The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach

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  • Memory in Song (II)

    More oddly-prescient musings of Jackson Browne.

    “Lives in the Balance”
    Jackson Browne
    Lives in the Balance

    I’ve been waiting for something to happen
    For a week or a month or a year
    With the blood in the ink of the headlines
    And the sound of the crowd in my ear
    You might ask what it takes to remember
    When you know that you’ve seen it before
    Where a government lies to its people
    And a nation lies drifting to war
    There’s a shadow on the faces
    Of the men who send the guns
    To the wars that are fought in places
    Where their business interest runs…

    On the radio talk shows and TV
    You hear one thing again and again
    That the USA stands for freedom
    And we’ve come to the aid of a friend.
    But who are the ones that we call our friends,
    these governments killing their own?
    Or the people who finally can’t take anymore
    So they pick up a gun or a knife or a stone?

    And there are lives in the balance
    And there are people under fire
    And there are children at the cannons
    And there is blood on the wire…

    There’s a shadow on the faces
    Of the men who fan the flames
    Of the wars that fought in the places
    Where we can’t even say the names.
    They sell us the President the same way
    They sell us our clothes and our cars
    They sell us everything from youth to religion
    At the same time they sell us our wars.
    I wanna know who the men in the shadows are
    I wanna hear somebody asking them why
    They can be counted on to tell us who our enemies are
    But they’re never the ones to fight and to die.

    And there are lives in the balance
    And there are people under fire
    And there are children at the cannons
    And there is blood on the wire…

  • Memory in Song (I)

    It’s still surprisingly hard to write about 9/11. It galls me to see, again, our national “leaders” exploit this tragedy for political ends. And it saddens me that we don’t seem to have learned any lessons. So it’s really not in me to pen something deep and insightful. Instead, I’ll fall back on the melodic musings of Jackson Browne, writing long before today but seeing, apparently, the same sickening game.

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  • 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.

  • Lying Lies and the Liars Who Tell Them

    In case you — like me — watched Sarah Palin’s speech from the Republican National Convention and keep saying — like me — “I know that’s a lie”, but were unable to point to a source, let me offer this post by Hilzoy over at Political Animal @ the Washington Monthly. It sums up the lies and points you toward the evidence.

  • McCain’s VP

    So, Senator John McCain has chosen Sarah Palin, governor of Alaska, as his running mate.

    Wow.

    It’s taken me a while to get my head around this. Sarah Palin is a political neophyte — if your main charge is that Barack Obama is inexperienced, then you have to see Sarah Palin as INEXPERIENCED. All of her avowed positions are far far to the right of mainstream American opinion. It’s impossible not to believe that the campaign picked her in a blatant attempt to pull off a cynical two-fer: (a) The ultra-right goes ga-ga over her ideological credentials; (b) low-information “Hilary die-hards” decide to vote against everything Senator Clinton believes in so as to get a woman — any woman, dammit — into the executive wing. The latter part is so blindingly obvious that, I think, the only people who will fall for it are people who would have found some reason to vote for McCain anyway.

    What to do? How to react? The Obama campaign has a lot of people way more plugged in than me, but below the fold, I give my two cents:
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  • Senator Clinton’s Speech

    Senator Hilary Clinton has finished her address to the Democratic National Convention. My personal response: She didn’t hit it out of the park but she definitely got some extra bases and maybe batted some runs in.

    I think she delivered a full-throated, crystal clear indictment of the past eight years and of John McCain’s alignment with it. It was a bit corny but I liked the line about McCain and Bush meeting in the Twin Cities because you can hardly tell them apart. Senator Clinton did a good job enunciating what the Democratic Party is for — things like universal healthcare and improved public education — as well as what the Party is against — such as military adventurism, crony capitalism, and the abandonment of civilized society to a race of all against all. I still believe that had she delivered this message consistently throughout the primaries, rather than focusing on her opponents, she would have made the hurdle and would be speaking tomorrow instead of last night.

    Perhaps not surprisingly, the speech was nonetheless still mostly about her — her experiences on the trail, her motivations for running, etc. That’s to be understood and it was a historic campaign, so it can be forgiven. She spent a little too much time on that, and she did detour into the end into a polishing of the legacy of President Clinton. If you tuned in to the middle and you cut out before the last few moments, you would be forgiven for thinking this was a Clinton acceptance speech.

