Take Arms Against a Tide of Sorrows

Well, I was trying to do something special for my 100th post. Then I noticed that Blogger also counts saved drafts as blog posts, so it looks like I have a few more posts to write before I can celebrate, kick back, and rest on my laurels. So today I'll flesh out one of the ideas I had while being unable to sleep Monday evening. Then I'll be one step closer to my planned self congratulatory celebration!

I was recently reading an article in the State News, MSU's student operated paper, concerning the aftermath of the disasters which occurred last week in Japan. What struck me most was a section talking about the concern for MSU students studying abroad in Japan. I am saddened, but not particularly phased, when I hear that the International Studies program cancels a trip to a South American region due to unrest, or when a friend is evacuated from Niger because of a murder. However, this is Japan!

I felt that this was a thought worth considering, that even in Japan, a fully industrial and, arguably, safer society than our own, tragedy can strike turning the region into a danger zone. This has serious implications for our own sense of safety. We can play the odds, avoid walking alone at night down the streets of Ciudad Juarez, but eventually our number will come up, and something will be the cause of our death. I am not advocating a complete disregard for one's personal safety, but if you are lucky enough to find a cause for which you are passionate, it seems reasonable to weigh realistic decreases to your life expectancy against the fulfillment of pursuing your dream, since no place is truly safe.

That is the extent of my, slightly, nihilistic call that you go forth and seize the day. A few other responses to the events warrant mention, but are not dignified enough to receive well thought out refutations. The idea that this disaster was somehow karmic justice for some historic Japanese offense or another is sickening! That type of filth is no better that the hatred that spews from the Westburo Baptist "church." Trolls who would joke about celebrating this incident, if anything, seem less dignified. At least the hate filled are sincere in their ignorance, to claim to believe that this is a tragedy, then feel it appropriate to publicly joke about to incite a reaction seems a particularly callous response. Do not misunderstand me, I have made some horrible jokes in my time, but I keep their circulation low, and tell them in person so that I may apologize if they seem to offend. Finally, in regards to the lady from UCLA who decided to complain about Asians on their cell phones less than a week after these events, seriously bad timing. I think material of similar tone could be found lingering in obscurity in the darker corners of the web at any time, what makes this one notable is not so much the content, but the timing. Of course the content was objectionable, but I don't think it was any more so than when Rosie O'Donnell made similarly themed comments. Neither event, of course, warranted death threats or such an outpouring of hatred. If you were to devise a strategy to overcome bigotry, would you rather rely on overpowering it with a counter wave of hatred, or winning it over through increased education and opportunities to interact with people of a different background?

One of the, if not the only, reasons I overcame my conservative indoctrination against homosexuals was the simple fact that I met some. It is easy to dismiss or oppress ideas in a way that most of us will not feel comfortable doing to people with whom we have built a relationship. It is for this reason that hate speech and personal attacks have no place on any side of a respectful relationship, we must always be seeking to open up positive relationships with others. If I felt that people making the types of comments I deride in the previous paragraph, a) were going to read my blog, and, b) were likely to respond well to reason, then I would post a rational refutation of these remarks. As it is, I settle for a brief condemnation of these remarks, although not necessarily the people making them, because such remarks must be condemned if we are to move past this type of discourse and embrace our shared humanity.

Amidst all this doom and gloom, let us not lose sight of the grandeur of the shared humanity towards which we aspire. I saw an article earlier remarking on the absence of looting in Japan, as citizens and businesses support each other and chip in to recover. A friend also posted about the extraordinary heroics involved in managing the evolving disaster at the Fukushima Daiishi plant. Humanity may have some ugly warts and serious scarring, but there is beauty too in our tragically flawed visage.

In Defense of Pi

I don't often do this, but, in honor of Pi Day, today I shall take up my words in the defense of traditional values. The traditional value in question is Pi itself. Much fuss has been made by proponents of a new circle constant, Tau, which would be equal to two times Pi. As much as it pains me to argue against the enigmatic and engaging Vi Hart, Pi is very much right.

While all concerned, except perhaps politicians and Biblical literalists, agree that Pi is an irrational value which is about 3.14, the argument is whether Pi is the value that we should consider important. Tau proponents argue that Tau is more sound pedagogically. Instead of half a circle being Pi radians, it would instead be half Tau radians. A quarter circle, a quarter Tau.

I cannot argue against this claim, it seems that high school mathematics would be made slightly simpler if we were to switch our focus from 3.14 to 6.28, however, arguing that we ought do this ignores a wealth of mathematical history. Humans have been seeking the decimal value of Pi as long as there has been civilization. The use of the Pi symbol to represent the value is over 300 years old, and was popularized by the mathematical great Euler. To cast Pi aside for slight notational clarity would be to show a remarkable disrespect for the historic foundations of mathematics.

