The Death of the Media Lab?

by philg

In a world where the only enterprise that is happy with its investments in high-tech is the U.S. military, what chance does the MIT Media Lab, the product of corporate money have?  This is the question asked by a recent WIRED magazine article.


The Media Lab made its money by convincing big companies to spend a portion of their profit on funding advanced R&D.  Today the average big companies, with a combination of stock options and cash, pays its top managers an amount roughly equal to total profit.  I.e., there is nothing left to invest in R&D at MIT or elsewhere.


In the long run the Media Lab may be remembered best for its revolutionary organizational structure.  The typical university professor is expected to manage research, teach students, raise funds, and promote his or her glorious results.  Very seldom will an individual be expert in all of these areas.  Why not ape the commercial world and divide labor among specialists?  That’s precisely what the Media Lab did.  A dedicated staff of PR professionals did the promotion.  A dedicated team of expert after-dinner speakers and schmoozers did the fundraising.  The founders discovered that MIT did not valorize teaching and therefore the Media Lab elected to leave the grunt work of teaching to other departments.  The best researchers were thus free to spend all of their time managing research.


It all worked great until (1) corporations decided they’d rather spend their money on vacation homes and private jets for their executives and board members, and (2) the Media Lab discovered a $multi-million accounting error that forced a lot of layoffs.


How did the accounting error happen?  Basically there are two ways to set up a business.  If you don’t believe that you’re a management genius you push profit-and-loss responsibility down to the lowest level possible.  In the case of McDonald’s and its franchisees, for example, P&L responsibility is at the individual restaurant level.  If one restaurant is doing badly if doesn’t have access to the bank accounts of the other restaurants and thus there is no way for the bad apples to drag down the barrel.  Furthermore the top managers don’t need to care too much about how an individual restaurant is spending its money.  As long as the group with P&L is making a profit, who cares how they are doing it?


An alternative approach is central management by function.  The Freedom Fries cooks at all McDonald’s would report to regional managers and a VP of Freedom at headquarters.  The soda pourers would report to middle managers under the VP of Soda.  The drive-through cashiers at different restaurants would share a manager and so forth.  If you have amazing business management skills in theory this method could produce higher performance and greater efficiency.  However, without metrics and cost controls there is a substantial risk of bankruptcy because many fewer people have profit and loss on their minds.


Traditional research universities push P&L responsibility down onto the individual faculty member.  He or she must apply for grants and can spend money only from those grants.  Once the money from a grant is gone, that professor can no longer spend money.  This way the university makes sure that more cash never goes out than came in (in fact they charged a fat overhead commission on that grant money when it came in so actually a lot less cash can go out than came in).  A professor who is not successful at raising funds never puts at risk a lab that is getting a lot of grants.


The Media Lab went the big-company division-of-labor route but didn’t mature fast enough to have all of the departmental profit metrics and cost controls of the best large companies.


Prediction:  In 100 years the Media Lab will be remembered primarily for its pioneering approach to managing university research. 


(In the meantime, let’s hope that the new building gets finished.  If you go to the basement of the current building and look at the model, I’m sure you’ll agree that it would be one of the nicest-looking and most comfortable buildings in Cambridge.)

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Staying Alive in Small Airplanes

by philg

One of the hazards of wealth and/or hanging around with rich people is the possibility of dying in a small airplane crash.  If you’re an average schmoe you’ll wear a rut in the pavement between house and job, be entertained watching TV on the sofa, watch your kids get on the schoolbus every day, and drop dead of obesity [should say “average American”, I guess] at age 83.4.  The rich, however, must shuttle among their 5 luxury homes and get their kids to and from exclusive private schools in the countryside.  Shuttling requires many private airplane flights, not least because the luxury homes may be on islands where airplanes provide the only access.  If you want to escape the rabble you have to go somewhere that is impractical to read by car and that isn’t so populated that it merits daily Boeing 747 flights.


A couple of recent airplane crashes, however, have got people scared.  One involved Minnesota Senator Paul Wellstone and an April 4 crash here in Massachusetts involved M. Anthony Fisher, a real estate tycoon from New York.  Both were in Beech King Air airplanes, each of which had two engines and two professional pilots.  Both were doing non-precision instrument approaches in bad weather.  In both cases people initially suspected icing, a terrifying flight hazard in cold-weather clouds but one that the King Airs are reasonably well-equipped to handle.  In both cases the actual cause appears to have been that the airplane was simply flown too slowly and fell out of the sky, which is by far the most common way to crash an airplane for all levels of pilot.  People fear engine failure but they die from pulling the stick back too far.


