Another rant about education

Tomorrow, our school district will have what is called a "Superintendent's Conference Day."  What this means is that students don't have to be here (which generated much rejoicing amongst the student body), and the teachers and support staff will spend the entire day in meetings.  This year, the meetings will revolve around implementing the state standards for education.

This has also been the topic of probably half of the superintendent's conference days I've attended in my 25 year career.

The "state standards" are outlines describing what information and skills students should be able to master in each class and at each grade level.  They're amazingly vague.  For example, one of the high school standards in biology (they changed the name of the subject ten years ago to "Living Environment," but I steadfastly refuse to comply):

• explain the basic biochemical processes in living organisms and their importance in maintaining dynamic equilibrium.

What does this mean?  That a student could be tested on the mechanisms of serotonin synthesis in the synaptic terminals of brain cells?  No, of course not.   That would take actual knowledge.  The test is much more likely to have a question like the following:

Question:  Why do living organisms have basic biochemical processes?
Correct answer:  Because they are important in maintaining dynamic equilibrium.

If this was a multiple choice question, it would be accompanied by obviously ridiculous wrong answers, such as "So they can have an unlimited life span."  Note as well that you don't have to have any specific mastery of content in order to get this question right; in order to finesse this test, all you have to do recognize jargon.  Last year I did not have a single student fail the state exam in biology, and this includes the student who while labeling a diagram of a human body incorrectly indicated that the anus was located on the left arm.

I wish I were making this up.

Increasingly, the standards are becoming vaguer, while simultaneously the notion of "progress" is becoming more data-driven.  We're trying to turn everything into numbers.  Just yesterday, we had the first of seven faculty meetings this year, the thrust of which will be to consider the topic of grading.  This isn't just in our school; statewide, the professional b-b stackers at the State Education Department in Albany are assigning numbers to all of us, and that includes the teachers and school administrators.  Yes, I will receive a grade at the end of the year.  No, I don't particularly give a damn what grade I get, because honestly, it's meaningless.  We go on and on about how "feedback needs to provide information to students about what they did incorrectly, and how to improve" -- and the people at State Ed are going to take my entire year and collapse it into:  "86."  If I get an 84 next year, am I regressing?

More and more, I'm convinced that the upper-level administration in state departments of education, and the federal Department of Education, have no idea what they're doing.  We write new standards, rename courses, come up with new formulas for grading, scoring exams, and scoring teachers, and it hasn't made one grain of difference to how well the actual act of educating children is conducted in classrooms on a day-to-day basis.  Most of us get jaded; we go to the meetings and conference days, write stuff on sheets of butcher paper with brightly colored sharpie markers, discuss the results at our tables, and then go back to school the following day without a single thing being changed -- except that the powers-that-be, most of whom haven't seen the inside of a classroom in twenty years, think that they've actually accomplished something.

So, tomorrow, I'll probably be a good boy and go to all the meetings and try to do what they want me to do.  Just once before I retire, however, I'd like to actually do what I've been wanting to do for years -- to stand up in one of those meetings and ask the presenter, "How, precisely, is this supposed to benefit my students?  I want specifics -- not some airy-fairy 'Refining the standards helps you to frame curriculum development in the context of measurable outcomes.'  And if you can't answer that question, get the hell out of here and stop wasting my time and our school district's money."

Beasts in the east

For any of my readers who happen to live in Russia, you should consider attending the International Yeti Festival that is occurring this week in Tashtagol.

The whole thing is being organized by Igor Burtsev, who runs the "Yeti Institute" at Kemerovo State University.  I didn't know that some universities had departments of yetiology, did you?  Seems like they wouldn't have much to do, given that the object of their study has never left behind any actual evidence other than a few footprints and some fuzzy film footage.  But somehow, Burtsev is being taken seriously enough that investigators from six countries are gathering to share their evidence at the International Centre for Hominology in Tashtagol.  Maybe he garners a little extra credibility because he looks a great deal like Papa Lenin:

Be that as it may, Burtsev is understandably excited, because he claims that his home of Kemerovo is a hotbed of Yeti activity.  He believes that there's a tribe of thirty or so Yetis in the area.  (What do you call a group of Yetis?  A shriek of Yetis?  A lope of Yetis?  A squatch of Yetis?)  They are, Burtsev says, the surviving remnants of the Neanderthals, and are notorious for sneaking onto people's farms and stealing sheep and chickens.

