funniest moment this week

There's this one kid, call him Joey, though of course that's not his name, who drives me crazy. Absolutely batty. He does not come on time or sit in an assigned seat or follow directions or behave predictably or stop swearing or stop throwing paper or not sing irritating and obscene Akon songs. He does learn math - like crazy, as fast as I can teach him, more or less - and dance and ask why all the time and smile this wolfy secret grin when he gets caught doing something. I love him.

The other day, while I was dismissing the class one at a time, Joey walked over to a girl three seats over, took the bright red, pointy-toed 3-inch spike heels off her feet, and put them on his own. Then, dressed in black Dickies, a black school logo polo shirt, and red stilettos, he sashayed down the hallway to lunch.

upgrade my classroom

As many of you know, I teach 9th and 12 grades at an under-resourced neighborhood high school in Philadelphia. My school, built in 1939, lacks books and technology, giving my students little chance to develop the academic and technological skills they need. In my second year, I teach 4 periods of 9th grade math a day, plus a senior English class another teacher and I designed to prepare our students for college. We are teaching Beowulf, which is the first text in the senior curriculum, but our students do not have their own books: they cannot read at home, write notes and definitions in the margins, or underline particularly important parts, all of which are critical for college preparedness and basic understanding of such a difficult text.

This can change - not just in the long term, but right now. I set up a donations page through the Amazon Honor System: please consider donating $5 to $20 if you can. I also set up a blog to keep people posted on the projects I'll be doing with the money: the first is to buy individual paperback copies of Beowulf for my seniors (less than $200). You can read about it at laurelsclassroom.blogspot.com, where I'll also be posting pictures.

everything (missed opportunities)

It's 3:45. Ms. Z wants to talk to me. It's about paper for the copy machines. I'm using too much (300 pages a day, she says, though I'd estimate 180, max), and half of my classes aren't even ESOL. The paper comes out of the ESOL budget; I need to go get my paper allotment from whichever unknown administrator controls the department that has it. Is it the assistant principal? Is it the military administrator? The central message is that I need to track down this paper, some way, somehow. It's my job.

This is one of those moments where resource scarcity in the urban schools comes front and center. Not just material scarcity (of paper, of all things!), but time scarcity, knowledge scarcity. Ms. Z is volunteering her time to administer the ESOL program, since the normal administrator was badly injured in a motorcycle accident. She's fine - she's TFA as well, interested in running her own school someday, trying very hard to do good work - but she's never done it before, and she's very conscious of the fact that she's not being paid for it. She doesn't want to be the one tracking down the paper, but she also is absolutely emphatic that it must happen.

In a school that didn't ration paper, this wouldn't be an issue at all. In a school with more time available, I imagine that administrators, several of whom probably have the same issue, could get together and work out some kind of system. If she'd been here for years, we'd know how to deal with this without fuss.

One of the results of a broken public school system is that teachers become responsible for everything. Supplies, funding, real-time curriculum development, meetings, sports: if you don't organize it yourself, there is precious little chance that someone else will. Hence, being awake from 5:30 AM to midnight on Tuesday, with maybe a total of 2.5 hours when I wasn't working. You know what takes 2.5 hours? Eating breakfast, eating lunch, eating dinner, and taking a shower, that's what.

brag

Dear everyone,

My parents are Bon Appetit food artisans of the year for 2007.

That is all.

North

dust and schadenfreude

Context: I'm at school. First day back. No kids yet, a bunch of newbies (even newer than I am! 52 out of 157 teachers have been here two years or less!), not bad, except that the teacher who had my room last year left the detritus of 40 years of teaching here. I'm talking manuals for software for the Apple IIe. If software fossilizes, does it turn into hardware? I just filled two large trash cans and 10 boxes with most of the stuff I'm not keeping, and I'm hoping to give most of the rest of it away on Thursday. I've been at school for ten hours so far. I think I'm going home soon because I'm too hungry to stay, not because I'm done.

