06.26.07
Posted in People, Society
at 3:26 pm
by Dave Badtke
Reading Joan Didion this summer should mean The Year of Magical Thinking. But I’m not up to dealing with her dealing with her husband’s death and the illness that would eventually kill her daughter, so I’m reading instead the Everyman’s Library compilation of her seven books of nonfiction written between 1968 and 2003: We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live. The title is from the opening of The White Album, published in 1979:
We tell ourselves stories in order to live. The princess is caged in the consulate. The man with the candy will lead the children into the sea. The naked woman on the ledge outside the window on the sixteenth floor is a victim of accidie, or the naked woman is an exhibitionist, and it would be “interesting” to know which. We tell ourselves that it makes some difference whether the naked woman is about to commit a mortal sin or is about to register a political protest or is about to be, the Aristophanic view, snatched back to the human condition by the fireman in priest’s clothing just visible in the window behind her, the one smiling at the telephoto lens. We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.
During the fall semester I’ll assign Didion’s “On Keeping a Journal,” found in most anthologies, because my students will need to keep journals that I’ll read and grade. I’ll encourage them to look carefully and record without worrying about reasons or consequences. Some will, but most won’t because it’s an alien concept, the metonymic truth that lies in detailed, seemingly syncretic observations. . . and inimitable prose.
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06.22.07
Posted in Education, People, Column Ideas
at 8:09 am
by Dave Badtke
Comparing some 60,000 IQ tests taken by male Norwegian military siblings, Norwegian researcher Petter Kristensen claims, as reported in the San Francisco Chronicle (also in the NY Times), that the debate over the intelligence of the oldest in a family is over:
On average, the eldest child’s IQ is a measly 2.3 points higher than the second. But researchers say the difference is enough to give the first child a better chance — about 13 percent higher – of getting into the top college.
The researchers, whose work appeared today in the online issue of Science, analyzed IQ scores of 250,000 men starting mandatory military service in Norway. They found a significant difference in IQ scores in 60,000 pairs of siblings, making it the largest study to confirm that birth order affects intelligence, ending nearly a century of debate, said lead author Petter Kristensen, professor of epidemiology at the University of Oslo.
Even though the researchers looked only at men, Kristensen said previous studies say women are similarly affected by their birth rank in the family.
Maybe. Certainly if you’re the oldest in your family, this is confirmation of what you always knew, but if you’re not, it’s faulty research.
When I was in the Peace Corps in Liberia, West Africa in 1968, I was a Jean Piaget fan. In one of my classes crowded with elementary students sitting closely together, squeezed into the small classroom with arms and legs wrapped around each other, all listening intently to my lessons, I would perform little Piaget experiments to see whether Piaget’s Switzerland results applied in Palala. One that I remember involved an understanding of volume in which water from a squat vessel is poured into a tall thin vessel. When I asked my students which had more water, the squat or tall vessel, they knew that both contained the same.
“Duh,” these little kids seemed to say. “You just poured the same water from one into the other. Of course they’re the same.”
According to Piaget, at their age they shouldn’t have understood this conservation principle that older children, at least Swiss children at the time, had trouble with. My students were different from Piaget’s, it seemed, and while I continued to be interested in Piaget’s theories, I didn’t give them as much weight: Certainly a child’s understanding of the world changes as he develops, but that change is a complex mix of nature and nurture.
So perhaps younger siblings can have hope if they’re not Norwegian, which reminds me of the marvelous Norwegian movie Elling, in which IQ plays a complex, comical role.
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06.20.07
Posted in Education
at 5:09 pm
by Dave Badtke
Okay, this is a shocking story — NOT! — today in the San Francisco Chronicle:
About 500,000 teachers across the country give up on the profession every year — a persistent churn and burn that costs the public schools an estimated $7.3 billion annually, according to a national report released today.
“Schools are able to hire enough teachers, but they just can’t keep them in the classroom,” said Tom Carroll, president of the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future, which conducted the study.
In San Francisco, the district spends an estimated $12 million to recruit, hire and train new teachers each year to replace those who’ve left, the researchers found.
The annual exodus is “draining resources, diminishing teaching quality, and undermining our ability to close the student achievement gap,” according to the report.
To stem the flow, districts must first determine the annual turnover rate and then focus on hiring well-prepared teachers who have a clear understanding of content, curriculum and how to manage a classroom, Carroll said.
What if they — who’s this “they,” anyway? — just gave this $7.3 billion to teachers as extra pay?