This isn't the only recent attempt to track down the Russian answer to Bigfoot.  A couple of months ago, Russian heavyweight boxer Nikolai Valuyev led a much-publicized expedition into the wilds of central Russia.  After stomping around the place for several days with a camera crew, all they found as evidence were "some broken branches" and "a few enormous footprints."  Valuyev wasn't discouraged by the fact that he didn't find the Yeti, however; he's still sure they're out there.

At this point, perhaps I should show you a photograph of Valuyev.

He may have a somewhat personal reason for wanting to find the Yetis, if you get my drift.  The guy is seven-foot-two, and his nickname is "The Beast from the East."

In any case, the Yeti Conference should prove interesting.  It is, the news release said, the first conference of its kind since 1958, and will result in sharing all sorts of secret documents from the Cold War.  Me, I thought the Soviets had better things to do during the Cold War than amass information on Yetis, but what do I know?  The more time they spent wandering around looking for "enormous footprints," the less time they had to spy on us.

Anyhow, here's another thing that I'd definitely attend, if I could -- along with the ghosthunting classes in England and the workshop where you learn how to be a shapeshifter in Costa Rica.  So much to do, so little time.

The wrath of Pat

Last week, I commented that politics was the only venue where you could make a statement that was demonstrably false, continue to defend it, and not lose your credibility.  It may therefore not be a coincidence that in the job of political commentator, you can make statements that are neither true nor false, but completely insane, and people will keep listening to you.

I'm referring, of course, to Reverend Pat Robertson, who is wildly popular despite being crazy as a bedbug.  And I don't think that people are listening to him for the humor value, either, the way people will sometimes read Ann Coulter just because they can't wait to hear what she's going to blame liberals for next (I have money that eventually she'll find out a way to blame liberals for the Black Death).  With Pat, though, I have a feeling that the people who listen to him mostly agree with what he's saying, which is a scary thing, given that he's said the following:

• The Haitian earthquake was a "blessing from god" because the Haitians had sworn a pact with the devil during the French Revolution.
• Be careful about studying martial arts, because in some martial arts traditions the practitioners "inhale demon spirits" prior to working out.
• Hurricane Katrina was sent by god to "teach a lesson to the American people" because they support laws that allow abortion.
• Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon suffered a massive stroke because god was punishing him for his negotiating with the Palestinians.
• We should nuke the US Department of State and send in covert operatives to assassinate Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez.

So you have to wonder why we would expect anything he says to make sense, but only after spending a lot more time wondering why anyone listens to someone who seems to have a giant wad of Laffy Taffy where most of us have a brain.

Be that as it may, Pat's latest pronouncements are still making news, and this time he's turned his Roving Rant Machine onto the subject of Halloween.  Halloween is often a sticky subject with evangelicals, who don't like its occult origins.  You'd think, however, that sooner or later they'd relax about it, now that it's turned into little more than a day for kids to wear plastic Buzz Lightyear masks with eyeholes that don't line up, wander around in the dark being followed by parents who would really much rather be home watching television, and collect enough candy to meet the diabetes needs of the nation for another ten years.  All pretty innocent, no?

No.  Christians shouldn't participate in Halloween, Pat says, because "Halloween is Satan's night.  It's the night for the devil."  He goes on to say that, "we (Christians) don't believe in hauntings, we don't believe in ghosts, we don't believe in all that stuff," and then in the same breath follows it up with, "(Halloween) is skeletons, it's like, it's the dead rising."

So, let me get this straight; you don't believe in ghosts, but you do believe in the dead rising?

Of course, it's not the first time that a prominent evangelical has spoken vehemently against Halloween.  Two years ago, Kimberley Daniels of the Christian Broadcasting Network implied that not only was Satan abroad on Halloween, even the candy wasn't safe:

During Halloween, time-released curses are always loosed.  A time-released curse is a period that has been set aside to release demonic activity and to ensnare souls in great measure ... During this period demons are assigned against those who participate in the rituals and festivities.  These demons are automatically drawn to the fetishes that open doors for them to come into the lives of human beings.  For example, most of the candy sold during this season has been dedicated and prayed over by witches.  I do not buy candy during the Halloween season.  Curses are sent through the tricks and treats of the innocent whether they get it by going door to door or by purchasing it from the local grocery store.  The demons cannot tell the difference.