Let’s start by looking at the most recent crash, which involved Bob Monaco, a pilot based from our local airport (Hanscom Field in Bedford, Massachusetts, BED).  Today’s Boston Globe carries a story that is typical for (a) being filled with errors, and (b) not providing the URL where readers could find the original National Transportation Safety Board report and study it themselves.


The goal of the trip was to fly the rich family up to a prep school that the daughter was considering attending, then take the rest of the family and its interior designers out to their house on Martha’s Vineyard.  The pilot, Bob Monaco, planned the flight initially from New York to Bedford, a large civil/military airport with a 7000-foot main runway and an instrument landing system (ILS). 


Background on aerodynamics:  Airplanes hold themselves up by pushing air down.  In flight, an airplane’s wings are angled up. As the plane moves forward this angled surface pushes air downward and, as a reaction, the airplane rises up (Newton’s 3rd Law). Air weighs a lot less than the metals and plastics in the airplane and therefore one must push a lot of air down in order to pull the plane up, which is why wings are so physically large.  An airplane must maintain a reasonably high forward speed for the wing to do its job; a wing that isn’t moving pushes no air down.  If a pilot, in attempting to slow down for landing, slows down too much the plane will “stall” and become hard to control.  If the pilot does not immediately push the stick forward to pitch the airplane down and pick up more speed, the plane may go into a “spin” and start to fall out of the sky.  A plane can be recovered from a spin but usually this requires more altitude than is available if the spin happens while approaching to land.  Turning an airplane uses up lift that would otherwise be available to hold altitude and therefore an airspeed that works for level flight will result in a stall in a tight turn.


Background on flying in the clouds:  An ILS approach is referred to as a “precision approach”.  Under normal circumstances the Air Traffic Controllers (ATC) give you radar vectors and altitudes to fly until you intercept the radio beams of the ILS.  They are required by regulation to set you up so that you need not make more than a 30-degree turn to get onto the ILS, i.e., ATC points your airplane more or less straight in toward the landing runway.  Once established on the ILS you make very small adjustments in pitch and bank to keep the needles centered and set the engine power so that your airplane holds a slow steady speed (pointing the nose down toward the ground would normally build up a lot of speed so you cut engine power from its cruise setting to reduce the total amount of energy being put into the system).  Notice that at no time on an ILS is the airplane required to make a turn; the airplane is going slow but flying straight.


At Bedford the ILS 29 approach lets you go down to 300′ above the ground without seeing anything, then, if you can see the runway lights you’re allowed to go down until you’re just 100′ above the ground.  In an emergency you wouldn’t worry about ever seeing the runway but keep flying the needles until the wheels slammed down on the pavement (they do this in training in Europe, actually).


Not only does an ILS provide low minimums but it also generally comes with assistance from ATC.  If you’ve somehow gotten very confused or your equipment isn’t working right and you’re off-course or at the wrong altitude, they’ll probably call you on the radio (they are invariably polite and ask you to “say altitude” or “say position”, hoping that you’ll discover your mistake, rather than “you’re in the wrong place, bozo”).


A non-precision approach is a much more complex procedure that (a) requires a bunch of turns in the clouds, fairly slow and low to the ground, (b) makes the pilot(s) solely responsible for the airplane’s position, and (c) requires the airplane to stay at a higher altitude if the pilot cannot see the runway.


Why would you ever do a non-precision approach?  For the airlines the answer is generally that you don’t.  You fly from ILS-equipped airport to ILS-equipped airport.  If there is no ILS at an airport that you wish to serve, you twist the government’s arm into installing one.


On April 4, Bob Monaco changed his plan, while in flight, to go from an ILS-equipped airport (BED) to a much smaller airport, Fitchburg (FIT) at which only non-precision approaches are available.  Because he is dead we can’t ask him why but we can presume that he got a weather report for FIT that said the clouds weren’t that low and FIT was closer to the prep school, thus saving 45 minutes of driving.