Make no mistake, a slight notational clarity is the only true advantage of "Tau." Because "Tau" is just 2 times Pi, moving from one notation to the other is a trivial computation. If you have a value which is c*Pi, it will be (c/2)*Tau, if you have a value k*Tau, it will be 2k*Pi, easy as pie! Whatever notational clarity is gained by making the change, I would imagine more confusion would be created as we introduce a second, unnecessary, symbol for a concept that is already well represented.

Despite my nostalgia, I understand the systematic logic behind revoking Pluto's status as a planet. Despite my upbringing, I envy the computational clarity of the metric system. So please believe me when I say that I see no significant computational advantages to "Tau" over Pi!

Nothing Lasts Forever

It sometimes feels like once you put something on the Internet, it will last forever. If you've ever tried to delete your embarrassing Facebook photos, I imagine you know what I'm talking about. Once I put something on the Internet, I no longer have to trust the frailties of my own memory, I can immortalize my every thought in the bedrock of our society, as though we were young lovers, simply by publishing a blog post.

However, this is a false confidence, a brittle permanence. Although the electronic memory may seem perfect in a way no human memory ever could be one minute, upon its deletion it is gone in a way no repressed or forgotten memory ever will be. With a click of a mouse a thought, a paper, a profile, even a friendship can be obliterated.

This frailty is not reflected in the real world. A computer stores its memories, each in their place, each separate from the memories stored around it. People, we live our memories, we are our memories. We don't remember things because they are "stored," we remember things because they have become a part of us, and who we are is a part of our memories. Every single thing that I remember is connected to every other, because they are all, in some sense no matter how small, a part of this thing I call myself.

On the other hand, I too am terribly impermanent, so although the memories stored within me may be more flexible and, consequentially, more durable than those in a computer, they too shall be obliterated as time wears on. I would like to thank everyone who participates in this blog for sharing something more than bits and bytes with me, for, in some way, making me who I am.

Nothing lasts forever, except loss.

Grad School

A short post, to give a reprieve after yesterday's post, about how grad school makes me question my own identity. I think the biggest problem with being a grad student is that one doesn't fit in a broad category. On one hand we are students, and I still, for the most part, consider college students to be my peer group. However, I also am an instructor to said students so, at least with regards to the specific students in my classes, I do not consider myself their peer. When you consider them, I am much more like a professor, and indeed they sometimes call me a professor. However, I too have professors teaching my classes, so they are not my peers.

Another thing is that I am, sort of, not very competently, running my own life. I have a job, which gives me a paycheck, with which I rent an apartment, buy food, make my computer work, and all the other serious adult-y things that one might imagine adult-like people doing. But, as mentioned above, I still think of myself as a student, someone preparing for life, rather than living it (this might be worth an elaborating post in itself some time, but not now).

Sometimes I worry that one of the functions of grad school, similar to boot camp, is to break down the participants sense of self in order that I can be re-molded in the form desired by her or his superiors. Whether or not this is the case, I certainly have, in previous semesters, lost myself over the course of the semester. Granted, over the past few years, even before I came to grad school, I haven't had the strongest grasp on who I thought I was. However, I feel like it has been worse since coming to Michigan. Upon returning to Oregon over winter break this year I remarked to a friend that as I was leaving to walk over to his house I had the strangest feeling, as though when I had done the same thing last summer was much more immediate than anything that had happened to me in the intervening semester.

This is one of the reasons I try to keep up with the blog, it keeps me thinking important thoughts, and not sleepwalking through life. And I appreciate all those who are willing to share that journey with me. One last piece of advice, always go for the red pill!

Das Klassenraum

I have not been terribly prolific this March; part of the reason is that I was fairly stressed last week, but mostly it is due to how much mental wrangling this post entailed. Whenever a post tries to tie together wide ranging concepts, I struggle to get my thoughts into a linear form suitable for communication. As to how well I have succeeded in this case, I will let you be the judge.

A while ago I shared this link, on Facebook, to a wonderful, but heartbreaking, post from an Oregonian elementary school teacher. The author clearly feels called to teach, and apparently was quite good at her job. Her love of teaching survived the overwork and underfunding of Oregon's early years cutting the education budget. However, the trend toward larger class sizes and increasingly varied competency in her students have robbed teaching of its joy for her. Pupils with special needs which would previously have been met in supplementary programs such as English as a Second Language or Special Education curriculum began overwhelming her ability to meet each student at their own level, simultaneously homogenization of desired outcomes, signified by scores on standardized tests and rankings for No Child Left Behind and related legislation, leaving her with the sad realization that she no longer wishes to be a teacher

That alone saddens me immeasurably, that someone who clearly loved teaching, and devoted her professional life to its craft, has lost their passion for it. But that is her story, and one she tells, far better than I could, in the linked article. What I want to explore in the rest of this post are the structural changes she talks about, specifically in relation to Marx's theorization of capitalism. If you are having an adverse reaction to Marx's name, I ask that you bear with me, I do not advocate a teacher revolution to solve these problems, I merely intend to explain how these problems fit almost eerily well into a Marxist view of capitalism.