Given the volume of candy sold during October, I wonder how the candy manufacturers manage to curse it all. They must employ thousands of witches, working round the clock, saying satanic prayers like mad over moving conveyor belts. I guess the witches have to pray quickly, or they'll back up the whole process, and end up flinging un-cursed candy about in the manner of Lucille Ball.

In any case, I find it baffling that people listen to these people, and downright astonishing that anyone believes it.  On the other hand, is it really so inconsistent with what the bible actually says?  One thing you have to say for people like Robertson and Daniels: they walk the talk.  The bible is full of stories of people, and sometimes entire cities, who did something naughty in god's eyes and got the crap smitten out of them.  God had no problem with the righteous killing the unrighteous, including unrighteous infants ("Happy the man who takes your babies and smashes them against a rock!" [Psalm 137:9])  Natural disasters were always attributed to "god's will."  Demons and evil spirits were everywhere.

So, honestly, once you decide that the bible is literally true, it's a reasonable result that you'll believe all of this sort of stuff.  Reverend Pat is just the furthest reaches of the logical chain that begins with the assumption, "the bible is god's revealed truth."  It is perhaps the rest of the Christians that have some 'splainin' to do.

A rip in Canadian space-time

I know it's kind of ridiculous to make generalizations about a whole country, but I'd always had this feeling that Canadians were, on the whole, pretty sensible folks.  Oh, you had your odd crank like Dennis Markuze ("Mabus"), sending out 458 gazillion emails per week to anyone who publicly identified him/herself as a skeptic, but that was the exception.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I ran across the publication The Canadian.  From the name, you'd expect the main stories to revolve around hockey, how to avoid grizzly bears, and other essentials of Canadian life.  Instead, I find therein headlines such as the following:

"Global Economy and Human Evolution Don't Go Together"
"Scientists Find Extraterrestrial Genes in DNA"
"9/11 Hijackers Miraculously Brought Back to Life, Says Japanese Democratic Party"
"The Romantic Striptease!"

So, I guess what this turns out to be is sort of a Canadian version of The Weekly World News. 

I'd like to look at one article from The Canadian more closely, and no, don't get your hopes up, it's not going to be "The Romantic Striptease!"  For one thing, this is a PG-13 rated blog.  For another, between the blackflies and mosquitoes and the fact that in most parts of Canada is seldom gets over 50 degrees, I would think that a Canadian version of a romantic striptease would be fast, involve large quantities of insect repellent, and end with both parties huddled under a quilt shivering.

The one I want to look at is, "Extraterrestrial War of the 1930s Altered Human Consciousness Of Itself Into A Destructive Timeline."  (You can read the whole article here.)  I didn't know about any extraterrestrial war in the 1930s, did you?  There certainly doesn't seem to be much about it in the history books.  That's to be expected, says Alex Collier, the originator of this idea; the Great War of the 1930s resulted in our being pushed into some kind of alternate dimension, and the aliens wiped our memory of the event, so now our history is proceeding in a way that it was never intended to do.  It's kind of like the episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation wherein the Starship Enterprise enters a rip in the space-time continuum.  Space-time seems to have an awful lot of these rips, given the fact that the Starship Enterprise ran smack into one every couple of weeks or so.  Each time, though, they acted as if it was a great big surprise, as if this had never ever happened before, and it always seemed to take Geordi LaForge until the third commercial break to figure it out despite the fact ordinary non-Starfleet members like myself had it figured out in the first five minutes.  Anyway, in this particular episode, they ended up in a universe where the Klingons and the Federation had never become allies, and they were in a terrible war, blowing each other up right and left.  It turned out that the only way to make it all better was if Tasha Yar died again, an event that happened only slightly less often than running into rips in the space-time continuum.

But I digress.

