Maine Repeals Gays as Human; Public School Parent Protests Gays as Animals

Dan Delong of Carlinville, Ill., at teacher at Southwestern High School in the nearby town of Piasa, will face a school board hearing November 2, after being suspended from teaching. A parent of one unidentified student thought the optional reading assignment was inappropriate for her child . . .

When this and this coincide in the same week, what are kids actually learning do you think, about the values woven into America’s power of story?

The teacher’s disciplinary hearing was Monday night, and perhaps there’s a better lesson in how it ended than in how it started, a fitting lesson of today’s American president as true to yesterday’s American precedent:

“As a nation we’ve come far on the journey towards a more perfect union. . . Time and again, we faced opposition. Time and again, the measure was defeated or delayed.

Time and again we’ve been reminded of the difficulty of building a nation in which we’re all free to live and love as we see fit.”

Now that’s all I need to know, to read this as American Power of Story fit for any public school classroom, especially at the high school level.

But here’s more sensational, divisive detail for anyone who can’t or won’t support individual liberty on principle and instead needs to see which side is which first and put on the correct-colored jersey, march into battle under a reliably solid-colored flag and can only understand human power of story as “opposite-meaning” akin to Carrie Prejean’s intellectually bereft concept of “opposite marriage”:

Dan Delong, an English teacher at Southwestern High School in Piasa, Illinois has been suspended for allegedly allowing [honor] students in his English classes to read an [optional extra-credit] article about homosexuality in the animal kingdom. The article that Delong allegedly had his class read was published in a 2006 edition of “The Gay Animal Kingdom” and is available at Seed Magazine.

See Google This Morning and Smile!

Then call any handy family members over to share the smile.
I just did.

UPDATE: See CSM’s favorite video clips from the 40-year run. And here’s one of mine, as a sax lover:

Mike Lux on America’s “Historical, Hysterical Conservatives”

They have used the same arguments — for tradition and states rights, against “big government socialism” — in every era. In those past eras, history was not on their side. It is not in our time, either.

. . .These conservative arguments have always been tinged with more than a little hysteria, just like today. And no matter what, conservatives always insisted they owned the moral high ground.

Related news reinforces the Lux WorldView: the former governor of my state now accuses President Obama of attacking American capitalism. Jeb Bush does this not just publicly but apparently for calculated effect not on capitalism or the economy’s current crisis, but his own political prospects.

He needed to make the news he’s been so out of and must re-control if his plan to resurrect any of his traditional dynasties — the Bush family, GOP, Roman Catholic Church — with himself anointed to lead, has a prayer.

How Do You Define What’s Up (at pussy)Cat’s?

The latest round of thinking parents playing “What’s in a Name?” as a floating blog-game of religion and politics costumed as each other for Halloween, apparently started with Lynn and JJ and many commenters both places, riffing on Frank Schaeffer’s books and his new MSNBC repudiation of the evangelical radicalism he was weaned on, taught to use as a weapon of mass destruction in mainstream politics and governance, back in mid-century America. He used some very colorful and contentious language to make his case that this was a bad thing then and a worse thing now.

Cat linked that video and the posts, used it as a mirror exercise in fallacious argument with her kids, which interested JJ enough to keep her playing over there instead of here for a couple of days.

Oh,and Monty Python got involved because isn’t it axiomatic that satisfying intercourse between smart people just does revert to Monty Python sooner or later?

And here we are. My last comment at Cat’s is reproduced below as an invitation if you’re so inclined, to take on the Python persona of your choice and join the improv, here or there across artificial boundaries and dubious definitions as you prefer:

Well, let’s define terms immediately upon using them, or far better, stick to dictionary definitions. A good argument needs no redefinitions, right?

Or a good argument is almost entirely redefinitions. Need we first argue to define good argument?

To that point, I’m surprised you missed this Python definition of argument!

I laughed at that in the 70s because it was really absurd while Bill Buckley was doing Firing Line on PBS for real — breathing life into intellect and intellect into argument and argument into television.

Initially, Cleese simply contradicts everything that Palin says. Palin insists that it is not an argument but merely contradiction and asserts that “argument’s an intellectual process. Contradiction is just the automatic gain-saying of anything the other person says.” Cleese asserts that, to have an argument, he must “take up a contrary position.” Palin is frustrated until he realises that Cleese is actually engaging him in a sort of meta-argument about what constitutes an argument.

But it’s not so funny when television and real life become one big intellectually bankrupt contradiction clinic 24-7.

I think of “good argumentation” much like, ahem, other forms of healthy human intercourse.

