Words by Woods

Archive for the ‘Education’ Category

I know nearly nothing about autism.  While not impacted by the condition within my immediate family, I have worked with an very capable autistic man in the past.  Given reports that autism is being diagnosed more frequently, the future may hold more such interactions.

In one of its plot-lines, the new TV show “Parenthood” dramatizes a family’s experience becoming aware of their son’s autism, and learning how to adapt and support their son’s development.  While it is a learning experience for me, I can see this dramatization aiding extended families who are going through or have already been through actual experience with an autistic child.

On her blog “The Playful Spirit,” Lady Baker shares her own experience with an autistic son.  I was fascinated by how she used books to leverage her son’s abilities.

I have seen an interesting interview with Temple Grandin, where she discusses her book Thinking in Pictures: My Life with Autism.  It was very informative to me as she described in detail her own thinking process and how she understands it to be different from others.

Although I do not have the experience to evaluate the material, on their YouTube channel, in the past week, Yale University has posted a series of lectures from a seminar on autism and related disorders:

Treatments for Autism: Overview of Model Programs, Fred Volkmar [41:50 min]

Overview of Autism, Prof. Fred Volkmar [31:58 min]

Behavioral Treatments, Dr. Michael Powers [? min]

Parental Perspectives and Supporting Families, Alison Singer [53:49 min]

Communication in Autism, Dr. Rhea Paul [1:50:50]

Autism in Infants and Young Children, Dr. Kasia Chawarska [1:14:23]

“The gullible are often the most dishonest. If they’re foolish enough to believe the big lies of others, then they’re foolish enough to expect others to believe  their own deception.” — Dr. Michael J. Hurd

Reaction to the recent Amazon tax in Colorado, demonstrates the demagogic aspects of public lies as an effort to use fraud to wield force against those that dissent. A collection of letters to the editor of the Denver Post demonstrates the echo effect. However, activist and scholar Diana Hsieh’s letter correctly identifies the issue:   “…I don’t blame Amazon. I blame our Colorado politicians for enacting an unjust law. They’ve made business through affiliates impossible in Colorado by  imposing a mess of costly red tape and taxes. Amazon is not just a victim in this mess, but the primary victim. Honest people do not blame business for  the sins of government.” At Free Colorado, Ari Armstrong goes into detail about how the Colorado statute violated the protections our federal constitution.

At RuleOfReason novelist Edward Cline reviews Al Gore’s defense of anthropomorphic global warming fraud and Gore’s financial interest in advancing disinformation. Cline writes in part,

Gore comes off sounding like a television evangelist claiming  that God exists, is all-merciful, and will forgive you your sins if you only obey him. The evangelist’s audience is composed of stunted minds for whom the  proofs that God is a metaphysical impossibility would roll off their frontal lobes like water off a duck. It is the same with Gore’s true believers. They must  believe, because they refuse to think and accept the evidence of their senses. These are the people, laymen and “scientists” alike, for whom faith is as  trustworthy as certainty. So many people believe in anthropogenic global warming (decades ago it was global cooling); who are they to question such an  impressive consensus? It must be true.

In response to Chief Justice Roberts recent comments, George F. Will attacks the custom of the State of the Union speech, and calls for a general boycott of the process. Will is entirely wrong, and his explanation demonstrates the second-hand nature of conservative thinking with its emphasis on non-essentials and deference to  the out-of-context thoughts and actions of the past’s titans. The defects of the current State of the Union practice is symptomatic of the defects of our  recent Presidents; Will advocates ignoring the symptoms as a solution to the problem. Of course, the defect is that the American people have been  selecting inferior individuals to be President.

The New York Times reports, for more than a decade, the Kansas City School board evaded the  reality of their failing schools, and now fiscal reality has resulted in a plan to close 28 of their 61 public schools. In the past decade, enrollment has been  halved as individuals chose suburban districts and charter schools as a solution for their children’s education. Fewer than 25% of the school district’s  students perform at grade level.

During his campaign, candidate Obama promised that his presidency would strengthen our relationships in the world. Recently, the European Parliament  responded to the Administration’s diplomacy, by ending  cooperation with the US in fighting terrorist financing, which reversed a major diplomatic achievement of the Bush Administration. Now, the Washington Post reports that Sec. of State Clinton is threatening Israeli  Prime Minister Netanyahu with weakening our bilateral relations, in an effort to compel him to negotiate with terrorists. The Obama Administration’s efforts to embrace our enemies and rebuff our friends have done the opposite of what candidate Obama promised. This reminds me of Jackson Diehl’s report that Administration officials had trouble identifying any foreign leader with whom President Obama had formed a strong personal relation and the most credible claim was Dmitry Medvedev, the puppet President of Russia…which makes sense as they have so much in common in that regard.

Paul McKeever, leader Ontario’s Freedom Party, reports on dishonest public budgeting and its tendency for cost overruns. In opposing public financing of the 2015 PanAm Games in Toronto, McKeever reminds the  taxpayers that the original budget for this year’s Vancouver Olympics was $874 million, which was exceeded by solely the actual expense of security,  while estimates for actual costs are $6 BILLION. Retrospectively, the anticipated and actual costs for Social Security and Medicare would demonstrate a similar duplicity, which could be exceeded by the enactment of PelosiCare.