Anyhow, Collier is convinced that the aliens who perpetrated this atrocity need to be exposed, so he's written a book called Defending Sacred Ground which describes how most of what we're told about aliens is disinformation spread by the aliens themselves.  Also, by the bye, he believes that both creationism and evolution are alien propaganda.  He knows all this, he says, because he was contacted by "Ethical Extraterrestrials" from the Andromeda Galaxy, and they want us to show up the bad aliens for being the villains they are, so they told Collier how to tell the alien propaganda from the truth.  If we can just get enough people to understand what's happened, he says, it will allow us to get back into our proper time line without even having to kill Tasha Yar.  We can do this,  he says, because we're on the "Eleventh Density" (whatever the hell that means), and we are capable of "a very large area of spiritual evolvement."

All of which makes perfect sense, as long as you've spent the last half-hour doing sit-ups underneath parked cars.

The whole thing leaves me feeling a little dazed, and wondering if I might not have been better off analyzing "The Romantic Striptease!" after all.

In any case, I guess it's just as well to find out that Canada has its share of wingnuts.  I was all too aware of our American assortment, and it really was a little ridiculous of me to think that the USA had cornered the market.  I'm quite sure, however, that just like here in the States, the majority of Canadian citizens are reasonably smart, rational, and sensible people, so I won't judge you based on people like Collier and Markuze if you'll promise not to judge us based on people like Michele Bachmann and Alex Jones.

Deal?

Death cauldrons and aerial dogfights

There are certain pieces of terrain that are just peculiar.  We tend to give them evocative names, because they are evocative; and this often leads people to attribute their formation to some seriously crazy causes.

Take the Mima Mounds, in Thurston County, Washington.

They're a little creepy-looking, no?  The mounds average about twenty to thirty feet across, and are roughly circular -- and there are hundreds of them.  It's a seriously atmospheric place, conducive to all sorts of woo-woo explanations -- some people believe that the Mima Prairie, where the mounds are located, is haunted, presumably by ghosts who are obsessive-compulsive landscapers.

There are other features which seem too regular to be natural -- take the glacial feature called a cirque, which takes the form of an often perfectly-circular lake:

Cirques form because they are at the origins of glaciers, so experience pressure and consequent erosive forces radiating out from a central point - if the contour of the land will allow it, it results in a nearly perfectly circular depression.

Arches, pinnacles, balancing rocks, channeled scablands... natural forces can result in some amazingly cool, and sometimes bafflingly symmetrical, structures.  No need to conjure up any kind of woo-woo explanation.

Of course, this doesn't mean that humans can't be involved, too.  When I was in Iceland, I visited a place called "Viti."  Viti is a beautiful, circular blue lake, which would have been peaceful had it not been for the jet-engine roar of a steam vent nearby.  The vent was surrounded by a high fence, and had a sign on it, in various languages, which said (as near as I can recall the wording):

Get the hell away from this vent, you stupid tourist.  This vent produces superheated steam, and if for some reason the machinery controlling its release were to fail, you would be cooked by a jet of steam before you could even turn to your wife and say, "Hey, Blanche, come take a picture of me next to this sign!"

The reason for all the caution was, I discovered, because the machinery had failed, about ten years before we went there, and the resulting explosion had thrown a piece of the rigging with such force that it landed a kilometer away.  Apparently the crater left behind by the explosion of the vent machinery was a circular hole in the ground, out of which came water vapor at about 3,000 C.  At that point, Icelandic geologists decided to leave well enough alone, and simply put a diverter over the hole, so that the steam is vented high enough in the air that it won't cook the tourists.

I bring all this up because of a recent article (read the whole thing here) about the Siberian "death cauldrons."  Speaking of evocative names.  It turns out that there are circular depressions in the ground in many places in Siberia, and legends about those places being "evil," and various stories about people going there and dying horrible deaths.  There is talk of metal debris and mysterious underground bunkers.

What, pray tell, is the cause of all of this mayhem?  We have the following proposals:

1)  It was an area used for nuclear testing during the Soviet era.

2)  It is the pock-marked battlefield left behind when two hostile alien species had an aerial battle in spaceships.

Well.  I know it's hard for me to decide, given the fact that both theories are both pretty darned persuasive.  The proponents of the alien theory have going for them that the natives of the area claim that they've seen powerful, fire-wielding beings coming from the sky for centuries, and as I was mentioning to Thor just yesterday, you know how accurate the such myths and legends tend to be.  The other thing they point out is that it has to be aliens, because it was right next door in the province of Krasnoyarsk Krai that they had the Tunguska Event, where an alien spacecraft blew up in 1908 and flattened trees radially for miles around.