It is meant as a creative force to uplift, connect and sustain virtues rather than do harm to anyone directly or indirectly through vice and self-indulgence. It is “good” intercourse and fun to share with the right person for the right reasons, when it’s

JJ’s Reading Serious Stuff About Vaccine and Public Health Foolishness

Science doesn’t kill people, people kill people. With politics and mind games.
And “fear spreads as rapidly as any virus . . .”

David Shenk is the author of five books; his next book, The Genius in All of Us: Why Everything You’ve Been Told about Genetics, Talent and IQ is Wrong, will be published by Doubleday in March 2010.

Oct 20 2009, 5:59PM
Health / Medicine:
The New Pandemic of Vaccine Phobia

We no longer believe that witches control the weather or inhabit the souls of adolescent girls. We no longer believe that the earth is flat, and we have even held our ground against the pseudoscience of “intelligent design.”

Now it is time for all who respect logic, rationality, and the scientific method to come together and say NO MORE to anti-vaccine demagoguery.

No one pretends that vaccines are perfect, or 100% risk-free. But approved vaccines work. They save lives. They do not cause mercury poisoning or autism. They carry very low risks — risks almost always worth taking. And, to top it off, vaccines have become something of a civic responsibility: they work best when everyone takes them.

Six recent helpful articles:
[see at story link]

Wired Magazine is out with its new cover story about a prominent vaccine scientist and historian/biographer, who is to vaccines what Richard Dawkins is to evolution — someone who gets death threats for his modern medicine the way doctors who courageously provide women’s family planning and reproductive health care do:
An Epidemic of Fear: How Panicked Parents Skipping Shots Endangers Us All

Then I came across a progressive Indiana pediatrician at HuffPo blogging health care and insurance reform in a way that appeals to my intelligence: RATIONAL ARGUMENTS: a blog mainly (but not entirely) about health policy. . .his radio talk about intelligently negotiating health insurance reform is here.

“Collision: Is Religion Absurd or Good for the World?”

Last fall, we went on tour debating the topic “Is Religion Good For The World?” Our arguments were captured on film for a new documentary, Collision. Are our morals dictated to us by a supreme entity or do discoveries made by science and reason, make Atheism a natural conclusion? You decide.

Christopher Hitchens and Pastor Douglas Wilson
Posted: October 20, 2009 10:18 AM
“Collision: Is Religion Absurd or Good for the World?”

And to go with it, I offer religion historian and former nun Karen Armstrong in Foreign Policy Magazine, with THINK AGAIN: God:

“Theological ideas come and go, but the quest for meaning continues. So God isn’t going anywhere. And when we treat religion as something to be derided, dismissed, or destroyed, we risk amplifying its worst faults. . . .”

Finally, Dale at Meming of Life is writing about how we can communicate with each other across religious-atheist divides:

Now, thanks in large part to the Internet, the nonreligious are finally finding each other and forming communities—with the same good and bad results. Sometimes we devote ourselves to good things like service and social justice, and sometimes we focus and facilitate a level of hatred and division that would not be possible without the reinforcement of that likeminded community.

So it’s not just a religious thing. It’s a human thing. And the difference between the good and bad result goes right back to comfort and contact with difference.

The more a group shuts off contact with unlike minds, the sloppier it gets.

Telling Children Who They Are and What’s Within Them

“You are not half. You are a whole soul living in a divided world. “

There Is No Such Thing as Half
by Joanna Brooks

What comes out when a Mormon and a Jew raise a kid?

. .You are a body spun from ancient dust and ancient water; you are the glorious hope of legions of ancestors who lived poor and died ugly; you are a soul realized in the temple of my hipbones. You are what we all are: composite, recycled. You are what we all become someday: the sum of a series of accidents and choices. A lovely mess, that’s you. Sanctify yourself with righteous words and deeds, and you will have nothing to worry about.

Smartest Two Percent Use It to Conclude Home Education is Smart

Spunky is blogging a Mensa study done by that organization’s foundation to research the nature of intelligence:

First-year college performance:
A study of home school graduates and traditional school graduates

The academic performance analyses indicate that home school graduates are as ready for college as traditional high school graduates and that they perform as well on national college assessment tests as traditional high school graduates.

The results of this study are also consistent with other studies on the academic performance of home school students compared to traditional high school graduates (Galloway 1995, Gray 1998, Jenkins 1998, Mexcur 1993). These results also suggest that a parent-guided K-12 education does not have a negative effect on a student’s college success.

For those of you needing traditional research to show an uneasy spouse, mother-in-law or the FSM forbid, a custody judge, keep this handy. I don’t need it though. I am my own case study, from a unique perspective as a school professional who unschools, also Mensa mom of Mensa kids including one proving the conclusion as we speak, on campus.

