Sorry, Teachers Are NOT Unique

One of the problems with teacher unions is that teachers believe that they are unique…they may even believe that the laws of gravity apply to them!

Teachers are not unique, even though they believe they are.

Teachers should be forced to give up tenure (that may take a one year national strike), or perhaps they can be lured to do so…although an attempt by a reformer (Machael Rhee)  to get District of Columbia teachers to give up tenure for a huge increase in salary, failed.

This, I think is the best offer to put on the table, along with a starting salary of $100,000:

End tenure

End Unionization

Impose STRICT testing for incoming teachers

Rank ALL teachers on a ladder, so there must be only one teacher per rung. and then…

End “The Dance of the Lemons” by cutting the bottom 5%

Permit Merit Pay

This policy will, in addition to the obvious work rule reform, start to entice those much higher SAT and IQ students currently going into Law, Medicine, Engineering and Computer Science to consider the teaching profession.

I know the argument that without tenure, school districts will lay off the better paid, usually higher performing teachers to bring in new, and lower performing talent.

Duh!

School districts are no more prone to firing all experienced and highly-paid teachers than Apple would fire all of their experienced and highly paid Engineers in favor of newly graduated and lower paid Engineers, or Sears would replace their older and highly paid Managers with recent college graduates at 20% of the cost.

(Ask Jay Leno!)

I know that teachers believe that they and they alone can do their job, but education, as opposed to schooling — they are sometimes the same, sometimes not — has always been cheap, from libraries, to encyclopedia, to the Internet, to….

Teachers are important, but they are as susceptible to automation replacement as anyone. Students with self-discipline can and will get an education, but good teachers are only partly intellectual mechanics, they are also coaches who inspire, disciplinarians who control the animal instincts we all have.

You First, Mr. CEO

The CEO of Starbucks wants gun-toters to leave their weapons outside. He is asking politely – that is something.

(Here is a guess: He has an armed bodyguard, perhaps more than one – and they do not disarm when he goes for a lotte.)

What is a CCW (a license to carry a concealed weapon) owner to do? Leave it in their car?

I carried a concealed weapon for decades (.44 S&W and Walther PPK.380) and I carried it everywhere. Literally, EVERYWHERE. Church, schools, you name it.

Where was I going to put it? None of these places have a lockable gun locker into which to safely leave a loaded weapon!

(Not that I would have used one. A trained assassin looks for times when the target is defenseless, and a trained man who is a potential target KNOWS that! The ideal target is asleep, or taking a shower…the Mob prefers a target getting a shave in a barber shop!)

Think I would unlimbers my weapon just to satisfy the Starbucks CEO?

Fat chance.

Sometimes Conditioning and Heart Matter

When I saw the news clip of the high school player in Georgia who is so agile that he cheerleads at halftime, my immediately thought of poor Army and Navy football, and how they must recruit top scholars who, for some reason, are light.

Navy regularly gets outweighed in the lineman positions by 75 pounds per man, often 100 pounds.

That Georgia high-schooler so agile that he cheerleaders and weighs 375 pounds!

In HIGH SCHOOL!

A good little man can beat a good big man, sometimes. Just not often.

For example, Navy opened its season Saturday against Big Ten opponent Indiana, which had opened its season the week before scoring more than 70 points against Indiana State, and Indiana — “the most potent offense in the Big Ten” — was flavored to beat Navy by 13 points.

“A prow from the U.S.S. Indiana had been installed in front of Memorial Stadium, dedicated in a pregame ceremony at which Indiana’s president, the state’s two senators and its congressman did their best to brag on the their naval prowess with the Secretary of the Navy in attendance…What none of those figureheads could have expected, not even after Navy’s upset win over Indiana last year, was that the Midshipmen beating a Big Ten team would become a yearly tradition.”

http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2013-09-07/sports/bs-sp-navy-indiana-0908-20130907_1_darius-staten-midshipmen-geoffrey-whiteside

To say that Indiana fans expected to win against Navy (although Navy beat Indiana last year by a single point) is an understatement. A good writer for Indiana U. wrote:

“I’m just going to focus on looking forward and never ever ever looking back at last night’s game. If you ask me about it, I’ll say I don’t know what you’re talking about. This blog is now going with the policy that games against Navy don’t exist. If I had my druthers we’d never play them again. Just not worth the headache of completely changing your defense for one week in the middle of the schedule. So, next up we have a Bowling Green team that has looked pretty decent, but nothing that should have us worried. Then again, I thought something similar about that one team. I forgot their name.”

http://www.crimsonquarry.com/2013/9/8/4706804/indiana-football-falls-to-navy-not-even-once

Navy won, running for 444 yards, and a total of 515 yards on offense. Navy scored 45 points, and Indiana scored 35. Navy can’t ever be expected to stop anyone because of the weight/speed problem — they MUST out score the opponents. Navy never punted, going to the well successfully four times on Fourth and Short. The entire football field is Four Down territory for Navy. It has to be.

