when the status quo frustrates.

Governments interfering in education? Oh no!

Monday, September 17th, 2007

When the U.S. government makes changes to the public education system, forcing public schools to conform to state regulations or face privatization, it’s business as usual.

When the Venezuelan government makes changes to the private education system, forcing private schools to conform to state regulations or face nationalization, it’s a Socialist! School! Takeover!

Speaking of standards, 11% of Americans can’t find their own country on a map. Meanwhile, the education system under Chávez seems to be vastly improving. (I couldn’t find any information on Venezuelan map-reading abilities. One can only assume that they know where donkeys come from.)

I can only assume that the new Venezuelan history textbooks won’t be as bad as the ones we had in public school. Each chapter brimmed with gushing descriptions of white, upper-class male accomplishments, with a paragraph here and there about “the role of women,” and barely a whisper about the folks from whom we stole this land.

17.09.2007 Edumakashun, book larnin' 3 Comments

Education: big mistake or bad idea?

Sunday, September 9th, 2007

“How much are YOU WORTH?” A shady computer tech school in my area begins their radio commercials asking people to pause and reflect on that question before going on to imply that a certification in information technology will be worth about 50K right at graduation, and creating a false sense of prestige by saying you have to pass a test (oh, god, not a test!) to qualify for their program. For a person stuck in some of the armpits of service jobs we have here, such an offer must sound pretty tempting – I know that at my least employed and most desperate I spent $200 on a bartending course that was laughably useless although by the time I was willing to admit that, the check had already cleared and the classroom had moved on to the next geographical set of suckers. I keep the certification just to remind myself that I’m not as smart as I think I am.

I thought about that a few days ago when Cog over at Offsprung touched a nerve on the topic of useless vs useful college degrees. Cog, who I guess got burned by his expensive but ultimately not lucrative undergraduate program, subscribes to “the idea of college is to spend lots of money to get a degree that will get you a job.” A view that drives others (like me) insane. By the middle of the thread, it was very clear that this was a highly personal subject that divided people into roughly three or four camps that were speaking different languages. And I thought about it when I ran into today’s MSN list’o'the hour, Top Earning College Degrees.

Of the top 10 starting salaries according to major, no fewer than five have the word “engineering” in them. Two or three others (depending on how you count economics) involve high finance, and the remaining ones are computer related. Unifying theme? Math, and plenty of it. And they’re freaking hard.

The participants in Cog’s conversation were heavy on the liberal arts degrees, no shock since college graduates in general are heavy on the liberal arts. As far as I can tell, they divided into camps roughly along these lines:

1) Cog’s Supporters: People who feel that since the conventional wisdom is that you need a degree to get a decent job then you should pick your major based on lists like the one offered by MSN to ensure that you’re not burning money.

2) People who feel that education is it’s own reward.

3) Sensible Educational Theory types, who’d like to agree with statement 2 but have been crushed by reality and would like us hoity-toity learn-for-the-love-of-it types to wake up to the real world, kids.

I belong to group 2, but I have to admit to being a bit of a hypocrite; I ended up trading a kind of joke major for a more impressive, and more reliably lucrative, one. You see, my original major was communications, which I studied at a University that cost as much per year as three or four years at the place I ended up graduating from. So really, I almost made the same costly mistake that Cog appears to think he made. But by the end of that year I was bored out of my mind, I hated the school, and I realized that for what I wanted to do, college was the complete wrong path.

So I quit, and spent a year in theatre, doing some prop stuff and stagehand stuff. But when I realized that I could -if I was lucky and worked my ass off- maybe someday have my boss’ job, I quit that too. I went back to school but this time I majored in physics, and it took 5 years which basically sucked the whole way through. But then I got my degree and it really was the magic piece of paper everyone thinks a college degree is, and I’ve been doing pretty OK ever since.

