kylecassidy

Seattle workshop underway! Gabriel and Kai photographing Georgia. Students completely rocking. More on Twitter most likely if you're curious about how it's going. @finallykyle

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pharyngula

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/scienceblogs/pharyngula/~3/94WZ5y4TiGw/the_university_of_minnesota_ha.php

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/11/the_university_of_minnesota_ha.php

Katherine Kersten is Minnesota's own version of Glenn Beck. She's a 'columnist' (literally true, since she is given a regular column to fill with right-wing nonsense) for the Star Tribune, and is a regular embarrassment. She recently aimed her smear-gun at the University of Minnesota, in a deranged tirade that has been picked up by Wing Nut Daily and Hot Air (read the comments at that site for a glimpse of how insane the right wing has become).

What made her so angry? The UM has a program in the college of education called the Teacher Education Redesign Initiative, or TERI. It's a reasonably routine effort; the college is reevaluating their program, trying to set up appropriate priorities for teacher education, and is churning out documents as various groups wrestle with decisions about what's important in their programs. Like I say, it's routine — I've had to read lots of this kind of thing as part of the general output of a university bureaucracy — and it's also a good thing, that university divisions exhibit at least a little introspection and flexibility.

Kersten does not think this is a good thing. She has her own strange view of what the effort is all about.

In a report compiled last summer, the Race, Culture, Class and Gender Task Group at the U's College of Education and Human Development recommended that aspiring teachers there must repudiate the notion of "the American Dream" in order to obtain the recommendation for licensure required by the Minnesota Board of Teaching. Instead, teacher candidates must embrace -- and be prepared to teach our state's kids -- the task force's own vision of America as an oppressive hellhole: racist, sexist and homophobic.

Except…the report says nothing of the kind. You can read it yourself, if you want, although you probably don't — it's written in lumbering, repetitive, earnest Academese, which is a dialect of Bureaucratese, and it isn't pretty. I get this stuff in my mailbox and it makes me want to claw my eyes out, so it took some masochistic discipline to dig into it voluntarily, but Kersten misrepresents the thing from top to bottom.

There is a grain of truth to what she says: the report does say that we need more emphasis on recognizing and appreciating diversity, and that we need more equitable representation of American culture in the teacher workforce. It does not say that America is an "oppressive hellhole"; that's her own weird interpretation. She should have looked deeper. Doesn't the fact that we're training teachers at all imply that America must be a pit of ignorance and stupidity that needs correcting?

She's basically taking the blinkered and customary wingnut position that any discussion of how we can improve the country implies that we are currently in a less than sublime state of perfection, which makes any constructive suggestion an unpatriotic act of treason.

This has set the wingnuts on fire. They are complaining bitterly about the goals of the UM college of education.

In an October 28, 2009, proposal to the Minnesota-based Bush Foundation, the college promises that it will revise its curriculum toward the "development of cultural competence." The college's full articulation of this vague concept at present is just what the Race, Culture, Class, and Gender Task Group has determined it to be.

Not only that, however, the college in its proposal promises to start screening its applicants to make sure they have the proper "commitments" and "dispositions":

Develop admission procedures to assess professional commitments.

We recognize that both academic preparation and particular dispositions or professional commitments are needed for effective teaching. [Emphasis in original.]

The college promises that it will begin using "predictive criteria" to make sure that future teachers will be able to develop an acceptable level of "cultural competence"-apparently, those who do not pass the political litmus test and seem too set in their beliefs will never get admitted. This is far worse than what Columbia Teachers College does with its own "dispositions" requirement, and far in excess of what the National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) has ever mandated.

Never trust a kook to quote anything. When you see one line extracted from a document, and then spun out into a fable of planned oppression of a political point of view, you know there's got to be something more that they're leaving out. In fact, in this case you might be wondering what political views this 'litmus test' is intended to exclude…like, no Republicans will ever be allowed to teach again?

Nope. Here's what they mean by 'dispositions and commitments'.

Develop admission procedures to assess professional commitments.

We recognize that both academic preparation and particular dispositions or professional commitments are needed for effective teaching. Our school-based partners have told us that they would like to hire beginning teachers who demonstrate the commitment to focus relentlessly on student learning and take responsibility for the learning of all students without seeking excuses in the community, family, and culture of the students. They want teachers who can communicate and collaborate with each other and with the families and communities of their students. In response to our school partners, we will develop admission procedures that identify candidates with the potential to demonstrate these commitments as teachers.

Note the part I put in boldface. That's what has Kersten incensed, and that is fueling the fear of right-wing reactionaries. They're saying they want teachers who want to teach, and who do not sit around blaming the failure of students on their race or ethnicity. That's it. It isn't a political litmus test at all — it's saying that bigots who won't try to teach all of their students equally do not make good teachers.

That's the sentiment that Kersten, Hot Air, and the Wing Nut Daily find horribly objectionable.

Fundamentally, it's yet another admission that that (R) after politician's name has become shorthand for (Racist). Conservative politics has become so tainted with lunatic anti-immigrant, anti-diversity, anti-human policies that a college can't even say that tolerance and encouragement of the non-white portion of our populations is a good goal to work towards without being accused of being unpatriotic.

It's not surprising. These are the same people who think Lou Dobbs would make a good president, and who dream of a Beck/Palin candidacy in 2012.

cuteoverload

http://cuteoverload.com/2009/11/28/im-packin-my-things-and-you-cant-stop-me/

http://cuteoverload.com/?p=35705

I may have short-sheeted your bed, Meg.