From the NTSB report, it sounds as though the clouds were right around 1000′ above ground level, which is the minimum height that Monaco was required to maintain above the runway until he could see it.  It sounds from the witness reports that he did not really see the runway until he was right on top of it.  At this point he was too high to land.  However, it is legal, assuming that you can maintain continuous visual contact with the runway, to make tight circles around the airport and then land, perhaps on a different runway than the one you were initially approaching.  You want the circles tight so that you don’t risk flying into more clouds.  Note that tight circles imply turns and that if you are hoping to land an airplane you want to be going slowly.  Recall from the aerodynamics paragraph above that turning makes it more likely that the airplane will stall at a given speed.


Even with two pilots on board, the challenge of keeping the runway in sight, setting the plane up for landing, and making those tight turns was apparently too great and the King Air crashed.  The NTSB report says that the airspeed indicators showed 60 and 66 knots on impact, which is a good speed for a little training airplane but much too slow for a King Air in a turn (the King Air’s typical approach speed is 100 knots).


If you’re planning to take a trip in a small airplane, what lessons can you learn from these mournful events?  First, legal does not equal safe.  One reason that the airlines have such a good safety record is that they are much more conservative than required.  For example, many airlines have found that their pilots are unable to maintain acceptable tolerances during circling-to-land approaches such as the one Bob Monaco was attempting and therefore they no longer train pilots on this procedure nor use it in operations.  Second, an ILS greatly enhances safety.  If the weather is marginal and your friend says “we’re going to the little airport at Gaithersburg, Maryland” repond with “I don’t mind driving an extra 20 minutes from Dulles or Baltimore-Washington International”.  Third, if you really want to be safe wait for the weather to improve.  Even with the best equipment and pilots, sunshine adds a big safety margin.

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You can get a lot more with a kind word and a gun…

by philg

… than with a kind word alone.  This will presumably be the lesson drawn by the U.S. government from the last couple of years of hand-wringing regarding Iraq.  When the invasion of Iraq started on March 19 (see daily summary from CNN) some friends started a betting pool concerning the date on which the last Iraqi military unit would surrender. My guess was April 15. Note that this does not count lone snipers or terrorists. It appears that yesterday was the big day and that the person who bet on April 14 will be the winner.  The only comparably quick surrender that comes to mind is France’s 1940 surrender to Germany after about 1.5 months.  George W. might well be asking himself “Why did we waste all of that time with diplomacy if all it took was a modest military effort that did not even last one month?”


We Americans are thus faced with the question “Iraq is done; what’s next in the Middle East?”  Some friends asked for an opinion of background issues, especially why the U.S. would want to support Israel (a very unpopular policy here in Cambridge, Massachusetts), so I wrote http://philip.greenspun.com/politics/israel/


Let me know if you think it provides any interesting answers.

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Why do Colleges Build Dormitories? And teach half-time?

by philg

The one thing that everyone who has studied college education can agree on is that students learn more when they work in groups.  Yet colleges don’t build infrastructure to support this.  A university will spend hundreds of $millions on dormitories, i.e., places for students to drink beer and sleep together.  Why is there is no budget for cubicle farms where students in the same major could do their homework together, asking for help from the person at the next desk and, if necessary, raising their hands for help from roving teaching assistants?


Another paradox of college life is the brevity of the calendar.  In a country where less than 3 percent of the population works on the farm, we’ve preserved a long summer break so that Junior can go home and help bring in the harvest.  The result is that parents, already reeling from the cost of 4 years of tuition, also have to figure out how they’re going to support Junior during Winter Break ski trips, Spring Break beach trips, and the long summer break in an economy where jobs are scarce.


Would it not make more sense for colleges to get out of the housing business and into the group-work business?  Let students come to campus at 9:00 am and stay until 9:00 pm, working with other students.  Then let them sleep at night wherever they want to.  If a college has infinite money, there’s nothing wrong with building dorms but if funds are scarce why not spend it on things that are directly relevant for learning?


Would it not make more sense for colleges to be in session for 45-50 weeks per year?  A student would be able to get a bachelor’s degree in 2.5 years and join the workforce, i.e., get off the parental payroll.


