This is a few thoughts that involve something common in the new year; dieting. Well, tangentially diet related.
Part of the issues I've had cascade down in the past few months...thanks life!...has led to appointments with the rather new bariatric unit at the local hospital unit. They take a whole-in approach of using a team of nutritionists, fitness experts, gastric surgeons, psychologists...the whole nine yards...to create a program with support system for patients.
Part of the intake process meant reviewing your history. This is where I learned something nifty (beyond this machine that weighs you while zapping you with a current that measured all sorts of density information regarding the different kinds of body fat and densities in your body to come up with a profile of good and bad stuff in your body).
They asked about my past history and I told them about the gastric bypass procedure I underwent many years ago...I believe it was around 2009. April. Somewhere in there. My memory is fuzzy.
At the time, the local hospital system didn't really have a bariatric unit. While they very much seemed to support the idea that if you're fat, most of your illnesses and afflictions were weight-based and you needed to lose weight to deserve to be better, they were not well known for their "let's cut parts of the digestive system apart to help lose weight."
There was another hospital, about an hour away from us, that did have a small bariatric surgery unit. They took me into the program, agreed to do the surgery if I lost X amount of weight first, and after reaching that milestone I had the surgery.
Not long after, during the latter phases of physical recovery, I unceremoniously discovered that not only did my surgeon retire, but the hospital killed their bariatric surgery program. There was no notice. There was no letter, no email, no announcement ever reached us. Just...nothing. No more appointments kept.
I soured on the medical system a little more at that point. There was emphasis on how important a support system was...and there is certainly no shortage of continued feeling that when a doctor looks at you, your weight is first a foremost on their mind when figuring out how much a person is worth.
One day I had a consult about something at the local hospital and they mentioned the bariatric surgery, and how I could get followup at the other hospital.
"We can't," I said. "They shut down their bariatric unit."
"They restarted it a little while ago," they said.
Turns out, with little (read: no) fanfare or notification, they revived their bariatric unit. I have no doubt the doctors I worked with are gone; my surgeon had retired, and I can't imagine the younger doctors stuck around once their specialty had been shut down.
This came at a time when fat people were becoming (medically) profitable. Oh, sure, we're still a huge expense in cardiac care (and in this time the local hospital became a leader in cardiac care), but now some of those costs are being recouped through insurance companies through growing sleep apnea care, diabetes drugs and bariatric surgery. What was justification for treating people as sub-human was becoming a PR race to open the best fat-care centers, which before was the market for hucksters and easy diet schemers on television ads.
In other words, upon hearing that the other hospital had re-opened their bariatric unit without any announcement to former patients, I figured it was because it was becoming fashionable and probably profitable to do so. I certainly didn't trust them to give a damn, though. They didn't notify their old patients about it. They expressed no damns about my status. So...screw them.
The annoying thing is that the local hospital decided to focus more and more money into developing a local bariatric/weight loss program. As time went on they moved more staff into specializing on weight care. They repurposed a building just for weight loss. They focused resources on their weight loss center.
But when the topic of weight loss came up with my appointments, the moment my surgery history came up it was suggested I drive another half hour to the other hospital and continue care there.
It was during intake that I finally found out why. During the consult they mentioned something about checking the size of the stomach pouch, as it was obvious I could eat more than I was supposed to be able to. My history came up, and she said something about going to the other hospital.
I recounted my history and my distaste for dealing with a hospital that made it so blatant they didn't give a damn about their patients. She said that she could talk to the surgeon in the local hospital's weight clinic, but she knew what he'd say...no, he wouldn't work with me on it. That was when I learned why.
The government made rules.
See, to make hospitals "accountable" (that's a big buzzword for hospitals now, not just schools!) they were getting evaluated based on patient followup. In this example, I was operated on by hospital A. They had a program they wanted to end, and they did...essentially dumping their patients.
I ended up going to hospital B, my preferred hospital for most medical issues since I only went to A for a procedure B refused to do at the time. But this means that if anything was bariatric-related, B was getting (federally) evaluated for my poor outcome. At some point it seems A was pressured to re-open their bariatric program and make available their resources to old and new patients (although they didn't advertise it...take that as you will.)
That was why I was repeatedly "encouraged" to go to another hospital for some weight treatment followups. It's also why I'm not able to access certain resources at a hospital that in the years following my surgery dumped not insignificant resources into developing a "cutting edge" bariatric unit.
Once again the government is interfering in efforts they don't understand. Or at a minimum lots of hands in the pot have created a system that benefits not the patient, but some other interests, with the net effect of screwing the patient.
In the end I still have to go through their weight clinic, just with some options limited. I get to begin the new year miserably tracking calorie counts and using words like "carbs" and "abs" and "veggies," and dealing with the neuroses that I know will flare up while pursuing the accurate tracking of goals.
Will I be successful? Will I find more reason to distrust and/or outrightly dislike the hospital? Or will I fail miserably? Time will tell. But if you'll excuse me, I have to go prepare a big old egg patty with...egg. Lots of protein. Minimal carbs. Low calorie!
I really miss food.
Showing posts with label Rants. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Rants. Show all posts
Saturday, January 13, 2018
Sunday, September 24, 2017
One Example of How To Tell When Obligations are Wastes of Time
(Disclaimer: everything here is my own opinion. I ordinarily shouldn't have to mention this, but there are times where mentioning certain catalysts for thoughts tends to make those catalysts angry and definitely not do things that resemble acts of retaliation against people who aren't me but are related in some way to me. This isn't even about them. But I feel I have to explicitly state that because sometimes the catalysts may not be very good at reading comprehension.)
The local paper recently had an article announcing that a local school superintendent was awarded the highest rating for his performance. I personally wasn't too surprised given that during negotiations over teacher contracts, questions for his opinion on the matter were something to the effect of, "I serve at the will of the board."
But I wouldn't speak ill of the school board. When criticized, things happen that are definitely not retaliation against people who are related to me in their district. And this isn't about the board. It's about the obligations that make boards...or any regulated body...look like they're doing work when really it's a waste of time and opportunity to rubber stamp their own work (or use it as an excuse to get rid of someone that displeases the regulated body in some way).
The news report had said that there were four performance ranks that could be given: distinguished, proficient, needs improvement or unsatisfactory. Having a set of scores aggregated in sets of one to four isn't necessarily bad...even Netflix now has a rating system based on a 1 or 2, which of course eliminates all the nuance of "The movie didn't make me want to throw up, but I definitely wouldn't want to watch it again" and instead reduces the viewing experience to "I LOVED THIS FILM" or "This film is so terrible that it will become a niche cult classic in 10 years when the latest group of self-appointed film buffs rediscovers it and nit picks the flaws into virtues."
What areas were evaluated? "Professionalism, human resource management, district operations and financial management, student growth and achievement, organizational leadership, and communication and community relations."
A key question to ask is, how are these evaluated? These are standards. It's spelled out in school laws established in "1949 Act 14": "...the employment contract for a district superintendent or assistant district superintendent shall include objective performance standards..."
To figure out if this is actually useful or a waste of time when referring to an obligatory standard, you need to ask yourself against what ruler the standards are measured, and ask how the areas being measured are established.
The article said nothing about the scores other than the board members sat down and filled in sheets that were aggregated and found to be wonderful. Some objectives seemed like they'd be easy to measure, such as "student growth and achievement," something that has plenty of semi-effective rules regulating measures of student test results. Other things are blatantly arbitrary. How do you measure professionalism? You get a minus one each time you show up wearing a clown outfit? Or do you get a minus one for not wearing a tie, a minus two for wearing a "fun" tie, and a minus five for dressing as Pennywise?
Not having standards that can be objectively measured is a strong indication that you're dealing with a feel-good waste of time.
What about what or who establishes the items to be measured? This time around the superintendent had to post a list of what was to be measured on the school website. After some digging around, I found the list. Apparently the list is determined by the person being evaluated, then the board okays it (which again is allowed by the school code...it turns out the "standards" for evaluation are "mutually agreed to").
I won't comment on how weird it is that the first half of the letter to the board is a word for word match to another district's older set of "standards" (although it does make me wonder if those items are actually, as it states, "set forth in the Superintendent's Contract are as follows:"...)
Instead I'll point out statements such as, under "School District Operations and Financial Management", that the "Superintendent shall manage effectively, ensuring completion of activities associated with the annual budget, oversee distribution of resources in support of School District priorities, and direct overall operational activities within the School District."
What does that even mean? Manage effectively meaning, this job is completed? And what is the job? Ensuring the completion of activities related to the budget would basically mean you check in on the person or people in charge of actually creating the budget. Oversee resources being allocated to District priorities means what, if not making sure money goes into proper budgets and books go to the right classes? And directing overall operational activities means he's in charge of the district which, oddly enough, is what a superintendent DOES.
This whole paragraph sounds like he's being evaluated on whether he actually does his job. And I also noticed there's no actual gauge by which to measure it. The measure is arbitrary.
There's a section called Organizational Leadership, under which it states, "Superintendent shall work collaboratively with the Board to develop a vision for the School District, display an ability to identify and rectify problems affecting the School District, work collaboratively with School District administration to ensure best practices for instruction, supervision, curriculum development, and management are being utilized, and work to influence the climate and culture of the School District."
What does that mean? The superintendent will work with the board to establish a vision for the district, which under ordinary conditions would make sense, except when he clearly said during contract negotiations that he serves at the will of the board. The translation would therefore imply that either the board is coming up with the vision, or he's going to propose something that the board will vote to pass if they don't want to come up with one.
And "display an ability to identify and rectify problems affecting the School District"? I'd be interested in hearing someone talk about a time when a superintendent talks about the problems of their district. I don't recall hearing something like that from the superintendents of our local districts.
The last part is also vague--influence the climate and culture of the district? I'm not sure there is an objective measure for cultural influence. Most "culture and climate" I've heard regarding the school comes from the community, and much of that is influenced by the public and opinions spread by the school board during contract negotiations...and it's rarely positive. The statement itself doesn't even say he's going to positively or negatively influence the climate and culture. As the "head" of the district serving at the pleasure of the board, he could achieve this objective just by establishing a baseline expectation that when an issue is brought to his attention, the staff knows what they'll expect will probably happen, for better or worse.
And again, this has no objective measure against which to base a standard to score.
That brings me to the next sign you're dealing with a waste of time. The language is flowery, but vague. Stopping to translate paragraphs into actual meaning shows they aren't really meaning much at all once boiled down.
The last part of the letter is supposed to spell out how he is going to meet his objectives. It has items like, "Increase interventions and remediation's (sic) for students who need it most before, during, and after school", and, "Create a long range and comprehensive strategic plan - WILDCAT 2025".
If you thought I'd call this a waste of time, you'd be wrong. The list reads like a checklist, and having a checklist isn't a bad thing. If your goal is to get these things accomplished in the course of the upcoming year, that's great.
If anything were wrong with it, it's that this is a checklist in the context of a subjective set of standards by which to measure the performance of the person in charge of the district. If you judge a sports player and his or her checklist includes an item to improve the distance he or she throws the ball, that's great. But how much? 10% farther? 10 feet farther? Does he or she get points based on how many feet they improve the throw, or the quality of the throw by combining the distance with accuracy?
So why go through the effort of publishing a story about a superintendent being rated insanely great by the board that hired him in the first place and spent the past year "serving at the will of the board?" It's entirely a matter of speculation, and I can't engage in speculation because that could lead to definitely not retaliation. And this evaluation is just one more example of something mandated by the state that probably started with good intentions and mutated into a pathetic waste of time as it bounced around various fingers before becoming part of the law. But it's important to be able to apply critical thinking and differentiate when something reaching the public is worthwhile news and when something is little more than a waste of time.
The local paper recently had an article announcing that a local school superintendent was awarded the highest rating for his performance. I personally wasn't too surprised given that during negotiations over teacher contracts, questions for his opinion on the matter were something to the effect of, "I serve at the will of the board."
But I wouldn't speak ill of the school board. When criticized, things happen that are definitely not retaliation against people who are related to me in their district. And this isn't about the board. It's about the obligations that make boards...or any regulated body...look like they're doing work when really it's a waste of time and opportunity to rubber stamp their own work (or use it as an excuse to get rid of someone that displeases the regulated body in some way).
The news report had said that there were four performance ranks that could be given: distinguished, proficient, needs improvement or unsatisfactory. Having a set of scores aggregated in sets of one to four isn't necessarily bad...even Netflix now has a rating system based on a 1 or 2, which of course eliminates all the nuance of "The movie didn't make me want to throw up, but I definitely wouldn't want to watch it again" and instead reduces the viewing experience to "I LOVED THIS FILM" or "This film is so terrible that it will become a niche cult classic in 10 years when the latest group of self-appointed film buffs rediscovers it and nit picks the flaws into virtues."
What areas were evaluated? "Professionalism, human resource management, district operations and financial management, student growth and achievement, organizational leadership, and communication and community relations."
A key question to ask is, how are these evaluated? These are standards. It's spelled out in school laws established in "1949 Act 14": "...the employment contract for a district superintendent or assistant district superintendent shall include objective performance standards..."
To figure out if this is actually useful or a waste of time when referring to an obligatory standard, you need to ask yourself against what ruler the standards are measured, and ask how the areas being measured are established.
The article said nothing about the scores other than the board members sat down and filled in sheets that were aggregated and found to be wonderful. Some objectives seemed like they'd be easy to measure, such as "student growth and achievement," something that has plenty of semi-effective rules regulating measures of student test results. Other things are blatantly arbitrary. How do you measure professionalism? You get a minus one each time you show up wearing a clown outfit? Or do you get a minus one for not wearing a tie, a minus two for wearing a "fun" tie, and a minus five for dressing as Pennywise?
Not having standards that can be objectively measured is a strong indication that you're dealing with a feel-good waste of time.
What about what or who establishes the items to be measured? This time around the superintendent had to post a list of what was to be measured on the school website. After some digging around, I found the list. Apparently the list is determined by the person being evaluated, then the board okays it (which again is allowed by the school code...it turns out the "standards" for evaluation are "mutually agreed to").
I won't comment on how weird it is that the first half of the letter to the board is a word for word match to another district's older set of "standards" (although it does make me wonder if those items are actually, as it states, "set forth in the Superintendent's Contract are as follows:"...)
Instead I'll point out statements such as, under "School District Operations and Financial Management", that the "Superintendent shall manage effectively, ensuring completion of activities associated with the annual budget, oversee distribution of resources in support of School District priorities, and direct overall operational activities within the School District."
What does that even mean? Manage effectively meaning, this job is completed? And what is the job? Ensuring the completion of activities related to the budget would basically mean you check in on the person or people in charge of actually creating the budget. Oversee resources being allocated to District priorities means what, if not making sure money goes into proper budgets and books go to the right classes? And directing overall operational activities means he's in charge of the district which, oddly enough, is what a superintendent DOES.
