. Students who had engaged in long sequences of language study (e.g., beginning in grades 4-6) performed significantly better on the corresponding AP Exams and positioned themselves to be granted advanced placement and/or receive academic credit when entering college. (Baum, Bischof, & Rabiteau, 2002)
World Language Study Translates to Higher SAT Scores
In the College Board’s report, 2004 College Bound Seniors: A Profile of SAT Test Takers, students whose profiles include long-sequences of world language study consistently demonstrate higher scores on both the math and verbal portions of the SAT than do their non-language studying counterparts.  The gains are incremental; the more years of world language study, the greater the gains on the SAT Test. These data continue to corroborate previous research confirming the correlation of world language study with higher SAT scores.

Disappointless

I thought it my be time to revive my neologism for when one feels particularly disappointed after trying really hard, being really thoughtful and considerate, and all for naught.  For example, "I can't believe that guy shot down our proposal in a faculty meeting, especially after we all worked so hard to make a balanced document!  That was totally disappointless."  Or: "Wow, we started off with that compromise of 300 billion in tax cuts that actually don't do that much for most Americans just to appease those people and those very people still went around whining like babies and making disengenuous arguments.  That was truly disappointless."

Cheerleader Journalist vs. Analysts: Inane vs. Sane

Here's the picture, via tpm, students: Nouriel Roubini and Nassim Taleb had a 3-hour long line to get into their talk at Davos.  Who was waiting to get in?  Folks like Bill Gates.

Roubini is "famous" now, so CNBC invites him and Tasseb on to the channel.  The problem is that either these journalists are too isolated, stupid or brainwashed to understand what Roubbini and Taleb had to say, or they are selling a product (unlimited growth, DOW 50,000!) that just doesn't exist right now.  They seem to think there is some sector that will give their portfolios a miracle cure, which is silly.  Our problems are systemic.*  It's not just banking or insurance or production or demand.  It's all entangled and until the finance sector clears its bad assets and can clearly put value on real, physical production (as opposed to circulating mathematical-model hedge funds that relate to no real-world products) then the system will not work.  It's really fascinating to watch these clueless people who seem to think that a little cheerleading is going to get everybody through this.  (Oh, and they also think that all bankers are geniuses and deserve high salaries for crashing the system.)

http://www.cnbc.com/id/15840232?video=1027496846

Video link 

*Of course, there will always be some stock somewhere that makes money.  The point is, Roubini and Tasseb are not talking about isolated stocks, but about a whole (screwed up) system.

Back to the classroom...

Things I'm looking forward to this semester:

--Teaching
--Gardening
--Writing more
--Exericise
--Getting back to blogging
--More moodle

Things I'm not forward to:
--Grading
--Exercise
--Assessment
--California's budget
--The Republican Party' Budgetary Bad faith (in California and the U.S.)

Master Shine

Master Shine
Originally uploaded by andrethegiant

I lieu of my comments re: The South elsewhere on the internet, I thought I would post this picture I took back in 2006. It's a rather sad commentary, I think.

The Count of Monte Crisco

Student paper: "...Dantès was a character in and Alexandre Dumas story called the Count of Monte Crisco..."

Now that's a typo I can believe in.  It's tasty and has a long shelf life.

Why They Hate the Great Depression:

I know, I know.  I don't know a damn thing about economics.  Luckily I blog so it doesn't matter.  Here is why rich people hate the Great Depression: 1) The Business Class screwed up royally and wrecked the economy and a lot of rich people got less rich and even went broke; 2) Interventionist state policy actually worked to fix it:

 

Of the various sins committed by Roosevelt, Keynes et al, it is the fact that their policies worked that is the scaries to the "conservatives."  Note how a return to more "orthodox" (read: non-interventionist return to 20's-style) slows the recovery.  

If you don't believe me, ask Brad Delong, he's the guy I stole this chart from.

Politics in the Classroom: Not such a bad thing?

Students in most of my literature and cultural courses have probably noted that I do not hide my political identity.  Of course, like most of my colleagues, I think I strive for evenhandedness, fairness and bringing a multiplicity of voices to the classroom.  And, certainly, when grading, I attempt to be extremely sensitive to recognizing my own possible bias.  Indeed, it is quite possible that, in an attempt to be fair when I grade, I allow students certain leaps of logic that I would not in the classroom setting where realtime dialogue is possible.