Well, okay, technically it's only "right next door" if by that phrase you mean "1,500 km away," and almost everyone who's studied the Tunguska Event thinks that it was a small fragment of a comet that hit the Earth.  But still!  Alien spacecraft!  Aerial dogfights!  Crash landings, leaving circular depressions in the ground, and scattered radioactive debris that poisons the landscape and anyone foolish enough to visit!  C'mon, don't you think so?  Don't you?

Okay, maybe not.  But you have to admit that as an explanation, it does have more panache than "the Soviets blew up some nuclear bombs there, and never cleaned up their mess or even admitted that they'd done it."

If looks could kill

New from the Why Didn't I Think Of That First department, we have a guy who performs psychic healing just by looking at people.

Here I thought you had to at least do something to affect a woo-woo cure -- swing some crystals around, say a chant or two, give your patient a homeopathic pill that doesn't contain any medicine -- at least something. 

Enter the Croat healer known only as "Braco."  Braco, now touring the United States, gets paid big bucks to sit on a stage for a half hour and stare at the audience.  He doesn't say a word -- just stares, then gets up and leaves, and goes backstage to collect his paycheck.  His gaze is said to have "healing powers."  "People aren't even sure what they're feeling," devotee Sahaja Coventry told a reporter at Braco's latest appearance, at the Renaissance Hotel in Cleveland.  "But it is a sweetness, it is a loving energy and some people get physical healing, some just feel a sense of peace."

If I had to sit there for a half hour in a dimly-lit room in total silence for a half-hour, I bet I'd feel a sense of peace, too -- I'd probably fall asleep.  But of course, that's not what Coventry et al. are talking about.  Neither do they think they're being hypnotized, which is another possibility.  They really think that Braco is doing something with his eyes, somehow affecting "energy levels" in the room.  Braco, of course, does everything he can to beef up this claim; children and pregnant women are not allowed to attend, because the "energies could be too strong," and he does not let his face be broadcast on television for more than seven-second clips, presumably to prevent some sort of electronically-transmitted overdose of Braco Stare.

My objections, of course, are the usual ones.  First, show me the mechanism.  If you think this guy's gaze can cure your chronic headaches, show me how that could work in such a way that it eliminates the possibility of auto-suggestion.  Another of his followers who attended the session at Cleveland hinted at the problem when she said, "You have to have an open mind and an open heart, more or less to get this feeling."  Why on earth should this be so?  If the guy is doing something real, how could my attitude make any difference?  You'd think it'd be even more impressive if Braco cured someone who thought he was a fraud.

Second, of course, there's the fact that the whole thing flies in the face of how vision actually works; because when you see, it's not because something's going out from your eyes, it's because something's going into your eyes (namely, light reflected from the object you're looking at).  Vision is receptive, not productive.  The ancients didn't get this, and we see this in some relic expressions like to "throw a glance" at someone, and in holdover beliefs such as the "evil eye."  Certainly, the eyes and face can communicate information; a lot of work has been done on the ease with which the human brain can pick up on subtle "microexpressions," and how that effects social interaction.  But that's not what Braco's followers think is happening, here -- they really think that some "force" is leaving his body through his eyes, and traveling to you, and changing your mental and/or physical condition.  To which I say: I seriously doubt it.

In any case, if you'd like to see him (or, actually, to have him see you), you can check out his tour schedule at Braco.net.  Be warned, however -- on his website there's a giant photograph of him, and it will look out of the monitor at you in a highly scary fashion.  I suggest putting on eye protection before clicking the link, and whatever you do, don't leave it staring at you for more than seven seconds!  Don't say I didn't warn you.

Honestly, though, like I said initially, I kind of wish I'd thought of it first.  It seems an easier way to make a living than to do what I do, which is to stand in front of bunches of high school students talking all day long.  If I could make a living just by staring at people from a stage for a half-hour every few nights, I'd could ditch all the lesson plans and paper grading and so on, and have a great deal more free time than I currently have.  But Braco seems to have cornered the Psychic Stare market, so I'll have to come up with a different angle.  Hey, I know!  Maybe you could just send me a check for a hundred dollars, and I'll stare lovingly at your signature for five minutes.  It will communicate healing energy through the psychic link established through your signature.  You'll feel better immediately.  Trust me.