While the battle in Wisconsin has the traditional image of Marxist class struggle, you might be wondering why I would invoke Marx in relation to the linked article. In his work Capital (Das Kapital) Volume I, Marx examines the structure of capitalism. He theorizes that the ability of the capitalist to invest money and somehow end up with more money than originally invested can solely be explained by the capitalist buying labor power (hiring workers) for less pay than the value of the work they did in their time. Since he placed capitalism on this foundation, Marx concluded that it was greatly in the interest of the capitalist to keep labor costs as low as possible, two major tools in this undertaking were keeping labor unskilled and interchangeable.

While related, these are separate concepts. Unskilled labor is easier to produce, which means unskilled laborers have fewer costs which their wages must repay (think student loans for those who have gone to college). Because there are fewer expenses involved in creating unskilled laborers, they are able to be paid lower wages. Furthermore, their lack of skill limits their marketability, inclining them to remain in a position once they are hired. Interchangeability refers to the ease with which a worker can be replaced, or the cost of replacing a worker. If there is a high cost to replacing a worker, then that worker has greater leverage to obtain higher wages, so the capitalist strives to keep interchangeability high. Certainly the less skilled labor is, the easier it is to replace, so interchangeability and unskilled labor are related, but they are not the same. For example, one can increase the interchangeability of skilled labor without reducing its skill level by creating a pool of individuals certified to be skilled laborers from which to choose.

In Marx's day, during the Industrial Revolution, the metaphor of an industrial factory for capitalism was of immediate saliency (obvious relevance). In this metaphor, the recent idea of replaceable parts represents interchangeability while how easy a specific part was to produce correlates with how skilled the labor is. The industrial factory represented the pinnacle of capitalism to Marx for another reason. Once most of the work was being performed by machines, and human laborers were reduced to the tenders of said machines, the jobs humans were called upon to perform were both unskilled and easy to be filled.

If we take this model and examine modern education, I believe that an unsettling trend becomes apparent. Centralized curriculum planning, as represented by standardized tests and the mandate to teach to the tests (teach the material of the test in the manner it is presented on the test), serves to reduce the skill needed to function as a teacher which, of course, also makes teachers more easily replaced. In fact, as noted in the article, this race to the bottom also serves to drive out experienced, highly skilled teachers, so much the better to keep costs down! It seems a little amazing to me that a nation which so soundly rejects any notion of economic central planning, which I agree is a disaster, is so complacent about the rise of educational central planning, also a disaster in my opinion. Perhaps this is because one is bad for the capitalist, while the other seems quite favorable.

A still more horrifying picture is revealed if we look at the effects of capitalizing education on the students rather than the teachers. In addition to providing a set of standardized certifications so capitalists know they have a ready labor pool for even skilled labor, I think that our modern educational philosophy serves to beat a love of learning out of many students. Students of a capitalist education come out of their schools with the specific set of skills for their vocation, limiting their flexibly in the job market. As an undergraduate, I had to take Baccalaureate Core courses, which were courses representing a wide array of subjects from Systems of Power and Dominance to Western Culture to Science, Technology, and Society. I absolutely adored being exposed to this stunning breadth of thoughts and information, but some students complained that it had nothing to do with their program, or wasn't useful to their job. This is also related to the common complaint about mathematics, "when will I ever use this?" which I have addressed previously in my "Three 'R's" post and my sister has also wonderfully argued against.

Lumping all students together in ever larger classes, then holding them to draconian inflexible standards in no way seems like the ideal of education. But it does seem like an efficient way to produce a fresh batch of workers, and if some students are incapable of meeting the standards, such is life, in production there will always be a certain percentage of defective goods. Furthermore, by including students with high levels of need in the standard classroom, and by adding task after task to the teacher's job, we can simultaneously free parents from child raising responsibilities, enabling them to be more efficient workers themselves, and systematically demoralize educators, to keep them from feeling as though they deserve better wages and conditions. All in all, a rather bleak picture of education.