The answer to these apparently obvious questions seems to be “it depends”.  Mostly it depends on how rich the students’ parents are.  At a school for the ruling class, e.g., Harvard or Yale, it really doesn’t matter how effective the pedagogy is.  If Biff doesn’t learn calculus his daddy can still buy him a seat in Congress.   What Biff really needs to do is meet other members of the ruling class even if they are from different majors  The dormitory is the ideal environment for this mixing.


Similarly a school targeted to children of the ruling class need not worry about the parents’ ability to support Muffy for 4 years.  Much more important is that Muffy have plenty of time off to take the Grand Tour of Europe, hop the family fractional jet for the December trip to St. Barts, spend a summer interning in Cousin (Senator) Bob’s office.


A suboptimality arises when schools whose parents aren’t rich ape the policies of the traditional schools, all of which were established in an age when only the privileged went to college.


Prediction:  the coming decades will see the rise of new colleges with more intensive academic programs, more shared workspaces for undergraduates, and no dorms.

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Biographical Focus: Idi Amin

by philg

Sundays on this blog will be for focusing on one person, ideally someone connected to current events but who has slipped from notice.  Today’s focus is Idi Amin.


Idi Amin might seem like an odd choice because he has not been in the news for more than a decade and in fact many Westerners have the impression that he is dead.


Amin earns his place in this blog today because of the fact that the whole crop of modern Islamic rulers are merely following the trail blazed by Idi Amin. Amin, who ruled Uganda in the 1970s, took on the challenging project of creating a true Islamic nation out of a country that was only about 6 percent Muslims at the time. Amin, accused of murdering hundreds of thousands of Christians, did not get too much good press in the West (like Saddam) but he was a hero to Arabs and Muslims worldwide (like Saddam). Like Saddam, Idi Amin was the victim of a long-distance Israeli air raid (Entebbe 1976).  Like Saddam, Idi Amin was overthrown by a foreign military (in Amin’s case it was the war that he started against neighboring Tanzania that ultimately brought Tanzanian troops back to Kampala, the capital of Uganda).


Idi Amin made and kept friends throughout the Middle East.  For example, Yasser Arafat was Best Man at Amin’s 5th wedding.  After Idi Amin was overthrown he was set up by the Saudis in a magnificent seaside villa in the Red Sea port of Jiddah (i.e., when we fill up our SUVs part of the money goes to pay for Amin’s wives, cars, servants, etc.).


Idi Amin turned 78 years old on January 1 and currently lives in Mecca.

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Saturday Night at the Movies

by philg

In theaters everywhere (well, maybe in Manhattan):  Rivers and Tides, a documentary showing Andy Goldsworthy at work.  If you’ve not seen Goldworthy’s books basically the idea is to go out into the woods and arrange or alter natural items such as leaves, rocks, dirt, and moss.  Governments and foundations pay him to do this and before Nature reclaims the work he takes photos to sell and put into art books.  I thought that the funniest scene is in his kitchen at home in Scotland.  He finishes a cup of coffee and tells his wife “I’m going out to work at the tree” in much the same tone as a factory worker.  Worth seeing on a big screen, especially for the sequences of leaf chains flowing through streams.


Francis Ford Coppola provides an excellent argument for the DVD format with his director’s commentary on the Conversation (1974), a superb movie to begin with.  He really explains the how and the why of the camera angles.  His commentary on the Godfather DVD is also interesting for students of the interaction between the suits and the creative types in Hollywood.  According to his commentary, Paramount was ready to fire Coppola 2.5 weeks into the filming.  This despite the fact that Coppola had already captured some of what are today regarded as the best scenes in the movie, which of course went on to be one of the most profitable pictures ever.  Mario Puzo’s book, on which the film was based, had become a bestseller and the studio thought a bigger name director was warranted.  Coppola only saved his job by firing 4 of his subordinates whom he’d felt to be disloyal.  This confused the studio sufficiently that he was able to finish shooting.


One Day in September (1999; Academy Award winner) documents Yasser Arafat’s terrorism operation at the 1972 Munich Olympics, told primarily by retired German offiicials, the Dutch widow of the Israeli fencing coach, and Jarnil Al Gashey, one of the killers (currently hiding, with his wife and children, “somewhere in Africa”). 