This whole paragraph sounds like he's being evaluated on whether he actually does his job. And I also noticed there's no actual gauge by which to measure it. The measure is arbitrary.
There's a section called Organizational Leadership, under which it states, "Superintendent shall work collaboratively with the Board to develop a vision for the School District, display an ability to identify and rectify problems affecting the School District, work collaboratively with School District administration to ensure best practices for instruction, supervision, curriculum development, and management are being utilized, and work to influence the climate and culture of the School District."
What does that mean? The superintendent will work with the board to establish a vision for the district, which under ordinary conditions would make sense, except when he clearly said during contract negotiations that he serves at the will of the board. The translation would therefore imply that either the board is coming up with the vision, or he's going to propose something that the board will vote to pass if they don't want to come up with one.
And "display an ability to identify and rectify problems affecting the School District"? I'd be interested in hearing someone talk about a time when a superintendent talks about the problems of their district. I don't recall hearing something like that from the superintendents of our local districts.
The last part is also vague--influence the climate and culture of the district? I'm not sure there is an objective measure for cultural influence. Most "culture and climate" I've heard regarding the school comes from the community, and much of that is influenced by the public and opinions spread by the school board during contract negotiations...and it's rarely positive. The statement itself doesn't even say he's going to positively or negatively influence the climate and culture. As the "head" of the district serving at the pleasure of the board, he could achieve this objective just by establishing a baseline expectation that when an issue is brought to his attention, the staff knows what they'll expect will probably happen, for better or worse.
And again, this has no objective measure against which to base a standard to score.
That brings me to the next sign you're dealing with a waste of time. The language is flowery, but vague. Stopping to translate paragraphs into actual meaning shows they aren't really meaning much at all once boiled down.
The last part of the letter is supposed to spell out how he is going to meet his objectives. It has items like, "Increase interventions and remediation's (sic) for students who need it most before, during, and after school", and, "Create a long range and comprehensive strategic plan - WILDCAT 2025".
If you thought I'd call this a waste of time, you'd be wrong. The list reads like a checklist, and having a checklist isn't a bad thing. If your goal is to get these things accomplished in the course of the upcoming year, that's great.
If anything were wrong with it, it's that this is a checklist in the context of a subjective set of standards by which to measure the performance of the person in charge of the district. If you judge a sports player and his or her checklist includes an item to improve the distance he or she throws the ball, that's great. But how much? 10% farther? 10 feet farther? Does he or she get points based on how many feet they improve the throw, or the quality of the throw by combining the distance with accuracy?
So why go through the effort of publishing a story about a superintendent being rated insanely great by the board that hired him in the first place and spent the past year "serving at the will of the board?" It's entirely a matter of speculation, and I can't engage in speculation because that could lead to definitely not retaliation. And this evaluation is just one more example of something mandated by the state that probably started with good intentions and mutated into a pathetic waste of time as it bounced around various fingers before becoming part of the law. But it's important to be able to apply critical thinking and differentiate when something reaching the public is worthwhile news and when something is little more than a waste of time.
Monday, September 4, 2017
Formatting Woes
Am I the only one that uses Blogger and keeps discovering formatting issues?
I take time to review my posts. I preview them. I lay out the fonts and paragraphs to include spacing that breaks up the sections for increased readability. I wrap text around graphics and use captions for text specific to that image.
It seems like no matter how much time I put into carefully laying out the format of the page, at some point I view the post as a regular user and...WHY IS THE SPACING GOOFED UP?
Is it Blogger? Is it a side effect of the template used for the layout? Certain fonts used?
I don't know.
I just know that it's incredibly frustrating.
It seems odd that even when I preview a post, adjust spacing, and finally post, the end result is still..."off".
I have several subjects to write about. Periodically noticing screwed up posts led me to write this up first.
As I type this I'm still using blogger...but I'm tempted to try another platform. Maybe someday I'll shift everything to another site and if I do, it will simply not make sense because formatting actually looks sane.
On the other hand, moving to a sane site...different template?...may cause the adjustments I tried using to "fix" errors to actually make things weird in some other way.
Maybe time will tell.
I take time to review my posts. I preview them. I lay out the fonts and paragraphs to include spacing that breaks up the sections for increased readability. I wrap text around graphics and use captions for text specific to that image.
It seems like no matter how much time I put into carefully laying out the format of the page, at some point I view the post as a regular user and...WHY IS THE SPACING GOOFED UP?
Is it Blogger? Is it a side effect of the template used for the layout? Certain fonts used?
I don't know.
I just know that it's incredibly frustrating.
It seems odd that even when I preview a post, adjust spacing, and finally post, the end result is still..."off".
I have several subjects to write about. Periodically noticing screwed up posts led me to write this up first.
As I type this I'm still using blogger...but I'm tempted to try another platform. Maybe someday I'll shift everything to another site and if I do, it will simply not make sense because formatting actually looks sane.
On the other hand, moving to a sane site...different template?...may cause the adjustments I tried using to "fix" errors to actually make things weird in some other way.
Maybe time will tell.
Wednesday, September 21, 2016
Skittles are to Refugees what M&Ms are to Not All Men
Side note: I can hardly believe how long it's been since I've added to this blog...but it looks like several months have flown by since my last entry. I guess I took an impromptu blog break while I was heads-down on some personal Go programming projects. Amazing how something can expand to fill your spare time activities...now I have programming plus personal issues to nudge me into remedying my blog hiatus status...
This entry is not a Go-related topic. This, instead, is an entry about a Presidential candidate's campaign assertion that, when I heard about it, felt eerily familiar.
Donald Trump, Jr. used the recent bombings in Chelsea and New Jersey to compare refugees to a bowl of perhaps-poisoned candy. Basically, the argument goes, if you have a bowl of Skittles and 3 of them were poisoned, would you take a handful?
The makers of Skittles were not amused, as you can imagine. Their reply simply asserted that Skittles are candy while refugees are people, so they did not believe the analogy was proper (side note: did you know Skittles is owned by Wrigley Americas? I thought they were known for gum...)
Leaving aside the argument that the suspect in the bombing is a naturalized American citizen or that the actual math behind your odds of dying at the hands of terrorism in the US are minuscule compared to heart disease, being struck by lightning, car accident or, in the US, being shot, hearing this tweet make the rounds in the usual social media reminded me of another "would you want to risk <eating a large amount of innocuous, common food> if you knew there was a <tiny but acknowledged number> that were deliberately fatal?" meme, only for the opposite, pro-social justice argument. It wasn't hard to uncover it.
Apparently the Trump campaign was resurrecting the old "Not All Men" argument that used M&M's, instead of Skittles, in response to the idea that not all men are terrible, so please don't overgeneralize about all men being <murderers || rapists || chauvinist pigs || etc>. It seemed to make sense...they acknowledge that not all men are terrible, but all you're doing is derailing the actual point by trying to deflect on focusing on the population of people that were good instead of the very real danger of the significant population of men doing bad things. I had forgotten that meme...and only realized now that it seems to have largely disappeared from the social media rounds. Or perhaps I had simply stopped paying attention to the waves of regurgitating hive-thoughts posing as original thought...
Thanks to the anti-Trump sentiment, though, this iteration of the poisoned candy argument didn't last long before a rebuttal made the rounds. Now the small-population-of-poison-in-the-patch argument is linked to anti-semitic material from Nazi Germany. In the heartwarming story Der Giftpilz, Jews are compared to mushrooms in the forest, where there are good people and good mushrooms, and there are bad people and bad mushrooms, and bad mushrooms can kill whole families...so you have to be vigilant against poisonous Jews killing your family. The author, Julius Streicher, was executed as a war criminal.
Oversimplifying to the point of overgeneralization (ironically, in the case of what I'm about to say) is rarely, if ever, effective when analyzed. It is a propaganda tool; a way to get eyeballs with a headline without actually having a headline. In the cases here, these were used as tools to manipulate people using what seemed, at first thought (and rarely a second thought applied) logical, sound reasoning. It takes more thought to understand the nuances of the actual issues involved...and these shortcut-think-phrases are simply a way to appeal to lazy supporters of side X, and to possibly deflect from the actual goal or reasoning behind a movement or idea.
In the case of the poisoned candy, if you're told there are definitely, say, 3 poisoned items in there, of course reasonable people are not going to eat them (or in some variants, feed them to their kids.)
Of course it ignores that candy are not individual people with complex, nuanced personalities.
It ignores that a reasonable person has little reason to believe that any candy are poisoned in your average bag of bulk candy.
Or that the actual odds...the math that we, as human beings with minds poorly wired to think in terms of mathematics and statistics,...are nowhere near the same for dying from terrorism as they are for "3 of <a bowl> of candy" are for killing you, unless the bowl were perhaps a swimming pool or you apply the analogy to something purposely vague so every jackass making a sexist or unwanted comment to a passing stranger counts as a poisoned candy.
It also ignores the ethical motivations of the rest of that candy bowl...that they're people, searching for safety, fleeing a war they had nothing to do with, and the vast majority want nothing more than to live their lives in reasonable safety.
And it ignores the possibility that the candy is loaded with sugars that contribute to the diabetes and heart disease that are more likely to kill you than terrorism despite the "good" label applied to them.
And it certainly doesn't acknowledge that there is no binary "safe vs. unsafe" activity in life. I often wondered this when a religious person would talk about the evils of gambling...isn't life a gamble? You're getting out of bed without thinking that the shift in blood pressure could trigger a stroke, and taking a morning shower without acknowledging that you could slip and fall and crack your head. The act of taking a number two can strain your heart and cause a heart attack. Eating a meal can cause you to choke to death. There is no %100 safe activity for which you're not betting that you'll be okay performing a relatively common thing, and if gambling is the act of wagering on an uncertain outcome, life is filled with uncertain outcomes.
In the end, I'm not indicting the social movements that led to these memes. My post is an indictment against the type of thinking that leads people to treat these thought-bites as if they were entire arguments for or against an idea instead of the bullet points they really are; we are a culture that mistakes sound bytes and headlines for actual news items, when the actual story requires actual research of some depth to even begin to understand and empathize with.
Worse, we have so much information, so many sound- and thought-bites begging for our attention that people (and media outlets) treat stories like the recent Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt divorce filing as something more deserving of headlines than a gossip-column footnote.
Perhaps this is also a reflection of how people process information; perhaps before, we didn't have the technology to indulge in sifting through a plethora of visual clickbait and having the luxury of ignoring nuance. Or perhaps people have always been full of uninformed opinions, but now we are graced with social media giving a voice by which to proclaim these ideas. How much we are shaping our information and media tools versus how much we are shaped by them is an exercise for philosophers and time to measure.
Unfortunately I can't pretend to be above the influence; I can only try to acknowledge that it happens and try to limit the degree of validity I assign to the resulting fallacies. The best thing I've done is limit my exposure to social media, and even popular news outlets. I've gradually cut things out that others take for granted; as satellite (and cable) TV grew more expensive and we tried to cut bills, we stopped watching TV (and I am still amazed at how little tolerance I have for commercials as a result). I configured Twitter to dump tweets directly to Facebook, eschewing having to sift and post there in order to update virtual relatives and friends of life events and thus limiting the amount of regurgitated cruft from the FaceBook timeline that inevitably led to a "Here's a Snopes article that had you spared 5 minutes to Google you'd have known what you just said was pure crap" reply.
So take a minute and reflect on the true meaning of a soundbite. What is the truth behind it? What is the possible true motivation behind the meme? And most of all, why are you willing to support, or fight, that meme?
This entry is not a Go-related topic. This, instead, is an entry about a Presidential candidate's campaign assertion that, when I heard about it, felt eerily familiar.
Donald Trump, Jr. used the recent bombings in Chelsea and New Jersey to compare refugees to a bowl of perhaps-poisoned candy. Basically, the argument goes, if you have a bowl of Skittles and 3 of them were poisoned, would you take a handful?
The makers of Skittles were not amused, as you can imagine. Their reply simply asserted that Skittles are candy while refugees are people, so they did not believe the analogy was proper (side note: did you know Skittles is owned by Wrigley Americas? I thought they were known for gum...)
Leaving aside the argument that the suspect in the bombing is a naturalized American citizen or that the actual math behind your odds of dying at the hands of terrorism in the US are minuscule compared to heart disease, being struck by lightning, car accident or, in the US, being shot, hearing this tweet make the rounds in the usual social media reminded me of another "would you want to risk <eating a large amount of innocuous, common food> if you knew there was a <tiny but acknowledged number> that were deliberately fatal?" meme, only for the opposite, pro-social justice argument. It wasn't hard to uncover it.
Apparently the Trump campaign was resurrecting the old "Not All Men" argument that used M&M's, instead of Skittles, in response to the idea that not all men are terrible, so please don't overgeneralize about all men being <murderers || rapists || chauvinist pigs || etc>. It seemed to make sense...they acknowledge that not all men are terrible, but all you're doing is derailing the actual point by trying to deflect on focusing on the population of people that were good instead of the very real danger of the significant population of men doing bad things. I had forgotten that meme...and only realized now that it seems to have largely disappeared from the social media rounds. Or perhaps I had simply stopped paying attention to the waves of regurgitating hive-thoughts posing as original thought...
Thanks to the anti-Trump sentiment, though, this iteration of the poisoned candy argument didn't last long before a rebuttal made the rounds. Now the small-population-of-poison-in-the-patch argument is linked to anti-semitic material from Nazi Germany. In the heartwarming story Der Giftpilz, Jews are compared to mushrooms in the forest, where there are good people and good mushrooms, and there are bad people and bad mushrooms, and bad mushrooms can kill whole families...so you have to be vigilant against poisonous Jews killing your family. The author, Julius Streicher, was executed as a war criminal.
Oversimplifying to the point of overgeneralization (ironically, in the case of what I'm about to say) is rarely, if ever, effective when analyzed. It is a propaganda tool; a way to get eyeballs with a headline without actually having a headline. In the cases here, these were used as tools to manipulate people using what seemed, at first thought (and rarely a second thought applied) logical, sound reasoning. It takes more thought to understand the nuances of the actual issues involved...and these shortcut-think-phrases are simply a way to appeal to lazy supporters of side X, and to possibly deflect from the actual goal or reasoning behind a movement or idea.
In the case of the poisoned candy, if you're told there are definitely, say, 3 poisoned items in there, of course reasonable people are not going to eat them (or in some variants, feed them to their kids.)
Of course it ignores that candy are not individual people with complex, nuanced personalities.
It ignores that a reasonable person has little reason to believe that any candy are poisoned in your average bag of bulk candy.