Unsurprisingly to me, it turns out that American students lack many of the basic skills required to "talk politics."  Anne Colby, at the Carnegie Foundation, exposes the problem at length in a recent AAC&U article:

Although preparing young people for intelligent democratic participation is undeniably important for them and for the country, this goal is not addressed in a direct and systematic way in American higher education. To be sure, higher education does improve political understanding and engagement. Virtually every study of political knowledge, interest, and participation shows a positive relationship of these variables with educational attainment. But, despite this positive effect, many college graduates are not very politically knowledgeable, sophisticated, skilled, or engaged.
Even though the proportion of the U.S. population attending college has increased dramatically in the past fifty years, according to some indicators, political knowledge and engagement have actually decreased. Delli Carpini and Keeter (1996), for example, found that from the 1940s to the 1990s, overall levels of political knowledge did not go up, while the percentage of Americans attending college more than doubled. As they put it, “Today’s college graduates are roughly equivalent [in political knowledge] to the high school graduates of the 1940s.” Likewise, Bennett and Bennett (2003) report that the statistical strength of the relationship between higher education and political knowledge and participation has weakened in recent years. They found, for example, that exposure to higher education had a weaker differential effect on news consumption in 2000 than in 1972. Research my colleagues and I have conducted suggests that this trend could be reversed if higher education would address students’ political learning more directly.

 What is unsurprising too is that Colby underlines the importance of active learning and engaging pedagogies.  Powerpoints on government structure are really courses about politics, but rather organization.  Students need to learn to engage in personal ways that make politics (its structures, its discourses, its history, media, etc.) contextualized and pertinent.  It is about global learning, and tolerance.  It is more about opening minds than "teaching" them things:

In practice, it is not easy to sort out exactly what it means to align efforts to support political development with these core academic values. It does not mean giving equal time to ideas that are without merit, for example. But it does require a real commitment to open-mindedness on the part of faculty and administrative leaders.
In the courses and programs in our study, we saw that it is possible to combine passionate concern and commitment with openness to views different from one’s own. Many of the students reported that they gained a gut-level understanding that those with opposing views are real people, not demonic caricatures. They learned how to find common ground with people whose interests are quite different from their own and saw that both can benefit when they cooperate around shared goals. We were continually impressed by the ways these courses and programs were able to work toward political clarity and conviction combined with human understanding, tolerance, open-mindedness, and a sense of community that transcends ideological difference. [My emphasis]

I am always pleased to read that a good classroom is not necessarily a "neutral" environment but a place to weigh, balance and discard "bad" ideas--without throwing the people who hold them.

The Mind of the South

We were at a party last night and Adrian says "Look what I got: The Mind of the South," and say "Cool. Uh, what's that?" So he hands me the book and I flip immediately to page 53:

Such is the primary picture. But I must not leave the theme without calling your attention specifically to the stimulation of the tendency to violence... Nor must I leave it without pointing to two significant patterns which grew up in the closest association with this romanticism and hedonism and served it as channels of discharge.
The first of these is the Southern fondness for rhetoric. A gorgeous primitive art addressed to the autonomic system and not to the enchephalon, rhetoric is of course dear to the simple man everywhere...

Well, I read that and laughed and thought "What the hell is this?" and we all got a chuckle out of its ornate prose and "fondness for rhetoric."

I am no longer making fun of the book, though. I've been flipping through it and, while it is "primitive" in its approach to social sciences and says sweeping, generalizing things like "The Yankee" and "The Southerner" and "The Negro" all the time, W.J. Cash's book is truly interesting. Right now I'm reading p. 331 where he is listing a whole slew of incidents in which professors at various universities have been fired for saying things like "The North was generally in the right" or Booker T. Washington was a great man. Earlier, Cash goes into the whole idea of victimization in "The Southerner." I can only say that this foreshadows the current nativist trends in the Republican party, the militia movement and various right winger purveyors of hate. His writing is thus an ancestor to books I love like What's the Matter with Kansas?, Nixonland, and, obviously with Wendell Berry's stuff.

Cash's condemnation and deconstruction of lynching as a practice are great too. At one point he draws the obvious parallel that the KKK and the Nazi's are of a cloth: "In its essence the thing was an authentic folk movement--at least as fully such as the Nazi movement in Germany, to which it was not without kinship" (344). (Remember, this book appeared in 1941, so he doesn't need film reels of concentration camps to figure things out.) He goes on to relate the growth of the Klan in class terms: "Its body was made up of common whites, industrial and rural. But its blood, if I may continue the figure, came from the upper orders" (344). His point was, of course, that he saw through the upper class' self-interest. The KKK was being used in part to keep workers divided along racial lines.

Ok, I'm going to read now.

Thanks, Adrian. Much, much more interesting than I had thought.

No on Prop 8

Courage Campaign asks you to sign their petition. 180k have so far. Why not you?

http://www.couragecampaign.org/page/s/repealprop8

Ingrates

The Republican party is either full of ingrates, ashamed of its history, or some of both:

To understand Nixon’s pivotal role in American history, it is essential to see how he helped turn his personal anxieties into political arguments, remaking his own insecurities into right-wing populist messages. Rick Perlstein’s superb recent book Nixonland provides a fascinating account of Nixon’s rise that ties together his private story with the larger saga of American conservatism.

