If There's Enough, It's About the Money (Cleveland Post, November 3, 2011)

So, a couple of years ago I informed my husband he could give me gold hoop earrings for Christmas. I hadn't lost a cheap pair in years and deemed I could now be trusted with the real thing.

He obliged. He gave me a lovely pair made of twisted wire, sort of a filigree pattern.

I lost the first one within the hour. Fortunately, we were in the house and it was soon found. Even so, I was not happy.

You see, funny things can happen when you mix women and manufacturing engineering experience. "Pretty" just doesn't cut it any more, not when trouble-shooting inspection reveals how "pretty" will fail way before it should.

The design of the earrings was defective. The clasp was flimsy. The earring easily became tangled in long hair such that, something like tucking a loose strand of hair behind the ear would cause the clasp to come undone. Gravity takes over from there.

I ask you: what idiot would put a cheap clasp on an expensive pair of earrings? Do they not know that such things are often given as gifts, have sentimental value, are expected to be treasured for years? Do they not know that hoops are favored by women with long hair? Do they expect people to shrug off the loss of a Benjamin or two as easily as they would a George?

Or do they just think girls won't notice as long as its shiny and pretty?

Not this girl. Customer complaints are a professional obligation: no continuous improvement without feedback. I collected the receipt and the box and was off to the department store to return them.

In congenial but no-nonsense terms, I explained the defect to the sales associate.

She did not see the problem, did not politely pretend to see the problem or even breathe an insincere "So lucky you found it!" in sisterly commiseration. Not at all interested in this opportunity to improve quality and customer satisfaction, she terminated the debate by rapidly processing the return. She was even less interested in preventing future dissatisfaction, for she tucked the earrings back into the display to sell to the next unsuspecting customer. And her bearing seemed to say, "If you can only afford the low end of the fine jewelry department, then maybe you should stick to the cheap stuff."

I should have used that one economic power I had to register my disgust and walked out, but sometimes I'm a little slow. I picked out a new, more substantially constructed pair of earrings, and left.

*****

The earrings were not the only annoyingly defective gift. Finished with them, I turned to the tape measure. It broke the first time I tried to use it, so I was off to hold them to their lifetime guarantee.

Again, I was prepared to show the sales associate how it was broken. But, like the woman in the jewelry department, he wasn't interested. Like her, he seemed to find my presence annoying, perhaps thinking "Must be nice to have time to worry about such small stuff. He directed me to the shelf where I could find a replacement and that was that.

Strictly speaking, I suppose you could call these "no hassle returns." And, to be fair, it was only a week or so after Christmas, a time when the patience of even the best sales associates have been severely depleted.

But I think that, on a very small scale, they point to the same things that get under the skin of both the Occupy protestors and the Tea Party folks: money talks, but not in the denominations ordinary people carry.

As for my new earrings? The pair didn't survive the summer. I'm back to wearing cheap ones. I don't lose those. And the tape measure still works. When I can find it.

Repeating History (Cleveland Post, October 20, 2011)

I have been fascinated by the past for as long as I can remember. It started out with the dresses - I wanted to live in "olden times" because I wanted to wear pretty dresses when I pretended I was Cinderella going to the ball. Contemporary fashion at this stage in my life was no help. It offered only the ugly present - loud colors, fake fibers, bell bottoms and mini skirts that couldn't twirl.

The desire for long dresses lead me to read historical fiction, which lead to tales of adventure. And, as books for young people are generally written by adults who want youngsters to learn a thing or two, I came out with a respect for history, for education, for knowledge, and for truth (sneaky buggers!).

****

The past is all around us but usually keeps to itself. Not this week.

Innocently plowing through a book on my "should read" list, I was startled to read about Wall Street and bailing out the bankers. Occupying Wall Street wasn't an option for the people on the page, but the blame for the economic mess had a familiar ring.

A little further on, another zinger: "First it proceeded to save most of the bankers who were not already wholly liquidated, dead or in jail. Usually, that was accomplished, indeed, by having the depositors agree to lose a more or less great part of their savings."

"It" was the New Deal, and the economic disaster being blamed on Wall Street was the Great Depression. The book hiding such electric connections between past and present was The Mind of the South by W. J. Cash It was published in 1941, before 'Great Depression" had earned its capitalization and when there was only the World War.