Or that the actual odds...the math that we, as human beings with minds poorly wired to think in terms of mathematics and statistics,...are nowhere near the same for dying from terrorism as they are for "3 of <a bowl> of candy" are for killing you, unless the bowl were perhaps a swimming pool or you apply the analogy to something purposely vague so every jackass making a sexist or unwanted comment to a passing stranger counts as a poisoned candy.
It also ignores the ethical motivations of the rest of that candy bowl...that they're people, searching for safety, fleeing a war they had nothing to do with, and the vast majority want nothing more than to live their lives in reasonable safety.
And it ignores the possibility that the candy is loaded with sugars that contribute to the diabetes and heart disease that are more likely to kill you than terrorism despite the "good" label applied to them.
And it certainly doesn't acknowledge that there is no binary "safe vs. unsafe" activity in life. I often wondered this when a religious person would talk about the evils of gambling...isn't life a gamble? You're getting out of bed without thinking that the shift in blood pressure could trigger a stroke, and taking a morning shower without acknowledging that you could slip and fall and crack your head. The act of taking a number two can strain your heart and cause a heart attack. Eating a meal can cause you to choke to death. There is no %100 safe activity for which you're not betting that you'll be okay performing a relatively common thing, and if gambling is the act of wagering on an uncertain outcome, life is filled with uncertain outcomes.
In the end, I'm not indicting the social movements that led to these memes. My post is an indictment against the type of thinking that leads people to treat these thought-bites as if they were entire arguments for or against an idea instead of the bullet points they really are; we are a culture that mistakes sound bytes and headlines for actual news items, when the actual story requires actual research of some depth to even begin to understand and empathize with.
Worse, we have so much information, so many sound- and thought-bites begging for our attention that people (and media outlets) treat stories like the recent Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt divorce filing as something more deserving of headlines than a gossip-column footnote.
Perhaps this is also a reflection of how people process information; perhaps before, we didn't have the technology to indulge in sifting through a plethora of visual clickbait and having the luxury of ignoring nuance. Or perhaps people have always been full of uninformed opinions, but now we are graced with social media giving a voice by which to proclaim these ideas. How much we are shaping our information and media tools versus how much we are shaped by them is an exercise for philosophers and time to measure.
Unfortunately I can't pretend to be above the influence; I can only try to acknowledge that it happens and try to limit the degree of validity I assign to the resulting fallacies. The best thing I've done is limit my exposure to social media, and even popular news outlets. I've gradually cut things out that others take for granted; as satellite (and cable) TV grew more expensive and we tried to cut bills, we stopped watching TV (and I am still amazed at how little tolerance I have for commercials as a result). I configured Twitter to dump tweets directly to Facebook, eschewing having to sift and post there in order to update virtual relatives and friends of life events and thus limiting the amount of regurgitated cruft from the FaceBook timeline that inevitably led to a "Here's a Snopes article that had you spared 5 minutes to Google you'd have known what you just said was pure crap" reply.
So take a minute and reflect on the true meaning of a soundbite. What is the truth behind it? What is the possible true motivation behind the meme? And most of all, why are you willing to support, or fight, that meme?
Wednesday, April 13, 2016
Athens School Board's Response to the 2016 Threatened Strike; Disingenuous Again
The teacher's Union has finally...after over 3 years of negotiation stalemate...threatened a strike.
The School Board responded pretty much as I thought they would; they quickly put up a rope and aired their version of the dirty laundry. And just as relevant, they blamed the teachers for making the britches dirty even though it's their crap on the backside.
The Board posted, on the school website (which still pisses me off as the Union can't post information to the school website for their side of the story, but the School Board likes to post propaganda to the front page of the district site, making it harder for the public to actually piece together a coherent picture of what's going on if they are so inclined), their "Responsnse from the AASD school board.pdf." (The typo is theirs; I thought it amusing, so I pointed it out, although they may change it later).
They start off painting the teachers as evil, untrustworthy and shifty. In their response, the Board used phrasing such as, "We would like to add that at no time has the Athens Area School Board negotiation team members met at the table, unwilling to negotiate" to insinuate that they are the victims of a vicious Union (although phrasing is kind of important, since this sentence could be read as they simply never met at the table...). They say, "We have not put unrealistic timelines or demands on the AAEA, while that has not been the case by the AAEA." That's strange, given that the opening of the paragraph states they've had 3.5 years with no meaningful movement in negotiations.
After setting up those dominoes, the Board points out with evident self-satisfaction that the Union reneged on their official statement from November 2015 that stated they would allow a deadline of four weeks after a state budget was passed for a reasonable settlement to be proposed.
The state budget was officially allowed to lapse into passing on March 27th, and here we are with a threatened strike STARTING ON APRIL 18th! THOSE LYING UNION BASTARDS! They even ended the paragraph with an unsubstantiated claim that they offered to meet for negotiations but the AAEA "simply would not meet with us." In summary, "You can clearly tell we're victims of these horribly unreasonable jackbooted thugs." You can almost picture them cringing as the teachers march into the room in full uniform regalia, drooling in anticipation of crushing the kindhearted and well-intentioned School Board under their collective bargaining heels.
And they're right! The Union did take a strike vote in less time than promised. However, the Board failed to emphasize that the ultimatum was for a reasonable proposal and show an attempt to bargain in good faith. That's really a weak ultimatum. It's like telling your kid they better not hit their sibling again or you'll maybe punish them. Reasonable proposal. Show an attempt. And how did the Board react?
They weren't lying, but they weren't entirely truthful. Here's a handy link to the census information at Census.Gov. It's kind of weird that the Bradford County household income is $48,000, but the US average is $53,000 and Athens Township has an average income of $51,700. But I guess the $48,000 statistic paints a more outrage-inducing picture.
And in Athens, the major industries are...hospitals...the school...and...what? Most of your business booms are fast food, Wal-Mart and new hotels. At least, those are the visible new jobs. City-data.com says Athens' most common industry is manufacturing (27%) and the most common occupations are production- and construction- related (15% and 12%, respectively.) Knowledge workers with higher degrees seem to leave the area.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics says the median weekly earnings of a person with a Bachelor's degree (2015) is $1,137. There's 52 weeks a year, so that comes to a little over $59,000/year. Strange...that's not too far from the teacher's salaries. Master's degrees earn about $1,341/week, or $69,732/year.
That means the teacher income average in Athens, at $66,000/year, is well within the "average" mark. A high school diploma average is $678/week or $35,256/year, for what it's worth.
I suppose the board would say that the $66,000 is still significantly higher than the average for having a Bachelor's degree. Let's take a quick glance at the data in the tables they published online to illustrate how overpaid their semi-anonymized teachers are.
Most of the staff were hired between 6 and 18 years ago! I count 27 people hired before 2000, 52 employees were hired between 2000 and 2010, and 18 from 2010 to 2015. Four of the 27 were hired in the 80's! There's a significant number of experienced staff! (Note I figured this up by hand from the chart the board provided. I may have a miscount. Feel free to double check, let me know if I missed something in the comments...)
And that's what the board is focused on. Teachers are expensive. Cut them down at all costs.
To further illustrate how unreasonable teachers are, the Board said they REFUSED to work an additional 15 minutes a day without being compensated. What they still refuse to acknowledge is that teachers already work this additional time. They're just not contractually obligated to do so during the school day. The Washington Post reported that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation along with Scholastic issued a report showing that the average teacher works 10 hours and 40 minutes a day. Yes...obligated to work 37.5 hours a week, but actually on average, working 53 hours a week.
From their web page:
The 7.5 hours in the classroom are just the starting point. On average, teachers are at school an additional 90 minutes beyond the school day for mentoring, providing after-school help for students, attending staff meetings and collaborating with peers. Teachers then spend another 95 minutes at home grading, preparing classroom activities, and doing other job-related tasks. The workday is even longer for teachers who advise extracurricular clubs and coach sports —11 hours and 20 minutes, on average. As one Kentucky teacher surveyed put it, “Our work is never done. We take grading home, stay late, answer phone calls constantly, and lay awake thinking about how to change things to meet student needs.”
Um...that's kind of awkward. It pretty clearly says that the fact finder report was yet to be voted on by the Union for acceptance when the Board already rejected it. October 8 of 2015. Unanimously. It's available on the labor relations board website, by the way.
But if you were to just read the Board response, the rejection was all on the Union. Funny how a simple Google search shows that insinuation is utter crap.
The next page had a listing for an article from June 2014 when the board once again rejected a fact finder's report (and this one pointed out the teachers accepted the report.)
And for all the calls for saving money, the Board seems oddly bent on wasting money in other areas. For example, they recently spent $15,000 on a study that told them they were wasting $800,000 on transportation. There's bound to be some variability in spending...but $800,000? It's kind of an amazing article to read. And the report, too.
The Board is also cutting two checks to lawyers. This has a bill from John Audi (Sweet, Katz, & Williams) in January for nearly $6,000. (also one to a doctor, Sidney G. Ranck, Jr., for $1,200...he's in obstetrics and gynecology. That's kind of...disturbing?)
This bill has John Audi getting a check cut for nearly $3,000. And this one is another $6,500 check, along with their second lawyer, Pat Barrett, getting a check for $6,000. The list goes on.
And this is in addition to the acting superintendent's $130,000 salary (strange that seems to be missing from the salary list the Board is holding up as evidence that teachers are overpaid...)
The interesting part of that salary is that the previous superintendent was getting about $122,000/year. The acting superintendent isn't qualified to be superintendent and he's getting paid more. Part of me wonders if it's a gender thing...but that would be speculation. He's literally not qualified. The Board is paying for him to take classes and get his certification. That's why he's an acting superintendent. The previous superintendent was hired away from another district and had several years of experience. The new one is making more money and doesn't have a certificate. Somehow the Board equates this with hiring the best staff as per their resolutions back in January of 2013.
Overall the whole "response," in my opinion, is one long exercise in misleading the public. Take the claims that they have been open to bargaining this whole time in good faith with a grain of salt. They claim to care about the community and educating the kids, but their actions demonstrate, quite loudly, otherwise.
ADDENDUM
I did some quick checking of how much the frugal school board is spending on lawyer's fees. These figures were taken by eyeballing the board bills found on the school website. These reports are in PDF format, making them really really difficult to process in an automated fashion. Since I couldn't process them automatically I may have missed some payments, so the numbers I have, assuming I didn't misread some line items, would be considered a minimum paid to two law firms over the past 3 years, meaning there are probably payments missing. I think the contract talks may have extended beyond what bill items are on the website.
Regardless, this kind of money is interesting given how much the Board speaks of money problems and how expensive teachers are. It's also interesting how much vested interest the legal counsel has in prolonging the contract talks. How many meetings are there for negotiations? How much are they making per meeting?
The numbers are all there, listed with dates the checks were cut. Feel free to double check my numbers and tell me if I'm missing something. Also, I'm aware that the solicitor for the board (P.B.) does other duties, so these are not funds spent only on fighting the Union; I'm not privy to the other duties, however, so I can't break down the numbers into sub-categories. I've been told the John Audi firm was hired just to fight the Union, however, so big numbers are still big numbers.
Update 4-17-16
One of the sticking points in contract negotiations is in regards to the number of consecutive personal days a teacher may take. But it strikes me as being rather odd...what do they hope to accomplish by limiting consecutive personal days when teachers only get 3 personal days per year?
The AAEA (Union) provided an answer with a FaceBook post.
A Board member wanted to "talk" (usually situations like this implies "complain", but given a lack of specific information, that again is speculation) with a teacher. Teacher was on vacation. School board member now just happens to be pushing for limits on teacher time off.
If the implication is true the push to limit personal time off is purely for personal reasons, not for the benefit of the community taxpayers. This is a vendetta as a negotiations sticking point. How many other points of negotiation are driven by purely personal reasons?
The School Board responded pretty much as I thought they would; they quickly put up a rope and aired their version of the dirty laundry. And just as relevant, they blamed the teachers for making the britches dirty even though it's their crap on the backside.
The Board posted, on the school website (which still pisses me off as the Union can't post information to the school website for their side of the story, but the School Board likes to post propaganda to the front page of the district site, making it harder for the public to actually piece together a coherent picture of what's going on if they are so inclined), their "Responsnse from the AASD school board.pdf." (The typo is theirs; I thought it amusing, so I pointed it out, although they may change it later).
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| A werd frum ower sponser |
They start off painting the teachers as evil, untrustworthy and shifty. In their response, the Board used phrasing such as, "We would like to add that at no time has the Athens Area School Board negotiation team members met at the table, unwilling to negotiate" to insinuate that they are the victims of a vicious Union (although phrasing is kind of important, since this sentence could be read as they simply never met at the table...). They say, "We have not put unrealistic timelines or demands on the AAEA, while that has not been the case by the AAEA." That's strange, given that the opening of the paragraph states they've had 3.5 years with no meaningful movement in negotiations.
After setting up those dominoes, the Board points out with evident self-satisfaction that the Union reneged on their official statement from November 2015 that stated they would allow a deadline of four weeks after a state budget was passed for a reasonable settlement to be proposed.
The state budget was officially allowed to lapse into passing on March 27th, and here we are with a threatened strike STARTING ON APRIL 18th! THOSE LYING UNION BASTARDS! They even ended the paragraph with an unsubstantiated claim that they offered to meet for negotiations but the AAEA "simply would not meet with us." In summary, "You can clearly tell we're victims of these horribly unreasonable jackbooted thugs." You can almost picture them cringing as the teachers march into the room in full uniform regalia, drooling in anticipation of crushing the kindhearted and well-intentioned School Board under their collective bargaining heels.
And they're right! The Union did take a strike vote in less time than promised. However, the Board failed to emphasize that the ultimatum was for a reasonable proposal and show an attempt to bargain in good faith. That's really a weak ultimatum. It's like telling your kid they better not hit their sibling again or you'll maybe punish them. Reasonable proposal. Show an attempt. And how did the Board react?
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| Yeah, seems reasonable |
The Union stated publicly at a school board meeting on April 12th, when questioned about this decision, that the negotiation team felt the Board was refusing to further negotiate after their last session as a member of the School Board’s negotiation team declared, “We have nothing more to talk about.” At that point, the Union’s executive team made the decision to ask their members to vote on a strike.
The next bit of the Board’s response is an outline of goals to establish how reasonable the Board is. Three are pretty clear-cut. The last one is fluff, as there's absolutely no way to measure it, but makes them sound like they care about something important. Be allowed to hire the best professional staff members? After they stated goals that equate to trying to save money and lower pay, during a three and a half year standoff? You don't want the best. You want the most naive new recruits, too inexperienced to know that you're beating them in the head with a switch from a whackin' tree while you're telling them you're doing them a favor. Pro tip: don't start off highlighting why you're being browbeaten for 3+ years by an evil Union regime while bravely fighting to reduce your teacher's benefits and pay only to end it by saying you're trying to recruit the cream of the crop to work for you.
