Category Archives: Education

Making Instructional Design Projects Requires Adopting New Ideas

App Design, Business, E-learning, Education, Social Networking, Technology

As an e-learning designer, I spend a lot of time looking at what other people are doing to see what works and what doesn’t, and quite surprisingly, I would argue that 95 percent of the stuff I look at doesn’t work, and the reasons most of it doesn’t work would surprise you. Here are some things that seem to be quite common (and problematic):

1. Designs that were made for old technology. I see this as the biggest problem. Quite often, someone designs a flashy Power Point presentation, and then dubs it “e-learning” because it’s too flashy to be just a Power Point presentation. And some of it involves lots of screaming graphics and stuff that flies around the screen. Just like I used to tell people when I first started designing web pages, making it fly around doesn’t make it more professional, nor does it make the content any more useful.

Too often, the attempt is made to show what the software can do, rather than use the software to do what it should do. If I want to display that George Washington crossed the Potomac, I can make a little boat float across the Potomac, and then once I’ve done that, I can then make the water all wavy-like, and blue, and maybe cause a thunderstorm to appear out of nowhere, and then Native-Americans that charge across the screen at him, and maybe some Imperial stormtroopers fighting jedis with lightsabers, and… Well, you get the picture. It’s all great, and looks really exciting, but in the end, it doesn’t tell me anything about George Washington crossing the Potomac. Whereas, I might re-create the weather conditions, and maybe the mood of the scene with some classical music (or more Independence Day inspired music), and then maybe a narrative of something that came from that time. And even that might be over-doing it. In the end, it might be more beneficial to teach by showing less and making the point of why the incident was so important to history.

Yesterday, I redesigned one of my presentations to my political science class by adding arrows that told a circular story of how Machiavelli interpreted Aristotle’s political foundations. It made sense and wasn’t over the top. I could have made it over the top, but then I realized that my students would be focused on the presentation and not the information contained in the presentation, and quite often, that is where we fail.

2. The lack of interactivity when needed. I recently designed an interactive e-learning that leads someone through a computer environment. For the longest time, we’ve been creating re-creations of computer environments where the student is a passive follower of the content on the screen. For the longest time, I suspected this wasn’t very educational, as I’ve often received far greater responses from students when they were working the computer system themselves. So, I redesigned the environment from scratch so that the e-learning is actually an interactive one, forcing the student to enter informaton in a simulated computer environment. Scripting their scenario for them, I lead them through the entry process, but they put in the information themselves, requiring them to prove that they understand the environment, and haven’t just been watching simulations of the environment. If they don’t get it, they don’t move forward. This has to be far better than reading a book about a programming language and then trying to create something from scratch, even if the book hand holds you through the process.

I looked over the e-learning we were doing before this and realized that passive presentation is all we’ve been doing, and then I realized after looking at a lot of other instructional e-learning, from Apple’s podcasts to Adobe online instructional guides, that this is how most e-learning is designed. If you want to make your students really learn what they are doing, make them do the work in your e-learning process. The system I used to design this latest module was an LLMS, and it was not really designed for interactivity, other than to test people afterwords, so I used the testing processing applications to integrate the interactivity into the training module itself. The software wasn’t designed to do that, but it sure is now that I finished playing with it. I would imagine more e-learning software will have to start doing this in the future because students need to touch the applications, not just watch them, to learn.

3. This is kind of a recap, but it’s important to be open to new ideas and new ways of teaching. You can’t be reactive with an e-learning module. You have to design to teach, not to do what’s been done before. And that’s one of our biggest struggles. We keep thinking in old technology and then try to re-create old ideas with new toys. The iPad is a good example of this. I’ve seen so many apps built for it that were really built for computer screens, where the designer obviously used a mouse in the design process, not realizing that people hold an iPad (or iPhone or Android device) so much differently than a mouse, keyboard and visual screen. Yet, we keep thinking that the student (or user of the device) will cooperate with us, rather than teach ourselves to design for how they want to interact. It’s the reason Steve Jobs laughed at Microsoft’s first tablet (designed with a mouse); he just knew that Bill Gates didn’t get it. And that’s the lesson for today. Design for people who will be using your application, e-learning or programs, not for the ease of what you’re used to using.

America Needs a Social Messiah

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Most people feel it but don’t really know how to put it into words. Something’s wrong with our country, everyone seems to know it, but no one really knows what to do about it. Our politicians keep claiming they have it all figured out, but they’re floundering, unsure of what to do and constantly going back on everything they say because they’re as confused as the masses. Something’s wrong, and we’re at a stage where something needs to happen to fix what’s wrong.

