Performance pay in teaching and in business
The following is a partial transcript of my live chat tonight. (I’ve rearranged a few lines so that the conversation reads more linearly than it really was, and I’ve done some other light editing for readability.) Paying for performance came up, and a student who works in private business started to talk as if it made no sense […]
Ironic turns of phrase
From a friend who goes as kestrel’s nest: The phrase [“building a Red America”] caught me up short, remembering the jingos of my adolescence, one of which was “better dead than red” in reference to Communism. Back then, “Red” was synonymous with evil, anti-democratic, “anti-American” politics. Now it is used to mean “Republican, right-wing ‘ultra-American’ […]
Tough lessons
Paul Tough’s What It Takes To Make A Student is the cover story in this week’s New York Times Magazine. Plenty of things to talk about here, plenty of things to quibble about, but Tough’s central point—and one that should resonate for most people—is that the failure to educate children is a political failure, and […]
Draft of Accountability Frankenstein completed
The manuscript is done, or at least the initial drafting is done. It’s a relatively short MS—approximately 68,000 words, excluding references. In revision, that will probably stretch to 70,000, but it’s unlikely to get much larger. (December 28 update: The revised manuscript is about 73,000 words, with 12,800 words in the references section.) In contrast, […]
Lit-review frustrations, part 397
The next time I read someone claiming to derive postmodernism from quantum mechanics and chaos theory, I’m going to scream. This misunderstanding of physics usually ruins what otherwise would be interesting reading.