So then, how might one attempt to effect a solution? Smaller class sizes, restoration of special needs programs, and localizing control of curriculum are obviously going to be on my list of positive steps. This may not entail increased educational spending so much as re-prioritized educational spending. A recent examination of Oregon State University's finances, and the Oregon University System's in general, by a third party economist (from Michigan!) produced the recommendation that administrative costs were ballooning at the expense of academic budgets and students' tuition costs. The recommendation was to curtail administrative budgets and focus on the core mission, academics and research. I believe the education system as a whole could benefit from that mentality. I would, of course, also like to see teachers given the type of respect and compensation required to pull some of the brightest in the field into education. Of course, if one feels called to teach, one will probably go into that profession as long as it is a viable life choice, the question is what kind of teacher do we want to make up the gap between the number called to it and the larger number that we need to educate our children?

As always, I welcome further questions, alternate proposals, related thoughts, rebuttals, and any other thoughtful responses that may not be covered by those categories.

Note: For you German speakers, I apologize for the quite intentional grammatical error in the title. Since Raum is a masculine word, it should, of course, be "Der Klassenraum," but this loses some of the desired analogy with "Das Kapital." I could have switched to "Das Klassenzimmer," but that is no longer an obvious English cognate, so I took some artistic liberty with the language.

Something Incoherent and Strange

If you are coming over from Facebook, you probably already know this post is about Charlie Sheen. However, the title is about this post, considering how exhausted I am as I write this. I have been a bit lax about posting this week, and the reason is I have another "tie everything together" type education post I want to make, but I am having trouble wrapping my head around it. So instead I shall write a post about which I do not need to think too much.

I know I shall not need to think about it too much because my entire life I have gotten by terribly well without thinking about Charlie Sheen too much. Well, that may not be true, but my personal problems are in no way related to my lack of Sheen contemplation. In fact, it was not until yesterday that I learned who Charlie Sheen is. Of course I had seen him on ads for Two and a Half Men, but that in no way means I could put a name to his face.

Once he popped up on my radar, I learned a bit about Sheen. Although I have not attempted to find clips of his rants, as they seem at best irrelevant, and at worst a rather cruel thing to joke about, I have picked up a few tidbits about perception of his life. According to the people "in the know," Sheen has drug problems, alcohol problems, mental problems, and domestic abuse problems. Of course, many people have these problems, it is just that, unlike them, Sheen does not live under an overpass and his rants get an audience of millions. Which brings me to my main message, get over it people! Unless you have a solid plan to assist Sheen, with the expertise to back it up and the desire to help it does not seem to be any of your business.

The other thing I wanted to address was this wonderful NPR article, which asks if there is a point at which we stop exploiting Sheen and start trying to help him. The answer is, as soon as his antics become unprofitable. This it the way capitalism works, Sheen is a commodity to be used up. I hope he manages to get some control of his life, but if not we shall use him up until there is nothing left, or the public becomes, justifiably, bored with his antics.

The US and the Middle East

For those of you living under a rock, revolutionary fervor is sweeping through the Middle East. Those of you living under Iraq probably already know this. First in Tunisia, then in Egypt, and now, perhaps, in Libya, dictatorial regimes are being thrown out of power. I have been silent on this subject thus far because, a) I know little about the region, b) I have quite a few other ideas for things to talk about, and c) I have been seriously busy.

However, on the subject of US policy regarding the revolutions, I have some thoughts to share. My strongest opinion is that we have no business interfering in these revolutions! If we want to swat down planes bombing their own citizens on humanitarian grounds, I have no issue in that, but I do not believe we should play an active role in determining the agendas or policies of the post-revolutionary governments.

Due to our demonstrated interest in the region's oil and our longstanding policy of meddling in the politics of the Middle East, often to the disadvantage of large portions of its citizenry, we have neither the moral authority nor the local trust needed to be good mediators in this conflict. Were we to intervene on the behalf of the revolutionaries, it would probably be in return for "considerations" from the eventual government, and even if it were not, it would likely still appear as though that were our motivation, casting a pall of suspicion onto the new government. So, other than expressing our support for the people and protecting them from the worst atrocities, I feel that we have no direct role in this conflict or the reconstruction that will follow afterward. Too bad, after so many tries, we are probably getting fairly good at installing puppet popular regimes.

Even if we had the moral authority to intervene, it would probably be best that we did not. Freedom, and even more so democracy, require lasting commitment and effort on the part of the people. If the people of the region obtain them on their own, hopefully they shall appreciate the value all the more, and be willing to cultivate them as is necessary.

This is not to say that we cannot support the revolutionaries. Our very mission as a nation requires that we admire their desire to overthrow dictators and, if we wish to remain decent human beings, we must by our nature condemn the human rights abuses occurring in Libya, which, thankfully, were mostly absent in Egypt and Tunisia. If our foreign policy focuses more on extorting human rights and open governments out of repressive regimes, rather than oil rights and open markets, then I believe the US will be a nation which finally represents something worthwhile.