So with that disclaimer out of the way, I’d like to use this thread to sort out some confusion I saw between the camps in Cog’s thread, because it seems that a lot of people were talking over each other. The whole thing has a tawdry Mommy-war vibe to it, with opposing camps that each have really good points but are defensive and see only where they disagree. So let’s open this can of worms with an insanely long post!
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09.09.2007 A million ways to mortgage the future, Blogitics, Circle Jerking, Conformity, Culture, Edumakashun, Politics, Purposefully Inflammatory, Soapbox, book larnin' 18 Comments

A nice thought, but what I could really have used was a DentistMobile

Tuesday, August 28th, 2007

We’re barely into the first week of classes and already a thrilling novelty gas-guzzling vehicle is on it’s way and the air is crackling with excitement. Can you guess who?

WMside

Pfft, I wish! The Weinermobile, how cool would that be? No, our visitor is more controversial.

GGW.512

No, they usually show up right before break, and stick to the bars off campus. Come on, guess!

It’s the Busybody ‘Christian’ Ultrasoundmobile! Squeeeee!

newrv3

That’s right, my school is one of three (count ‘em!) universities to be on the Ultrasoundmobile’s exciting three-county, semester long tour! I can’t wait to get my unnecessary ultrasound! Girls from all over campus will flock to get free quasi-medical attention from the inside of an RV, which would save them the arduous walk to the student clinic or the even more torturous journey to the local Planned Parenthood.

I might go and get mine this week, since things should be quiet at the begining of the semester before the girls have had a chance to get their bearings and start slutting around. Another month or two and they’ll be mobbed so I’d best get mine while the getting is good.

The Fetus Pictures RV’s website promises a comprehensive set of services:
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28.08.2007 Edumakashun, Fetii, For the ladies, Godbaggery, Reproductive Rights 14 Comments

Violating the conservative mythos on rape

Thursday, January 18th, 2007

After reading a Courtney Martin article on sex education that’s been covered quite well across the blogosphere, my mind was immediately flooded with the kneejerk reactions I would expect to hear from your standard-issue rape-apologist wingnut.

Courtney opens her article by recounting the story of her friend, Jen, whose sociology professor described the power dynamics of rape in class, leading Jen to realize one of her recent experiences after a night of drinking precisely fit the mold.

The Right would be incensed by this tale, but not because of the rape. No, they’d be pissed she had the gall to get raped and then realize she got raped, advancing arguments like:

“It’s her own fault for putting herself in a bad situation!”

Yep. Drinking is dangerous. Problem is, the conservatives never ask themselves what’s worse: drinking which puts you in danger of being raped, or drinking so that you release your inner rapist and actually rape someone. If anyone should be chastised for imbibing so much alcohol that you can’t control yourself, it should probably be the violent offender. Wacky pinko liberal theory, I know. But hey, when a drunk driver hurts someone, we usually blame the person who got hit for being out in the road, don’t we?

What’s that? We don’t? Oh.

Getting in a car is dangerous. Jaywalking is dangerous. Challenging Jeff Goldstein to a fight is dange- okay, well, not that one so much, but you get the idea. Every day, each of us do plenty of things that increase our risk of being hurt, but that doesn’t give a single soul the license to hurt us.

“If she really didn’t want to have sex, she’d have fought back harder!”

A famous conservative once made waves with a powerful and popular slogan: “Just Say No.” For las drogas, that was supposed to be good enough. For rape? Apparently, in a paradox to the previous wingnut axiom, you’re expected to increase your risk of being harmed even further by instigating violence against your attacker. That’s the only way to “prove” you didn’t want it. If you didn’t bleed, says the ‘nut, then voluntary sex was decreed.

I’d wager that if any of the asshats promoting that position ever switched places with Ned Beatty in Deliverance, they’d have a whole different outlook on how one would react in a rape situation, or any situation where you are in real danger of being hurt even more by escalating violence. Of course, these same nitwits think waving a gun at an intruder in your home will somehow “protect” you, so maybe they shouldn’t be considered too trustworthy when it comes to risk factors. [Insurance agents, take note!]

“Liberal academics are filling our kids’ heads with lies!”

