Not quitters
I’m sure that there will be much tea-leaf reading in the next few days, but there isn’t that much from the president’s address that’s dramatically news-breaking on education policy. The call for everyone to attend some higher education is a little new, but the theme isn’t. The most obvious way to read the statements about […]
Sick leave and pensions
I’m taking one of my rare sick days today, and while I don’t have that much stamina to concentrate for a long time, I’ll note just a few thoughts about debates over teacher pensions a la Chad Aldeman’s comments. First, the entire debate strikes me as largely unconscious of or compartmentalized from the larger context […]
Stationary population models and graduation
In odd moments in the last few weeks, I’ve been playing around with a standard demographic concept, the stationary population model. This is one of those things that don’t really exist in reality, a population with constant mortality and fertility rates, with no migration in or out, and where the population is the same every […]
Forward moment-choo-m
When my mind has strange inclinations, I sometimes anthropomorphize my mental state: “Oh, gee, isn’t it interesting that my brain cannot make the connections I usually can, or it’s making very strange connections. I wonder why it does that.” I don’t worry about the recursion there, because the technique is largely a way to stop […]
Trip triage
My travel schedule in both the near and far term is becoming abbreviated. In the short term, I am canceling two trips to Orlando I had planned for the next two weeks because I’ve had a cold this weekend and know my limits (or at least need to start behaving as if I know them). […]