blame the (good) teachers!

It is exhausting to attempt to follow all of the various arguments about school improvement in the United States. In no small part, this is because it frequently feels like it all devolves into a game of finger pointing. There is one party responsible for the state of modern education in our country, and they are responsible due to a shocking negligence.

We should not be blaming politicians for the state of modern education in the US. Yes, they have forced it on us, but they didn't create it. That was done for them by moneyed interests, and nobody told them otherwise (which of course means, "nobody demonstrated to them that it would be politically unjustified to resist the moneyed interests").

We should not be blaming parents and families for the state of modern education in the US. Yes, they are an easy target and it is frustrating to have students show up to school without having had enough food, enough sleep, enough time for homework, good clothes, or preparation for kindergarten. However, parents are doing the best they can. None of them are perfect and many do intentional or inadvertent harm to their children, but that is something that our country is not ready to do much about through the law, so it's off the table in the education debate.

We should not be blaming administrators. They are, contrary to what many of them say, not in the business of educating children. They are in the business of running schools. One function of that is seeing that children are taught well, but they also are concerned about keeping the lights on and providing meals. They cannot be expected to digest, understand, and then advocate for or against education policies as they simply do not have the time.

We should not be blaming "bad teachers." Now, this one is a bit controversial. It is tempting to blame the spectre of bad teachers for every ill in the schools, but these are much like Reagan's specious welfare queens - there are abuses of various privileges to be found in virtually every school, but I have never yet encountered a teacher who truly didn't care at all about children, education, or seeing that children become well-acquainted with that teacher's subject matter. We should stop considering these people "bad" teachers and think of them as unmotivated. They are like water - they follow the path of least resistance, but can generate great quantities of work if well-guided.

We should not be blaming the students. They're children. They're all egocentric and most of them are lazy, and it's up to the adults in the room to work with and around that.

We should be blaming the good teachers.

The good teachers are the ones who come to school early every day and leave late almost every day. They teach well-organized lessons that align to well-considered curricula. They bring extra bagels in their lunches to slip to the kid who didn't have breakfast or offer a ride home to the kid who's walking in the rain. They sponsor two or three clubs without asking for a stipend because they can see that it benefits the children. They attend professional development and read up on the latest instructional theories and attempt to implement research-based methods in their classroom and excitedly meet with other teachers in their discipline or in other departments in order to find new strategies or places where they can collaborate. They know that it takes a personalized community effort to teach every child, so they call home frequently and send notes and meet with counselors and administrators and coaches and the librarian in order to get the fullest picture possible. They're doing everything right, but this is all their fault.

What they are not doing is anything beyond the school level. They do not show up at school board meetings. They do not testify before the state legislature. They do not contact their national representatives and they most certainly do not testify before Congress.

Good teachers knew what was wrong with every major educational initiative of the past twelve years before it was enacted (because they do their homework), but they never stood up to advocate against these flaws.

While rolling their eyes in department meetings and chuckling to themselves about the newest policy that surely wouldn't last five years, they counted on someone else to tell Congress that No Child Left Behind wouldn't work because it didn't have enough money and was expecting the impossible (seriously, every good teacher is an optimist, but not even the most starry-eyed of hippie dreamers would believe that in only thirteen years, every student in the country would be able to pass standardized state exit exams).

After realizing that NCLB really wasn't going away, teachers were elated to hear about Race To The Top, until they did what nobody else did and actually looked at what was being asked. When they realized that it meant increasing class sizes, reducing curriculum diversity, and aligning state standards with the Common Core, they got nervous. After all, the Common Core is a nice guide and all, but students in different places have different understanding of the world - there are two states for which the answer to "what country lies south of the United States?" may well be "Canada." Similarly, cultural understandings and social mores vary greatly from place to place, even within a state. Again, good teachers saw this problem coming and did nothing.

When charter schools became more and more popular as "school choice" options, good teachers began looking at the data and pointing out to each other (but not to parents, legislators, or newspaper editors) that even with selective admissions practices (meaning that most charter schools will not take special education students or those with language impairments), charter schools perform on average in a manner that is statistically indistinguishable from the average public school, if not worse. Of course, this is done with far less oversight than what is given to public schools.