The plot is vaguely familiar.  Palestinians walk into the Olympic Village, kill two Jews and take nine others hostage.  Despite the murders and the hostages the Games continue.  The German government refuses to let an experienced Israeli hostage rescue team enter the country.  Tens of thousands of curious onlookers and TV crews surround the apartment building in which the Arabs have holed up.  The Bavarian police organize a group of untrained volunteer policemen to rescue the hostages but the effort is called off when they realize that it won’t be possible to surprise the Palestinians given that (a) the TV crews are filming the police sneaking around the roof, and (b) the terrorists are watching TV inside the apartments.  The terrorists ask for a plane to take them to “an unspecified Arab country” and the German government arranges a decoy 727 at a nearby military field, to be filled with policemen (disguised as crewmembers) ready to overpower the leaders.  Events at the airport go wrong very quickly.  Apparently the public was kept informed of the plans and tens of thousands gawkers clogged the roads to the airport.  The police in the 727 get scared and abandon their position, leaving an empty plane.   The two Arabs who go into the 727 to check it out find that there aren’t any pilots so they come back out screaming that the whole thing is a trap.  There is some shooting, meanwhile the hostages are trapped and tied inside two helicopters.  The Germans organize a team of 5 police snipers to take on the 8 Palestinians but do not supply the snipers with radios.  In the ensuing confusion, a sniper on the terminal roof shoots a sniper on the tarmac by mistake. The police forgot to order an armored car and weren’t willing to get anywhere near the terrorists without it (2 hour delay after the shooting started).  The Arabs toss grenades and machine-gun fire into the helicopters, killing all 9 remaining Jews.  Less than two months later, the surviving terrorists are freed by the German government and are given a hero’s welcome in Libya.


Around the same time that the movie was released, Abu Daoud, the planner of the operation, who was living in comfortable retirement in Jordan, released a French-language book about the operation that won the 1999 Palestine Prize for Culture.  Yasser Arafat had denied involvement with the Munich murders at the time, claiming that it was the work of a radical spinoff of his own terrorist organization, but Daoud writes that Arafat saw him off on the mission with the words “Allah protect you”.


The movie is mostly interesting for what it reveals about how much has changed and not changed in 30 years.  The TV clips show a festival atmosphere around Palestinian terrorism that persist in Muslim countries today but which has gone out of fashion in Europe and the U.S.  German families were bringing their kids out to picnic and watch the exotic Arabs with guns.  You probably wouldn’t see that today, even if the authorities would allow families with kids to get within a few hundred yards of an Arab hostage taking.


What hasn’t changed is the success of French and German policies toward violent Arabs.  In the 1970s, Palestinian terrorists flowed freely in and out of these countries’ jails in exchange for the understanding that terrorist attacks would not be carried out in France of Germany proper.  What do we see 30 years later?  The September 11th terrorists using Hamburg as their planning and finance base; France and Germany being Saddam Hussein’s strongest supporters in Europe.

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Happy Friday: the ice pack is breaking up

by philg

A wise man once told me that people tended to be unhappy because they focussed on the problems in their life.  Things that were going well did not require attention and therefore did not get it.  Consequently if you asked a person what he or she had been thinking about it was generally an unpleasant and difficult to solve problem.  This blog will try to fight this tendency with a Happy Friday policy.


Yesterday my friend Brad and I took the DA40 out of its hangar and headed out to Williamstown, Massachusetts.  There are three great art museums within 3 miles of the Harriman and West Airport (paved but VFR-only and surrounded by mountains):  Clark, MassMOCA (installation art fueled by approx. $50 million of Massachusetts taxpayer funds; run by New Yorkers who dress and sound like Dieter on Saturday Night Live), and Williams College’s art museum.  We stopped by Williams College and looked at their magnificent 9th century BC Assyrian tablets plus a visiting show of Tibetan art.