Having said that, I have to point out that one of two things is going to happen (aside from nothing happening and this state of morass continuing for more years before a solution finally occurs). Either someone is going to come along and rally everyone together to lead them off the end of a cliff, or someone, or some thing, is going to arrive and lead us to a better place. We’re at that stage where we need something, and unfortunately everything already in place is totally incapable of doing the trick.

This is part of why Obama became president. He came after a crappy period in US history, when we had a president and and administration that led the country down a road into near despair and depravity. He came along and promised a new sense of America that would put the country back on track, kind of like a political messiah who would lead us to the proverbial promised land. Instead, he gave us a lot of what we already had, and basically became Bush Light, leaving us in a state where we’re still waiting for someone to come along and pick up the slack he was supposed to actually use to make things better.

It’s not just a bad economy that’s causing the frustration. It’s a sense that no one knows what to do with the most powerful country on the planet. We have no rudder, steering us to some place better because we honestly don’t know where a better place might exist. Technologically, we’ve created the computer and hand held devices that make life simpler, although they tend to make things even more complicated (adding to our work day instead of cutting it down). Intellectually, we kind of have a lot of science and medicine already figured out, although we still can’t provide health care for everyone, our medicine is created by companies that make only the drugs that are profitable and lobby to make sure things don’t get better for the masses, and we pay our businessmen far more than our engineers and scientists, which means we’ll always have more people making money than making better products. Our political landscape hasn’t changed since the 1800s, as we still rely on diplomacy that requires tit for tat game theoretical models which reward last year’s actions and beg next year’s compliance (even the Roman Empire planned five years ahead, rather than this “what have you done for me lately” policy we seem to have fallen into).

In other words, we don’t seem to have a direction, or even a clue as to how to get ourselves pointed in any direction. People are so focused on the now that they could care less about the future, and anyone who things progressively is seen as foolish and foolhardy, which means we are like ten year olds planning for lifetimes of mediocrity.

This is the time when someone can come along and change things. This could be a great thing, especially if we find an enlightened thinker, but unfortunately we’re so 18th century in our thinking that we all seem to believe we need an enlightened “leader” rather than an enlightened “thinker.” Think about that for a moment. When it comes down to it, we’re going to end up going to the polls, or erecting an homage to a power base, rather than follow the enlightened ideas of someone who has the right ideas. We’re so Hobbesian in our ideals (needing a leader to lead us) that we have forgotten that the US was created in Lockeian ideals (where we control the leader), and really should have been leading to Rousseauian ideals (where the group identity has more power than the individualistic desires that we have today…where some corporate entity can dominate the masses because it has economic power that speaks louder than ideas and voices).

Part of my fear is that most of the west is filled with people who are only capable of the lowest levels of Maslowian achievements (basic needs) rather than higher level analysis (using logic to figure out ways to fulfill needs rather than immediate gratification). This means that when someone comes along and tells us what we want to hear, we’ll comply and expect great results, and when that person proves to be no better than your average Detroit politician (i.e., corrupt), we’ll back that person even when things turn into Ponzi schemes and false hopes and promises. When people are incapable of thinking logically through higher level concepts, they’re constantly doomed to being cheated and exploited by their leaders (kind of where we are today).

The ideas of Rousseau are probably interesting to point out here because the ideas he espoused were those of an enlightened society that realizes its needs are met through its communicative knowledge, but as long as we want things fulfilled within easily constructed plans, we’re always going to be doomed to Hobbesian outcomes (the leader telling us to do what to do so he can get the payoff instead of us). The solution, unfortunately, involves more and more people talking to each other about how to make things better, but as long as media is one-way communication (them to us), we’re never going to get there. Social networking is designed to be two-way, but as I look at the recent approaches of Facebook and Google+, all I see are attempts to create celebrities with bullhorns, rather than a process to open communication between both sides. Which means we’re moving further and further away from where we need to be.

At the end of a diatribe like this, I’m sure the logical question will come: “Do we need to know this for the test?” And when I say no, thinking stops and texting starts.

So I give up again.

Classic Literature is not a Punchline of Knowledge

Books, Education, Social Networking, Writing, , , , , , , , , ,

I was having a conversation with someone about a mundane topic, specifically about butterflies, when it reminded me of Kobo Abe’s Woman in the Dunes, a story of butterfly hunter who gets trapped by a society that mates him with a woman in an inescapable sand house. When first discussing it, there was no expression of interest about my story until I mentioned that the man’s story served as somewhat of an allegory to the fact that he used to trap butterflies (and thus, he became the trapped butterfly as a result). Then there was the recognition of the point of the story, and that’s the end of that.

