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Mole

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Everything posted by Mole

  1. Tomorrow morning I’m going to start tracking the direction the sun rises from to see if I can establish a pattern in a few years.
  2. She’s kind of a big deal. She rightly called Trumpism idolatry recently. The evangelical Trumpers that I know already somewhat rejected her over it and found themselves make defenses of Christian nationalism in the process. The SBC seems to be one step forward, two steps back. In the past several years they’ve made a few real positive steps in redeeming their explicitly racist founding but then they keep stepping in it over race and other issues. For example, without really consulting the faculty, the seminary presidents jointly rejected critical race theory as any kind of useful framework.
  3. Like you, I am a professor of something other than English. And also like you, I’ve never had a bribe attempt. Still, there’s something amiss here. I’m struggling to articulate precisely what the issue is, but the government paying students for grades changes the nature of the relationship between teacher, parent, and student in some ways that seem troubling to me. It doesn’t have to simply be the grift aspect. The payoff might be worth this change in dynamic, but I don’t think it’s wise to pretend that things wouldn’t be different. I suspect that there would be significant pushback from teachers due to these changes. It could exacerbate the already adversarial relationship that seems to exist between some parents and teachers. Good grades and recommendations leading to better paying jobs or even scholarships is abstracted enough from the monetary payoff to be different than the government making it rain for high scoring essays by second graders. If they were the same, no one would suggest paying students for good grades, since they would already be motivated by the benefits of a good education. I think it’s an interesting idea, but there are problems.
  4. Put another way, my parents paid me for good grades and it was a motivating factor. It also served to perpetuate a supportive relationship between parent and teacher. My parents were supporting the work of my teachers. Outside money turns this relationship on its head. Teachers already complain about the toxic, unsupportive relationship with many parents and this looks like it could make things worse. There might be ways to pull it off, but there are ways it could really make things worse as well.
  5. I tend to like the general idea of monetary and other incentives, but tying it to grades invites some problems. If the money is enough to be an incentive, it’s probably enough to draw and all sorts of issues: grift, an even less supportive relationship between parents and teachers, etc. It introduces a whole new set of weird pressures on the teachers which doesn’t seem healthy. There might be ways to pull it off, but there are some problems. Simply tying it to attendance eliminates most of these problems although it might lessen the positive learning impact.
  6. Maybe Deion could reopen his Prime Academy to start pulling in that a sweet B+ government cash.
  7. On some level, yes: let me steal this case of Natty light and I’ll split it with you. But grading little Johnny’s presentation on Sam Houston is nebulous in a way that a missing case of watered down beer isn’t. Of course it depends on how the payments would be made and the amount of money involved as to whether or not it would be worth it.
  8. Also, things that keep kids engaged need to be seen as essential to their education just like math and reading. That means sports, art, drama, music, scouts, and other things that don’t show up on standardized test questions need broad support especially in the most underperforming areas. Chasing the almighty test score might not be the best way to develop an educated populace.
  9. I know I brought up the fraud issue, but the general concept is intriguing to me. Some mix of parental tax credits for child school attendance, small but tangible rewards for the kids, some sort of investment towards post high school educational funding, and high school/industry vocational partnerships seems like something with potential. If a kid doesn’t see what there is to gain from school, why should they care? Incentive works. My kid isn’t school age yet, but we’ve offered toys for accomplishing various educational tasks that might take some weeks to learn and it’s clearly motivating. I’ve long thought that the plan of paying young women to take birth control would also have a clear benefit on many fronts, but I’m guessing that would never fly in our current environment.
  10. Paying kids for grades: an interesting idea that seems also ripe for fraud. Hey teacher, give me an A and I'll cut you in on some of this action.
  11. Never is probably too strong of a word and I guess there would be cases where there's some sort of clock they could run out, but if all they could do is slow things down and make a spectacle of themselves, it seems like it wouldn't be the all powerful and painless thing it is now. Even if they lined up 50 Senators up in a row, eventually that has to end as well, right? These old Senators can only keep this up for so long. I've seen Hand on a Hardbody; there are limits to the human body. I certainly don't fully understand all of the ins and outs of Senate rules, so there could obviously be something that I'm missing.
  12. Making them talk seems like the easy answer. Most people probably assume that’s still how it’s done anyway; it would make for lots of look-at-me theatrics which politicians love; and it would never kill good legislation just slow things down while still allowing the minority party a chance to make their case.
  13. I’m not sure I want to drill down here, but this sounds like a euphemism.
  14. I’m going to push back some on this. It’s overly simplistic to boil all of this down to economics, although that’s obviously a big part of it. Even if you set aside the question of why economic issues seem to impact the Black community more (which pretty easily traces back to a long and storied history of racism), there are access issues that probably can’t be fully explained by economics. There are well-founded trust issues between the Black community and government agents offering medical advice. There are all of the issues that have been brought up in this thread, which are partially economic (which again, is largely a race issue once removed) but also something more. And there’s the persistent unwillingness by “us” to do much about it or even acknowledge the obvious. I think it might be revealing to do an informal study on the history of the popular portrayal of poor people (white? black? young? old?) and how much we collectively cared. I have my suspicions that as the poor became increasingly portrayed as Black our culture became less interested in caring about or dealing productively with the problem, but it’s just a hunch right now.
  15. What did you sign up through? It looks like they recently (maybe this week?) added a state signup form on the website. Georgia messaging on this hasn’t been exactly clear.
  16. The one remaining full-Q acquaintance that I have is suggesting that everything will go down over this month and presumably Trump will be back by April. There’s progress though since it seems to be less of his identity now. I don’t expect any proclamations of “I was an idiot,” just a slow return to Q-light mild insanity.
  17. I can only speak for myself, but my esteem for Bath and Bodyworks only went up from this interaction.
  18. It looks like the “wait and see” group waited and liked what they saw.
  19. To the extent that they exist: Fatherless homes is both a cause and symptom of the problem. Drug use is both a cause and symptom of the problem. Lack of interest in education is both a cause and symptom of the problem. Pointing to symptoms of larger problems as the root cause (if “they” would just stop using drugs, etc) is nothing more than a prelude to pretending that there isn’t a problem. Likewise, pretending that these individual issues aren’t problems isn’t particularly helpful either. These bad things hurt individuals and communities but they aren’t always entirely irrational. Fatherless homes, drug addiction, and lack of interest in education might seem perfectly rational given the right circumstances. That doesn’t mean that they are good or should be encouraged, but the reason they might seem rational might point towards some sort of solution.
  20. As someone who uses surly on my phone in dark mode, I literally can’t see this to read it. This is a perfect encapsulation of the dark mode rich text issue.
  21. Since these discussions always devolve into bastardized versions of the Moynihan Report, maybe some here should read it. Particularly those who are bringing up the fatherless issue should read it. It provides some context through early 1960s eyes. We usually hear the issue of fatherless black families, education, and related subjects as sort of a “them” problem. These are the problems with the Black community, so “they” need to fix it. “It isn’t my problem” supported by graphs. It can be eye opening to read a similar story from the 60s without it serving as a prelude to ignoring the problem. Moynihan’s report is at times quite prescient and we largely ignored it. After reading it, blaming the woes of the Black family on 1960s era legislation seems simply absurd. Its a bit of a long read, but if you’re committed to discussing the issue within this framework, you should at least bother to see the origins and how distorted the framework has become. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/09/the-moynihan-report-an-annotated-edition/404632/
  22. I like this one:
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