The state of Florida has just fallen off the flat, 6,000 year old earth they think we all live on (which, by the way we don’t). Florida’s House and Senate just passed legislation pushing religion into the science curriculum. Despite the claim of “academic freedom”, all Florida has done is to show that A) their state government, at least, is run by idiots; and B) they have condemned their students to receiving substandard science education.

Got kids in Florida? You may want to move.

Read the rest of this entry »

This is no April Fool’s joke — Homeland Security, as threatened, has gotten Congress to begin the end for border fence opponents by pushing through waivers in California that will allow the fence to go up despite existing laws. The other border states, Texas most notably, are sure to be next. By flat out trashing environmental areas, ignoring the needs of organisms on the endangered species list, disrupting local commerce, stealing land from land owners, and wasting a ton of money, we will be kept safe, declares Homeland Security officials.

Yeah, and pigs will fly, too. Maybe we can use them as aerial reconnaissance platforms.

Let’s just think about this, shall we? What’s wrong with the current border between the US and Mexico?

1. Well, it isn’t the only border. There’s a really big one up along Canada. We gonna fence that one off too? If you are worried about terrorists it’s probably easier to cross that border than the Mexican one. If you really want to just be a bigot (which, I suspect, is a big part of the problem with the current administration), then I suppose you could focus only on the southern border, but you can’t ignore the fact that one fence along one border is NOT going to do squat to keep out terrorists.

2. There already exists some fencing, generally along the more readily navigable avenues. The new wall will replace this, but there still won’t be a complete wall along the border. There will still be some remote funnels that could be traversed. So what’s the difference? Wall…fence…in the end 100% coverage is absolutely impossible. Nor should it even be desirable.

3. Besides the fact that the wall can’t be everywhere, what are the other problems? Well, let’s just see. You are really desperate. You need a job or money or food. Desperate people will do desperate things and often desperate people get real creative. Wall in your way? Go over it. Go under it. Go around it. Go through it. All of these solutions are currently employed by those desperate to get here. We sure aren’t building some medieval style siege wall here, so in less populated areas with fewer patrols, going over will still be an option. Tunneling, though used most often to move drugs, is an option for people too. Are you telling me that somehow Homeland Security will be able to detect every tunneling attempt? The thing about a tunnel is you can hide it and change where it opens. Kind of hard to watch everywhere, isn’t it? How about going around? You could simply get a boat and hit a coast or, let’s face it, a plane ticket is probably cheaper. Our passport and visa security is so fundamentally flawed it isn’t hard to fake it. Or, you could go through it — via car, truck, produce container, etc. Unless the border patrol is going to stop and search every single vehicle that crosses the border, you will miss people.

4. There really are environmentally sensitive areas along the Rio Grande and in the desert regions of the southern US. This new wall, and the agents, the flying pig platforms, and tech will mess things up. When Homeland Security claims that the impact on the environment will be low, they are absolutely lying through their teeth. Take one look at the pix attached to the LA Times article below and you will see that the wall structure is pretty solid and to make it effective you have to clear quite a bit of land around it. That means destroying habitat and destroying habitat will affect the animals that live there. In Texas you are talking about changing how waterways flow. Tell me this won’t have an impact.

5. Walls are stupid. Why are we even building a wall to begin with? What are we afraid of? Why is the government so keen on making us live in fear such that we have to hide behind walls and be suspicious about everyone and everything? Where does that get us? It gets us nowhere. There is no point in living in fear. If you do you don’t actually end up living anymore. This wall is stupid. We need the workers that come here and if you think we don’t you are lying to yourself. There aren’t any more criminals coming here than what we already have, so using fear tactics are just plain dishonest. The number of terrorists that will be stopped by a wall is ZERO. Not ONE of the 9/11 terrorists snuck over the Mexican border. And why shouldn’t people have a chance at food and work and shelter and education in any case?

