Teach For America Is Evil

Teach For America sounds like a good idea.  Train young people to teach and send them to places where they are most needed.  Places like rural areas or low income areas where nobody is willing to teach.  Places like Chicago.

Wait, what?  Chicago?  The place that recently laid off over one thousand teachers?  The place that closed a whole bunch of schools because of low attendance?  Yep.  Chicago signed a contract with TFA to add 325 new teachers this year while firing 1,000.  Where is the sense in that?

Union busting, plain and simple.  It’s brilliantly Machiavellian.  Get a bunch of mostly idealistic highly privileged youth and sign them up with promises of changing the world for our most underserved citizens while bringing them in to localities that have a strong union presence and don’t need new teachers.  This combination makes TFA almost immune to criticism.  You can almost smell the righteous indignation in the air.  “How dare you criticize me!  I’m doing it for the children!  We do a lot of good!  Look at how well the kids are doing!  Why do you hate the children?”

Look, this isn’t difficult.  You can be performing a very visible societal good while at the same time performing an invisible societal evil with equally dire consequences.  It’s easy to ignore the evil that you can’t see for the good that is right in front of your face day after day.  What’s happening in Chicago is the best example of that generally hidden evil.

Teaching is one of those few jobs where two (or even one) years of experience makes a huge difference.  No amount of schooling in the world can adequately prepare you for putting yourself in front of 30 kids for the first time.  What’s happening in Chicago is the removal of one thousand union teachers who have that couple of years’ experience and replacing them with a couple hundred non-union rookies who have none.  This is not in the best interests of the children.

One of the major counter-arguments you will hear is that TFA is building for the future.  Sure, these are new teachers, but they’re people who WANT to teach as opposed to teachers who are just doing it for a job.  These TFA teachers often stay on after their two year contracts.  That may be true, but they don’t want to stay in teaching in any greater frequency than their unionized counterparts.  Plus, who’s to say that Chicago will decide to keep you?  There’s already a precedence for firing experienced teachers and hiring TFA teachers.  Why should that change?

There are many things wrong with how we educate our teachers.  A teaching degree is filled with mindlessly wasteful courses only to be followed by a year of slave labor (aka, internships).  Those things need to be fixed, but TFA is not the solution to the problem.  The solution will likely look like this: Allow anyone with an advanced degree to be hired as a teacher at locally comparable cost of living wages and pair them with a rotation of experienced teachers to show them the ropes for a year.  At the end of the year, the teachers vote on if you have what it takes to teach.

TFA does nothing to solve the various crises our school systems are suffering from.  They only exacerbate the problem by allowing places like Chicago to bust unions and drive down already low teacher’s salaries.  I can only hope that TFA gets morphed into something like I describe above because there is a lot to be gained by broadening the pool of available teachers but TFA is only succeeding at replacing the pool.

Movie Review: RED 2

Ratings for reviews will appear above the fold, while the review itself will appear below the fold to avoid spoilers for anyone that wants to go into it with a blank slate.

Jean-Paul’s rating: 3/5

Watching old people fight is mindlessly entertaining.

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And Since I’m Being A Shill For Dorkdom…

You should also buy All The Nomz!  It’s a cookbook with recipes from celebrity geeks, dorks, and dweebs.  Best of all, ALL of the proceeds go to charity.  Specifically, Child’s Play, an organization that provides toys and games to children in the hospital.  So not only do you get a cookbook, but you also get to help spawn a new generation of gamers.  Win, win!

You Should Give Them All Your Monies!

Person I would like in my neighborhood, Phil Plait of Bad Astronomy fame and Zack Weinersmith of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal fame have teamed up to help you make stupid people look even stupider.  Behold, 2^7 Nerd Disses!  Best of all, you choose the price!  They suggest $1.  I suggest more.  I paid $5.  Both men have certainly entertained and informed me much more than $5 worth.  And if they’re not entertaining and informing you, I will have no choice but to use an insult on you.  A sample:

You’re so scientifically illiterate… You think absolute zero is diet vodka.

So go buy the book or I will insult you a second time!

Exactly How Racist Is America?

This racist.

Marc Anthony sang God Bless America at the baseball All Star game earlier this week.  What followed was a bunch of racist assholes complaining about having a Mexican singing God Bless America.  Here’s the thing.  Marc Anthony is an American citizen.  People just assumed that he wasn’t because of the color of his skin.  So they’re not just racist assholes, they’re clueless racist assholes. The saddest thing is some of them were called on the fact that Marc Anthony was American and some just doubled down and said that he didn’t look American.  That means he wasn’t white.

Anytime you hear anyone talking about Real America, you can be assured that they’re pining for the days when only white people had rights.  Real America is a dog whistle cry to all the racists out there.  And they respond to it in droves.

In other news, people still watch the All Star Game.  Who knew?

Another Win For Obamacare

New York recently announced that individual plans under Obamacare will save it’s citizens 50%.  This is huge!  Obamacare will cut the premium costs of 6% of America in half!

The rest of us likely won’t be quite as fortunate.  Most states still don’t know how much, if anything, they will save.  New York had the highest premium costs for individual insurance in the country.  This is because of a law that requires insurance companies to cover preexisting conditions.  Without a mandate for its citizens to carry health insurance, as more people with preexisting conditions signed up, the costs of insurance for everyone went up.  This caused healthy people to drop their insurance which caused the costs for those with the preexisting conditions to go up. Obamacare both demands preexisting conditions be covered and that individuals carry insurance under penalty of law.  Thus the very large savings for New York which only had half the formula to save money.

The most important takeaway from this is that what’s happening in New York highlights exactly what Obamacare proponents have argued would happen.  A larger pool that can’t exclude anyone leads to drastically lower premiums for the individual.  In my analogy where Obamacare is a bag of poo left on the doorstep but what we had before was a flaming bag of poo, what’s happening in New York is what put out the fire.