Nowhere in this article is there a mention of pay, which is awful, especially since we all know the profound impact teachers had on each one of us, and physical and social working conditions, which are deplorable in too many schools.
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Posted in Language
at 4:51 pm
by Dave Badtke
This from Gene Expression, a game that helps with hiragana, katakana and kanji:
It is called Slime Forest. The slimes attack and yell characters at you to which you must respond appropriately. Save the princess!
While I realize that I’ll never learn to read and speak Japanese if I don’t study, which I’m not tending to do even though both boys and their partners live in Tokyo, I’m thinking that a game like this might help me. On the other hand, a language drug injected directly into my brain would save a lot of time — like years.
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06.14.07
Posted in Society
at 10:56 am
by Dave Badtke
The following article appeared today, June 14, in the Benicia Herald. I’ve reprinted it here because I agree with the sentiments expressed by Les and also because I regret that since the Benicia Herald has no online presence, this article will be recycled by tomorrow — maybe most already have recycled it — only to be found with difficulty by going to the Benicia Library.
My Two Cents
By Les Mahler
The ongoing immigration debate has hit a nerve with me. And although I could say it’s because I am an immigrant, it’s more about the other side of this issue: how we treat people, be they immigrants, guest workers or whatever else.
While I did emigrate from the Netherlands (I was born in Indonesia but we were forced out during the Sukarno dictatorship simply because my father fought for he Dutch army during WWII), I became a United States citizen in 1962 through my parents. That should quiet down any questions about my status or worries that I believe in a socialist form of government simply because I lived under one in earlier years.
What really bothers me about the immigration issue is how the other side in this whole debate is missing — the treatment of these so-called guest workers. They pick the strawberries, the beans, the spinach and almost every other produce that grows in the Central Valley. And let’s be honest, without them, we wouldn’t have that produce on our dinner tables, would we? After all, how many of us would really work under the harsh conditions that these men, women and children work under? Be honest. After all, we’re accustomed to soft chairs, air conditioning, indoor plumbing, eight hour days, water cooler breaks and other things we simply take for granted nowadays. And after work, we usually go home, sit on a sofa, have dinner at the table and watch TV afterwards. It’s not a bad situation when you stop to think about it.
Now, what do you think are the conditions for most field workers? Don’t know? Well, as a reporter covering San Joaquin County, I got a firsthand glimpse of just what type of conditions field workers have to endure. I was the first reporter on the scene at the Lower Jones Tract flooding of 2004. And while the focus during those months was the loss of crop and agricultural land, we barely saw what those floods had done to the· workers, until one day after the waters subsided.
I was given a private tour of a farm outside Tracy, and I remember walking into a barrack-style building with 45 to 50 bunk beds, all in a row. What amazed and saddened me was how the flood waters had swept up each worker’s belongings, how they had the simplest of items as their possessions and now they were gone.
What angered me most was how conditions in that barrack-style building were so stark: no air conditioning — just a large fan at the front of the building — and a small kitchen at the end of the room, with no restroom facilities, no shower and no living room. They were stacked in there like cattle, brought out to pick our fruits and vegetables and then simply herded back in at the end of the day. They were treated no better than cows; actually, that’s not true.
As an agricultural reporter, I remember going to a dairy fann in San Joaquin County and being told how when it gets hot, cows can gather under a mister or collect under shade. Every six months, a veterinarian would come in to check how the cows were doing, sort of a health checkup.
Perhaps what’s worse is that it isn’t just men who slave away this way, it’s families. During one interview with a mother of two boys who worked the fields with the rest of the family, I asked how old they were. When she told me 15 and 17, I reminded her that county department of education would require that her boys be in school.
With that, she terminated the interview and story. For, as she told me, the boys needed to work in the fields so the family could have a place to live. If they went to school, the family would be homeless.
Now, as the Senate and the president debate immigration reform, let’s bring in the elements of human dignity, treating guest workers, field workers and migrant workers, with dignity and not as second-class slaves.
If we’re going to have migrant farm workers do our backbreaking work for us while we reap the sweat of their hard work, then farmers need to make sure that conditions such as the above are part of the immigration debate. I just can’t see how it would be or could be any other way.
Disclaimer: The thoughts, opinions and whatever else contained in this column are mine and mine alone.
Les Mahler is the Editor for the Benicia Herald.