Next, they decide to roll into the biggest issue, the nearest and dearest to the taxpayer heart—teacher salaries. Teachers are too expensive to hire! The Board repeatedly presses to not give retroactive pay (after over three years of refusing to actually settle the contract, pretending that when this one is eventually passed they won't have to immediately settle the NEXT CONTRACT because they couldn't do their job...) and lower the pay increases due when teachers increase their experience/education levels. They do this by appealing to the public's basic grasp of math, because nuance is hard.
TEACHERS MAKE $66,000 A YEAR ON AVERAGE! THE AVERAGE BRADFORD COUNTY INCOME IS $48,000! HOW FAIR IS THAT?! They even published a table of teacher salaries; they were kind enough to omit the names, but it wasn't really much of a kindness. Teacher salaries are public knowledge. While the table they provide is semi-anonymized, the data has enough information to combine with the links to the (slightly out of date) data for public teacher salary records to figure out who is who, with a bonus of now knowing their employee identification numbers used in internal business records. So, yay for more "here's how you phish for data" handed out.
Holy shit. That sweet Bill Gates paycheck must be why the teachers be rollin' in to the parking lot with diamond-encrusted Lambo's and gold-trimmed Porsches. Sounds pretty bad. Why do they get so much when I don't!? The Board doesn't link to the document from which they pulled the numbers, but mention it's from the US census.
They weren't lying, but they weren't entirely truthful. Here's a handy link to the census information at Census.Gov. It's kind of weird that the Bradford County household income is $48,000, but the US average is $53,000 and Athens Township has an average income of $51,700. But I guess the $48,000 statistic paints a more outrage-inducing picture.
But is that the whole picture? Probably not, considering that income tends to be tied to education level. Teachers are required to have ongoing education credits. Basically the government tells them they need continued schooling or some equivalent (One of the step items the Board wants to not pay them extra for having attained) in order to retain certification. Nearly 88% of Bradford County aged 25+ (and 90% of Athens Township) have high school degrees or higher. But only 17% of Bradford County (and 23% of Athens) has a bachelor's degree or higher!
And in Athens, the major industries are...hospitals...the school...and...what? Most of your business booms are fast food, Wal-Mart and new hotels. At least, those are the visible new jobs. City-data.com says Athens' most common industry is manufacturing (27%) and the most common occupations are production- and construction- related (15% and 12%, respectively.) Knowledge workers with higher degrees seem to leave the area.
But of the educated, what are their average incomes? The Board is comparing a large population of mostly non-degreed members with teachers, who not only have at least a Bachelor's degree, but are required to continue with education in a rather specialized niche. It's not uncommon for teachers to end up with master’s degrees or higher. They're almost forced to.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics says the median weekly earnings of a person with a Bachelor's degree (2015) is $1,137. There's 52 weeks a year, so that comes to a little over $59,000/year. Strange...that's not too far from the teacher's salaries. Master's degrees earn about $1,341/week, or $69,732/year.
That means the teacher income average in Athens, at $66,000/year, is well within the "average" mark. A high school diploma average is $678/week or $35,256/year, for what it's worth.
I suppose the board would say that the $66,000 is still significantly higher than the average for having a Bachelor's degree. Let's take a quick glance at the data in the tables they published online to illustrate how overpaid their semi-anonymized teachers are.
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| Interesting how the median looks like a middle finger |
Remember that bit the Board claimed about wanting to hire the best? Unless your job makes you bitter you usually get better at your job with additional experience.
Unfortunately that's the garlic to the Board's vampire. These are educated professionals; a significant number of them have decent experience, and have been getting continuing education. That means they're going to be closer to the upper pay limit both because they've been there a while AND they have paper saying they're smarter.
In other words, you're paying for people who are better. And the Board doesn't want to pay them. I wouldn't be surprised if part of that spike in 2013 through 2015 is comprised of inexperienced graduates...they're cheaper.
The Board’s information about the teacher work day is also misleading. Teachers are obligated to work 7.5 hours a day with a half hour duty free lunch (SLACKERS!)
The language in their response is kind of funny. "Only work a 7.5 hour day." The 40-hour workweek, when I last checked, was comprised of 5 8-hour days. Even McJobs are required by law to give you 30-minute lunches when you work over five hours in a single shift. Plus breaks. The board is complaining that the teachers aren't obligated to work the hours of an hourly fast food worker.
Well, not quite. The board goes on to complain that in addition to the 2.5 hours of lunchtime they get a week, teachers are allowed 3.75 hours per week of self-directed time. THEY WERE EVEN ALLOWED TO GO TO WALMART OR THE BANK. It's like the inmates are running the asylum. I'm pretty sure at one point the Board proposed adding instructional time by having staff wear diapers to save trips to the bathroom. (That 3.75 hours was roughly 45 minutes a day. According to most teachers, this time was usually used to correct papers and prepare for another class period. They weren't watching Netflix or leaving en masse to get more adult diapers from Walmart every day, although I can see why the Board would be horrified that teachers would run an errand while stores were open.)
From their web page:
The 7.5 hours in the classroom are just the starting point. On average, teachers are at school an additional 90 minutes beyond the school day for mentoring, providing after-school help for students, attending staff meetings and collaborating with peers. Teachers then spend another 95 minutes at home grading, preparing classroom activities, and doing other job-related tasks. The workday is even longer for teachers who advise extracurricular clubs and coach sports —11 hours and 20 minutes, on average. As one Kentucky teacher surveyed put it, “Our work is never done. We take grading home, stay late, answer phone calls constantly, and lay awake thinking about how to change things to meet student needs.”
To my knowledge, the Board has never acknowledged this. In fact, they have previously attacked teachers for being overpaid while using only the contractually obligated work time as their measure. This extra time is no secret among teachers, and it's nothing new. Just doing the basic math for hand-grading a two-page report for 30 kids in one class can take a significant chunk of time from an English teacher; if you assume 5 minutes per report (which is an unrealistic deadline to begin with), it’s 150 minutes, or 2 hours and 30 minutes. For one class. What does the Board think is going on during that "self directed" time? Teacher disco hour?
It's at a point where the Board would have to be purposely playing stupid to not know how this factors in. The requirements put on teachers, with homework correction load and prep, makes accomplishing what needs to be complete within the time allotted a joke. It's as if you were tasked with moving a giant mound of sand from point A to point B; you are going to be paid to do it in an hour. The job has to get done, or you're fired and not paid for the job. But you will only be paid for an hour of work...even though it takes two hours to accomplish. Yet, teachers still accept this as part of the burden of working as a teacher even as the Board makes it abundantly clear that they're either clueless about what it takes to teach, or they simply enjoy making the work environment miserable.
It’s laughable that the Board insists they "...understand the importance of its professional staff to remain lifelong learners" before moving on to propose eliminating some salary benefits to continuing education along with a "if you leave within 4 years of tuition reimbursement you have to pay it back" and a cap on reimbursement spending. Does the Board not understand what they're saying there? "We know this is important. So we'd like to limit it in many ways, along with adding financial uncertainty by forcing you to pay back the education you're required to get if something happens where you leave our employ AND only some teachers can continue their education at a time.” How do you negotiate with this kind of cognitive dissonance?
Then they start winding down with some mini-zings, the bits that don't all seem to make much sense as points of contention unless they are actually put into context. Eliminating the transfer clause that allows seniority to be factored into filling vacant positions? What's the problem there? Not much, except it pretty much is meant to allow administrators and the Board to place favorite hires into new positions and add pressure to get rid of the expensive experienced teachers, assisting in eliminating positions by attrition (see the number of recent hires? Just speculating...)
Most of the Board's response (or "resposnse", which still makes me giggle) is disingenuous at best. They even claim, "There have been 2 independent fact finder reports completed in the last year. Both reports were rejected by the AAEA." Those unreasonable Union bastards!
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| Those unreasonable Union bastards...wait, what the hell? |
Um...that's kind of awkward. It pretty clearly says that the fact finder report was yet to be voted on by the Union for acceptance when the Board already rejected it. October 8 of 2015. Unanimously. It's available on the labor relations board website, by the way.
But if you were to just read the Board response, the rejection was all on the Union. Funny how a simple Google search shows that insinuation is utter crap.
The next page had a listing for an article from June 2014 when the board once again rejected a fact finder's report (and this one pointed out the teachers accepted the report.)
And for all the calls for saving money, the Board seems oddly bent on wasting money in other areas. For example, they recently spent $15,000 on a study that told them they were wasting $800,000 on transportation. There's bound to be some variability in spending...but $800,000? It's kind of an amazing article to read. And the report, too.
The Board is also cutting two checks to lawyers. This has a bill from John Audi (Sweet, Katz, & Williams) in January for nearly $6,000. (also one to a doctor, Sidney G. Ranck, Jr., for $1,200...he's in obstetrics and gynecology. That's kind of...disturbing?)
This bill has John Audi getting a check cut for nearly $3,000. And this one is another $6,500 check, along with their second lawyer, Pat Barrett, getting a check for $6,000. The list goes on.
And this is in addition to the acting superintendent's $130,000 salary (strange that seems to be missing from the salary list the Board is holding up as evidence that teachers are overpaid...)
The interesting part of that salary is that the previous superintendent was getting about $122,000/year. The acting superintendent isn't qualified to be superintendent and he's getting paid more. Part of me wonders if it's a gender thing...but that would be speculation. He's literally not qualified. The Board is paying for him to take classes and get his certification. That's why he's an acting superintendent. The previous superintendent was hired away from another district and had several years of experience. The new one is making more money and doesn't have a certificate. Somehow the Board equates this with hiring the best staff as per their resolutions back in January of 2013.
Overall the whole "response," in my opinion, is one long exercise in misleading the public. Take the claims that they have been open to bargaining this whole time in good faith with a grain of salt. They claim to care about the community and educating the kids, but their actions demonstrate, quite loudly, otherwise.
ADDENDUM
I did some quick checking of how much the frugal school board is spending on lawyer's fees. These figures were taken by eyeballing the board bills found on the school website. These reports are in PDF format, making them really really difficult to process in an automated fashion. Since I couldn't process them automatically I may have missed some payments, so the numbers I have, assuming I didn't misread some line items, would be considered a minimum paid to two law firms over the past 3 years, meaning there are probably payments missing. I think the contract talks may have extended beyond what bill items are on the website.
Regardless, this kind of money is interesting given how much the Board speaks of money problems and how expensive teachers are. It's also interesting how much vested interest the legal counsel has in prolonging the contract talks. How many meetings are there for negotiations? How much are they making per meeting?
The numbers are all there, listed with dates the checks were cut. Feel free to double check my numbers and tell me if I'm missing something. Also, I'm aware that the solicitor for the board (P.B.) does other duties, so these are not funds spent only on fighting the Union; I'm not privy to the other duties, however, so I can't break down the numbers into sub-categories. I've been told the John Audi firm was hired just to fight the Union, however, so big numbers are still big numbers.
Update 4-17-16
One of the sticking points in contract negotiations is in regards to the number of consecutive personal days a teacher may take. But it strikes me as being rather odd...what do they hope to accomplish by limiting consecutive personal days when teachers only get 3 personal days per year?
The AAEA (Union) provided an answer with a FaceBook post.
A Board member wanted to "talk" (usually situations like this implies "complain", but given a lack of specific information, that again is speculation) with a teacher. Teacher was on vacation. School board member now just happens to be pushing for limits on teacher time off.
If the implication is true the push to limit personal time off is purely for personal reasons, not for the benefit of the community taxpayers. This is a vendetta as a negotiations sticking point. How many other points of negotiation are driven by purely personal reasons?
Sunday, March 13, 2016
Apartment Rent and Building Management in the City
I was recently presented with the opportunity to renew my lease with the company that manages the apartment complex.
I grew up in a really small town; most people live in houses and worry about mortgage payments, not rent payments. At least, that's what it was like when I was growing up. After gas well people came to town the number of rentals...some apartments, some homes, and some homes converted into apartments...swelled. But that's another story.
Having grown up in a small town where the familiar experience dealt with home ownership, the logistics of living in a big city is still baffling, and definitely not what you are shown on television. Another important factor is that I moved to the city and have a job that pays above-average, both of which count against you when trying to find affordable rental space.
Pretty much standard is the idea that you'll be treated in a way that lends evidence to the idea that the management company hates their tenants. And in the city, you're almost always dealing with a management company. There doesn't seem to be many individuals or co-ops that own buildings in the city; it's almost always a large company that has little reason to listen to the individual needs of tenants in a city where housing is scarce and rent is always on the rise (my rent was raised by over $200/month, but it shouldn't change for the next two years, which for this area isn't too horrible. This is still absolutely crazy for someone back home to consider when rent here started at $1600/month.)
Many would think that for rent like that, you'd get some nice amenities. There's a laundry room where sometimes most of the washing machines and dryers are all working, and there's even some machines free if I get there at the right time. It is nice that there are three elevators; I've actually had very little problem with them so far, despite looking like they're from the 70's and leaving me to wonder if they're going to fail at an inopportune moment when they rattle.
The building has a "front desk" guy and doors that are badged with a keyfob in order to pass, but to be honest I'm not sure why. The guard doesn't stop anyone. I routinely come home to find various business cards, menus and door hangers stuck to my apartment entrance. Once someone started getting into my apartment; my wife and I were sitting in the living area watching a movie when there came a knock at the door followed by the sound of a key in the lock. The two people in the hall were held out only by the chain on the door; they muttered something upon seeing us, shut the door, and disappeared before I could get to the door and look for them in the hallway. I reported it to the front desk. A "special patrol" NYPD officer came up and wrote a brief statement on the back of scrap paper (literal scrap paper; it looked to have been torn from something on the desk.)
To my knowledge, they never did check the elevator camera footage to try finding them.
The front desk doesn't provide much in the way of security; nor do they assist with packages. If it doesn't fit in the mailbox, you might as well arrange to deliver a package to a local storage area or post office box, unless you can be certain someone will be available in the apartment to get the delivery.
The only thing I've seen the front desk people do is patrol the front parking area to make notes of who's parked too long so they can be booted and have fines collected.
But the way the company does business that more cynical people would think that the management company is purposely doing things inefficiently. The office that handles renewals is down the street from me. It is about five minutes' walk from my building, just past a post office.
The renewal forms came with an envelope for mailing it back to them (the office address is the destination and sender on the envelope) but I was still required to put on postage. It at least had a helpful box for the stamps with a note saying "Extra postage required." It didn't tell me how many stamps it would need, but it did imply more than one.