I guess if evolution is a lie, so, too, is the idea that being forced to have sex after saying “no” equates to rape. Either that, or those kooky academic ideas just happen to threaten two of the conservative’s most endearing positions, namely “I will NOT die and rot in the ground because I AM A BEAUTIFUL AND UNIQUE SNOWFLAKE GODDAMIT” and “Boy will be boys!”

When handled by a reasonable teacher, almost all meaningful education points to a belief in equality. The traditional differences we’ve been taught to fear are better explained, and in some cases torn down, by biology, philosophy, and, yes, sociology. But hey, if you go that route, then the special treatment and double standards afforded men don’t make as much sense any more, and *poof!* you lose your ability to get away with stealing a bit of the ol’ in-and-out.

That simple fact is part of why we have so much trouble fulfilling Ms. Martin’s desire to see reasonable sex ed taught in American schools. She’s right that, if done correctly, sex ed could dramatically reduce rape and sexual confusion, but I fear there are far too many people who like the system just the way it is. It’ll be some time before we can even hope to have a reasonably-sized pool of teachers in our school system who wouldn’t mangle sex ed with their own broken beliefs or religious righteousness.

Fortunately, painful as it has been at times, feminism continues to make real progress in America. Maybe in 100 years it won’t be so easy for so many people to dismiss stories like Jen’s with the loathsome lies above, or so hard to teach our kids about the basics of their bodies and how to interact with them responsibly.

18.01.2007 Edumakashun, Feminism, Rape, Shame on you for being a woman 7 Comments

They could have sworn they found a wad of gum stuck under a seat in the auditorium

Tuesday, January 16th, 2007

So I’m a punkass now. Believe me, I’m as surprised as you are.

To celebrate, I thought I’d pop some champagne and share with you what I learned from PZ Myers today: Christian fundamentalists in America are being persecuted.

Ken Ham’s creation museum hasn’t even opened its doors yet, and things are already getting ugly on the bloodthirsty Darwinist heathen front. Now, don’t get them wrong; the Docents for Jesus can handle being laughed at.

While foreign media and science critics have mostly come to snigger at exhibits explaining how baby dinosaurs fit on Noah’s Ark and Cain married his sister to people the earth, museum spokesman and vice-president Mark Looy said the coverage has done nothing but drum up more interest.

“Mocking publicity is free publicity,” Looy said.

But they aren’t quite as lighthearted about being torched to the ground by the inevitable hordes of pitchfork-wielding evilutionists.

The museum has hired extra security and explosives-sniffing dogs to counter anonymous threats of damage to the building.

Of course it has. It makes me want to fly to Kentucky and blow up an aerosol can in the parking lot to make them feel better.

16.01.2007 Punkass!, "Science", Brilliant Ideas, Edumakashun, Godbaggery 10 Comments

A matrix revolution that wouldn’t suck

Tuesday, January 9th, 2007

Here at punkassblog, we fully endorse the virtualization of your identity. As the state of the country and the condition of the world worsens, why not jack into the matrix and live out the life of which you always dreamed in a land unBushed by war and misery?

Or better yet, why not use the matrix to improve on our real planet? Instead of hiding from what’s wrong in 3Dville, maybe we should use the virtual world to make things better for the fleshies.

Turns out some educators are doing just that via Second Life, a popular virtual reality community mentioned previously in this space as a booming den of hot, buttery cybersex.

But these folks aren’t teaching underage children how to get it on. No sir.

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09.01.2007 Edumakashun 2 Comments

It’s true that if I’d never learned to type, it would be that much harder to mock you right now

Saturday, November 25th, 2006

There is no stronger weapon in the anti-feminist arsenal than that of making feminists defend the same damn obvious points again and again and again. And if you don’t believe me, check out my 300-comment thread where a guy whines repeatedly that a few wrongful rape convictions compared to an ocean of unreported rapes means that we totally have to treat rape victims as lying whores until proven otherwise by, oh, I dunno, four male witnesses or something before we can even think about convicting more guilty men. He declared himself the winner of this debate, I have the first 300-post threat at PAB, we all left happy.