Event: I read this article describing the Republican prospects in the Senate for 2008. Each paragraph is better than the last, but these three stand out. First, for sheer color:

"It's always darkest right before you get clobbered over the head with a pipe wrench. But then it actually does get darker," said a GOP pollster who insisted on anonymity in order to speak candidly.

Second, because it's just true:

Nathan L. Gonzales, political editor of the nonpartisan Rothenberg Political Report: "If Idaho ends up the fire wall, they are in deep trouble."

And finally, elegantly summarizing the situation:

"About the only safe Republican Senate seats in '08 are the ones that aren't on the ballot," a GOP operative with extensive experience in Senate races said.

Is it wrong to be this happy that people's careers are being ruined?

same-sex marriage? in Iowa?

So, before we continue, I have a question. If your state representative only lists her home phone number on her official web page, can you call her at home? Because I definitely need to call her. Because today, in Des Moines, two guys got married. You can read the AP story or the Des Moines Register story.

I'm, ah, delighted. Overjoyed. Amazed. Shocked. That's my hometown - I may have visited the courtroom where that decision was made - and if I'd had to lay odds on a state, even a Midwestern one, being next for same-sex marriage, it would not have been Iowa. My faith in my state, sorely tested after the last election, springs up again.

So, of course, homework for everyone. School starts Tuesday, too, so do it now.

1) Call your state legislators, if you're an Iowan. Hell, if you're not, email the governor's office to say how great you think this is for Iowa's reputation and how it's made you think of Iowa in a whole new light. Provincial coastal denizens, I'm talking to you.

2) Look at the Justly Married photo set, and think how damn cute all those couples are. Then look at the pictures of Phyllis Martin and Del Lyon getting married and think how damn cute those two old ladies (who were out lesbians in the 1950s) were.

This is the kind of thing that gets people really excited and then sinks. But you know, it really does mean something to all the queer people in your life if you hear about this and get excited and call your legislators and everything. Not only does it make us all feel a little warm and fuzzy about our friends, but all the legislators on the fence? The ones who aren't sure they can get away with supporting same-sex marriage? Or who don't have much of an opinion but don't want to lose their seats over it? One of the things they look at is how the calls are running. If they get five times as many supportive calls as negative calls, they're going to think they won't get eviscerated for this in the next election, and maybe support the same-sex marriage decision. Or even just not actively oppose it. And that's how things get a little better.

Remember how at the beginning I asked if it was ok to call my state legislator at home? That's how small Iowa is. In a place like that, it's easy to swing a decision by saying something about it. I have a couple of pretty crazy stories about things I did in high school - before I could vote! - that permanently affected state policy. Not just me, of course, but stuff I helped organize.

Hurray for my state! Hurray for political participation!

single-issue voting

Health care is the single most important issue in the primary, and maybe in the general election too. Bar none. More important than Iraq, more important than the environment, more important than education or queer rights or feminism or trade agreements or crime or abortion or immigration or whatever the hell else they're talking about these days.

Here's why: it's urgent, and it's distinguishing.

All the Democratic candidates are pro-choice and have sort of moderately pro-environment positions. None of them are going to do a damn thing for education as far as I can tell - and I don't blame them, since I've never heard of a president doing much that's useful for education other than funding it. I sincerely doubt any of the candidates will negotiate any kind of trade agreement that improves the world.

Meanwhile, Iraq is going to be a disaster from hell no matter who's in charge. None of them have any kind of environmental or energy position that will really protect us from peak oil or climate change. Queer rights? Who cares what they think? There's not going to be much done for queer rights at the federal level for at least another ten years. These are not salient issues right now, because there's no real national consensus that something must change in a particular direction. Even immigration, which I think is maybe the next issue up, is something around which there's tremendous conflict at many levels - it's more like same-sex marriage than health care in that way, and the next president will most likely not have the opportunity to enact major reform.