But it got me thinking because I realized that after telling this little literary selection that there are a lot of people who seem more focused on the punchline of a story than in the story itself, and that’s the purpose behind this post. You see, what I’m starting to suspect is that people are so focused on the outcome and the “rest of the story” that they miss the purpose of the original story in the first place. In other words, people will read about Machiavelli, figure the Prince was about gaming the system and then feel they know what they are talking about when they refer to someone as being Machiavellian. I use this example because it is probably one of the more misused literary references in current usage. I observe the media constantly trying to act academic when they call some world leader, or some local leader, as Machiavellian, and what they’re really saying is that someone is manipulative. It immediately gives me the impression that they’ve never actually read Machiavelli to understand that to understand Machiavelli is to understand the Discourses, not the Prince. The Prince is only a small part of a much larger canvas, and quite often people read the Cliff Notes of even the Cliff Notes version of Machiavelli, meaning they’re getting about 1/10th of 1/10th of an understanding of the government scribe, not even realizing his whole purpose was to explain Aristotle in his modern day terms, not to create an understanding of how people can be snide to get over on others.

I find this in a lot of media (and common) references to literature. I hear a lot of referral of Moby Dick from all sorts of sources, and almost always they focus on a tiny segment of the story. Sure, they usually get the overall message, but almost every time I get the impression that that’s all they got out of the story, meaning they probably never read it all of the way through. A couple of years ago, while sick in Prague, I sat in my room and read through Melville once again, and I came away with a completely new understanding of his novel. Most people, if lucky, might read it once, and that’s it. And usually it’s because it was required reading.

I see this same thing with Don Quixote, which is such a brilliant story, in both English and Spanish, yet I would bet that one percent of the people who talk about it have actually read either version all of the way through. I was reading it a year or so ago again, in English this time, and I was just floored at how great a story the author constructs. It’s not just a literary story, but it’s hilariously written by a man who truly understood the human condition enough to hold it responsible for all of its absurdity. A media critic bringing up his loyal assistant doesn’t come close to relaying the significance of that poor follower who leads us through so many of the protagonist’s great, yet ridiculous, adventures.

A year or so ago, I sat down and re-read Dostoyevskiy (one of many spellings of his name) again. I had read Crime and Punishment when I was a young child. As a matter of fact, it is the very first book I ever read, and I only read it because my grade school teacher at the time said I was too young to ever read such a book. The first time I read it, I struggled through it and barely eeked out an understanding that this was the story of a man who did something horribly wrong and was fearing the ramifications of his actions, kind of a reading I would have years later of the Tell Tale Heart from a much different nuanced author. Yet, I have re-read that book many times over my life, each time getting a better understanding of what the author was trying to reveal to me, only understanding it differently because I had years of living that backed up my new understandings. This time around, as I read through the Idiot, I think I came one step closer to understanding why the author told the story he did. Years from now, I hope to revisit it again and see if I came closer that time.

The problem I perceive right now is that way too many people are hearing stories, or watching them on TV or in movies, and they’re convinced they’ve “read” the novel and understand all of the choices the author took to relay his story. That is such a weak interpretation of literature and so sad of a compromise that it bothers me to even think about it. I fear for America because almost all of our bestseller charts are filled with young adult books rather than powerful novels that challenge us to think, rather than fill our heads with mild entertainment. From vampires and zombies to Harry Potter, we keep filling our libraries with crap that does so little to stimulate people intellectually, and while I sometimes think “well, at least the masses are reading”, I’m left wondering if we’re a society doomed to complacency and easy manipulation by people who are smart enough to realize that an intellectually void mass is much easier to control than one that thinks for itself. All it takes is someone with the wrong intentions, perhaps someone very, shall I say Machiavellian, and the future might not look so bright.

Learning to Code can sometimes be like learning to disarm nuclear weapons but harder

Computer Games, Education, Technology, , , , , , ,

A long time ago, I was learning the computer language COBOL. The first two books I went through were very simple. It was almost like learning to tie my shoes. And then the third book was like learning calculus right after learning subtraction. Nothing made sense. And everything before had almost no relevance to anything that came after.

I experienced that again today. I’ve been learning Objective C, Alice and XCode programming. It’s all been going well. As part of my learning, I’ve been following the Apple itunes demonstration lectures, and like COBOL, the first two were very simple, almost like learning how to plug in your computer. The third lecture started off with advanced algorithms that even Commander Data would have struggled with. And he went so fast, and the type was so small, and then out of the blue (due to time constraints) he decided to plug in predesigned code (to speed things up), and that’s right about the time I lost him (and it completely).