The renewal meant not just filling in forms but also including a check for the difference to go towards my security deposit. I'm not entirely comfortable sending these things through mail to the office...I mean, it's five minutes away. Why not just deliver it?
Unfortunately the weekday hours are 10AM to 6PM most days. I leave by 6 in the morning and usually get back around 7 or 8 at night. But their listed hours did say that they were open on Saturday from 10 to 5!
So I emailed the building superintendent and assistant super asking if I can deliver the renewal papers that weekend. I waited a day, and when I didn't hear anything, I tried another address in my contact list, and she confirmed I could deliver them. Great!
I got to the office on Saturday and the front desk buzzed me in. I asked about going up to the renewal office, and the person at the front desk said that office was closed.
"The leasing office is open, but the office that renews leases is closed?"
"Yes."
"And I can't leave this here for delivery?"
"No..."
Now I was just getting over the fact that this is 2016 and I have to write a paper check for renewing my lease, but I was having a lot more trouble figuring out why their leasing office was separate from their lease renewal office, and why their office hours are squarely placed in the time period when people trying to afford rent would most likely be at work trying to get a paycheck to afford the rent, and they expected residents to mail the letter out to traverse...at a small but inconvenient price...the mail delivery system so it would be delivered five minutes away from the apartment being renewed.
Why?
Perhaps they really don't care. Or maybe they don't like their tenants. Or they are just used to doing things this way and change is annoying. There are a number of possibilities, the number of which I can come up with changes depending on my mood and how annoyed I am.
Of course, I still put up with it.
The space is nice compared to a lot of other apartments. My first apartment was close to the size of a hotel room, and I had to walk eight flights of stairs to get to it. This apartment has an elevator to get me to the right floor.
And I am near suburbia. It's not as low-population as back home, but it's familiar...malls within 10 minutes walk from me. A grocery store at an even more convenient reach. There's a Costco not far from me. And a parking garage that isn't exactly cheap, but still less than the average Manhattan parking garage.
My previous apartment also had a building super that didn't live in the building; I think he lived in New Jersey, if he didn't work a second job there, because when I did get ahold of him for a repair request he would have to schedule it at a time he could come in when traffic wasn't horrible on the connecting bridges or tunnels. The staff here are relatively good about accommodating schedules and doing decent work.
And best of all I'm not horribly far from a subway line that leads pretty close to work. Maybe a ten or fifteen minute hike.
The neighborhood is relatively nice. I'm close to the densely populated island of Manhattan while being far enough away to have a slightly more affordable rent in an area not surrounded by skyscrapers.
In the end, living the apartment life in the city is a series of compromises. You pay way too much money to co-habitate with bugs and hopefully you will have a management company that might reply to you when you contact them about a leaky faucet or malfunctioning heater, and in return you get to live in one of the most cultured, active and diverse places in the country. Love it or hate it, my new lease says I'll be (barring unforeseen events) experiencing it for the next two years!
I grew up in a really small town; most people live in houses and worry about mortgage payments, not rent payments. At least, that's what it was like when I was growing up. After gas well people came to town the number of rentals...some apartments, some homes, and some homes converted into apartments...swelled. But that's another story.
Having grown up in a small town where the familiar experience dealt with home ownership, the logistics of living in a big city is still baffling, and definitely not what you are shown on television. Another important factor is that I moved to the city and have a job that pays above-average, both of which count against you when trying to find affordable rental space.
Pretty much standard is the idea that you'll be treated in a way that lends evidence to the idea that the management company hates their tenants. And in the city, you're almost always dealing with a management company. There doesn't seem to be many individuals or co-ops that own buildings in the city; it's almost always a large company that has little reason to listen to the individual needs of tenants in a city where housing is scarce and rent is always on the rise (my rent was raised by over $200/month, but it shouldn't change for the next two years, which for this area isn't too horrible. This is still absolutely crazy for someone back home to consider when rent here started at $1600/month.)
Many would think that for rent like that, you'd get some nice amenities. There's a laundry room where sometimes most of the washing machines and dryers are all working, and there's even some machines free if I get there at the right time. It is nice that there are three elevators; I've actually had very little problem with them so far, despite looking like they're from the 70's and leaving me to wonder if they're going to fail at an inopportune moment when they rattle.
The building has a "front desk" guy and doors that are badged with a keyfob in order to pass, but to be honest I'm not sure why. The guard doesn't stop anyone. I routinely come home to find various business cards, menus and door hangers stuck to my apartment entrance. Once someone started getting into my apartment; my wife and I were sitting in the living area watching a movie when there came a knock at the door followed by the sound of a key in the lock. The two people in the hall were held out only by the chain on the door; they muttered something upon seeing us, shut the door, and disappeared before I could get to the door and look for them in the hallway. I reported it to the front desk. A "special patrol" NYPD officer came up and wrote a brief statement on the back of scrap paper (literal scrap paper; it looked to have been torn from something on the desk.)
To my knowledge, they never did check the elevator camera footage to try finding them.
The front desk doesn't provide much in the way of security; nor do they assist with packages. If it doesn't fit in the mailbox, you might as well arrange to deliver a package to a local storage area or post office box, unless you can be certain someone will be available in the apartment to get the delivery.
The only thing I've seen the front desk people do is patrol the front parking area to make notes of who's parked too long so they can be booted and have fines collected.
But the way the company does business that more cynical people would think that the management company is purposely doing things inefficiently. The office that handles renewals is down the street from me. It is about five minutes' walk from my building, just past a post office.
The renewal forms came with an envelope for mailing it back to them (the office address is the destination and sender on the envelope) but I was still required to put on postage. It at least had a helpful box for the stamps with a note saying "Extra postage required." It didn't tell me how many stamps it would need, but it did imply more than one.
The renewal meant not just filling in forms but also including a check for the difference to go towards my security deposit. I'm not entirely comfortable sending these things through mail to the office...I mean, it's five minutes away. Why not just deliver it?
Unfortunately the weekday hours are 10AM to 6PM most days. I leave by 6 in the morning and usually get back around 7 or 8 at night. But their listed hours did say that they were open on Saturday from 10 to 5!
So I emailed the building superintendent and assistant super asking if I can deliver the renewal papers that weekend. I waited a day, and when I didn't hear anything, I tried another address in my contact list, and she confirmed I could deliver them. Great!
I got to the office on Saturday and the front desk buzzed me in. I asked about going up to the renewal office, and the person at the front desk said that office was closed.
"The leasing office is open, but the office that renews leases is closed?"
"Yes."
"And I can't leave this here for delivery?"
"No..."
Now I was just getting over the fact that this is 2016 and I have to write a paper check for renewing my lease, but I was having a lot more trouble figuring out why their leasing office was separate from their lease renewal office, and why their office hours are squarely placed in the time period when people trying to afford rent would most likely be at work trying to get a paycheck to afford the rent, and they expected residents to mail the letter out to traverse...at a small but inconvenient price...the mail delivery system so it would be delivered five minutes away from the apartment being renewed.
Why?
Perhaps they really don't care. Or maybe they don't like their tenants. Or they are just used to doing things this way and change is annoying. There are a number of possibilities, the number of which I can come up with changes depending on my mood and how annoyed I am.
Of course, I still put up with it.
The space is nice compared to a lot of other apartments. My first apartment was close to the size of a hotel room, and I had to walk eight flights of stairs to get to it. This apartment has an elevator to get me to the right floor.
And I am near suburbia. It's not as low-population as back home, but it's familiar...malls within 10 minutes walk from me. A grocery store at an even more convenient reach. There's a Costco not far from me. And a parking garage that isn't exactly cheap, but still less than the average Manhattan parking garage.
My previous apartment also had a building super that didn't live in the building; I think he lived in New Jersey, if he didn't work a second job there, because when I did get ahold of him for a repair request he would have to schedule it at a time he could come in when traffic wasn't horrible on the connecting bridges or tunnels. The staff here are relatively good about accommodating schedules and doing decent work.
And best of all I'm not horribly far from a subway line that leads pretty close to work. Maybe a ten or fifteen minute hike.
The neighborhood is relatively nice. I'm close to the densely populated island of Manhattan while being far enough away to have a slightly more affordable rent in an area not surrounded by skyscrapers.
In the end, living the apartment life in the city is a series of compromises. You pay way too much money to co-habitate with bugs and hopefully you will have a management company that might reply to you when you contact them about a leaky faucet or malfunctioning heater, and in return you get to live in one of the most cultured, active and diverse places in the country. Love it or hate it, my new lease says I'll be (barring unforeseen events) experiencing it for the next two years!
Sunday, February 28, 2016
Lessons From an Elementary School: Censorship and Systems
My son recently came under increased scrutiny at school after he arrived home from school with tape on his shirt.
He wore a shirt that he had worn several times before. It said something to the effect of "I have a freaking awesome mom, and yes, she bought this shirt for me." The exact wording is inconsequential; on this particular day the operative, taped-over word was "freaking."
I took umbrage to this for a few reasons. One, my son did not understand what he did wrong. He, like many sensible individuals, did not consider the word "freaking" to be offensive, especially taken in context.
Two, he had worn the shirt before and didn't have problems. When something is disruptive to the learning environment, you'd think that it would be something that causes a noticeable problem.
Three, he didn't know who was offended by his shirt. His homeroom teacher was delegated the duty of covering up or eliminating this newly-created problem, and he says he has no idea who "told on him" (so to speak.)
Four, he often has a similar way of thinking that I do. If something like this were to happen to me, I'd interpret it as someone has a "thing" against me, and tattling...especially by hiding behind procedures to prevent anyone from knowing who was too cowardly to take responsibility and say that they have a problem with it, so I'd know to avoid them in the future...would make me want to avoid everyone, knowing that one of them may well "attack" me again and I have no defense against them.
He's working on ways to better cope with the world. But he is still learning. He's still adapting. And for him, he's very anxious when he feels he is "breaking rules." He wants nothing more than to keep his head down and stay off the radar with the exception of his one self-imposed defining trait, which is his unique hair coloring. Otherwise he stays behaviorally nondescript to the point of being described by many as "shy."
So he's confused and a bit upset that he was singled out. The act of covering the shirt drew attention to it, like a bit of fashion-themed Streisand effect. My wife and I felt that this was mishandled because it dealt with something that was only marginally offensive, as evidenced by the fact that no one seemed to have a problem with it the previous times he wore the shirt and in this case it clearly wasn't causing a disruption in the classroom. It was, we were told, one teacher having an issue with the word and complaining.
I emailed the principal asking what lesson he would suggest Little Dude take away from this; to me, it was against the principle of personal responsibility since the teacher was hiding their identity (although this is a common practice as you get older; you have people who don't want to deal with angry retribution for complaining but feel the need to have the perceived issue addressed which leads to fun office politics and HR speaking in the third person during special meetings...I guess kudos to the school administrator for showing support for the teacher in this case? Administrators supporting their staff seems to be a rare occurrence nowadays, what with teachers waging a war and all...see previous posts if you don't get that reference.) The school liked pushing the idea of character traits to focus on, but this was less "taking personal responsibility" and more a demonstration of "do as I say and not as I do."
It was also arbitrary enforcement of a rule, which just made him more confused. There's no rule in any handbook, from what I could find, saying that "freaking" is a forbidden word. He'd displayed it without issue before. He'd heard religious people use similar words in the context of swearing...darn, gosh, etc...as an alternative to "actual" pejoratives. One day the shirt was fine. The next, he's given a choice of wearing his shirt inside out, taping across the offensive word or wearing a sweatshirt over it (he had no sweatshirt available.)
So how should I explain this in a way that contextualizes and makes the situation make sense to Little Dude, turning this into a teachable moment? I didn't elaborate on my feelings in the message to the principal as I did above; I mostly focused on asking him what lessons the school was imparting, and how to explain them to a confused 10-year-old.
The principal replied with a message asking if we could all meet in person.
It would be easy to say that this was because the principal didn't want his words recorded, or that perhaps he was, like so many others in the education field, technophobic. Maybe he wanted witnesses, or maybe he felt his strength in placating angry parents lay in dealing with issues in person so he can get a "read" on the person, which the written word is often not conducive to conveying for many people. But at this point it didn't really matter. I was supposed to be in town that day anyway, so we arranged to meet Monday morning.
As for the meeting itself, my wife and I didn't go in with any set outcome in mind. I figured he was planning on meeting angry, raving helicopter parents; to be sure, I was angry, but I didn't speak much at all. After having dealt with the school, both as an employee and as a parent (and as a student...this school was similar in many ways to the schools I attended) I figured they would be loathe to actually address the concerns I asked about directly, nor would they want to (or be able to, at this point) argue how stupid it was to consider "freaking" an offensive word. They had committed. An apology would even be out of the question.
I wasn't disappointed. It was made kind of clear through social cues that the position of the school is that this was an inappropriate thing, and they trusted that the shirt would not be a problem in the future. The tone quickly shifted to one of Little Dude needs to just cope with it. If they can help, they will, but really it's not their fault that he can't handle it (this is all paraphrasing and my interpretation of the situation, by the way...I wouldn't want to quote what is said and have misremembered something.) No one is out to "get him" and his homeroom teacher tried to handle it as quietly as she could.
Which...we already knew. The problem is that it's not how his brain interprets things, and the reaction to the situation was such that it drew extra attention to him. But the conversation was, at the 10,000 foot level, quickly communicated that the school was in the right, it was handled how it was handled, and to deal with it in the future realize it was nothing personal. I'm really glad I didn't have to travel 150 miles to get that outcome.
I did email a follow up that pointed out that the original question, asking what lessons were taught by this action, was never really answered, and suggesting that in the future a note home requesting he not have that shirt in school again would probably suffice. The shirt wasn't causing a disruption, and my issue was with how Little Dude interpreted the situation and singling him out over something silly. If he had to go through this the least we could do was have a teachable moment with him...introducing a different perspective that wasn't part of a narrative that sometimes people take advantage of a system to anonymously attack you or that sometimes things the majority of people don't care about will still piss someone off and they'll try to silence you for it.
A simple note home would have meant that I'd still think you were doing something silly and overreacting. But I'd at least have ridiculed that in silence. There would not have been an email, nor this posting, or the obligatory "What the shit, school?!" FaceBook posting. Focusing attention on him, making him think he did something wrong, punishing him for an arbitrary and opinionated interpretation of something like that was a bit much.
The reply I got was probably one of the most diplomatic "go away" messages I'd ever gotten. (Honestly, it was. Very succinct and staying on-message.) It still didn't answer the question nor address the suggestion I made.
Or perhaps it did. The question, he said, may not have an easy answer. And at the end, he said that the teachers will proceed as usual, although the context may be up for interpretation. I'm kind of stretching to say that the questions were addressed rather than deflected.