Health care is different. Since 1992, the last time we had a go at health care reform, the insurance situation for middle-class people has worsened dramatically. Even many upper-middle-class people are finding health insurance dramatically expensive or difficult to obtain. I've been thinking back to my American politics classes, which strongly suggest that when something becomes a middle-class issue (and especially an issue that affects the professional and upper middle class), there's an opportunity for policy change. Some of the most popular, least politically touchable programs are the housing subsidy for the middle class (home mortgage interest tax deduction) and Social Security, which provides benefits to people at all income levels and thus has a really broad base. We don't have a health care program, but the current conditions give the next president a major opportunity to create one. I think our health insurance system has become so problematic that it will change substantially within the next 5 years; whatever we get is likely to become politically untouchable, so it better be good.

Conveniently, the candidates have very different plans. Put the Republican candidates aside, as they have plans that I generally find fairly repellent (ranging from Giuliani's tax breaks to Romney's unsupported individual mandate¹ to Brownback and Thompson with no plan at all) and I wouldn't vote for them anyway. To spell out what I'm looking for: a plan that will provide us with the major benefits of universal health care enjoyed by all other industrialized nations. Those benefits include better public health outcomes because everyone has access to necessary (and especially preventive) care; and lower costs, both because people get treatment before their conditions get too complicated and because the government has negotiating power with the agents who deliver care and supplies.

Let's look at the three major Democratic Candidates. Obama's plan is too complicated, and I think it's unlikely to lower costs or improve public health outcomes in the way that universal health care in other countries does. Clinton doesn't have a [published] plan, which I think is because she got so badly burned organizing the Bill Clinton health care plan in 1992. She's by far the most experienced and knowledgeable of the three about health care, but I'm concerned that she will have the exact same reticence as president that she now has as a candidate.

Edwards has by far the best plan. It would lower the over-all cost of health insurance by spreading the risk through a wider pool (i.e. everyone), and ensure that everyone could get into that pool by mandating that insurers offer coverage to everyone regardless of health history and with no surcharge for previous health problems. He also spells out how he'll support and fund the plan, and dude, it would work.

Go Edwards go!

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1. Romney on mandating that individuals buy health insurance: "I think it appeals to people on both sides of the aisle: insurance for everyone without a tax increase." Hey! Does it really matter whether you pay the money to the insurer or the government? Requiring that people buy health insurance is still a government mandate on how my money be used! I don't so much mind the mandate itself - Edwards's plan includes one - as Romney assuming I can't do the math.

so long, Wallyann!

Kitten status: adopted in record time by someone at the vet's office. All us suckers are way relieved that we're not stuck with her.

You've always wanted a kitten!

WallyAnn Radio Hegemony Cricket is not my cat. But maybe she's yours! She's 13 ounces of adorable gray fuzz with big blue eyes, bat ears, and a pretty little white nose. Her meow will rip your heart right out of your chest. In fact, she's already suckered 5 people who are determined that they (um, we) do not want a cat into feeding, bathing, and flea-combing her, not to mention taking her home and carting her all over town. Wanna take her home?

the importance of math education

There's an article in the New York Times pointing out that it is logically impossible for men and women to have different average numbers of sex partners. Which is a problem, since men and women report significantly different lifetime averages (e.g. 4 sex partners for women, 7 for men in the US, or in Britain 12.7 for men and 6.5 for women). Anyone who is decent at math and remembers the definition of the mean will be able to tell you that in a world with about the same number of men and women, it is impossible for men to have more hetero sex partners than women. Indeed, a mathematician has actually proved it. So, explanations?

1. The researchers say it might be that men have significant numbers of sexual experiences with women who aren't counted in the survey, like prostitutes or women in other countries. That would mean that there's got to be some country somewhere where women have many more sex partners than men, and thus far no one's found it. Also, I question their ability to screen prostitutes out of the survey data.

2. Men and/or women are lying their heads off in what they think are the socially approved directions. I think this is quite likely.