So I’m having to refigure where I am with this language, and now I’m discouraged. This happens a lot with computer languages. Something goes so easily, like they teach you how to program “Hello World” and then lesson two is how to break into the Pentagon and rewire their networks to get free HBO from the World Bank.

Having said that, I start teaching college classes again next week. I’ll try to make sure I don’t teach the same way I’ve been learning lately. I’d rather not have all of my students jumping off bridges.

I is a teacher

Education, Social Networking, Technology, Writing, , , , , , , ,

A new semester is finally about to begin. Again, I will be teaching college political science and interpersonal communication, two separate disciplines, but two fields I am qualified to teach). Strangely enough, the two disciplines really aren’t that different from each other.

While I’m looking forward to a new semester of new young (and some older) minds to educate, I’m also feeling a bit apprehensive, and it’s mainly because our country is so negative towards teachers that I’m tempted to tell America to go screw itself and stop educating anyone on anything. The money isn’t all that great, so that’s not the only reason anyone would ever teach. But whenever I read about some critic of education going all half cocked about how teachers are lazy, how they only work a short period of time and get great pay (which they rarely do), and all sorts of other insults, I want to just say screw it. It’s not worth it. If America sees education as less important than business than let’s let the market figure it all out (which to make a long story short, the market is completely incapable of handling altruistic disciplines, like education, because there is no profit in doing the right thing to make your country benefit in the long run). Altruism, which is quite often the only reason to teach, is very difficult to maintain, especially when society goes out of its way to ridicule your field and everyone who has ever gone to school is convinced he or she is an expert on teaching, even though they have absolutely no experience at teaching, or so little that they have nothing solid to contribute.

When I first started teaching years ago, I remember being bogged down by the fact that I was overly concerned that a few of my students were struggling and no one else seemed to care. Other colleagues would tell me they were lazy, so forget about them, but I didn’t feel that way, and by getting closer to them, I discovered that there was more going on with their personal lives that was actually interfering with their learning. I realized then and there that they were going to fail because everyone else gave up on them because it was too much work to care, not because it was the right or wrong thing to do. What I discovered then and there is that educators who care are quickly discouraged from caring and working harder, quite often by the system, and sometimes by the same people they educate. Yet, I was convinced that this was important to overcome, or our very reason for teaching was gone.

Years later, I found myself in the same situation with a few students just last semester. It was so difficult to try to be more available than the system allowed, yet I tried, and in the end all you get is sometimes a belated thank you from someone who may or may not have saw you as their ally rather than the person who was making their education “more difficult” by forcing them to jump through hoops no one forced them to do so in the past. A couple of students out of the blue contacted me and thanked me, which may not have been the reward that completely paid back the efforts, but it helped, and that sort of thing is the item that keeps a teacher going. However, when attacked by so many other who really don’t care and see you as the enemy (for bizarre reasons that make no logical sense), it becomes less and less likely that you’ll continue trying.

So, I go into a new semester, thinking that maybe this will be the time when I find that one struggling student who needs that certain nudge forward, and hopefully I won’t be discouraged, rejected and forsaken at the time that one person needs a little more from an educator who is doing everything possible just to make sure the trains run on time (for the sake of an Italian historical reference of competent leadership).

When you’re standing up in front of a class of students and explaining the virtues of the governmental system, as proposed by Adams and Madison, you have to bite your lip after that young student in the back row raises her hand and asks: “Do we have to know that for the test?” I remember once responding to that exact question with a ten minute lecture on the importance of knowing information, history and relevance to all sorts of connective synapses of knowledge. How Caesar understood that Alexander’s charge into India incorporated phalanx technology with the scattering of forces or how Patton understood that Caesar’s understanding of Alexander showed him how a faster tank can be stopped by a barrage of spread ammunition. To them, nuance was more important than specific knowledge, but they came to specific knowledge through understanding of nuance. Even when explaining such things, you’ll still have one student sitting there wondering, “is this going to be on the test?”

Unfortunately, teaching can be a lot like that.