Navy just doesn’t attract any athlete who might have a shot at professional ranks, so one that does like Roger Staubach or David Robinson is an anomaly — or rather one that is a late bloomer. The Navy QB (Keenan Reynolds) may be another prodigy, because he led Navy to a winning season as a Freshman (Plebe) last year, and continues his excellence as a Sophomore, but Navy will always lack size and speed.

Sometimes conditioning and heart can make a difference.

I am always surprised with how little I really know

A quick comment on audible.com. I use audio books because with audio, books are always with me, downloaded automatically on my PC, iPhone and iPad. With a system called WhisperSync, wherever I leave off on one device I automatically pick up on the next device (at least often)– at least when I am inside my Wi-Fi signal, which I usually am.

This is really important, because some books are short and some, like my current project, are more than 24 hours long

My current project is actually a Great Course series through Audible: “The Other Side of History. Daily Life in the Ancient World.” It is a series of short lectures by a Cornell University Professor, Robert Garland.

I am always surprised with how little I really know.

(A LOT!)

There is always more to learn, because history changes. As Professor Garland notes: in his home country of Britain, in just one month (June, 2010), stone shards from tool production found along the British coast put ancient inhabitants back to 840,000 B.C. a cool 250,000 years earlier than previously known.

Additionally 54,000 bronze and silver Roman coins were found in a place that marked that spot as a mercantile center that had not been known, and to the Professors dismay, bones from a British cave 14,000 years old demonstrated that his forefathers were cannibals.

As The World Turns…

Have you noticed how quiet the North Korean Loudmouth Dictator is these days?

That is because his last tantrum — which actually was his first, but right from the play book of his successful predecessors — only this time it just didn’t work. Tom Brady couldn’t make a play work that many times.

Even China said, “Aw,  cut that out”

And he has. Unfortunately for him there is lingering pain — substantial pain.

The cooperative North Korean city of Kaesong, where South Korean industries had employed North Korean workers at wages one-third that of Chinese workers was closed in a fit of dictatorial pique.  That threw 53,000 North Koreans out of one of the few opportunities the NK had of making foreign currency.

It hurt South Korea cooperating industries as well — it destroyed a docile, non-union work force, and left not just un-filled orders but left a lack of confidence in those industries to fulfill orders. Those industries lost both current and future business.

Recently the NK graciously announced that the industries were invited back, but little moved in the South — once burned, twice shy. The Dictator probably expected that the South Korean government could order industrial resumption and that would be it.

The South Korean government has offered the industries $270 million in reparations, because they see the potential inroads that 53,000 well-fed observers of industrial prowess might bring to the eventual re-unification of the entire country.

The industries say that they lost $1.8 billion in lost current and future business, so they are not anxious to play on that ball field again. The buyers they once had are nervous over the reliability of their product chain. Deservedly so.

So the Dictator had to sweeten the pie. He offered a resumption of the family reunification ended in 2010. Families long separated could again meet at a camp in North Korea, which is certainly a win-win on the diplomatic front, but does nothing for the  industries tempted to return to Kaesong. Perhaps the government of the South might be inclined to sweeten the $270 million offer, in order to get movement on the industrial front.

However, the main consequence is the Lessons Learned on the part of the NK: People tire of temper tantrums.

The North Koreans, while still not able to feed themselves at least no longer die by the millions through starvation. The nation is as insular as ever, but the Internet is making small inroads, cell phones are owned by more than just the government apparatchiks, and what passes for fashion is beginning to appear.

It is too much to ask that the 38th Parallel will fall any time soon, but if the latest missile launch threat is the last (they have dismantled the threatening rocketry), then perhaps things might slowly move in the right direction.

My hope is that the Swiss educated dictator tried to tell the Generals, who have more control than influence, that the missile threats and closing of Kaesong was a big mistake, and, as history has demonstrated he was right. That may have given him the latitude to do something new and different

The industries don’t need Kaesong cheap labor as much as the NK needs foreign currency — cheap labor is a world-wide product.

