An idiot journalist at WashPo constructs a completely bizarre argument as to why the striking Illinois teachers are evil:

Wilfrid Laurer’s David Johnson studied the same Ontario strikes and also found that they hurt student achievement. Like Baker, he found only small effects for students for whom the strike occurred in third grade, but large effects if the student was in sixth grade. In the latter case, the percentage of students getting a passing score on math standardized tests fell by 0.21 percentage points per day, and the percentage getting a non-failing score across all tests fell by 0.10 points per day.

If this brainless maniac tried paying attention before blabbering stupidly, he would have managed to notice that the teachers are striking precisely because these standardized tests are completely useless. All this freakazoid manages to prove in his article is that the teachers are absolutely right. The success on these standardized tests is evidence of nothing save how many hours students spent memorizing specific answers to specific questions.

By the end of his article, this stupid parrot does seem to realize that he is making the teachers’ case for them:

One last thing — one could protest that all these results rely on standardized testing, which may or may not correlate to real learning. That’s fair enough, but there’s a bounty of evidence, from Harvard’s Raj Chetty (pdf) and Stanford’s Eric Hanushek, among others, suggesting that standardized test scores correlate with higher education achievement, lifetime earnings and more.

This bounty of evidence he has taken out of his ass and is now waving around proudly is worth as much as any other thing that comes out of anybody’s rectum. As a university professor who has spent the last 11 years teaching students at 4 different universities in North America and who has discussed this issue extensively with other educators, I can assure everybody that there is nothing worse than having a bunch of these standardized-test takers in one’s classroom. They have zero knowledge and no capacity to analyze facts, draw conclusions, and relay their findings either orally or in writing. Actually, it seems like the author of this article was very good at taking standardized tests given how intellectually impotent he is today.

The Soviet Union loved standardized testing and always employed the same teaching evaluation practices that Chicago teachers are striking against today. Does that tell you anything?

OK, people, this is absolutely the best answer I ever got from a student.

Jews were persecuted horribly in mid evil Spain.

How can I even correct this beautiful statement?

OK, people, I’m now officially giving up on trying to leave comments at Blogger blogs. Blogger has introduced this bizarre system of comment verification where you have to guess a weird combination of letters and then reproduce it. Here are some examples:

 

or

 

or

 

It takes forever to decipher these weird inscriptions and, more often than not, I need more than 2 tries to get them right. Sometimes, you just want to support a blogger by leaving a comment that you like the post or agree with what the blogger says. But such a short comment isn’t really worth the trouble of straining your eye-sight and damaging your brain to analyze this strange collection of letters.

So if you blog at Blogger and are wondering where your commenters have gone, please know: we still like you but we are prevented from participating by this obnoxious system.

There is a relentless assault on educators underway in this country. No other profession is as vilified as ours is on a daily basis. Yes, people hate lawyers, too. But how many articles, discussions and blog posts have you seen this week aimed at demonstrating how  evil, stupid and unprofessional lawyers are?

Educators can do nothing right in the public’s eyes. What’s worse, educators themselves absorb this message and happily make it their own. The week before last, everybody dumped on a Harvard professor because we all know a lot better than he does how he should teach his classes. Then there was another scandal surrounding a professor who breastfed a child in class. This week there is a hullabaloo about the hiring practices of the English Department at Colorado State. And every time when this non-issue du jour is turned into a major drama, we, the educators, join the pack that hounds our colleagues.

What we don’t want to realize is that our turn will come next. Today in class, at the committee meeting, in the office each of us might do, say or write something that the next irresponsible journalist or blogger will use to promote the idea that all educators are freaks, jerks, and hateful creatures. This is a message that sells very well nowadays. Crowds of ignoramuses want to excuse their grievous lack of intelligence by fostering the idea that they never learned anything because teachers are stupid.

I suggest that we stop participating in this vicious endeavor. Let’s stop lending our voices to the attempts to destroy education in this country. The teachers of Illinois are on strike right now, protesting the ridiculous decision by the Obama administration to force teachers to stop teaching and start training students to pass some meaningless standardized tests. Do you enjoy my posts about students who think that Latin America is a country and who ask in shocked voices, “Hitler is dead? When did that happen?” Prepare to see a lot more posts like those if Illinois teachers lose their struggle. Obama continues Bush’s policies aimed at destroying education in this country. This is the real issue we need to discuss.