Regardless, I’m sure Mrs. Alexandra had only the bestest, most sincere intentions when she asked a question that preys upon that tiny little subsection of humanity that wonders, in the back of its mind, if women actually have souls (answer: sorry guys, but it the question was never seriously posed and only became debate because pundits in the Middle Ages were just as good at missing the point as they are today. Not that this should discourage you from the debate at hand. There are no similarities. Trust me.)

Should we be educating women? You know, like they were men or something?

Education, especially female education has become a very controversial subject in the recent years.

There are two kinds of people who think that female education is controversial: people with agendas, and people with different agendas. Both of them hate women.
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25.11.2006 Douchebag on Feminism, Edumakashun, Feminism, For the ladies, Godbaggery, HUH!?, My Brain Hurts, Shame on you for being a woman, What Patriarchy? 9 Comments

Your fingerpainting reminds me of death, Janie. Can’t you just recite important dates in US history like a good little girl?

Friday, September 22nd, 2006

Mixing Memory recently discussed some social psych experiments regarding Terror Management Theory and the impact of high “mortality salience,” i.e. awareness of one’s own mortality, on a person’s perceptions. Politically, high mortality salience was linked to supporting Bush and conservatism:

In what is probably the most famous set of TMT experiments, Landau et al.2 first showed that priming participants with thoughts of death (as opposed to a neutral control topic) made them more supportive of President Bush. Then, after an experiment showing that thinking of the September 11 attacks increased mortality salience, they showed that thinking of the September 11 attacks also increased support of Bush. In a follow-up study3, Cohen et al. showed that during the 2004 presidential campaign, participants whose mortality salience was high (through a manipulation similar to that in the Landau et al. experiment) were much more likely to say they would vote for Bush than Kerry, while participants in the control condition were much more likely to vote for Kerry than Bush. Apparently, mortality salience makes us more supportive of authority figures, and perhaps a bit more politically conservative as well.

The constant fear of terrorism may appeal to people with a naturally high awareness/fear of their own death, or perhaps that awareness/fear was permanently hiked by coming to believe we could be hit again at any moment. Chicken or egg, a strong mortality salience appears to play a part in causing someone to lean right in the present climate. Since those with lower mortality salience lean left, it may also be safe to assume that most wingnuts would have to have high MS to remain so staunchly conservative these days. Folks who exhibited those qualities also tended to prefer more structure, not less.

TMT studies also focused on the perception of objects without context. For example, when subjects were asked to consider death-related topics before looking at a Jackson Pollack painting with a name like “#12,” they were much less likely to feel positively about the painting than those who viewed it with a more substantive name. The name gave the abstract painting some context, and thus the subjects were a little less likely to project their mortality fears onto it. Without that context, they tended to imbue it with their own negative thoughts.

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22.09.2006 Art, Edumakashun, Wingnuts 1 Comment

Academonia

Thursday, August 3rd, 2006

“I can’t believe I’m really here.”

Janet spun slowly in the middle of the campus square, taking in the stately presence of her university surroundings. Backpacks, cell phones, and iPods swirled around her as she gaped at the ivy-covered brick buildings. Janet could practically feel the intellectual energy being sent and received on the other side of those walls, and the nape of her neck tingled at the prospect of participating in the exchange.

Her daydream came to a crashing halt when Janet was knocked to the ground with a thud.

“Oh, excuse me! I’m so sorry.”

Shaking off her surprise, she took the strong hand offered to her. “Hi, I’m Paul,” said the All-American square-jawed smile at the other end of the arm. Janet blushed and managed to fumble a response she hoped had included her name.

Paul was a sophmore in Kinesiology and a walk-on tight end for the football team. Janet mentioned her interest in biology and physiology. “I love to learn about the magic of God’s creations,” she beamed.