The conversation among Spunky readers is from a different angle than what I tend to see, so I thought I’d open it up here too. I’m not sure what any of this means (the study or the reactions to it) or what to think is smart or stupid or self-validating, except that being really intelligent is understanding that “what we know” — at any age — isn’t as important as “how we think.”

And that, as some of you already know, in 2000 when Favorite Daughter was nine-turning-ten, Mensa referred us to a mainstream but stupid “reality” show to find “the smartest kid in America.” (Since reality shows and kids are in the news this week, y’all might find it particularly interesting.)

Here’s the correspondence we had with the tv producer.

Social and Economic Change Spells School Problem

Even when the cultural change is the business of sports, it’s still a school problem, particularly in vocational education. (Does this make schooling and its related standards and certifications and enterprises, more conservative economic impediment in effect than progressive asset? )

Choosing to end the barbarism of Spanish bull-fighting for example:

Luis Alcántara is afraid that group will be large enough to undo 11 years of work. Since 1998, he has run a bullfighting school in Hospitalet, just outside Barcelona. His enrollments were hurt by the under-14 provision of the animal cruelty law passed in 2003, and these days, he has only nine students practicing their capework on an abandoned football field. He worries that the initiative will put him out of business altogether.

“Nobody here really hears about us,” he says. “We go to a corrida, and then go home until the following Sunday, and we don’t have any power. But there are plenty of Catalans who still love the bulls.”

Or major-league baseball umpiring in America:

From the beginning, umpiring has been seen by those who run baseball as a necessary but marginal aspect of the game. Major League Baseball does not train its own umpires, and therefore it has not established practices that would attract the best people.

Those who wish to enter the profession attend schools run by former umpires. But these are entirely private businesses; the commissioner of baseball doesn’t control the curriculum, manage the training or do anything to lure people of all races and ethnic groups to become umpires.

Everything is connected to everything, and especially School.

Kids Need Real Mom to Show Up, Not TV Reality Show

UPDATE 1:55 pm EDT – just heard the entire sheriff’s news conference on CNN live, extraordinary. All three boys are said to have had “100% involvement” in the hoax, and what the sheriff called “guilty knowledge” — so one of the felonies with which the the parent/s will be charged is “contributing to the delinquency of minors.”

_____________

Note to Balloon Boy’s Mom: Get a Clue, These are Your Real Kids, Not Some TV Show:

I don’t judge whether your sons swear, pick their noses, fart, burp or jump over banisters. I have two little boys. Glass houses. . .

That said, Mayumi, get a clue.

As of press time Saturday it seems you have either been dragged or agreed to participate in a stunt by a husband who is a child and a women- bashing gasbag. What’s more, he apparently wants your boys to be raging, women-hating gasbags. . .

These are your real live children with their own humiliations and their own storms to chase. Hold on tightly to them. They need at least one parent to keep them from flying too close to the sun.

What School Movies Have Affected Your Life?

Which ones are personally most memorable, for good or ill or just as powerful story-telling?

After posting that video clip from The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie the other day, I was stunned that Lynn has never seen it thus doesn’t have it in her frame of reference as we talk about School Ideas — what an impact that movie had on me as a schooled girl, seeing it in the theatre in 1969! [shudder]

School stories in both book and movie form have always stuck in my mind. (We can do just books later if you want.)

Harry Potter obviously, and Maggie Smith is a teacher in those school movies too, 40 years after she was in her Prime, eerie huh?

Sidney Poitier’s To Sir With Love was another high-impact, early-influence school film for me. Later there was Robin Williams’ Dead Poets Society.

And for no easily explained reason I remember the power over my thinking of an obscure late-night movie about high schoolers who got pregnant before abortion was legal, called Blue Denim. I think it was an impossibly young and blonde-ponytailed Carol Lynley, never saw the film again anywhere but it’s definitely loomed large in my frame of reference ever since.

How about you and school movies that really affected you and stayed with you? And what about your kids?

“Most Inappropriate Halloween Costumes” Slide Show

(Strong warning to those offended by, well, things clearly meant to offend.
Like listening to Beck or Limbaugh.)

Just remember, no matter how bad you may feel about whatever you come up with, as long as you’re not dressed in one of the costumes below, you’re all set.

The show starts with “child pimp” just like the ACORN set-up. Most are not child costumes though. Lots of graphic genitalia. Some racial and religious offense intended.

There was one I didn’t get, try as I might and worldly as I think I am. See if you can tell which is the most obscure, maybe explain it to me. (No, it wasn’t the misspelled bestiality costume. That was obvious.)