3. Men and women have very different distribution patterns for their data. The mean number of partners must be the same for men and women, but that doesn't mean the median number of partners must be the same. As an example, imagine that there are only 5 men and 5 women in the world, and a total of 13 sexual partnerships. The men have had 0, 1, 3, 4, and 5 sexual partners; the women have had 1, 1, 1, 5, and 5 sexual partners. The mean for both groups is going to be 13/5 = 2.6 partners, but the median number of partners for men is 3, while the median for women is 1. That's a huge percentage difference just because women had a few people with high numbers of partnerships, while most women still had fewer sex partners than most men. Is this likely on a large scale? I don't really think so - it's a lot harder to skew data like that when you're not making it up and there are thousands of people in your data set. But I don't really know, and apparently the social scientists who could find out for us aren't. My best guess still goes to #2.

This is an example of bad math education perpetuating a particular social ill, namely the idea that men get around more than women. To his everlasting credit, the mathematician who inspired the article points out exactly this: that taking this data as accurate works to “reinforce the stereotypes of promiscuous males and chaste females" and may skew self-reporting and behavior. If math education were better, and people understood mean and median and interpreting statistical graphs, and if the news media could therefore publish graphs of the statistics in question, there'd be a lot more ways for people to check stereotypes against reality.

When will those darn math teachers do something about it?

authentic schmauthentic

Iowa is a certain kind of hipster heaven. We have trucker hats, dive bars, cowboy boots, soda fountains, and cheap beer. We have craft shows and karaoke.

Only thing is, there aren't any hipsters. This stuff is for real.

being home

Everyone talks about the caucuses. Everyone. Instead of "How 'bout that local sports team?" it's "How 'bout that Democratic candidate?" Or occasionally, "Damn, the Republican field is pathetic." Which it is.

I can pretty much do as much running on the bike path down by the river as I want. With the dogs. Best thing ever in the morning? A big fluffy blonde dog and a smaller, sleek brown dog with green eyes chasing rabbits and messing around in the water.

I like my parents but I'm glad I don't live with them.

People remember me. A state rep I volunteered for in college remembers me. My parents' friends want me to move back. Sometimes it's nice to remember that if I want to move back here, there are things I can do.

I drink more here than I drink anywhere else. The average might be down to 2 glasses a night by now, after I cut back a bit. Glass of wine while you cook? Glass of wine with dinner? Go out for a beer with friends? Yeah, I think I'm safe to drive.

Bull testicles. My friend Aroog's birthday party involved bull testicles and karaoke and his little sister trying to get me to go to church with her the next morning. I ate Rocky Mountain oysters (just a smidgen - beans and rice for real dinner), sang "Goodbye Earl" and "Boy Named Sue," and bought Aroog's mom a rum and coke, which is funny because that's what he pours at his infamous New Year's parties. As far as the karaoke went, two of my high school friends have talent. The rest of us have heart.

how not to apologize

Michael Ignatieff offers the world's lamest admission of being wrong in the Sunday New York Times Magazine. To summarize: "political judgment is about specifics. But let's not talk about the specifics that could have shown us that this war was a bad bet (and thus help us figure out the next one)! Instead let's talk about general principles of political leadership!"

Ignatieff also says, after quoting Bismarck to the effect that good judgment means you hear the horses of history early, "Few of us hear the horses coming." I saw a debate between Leon Wieseltier and Mark Danner right before the war, and the basic summary of the arguments went as follows: Leon Wieseltier supported the war, arguing that Saddam was really damn bad and Bush was the only chance we had to get rid of him; Danner opposed it, arguing that the Bush administration would do such a bad job with it that it wouldn't be worth it.

Guess who was right?

I think what Iraq actually teaches us is that you can't disregard means. You have to have the whole thing thought through before you're done. And you can't support an entity as incompetent, corrupt, and lawless as the Bush administration to tackle a very complicated, high-stakes WAR.

Which is basically saying that wishing doesn't make it so. I wish Ignatieff - who has a Ph.D. and a political position - would maybe express a little actual remorse for the disastrous war he supported.

travel plans

I'm headed to Great Smoky Mountains National Park, where I will be held incommunicado through Sunday, and thence to Des Moines, where I'll have most everything the information age can offer. Even cable!

presidential calculuses

So Andrew asked why I'm supporting John Edwards, and brought up some things he's been wrestling with: electability, leadership, and policy positions. All of those things are shorthand for 15 million other things, but here's my best shot at explaining why I'm supporting Edwards. For the people who always read the last page first: it's about policy.