Paul winked in response and broadened his smile. “I think you’re gonna like it here, Jan.” Jan. How adult! She was feeling more grown up already. “Hey,” he continued, “we’ve got this little social club meeting tomorrow night, a mixer to introduce freshman to life on campus. I’d love to see you there.” Paul handed Janet a simple flyer for an event titled “College 101″ and strolled off with a half-salute wave back at Janet. Jan. She was Jan now.

——— CH. 2

Jan made her way down the narrow corridor towards room 308, her place of residence for the next year. As she got closer, a repulsive, vaguely familiar smell invaded her nostrils. She reached the open door of room 308 and was deeply disappointed to discover that the stink was emanating from her new home. Splayed out on one of the beds was a girl who seemed to have lept out of a Woodstock documentary — she was greasy and unkempt with hair in all the wrong places for a female.

The girl was deeply immersed in a book entitled “The Best of Female Erotica,” and Jan felt a cold shiver as she stared at the sinful lips dominating its cover. Jan set down her bag and caught the attention of her roommate, who introduced herself in a growly voice as Martha. She asked Jan if she wanted a smoke.

“I don’t think we should do that in here, do you?” Jan warned. Martha rolled her eyes and took out some kind of homemade cigarette. As she lit it, a new kind of odor invaded Jan’s nostrils. As the old one became overpowered, Jan realized where she’d smelled it before: from the homeless people begging on street corners near the highways of her home town. She got queasy at the thought, and the new stench wasn’t helping.

“It’ll be fine,” Martha assured her. “Anyway, this is the kindest of the kind. You want some?” Jan shook her head. “Come on. Everybody in college does it. It’s like a rite of passage.” Jan felt uncertain. She squeezed the cross under her shirt for guidance.

“I don’t like putting unnatural chemicals in my body, thanks,” Jan said. Martha giggled, “It’s totally natural, silly. God’s own creation put right here on this Earth for our enjoyment. C’mon. One puff.” Martha leaned over and extended the tip of the cigarette to Jan. Jan looked at it and hesitated. Well, I squeezed my cross, Jan thought, and right then she mentioned God. Plus, she said it was kind. Maybe this is a good idea.

Jan stuck her head forward, put her lips against the sticky end of the cigarette, and inhaled. She shot backwards with a sharp cough, and suddenly she realized she had just smoked marijuana. She shook her head vigorously, trying to clear the fog rolling in, but darkness overcame her. Jan passed out at the foot of Martha’s bed.

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03.08.2006 Edumakashun, Family, Fiction 12 Comments

Nude teacher catfight!

Monday, June 19th, 2006

Since our hit count has skyrocketed thanks to the obsession over Tamara Hoover, I figured a saucily-titled follow-up would ensure maximum pr0n addict traffic thanks to the power of google.

**********************************************************************
Before we proceed, now that I have trapped them here, I’d like to remind said addicts that this teacher is a real person, not a masturbatory object of lust, and that her photo work was fueled by artistic intentions, not a desire to get off anyone harboring an intense fetish for the thought of a NUDE TEACHER. If you want to see one so badly, try asking one out instead of obsessing over the exploited photos of Tamara Hoover.

This has been a test of the emergency pr0n addict alert system. If this had been a real emergency, this broadcast would have been followed by an animated gif of two women kissing.

Now back to our regularly scheduled programming.

**********************************************************************

I taught at a high school briefly, and let me assure you that this interaction would have resulted in my immediate release and possibly the filing of criminal charges against me:

Johnny: Hi Mr. Punkass! I know where you can see nude photos on the internet!
Mr. Punkass: Wow, Johnny, that’s cool. Good for you.
[a few days pass]
Mr. Punkass: Actually, Johnny, could we look at those photos together?
Johnny: You bet! Point me to a keyboard.
Mr. Punkass: Here you are, lad, use this school computer and show me a naked lady.
Johnny: There she is, breasts and all. Enjoy!