The problem is that in their own right the North Koreans are as irrational as the Middle East, not from religion but from insular culture. The success of the South shows that, but without major in-roads into that culture, nothing changes.

Still, the NK are better than they once were. Barely.

Modern New Local Magnet School

Saturday I toured my great grandsons new “magnet” Escondido high school — brand new, and one he will be in the first entering class. Del Lago Academy for Applied Science.

(First, let me admit that you have to be very old to have a great grandson entering high school!)

This is a state of the art high school — designed for “Applied Science” and Biotech. It will eventually hold 800 students, but right now there are 300 Freshmen and Sophomores. My great grandson will be in the first class to spend all four years years on campus.

The incoming students have already been issued iPads loaded with the necessary apps. There are no textbooks. The huge library has space for only 800 physical books — every necessary book will be downloaded to their iPads as necessary.

There are four, 2,700 square foot laboratories, each with “clean rooms” attached, and three other specialty rooms as well. The gym and workout rooms would make 24 Hour Fitness  green with envy. The school has no football field, but Lacrosse and Soccer fields, a beautiful basketball court and a swimming pool.

Courses are not semester limited, but courses like math take place daily all year so that there are not breaks during which continuity is lost. The curriculum is called STEAM: Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Math.

The high school has several rooms that the Principal calls “Bait Rooms” –terrific auditorium with a $40,000 projector, and a small highly connected (audio and video) lab, capable of communicating directly with labs as far as Harvard and MIT.

They are “bait” for getting cooperation from the brand new and nearby billion dollar Palomar Hospital, and nearby California State University, San Marcos — neither of which offers their researchers, professors or Doctors the sort of worldwide, two-way, video and audio communications for small or large groups. Those nearby facilities can use the “bait rooms,” in return for the loan of lecturers.

The school is, obviously, state-of-the-art to prepare young minds for careers in the scientific, engineering and biomedical fields.  In keeping with its scientific emphasis, there are solar panels for electricity and catch basins to recycle and clean rainwater, initially for sending to the ocean but soon for reuse on campus.

If these kids don’t excel in life, it will not be because they lacked opportunity.

Obama is a “God!”

Obama is a “God!”

Stay with me here…

Obama is not being held responsible for ANY of the current problems. The Washington Post says that Obama’s poll numbers are virtually unchanged after Fast and Furious; the Justice Department chilling, criminalizing of newsmen; Benghazi; and the IRS selective harassing of conservative groups.

That is the “God Effect.”

“God” in every culture and religion, gets credit when the crops come in heavily, or someone is rescued from harm, but never takes any blame for storms, hurricanes, failed crops, or those who die in disasters.

That phenomenon has always impressed me about human nature, and it is true across cultures and religions.

Dan Balz, writing in the Washington Post, notes ” It is never good for an administration when a front-page newspaper article about an ongoing controversy begins as follows: “The White House offered a new account Monday of how and when it learned . . . ”

Perhaps the constant drip, drip, drip of scandal will eventually impact the impervious aura that surrounds this president, who is an iconic figure and can withstand scandals that would politically doom lesser figures.

iPad Is a “Market Devouring” Device

Dell Computer has said what everyone already knew, that the “pad” particularly the iPad is killing the desktop computer.

It is certainly true — the tablets are taking over because the desktop is way, way too powerful for most everyday use — the sort of computing that launches missiles just a few years ago.

Desktop computers are really powerful, but they are really stationary, while people are decidedly not stationary, and further people just do word processing, minor spreadsheets, and connect to the web — all of which my first micro-computer, an Apple IIc could easily do quite well.

And so can a tablet computer. There is an “app” for everything, in fact multiple apps. Not only can you do just about everything, but there are multiple ways of doing everything. Yep, tablets — but particularly iPads, have changed the entire computing landscape.

Business Insider calls the iPad, “market devouring” and “”Apple has sold 121 million iPads, totaling $67.7 billion in sales…. The PC industry is reeling because of the iPad… iPad revenue is bigger than Windows revenue!” (This was reported by CNET)

http://cnet.co/10DXRsc

Dell recognizes the change, but they are late to the game. Unless there is still another twist of the computer business, and perhaps the computer watch, or Apple TV or perhaps Google Glasses will be it — but none has a Dell (or H-P, for that matter) name on it.