The Assyrian tablets remind one that the current conflict in Iraq is not the first one and that the artifacts of ancient civilization in Iraq have nothing to do with its current Arab rulers.  The Assyrians are the heirs to a literary and cultural traditional that goes back to the Epic of Gilgamesh and Sargon’s kingdom circa 2350 B.C.  For some reason it became conventional in Assyrian literature for heroes to be discovered in baskets floating on rivers, washed into the reeds.  This is how Gilgamesh was found and also Sargon.  For those of you going to a Passover Seder this year, a good way to really piss off your hosts is to start asking questions about whether the story of Moses being found in a basket in the Nile wasn’t simply copied from much earlier Assyrian stories.  Suppose that it is true that Moses grew up in an Egyptian royal household but not that he was found in the river.  That would make Moses, the Jewish leader of the Jews, … an Egyptian pure and simple.  (The descendants of Moses’s relatives would therefore be the Coptic Christian minority that survived the Arab invasion of Egypt.)


Assyrians converted to Christianity shortly after the death of Jesus and have been fighting a losing battle with Muslim Arab invaders since the 7th century A.D.  They seem to be a forgotten oppressed minority in an Arab country but they do have a Web site: http://aina.org/aol/


From the art museum we walked out into the 50-degree sunshine and along a creek filled with snowmelt.  A young woman came up behind us, smiling, red-faced, and walking briskly with wet hair.  She had been celebrating Spring by taking a swim in the freezing water.


For our return flight to Boston we took off just as the sun was setting in the Berkshires.  The hilly landscape around the Connecticut River was painted with a pinkish light reminiscent of the Hudson River School.  We could distinguish the subtle tones with our eyes but there is no way that film would have captured it so Brad and I just enjoyed it.  In flying over lakes we noticed that the pack ice was broken up and covering less than 50 percent of the surface.  Spring is here.  Brad flies for American Airlines so you’d think that he would have become jaded with aerial scenery but he looked out the window in wonder (and in fear; I did much of the flight with a hood on so that I could see only the instruments while Brad looked for other airplanes and critiqued my performance on 4 instrument approaches).


Now that we New Englanders seem finally to escaped the clutches of Winter it may be worth reflecting that it could have been much worse.  Here’s a note from Marion, an old friend who lives in Alaska:



I am curious whether you heard as far away as Boston about the storm of the century we had here in Anchorage about two weeks ago. 130 mph winds, right off the inlet and onto our poor little condo. The winds and low temperatures also meant there was about a -30 degree F windchill. First the power went out and the car alarms in the neighborhood were going off like crazy. Debris was flying everywhere, trees were going down, and the dust was high. Then the roof flew off next door (from the green house on the corner), up about 15′ and onto our building’s roof, crushing it and breaking a joist. Boards were falling from the ceiling onto Sylvia & Jerry while they were in bed (Jerry tried to dismiss Mom’s complaints about the roof falling in until a board hit him in the ear! That is what he deserved). Then, early in the morning, our downstairs neighbor, Sherman, came flying into my condo announcing that the pipes had burst and water was spraying everywhere. We had to shut off the water. Concurrent with this, we also lost our heat. The water and heat stayed off for about a week. 

Marion lives in Anchorage, the largest city in Alaska and one of the places with the mildest climate. Full post, including comments

The Life of a Public School Teacher

by philg

In an effort to adapt to the blog culture, perhaps it is best to alternate between the themes of public schools and politics in the Middle East.  Here then is a public school-related posting.  Most of the opinions one hears expressed on public schools come from folks who’ve not set foot in a school for a decade or more.  This story comes from a friend who is a very well-educated teacher of high school math/science and gifted/talented classes.  I asked her why, given that so much taxpayer dough ($11,000+ per student per year in Cambridge, MA) was allocated to public schools, people still weren’t happy with the results.


Her words:



Maybe the perception is there that money gets poured into the public schools, but I certainly never see it.  I take home $1500 a month after taxes and have an increasingly expensive healthcare plan.  I’ve been waiting for five months for the state to consider whether to pay me at the Masters degree level, which would add $3500 more over the year.  With my student loans and other unconvered expenses like vision and part of dental, I save no money.  But obviously we don’t do this for the money. 