Some Thoughts on Current Events

Business, Economics, Education, Memoirs, News, Politics, Relationships, Social Networking, Technology, Television

Okay, haven’t done a recap in a bit. And I’ve been kind of busy, so here goes:

1. News of the World. Okay, I don’t know an easier way to say this, but I’m finding the whole situation with Robert Murdoch and his evil empire to be somewhat hilarious. Yes, he’s evil, and his empire is evil. And they’ve been discovered to be doing evil things. Not really all that surprised. He wants to own the world, and when you want to own the world, chances are pretty good that you don’t care who you destroy on the way to doing it. Some people are glad this has happened because they are liberals and hate Murdoch because he’s anti-liberal. I’m not like that. I just find it hilarious. I do want to add, however, that I think Rebecca Brooks, the one who lost her job because of being Darth Vader to Murdoch’s Dark Emperor, is kind of hot. I’m just saying….

2. Charlie Sheen is going to have a new TV show. I don’t care. Didn’t watch his old show. Won’t watch his new one. Next story.

3. Rebecca Black Has a Follow-up Song to “Friday”. Never heard “Friday”. Don’t care that she has a new one. Basically, someone who was ridiculed for a really bad song has managed to create a music career out of the ridiculousness and now wants to be taken seriously. But she wasn’t taken seriously before. Next story.

4. Universal pulled the plug on Dark Tower movies. Ron Howard was going to direct Stephen King’s epic series about Roland the Gunslinger. Was looking forward to it. Now, I’m disappointed. I’ll move on now….

5. Reporters Are Trying to Find out Where Casey Alexander is Hiding Out. Really? Get over it. The story of the century (or the last few months) is over. Move onto something else. Isn’t there an ambulance somewhere that can be chased?

6. Justin Bieber and Selena Gomez crashed some wedding. Supposedly, Bieber’s song was playing so loud while they were driving by that he went in and became a part of the wedding party celebration. First, I was thinking my first act as the groom would have been to deck the guy for showing up at my wedding. The second thought was to immediately not get married because my future wife decided to play Justin Bieber music at my wedding reception. And then I realized that if they were listening to the twirp, who cares? They were probably overjoyed to see him, much as I would be if Shania Twain showed up to my wedding (assuming she didn’t show up to be IN my wedding as the bride). So I really shouldn’t be commenting here.

7. The Debt Ceiling. They’ll either come to an agreement. Or they won’t. I’m going to assume that they’re still going to collect my taxes and that we’ll still be at war with countries I don’t want to be at war with. So I really don’t care. I’m not important enough so that anything I do is of any concern to them, so I”m not really concerned at anything they do either. For them, it’s a tragedy because they’re the ones with the money, and they’re the ones who stand to lose a lot. For me, I stand to go from being kind of poor to being really poor. Not going to make much of a relevant difference. I’ve stopped being significant a long time ago. Come to think of it, I never really was.

8. Apparently US students still suck at geography. This caused me to pull out a map to see if I could figure out where the US was to see how close it was to Michigan, just so I could get an idea of where this place might be. Couldn’t find it, so I assume it was probably some small country somewhere unimportant.

9. Google and Facebook appear to have changed their relationship status to “It’s Complicated”. Ironically, that’s my life status as well.

10. Number 9 was really my last item. I just like having 10 items whenever I can.

Several days after the Rapture didn’t happen….

Education, News, Politics, Religion, , , , , , , , , ,

There are a lot of people congratulating themselves on predicting the predictions of the crazy religious guy were not going to happen. Atheists laugh because it makes them feel, well, more justified in their belief that nothing exists, religious leaders feel better knowing that they still hold all of the cards (people can’t determine religious events without relying a church), and everyone else breathes a sigh of relief because Saturday didn’t end with a bad Buffy the Vampire Slayer season finale-like moment in reality. As we in the academic community like to ask, was there a teaching moment in all of this?

I’m going to venture that the answer is no. We didn’t learn anything from this, and chances are pretty good that when the next nutcase comes along, the media will hype his drivel insanely, and in the end, they’ll act like they were the sober ones all along. In other words, we’re never really going to win.

But I did want to ask a rhetorical question just for the fun of it: What if the rapture happened, but no one actually observed it? Think about that for a moment. Everyone talks about how the Rapture is going to be some fire and brimstone moment, but in reality all religious tellings tell us is that it’s going to be a moment when God brings all the worthy up to Heaven to avoid the eventual destructive battle that will take place between Satan, Jesus and, well, the rest of us. But we make a massively interesting conclusion that because the event didn’t happen in a way that was televised by Fox News and CNN that, therefore, it didn’t happen.

What if it did?