When NCLB waivers began being offered and states clamored for them, good teachers again saw right through the biggest flaw and did nothing. While linking student performance on standardized tests to teacher pay and retention may sound like a great idea to someone accustomed to running a business, good teachers know that this makes as much sense as blaming Toyota for a car that ran into a tree after it's been piloted by a drunk driver with the lights off in an unfamiliar city. The multitude of factors impacting student achievement is too great to be distilled in one easy set of numbers that can all be attached to one person's work over ten months. These scores do not, cannot, and will not take into account any external factors and there is no way to have those external factors (pregnancy, rape, abuse, death of a parent, parental divorce, loss of the childhood home, etc.) attached to the score as a footnote. Again, the good teacher knows about those factors most of the time and is working with and around them in the classroom, but that never shows up when the scores are tied to the teacher's evaluation.

Good teachers know that merit pay is a sham. In only one study has merit pay been shown to do any good, and that was a study in which the teachers got the money up front and had to forfeit it if they did not perform to expectations. It's hard to give back that which has been spent. Good teachers, however, are not interested in bonuses. What they want is more time for professional development, more time for collaboration with other teachers and with students, better facilities in which to work, and, if there's time left over, a bit of respect. The unmotivated teachers also want all of those same things, and will generally teach better in situations where they spend more time in contact with colleagues who are doing all of the right things.

Unfortunately for the US and for the teaching profession, good teachers aren't sharing this knowledge. There are a few heroic advocates who are standing up to the corporate reformers and the Michelle Rhees of the world, but Diane Ravitch cannot do it alone. Teachers by nature tend to be a cautious lot. We self-censor all of the time because we do not wish to cause offense or to alienate students or parents with different beliefs. We carefully lock down our social media presences so that we do not cross any boundaries. We share our cell phone numbers with students for various reasons connected with work but are then uneasy about the public perception of a teacher with forty or fifty teenagers' numbers stored in a contacts list.

We need to get over our caution. We need to be our own advocates and take back our profession by doing what we do best. We need to teach the public the things that we know.

The era of the bandmaster is truly dead.

Why is there a single music classroom in this country not equipped with a dozen or more Macbooks with GarageBand loaded on them?

Anyone who knows me well at all will know that it's stating it lightly to say that I'm not a fan of Macs, but this software/hardware combination is revolutionizing the way that youth interact with music and it is devastating to see how many teachers and schools are missing out on taking advantage of this (me and mine included, at this point). I don't pretend to understand the potential of this program (I've never even used it), but I have clearly seen what it can do in the hands of willing students.

I'll come out and say it: there is no quicker road to music composition and arranging than putting a copy of GarageBand in a child's hands. For all that we talk about music classes (and art classes and creative writing classes and, and, and) being creative and helping students to embrace their right brains and learn to express themselves, there's not much creation or expression occurring in the average "creative" classroom. Students copy what they've been taught to copy or struggle their way through the basic theory and practice of making a mediocre product and eventually get to a point where they have a piece that can be performed or exhibited without everyone cringing. If a student can survive long enough without quitting the program, a really successful school may have a top-level course in AP Music Theory and Composition that is open to a limited number of students each year, forcing the teacher to beat off the hordes of students who obviously will flock to such an exciting and sexy course option.

On the other hand, what if students could produce a piece of music that sounded radio-worthy (or at least crappy-high-school-dance-worthy) within the first two weeks of joining their first music class? How many of those children would discover the joy of truly creating something new? How many of them would seriously consider careers in the creative arts? How many of them would begin to refine talents that would remain with them through high school and the rest of their lives? How many of them would see enough of a reward in music that they would embrace the work and discipline needed to create through more traditional means, even if that meant learning theory? Sound crazy? I see it every day with the students I work with who bring me their music on iPods and Macs, then sit at the drums or piano or guitar and try to figure out how to play what they just composed.

If these students, with no formal training, can create quality pieces of music in their free time, it's amazing to think what could be done with the assistance and guidance of a trained teacher. We don't need to be cultivating clarinets who we can later switch to oboe or bassoon or bass clarinet or saxophone in order to fill out the instrumentation of the band so that we can play some Gordon Jacob piece in a few years (cool as that would be). We need to be cultivating individual composers and creators who will feel the music so intrinsically that they will change the way we experience it in the future.

apathy or...?

For the first time since I've been legal to do so, I'm skipping an election.

Arizona is holding a special election with one issue on the ballot: a proposition to raise the state sales tax by 1%. This tax will theoretically be used to raise $1 billion to preserve education, health care, and public safety money that will otherwise be axed. I'm normally a huge fan of education, health care, and public safety, but I still don't know how to vote on this issue, so I'll abstain.

I'm tempted to vote against this proposition for several reasons. Sales taxes are highly regressive, and I dislike that intensely. Further, I hate that the state legislature insisted on cutting taxes in every other area for the past twenty years and is now acting like this emergency situation sprung up on us out of nowhere. Further, I don't trust our state's leadership to actually use this revenue as promised (see: state parks fund).