How about the job satisfaction?  I came back to my OKAY job to have it turn into a HORRIBLE job in one week.  All my stuff got moved w/out my knowledge, some personal things were thrown away, and I lost my space for consultations, meetings with parents, and computer access… This was all done to accommodate an administrator they moved into the area (a teacher work area, how humiliating for her).  I am no longer allowed a key to the area so I can’t get to my desk much of the time.  So now I keep half my crap on a cart, which I roll from room to room, getting stuck on any small bump, losing papers all over the floor.  I keep my purse and lunch out in the lockbox of my truck so I can get to it.  Of course, ALL the teachers lost their one last work area, and since even if they have their own room, it is used by a floater teacher during their planning, they either have to try and work at their desk with a class going on around them or wander rather aimlessly in the halls…. The room I use for one of my classes, which is out in one of the portables (so the above-mentioned cart gets rolled outside, where gusts of wind tend to blow things everywhere), now THAT teacher stays in there while I’m trying to teach, and on Friday even kept his radio on and had a loud conversation with one of this students.  Thank God my students (gifted and sharp) are very patient and understanding, because I feel that my environment is truly making me incompetent as a teacher.   I had to move my parent conference the other day from one room to another halfway through because my room was booked for a class, and another room had just opened up.  And none of this was held near my files, nor could I get to them, so if I needed to look something up, too bad.  Combine all of this with my good ol’ boy/former coach principal YELLING at me for (a) crying when I discovered personal things had been thrown away,  (b) for sending an email to the gifted supervisor saying I was concerned because one of the vice-principals was trying to make my gifted class a dumping ground for other students, and one of the gifted student’s parents is already ready to sue us, and (c) for having the AUDACITY to ask that same vice-principal if the students he dumped in my class came with teacher recommendations, because their academic background was weak, and he told me he spoke with them and thought they should try it (later the same kids showed up, said, ‘What’s this class?’, and immediately dropped the classes because of difficulty).


When I was being yelled at, the principal was saying things like, ‘You’re gonna sit there and listen, little lady, and I don’t want no attitude out of you… I’m the boss here, I say what happens… I’m in control, and if you don’t like it [they] can pull gifted out of this school…’


Like I said, none of this is particularly unusual.  The principal is stressed and yells at lots of people.  I know 7 people (plus myself) who are leaving next year because of working conditions. 


End of her words.


She starts her new job in a private school this fall.

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The Second Violinist

by philg

The Second Violinist is in a practice room at Symphony Hall.  The police knock on the door:  “We’ve got some bad news for you, sir.  Your house burned down and your children were injured.  They’ve been taken to the hospital.”


“That’s terrible!” exclaimed the Second Violinist.  “How did it happen?”


“I’m sorry to have to tell you this, sir,” continued the policeman, “but it seems that the Conductor has been having an affair with your wife.  They were in your bedroom, smoking cigarettes after having sex, and got careless.  The cigarettes lit the bedclothes on fire and then it spread to the rest of the house.”


The Second Violinist seemed stunned for a moment as a look of wonder spread over his face.  “The Conductor?  … Came to MY house?”


——————————


This story may explain how things spiraled into violence in Iraq.  George W. kept mentioning Saddam and Iraq in his speeches.  If Saddam had been watching CNN he’d have seen the most powerful man in the world focussed on him and the country that he owned.  It would have been a lot scarier for Saddam if W. had said, in response to a question about Iraq, “I delegated the issue to a one-star general, who has full authority to bomb Saddam if necessary, and he will be giving me a report six months from now.”


I recall seeing a headline “President delivers ultimatum to Saddam Hussein”.  How much more scared would Saddam have been if the headline had read “Administrative assistant to 3rd Undersecretary of State delivers ultimatum to Saddam”?

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What they should teach in public schools

by philg

Third World dictators come and go.  Preppie U.S. presidents come and go.  The U.S. military comes and goes (from various far-away lands).  What topic is sufficiently eternal to merit inclusion as my very first blog entry?  Public education!


A friend grew up in a rich suburb of Chicago and went to a public school full of rich kids.  “In our school we read all of the great philosophers and were asked by the teachers to figure out which of these philosophies we agreed with and would like to apply to our lives and our society,” he related.  “The problem with most public schools is that they don’t teach this kind of critical thinking,” he continued, “I’d like to see every kid in America educated like this.”


I replied “that doesn’t make sense for schools in middle-class and poorer neighborhoods.   With the increasing income disparity in the United States, it is very unlikely that a middle- or lower-class kid will ever become wealthy enough to influence politics.  So it is irrelevant what he or she thinks is a fair, just, or optimum law or philosophy of life.  We should teach middle class kids to obey authority mindlessly because that’s what they’ll have to do anyway.”

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