In short, building a wall is absolutely without merit. It is a sign of our own misplaced arrogance. It is a sign of our own failure to be human, to have compassion, to offer a helping hand rather than a smack in the face. This wall not only wastes money, it makes us look like a pack of fools.

The only way to prevent people from illegally entering the country — if that is your biggest problem with the whole issue of immigration — is to remove the reason they do it in the first place. Punishing them is NOT the way to do that. Debt relief, elimination of poverty, education, provision of opportunity — all of these things are what are needed and they have to occur in the originating countries. Do you really want to reform immigration? Then you need to support work in Mexico to make it a livable place. You need to support any country so that it becomes a livable place. Every single person on this planet has the exact same right to a decent living as you do. Instead of walls we need bridges.

Instead of walls we need to think about other people for a change and stop listening to the paranoid fools running our government.

For wall pix and reference see: Environmental rules waived for border fence, Marosi and Gaouette, LA Times staff writers, LAT, April 2, 2008.

This week in the New York Times national edition I read what for me was a rather disturbing article about paying students real money based on performance on No Child Left Behind (NCLB) state mandated tests [Next Question: Can Students Be Paid to Excel? by Jennifer Medina, March 5, 2008]. I thought surely I must have misread the headlines but no, I had not. New York City and several other cities around the country are in fact experimenting with monetary compensation as a motivator for children to do well on standardized tests.

Why do people continue to believe that throwing money at a problem will always fix it?

I hate NCLB. I hate it with a passion. Standardized testing is one of the worst systems I can think of in education. As a past college instructor I can tell you that the advent of standardized testing greatly correlated (in my anecdotal opinion) with a remarkable drop in the ability of students to work their way through problems and solve them. Thinking has been replaced with test taking strategies and memorization. Schools will deny that they teach to the test, but if you corner teachers off campus and ask them off the record, many will freely admit to doing just that. Students have certain things they “must” learn and that leaves little time to cover anything else.

NCLB does in fact leave children behind. If you cannot pass the high school exit exams you do not graduate. What is that if not leaving children behind? The tests don’t care if students can’t get enough food to feed their brains so they can concentrate. The tests don’t care if kids come from broken homes. The tests don’t care if kids are exposed to environments that detract from their ability to learn.

Didn’t pass the test? So sorry.

Maybe you should switch schools. The whole notion of changing schools if yours somehow isn’t “performing” however only helps the rich. If you don’t have a car to drive your kid someplace else, you don’t get to go. If there is no room, you don’t get to go. If you can’t make up the delta between a voucher and tuition, you don’t get to go. And so on. Maybe it is the teacher’s fault. Unlikely. Sure there are probably some bad apples out there but most teachers I know are working their butts off. They can’t, however, take the test for the students. Learning is a 2 way street.

Into this mess some schools now want to throw money. If you score “X” on your test, you get “$Y”. This is patently absurd. Pay kids to learn? What happened to having kids learn because they want to learn? That would be a nice motivation, don’t you think? But regardless of this, how can you justify what amounts to economic discrimination? Good students will get money, poor students will not. Many poor students are already poor students because of poverty issues and excluding them from the payment system will only increase an already ugly divide. The thought is “well, but they will try harder because of the money”. Some kids ARE trying their hardest and they still can’t succeed because they aren’t being given the right tools. How much more do you need to rub their noses in it? And for the ones who do get money, what message does that send? Will they do everything for money? Will that be the final death-knell for altruism?

Even more sinister, what happens when Johnny doesn’t bring home the cash? There are already stories you hear about kids being punished or beaten for poor grades. Money is a much uglier motivator. Money can be spent on lots of things. Just because you pay the child the money for performance doesn’t mean they will get to spend it. What happens when someone else comes to expect that money and then doesn’t get it?

In the article, the children were asked what they would do with their test bonus. Some said they wanted to buy toys or video games. One little girl said she would buy food for her family.

I thought child labor was outlawed years ago?