So I'm back to square one. Part of the problem is my own history with school systems. I came from a family of educators. I worked in the public school system. And it took me a ridiculously long time to come to terms with some things, such as a school isn't really concerned with the craft of teaching or finding better ways to learn. That is what is in the brochure version of the school system. Education. Learning. Academics. Helping kids achieve their potentials, preparing them for tomorrow. Even Little Dude's school district proclaims that it's "Building Foundations for Future Success!"
But really schools are a system. I believed the brochure version of reality growing up...that schools were places to learn, and they cared about learning. If I didn't understand something then it was because I didn't understand the situation, not because of a dissonance between what the school system claimed and what they actually did. I had the flaw. I didn't see why they're doing this but it really made sense, so I had something broken in my head.
This was a kind of example of that. Not just the personal responsibility thing..."I'm so offended this must be stopped, but I don't want them to know who it was in case the parents are mad," but the idea that this was an arbitrary rule enforcement ("Nothing personal, we just found someone who doesn't like it") and a common sense approach to this, seeing as it wasn't actually causing a problem but instead was purely a "we feel like this is breaking an interpretation of the rules" (again...I don't believe this is actually written out as "thou shalt not wear a freaking shirt in school" in any of the rules) that this could just as readily been handled by asking us not to send him to school in that shirt again. Not just Little Dude. Any kid. This was an interpretation of the rules that no one else had bothered to go through the trouble of being offended over.
The principal felt that the fact he had worn it several times without being noticed was unfortunate, but that doesn't make it ok. As an experiment, I wondered what would happen if we sent him in a shirt that read, "Fuck this shit," would that go several days without being noticed? I think it's a little disingenuous to characterize it as a "we didn't notice" when really it was "no one gave a damn until Bob down the hall was offended by it."
I suppose I have to tell Little Dude that schools are systems. They thrive on rules that can be enforced, sometimes arbitrarily, and not treating people as individuals because that takes resources and attention. It took me a long time to learn that; like, an embarrassingly long time. That's part of the reason that it was made clear almost right off the bat that there would be no discussion about the relevance of "Freaking" to the colorful metaphor list (we didn't bring that up, by the way...it seemed to be something he wanted to address right off that we'd not discuss that before diving right into why it was Little Dude's problem to properly perceive the situation.)
Sometimes, being a system, schools will say one thing while still violating those principles when they do things. It's hypocritical. But they'll justify it to themselves, and move on, and be even more offended if you don't accept your situation and do the same.
And sometimes situations just aren't fair, and never will be fair. That's something that schools indirectly teach that is actually quite relevant to life later on. You'll still find yourself in a situation that is uncomfortable, and you don't have the power to tell people that it's wrong. Storybook endings don't necessarily exist, where being right means you end up winning in the end.
Last, perhaps, just because it feels like someone possibly has a problem with you doesn't mean everyone is out to get you, metaphorically speaking. But you should probably be careful who you trust. Teachers are teachers, not friends. It's an important distinction, and one I think many kids don't quite learn the way they should (as well as some teachers...) That's a tough lesson for a kid to learn when your brain is wired to be more literal in interpreting things; the brochure of ideals doesn't match what schools actually do, and that gets confusing unless you start internalizing the dissonance as a problem with yourself and not the situation. It took me way too long to start coming to terms with that. I'd hate to have Little Dude go through years without benefiting from that late realization.
He wore a shirt that he had worn several times before. It said something to the effect of "I have a freaking awesome mom, and yes, she bought this shirt for me." The exact wording is inconsequential; on this particular day the operative, taped-over word was "freaking."
I took umbrage to this for a few reasons. One, my son did not understand what he did wrong. He, like many sensible individuals, did not consider the word "freaking" to be offensive, especially taken in context.
Two, he had worn the shirt before and didn't have problems. When something is disruptive to the learning environment, you'd think that it would be something that causes a noticeable problem.
Three, he didn't know who was offended by his shirt. His homeroom teacher was delegated the duty of covering up or eliminating this newly-created problem, and he says he has no idea who "told on him" (so to speak.)
Four, he often has a similar way of thinking that I do. If something like this were to happen to me, I'd interpret it as someone has a "thing" against me, and tattling...especially by hiding behind procedures to prevent anyone from knowing who was too cowardly to take responsibility and say that they have a problem with it, so I'd know to avoid them in the future...would make me want to avoid everyone, knowing that one of them may well "attack" me again and I have no defense against them.
He's working on ways to better cope with the world. But he is still learning. He's still adapting. And for him, he's very anxious when he feels he is "breaking rules." He wants nothing more than to keep his head down and stay off the radar with the exception of his one self-imposed defining trait, which is his unique hair coloring. Otherwise he stays behaviorally nondescript to the point of being described by many as "shy."
So he's confused and a bit upset that he was singled out. The act of covering the shirt drew attention to it, like a bit of fashion-themed Streisand effect. My wife and I felt that this was mishandled because it dealt with something that was only marginally offensive, as evidenced by the fact that no one seemed to have a problem with it the previous times he wore the shirt and in this case it clearly wasn't causing a disruption in the classroom. It was, we were told, one teacher having an issue with the word and complaining.
I emailed the principal asking what lesson he would suggest Little Dude take away from this; to me, it was against the principle of personal responsibility since the teacher was hiding their identity (although this is a common practice as you get older; you have people who don't want to deal with angry retribution for complaining but feel the need to have the perceived issue addressed which leads to fun office politics and HR speaking in the third person during special meetings...I guess kudos to the school administrator for showing support for the teacher in this case? Administrators supporting their staff seems to be a rare occurrence nowadays, what with teachers waging a war and all...see previous posts if you don't get that reference.) The school liked pushing the idea of character traits to focus on, but this was less "taking personal responsibility" and more a demonstration of "do as I say and not as I do."
It was also arbitrary enforcement of a rule, which just made him more confused. There's no rule in any handbook, from what I could find, saying that "freaking" is a forbidden word. He'd displayed it without issue before. He'd heard religious people use similar words in the context of swearing...darn, gosh, etc...as an alternative to "actual" pejoratives. One day the shirt was fine. The next, he's given a choice of wearing his shirt inside out, taping across the offensive word or wearing a sweatshirt over it (he had no sweatshirt available.)
So how should I explain this in a way that contextualizes and makes the situation make sense to Little Dude, turning this into a teachable moment? I didn't elaborate on my feelings in the message to the principal as I did above; I mostly focused on asking him what lessons the school was imparting, and how to explain them to a confused 10-year-old.
The principal replied with a message asking if we could all meet in person.
It would be easy to say that this was because the principal didn't want his words recorded, or that perhaps he was, like so many others in the education field, technophobic. Maybe he wanted witnesses, or maybe he felt his strength in placating angry parents lay in dealing with issues in person so he can get a "read" on the person, which the written word is often not conducive to conveying for many people. But at this point it didn't really matter. I was supposed to be in town that day anyway, so we arranged to meet Monday morning.
As for the meeting itself, my wife and I didn't go in with any set outcome in mind. I figured he was planning on meeting angry, raving helicopter parents; to be sure, I was angry, but I didn't speak much at all. After having dealt with the school, both as an employee and as a parent (and as a student...this school was similar in many ways to the schools I attended) I figured they would be loathe to actually address the concerns I asked about directly, nor would they want to (or be able to, at this point) argue how stupid it was to consider "freaking" an offensive word. They had committed. An apology would even be out of the question.
I wasn't disappointed. It was made kind of clear through social cues that the position of the school is that this was an inappropriate thing, and they trusted that the shirt would not be a problem in the future. The tone quickly shifted to one of Little Dude needs to just cope with it. If they can help, they will, but really it's not their fault that he can't handle it (this is all paraphrasing and my interpretation of the situation, by the way...I wouldn't want to quote what is said and have misremembered something.) No one is out to "get him" and his homeroom teacher tried to handle it as quietly as she could.
Which...we already knew. The problem is that it's not how his brain interprets things, and the reaction to the situation was such that it drew extra attention to him. But the conversation was, at the 10,000 foot level, quickly communicated that the school was in the right, it was handled how it was handled, and to deal with it in the future realize it was nothing personal. I'm really glad I didn't have to travel 150 miles to get that outcome.
I did email a follow up that pointed out that the original question, asking what lessons were taught by this action, was never really answered, and suggesting that in the future a note home requesting he not have that shirt in school again would probably suffice. The shirt wasn't causing a disruption, and my issue was with how Little Dude interpreted the situation and singling him out over something silly. If he had to go through this the least we could do was have a teachable moment with him...introducing a different perspective that wasn't part of a narrative that sometimes people take advantage of a system to anonymously attack you or that sometimes things the majority of people don't care about will still piss someone off and they'll try to silence you for it.
A simple note home would have meant that I'd still think you were doing something silly and overreacting. But I'd at least have ridiculed that in silence. There would not have been an email, nor this posting, or the obligatory "What the shit, school?!" FaceBook posting. Focusing attention on him, making him think he did something wrong, punishing him for an arbitrary and opinionated interpretation of something like that was a bit much.
The reply I got was probably one of the most diplomatic "go away" messages I'd ever gotten. (Honestly, it was. Very succinct and staying on-message.) It still didn't answer the question nor address the suggestion I made.
Or perhaps it did. The question, he said, may not have an easy answer. And at the end, he said that the teachers will proceed as usual, although the context may be up for interpretation. I'm kind of stretching to say that the questions were addressed rather than deflected.
So I'm back to square one. Part of the problem is my own history with school systems. I came from a family of educators. I worked in the public school system. And it took me a ridiculously long time to come to terms with some things, such as a school isn't really concerned with the craft of teaching or finding better ways to learn. That is what is in the brochure version of the school system. Education. Learning. Academics. Helping kids achieve their potentials, preparing them for tomorrow. Even Little Dude's school district proclaims that it's "Building Foundations for Future Success!"
But really schools are a system. I believed the brochure version of reality growing up...that schools were places to learn, and they cared about learning. If I didn't understand something then it was because I didn't understand the situation, not because of a dissonance between what the school system claimed and what they actually did. I had the flaw. I didn't see why they're doing this but it really made sense, so I had something broken in my head.
This was a kind of example of that. Not just the personal responsibility thing..."I'm so offended this must be stopped, but I don't want them to know who it was in case the parents are mad," but the idea that this was an arbitrary rule enforcement ("Nothing personal, we just found someone who doesn't like it") and a common sense approach to this, seeing as it wasn't actually causing a problem but instead was purely a "we feel like this is breaking an interpretation of the rules" (again...I don't believe this is actually written out as "thou shalt not wear a freaking shirt in school" in any of the rules) that this could just as readily been handled by asking us not to send him to school in that shirt again. Not just Little Dude. Any kid. This was an interpretation of the rules that no one else had bothered to go through the trouble of being offended over.
The principal felt that the fact he had worn it several times without being noticed was unfortunate, but that doesn't make it ok. As an experiment, I wondered what would happen if we sent him in a shirt that read, "Fuck this shit," would that go several days without being noticed? I think it's a little disingenuous to characterize it as a "we didn't notice" when really it was "no one gave a damn until Bob down the hall was offended by it."
I suppose I have to tell Little Dude that schools are systems. They thrive on rules that can be enforced, sometimes arbitrarily, and not treating people as individuals because that takes resources and attention. It took me a long time to learn that; like, an embarrassingly long time. That's part of the reason that it was made clear almost right off the bat that there would be no discussion about the relevance of "Freaking" to the colorful metaphor list (we didn't bring that up, by the way...it seemed to be something he wanted to address right off that we'd not discuss that before diving right into why it was Little Dude's problem to properly perceive the situation.)
Sometimes, being a system, schools will say one thing while still violating those principles when they do things. It's hypocritical. But they'll justify it to themselves, and move on, and be even more offended if you don't accept your situation and do the same.
And sometimes situations just aren't fair, and never will be fair. That's something that schools indirectly teach that is actually quite relevant to life later on. You'll still find yourself in a situation that is uncomfortable, and you don't have the power to tell people that it's wrong. Storybook endings don't necessarily exist, where being right means you end up winning in the end.
Last, perhaps, just because it feels like someone possibly has a problem with you doesn't mean everyone is out to get you, metaphorically speaking. But you should probably be careful who you trust. Teachers are teachers, not friends. It's an important distinction, and one I think many kids don't quite learn the way they should (as well as some teachers...) That's a tough lesson for a kid to learn when your brain is wired to be more literal in interpreting things; the brochure of ideals doesn't match what schools actually do, and that gets confusing unless you start internalizing the dissonance as a problem with yourself and not the situation. It took me way too long to start coming to terms with that. I'd hate to have Little Dude go through years without benefiting from that late realization.
Monday, January 18, 2016
Where Am I Rsyncing? (OS X Edition)
This is not about rsync options and using rsync. Rsync is so esoteric that there are tons of Google pixels dedicated to tutorials and examples of how to use rsync on the Internet. A search for the word "rsync" on Google gave me over a million results in .43 seconds. A search for "rsync examples" yielded 473,000 results in .39 seconds.
There's likely little I can add to that unless I want to create a cheatsheet for myself on my own blog.
What I do want to talk about...since it was surprising enough to me that I'm still thinking about it a day later...is an incident where rsync seemed to be running fine, but it was totally $%^& with me to the point where I needed to call in a coworker to rubber duck the issue.
I had two Macintoshes. On MacSource, I had a folder I'll say went to "/Users/myname/files/Town Problems". On MacDestination, I also have a "Users/myname/files/Town Problems" folder.
I used my typical rsync command line that...to my knowledge...had not given me issues. The whole archive and recursion and delete settings with a sprinkle of verbose and progress. It was pretty simple, and since it was a modified version of lines pulled from my quick and dirty sync scripts, it was nothing that should have had trouble.
Only I knew it had trouble when the first few lines scrolling rapidly through my terminal included, I could have sworn, the word "delete."
Huh? Not that many files should be getting deleted on that remote machine, I thought. There should have been two files deleted. Not enough that I should notice it in the rapidly-filled scroll buffer jittering past my eyes.
I secure-shelled into the remote machine and scanned the directory. The files that should have been deleted were still there. And a directory that should have been added, wasn't.
I scanned the command line I used. No typos.
Re-ran rsync with more verbose options. Everything, it swore, checked out and was a match. "Synced!," it seemed to say.
I fiddled with quotes, since there was a space in the name and rsync can be a pain in the arse with properly handling spaces, depending on how (and what) is doing the interpretation of the command on the machines involved. I tried various combinations of escape characters mixed with " and '. Each attempt gave no feedback indicating anything other than a successful sync. I even triple checked the use of a trailing slash on the specification, as common with rsync issues as off-by-one errors in loops for programmers.