Yet, for vengeance-minded Gayle Andrews, these actions managed to put her co-worker on the termination track instead of her:

Hoover and fellow art teacher Gayle Andrews had argued for most of the school year over a kiln, according to Andrews’ signed affidavit. After a confrontation on May 15, students told Andrews that they knew how to get Hoover in trouble and told Andrews to look at pictures on a photo-sharing Web site. Andrews said she initially ignored the information but asked a student to show her the site a few days later.

So thanks to her own affadavit, we now have confirmation that Ms. Andrews asked a student to use school property so that together they might view pictures of a nude woman. I fully endorse Tamara’s right to participate in this art, but I don’t think she ought to be encouraging students to see it. She didn’t, of course; that would be Ms. Andrews doing the encouragement.

So we have one teacher about to be fired for performing legal consensual acts on her own time off school property while the colleague who asked a student to pull up her nude photos at school gets off scot free. If Ms. Andrews had been told there was a peephole into the staff showers, would she ask the student where it was and if they could view Tamara Hoover together? God, there are a million ways to reframe this, and all of them are rather damning of Gayle Andrews.

Remind me not to pick any fights about kilns with her. If my nude pictures got out, our hit counts would _really_ shoot through the roof.

[making kissy face, rubbing own nipple, winking at you]

19.06.2006 Edumakashun, Shame on you for being a woman 11 Comments

Good news, bad news from the Southern Baptists

Thursday, June 15th, 2006

Coming into yesterday, there was a big stink about Southern Baptists considering the abandonment of public schools. Fortunately, they came to their senses:

The Southern Baptist Convention yesterday refused to support a resolution urging the denomination to form a plan to remove children from public schools.

Smart move, folks. The megachurches might have been able to provide considerable subsidy towards private school, but certainly not every SB church is as loaded as the ones in the ‘burbs. The education gap that would have developed between the haves and have-nots in Southern Baptism would’ve gotten out of hand pretty quickly. Maybe the SBs are anti-science, but they know that without jobs, their sheep won’t have much to put in the coffers. They need them to obtain _some_ kind of basic education, and not every Mom can afford (or is educated enough) to homeschool, either.

I’m happy about this news because I don’t like it when any large group pulls all of its kids out of the social blender of the school system. Going out on a limb here [har har], but if a fundie child’s exposed to kids with different backgrounds and teachers who may not share the same views as mommy and daddy on everything, I’d wager s/he stands a much better chance of waking up to the real world.

Oh, that’s the bad news part. The Southern Baptists don’t like that idea very much:

The resolution committee instead urged members to endorse a policy of exerting “godly influence” on public schools. That includes running for seats on school boards.

Before the annual meeting ended last night, delegates overwhelmingly adopted the committee’s resolution.

Le sigh.

Grass roots fundie-ism has a pretty successful track record, and I couldn’t be less thrilled at the notion of them targeting school boards as a top priority. I thought they already had, but if their growing educational influence hasn’t even been well organized yet, I think it’s time to go from fundie alert level lavender to fundie alert level electric blue. If you believe in responsible science in the classroom, you’re probably pretty uncomfortable with the phrase “godly influence.” Gay educators are also going to have quite a fight on their hands. Those who support teaching kids there’s a safe way and an unsafe way to have the sex they’re going to have anyway should probably be alarmed, as well.

I’d say we should organize a way to fight back, but here we bump up against the problem of the uber-organized religious wingnuttery. Our loose coalition of cool kids and hip parents doesn’t seem to stand much of a chance, does it? Curse our taste for individuality!

They also adopted a resolution urging school districts to accommodate parents and churches wishing to provide off-campus Bible instruction during the school day.

If any school system allows this, you just know they’ll make sure to pull the kids during any science class, and offer candy and oodles of “religious play-time” to entice as many as possible to come along. Hell, they’ve already got the lollipop.

15.06.2006 Edumakashun, Godbaggery 1 Comment

Que?

Wednesday, June 14th, 2006

Something wrong with this picture.

23903299.jpg

I don’t mean to be a stickler, but those quotation marks are completely unnecessary.

14.06.2006 Edumakashun, Racism 25 Comments

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