What if instead of a big, televised moment, the “worthy” were actually brought up to Heaven and the rest of us are now about to go through the rest of the story? I mean, how many people are really “worthy” to begin with? Think about that one for a moment, just on the semantic principles alone. How many people go to church every Sunday (or whatever day that organization holds its religious functions)? Of those, how many are actually living their lives in true, Christian morality, as opposed to the kind of morality that uses the thought process of “well, I generally do what I’m supposed to do, but it’s so easy to sin, and, well, it happens to everyone”? I ask this because even priests molest children, and their churches don’t hold them accountable, which means even their institutions of religion are seriously corrupt. So, if someone had to actually go out on a spiritual limb and say, who amongst you is truly devout and truly submissive to your specific religion, I argue that there really aren’t that many to begin with. I’m assuming there are probably so few actual idealized indivduals of this nature so that if the Rapture did take place, maybe no one would have noticed because so few people would have been brought up to Heaven in the first place. I figure, thinking generally, that the major numbers of the population all fit into the not so perfect category so that chances are pretty strong that when the Rapture happens, it’s going to happen in such a way that very few of us are ever going to be brought up in all its spiritual wonderfulness. If you buy into that sort of thing.

So if there really is a Rapture, maybe it happened, and the majorit of us turned out to be unworthy of the honor. If you think hard about it, it’s probably not that hard to realize that such a possibility is massively, scarily true. Remember, if you believe in that sort of thing, to the point where religion is that significant to you, how hard is it to make a leap of faith that might point out that an all-knowing God isn’t going to miss any of the nuances that make it possible for the “perfect” religious soul to be lacking in all things necessary to make it worthy of ascendance. I’m just saying.

So, like I said, maybe the Rapture happened, and so few of us got brought up to Heaven. I’d be more interesting in doing a missing persons search to see if a few people went missing that day. I’d argue that they probably live such unimportant lives, unfilled with the morass that we package as fame and fortune, so that so few of the rest of us would ever notice they left. We focus on famous people, celebrities, and the very wealthy, all of whom I would argue would never fit into this category of the person who would be brought up to Heaven for a moment like the Rapture. Oh sure, they’ll protest and get their throngs of followers to condemn such a thought, but no matter how many times Charlie Sheen talks about #winning, it’s really not winning if he’s as corrupt (or worse) as the rest of us when it comes down to the cosmic, spiritual questions.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think I”m one of the good ones either. I mean, I’m here, right? No angels descended, grabbed me and brought me up to Heaven, although a very attractive convenience store clerk did give me the eye the other day, so maybe I just missed the sign. I mean, I have as much experience in this sort of thing as anyone else, including the Pope, who would love to convince the rest of us that he has a direct phone line to the Almighty, but in reality has to stand in line like the rest of us; he’s just a lot more comfortable standing in line.

Now, having said all that, the odds are pretty good that we were bamboozled by yet another charlatan who tried to get money out of his many followers by pretending to be something he wasn’t. And chances are pretty good that another one will show up shortly after he disappears from fame and will do it again. And we’ll fall for it again because we’re stupid humans who don’t know any better. I mean, we play the Lotto in hopes of winning and have fights over baseball and football games that sometimes lead to serious injuries and death, not because we’re brilliant, but because we’re generally really stupid people who only can claim advanced evolution beyond primatives because we’re capable of making cell phone calls on our weekend and nights data packages that we pay extra for.

Unfortunately, I don’t have any answers. No one does. But we’ll gladly pay money to anyone who lies to us to convince us there are more answers than we can ascertain by looking up at the sky and seeing that the stars haven’t changed one bit in the last thousand years.

In the Worst of Times, the Common People Turn on Each Other While the Greedy Hide and Laugh

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It’s turning out to be a very interesting few years lately, now that we’re heading into the decade of the recession. While an economist might argue the recession is over, another might claim it’s still in the future, and another might chime in with the idea that it’s really a depression, and yet one more might claim things have never been better, the simple fact of the matter is that times are tight, and times are tough for a lot of people. If you buy into the lie that Americans are famous for sticking together, you’d be waiting for those Americans to band together and look out for one another. If you buy into the idea that banding together is a crock of crap, you’d probably recognize it when Americans have a tendency to kick anyone who is down and then point fingers, blaming that person for all of the troubles.

Unfortunately, the latter is how we’re responding to pretty much everything. In Michigan, for example, the legislators realized that obviously the people causing all of the problems must be teachers, and have now met and decided that they would tax teachers more (causing them to pay more money for their health care). The teachers, letting their response come from their union, have indicated that they are shocked that the people can so easily turn against them, especially when they are the ones teaching little Johnny to read. Well, if you listen to the people of Michigan, you might start to wonder how it is that the common person has become such a critic of anyone who would dare to be a teacher in this state. Some of the comments are outright hostile, and anyone who comes into the conversation backing teachers is immediately branded as stupid, corrupt, and some kind of radical communist who is teaching Johnny to build napalm bombs to kill all of Johnny’s friends at school.

