The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach

Category: Writing

  • Lunacon 2009 (3): Saturday

    Today was the busiest of the convention. I gave blood; saw Mercedes Lackey and others hold forth on building fantasy worlds; participated in a discussion on financial crises in sci fi; participated (sort of) in the Masquerade after all; caught about half of a surprisingly good 1940 adventure film; and caught all of a not-at-all surprisingly bad 1979 space adventure film.
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  • Lunacon 2009 (0): Arrival

    Well, here I am at the Hilton Rye Town for my third Lunacon. Apparently during the past year the Lunacon people changed their versioning system from counting from the first Lunacon (making this the 52nd) to simply attaching the year. I sort of miss the old way.

    I’m actually quite a bit early, as registration doesn’t even start until 5 PM tomorrow afternoon. In principle this means I could have probably skipped being here tonight and just come up tomorrow, and from a fiscal perspective I probably should have. But I hate travel and like having the time to recoup. Also I keep telling myself I will use this time to read and to write and generally attend to the personal activities I’ve been neglecting so far this year. We’ll see.

    Friday is a somewhat light day, as is Sunday, but Saturday is chock full of things and in fact (as usual) I have far too many things to attend that all occur at the same time. I’ll probably end up just going to whatever is closest to where I am at the time-changes. 🙂

  • The (non) Importance of Caring

    A former student of mine at some point had a facebook status that read,

    Why should I study something I don’t care about?  Why should teachers teach something they don’t care about?

    Actually, to be 100% accurate, the student’s status said that this was in someone else‘s status.  But still…

    “Why should I study something I don’t care about?” is a question that sounds more reasonable than it actually is.  Where you are at 17 — or at 5, or at 38 — is not who you will be your whole life.  Sometimes, indeed often, you don’t have the experience or wisdom to know what’s important.  (This is a generic “you”, not a some-particular-student “you”.)  And sometimes, to get to the good stuff, there really is other stuff you have to go through or learn.  That’s a part of life.  I’d even argue it’s not a bad part of life.  Things you learn should be meaningful, and that meaning should be clear.  But you aren’t done, yet, and what you care about is simply not the whole total of what’s worth knowing or doing.  It isn’t for anybody.

    I guess fundamentally I disagree strongly with the proposition that “what I care about” is synonymous with “what is important”.  There’s an arrogance in that which is every bit as haughty and unjustified as the “We’re the teachers so we decide what is important” tack.  It’s so inward-focused it’s very nearly solispistic.

    To be fair, I am somewhat assigning motivations on the assumption that the point of asking “Why should I study something I don’t care about?” is to offer as an answer “You shouldn’t”.  If the question is a legitimate call for information, it’s perfectly valid.  Students should demand to know why they are studying what they are asked to study, how it moves them along toward their goals or what it achieves.  Teachers should continually ask (themselves and others) why they cover what they do.  So as long as the questioner is intellectually honest enough to be open to the possibility that there could be things worth studying even if the questioner doesn’t particularly care about them — as long as that’s true, it’s a good question.

  • 25 Things

    There is a viral meme going around Facebook about listing 25 random things about yourself. It’s not accurate, since people spend some time crafting the 25 things (so they’re not really random … it’s not like people write 500 things and do a Monte Carlo selection or anything). Anyone, I got tagged by Annie and gamely set out to make my list, which is reproduced below the fold.
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  • Somewhere Beyond the Bitter End

    This is another in my intermittent series of posting things I’d written long before, so that they’re out there on the Net. I wrote this one quite some time ago, back when I was in the Bard Writing Workshop that Hun runs. I wrote most of it after taking a quick walk on a brisk October day right before that day’s meeting of Bard — so yes, this is yet another of my last-minute desperate writings because I didn’t have anything. But it came out OK. I eventually submitted it to The Hun Review and it made it … in 2007, I think.

    The title comes from a Patty Griffin song.
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  • Dawn Breaks

    A few minutes ago, Fox News — Fox News! — called the Presidential race for Senator Barack Obama. By now most networks have agreed, and apparently Senator John McCain has conceded the race.