"Dammit!"
I called in a coworker to glance at the issue and see if he could see what I was missing. At first, he couldn't. We talked it through as we navigated up and down the directory tree to see if it failed to expand the command line correctly, dumping it into "/Users/myname/files/Town/ instead of Town Problems. "No, that's not it. There's a /Users/myname/files/town directory, but not Town..."
Insert the screeching halt of realization there.
OS X does some really fun things to hide the fact that it's a POSIX UNIX engine hiding behind a pretty interface. And most of the time, it's really good at hiding the UNIX bits to the point of being usable by home users. The rest of the time those tricks create...quirks. And I realized we were running into one of those quirks.
"Dammit!"
diskutil info /
That's a command that gives information about your drives. Here's a couple lines from an example output:
File System Personality: Case-sensitive Journaled HFS+
Name (User Visible): Mac OS Extended (Case-sensitive, Journaled)
...See that "Case-sensitive" bit buried in there? Yeah, that's missing from the drives I was using in the sync. Apple recommends, probably due to compatibility issues with certain software, not to use case-sensitive HFS+ on root partitions. The thing is this is easily forgettable because the bash shell hides this when doing autocompletion. For example...
cd temp
mkdir Test
mkdir test
->mkdir: test: File exists
ls
->Test
cd t<tab>
->autocomplete doesn't do anything
cd T<tab>
->autocomplete changes it to "cd Test/"
<backspace the line>
rmdir test
ls
->
mkdir Test
ls
->Test
cd test
pwd
->/Users/myname/temp/test
cd ..
ls
->Test
Autocomplete treats the folders as case sensitive. Other commands do not. Because bash enforced case sensitivity while the OS didn't.
HAHAHA...the whole time rsync was syncing (and had wiped) my "/Users/myname/files/town" folder and I hadn't had issues with my previous syncs because I wasn't using folders that had shared namespace with partial-string-matched folder names with different capitalization.
How to solve the problem at hand? According to the history file, I used this:
...and that interpreted the file paths correctly. With a slight modification, I restored my "town" folder from my backup copy, ending my hour of expletive-filled head scratching.
Once again, bitten by the attempt to make things more user-friendly. Dammit!
There's likely little I can add to that unless I want to create a cheatsheet for myself on my own blog.
What I do want to talk about...since it was surprising enough to me that I'm still thinking about it a day later...is an incident where rsync seemed to be running fine, but it was totally $%^& with me to the point where I needed to call in a coworker to rubber duck the issue.
I had two Macintoshes. On MacSource, I had a folder I'll say went to "/Users/myname/files/Town Problems". On MacDestination, I also have a "Users/myname/files/Town Problems" folder.
I used my typical rsync command line that...to my knowledge...had not given me issues. The whole archive and recursion and delete settings with a sprinkle of verbose and progress. It was pretty simple, and since it was a modified version of lines pulled from my quick and dirty sync scripts, it was nothing that should have had trouble.
Only I knew it had trouble when the first few lines scrolling rapidly through my terminal included, I could have sworn, the word "delete."
Huh? Not that many files should be getting deleted on that remote machine, I thought. There should have been two files deleted. Not enough that I should notice it in the rapidly-filled scroll buffer jittering past my eyes.
I secure-shelled into the remote machine and scanned the directory. The files that should have been deleted were still there. And a directory that should have been added, wasn't.
I scanned the command line I used. No typos.
Re-ran rsync with more verbose options. Everything, it swore, checked out and was a match. "Synced!," it seemed to say.
I fiddled with quotes, since there was a space in the name and rsync can be a pain in the arse with properly handling spaces, depending on how (and what) is doing the interpretation of the command on the machines involved. I tried various combinations of escape characters mixed with " and '. Each attempt gave no feedback indicating anything other than a successful sync. I even triple checked the use of a trailing slash on the specification, as common with rsync issues as off-by-one errors in loops for programmers.
"Dammit!"
I called in a coworker to glance at the issue and see if he could see what I was missing. At first, he couldn't. We talked it through as we navigated up and down the directory tree to see if it failed to expand the command line correctly, dumping it into "/Users/myname/files/Town/ instead of Town Problems. "No, that's not it. There's a /Users/myname/files/town directory, but not Town..."
Insert the screeching halt of realization there.
OS X does some really fun things to hide the fact that it's a POSIX UNIX engine hiding behind a pretty interface. And most of the time, it's really good at hiding the UNIX bits to the point of being usable by home users. The rest of the time those tricks create...quirks. And I realized we were running into one of those quirks.
"Dammit!"
diskutil info /
That's a command that gives information about your drives. Here's a couple lines from an example output:
File System Personality: Case-sensitive Journaled HFS+
Name (User Visible): Mac OS Extended (Case-sensitive, Journaled)
...See that "Case-sensitive" bit buried in there? Yeah, that's missing from the drives I was using in the sync. Apple recommends, probably due to compatibility issues with certain software, not to use case-sensitive HFS+ on root partitions. The thing is this is easily forgettable because the bash shell hides this when doing autocompletion. For example...
cd temp
mkdir Test
mkdir test
->mkdir: test: File exists
ls
->Test
cd t<tab>
->autocomplete doesn't do anything
cd T<tab>
->autocomplete changes it to "cd Test/"
<backspace the line>
rmdir test
ls
->
mkdir Test
ls
->Test
cd test
pwd
->/Users/myname/temp/test
cd ..
ls
->Test
Autocomplete treats the folders as case sensitive. Other commands do not. Because bash enforced case sensitivity while the OS didn't.
HAHAHA...the whole time rsync was syncing (and had wiped) my "/Users/myname/files/town" folder and I hadn't had issues with my previous syncs because I wasn't using folders that had shared namespace with partial-string-matched folder names with different capitalization.
How to solve the problem at hand? According to the history file, I used this:
rsync --progress -av --delete '/Users/myname/files/Town Problems/' myname@MacDestination:"/Users/myname/files/Town\ Problems"
...and that interpreted the file paths correctly. With a slight modification, I restored my "town" folder from my backup copy, ending my hour of expletive-filled head scratching.
Once again, bitten by the attempt to make things more user-friendly. Dammit!
Sunday, December 20, 2015
Athens Teachers' War Against the Board: Public Relations
There was a recent rant going around Facebook about an "incident" at an elementary school in the Athens district. The rant was gaining traction in that it was a beautiful moment for anti-Muslim bigotry to be publicly paraded after the ranter claimed his child was subjected to 20 minutes of Muslim indoctrination and anti-Christian holiday...something. It's not worth really rehashing much at all.
I learned about it only because I was sent a message that a mutual friend on Facebook had posted information from a closed group dedicated to the elementary school's Parent-Teacher Group, a "social media response" to the allegations.
I wondered what the school's official response was; supposedly, according to the ranter, the school received many phone calls from numerous sources after his tirade. You would think there would have been an official response to an incident that had supposedly happened several days previous and had generated phone calls to the superintendent. But as of the time I'm writing this, you'd be wrong. I find nothing on the district's home page, where last year the school board had posted a list of arguments outlining why the teachers are grossly overpaid compared to the constantly toiling school administrators.
I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. Sources within the district say that it's not unusual for administrators to require teachers to address behavior issues of students with parents before administration will become involved. Calming an outraged mob of ill-informed Facebookers is only a stone's throw away from discussing behavior issues with the public if the school doesn't acknowledge the need for consistent handling of these issues through official channels.
Note: there was a newspaper story referring to a district statement. First, that guy's rant and backhanded apology was a story in the local paper?!? Really?!? Second, despite the story's claim, I can't find an official response on the school website, and the quotes in the story mirror the statement posted by the head teacher on the PTG Facebook page. Unless someone corrects me on where this statement came from and who authorized the wording, I'm calling shenanigans.
What struck me about the statement from the PTG Facebook page was how factual it was. It calmly, almost clinically, debunked the same batshit stupid ideas that still are tossed around about schools despite time and time again being denied, such as not saying the Pledge of Allegiance or allowing students to say "Merry Christmas". (Snopes.com needs to strike a deal with Facebook to auto filter that crap...please.)
The tone is much like the rare release from the teacher's Union in their ongoing contract negotiations. If you read what a certain board member characterized as a declaration of war, it was by far one of the most boring and dry declarations of war I've ever read. I mean, though apocryphal, at least John Hancock signed his "screw you" to Britain with such large strokes it could be read without spectacles. The Union's "demands" were tame and deferential. Contrast that with the bombastic tone of the mostly fictional allegations made by the father angry that his kid was learning about another culture, or the hyperbolic tone of the "pillar of the community" board member having a public tantrum and all but declaring war on those greedy, scheming teachers. The Union letter couched itself more heavily than my ten-year-old testing IKEA living room furniture displays.
Everything the Union releases is carefully crafted to be factual and straightforward; nothing is incendiary or opinionated. It's like being lectured by a Vulcan. The school board, on the other hand, has nothing to lose despite characterizing themselves as victims held hostage by their employees for the past three years. They have no problem going public with propaganda painting the non-community-member (and if you listen to them, probably not even really human) teachers as a boogyman army out for community members' wallets while contributing nothing to society--yet, many of the teachers live within the same communities as those they teach.
These recent incidents highlight a fundamental issue for the teachers; they have a serious PR problem. Yes, there are groups like the PTG that distribute information through a special Facebook page, but Facebook, like all social media, is an insular bubble. The very nature of social media means people seek out like-minded people. What do ninety percent of people you "friend" or "follow" in social media do when someone says something you don't like? Unfriend. Unfollow. Mute. Ban. Social media encourages you to pare down what information you're exposed to until these groups are echo chambers and followers hear what reinforces their established beliefs.
The job of public relations being farmed out to teachers is also treated as an afterthought; they're busy with actual schoolwork and busywork mandated by school administrators and state education requirements. But it's also a trap. Anyone who takes on this responsibility of informing the public about things the public is generally ignorant of while also shouldering the blame for backlash that it will inevitably incur is putting their job on the line. School officials tend to dislike situations that put them in a poor light, and there is simply no way to please everyone. Take as exhibit A the Facebook ranter's non-apology (the entire apology was yet another rant that, while technically an apology ["I said I was wrong at the end of these many paragraphs complaining about why the school was still truly at fault for following mandates which I explained through clever use of childish name calling!,"] totally deflected from an actual apology) where he still had numerous messages praising his post. These are people who will never be convinced the teachers (or the school) are not on some campaign to destroy America. Sharing information with the public and taking responsibility for the content is not an enviable position for a teacher when a hostile school board, principal, or acting superintendent is very willing to make an example of any pebble daring to make waves. It's telling that beyond press releases condemning teachers, the school board doesn't seem to work to clarify misunderstandings between the general public and the school, nor have I found a statement attributed to the acting superintendent defending his employees on the matter--only snippets of quotes in a newspaper article.
It does make sense if you look at it in the context of having someone who might do a decent job of clarifying issues while lacking the authority to be the "official" voice of the school; if that person screws up, he or she can be blamed by administrators and will be called to the carpet. It's another case of teachers being asked to do things unofficially; convenient to say this thing that has to get done requires them to step up for yet another thing not contractually required, but won't be recognized in the next argument where the board points out how overpaid teachers are compared to the minimum requirements they are contractually obligated to follow.
True media coverage of what the teachers do of benefit to the community...access to information outside of the insular social media circles...is rare. The politicized environment within the school discourages teachers from speaking because of the previously mentioned pebbles-making-waves problem; having bills to pay necessitates a job, and leadership within the school makes a point of emphasizing that, as one source told me, "There's no law preventing your boss from making your life miserable."
There are a few key moments that encourages coverage of the schools. The first is anything involving taxes. Taxes directly affect community members, and no one likes taxes. So when the community grumbles about paying them, especially (and understandably) people who don't have kids in the school, who better to blame than the schools? (I'll not mention the fact that governments underfund the schools, since people prefer to blame the most immediate and convenient entities to yell at.) School leadership blames teachers for high costs. They fail to mention that teachers make up the largest number of employees and, like in most businesses, employees tend to be the most expensive cost when it comes to expenditures.
The second is that spectacles sell. Everyone loves watching monkeys fling poo at the circus, and seeing articles declaring war on the teachers guarantees sales and clicks. I've mentioned the school board has nothing to lose and it's an open secret that retaliation within the schools happens if you make waves; the net result are the tactful and sanitized Union statements occasionally proffered to the media outlets while board press releases are plastered on the front of the school website.
It's sad that the teachers still do what "needs to be done" with hardly any acknowledgement. Technically they're supposed to be working under "work to rule" where they do exactly what is required by their contracts. It seems logical. "I'll show you how valuable I am with all this extra crap I do," the teacher says as another turd is hurled in his or her direction, missing by inches. "You criticize how little I'm required to do and get paid far too much for doing. I'll start doing only what's required."
But they don't.
If they worked only the time they are mandated to work, papers would never get corrected. Grades would never be entered. The workload they have requires working outside the hours they are paid to work. And if they actually did what the contract obligates, they'd be fired. Ironic.
But that wouldn't garner sympathy from a public who knows the school board justifies their distaste for academic "non-community-member" teachers.
Part of the ranter's tirade brought up the point that this was the same school that threw out lunches if kids couldn't pay. "Whatever happened with that? People were pretty pissed about it..." The school never recanted the policy of no-charging lunches. The same community that feels overburdened by the teaching staff continues to have a "paying for food" problem, sometimes to the tune of several thousand dollars. So the board decided to stop feeding those that continue to charge meals without paying for them.
I don't recall the Union pointing out that the Board was not feeding poor kids as a cost savings measure when the Board was doing what was best for the kids. I also don't recall the Union pointing out that students in schools that don't give peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to those who went without lunch were still getting lunches when they didn't pay because the teachers were paying for them. Yeah. Teachers didn't think it was right, they quietly paid for lunches for kids who can't pay for their own lunches. But I haven't seen that in the newspapers.
Nor have I seen the "dress down days" making headlines in the paper. Teachers get the opportunity to pay for the privilege of wearing a more comfortable outfit once a week and in exchange part of their salaries to a charity or cause. Unless there is a specific cause, it goes into funding a scholarship fund, but much of the funding goes to local charities such as Food for Thought, The Bridge or The Children's House. When a student, employee, or alumnus encounters a traumatic life-changing event, it's not unusual for the dress down day funds to go towards easing financial burdens for those in need. Over the course of a school year, it is not uncommon for each building in the Athens district to raise thousands of dollars or to donate goods and services. Does the paper cover these donations? Rarely, unless it is submitted to the paper by those heading a particular cause.