We've been here before.

Yeah, yeah. Everybody knows "those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it." Or something like that.

That sounds good. But for what purpose do we study history? What do we hope to learn?

How to avoid wars tops the list for me, followed by how to govern justly, and provide citizens with the framework for all to live and prosper.

Just because we learn it, does it mean we have to implement it? I think that, for some things, some folks - with much fidgeting and sweating and embarrassment, answer "no."

Again from The Mind of the South: "The Democratic politicians in Washington who managed the practical distribution of relief funds, observing cannily that money spent in a section which was certain to be Democratic anyhow could have no effect for political purposes...these politicians dealt with Dixie with a striking niggardliness."

According to Cash, Works Progress Administration wages in the South were as little as half of what was paid in other areas less certain to deliver Democratic votes. Surely we know better than to play those games?

And on the subject of fears of political favoritism at the University of North Carolina, William Powell writes in North Carolina Over Four Centuries: "Republicans charged that non-Federalists were dismissed from the faculty, that anti-Republican books were used, and that the young men of the state lost their Republican principles after a stay in Chapel Hill." The Republican legislature took steps against the university, only to draw criticism from around the country.

Of course, this legislature was acting at the opening of the 19th century, and these Republicans were Democratic Republicans, evolutionary forebears of Democrats as we know them. Last week's elections show some (on both sides) still see monkeying with education as a partisan tool.

*****

Back when the past mainly held my interest with satin and petticoats, it offered one other attraction. Security. Watching your parents watch the evening news in the late 60s was a scary thing. Society was changing in a very disorderly and disrespectful manner. There was a sense that "back then," society had been orderly, that folks knew what things were proper and how to properly do them, and all those other problems could be worked out politely if people would just be patient.

That perception is not history. It is nostalgia.

As a culture, we've been here before. As individuals in this place and time, this is new territory. We haven't got everything worked out the way it ought to be, and even things that are settled don't stay that way.

There's still lots of adventure to go around.

Actions Speak Loudest (From the Cleveland Post July 14, 2011)

Have you heard about the cheating scandal in the Atlanta Public Schools?

It wasn't the students. In 44 schools, going back as many as 10 years, principals and teachers have changed answers on high stakes standardized tests to improve their schools' performance numbers. Of 178 principals and teachers identified as having participated in 2009, 82 have confessed.

The report was released July 5 and is available through the Atlanta Journal-Constitution at ajc.com. Outrageous only begins to describe it.

The report opens with the obvious, "Thousands of school children were harmed..." The discussion of the harm seems to have been limited to those quantifiable pedagogical and regulatory items: deprived of access to additional help for academic weaknesses that likely would have been revealed by untainted results; deprived of effective teaching because it wasn't necessary to achieve the necessary scores; the cumulative damage of experiencing these deprivations over successive years.

Those things point to the curriculum and what the children didn't learn. But to my mind, the greater damage comes from what they did learn.

School is the first official place embryonic citizens are sent to learn about our society. Through the instruction of the teachers and the management of the principal, they are supposed to learn the things they need to succeed in life.

The best traditions of our civilization have determined that these start with reading, writing, arithmetic, and science. These are the tools of thinking, problem solving, exploration, and discovery. They are activated by personal curiosity and motivation, and lead to the kind of competence, confidence, self-reliance and ingenuity that set the United States apart early on. Education is something the student participates in and contributes to, not something that is done to him.

Competent, confident, self-reliant people can find jobs and feed their families. At the bare minimum, they're good for the economy.

Maybe the teachers and principals in Atlanta believe this in theory, or did believe it at one time. It is possible they never believed it, never bought into it because they never had anyone model it for them. And there is evidence that they had to choose between cheat or get fired.

However they came to participate in this betrayal, they have taught their students something quite different. Worse, they have gone a long way towards keeping them from every learning it.

I can imagine the thoughts of a perceptive Atlanta elementary student, particularly given the contemporary emphasis on self-esteem: "My teachers and principal lied to me. They told me I was smart and could do the work. They told me to be honest. They told me they loved me. But behind my back they changed my test answers. They don't think I'm smart. They don't believe I can do the work. And they're teachers, so they must be right."