When did it get to be this way? I know there was a recent batch of hostility towards community college professors for making over $100,000 a year in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Being a community college professor, although part time, I found myself shocked that the population of the city (and state) was nothing but hostile towards teachers. It was as if they were personally paying for these salaries from their own money, and because they weren’t making $100,000 themselves, no one else deserved it.

Now, I’ve come to the conclusion as to why those professors do make over $100,000 a year. This summer, I was offered absolutely no classes to teach as an adjunct (which is the lowest pay of any kind of instructor). Instead, the full-time instructors get first grab at all classes, and of course, they get the premium rate for taking those classes. Thus, their pay aut0matically heads up to those $100,000 figures we were talking about. The solution is simple: Hire adjuncts who are struggling to survive as it is. But instead, they hire the guys (and gals) who are arguably overpaid for the semesters they have already taught. The conclusions are obvious, but no one seems to figure it out, and thus, people will continue to complain.

But back to the hostility towards instructors and teachers. My opinion on this is that people really aren’t anti-teachers themselves but are anti-union, because the unions involved in these decisions are beholden to a tenure structure that massively benefits these teachers. Most every other worker in the state is not a member of a union with such power and prestige, so all they can see is that this class of workers is highly compensated and protected, and the average citizen is never offered the same kinds of protections themselves.

An example is my own job. I’m an at will employee, mainly because I do not belong to a union. I’m not advocating one, by the way, but at the same time because none of us have a union that we belong to, we have no such protections that these teachers all seem to have in their corners. It should not be surprising that those without the same protections are going to see those who are protected as “others” and thus, someone to be criticized for excess and outrageous behavior. It doesn’t take much of an analysis to see how a person in a union of such protection would then be perceived as someone who has too much of a good thing. And then you have a whole bunch of people running around hating teachers. The one to one logic doesn’t follow, but the eventual demise into hatred towards a class of people makes sense, especially if you understand group mob-like mentality.

If one is capable of distincing oneself from the passions of this argumentation, one is then also capable of seeing what is really happening in the background. There are people who benefit from this hostility, and they’re often never even involved in the discussions. I’m talking about corporate leaders and politicians who dig into this rhetoric, using it to feed entire careers of corrupt government service. I say corrupt because when you use the passions of people to rile them up and then benefit from stupidity, all the while doing nothing to solve anything, that’s corruption by manipulation of the masses. Yet, this happens all of the time, and continues to happen to this day.

This is why the whole debacle in Wisconsin took place. Politicians, enriching themselves on hatred and anger, orchestrated people to do all sorts of stupid things at no benefit to the people, yet in great benefit to people in power who seek to continue manipulating power. No one else benefits. Instead, people lost rights, money and power, all in the name of some other people using them through continued manipulation.

It’s happening in Michigan right now. We live in a very poor state that is suffering because a lot of very bad, corrupt politicians really only saw the benefits for themselves by rallying up the masses to make stupid decisions for themselves. Look at Detroit if you need to see a great example of this. Corrupt politicians, hiding money they stole directly from the people, cheated the people by promising to be something yet delivering the complete opposite. And then when they were called to account for their misdeeds, they claimed they were targets of politics or racism, or whatever else they could come up with to continue rallying the people behind them while they socked away more money before they were thrown from office (and sometimes directly into prison so they can wait it out before they are able to cheat the people again). Meanwhile, they continue to pretend that the people need to support them at their own best interest, and as always the people end up being screwed.

And when it comes down to it, some politician will use ridiculous rhetoric to lead the people down the wrong path again. And we’ll follow. As we always do.

Because we’re stupid. And to justify our stupidity, we’ll point our fingers at someone else who is probably just going about his business doing something that doesn’t affect anyone else in a bad way. And we’ll pounce on him. Hard.

Because we’re stupid. And we don’t know how to do it any other way.

When it comes to issues of sex, America does not understand redemption

Education, Movies, Music, News, Politics, Religion, Television, , , , , , , , , ,

I’m not one to latch onto another story and then write about it, although I admit there are a lot of bloggers who do that sort of thing. But this was one issue that I found to be so significant that I felt that it needed further attention, and perhaps even more perspective. An article appeared today in Salon.com that contained a personal narrative from Melissa Petro, a woman who had previously outed herself as a former sex worker and stripper before becoming a school teacher. As a result, she was hit hard by the conservative channels of the press, and then right after that by practically every other channel of the press as well. Even the governor felt it necessary to chime in demanding that she be fired. In all, she was completely railroaded out of the teaching profession, and by reading her personal story, you can also get the sense that she pretty much has a difficult time today of getting a job anywhere.