Perhaps this lack of public relations is a result of what happens when there's little to no accountability in the school system, which is ironic given that the most hated mandates by the public...No Child Left Behind, Common Core, etc...are the result of a public crying for accountability in the school system. Teachers end up being the target for the accountability crosshairs since years of experience has taught them that administration doesn't believe in the idea that good managers shield their employees from issues not directly part of their jobs as teachers. Teachers are targeted under the guise of accountability for everything from how their students behave to what parents are upset over, things they have little actual control over. It's no wonder they are skittish in the face of public assaults from people who have no accountability for poo-flinging.
I think what the teachers need is a reporter who cares about the state of teaching in his or her community. I know that reporters typically care only about things that grab headlines for being outrageous or are so directly relevant to the paper's readers that a 5 year old wouldn't need the importance explained to them and I also understand that much of the importance of proper education doesn't become evident until little Bobby grows up and leaves because there are few jobs in the area that make a promising career...education is about investment in the future, after all, and most people are more concerned over the next weekend's football game or this years's school tax burden.
The public appreciates spectacle over substance. Of course reporters would pay attention to stories about poo-flinging over boring things like helping the needy in their own community. Newspapers love stories about people who seem to become mentally unhinged; it generates sales.
What the system needs, though, is a reporter willing to put a journalism degree to actual journalism use and dig in to figure out the facts behind the hyperbole when a board member declares war on his own employees. The community could really benefit from this theoretical journalist presenting the facts in small, simple, digestible chunks that even the community members ostensibly charged with holding administrators accountable for their actions would understand without using a dictionary. Sort of like an education-system version of Steven Brill, the journalist who exposed the utter insanity of our healthcare system with a great article that turned into a great book.
The teachers are already trapped within a system that won't allow for frank discussion. An outside journalist with a small column on the other hand could give information in local newspapers; a medium that is favored by people who often don't get news from insular social media groups, but could still inject information into those same groups. Best of all, as an outsider, that person would be as accountable as...well, most other community members who aren't under threat of losing his or her job if facts made an administrator or board member glow in a poor light.
The other option would be for the system to change, where teachers could talk to the public without fear of retribution. But judging from what I've seen and heard from others, there's little chance of that happening in any near-term timeframe. The field is too heavily skewed away from teachers having a voice of any significance; the Union, a body that is supposed to prevent just this kind of imbalance, is effectively gutted from legal erosion of Union power that is not just a problem for the local teacher's Union but Unions across the US and across multiple fields (it's not a coincidence that the loss of the middle class and growth of income inequality coincides with the loss of Union influence in America...)
Which is more likely? Probably neither. Most likely this fight, where poo is flung from one side and dodged on the other, where schools are generically blamed for rising taxes while the implicit reason is the greed of teachers taking priority over an economically depressed community, and the argument continues in the backdrop of a community where most new jobs are coming not from innovative markets but chain stores and chain restaurants...this fight will be won through attrition. Eventually one side will grow too weary to continue and the education system will continue to erode. But this could be the cynic in me speaking.
What do you think? How are the teachers perceived, in contrast to the school board? Does the community make distinctions among the administration, teachers, and board? Do you think the teachers have a public relations, and public image, problem?
I should add that all of this is my own opinion, my own point of view, I speak for myself and only myself, etc. etc...not that I should have to add disclaimers, but I know if I don't someone will come up with some stupid ideas that I frankly don't feel like addressing beyond this disclaimer.
I learned about it only because I was sent a message that a mutual friend on Facebook had posted information from a closed group dedicated to the elementary school's Parent-Teacher Group, a "social media response" to the allegations.
I wondered what the school's official response was; supposedly, according to the ranter, the school received many phone calls from numerous sources after his tirade. You would think there would have been an official response to an incident that had supposedly happened several days previous and had generated phone calls to the superintendent. But as of the time I'm writing this, you'd be wrong. I find nothing on the district's home page, where last year the school board had posted a list of arguments outlining why the teachers are grossly overpaid compared to the constantly toiling school administrators.
I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. Sources within the district say that it's not unusual for administrators to require teachers to address behavior issues of students with parents before administration will become involved. Calming an outraged mob of ill-informed Facebookers is only a stone's throw away from discussing behavior issues with the public if the school doesn't acknowledge the need for consistent handling of these issues through official channels.
Note: there was a newspaper story referring to a district statement. First, that guy's rant and backhanded apology was a story in the local paper?!? Really?!? Second, despite the story's claim, I can't find an official response on the school website, and the quotes in the story mirror the statement posted by the head teacher on the PTG Facebook page. Unless someone corrects me on where this statement came from and who authorized the wording, I'm calling shenanigans.
What struck me about the statement from the PTG Facebook page was how factual it was. It calmly, almost clinically, debunked the same batshit stupid ideas that still are tossed around about schools despite time and time again being denied, such as not saying the Pledge of Allegiance or allowing students to say "Merry Christmas". (Snopes.com needs to strike a deal with Facebook to auto filter that crap...please.)
The tone is much like the rare release from the teacher's Union in their ongoing contract negotiations. If you read what a certain board member characterized as a declaration of war, it was by far one of the most boring and dry declarations of war I've ever read. I mean, though apocryphal, at least John Hancock signed his "screw you" to Britain with such large strokes it could be read without spectacles. The Union's "demands" were tame and deferential. Contrast that with the bombastic tone of the mostly fictional allegations made by the father angry that his kid was learning about another culture, or the hyperbolic tone of the "pillar of the community" board member having a public tantrum and all but declaring war on those greedy, scheming teachers. The Union letter couched itself more heavily than my ten-year-old testing IKEA living room furniture displays.
Everything the Union releases is carefully crafted to be factual and straightforward; nothing is incendiary or opinionated. It's like being lectured by a Vulcan. The school board, on the other hand, has nothing to lose despite characterizing themselves as victims held hostage by their employees for the past three years. They have no problem going public with propaganda painting the non-community-member (and if you listen to them, probably not even really human) teachers as a boogyman army out for community members' wallets while contributing nothing to society--yet, many of the teachers live within the same communities as those they teach.
These recent incidents highlight a fundamental issue for the teachers; they have a serious PR problem. Yes, there are groups like the PTG that distribute information through a special Facebook page, but Facebook, like all social media, is an insular bubble. The very nature of social media means people seek out like-minded people. What do ninety percent of people you "friend" or "follow" in social media do when someone says something you don't like? Unfriend. Unfollow. Mute. Ban. Social media encourages you to pare down what information you're exposed to until these groups are echo chambers and followers hear what reinforces their established beliefs.
The job of public relations being farmed out to teachers is also treated as an afterthought; they're busy with actual schoolwork and busywork mandated by school administrators and state education requirements. But it's also a trap. Anyone who takes on this responsibility of informing the public about things the public is generally ignorant of while also shouldering the blame for backlash that it will inevitably incur is putting their job on the line. School officials tend to dislike situations that put them in a poor light, and there is simply no way to please everyone. Take as exhibit A the Facebook ranter's non-apology (the entire apology was yet another rant that, while technically an apology ["I said I was wrong at the end of these many paragraphs complaining about why the school was still truly at fault for following mandates which I explained through clever use of childish name calling!,"] totally deflected from an actual apology) where he still had numerous messages praising his post. These are people who will never be convinced the teachers (or the school) are not on some campaign to destroy America. Sharing information with the public and taking responsibility for the content is not an enviable position for a teacher when a hostile school board, principal, or acting superintendent is very willing to make an example of any pebble daring to make waves. It's telling that beyond press releases condemning teachers, the school board doesn't seem to work to clarify misunderstandings between the general public and the school, nor have I found a statement attributed to the acting superintendent defending his employees on the matter--only snippets of quotes in a newspaper article.
It does make sense if you look at it in the context of having someone who might do a decent job of clarifying issues while lacking the authority to be the "official" voice of the school; if that person screws up, he or she can be blamed by administrators and will be called to the carpet. It's another case of teachers being asked to do things unofficially; convenient to say this thing that has to get done requires them to step up for yet another thing not contractually required, but won't be recognized in the next argument where the board points out how overpaid teachers are compared to the minimum requirements they are contractually obligated to follow.
True media coverage of what the teachers do of benefit to the community...access to information outside of the insular social media circles...is rare. The politicized environment within the school discourages teachers from speaking because of the previously mentioned pebbles-making-waves problem; having bills to pay necessitates a job, and leadership within the school makes a point of emphasizing that, as one source told me, "There's no law preventing your boss from making your life miserable."
There are a few key moments that encourages coverage of the schools. The first is anything involving taxes. Taxes directly affect community members, and no one likes taxes. So when the community grumbles about paying them, especially (and understandably) people who don't have kids in the school, who better to blame than the schools? (I'll not mention the fact that governments underfund the schools, since people prefer to blame the most immediate and convenient entities to yell at.) School leadership blames teachers for high costs. They fail to mention that teachers make up the largest number of employees and, like in most businesses, employees tend to be the most expensive cost when it comes to expenditures.
The second is that spectacles sell. Everyone loves watching monkeys fling poo at the circus, and seeing articles declaring war on the teachers guarantees sales and clicks. I've mentioned the school board has nothing to lose and it's an open secret that retaliation within the schools happens if you make waves; the net result are the tactful and sanitized Union statements occasionally proffered to the media outlets while board press releases are plastered on the front of the school website.
It's sad that the teachers still do what "needs to be done" with hardly any acknowledgement. Technically they're supposed to be working under "work to rule" where they do exactly what is required by their contracts. It seems logical. "I'll show you how valuable I am with all this extra crap I do," the teacher says as another turd is hurled in his or her direction, missing by inches. "You criticize how little I'm required to do and get paid far too much for doing. I'll start doing only what's required."
But they don't.
If they worked only the time they are mandated to work, papers would never get corrected. Grades would never be entered. The workload they have requires working outside the hours they are paid to work. And if they actually did what the contract obligates, they'd be fired. Ironic.
But that wouldn't garner sympathy from a public who knows the school board justifies their distaste for academic "non-community-member" teachers.
Part of the ranter's tirade brought up the point that this was the same school that threw out lunches if kids couldn't pay. "Whatever happened with that? People were pretty pissed about it..." The school never recanted the policy of no-charging lunches. The same community that feels overburdened by the teaching staff continues to have a "paying for food" problem, sometimes to the tune of several thousand dollars. So the board decided to stop feeding those that continue to charge meals without paying for them.
I don't recall the Union pointing out that the Board was not feeding poor kids as a cost savings measure when the Board was doing what was best for the kids. I also don't recall the Union pointing out that students in schools that don't give peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to those who went without lunch were still getting lunches when they didn't pay because the teachers were paying for them. Yeah. Teachers didn't think it was right, they quietly paid for lunches for kids who can't pay for their own lunches. But I haven't seen that in the newspapers.
Nor have I seen the "dress down days" making headlines in the paper. Teachers get the opportunity to pay for the privilege of wearing a more comfortable outfit once a week and in exchange part of their salaries to a charity or cause. Unless there is a specific cause, it goes into funding a scholarship fund, but much of the funding goes to local charities such as Food for Thought, The Bridge or The Children's House. When a student, employee, or alumnus encounters a traumatic life-changing event, it's not unusual for the dress down day funds to go towards easing financial burdens for those in need. Over the course of a school year, it is not uncommon for each building in the Athens district to raise thousands of dollars or to donate goods and services. Does the paper cover these donations? Rarely, unless it is submitted to the paper by those heading a particular cause.
Perhaps this lack of public relations is a result of what happens when there's little to no accountability in the school system, which is ironic given that the most hated mandates by the public...No Child Left Behind, Common Core, etc...are the result of a public crying for accountability in the school system. Teachers end up being the target for the accountability crosshairs since years of experience has taught them that administration doesn't believe in the idea that good managers shield their employees from issues not directly part of their jobs as teachers. Teachers are targeted under the guise of accountability for everything from how their students behave to what parents are upset over, things they have little actual control over. It's no wonder they are skittish in the face of public assaults from people who have no accountability for poo-flinging.
I think what the teachers need is a reporter who cares about the state of teaching in his or her community. I know that reporters typically care only about things that grab headlines for being outrageous or are so directly relevant to the paper's readers that a 5 year old wouldn't need the importance explained to them and I also understand that much of the importance of proper education doesn't become evident until little Bobby grows up and leaves because there are few jobs in the area that make a promising career...education is about investment in the future, after all, and most people are more concerned over the next weekend's football game or this years's school tax burden.
The public appreciates spectacle over substance. Of course reporters would pay attention to stories about poo-flinging over boring things like helping the needy in their own community. Newspapers love stories about people who seem to become mentally unhinged; it generates sales.
What the system needs, though, is a reporter willing to put a journalism degree to actual journalism use and dig in to figure out the facts behind the hyperbole when a board member declares war on his own employees. The community could really benefit from this theoretical journalist presenting the facts in small, simple, digestible chunks that even the community members ostensibly charged with holding administrators accountable for their actions would understand without using a dictionary. Sort of like an education-system version of Steven Brill, the journalist who exposed the utter insanity of our healthcare system with a great article that turned into a great book.
The teachers are already trapped within a system that won't allow for frank discussion. An outside journalist with a small column on the other hand could give information in local newspapers; a medium that is favored by people who often don't get news from insular social media groups, but could still inject information into those same groups. Best of all, as an outsider, that person would be as accountable as...well, most other community members who aren't under threat of losing his or her job if facts made an administrator or board member glow in a poor light.
The other option would be for the system to change, where teachers could talk to the public without fear of retribution. But judging from what I've seen and heard from others, there's little chance of that happening in any near-term timeframe. The field is too heavily skewed away from teachers having a voice of any significance; the Union, a body that is supposed to prevent just this kind of imbalance, is effectively gutted from legal erosion of Union power that is not just a problem for the local teacher's Union but Unions across the US and across multiple fields (it's not a coincidence that the loss of the middle class and growth of income inequality coincides with the loss of Union influence in America...)
Which is more likely? Probably neither. Most likely this fight, where poo is flung from one side and dodged on the other, where schools are generically blamed for rising taxes while the implicit reason is the greed of teachers taking priority over an economically depressed community, and the argument continues in the backdrop of a community where most new jobs are coming not from innovative markets but chain stores and chain restaurants...this fight will be won through attrition. Eventually one side will grow too weary to continue and the education system will continue to erode. But this could be the cynic in me speaking.
What do you think? How are the teachers perceived, in contrast to the school board? Does the community make distinctions among the administration, teachers, and board? Do you think the teachers have a public relations, and public image, problem?
I should add that all of this is my own opinion, my own point of view, I speak for myself and only myself, etc. etc...not that I should have to add disclaimers, but I know if I don't someone will come up with some stupid ideas that I frankly don't feel like addressing beyond this disclaimer.
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