Posted in Uncategorized

getrichslowly

http://www.getrichslowly.org/blog/2009/11/28/dont-just-thankact/

http://www.getrichslowly.org/blog/?p=7547

This article is by staff writer Adam Baker. Baker has recently come to realize that there will always be an excuse not to give if you look for one.

As the holiday season approaches each year, we’re reminded to reflect on those things we’re most thankful for.

Some of these remain consistent from year to year. Occasionally, a dramatic life experience — either positive or negative — will stir things up, adding new items to the list.

While this sort of reflection is useful, it has a bit of a downside. We can get stuck in a rut by making this only a mental game. We wipe our hands and pat ourselves on the back for taking the time to recount our yearly list of appreciation.

I’ve been guilty of this many times in the past. This year, though, I’ve been trying to brainstorm ways take the next step, turning gratitude into action.

You see, this is the first year my wife and I have celebrated Thanksgiving away from our families. In fact, we’re currently in New Zealand where the holiday, of course, isn’t celebrated or recognized. Honestly, I didn’t anticipate it would make a difference, but it’s actually caused even more self-reflection than usual this year.

As a result, I’ve challenged myself to create a tangible list of ways I can take my own thankfulness mindset and put it into action. The process worked well enough for me that I’d like to share it with you:

1. Create a written list of the top 3-5 things you’re thankful for. Be as specific as possible. Rather than writing “family”, try to be more detailed. What about your family are you thankful for? Maybe you’re just thankful to still have employment after a series of layoffs. Maybe you’ve gained a tangible skill this year that’s enabled you to grow. Try to be specific (this helps the next part).
2. For each item on the list, think of a tangible way you can pass it on. We’re not talking about changing the world, but just brainstorming small ways you can affect just one other person. If you’ve recently rented your first apartment, maybe you can donate time to a homeless shelter. If you’ve recently had a family member recover from a prolonged illness, maybe you could support a local program that does hospital visits. Obviously, your examples will reflect the issues that hit closest to home this year.
3. Encourage family and friends to do the same. This is what I’m doing right now — simply sharing something that worked well for me. Just the small act of committing our thoughts to paper and brainstorming ways to make them tangible can help us make more of this holiday season for others. If it helps you, spread the idea even further!

No, it’s not complex. There’s no technology involved. It’s just a simple, straightforward reminder that the holiday season isn’t just about being thankful — it’s about finding ways we can spread that goodwill to others!

I hope everyone had fun-filled and fantastic Thanksgiving weekend!

---
Related Articles at Get Rich Slowly:

• Fix Your Broken Appliance, Don’t Replace It
• Three Reasons Most Budgets Don’t Work (and How To Fix Them)
• Don’t Buy Stuff You Cannot Afford
• Don’t Just Save Your Quarters — Save Your Dollars, Too!
• What Makes a Resumé Scream “Don’t Hire Me!”

pharyngula

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/scienceblogs/pharyngula/~3/TSypaYZjbVo/hitlers_library.php

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/11/hitlers_library.php

This is a fascinating article about Hitler's library: he was an avid collector and reader, and part of his collection still exists, and you can even stroll down to the Library of Congress and ask to browse through the stockpile. The bulk of the books are about military strategy and tactics, and a subset are Hitler's personal favorite light reading, cowboy stories. But there are also many religious texts that give insight into the way his mind worked.

Experts since then have been of two minds on the matter of Hitler's spiritual beliefs. Ian Kershaw argues that Hitler consciously constructed an image of himself as a messianic figure, and eventually came to believe the very myth he had helped to fashion. "The more he succumbed to the allure of his own Führer cult and came to believe in his own myth, the more his judgment became impaired by faith in his own infallibility," Kershaw writes in The Hitler Myth (1987). But believing in a messianic myth is not the same as believing in God. When I asked Kershaw in 2001 whether he thought Hitler actually believed in divine providence, he dismissed the notion. "I don't think that he had any real belief in a deity of any sort, only in himself as a 'man of destiny' who would bring about Germany's 'salvation,'" he declared. Gerhard Weinberg, who helped sort through the Hitler Library back in the 1950s, likewise dismisses the notion of Hitler as a religious believer, insisting that he was driven by the twin passions of Blut und Boden--racial purity and territorial expansion. "He didn't believe in anything but himself," Weinberg told me last summer. Most historians tend to agree.

Some non-historians, however, have different views. In the 1960s Friedrich Heer, a prominent and controversial Viennese theologian, identified Hitler as a misguided "Austrian Catholic," a man whose faith was disastrously misplaced but nevertheless sincere. In a dense, 750-page treatise Heer saw Hitler the Austrian Catholic at every turn: the nine-year-old choirboy catching his first glimpse of a swastika in the coat of arms at the Lambach Monastery; the beer-hall orator whose speeches resound with biblical allusions; the Führer of the Reich who re-created the splendor of the Catholic mass at the annual Nuremberg rally. Even his virulent hatred of Jewry found sustenance in those roots. Fritz Redlich, an eminent Yale psychiatrist, asserts in his book, Hitler: Diagnosis of a Destructive Prophet, that Hitler acted from a profound belief in God. Noting Hitler's own words "Man kommt um den Gottesbegriff nicht um" ("You cannot get around the concept of God"), Redlich told me last summer that he was certain Hitler believed in a "divine creature." He rejected suggestions that Hitler's invocations of the divine were little more than cynical public posturing and insisted that we ought to take Hitler at his word: "In a way, Hitler was a terrible liar, but he was a tactical liar. In his essential line of thinking he was honest."

I tend to favor the opinion that he was a lousy Catholic…but an even lousier atheist.