Let’s stand in solidarity with teachers in Illinois, adjuncts, instructors, lecturers, graduate students, post-docs, tenured and tenure-track faculty, Visiting professors at colleges, Quebec CEGEPS, state universities, Ivy League schools, big research institutions, small teaching colleges. When the next round of manufactured outrage against a colleague comes on, let’s refuse to participate. Let’s give our fellow educator the benefit of the doubt.

Instead, let’s turn our attention towards issues that are really crippling our attempts to educate. The bad working conditions of school teachers, the idiotic standardized tests, the swollen administrative budgets, the exploitation of contingent faculty, the lack of tenure-track positions, the overblown athletic budgets, huge classes where nobody can get individual attention, poor school districts where teachers have to buy chalk and paper with their own money – this is what is destroying our education. These issues, and not a teacher who brought her kid to class once or a professor who punished students for cheating, are our real enemies.

Yes, I’m in a vile mood right now as evidenced by this photo I just took of myself. And in case you want to be critical, I don’t teach today and feel entitled to wear this dress because it’s hot.

The reason why I’m wearing this mean look on my face is the following. Today is the day that I need to resubmit my article with the changes that I have introduced. The changes have turned out to be quite profound and now I’m worried the journal will not want the article at all. I’ve been futzing with it since 8 am because I feel incapable of letting it go.

And in the midst of this painful process, I had to interrupt what I was doing and go all the way to campus to attend a committee meeting.

“Which ones of you served at this committee last year?” the bureaucrat du jour asked the committee members.

We all raised our hands.

“So all of you know how this works?” the bureaucrat continued.

We nodded.

“Well, then you know more about this than I do because I’ve never done this before,” the bureaucrat said. “In this case, if nobody has anything else to add, we can just end the meeting.”

After which I had to wait for my bus to come for 20 minutes.

And this is why I have this mean look in the photo.

Is it too much to ask that people stop using work mail lists to share their idiotic “prayerful” messages? I just received a chain email that starts with “We pray for the innocents of Iraq and Afghanistan” and I feel like I want to vomit. Why can’t people keep their intimate beliefs to themselves? Why this need to make a public spectacle of their fake faith?

I also have to wonder why these religion peddlers always end up being the most inconsiderate people on campus. I wake up to 70+ emails every day (I teach a blended course) and I end up having to sort through all kinds of crap to get to important messages. Even kitty lovers have the brains to realize that photos of their stupid pets should wait while the first month of the academic semester is over. The religious folks, however, are undaunted. No matter how busy you are, they will persecute you with completely irrelevant and obnoxious news of their idiotic prayers.

The academic blogosphere is abuzz with the news about the job posting from Colorado State University which specifies that the department is looking for a candidate with a PhD “awarded between 2010 and time of appointment“. This sounds very offensive to people who graduated in 2007-9 and haven’t been able to find a tenure-track position because of the recession.

However, after being on a few job search committees, I suspect that this job listing doesn’t aim to exclude people just because they happened to get their PhD in 2009 rather than in 2010. Rather, this might be an attempt to avoid being inundated with applications from housewives who left their careers 10-15 years ago because they had deluded themselves into thinking that their husbands’ success and money had anything to do with them. After those husbands dump them, housewives often try to revive their careers and start applying for positions. However, the years they spent out of work make them incapable of behaving themselves with any degree of propriety. After reading cover letters by housewives narrating in detail the story of their divorce and heaping abuse on the “bastard” of a husband (once again, this is an application for a job in academia) and leafing through letters of recommendation from women who recommended the applicant for a professorial position on the basis of giving birth at the same time as she did and knowing her as a very good person and a nice neighbor, I think any method is good enough to prevent them from applying altogether.

And then there is always that mentally unstable person that each department has as a follower and who applies with mile-long cover letters for absolutely any position offered at this department (from the secretary to the departmental chair.) Our department has a long-distance stalker of this kind.

I never managed to finish David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years. First, I don’t enjoy the attempt to grab onto a single concept and use it to explain absolutely everything in the world. Debt is a rich topic of research as it is and I see no need to try to create some sort of a grand narrative du jour out of it. I thought we were past grand narratives anyway.