    Wow.

    It’s going to take a while to absorb this. Words like “historic occasion” don’t cut it. This was an epochal moment at a critical time, and I am proud and amazed to realize that my nation once again rose to the moment. We put paid to some of the ugliness of our history and we recapture some of the promise of our future. People voted for change, for hope, for tomorrow. Against a rough and oft sleazy campaign, Senator Obama — no, President-elect Obama — ran an honorable campaign that took the high road, kept to issues, avoided the politics of personal destruction, and treated the American citizenry as adults, not animals to be cadged or corralled. Barack Obama staked his career on the premise that in a dark and dangerous time, this nation would listen to our better angels — and quite against expectation, the nation responded.

    The Reagan revolution has run its course. The Nixon Southern Strategy lies bankrupt on the dustbin of history. The wiles and vile counsel of Karl Rove and Lee Attwater has been refuted, rejected, and repudiated — we have decided that we will not be a nation ruled by fear, led by slander, demeaned and diminished by demagogy. We don’t have to agree on everything to agree that we are all Americans, we are all heirs of the great revolution, and we are all in this together.

    This campaign has lasted twenty months. It has aroused passion and resistance, hope and fear. It has elevated what is right about this nation and it has exposed all that remains wrong. It has been draining and it has been exhilarating. It has overlaid a touch of the transcendental into our everyday life. And at long last, it is finally over.

    Barack Obama has been elected President of the United States of America. History has been made. The future has been reclaimed. It is finally over…

    … Now, it’s time to get to work.

  • Why Bother to Vote?

    I wrote this at the request of my friend Maureen Leming, who is also Director of Annual Giving and Communications, and who wanted to send it out to the local media. No one bit, but I like it enough that I want it out there. So, self-publishing to the rescue!

    Why Bother to Vote?

    I teach physics to high school seniors, a large number of whom are eligible to vote. Dishearteningly, many of them have decided that they won’t be exercising their franchise because, as they tell me, “It’s not like my vote counts anyway”. With polls in New Jersey showing Barack Obama with double-digit leads, it seems at first glance that they have a point. But I argue fiercely that, despite that superficial impression, they should in fact get to the polls. My argument boils down to this: Elections aren’t about winning a contest. They’re about governing a nation.

    Let’s assume for the moment that the polls are accurate. Let’s assume further that you’re an Obama supporter. (If you’re supporting McCain, there’s more for you below.) Surely there’s no motivation to get out the polls, right? After all, Senator Obama is going to win those 15 electoral votes either way. If the election were just about winning, then those votes are all that matter. But since it’s also about governing, there are other considerations — one of which, for example, is the popular vote. A president who wins the electoral college but just squeaks by on the popular vote (or loses it) can be crippled right out of the gate. Consider George W. Bush, whose first nine months in office were roundly criticized for drift and inertia.

    On the other hand, if Senator Obama wins the election and wins the popular vote handily, it would give his agenda quite the boost. For example, if he wins by an excess of 20 million votes, it would be a landslide comparable to FDR’s election in 1932. Even a more likely outcome of six or seven million votes strengthens his hands and makes rapid adoption of his program much more likely. The length of the presidential “honeymoon” is strongly influenced by the extent by which the president wins the popular vote. In that race, every vote in New Jersey counts just as much as one cast anywhere else — even if that vote doesn’t affect the electoral total.

    Obviously, if you are a McCain supporter in New Jersey, similar but reverse arguments apply: You would want to reduce the margin of an Obama victory, or (of course) increase the margin of a McCain victory. And even if Obama takes New Jersey, McCain could win the presidency — and in that case, you would want his margin of popular votes to be as large as possible. In essence, if your side wins, you want to maximize its advantage in the popular vote so as to advance the agenda with which you agree. And if your side loses, you certainly want to diminish the margin of victory for the other guys, so as to retard their agenda as much as possible. Both possible scenarios dictate that you get out and vote.