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06.12.07
Posted in Education
at 11:55 am
by Dave Badtke
While I’m not surprised that Angelica Chang’s kindergarten students have learned to speak, read and write some Mandarin, it’s encouraging that some schools understand the importance of language immersion.
Across the hall from Chang’s classroom on Monday, Principal Chris Rosenberg declared the inaugural year of San Francisco Unified’s first Mandarin immersion program — which includes Chang’s and one other kindergarten classroom taught by Cindy Lai — a success.
All 26 kindergartners from both classes are expected to continue with the immersion program in first grade, along with seven new students who will likely have some catching up to do.
“It was a fantastic year,” Rosenberg said. “Did the kids learn Mandarin while mastering the grade-level standards? Yes. It was a big success, a great success.”
Thirty-four students are signed up for the program’s next kindergarten classes in the fall.
The program is expected to grow by one grade each year through the fifth grade.
I wonder at times if replacing our K-3 reading, writing and arithmetic curriculum with languages — English, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, etc. — music, storytelling, and hands-on geometric construction projects that include surveying might not better prepare our children to succeed in school. Such an approach would build skills that become increasingly difficult to master, especially languages and music, as students age.
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Posted in Business, Technology
at 8:56 am
by Dave Badtke
Because PCs have always been less expensive than Macs, because businesses favor PCs over Macs, because over the years I’ve bought software for PCs that would cost a lot to buy again for Macs, because I long ago worked for GE when it decided to put a rather worthless Windows PC on everyone’s desk — we would turn it on, look at the crude Windows, sniff it as though it might be something dead that we should bury in the grass beyond the parking lot, and go back to working on our Unix-based Sun workstations — because of all of these reasons and more that I’ve forgotten, I long ago began purchasing PCs so that my home and work computers would be compatible.
Years later here I sit writing my blog on a PC, but with a change today since Steve Jobs yesterday announced that Apple’s Safari browser was available for PCs. Analysts were underwhelmed. They were looking for a big announcement, but all they got was a browser. Down the stock price went.
But wait — could there be something more here, I wonder, as I type away in a window in this new browser? For years I’ve been saddled with a marginal operating system that always manages to crash at the wrong time or that makes networking harder than it should be or that just pisses me off because the software we were using on Sun workstations was so much better, and that was many years ago. Why do I need all this Microsoft-compatible hardware and software if I can now wirelessly connect to the Internet?
I blog away. I upload pictures. I get on my browser, in this case Safari with its very classy interface with tabs, which took me a couple moments to find, and I write this on my website server, not really caring that I’m running Windows. Clearly this is the future as network bandwidths increase and more and more applications adopt a browser approach that is independent of the computer’s operating system. Sure Adobe doesn’t do it yet with their Creative Suites, but they will. And then I’ll be able to create pages using Adobe applications running on my website server.
Won’t it be grand when we can carry around a paper-thin device with a battery that lasts forever that we can use to get all our computing and networking and communications done without complaining about Microsoft? Sure I may be an old guy. Sure I may be dead when it happens. But I can look forward to the future anyway. Hope springs eternal, don’t you know.
But maybe we’re not there yet. In trying to change my WordPress options using Safari, the browser crashed. Apple made it easy for me to send an error report and Safari is still in Beta, so I’ll have to wait and see. In the meantime, checking back from time to time to see how Safari’s doing, I’ll continue to use Mozilla’s Firefox browser, a rebel living on the edge. Bah, humbug Microsoft.
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06.10.07
Posted in Sailing, Family
at 5:31 pm
by Dave Badtke
Feeling more confident than we probably should have, since Dulcinea, our Corsair 750, sometimes seems more like a sports car than a sailboat, we decided to sail Saturday to San Francisco and beyond. Since we’ve been able to pick Bay Area spots in the past and get there and back without difficulty, why should yesterday have been any different from any other day if the tides were going our way? That’s simple: the winds.
After tacking way out on San Pablo Bay near the entrance to the Petaluma channel, hoping the winds would become westerly as they usually do — I was imagining a beam reach at 15+ knots straight south to San Francisco — we found ourselves instead beating against a strong southerly as we headed toward the Richmond Bridge. And that got tiring, so we changed our minds and headed for San Rafael.
The tide was ebbing and almost at slack when we entered the long, narrow channel where the
depth at times was no more than 3.5 feet, which isn’t a problem for us if we remember to pull up the center board and rudder. We motored back into the channel for a couple miles and tied up at the Seafood Peddlers restaurant, where the food was quite good, and it’s a terrific location.