Another problem I had with the book is that it is obsessed with proving that there were matters on which Adam Smith was wrong. I don’t know whether it’s a regular thing to do among economists to argue so passionately about a theory created in the XVIIIth century. I mean, the guy’s been dead for a very long time, so how is it a big breakthrough to assume that he was wrong on occasion? I can’t imagine publishing a book in my discipline arguing earnestly that Francisco Mariano Nipho, an XVIIIth century literary critic, was not entirely right. Well, duh. This would make me look like one of those weirdos who claim that psychoanalysis is useless because Freud fucked up often enough. As if nothing happened in the discipline since then.

The main reason that I disliked Graeber’s book, however, was that it became pretty obvious quite soon that the guy had an agenda that he tried to sneak past his readers in a very inelegant way. In his recent article “Can Debt Spark a Revolution?” published in The Nation*, Graeber proves that I was right from the start. His hope for the future is debt forgiveness:

 A debt jubilee, after all, affords the possibility not just of economic renewal, but of intellectual and spiritual renewal as well.

There is, of course, absolutely no proof that any spiritual or intellectual renewal will come from debt forgiveness. Evidence to the contrary, however, abounds. Graeber admits that a form of debt forgiveness has already been put in place when the taxpayers saved the failing companies from imminent ruin. So have the banks and companies we bailed out been spiritually or intellectually renewed? Obviously not. To the contrary, they pursued the same practices that led them into trouble with even greater abandon than before. They messed up, saw that there were no consequences attached to messing up, and continued doing exactly what they were doing before. There is no doubt in my mind that any further attempts at debt forgiveness will very soon lead to even greater portions of the population being even more indebted than they are today.

Graeber demonstrates exactly why the #Occupy protests have failed so miserably when he says the following:

Occupy was right to resist the temptation to issue concrete demands. But if I were to frame a demand today, it would be for as broad a cancellation of debt as possible, followed by a mass reduction of working hours—say to a five-hour workday or a guaranteed five-month vacation.

Here the article ends without any explanation of who will pay for these five-month vacations or forgiven debts, mortgages, auto loans, etc. The Treasury? Well, we all know it’s empty and up to its non-existent ears in debt. Of course, everybody wants a guaranteed five-month vacation and no debt. As well as world peace and wonderful weather all the time. But what’s the use of engaging in these silly fantasies if you are not ready at least to begin considering how they could be made reality?

* You have to be a subscriber to access the article.

We all remember how the anonymous protester was declared the person of the year. Today, however, we can see that the wave of protests that was witnessed by a variety of Western societies recently fizzled out without achieving anything of value.

The Spanish Indignados brought the Conservative Partido Popular to power and will now see their country subjected to a massive dose of PP’s austerity measures.

The Russian protest didn’t do any damage to Putin’s regime and has now turned to clownish support of the useless Pussy Riot.

The #Occupy protests in the US haven’t managed to become any sort of a force to be counted with in the current US elections. Just as many people support the party of the 1% as would have done had these protests never happened. If you don;t believe me, look at the stats for the 2008 elections and compare them to the 2012 presidential race.

So what can we conclude from all this?

First of all, that protests whose only platform is “let everything be good and nothing be bad” will never achieve any lasting change.

Second, street protests are useless. As I’ve been saying this entire time, if you want change these days, don’t go into the streets. Go to the Internet. Social networks and blogs have managed to do a lot more in the past year than all these street hullabaloos combined and multiplied by eleven. And you know why that happened? Simply because when you gather for a street protest, you don’t face the need to articulate any actual message. All you have to do is come up with a short meaningless slogan like “Greed = bad, compassion = good.” Online, however, you are forced to verbalize your grievances and list your demands. The streets are a great place to chant and to moo, but try doing that on a blog, a website, or even on  your Facebook page. You will lose all readership within days. Hell, even Twitter requires a greater capacity to articulate your thoughts than any street protest.

In the end, street protests nowadays are counter-productive because they allow people to let off steam, feel better about things, and return home prepared to accept much worse things than the ones they originally gathered to protest. It is not surprising that the protests in both Russia and Spain culminated in producing much more oppressive regimes than the ones the street protesters denounced. I only hope that we don’t end up in the same situation here in the US.

After your professor mentioned her Jewish family three times in class (a propos of course material, obviously), maybe it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to visit some racist website and copy-paste from it the priceless information that “in 1492, the Catholic king and queen finally managed to rid the Iberian Peninsula from the infestation of Jews who had been plaguing it for centuries.”

Some people are so clueless that they don’t even manage to be offensive.