 Of course,  I teach at his alma mater, so it's a tribute to our college's long legacy of advocating for peace, social justice, and tenure that I say this.

Keynes, Our Economic Times and a Liberal Education

The world-traveling alum strikes again with this find in Asia Times.  The article begins with a quote by Keynes, which should be enough to lure you in...

The power to become habituated to his surroundings is a marked characteristic of mankind. Very few of us realize with conviction the intensely unusual, unstable, complicated, unreliable, temporary nature of the economic organization by which Western Europe has lived for the last half century. We assume some of the most peculiar and temporary of our late advantages as natural, permanent, and to be depended on, and we lay our plans accordingly. On this sandy and false foundation we scheme for social improvement and dress our political platforms, pursue our animosities and particular ambitions ... [John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace], 1920

Keynes was a genius. Read the article and see what kind of shape we're in and what kind of thinking it's going to take to get us out.  GCS students, you'll be reading some of this.

When students graduate with an interest and some understanding of the world I feel a sense of pride and a renewed belief in the liberal eduation.

Fast cars, clean bodies...

Kristin Ross is a good writer:

"And women...as the primary victims and arbiters of social reproduction, as the subjects of everydayness and as those most subjected to it, as the class of people most responsible for consumption, and those responsible for the complex movement whereby the social existence of human beings is produced and reproduced, are the everyday: its managers, its embodiment." (Ross 77)

A student sent me this today....

By Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK - The largest island off west coast is emerging as another frontier for China's expanding plans to extract the rich oil and gas reserves of military-ruled Myanmar.

Initial explorations by a consortium, led by China National Offshore
Oil Company (CNOOC), has left a deep scar on Ramree Island, which is twice the size of Singapore and home to about 400,000 people. ''They have destroyed rice fields and plantations when conducting the seismic surveys and mining the island in search of oil,'' says Jockai Khaing, director of Arakan Oil Watch (AOW), an environmental group of Myanmar people living in exile.

''The local communities have been directly and indirectly affected,'' he said. ''Hundreds of people have been forced to relocate as a result of the drilling conducted near their communities. The locals hate the Chinese; their world has become crazy after the Chinese arrived.''

CNOOC has been pushing ahead with its work since early 2005 with no attempt to consult the local residents and showing little regard to such notions as corporate social responsibility, said Jockai. The Chinese company, which is listed on the New York and the Hong Kong stock exchanges, has ''not conducted the required environmental impact assessments and social impact assessments that are recognized internationally as a must before exploration work begins.''

Resigning feels good

I resigned from a position I was filling on campus this week.  It was time for new blood and, frankly, I was getting tired.

That's why it feels so good to stop. 

Seriously, it was fun, I learned a lot, I made some new friends, I tried some new things, I worked with some great colleagues, I got really tired.  Now I'm done!

Some Mapping Resources

Reaction in France

France is reacting overwhelmingly positively to the American election, but the French political class is also doing some introspection.  The youth, children of immigrants, are saying things like "I'm going to put my picture on my CV now" [In France, one attaches a portrait to a CV].  Not all are optimistic, but, still they see the elections as a positive step.

Recent French elections have some strong parallels with Nixonian and post-Nixonian identity politics.  Sarkozy, for one, managed to send out clearly racist messages while sounding the alarm about "personal responsibility," "delinquance," etc.  It is/was classic dog-whistle politics.  Like some American administrations, though, he as been innovative in not always promoting the elite-school technocrats but rather universitaires and minorities.  His actions, like George Bush appointing Powell or Rice, show the cognitive dissonance of his public policies and personal ones.

The Enemies List: Operation Leper

At Red State (I can't believe I'm even typing the name of that hate-filled site), they're gettin' their Palin on and starting an enemies list:

RedState is pleased to announce it is engaging in a special project: Operation Leper.
We're tracking down all the people from the McCain campaign now whispering smears against Governor Palin to Carl Cameron and others. Michelle Malkin has the details.
We intend to constantly remind the base about these people, monitor who they are working for, and, when 2012 rolls around, see which candidates hire them. Naturally then, you'll see us go to war against those candidates.
It is our expressed intention to make these few people political lepers.
They'll just have to be stuck at CBS with Katie's failed ratings.
Initial list:

1. Nichole Wallace
2. Steve Schmidt
3. Mark McKinnon

Who other than Fox commentator Michelle "Let's Intern the Japanese!" Malkin would be heading this up.  Really, folks, this seems awfully angry and spiteful.

In other news, textbook watchdogs say that most school texts still discriminate against non-Europeans and people of color.  I wonder what MM would say about that.

In Paris this morning