Now, I’ve written before about how I used to go to school with a lot of women who were sex workers while paying their way through school. At San Francisco State University, in certain disciplines, it was practically a right of passage. I couldn’t tell you how many friends I had who used to ask me to come see them dance as a stripper because at the time they were actually proud of what they were doing. Not all of them were, of course, but at one point in someone’s life, there is a sense that this is a perspective of freedom that not many other occupations can allow.

Unfortunately, that occupation is now competing against the sense that mainstream America has that anything involving sex is bad. And if you happen to work anywhere near children, it’s almost a given that you should be tarred and feathered and run out of town like the wandering gypsy you are. I won’t even get into the dichotomy issue of how most of the clients of these women tend to be the same men whose wives are horrified that these women did what they did; there’s always this sense that these “bad” women come from some place that has no interaction with the rest of society. And once they show up, they have to be run out quickly, or little Johnny might grow up to be a bad person, or might be forced into sex with her, or whatever bizarre hyper-fictious ridiculousness seems to be the fear that emerges in these situations.

The simple fact of the matter is, these women are all products of our society and civilization. They were churned out by the system at one time or another, and if we all want to go into this “they’re all bad for doing what they did” then we should take some sort of responsibility for putting them into those positions in the first place. We can’t have the luxury of just assuming that people are bad by nature, and therefore it was their fault that they chose to do those kinds of jobs that the rest of ridicule and condemn.

But even saying that, there’s an immediate assumption that stripping or sex work is bad. Is it really? What is so wrong about someone who does that sort of activity? What makes that person any less “moral” or less worthy of normal civilization than any woman who has carnal knowledge with a man as part of a relationship? Discounting the whole “it’s only okay in marriage” sort of nonsense that predates 1950, “moral” people don’t really make all that much of a fuss about people who engage in sex in relationships with each other. Granted, they don’t wanted specific details, but they really don’t care. So why is someone who is engaged in this activity on a normal basis considered someone to be less worthy of belonging to our daily civilization?

Over the years, I’ve known a lot of women who existed as sex workers. For a time, I got my start creating web pages for professional dominatrices, mainly because they were the ones who really fed the business back then when the Internet was started. Strangely enough, my main clientele were professional dominants and churches. And quite often, the references I received crossed both demographics (meaning that quite often my professional dominants contacts came to me from the web sites of churches I created or maintained, and the other way around as well). We’d like to think there’s a serious disconnect or separation between both avenues, but there isn’t.

What’s really concerning parents these days is not the sex worker “problem” but the belief that sexual activity is starting with people at a younger age, and they need a criminal to point to in order to feel better about the situation. But the reality of the situation is that by compartmentalizing sex outside of acceptable parameters, we make it so that younger people see it as something to explore out of the attention of parents, and then families pay for the consequences. Most young people are getting their sex information by watching Hollywood and the music industry sexualize every woman who has anything to do with entertainment so that the expectation is that it’s something good and to be pursued. There is absolutely no connection between a stripper and a music starlett, yet conservative media condemns the stripper and hypes the product of industry. Yet, if you really think about it, the stripper caters to a clientele that is strictly adult, whereas the music industry and Hollywood will take anyone with access to an MP3 player or a dvd player.

And with all that said, I’ve kind of wandered off the topic of the original person herself, Melissa Petro. In her own words, she actually felt herself empowered by her experience as a stripper and sex worker (well, more as a stripper than as a sex worker as she didn’t seem to say too many good things about the latter). Unlike most stories of sex workers, we’re told of horrible conditions and how they were forced into the experience. She came to it on her own, and it was a productive environment for her until she found her way out. And then she made something of her life, becoming a teacher who works with children.

We should have been congratulating her, not condemning her. If we accept the erroneous argument that sex work is bad, she got out of it and came back to us to live a more productive life. She should have been the poster child for how to win through horrible circumstances. But she wasn’t treated that way. She was eventually fired, and she has little recourse of ever working again, in any job. Her own narrative explains how she moved in with her boyfriend to survive.

What bothers me most is that no one else seems bothered by this. We’ll go on with our lives and criticize her for having made the mistake of revealing her past to the rest of the world. In other words, her was a teacher giving us a teaching moment, and none of us learned a thing.