But first, let's talk about something else: experience. Hillary Clinton is the only Democratic front-runner with really serious Washington and policy experience, and even she has very little electoral experience - she's just an insanely savvy person who spent 8 years hearing very directly about the Washington experience of another insanely savvy person. Neither Edwards or Obama has any real experience making day to day government decisions as an executive, or moving bills through Congress in the way a president has to do to be effective. I'm concerned about that, but I'm unwilling to vote for Clinton over it. If Bill Richardson's campaign gets any momentum, I might be interested, but let's put that aside for now.

On to electability. I don't really trust myself to predict who's electable in a general election, and I think that efforts to predict electability have screwed the Democrats six ways from Sunday. Kerry? Gore? Not the world's most electable people (in that Kerry wasn't elected) - yet they were chosen specifically for their electability. So I'm not really playing with that right now. I think Clinton has the most serious electability problem of the three major candidates: the American public is pretty damn sexist, plus she's a very polarizing figure, plus she's kind of varnished, which hasn't been going over well lately. On the other hand, have I mentioned how savvy she and her husband are? Obama's race will likely play against him, but I don't feel completely certain of it. Edwards is doing the worst in the head-to-head general election polls (though Dems reliably beat Reps), but I have some questions about whether the sexism/racism cards would affect Obama and Clinton differently in a polling booth rather than a phone call. I got kind of sick of spinning around in circles about this, so I decided to give up. Also, I think focusing on electability encourages a kind of content-free, passion-free politics that is one of the major problems of the Democratic party.

Leadership: I'm going to talk about race and gender here, since I already talked about my concerns about experience. I feel like I should be supporting Obama or Clinton specifically because I am a feminist and anti-racist. Obama is also super-inspiring for many people, which I think would be great in a president (and speaks some to electability). But ultimately,

It's all about policy. Specifically health, environmental, and economic policies, and specifically because there's pretty good evidence that presidential candidates do what they say they're going to do a lot of the time. Edwards's health care policy is really smart, and I think it could get passed and would work. Universal health care is one of those things that's becoming a middle-class issue in a way that means it'll probably get addressed within the next 5 years or so, and I think it matters a lot who the president is then. Clinton won't put her plan out there, and Obama's is pretty complicated, and I think would have a lot fewer cost-saving effects than the Edwards plan because it doesn't expand the pool of insured people as much, thus keeping risk and premiums higher than they ought to be. Obama's policies over-all are fairly piece-meal: his energy policy is like that as well.

Finally, Edwards has put economic inequality on the table in a way that I think is really, really important.

I would say more but I'm incredibly hungry and I'm leaving town on Sunday. More comparative policy analysis coming in two weeks or so.

(Julie and Andrew: big fat congratulations!)

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ok, some good news

The Democratic candidates are going to have a gay debate. I mean a debate about gay stuff where Melissa Etheridge and the head of HRC ask them questions. Does the debate itself have a sexual preference? How would we ever know?

I am really really excited about this for some reason. Maybe because I have some hopes it'll cut through some of the not-answering-questions-for-real bullshit that happens a lot with the Democrats. Except for Elizabeth Edwards, of course, but unfortunately she's not running for president.

in which I continue to be appalled

Shorter Bush to Congress: lalalalalala I can't heeeeeeaaaaar you.

Harriet Miers isn't even going to show up. Is there anyone who seriously believes he isn't hiding something pretty damn big?

In other news, the man's approval rating dropped to 29%. How low does it have to go before we can get impeachment?

For serious, call your representative. It is your representative's JOB right now to be submitting impeachment motions. Instructions given here.

p.s. most duh headline ever: White House Is Accused of Putting Politics Over Science.

evolutionary psychology and its discontents

There's an article in Psychology Today titled Ten Politically Incorrect Truths About Human Nature. Echidne of the Snakes spent some time doing a point by point refutation, which I suggest you read if you're interested in that sort of thing. Basically, the article itself is a particularly genius example of how Evolutionary Psychology as most people use the term is basically a collection of speculation about the lives of early humans, most of which gets used to justify sexism and crappy appearance politics. Refuting it requires slightly less work than shooting fish in a barrel. You don't even need a gun!