Book Review: Stranger Things Happen by Kelly Link

Jean-Paul’s rating: 2/5 stars

“Stranger Things Happen” is a collection of short stories of an indescribable genre.  They are not quite ghost stories, but you get the feeling that they’re all supposed to be ghost stories or dreams or something else equally gossamer and fleeting.  I say this because most of the characters behave more like you’d expect ghosts to behave than real people.  Their minds flit about from one subject to the other without much resolution of anything.  All the stories read as a slightly structured stream of consciousness.  And then they end.  Next story.

The short story is the most difficult form of writing.  You need to be pithy while at the same time being verbose.  You need characters that readers are instantly invested in while not really saying much about the character.  It is a great balancing act that, when done right, produces the best fiction imaginable.  “Stranger Things Happen” doesn’t do that.  It’s one of those books where you recognize the talents of the author but the execution just doesn’t click.

All this could just be me.  I might not get it.  Kelly Link has won a few awards, including for some of the stories in “Stranger Things Happen”.  Take “Louise’s Ghost” for instance.  It won an Nebula Award for best novelette in 2001.  It was certainly the most story-y of the short stories.  This is more so because the two main characters were named Louise.  Much of the time is spent trying to figure out which Louise is being talked about in any given sentence.  It’s clever as a writing device, but that’s about all it is.  The story itself doesn’t accomplish anything, however.  There are the Louises and a hairy ghost and a girl who thinks she was once a dog and a bunch of cellists.  There are descriptions of the Louises’ love lives and attempts to get rid of the ghost and a death and then a flashback and the end.

It’s as if all the short stories are half finished ideas.  Or maybe half started ideas.  They are beginnings without ends or ends without beginnings or maybe meat without bread or style without substance.  “Stranger Things Happen” is certainly some sort of accomplishment but I can not for the life of me say what it accomplishes.  Maybe that’s the point.

What If George Zimmerman Was The One That Was Killed?

Imagine you’re walking home from the store after picking up some snacks.  You notice a man following you in his car.  You go and cut through the yard where a car can’t go and the man gets out of his car and starts following you through the yard.  You’re talking to someone on the phone and telling them that this creepy guy is following you.  It’s really starting to freak you out.  What does this man intend to do to you?  Luckily, this is Florida so you turn around and confront the man who may intend to do you severe physical harm.  The man continues to approach so you stand your ground and attack the man.  The man pulls a gun but you bash his head against the sidewalk killing him before he can use it.

The above is a scenario that follows Florida’s stand your ground law and fits all of the facts presented in the case with the exception of who ends up dead at the end.  If it happened like this, do you think Trayvon Martin would not have been arrested immediately?  Do you think Trayvon Martin would not have been charged with murder soon after?  Do you think Trayvon Martin would have been found not guilty of murder?  How about if he used a gun to kill Zimmerman instead?

The scales of justice are stacked against black men in particular and minorities in general in so many ways.  Injustices are thrown at them on an almost daily basis.  How could you not be angry if it were happening to you?  And yet we live in a world where white people threaten revolution because their imaginary freedoms are pretend being taken away and where minorities rioting over actual freedoms being taken away are looked upon as misguided at best and less than human at worst.  Ta-Nehisi Coates says it best:

It is painful to say this: Trayvon Martin is not a miscarriage of American justice, but American justice itself. This is not our system malfunctioning. It is our system working as intended. To expect our juries, our schools, our police to single-handedly correct for this, is to look at the final play in the final minute of the final quarter and wonder why we couldn’t come back from twenty-four down.

To paraphrase a great man: We are what our record says we are. How can we sensibly expect different?

Make No Mistake About It, Trayvon Martin Is Dead Because He Is Black

Yes, George Zimmerman was acquitted of the killing of Trayvon Martin.  Yes, sadly, George Zimmerman should have been acquitted of the killing of Trayvon Martin given Florida’s ridiculous Stand Your Ground laws.  None of this gets around the fact that Trayvon Martin would be alive today if he were white.  George Zimmerman had black kids up to mischief on his mind when he followed Trayvon Martin.  All evidence points to this being true.

When I first heard about the call to pursue a Federal Civil Rights case against George Zimmerman, I balked at the idea.  There is no doubt in my mind that George Zimmerman is a soft racist, just like some of my family, just like some of my friends (and boy does it baffle me that they don’t realize they’re racist).  That, in and of itself, is not a good reason to pursue Federal charges.  The more I thought about it, though, the more it makes sense.

George Zimmerman is not your average soft racist.  He is a soft racist with a gun.  He used that gun to kill a black kid.  A black kid that he was following because he was black and “something’s wrong with him”.  This, despite the fact that he was told not to follow the black kid.  Why?  Because “these assholes always get away”.

George Zimmerman put himself into a position that allowed him to kill Trayvon Martin.  Florida law allows you to put yourself into a position to kill another human being.  The combination of the two led to Trayvon Martin’s death.  We have a racist man using a racist law to kill a black kid.  This seems to me to be exactly what Federal Civil Rights trials are meant for.

And I know it’s besides the point, but boy does George Zimmerman make it difficult for to like him or feel sorry for him even a little bit.  He thinks the killing of Trayvon Martin was “God’s plan”.  Defense attorneys were wise to keep him off the stand.  A sympathetic figure he is not.

Movie Review: Pacific Rim

Ratings for reviews will appear above the fold, while the review itself will appear below the fold to avoid spoilers for anyone that wants to go into it with a blank slate.

Jean-Paul’s rating: 1/5 stars or 4/5 stars

This is the greatest one star movie you will ever see.

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