    And of course, there are issues here bigger than simple partisan calculus. Democracy depends on an engaged electorate. There is no excuse for sitting out any election, particularly one so fraught with historic import. When turnout is low, politicians know that the road to victory lies in pandering to small but focused interest groups. The key becomes energizing your voter base and ignoring the rest of the population. But when turnout is high, the game changes. Pandering to everyone is the same as not pandering. Discourse and compromise become more viable, indeed, more necessary. When you can’t tailor your message to a narrow group and still win, you feel the pressure to formulate real solutions that appeal to a wider array of voters. Raise voter turnout and you improve the entire political process.

    Think your vote doesn’t count? Heck, on the contrary — it just might save democracy.

  • What’s Going Wrong

    The failure to enact the bailout bill, or indeed, any economic recovery bill, has shaken some people to their core. It’s heightened a sense that our politics is broken and that we as a people no longer have what it takes. Someone wrote something at Political Animal that stirred in me a passionate response, and I’ve replicated it below:

    Dan Kervick on September 30, 2008 at 9:23 PM

    Maybe we can now stop hearing so many pious paeans to the great genius of Our Illustrious Founders, the guys who gave us this inflexible, unresponsive, creaking tub of a political system in the first place.

    No, they’re still geniuses. They met in Philadelphia, surveyed all that was known of human history at that point, and sat down to solve the problem of human governance. And here’s the kicker: They actually did it. They crafted a system that included self-correction, that respected the minority viewpoint while empowering the majority, and that could cope with a vast expansion in people and area. They actually solved the problem — and they did it so well, they changed the world as a result.

    The irony, of course, is that by changing the world, they rendered obsolete and invalid the conclusions they’d drawn from history. History is different, and so the old rules don’t work.

    On the other hand, their system has survived (admittedly creaking) for 220+ years, risen above existential crises both foreign and domestic, expanded the definition of “citizen” (indeed, of “human”) far beyond its original sense, saved civilization (or helped save it) at least twice, while providing a standard of living so amazing that the typical person far exceeds the wildest dreams of avarice of the most powerful of old. Not so bad.

    The failure isn’t in the system. The failure is in us. We live in reduced times, where we accept corruption and ignorance, where we sit back and watch cable news like it was no more significant than sport (when we can bothered to watch it at all), where we avoid the person of differing opinion and where we trust only those who already agree with us. The Founders have not failed us; it is we who have failed them, and ourselves. We have allowed ourselves to be lulled into a stupor of reality TV and Fritos; we celebrate the ignorant and mock the educated. We would rather have a President to share a beer than to solve problems, and we would rather believe the cynical testimony of implicated cronies than do the legwork to understand what’s really going on.

    The system hasn’t been tried and found wanting. It’s been found hard and left untried. American citizenship is advanced democracy and it’s hard work … too hard for too many.

    The failure lies in us.

  • I am a Values Voter

    After the election in 2004, we were preached at that George W. Bush won election (not re-election) due to the rejection of John Kerry by “values voters” .. as if the millions who voted for Kerry had no decent values. That spurred me to write the following, which I still embrace today. In this election, even more than that one, it’s important to recall that we on the left have values as well — values which I, personally, think are better than those evidenced by the rabid right.

    I am a “Values Voter”.

    I value

    * compassion over condemnation

    * debate over demagoguery

    * reason over rage

    * freedom over fear

    * truth over lies

    These are American values.

    I believe

    * that real patriots ask questions

    * that government should not decide who I am, or who you are

    * that a sound safety net serves the interest of us all

    * that people should be judged on the content of their character, not the content of their wallets or the color of their skin

    * that justice everywhere is threatened by injustice anywhere

    * that labor has dignity and diversity has worth

    * that each person deserves a fair deal and a true opportunity

    These are core American beliefs.

    I am a “values voter”…
    … and this is my country, too.

  • I Didn’t Know

    For all the regular readers — both of them — wondering what’s prompted the past week of short bursts of happy posts, a hint. It’s about as subtle as a bowling ball and not nearly so good as it should be, but for what it’s worth, it is earnest. Further details, alas, are embargoed for a short while.

    (An aside: It is surprisingly hard to rhyme “breath” without dragging in the morbid. I didn’t pull it off.)
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