My sister studied bioanthropology (basically, the study of humans using biology, which includes quite a bit of evo-psych) in college, and I remember vividly two conversations about it that I had with her. When she was a sophomore and deciding to study bioanth, she argued that I was just wrong not to accept that differences between men and women were biologically based, and that my feminism was blinding me to the strong evidence for it. Two years later, as a senior, she called me up while I was driving through Utah and asked what she should do. She needed to write a senior paper - like a small thesis - to get honors, which she very much wanted, but she felt like she couldn't in conscience write a paper on any of the bioanth subjects she'd studied because the standards of evidence were so unutterably lame and unconvincing. Two years of study brought her to the conclusion that even at a fancy-pants research university, most evolutionary psychology is a collection of speculation about the lives of early humans.

I have a similar problem with a great deal of political theory, including all social contract theory. These theories rely on some kind of imagined history of early humans: life was "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short," then we all got together, signed the social contract, and turned our power over to the state. Hobbes is one of the most honest about this kind of thing (he doesn't make up rights without explaining where they come from) but still. Wasn't it great when we all signed the social contract? What a great party! No wait, no one was there. IT NEVER HAPPENED. (One of the things I like about Aristotelian political theory is that, while there's a theory of human nature, there's no just-so story about how we came to be this way.)

We know a little more about the lives of early humans in a factual sense than we used to, but we still have essentially zip about social structure. Among other things, it's pretty unreasonable to argue that social evolution just stopped at some point (which is what you have to say for evo-psych to still be relevant, or to use modern hunter-gatherers to learn about ancient hunter-gatherers), when we have very clear evidence that lactose tolerance evolved in some places as recently as 3,000 years ago. Humans continue, however, to be very good at coming up with reasons to justify whatever it is we want to justify right now, including rights, greed, censorship, free speech, monogamy, polygamy, etc.

Evolutionary psychology and political theory share one gigantic missed opportunity. Yes, it would be very very interesting to know more about how human brains really work and have evolved, and yes, it would be very very interesting to know how the social structure of early human societies developed, and think about what implications those have for our ideas about politics and community. Aristotle assumes that humans are by nature social - he doesn't even really imagine an isolated state of being human - and that seems likely to have some foundation (unlike, for example, his transparently bad justification for slavery). There's some serious work to be done matching up science and archeology about early humans with theories about human nature and society. But political theorists (who have some excuse, since they're not scientists or historians) and evolutionary psychologists (who have none, since they claim to be both) have done a pretty dreadful job of it. Too bad!

decision made

I support John Edwards for president. In case you were wondering.

the course of human events

I drank some very good peach beer, ate some very good Mexican food (restaurant review coming soon), had Queen Anne cherry sorbetto with dark chocolate gelato (Capogiro: still amazing), took the famous outlaw cattens to their temporary home with a very nice woman and a yappy dog. All this with the Political Schmientist. Then I went to the beach! A Feral Hat reunited, plus some excellent people who are and are not getting married. There aren't enough exclamation points to tell you how I feel about boogie boards! Why don't I live at the beach? Then we spent an hour between exits 113 and 120 on the Garden State Parkway and was late to dinner with my parents. And then my parents were in the LA Times, and then there were various not very surprising revelations and some excellent talk at hat-brunch. I had dinner with a food writer and his wife and aforementioned parents. It's hot. The diner for lunch with Fire Boss and a non-practicing Ph.D. with crazy eyelashes decided we didn't need pie. Got described as 'well-behaved' for the first two times in my life.

Then I drove home, read for a while, ate dinner. Listened to some awesome music, if I do say so myself. Drank another peach beer in the shower. Now I will watch TV.

When will someone make Hotel Yorba into a movie? I want it now!