I'm tempted to vote for this proposition for one big reason: the money is desperately needed.

Since I absolutely cannot resolve these two different viewpoints, I have decided to abstain from voting. It's an odd feeling, but I think it's what comes of not trusting my elected officials while knowing that something must be done.

been a while...

It appears that I haven't written in this blog since September. There have been several times that I've considered pulling it out of mothballs, but it took my wife's prompting to examine why I haven't done much writing.

First, it is worth pointing out that I don't lack for opinions that I want to share. Any person who has been near me in the past few weeks knows exactly how I feel about what's been going on in Arizona and I haven't been holding back on my other opinions either. I still hate most of the music the kids these days listen to and I still think that 90% of the movies coming out are terrible and I still hate it when people are in positions of power without having the knowledge or training for those positions and I still wish I'd gone to school to be an audiologist so that I could get rich on the ears of millions of today's iPodded teens.

I think my problem is twofold.

The first part of it is a really good thing. I've discovered a number of excellent blogs that say much of what I'd like to say. The Mudflats, Blog For Arizona, and a pile of others that I follow publicly are extremely well-written and update frequently on national and Arizona politics. How can I possibly step in and fight the Goldwater Institute better than David Safier or Sarah Palin better than Jeanne Devon, or even the Prescott Daily Courier better than Steven Ayres?

My second problem is far worse. Quite simply, I'm demoralized. I was having a great time paying attention to the good work being done by people like Kyrsten Sinema and Dan Patterson on behalf of Arizona's taxpayers, but paying attention to what they were up to meant that I was guaranteed to also see what Jack Harper, Russell Pearce, and Judy Burges were up to. Of the three, Pearce is the only one with international notoriety right now (thank you, Rachel Maddow), but the rest of the AZ Senate and House have been up to some downright stupid (...or evil) work as well. Stealing the money that the state parks have earned and shutting down the parks, holding $1 Billion in funding for education, health care, and public safety hostage to force a sales tax increase, cutting several million dollars worth of children's health insurance thereby losing $7 Billion in Federal matching money in order to appease an ideological base, and numerous examples of state officials meddling in education are only starting points. Beyond that, the state legislature has voted to (unconstitutionally) ignore the will of Arizona's voters several times, has voted to (unconstitutionally) violate the Supremacy Clause of the US Constitution, and has voted to waste my money in numerous ways, all while cutting funding in the worst places possible.

It feels good to get all of those gripes out, but that doesn't change the fact that it's hard work to sit down and talk in detail about any of those problems. As someone who writes about what's on his mind, I really have a hard time putting these thoughts on virtual paper. It's not that my feelings are difficult to express. If anything, my feelings are exceptionally easy to express. There are numerous four-letter words (and varying declensions and conjugations thereof) that express my emotions quite clearly. The bigger issue is how difficult it really is to share the ideas behind those emotions because I get so frustrated that I just want to walk away in the middle of writing.

On a more positive note, I plan to write at least once a week again on this page, and look for things that are less oriented towards politics as soon as later today.

Oh, no, he's been talking to education theorists!

The text of what President Obama will say tomorrow:

"Hello everyone – how’s everybody doing today? I’m here with students at Wakefield High School in Arlington, Virginia. And we’ve got students tuning in from all across America, kindergarten through twelfth grade. I’m glad you all could join us today.

I know that for many of you, today is the first day of school. And for those of you in kindergarten, or starting middle or high school, it’s your first day in a new school, so it’s understandable if you’re a little nervous. I imagine there are some seniors out there who are feeling pretty good right now, with just one more year to go. And no matter what grade you’re in, some of you are probably wishing it were still summer, and you could’ve stayed in bed just a little longer this morning.

I know that feeling. When I was young, my family lived in Indonesia for a few years, and my mother didn’t have the money to send me where all the American kids went to school. So she decided to teach me extra lessons herself, Monday through Friday – at 4:30 in the morning.

Now I wasn’t too happy about getting up that early. A lot of times, I’d fall asleep right there at the kitchen table. But whenever I’d complain, my mother would just give me one of those looks and say, "This is no picnic for me either, buster."

So I know some of you are still adjusting to being back at school. But I’m here today because I have something important to discuss with you. I’m here because I want to talk with you about your education and what’s expected of all of you in this new school year.

Now I’ve given a lot of speeches about education. And I’ve talked a lot about responsibility.

I’ve talked about your teachers’ responsibility for inspiring you, and pushing you to learn.

I’ve talked about your parents’ responsibility for making sure you stay on track, and get your homework done, and don’t spend every waking hour in front of the TV or with that Xbox.