Sailing back with our asymmetrical spinnaker set, I made a movie. We left Glen Cove at 11:40 and were back by about 6:40, with a couple hours for lunch, a total of about 2 1/2 hours in each direction, which is proving to be fairly standard if the winds are reasonable. The rumb line distance is about 18 miles, which we took on the return trip, but going out we sailed more like 22 miles, so our average speed was about 7 knots, which seems about right since we sat for awhile with no wind leaving San Rafael. Regardless, with Dulcinea if there’s any wind at all, we seem to be sailing at 5+ knots, and that’s a lot of fun.
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06.08.07
Posted in Column Ideas, Science
at 10:09 am
by Dave Badtke
The Pirahã (pronounced pee-da-HAN) of northwestern Brazil speak a language that is challenging linguistic theories. John Colapinto in the April 16 issue of The New Yorker writes that linguist Dan Everett, one of the first to learn the difficult Pirahã language, has concluded that Pirahã seems to lack some of the irreducible language elements that linguists have come to expect. In “Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in Pirahã,” Everett notes the “extreme simplicity of the tribe’s living conditions and culture,” which are reflected in their language:
The Pirahã, Everett wrote, have no numbers, no fixed color terms, no perfect tense, no deep memory, no tradition of art or drawing, and no words for ‘all,’ ‘each,’ ‘every,’ ‘most,’ or ‘few’ — terms of quantification believed by some linguists to be among the common building blocks of human cognition. [For a discussion of their number concepts, see the NPR Talk of the Nation program.] Everett’s most explosive claim, however, was that Pirahã displays no evidence of recursion, a linguistic operation that consists of inserting one phrase inside another of the same type, as when a speaker combines discrete thoughts (”the man is walking down the street,” “the man is wearing a top hat”) into a single sentence (”The man who is wearing a top hat is walking down the street”). (Colapinto 120)
The lack of recursion is particularly vexing because, as Colapinto points out, “Noam Chomsky, the influential linguistic theorist, has recently revised his theory of universal grammar, arguing that recursion is the cornerstone of all languages, and is possible because of a uniquely human capability.”
When I first listened to Pirahã speech at a religious site — interestingly, Everett started out as a Christian missionary who became a scientist because of his language abilities and exposure to the Pirahã — I had the impression that there were fewer sounds than one might expect, but I didn’t think that their speech sounded like singing as Everett has suggested. On the other hand, this recording was made for religious purposes, so perhaps the speaker was reading a script.
But then after listening to the excellent NPR piece on Everett, I was more fascinated. In addition to a brief discussion of the linguistic theories and the controversy Everett has stirred up, you hear the Pirahã speaking. Intriguing doesn’t begin to describe the nature of the exchanges. And then Everett demonstrates the flexibility of their language by saying a sentence, whistling it, and finally by humming the sentence. It’s amazing that these three forms convey the same information. And yes, indeed, the language does sound more like singing than speaking.
For more also see Dan Everett’s website at Illinois State.
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06.07.07
Posted in Places, Society
at 3:16 pm
by Dave Badtke
I just remembered to check on the Jackson County vote on library funding. I was sure it was going to pass, and it seems some who actually live there and would have a better sense of local feeling thought it would be a close vote. Unfortunately, it wasn’t as reported by the School Library Journal:
The [Jackson County] system shut its doors in April, throwing most of its 115 employees, including 17 librarians, out of work. Jackson County is believed to be the largest library closure on record. “I thought the actual vote would be a nail-biter, and it wasn’t,” Interim County Library Services Director Ted Stark says of the vote, in which 58.3 percent of voters said “no” to a ballot question asking voters to approve an additional 66 cents-per-$1,000 of their appraised property value. (Link to article)
Facing the reality of people’s reading habits, which are rapidly dwindling, and the disinclination to support local services that are not directly linked to life and limb, i.e., police and firefighters, I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised, but it does hurt Ashland, Oregon, which is one of the 17 Jackson County libraries, since Ashland is a vibrant arts and education community. It’s not clear what Ashland can do. And it could be that the problem is spreading since neighboring Josephine County may be the next to shut its library doors.
While it’s nice not paying sales tax when we go to Oregon, the state is suffering as a result and should implement a sales tax that would help offset some of revenue lost when fed funds for nonexistent logging dried up and that would also mean that on cultural visits we’d leave a little extra behind.
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