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  • Review: Marc Cohn at the Westhampton Beach Peforming Arts Center

    Marc Cohn & band
    Westhampton Beach Performing Arts Center
    Sunday 2008 August 24 8:30 PM

    It’s my habit to see Marc Cohn every chance I get during the New York leg of his tours. This explains why, three days after my last Cohn concert, I schlepped all the way out along Long Island’s southern shore to Westhampton. Tonight he had no opener; it was just his band and him. The WHBPAC is an intimate space, acoustically rich and comfortable. It lacks the grandeur of St. George’s Theater but is quite nice for a modern building.

    As before, the playlist is below the fold. I don’t have as many comments, as many of the songs are the same.

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  • Review: Marc Cohn at the St. George Theater

    Marc Cohn with Toby Lightman
    St. George Theater, Staten Island, NY
    Thursday 2008 August 21

    This is another in my ongoing series of reviews of Marc Cohn shows. See this earlier one and this one as well for comparison.

    The St. George is a beautiful venue, an old vaudeville theater (I assume) which has been either renovated or maintained lovingly in its original state. Ornate and glitzy, it nonetheless provided excellent sound for an intimate concert. The opener was a bluesy singer/songwriter named Toby Lightman, who has been featured (apparently) on the Home Shopping Network as well as singing the opening for NASCAR on Fox. Unfortunately I don’t know any of Ms. Lightman’s work, so I can’t review it in depth. She seemed to have a nice range, though, and her songs aren’t bad at all. She does appear to be a bit nervous on a stage by herself.

    After Ms. Lightman’s forty-minute set and a small break, Marc Cohn came on stage with his current touring band: Shane Fontayne on guitar; Joe Bobadillo (?) on drums; and John Ossman on bass. The set was high-energy and went on for more than an hour and a half, including two encores. The playlist is below the fold.
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  • Throwing Out the Textbook (Part II)

    (Part I gives the background.)

    Since the date to order a textbook has long since passed, I’m pretty committed to not going with one for “Space Science & Astrophysics”. I’ve taken the plunge. The problem is, I don’t know exactly what the course should look like now. Most especially, I don’t know of a good way to evaluate the students. I do not want long papers to grade every week! Also, although Scientific American articles are written for “the intelligent layperson” and so should be within the reach of 12th graders, there won’t be the same organized, coherent narrative that a textbook can give. In other words, when you know that you’re going to cover tides in detail in Chapter 5, you can arrange Chapter 3 more intelligently.

    I won’t have that luxury. It would seem that that would lead to more lecturing, a proven-bad way of teaching. I will have to lecture somewhat but I want to minimize how much. One thing I’ve considered is throwing it back onto the students. There are tons of sites dedicated to popular astronomy and astrophysics. Perhaps I can give them weekly worksheets with terms and ideas they need to research. Certainly class participation is going to carry a lot more weight than usual in my class, because a lot of what we handle is going to have to be tailored to what they bring to discussion. There will almost certainly be papers of some sort. I am also considering weekly quizzes just to ensure that people have read somewhat. Finally, each quarter will conclude with some sort of group project/presentation. What’s worked well in the past have been things like The Pluto Prosecution as well as a detailed project on Exobiogenesis.

    An intriguing possibility is that I will have functioning laptops for each student. This opens up the chance to do actual web-based instruction — but what would that look like? How can it be used to enhance the course? Most especially, web-kits often take a lot of time to develop, and I’ll be doing this largely seat-of-my-pants.

    What has me concerned most is tests. How much objective stuff can I put, when their sources are likely to be wildly divergent? And what would be the most effective way to assess the objective content? For the past two years, I’ve used a mixture of multiple-choice and fill-in questions, and (I have to admit) I’ve been immensely dissatisfied with both.

    So… anyone have any thoughts on how to assess this class? All suggestions will be deeply appreciated.

  • Throwing out the Textbook (Part I)

    (You can skip to Part II.)
    Some of you might remember that this is nominally a blog about education. It’s time again to shunt aside all the personal and political things I like to blog about, and to instead post about my classes. I do this in part because school starts soon and I am still up a creek regarding one of my classes, and thought that the great wide Internet community might offer some ideas.

    Here’s the situation: For the fifth semester I will be teaching “Space Science & Astrophysics”, a 16-week overview of the discipline intended for seniors at my prep school. Due to the vagaries of our curriculum, many if not most will be taking this course to complete their science requirement — and hence will not have taken regular HS physics beforehand. For the past two years I’ve used The Cosmic Perspective by Bennet, et al. (I’ve been using 4th edition but I see they’re up to 5th now.) I really liked the book, actually, and still think it’s a fantastic textbook for its audience … but its audience is not survey-level 12th graders many of whom have not had physics. As I observed even my best students falling behind in the reading, and as I considered the $125 price tag, I grew guilty and frustrated. So I decided to shake things up.

    More below the fold.
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