Witches, vampires, and irrationality

My mom, although she was generous to a fault with her friends and family, was very suspicious of strangers.  I blame this in part on the fact that during the last ten years of her life, she watched the show Cops every night.  If you expose yourself, even willingly, to a continual parade of thieves, arsonists, murderers, and other no-goods, you're bound to come away with the view that the world is a pretty shady place, and most of humanity unscrupulous at best and dangerous at worst.

It is perhaps an occupational hazard of writing a blog such as this one that I often find myself wondering if humans are honestly capable of any shred of rationality.  I realize that, like my mom, I'm deliberately opening myself to a skewed viewpoint -- every day I seek out examples of weird beliefs and bizarre behavior, so I shouldn't be surprised that I come away with the jaundiced attitude that my fellow humans are, by and large, a bunch of wingnuts.  Still, some of the stories I ran into this morning leave me shaking my head and wondering how natural selection hasn't replaced us with a more sensible, intelligent dominant species.  I think that dolphins, for example, might well make better Lords of the Earth, given some of our behavior.

For example, we have a murder case in Florida, in which 18-year-old Stephanie Pistey is accused of killing 16-year-old Jacob Hendershot.  All of which would be tragic but not relevant to today's topic, except that Pistey maintains that she killed Hendershot because she's "a vampire-werewolf hybrid."  According to the reports, Pistey "talked calmly and rationally" about her beliefs, which included the fact that "bloodlust is just part of who we are."

Of course, I'm sure that when Pistey comes to trial, her defense will try to prove that she's mentally unbalanced.  Which is clearly a true statement, but then, how mentally unbalanced do you have to be before you're honestly not responsible for your actions?  It's hard to believe that anyone who had not completely lost touch with reality (and there's apparently no evidence that Pistey is schizophrenic) would be so convinced that she was part vampire, part werewolf that she would kill someone.  But that's evidently exactly what happened here.  Clearly Pistey believes that vampires and werewolves are real, and it's to be assumed that she didn't come by that belief on her own.

Just yesterday, we had news that a couple in Oregon were found guilty two days ago of second-degree manslaughter for allowing their premature newborn to die.  The couple believed that praying for the child, and anointing him with "blessed oil," would cause god to save his life -- teachings promoted by their church, the Followers of Christ Church in Oregon City.  Amazingly, the judge agreed to a "religious exemption" -- meaning that the couple will likely spend less than 18 months in jail for the offense.  One has to wonder what other homicidal lunacy might become excusable as long as it's based on religious grounds.

Speaking of which, we have the cheery story that our allies in Saudi Arabia have beheaded a Sudanese man for witchcraft.  The man, Abdul Hamid bin Hussein Mostafa al-Fakki, was arrested in 2005 for "casting a spell to reconcile his divorced parents," and found guilty of sorcery, which is a capital offense in Islamic religious law.  He was executed by beheading last week.  And lest we think that such medieval beliefs are limited to the Middle East, we have a story from Uganda that four people were banished from their village for witchcraft, and a businessman in Indonesia is currently awaiting trial for using "dark magic" to harm his competitors in the marketplace.  Apparently, the fact that there's no such thing as Black Magic doesn't mean that you can't be convicted of it in a court of law.

I think I'll end with a story about an archaeological dig in Piombino, Italy.  Archaeologists searching for the tomb of St. Cerbonius, alleged to be in the vicinity, came upon the bones of a woman, who was between 25 and 30 years old at her death, which occurred in about 1200 C.E.  What caught the attention of the researchers was the fashion in which she was buried -- she had several nails driven into her jawbone, and there were more nails struck into the ground near her body.  (The cause of death is as yet undetermined, and it's to be hoped the nails were hammered into her after she'd died -- but that's not certain, unfortunately.)  The archaeologists stated that according to writings from the time, this was the way the bodies of witches, warlocks, and vampires were treated -- the nails were intended to keep them from coming back from the dead and harming the living.

How far we've come in 800 years.