Ex-Senate Parliamentarian Robert Dove (1981-1987) expounds upon the history of Senate rules that have been subject to dishonest political attacks upon the role the Senate plays within our constitutional system. He concludes that current issues within the Senate operations are not the fault of the rules, but the fault of the current Senators.

As an extension of earlier reports that Global Warming Alarmism causes mental illness, now the Telegraph reports that it causes murder and suicide.  Three more bodies, including a child, added to Al Gore’s death toll in his path to kill more people than Rachel Carson.

The National Center for Policy Analysis reviews how Massachusetts’ universal coverage presages the price controls that will be implemented by ObamaCare.  However, there is another important lesson related to unintended consequences.  Massachusett’s policy is a consequence of presidential prospect Mitt Romney in action. Romney might be a brillant VC, but he fails to understand the fundamental difference between business and government policy, which facilitated the development of this corrupt program.  Romney should not be considered a viable presidential candidate until he can articulate the lessons learned from his failure, as in the consequences of following unprincipled pragmatic solutions to public problems.

David S. Broder observes that the defeat of HillaryCare was largely responsible for the Republican take over of Congress in 1994.  If this is true and both event reoccur this year (defeat of the health care proposals and Democratic loss of the House), does that mean that Dem leaders will learn the lesson and never attempt such broad nationalization of health care policy?  Not that the results of incrementalism would be substantially different to the quality of health care.

DailyFinance reports that some Chinese military leaders have suggested that China use its US bond holdings as a weapon to punish America over Taiwan.  Let me get this straight…they plan to sell the bond holdings at step discounts in order to briefly reduce the cost for investors to US bonds.  Next, are they going to threaten to burn bales of their dollar holdings?

As the US Dept of Education does not understand feedback as it forbids comments on its YouTube videos, I have to comment on its “Harvard School of Excellence–A Turnaround Model in Chicago” vid here.  The turnaround model has four implemenation steps:  1) Replace the Principal, 2) Replace Most Teachers, 3) Revamp the Curriculum, and 4) Renew the Culture.  What do these things have in common?  Student failure is rooted in public administration of schools, which is why around the world public schools require reform, but there are no calls for reforming private schools.

According to Leonard Peikoff, via Peikoff Facebook Fanpage, “Philosophy is a human need as real as the need of food. It is a need of the mind, without which man cannot obtain his food or anything else his life requires. To satisfy this need, one must recognize that philosophy is a system of ideas. By its nature as an integrating science, it cannot be a grab bag of isolated issues. All philosophic questions are interrelated.”

Via Ayn Rand Facebook Fanpage, Ayn Rand wrote, “The Objectivist ethics holds that human good does not require human sacrifices and cannot be achieved by the sacrifice of anyone to anyone. It holds that the rational interests of men do not clash–that there is no conflict of interests among men who do not desire the unearned, who do not make sacrifices nor accept them, who deal with one another as traders, giving value for value.”

In light of President Obama’s recent State of the Union Address, I decided to revisit the first State of the Union Address from President George Washington.

By my reading, President Washington’s address was less than 9 minutes long.  While it has become a modern convenience that the presidential budget address and state of the union address be combined, the first state of the union focuses on the highest priorities and lacks the laundry list of spending initiatives that we see on TV.

My favorite part of President Washington’s address expounded upon the importance of knowledge and education as a foundation for our experiment in free government:

Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness. In one in which the measures of government receive their impressions so immediately from the sense of the community as in ours it is proportionably essential.

To the security of a free constitution it contributes in various ways – by convincing those who are intrusted with the public administration that every valuable end of government is best answered by the enlightened confidence of the people, and by teaching the people themselves to know and to value their own rights; to discern and provide against invasions of them; to distinguish between oppression and the necessary exercise of lawful authority; between burdens proceeding from a disregard to their convenience and those resulting from the inevitable exigencies of society; to discriminate the spirit of liberty from that of licentiousness – cherishing the first, avoiding the last – and uniting a speedy but temperate vigilance against encroachments, with an inviolable respect to the laws.

Today, when we gaze into the maul of the federal Leviathan, we should understand that it is the failure of our education system that has accelerated our decay by lobotomizing the citizenry.

While the full text of President Washington’s address is available on-line, I have created a video with a reading of that speech.

In an analysis of a performance plateau by4th graders in math, according to results released by the Institute of Eduction Sciences in the Nation’s Report Card, Lisa Guernsey of the Early Ed Watch Blog notes:

“In short, if we want to improve students’ proficiency in math, we have to improve teachers’ proficiency too. That may be the best way to start bending that score curve upward again.”

To improve teachers’ proficiency in math, we would first need to measure it by testing the teachers.  This would facilitate correlating gaps in specific teacher proficiency with their students’ performance, and to individualize remediation for deficient teachers.

Teachers who are actively interested in increasing student achievement should champion rigorous and systematic evaluation of their peers.

Update: Reconsidering this entry, the following additional point came to me.  Such teacher evaluations should include non-graded survey questions about instructional methodology.  I suspect that answers by teachers on method, which are correct according to orthodoxy, may correlate failed process with failed outcomes at the granular level of the teacher-student relationship.