I imagine that the thoughts of even the most well-behaved middle school students would require some editing for a family newspaper. Their cynical suspicions have been confirmed: "They say success is about education but its not. Its all about money and not what you know but who you know, and whose butt you kiss. Its all a crock."

If I believed that, I'd want to tax the daylights out of rich people, too.

Why does this story matter to us, to anybody outside of Atlanta? There are actually a number of wonky public policy and statistical reasons, including the fact that school systems compare themselves to each other to get a better handle on performance or efficacy of various teaching methods.

And there's the fact that there are discussions in our state about tying teacher pay to performance. Here is evidence that such a relationship creates an incentive to cheat.

But ultimately, I think this mess serves as a cautionary reminder of the role school plays in our society. Schools convey the values of the communities that establish them and the people who run them. Children hear the actions of those adults far more clearly than they do their words. The older they get, the better they get at detecting the discrepancies, and the less tolerant of them they become.

It makes me wonder: if today's students detect lots of discrepancies, how supportive of the public school system will they be when it comes time to educate their children?

And could it be that those uninvolved parents educators worry about so much just learned the wrong lesson when they were in school?

Defining the Problem, Inside and Outside of the Box (from The Cleveland Post, November 18, 2010)

Defining the Problem, Inside and Outside of the Box

by

Kathleen S. Volcjak

I love this quote from Donald Rumsfeld:

"There are known knowns. These are the things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know."

Learning to figure out which is which is (or should be) one of the main goals of education. I have tutored elementary and middle school students in math on and off for over fifteen years, and it is this skill that trips most of them up. Given 327 x 6, they know what to do (multiply) and what to do it to (327 and 6). No unknowns here.

But what to do when the multiplication sign is taken away and replaced with words?! Sometimes there are extra numbers, too, and the point is for the student to learn to sort through what is relevant and what is not, what is known but not relevant.

Children often provide their own examples of what is known but irrelevant. Consider this problem: "It takes Rick's mother fifteen minutes to drive from their home to his Cub Scout meeting. If his mother leaves at 5:30, what time will they arrive at the meeting?" Adults get to the point (hopefully) that they see it's the same elapsed time problem as 'If Molly puts the cookies in the oven at 5:30 and they bake for fifteen minutes, what time will it be when she takes them out?'

But not children. They make associations with words, like how Mama grumbles about the traffic after school and that time there was an accident and they sat next to Bojangles and smelled the fried chicken for a really long time. It becomes perfectly reasonable for a child capable of calculating elapsed time to say "I don't know" because, for her, the effect of traffic is a relevant known unknown.

The farther we move from being students, the more complex the problems become. We become the ones who create them and the ones responsible for developing answers. Not a comforting thought, considering the groans the mere mention of 'word problems' draws from many old enough to know better.

And so we come to the state budget. $3 billion dollars more scheduled to go out than expected to come in. Governor Bev Perdue has asked all agencies to present budgets showing 5%, 10%, and 15% cuts, and is also putting together proposals for restructuring government all together. Fine, as far as it goes.

But this is where the known knowns, the known unknowns and the unknown unknowns come in to play. We ought to know by now that the biggest known known in the budget is that the good times don't last. "When will they end?" and "Why did they end?" are open questions, known unknowns. But as new technology develops new markets and situations faster than we can identify potential economic hazards, "Why?" is also an unknown unknown.

It should be a no-brainer that the budget should serve all the people of the state and spend their tax dollars in a manner that honors the work and, perhaps, sacrifice that generated them in the first place.

To that end, one hopes the best resources are put to defining this budget - and that our legislators listen to them. Our state motto is "To be, rather than to seem" and our legislators should act accordingly, going for substance, not flash. They should use history and economics to flesh out the knowns and the unknowns into their various likelihoods. They should think inside and outside the box to put together a robust budget that covers the basics, anticipates bumps in the road and provides flexible responses. Then, prioritize what's left and add the high priority items.

Yeah, well.

In the mean time, encourage your children and grandchildren to get up to speed on math. If it was not your favorite subject, keep that to yourself and maybe get some help with it (studies show success in math increases with age!). It is a known known there will be more budget trouble in the future. If our children can't work out the math then, who will?