I’ve talked a lot about your government’s responsibility for setting high standards, supporting teachers and principals, and turning around schools that aren’t working where students aren’t getting the opportunities they deserve.

But at the end of the day, we can have the most dedicated teachers, the most supportive parents, and the best schools in the world – and none of it will matter unless all of you fulfill your responsibilities. Unless you show up to those schools; pay attention to those teachers; listen to your parents, grandparents and other adults; and put in the hard work it takes to succeed.

And that’s what I want to focus on today: the responsibility each of you has for your education. I want to start with the responsibility you have to yourself.

Every single one of you has something you’re good at. Every single one of you has something to offer. And you have a responsibility to yourself to discover what that is. That’s the opportunity an education can provide.

Maybe you could be a good writer – maybe even good enough to write a book or articles in a newspaper – but you might not know it until you write a paper for your English class. Maybe you could be an innovator or an inventor – maybe even good enough to come up with the next iPhone or a new medicine or vaccine – but you might not know it until you do a project for your science class. Maybe you could be a mayor or a Senator or a Supreme Court Justice, but you might not know that until you join student government or the debate team.

And no matter what you want to do with your life – I guarantee that you’ll need an education to do it. You want to be a doctor, or a teacher, or a police officer? You want to be a nurse or an architect, a lawyer or a member of our military? You’re going to need a good education for every single one of those careers. You can’t drop out of school and just drop into a good job. You’ve got to work for it and train for it and learn for it.

And this isn’t just important for your own life and your own future. What you make of your education will decide nothing less than the future of this country. What you’re learning in school today will determine whether we as a nation can meet our greatest challenges in the future.

You’ll need the knowledge and problem-solving skills you learn in science and math to cure diseases like cancer and AIDS, and to develop new energy technologies and protect our environment. You’ll need the insights and critical thinking skills you gain in history and social studies to fight poverty and homelessness, crime and discrimination, and make our nation more fair and more free. You’ll need the creativity and ingenuity you develop in all your classes to build new companies that will create new jobs and boost our economy.

We need every single one of you to develop your talents, skills and intellect so you can help solve our most difficult problems. If you don’t do that – if you quit on school – you’re not just quitting on yourself, you’re quitting on your country.

Now I know it’s not always easy to do well in school. I know a lot of you have challenges in your lives right now that can make it hard to focus on your schoolwork.

I get it. I know what that’s like. My father left my family when I was two years old, and I was raised by a single mother who struggled at times to pay the bills and wasn’t always able to give us things the other kids had. There were times when I missed having a father in my life. There were times when I was lonely and felt like I didn’t fit in.

So I wasn’t always as focused as I should have been. I did some things I’m not proud of, and got in more trouble than I should have. And my life could have easily taken a turn for the worse.

But I was fortunate. I got a lot of second chances and had the opportunity to go to college, and law school, and follow my dreams. My wife, our First Lady Michelle Obama, has a similar story. Neither of her parents had gone to college, and they didn’t have much. But they worked hard, and she worked hard, so that she could go to the best schools in this country.

Some of you might not have those advantages. Maybe you don’t have adults in your life who give you the support that you need. Maybe someone in your family has lost their job, and there’s not enough money to go around. Maybe you live in a neighborhood where you don’t feel safe, or have friends who are pressuring you to do things you know aren’t right.

But at the end of the day, the circumstances of your life – what you look like, where you come from, how much money you have, what you’ve got going on at home – that’s no excuse for neglecting your homework or having a bad attitude. That’s no excuse for talking back to your teacher, or cutting class, or dropping out of school. That’s no excuse for not trying.

Where you are right now doesn’t have to determine where you’ll end up. No one’s written your destiny for you. Here in America, you write your own destiny. You make your own future.

That’s what young people like you are doing every day, all across America.

Young people like Jazmin Perez, from Roma, Texas. Jazmin didn’t speak English when she first started school. Hardly anyone in her hometown went to college, and neither of her parents had gone either. But she worked hard, earned good grades, got a scholarship to Brown University, and is now in graduate school, studying public health, on her way to being Dr. Jazmin Perez.

I’m thinking about Andoni Schultz, from Los Altos, California, who’s fought brain cancer since he was three. He’s endured all sorts of treatments and surgeries, one of which affected his memory, so it took him much longer – hundreds of extra hours – to do his schoolwork. But he never fell behind, and he’s headed to college this fall.

And then there’s Shantell Steve, from my hometown of Chicago, Illinois. Even when bouncing from foster home to foster home in the toughest neighborhoods, she managed to get a job at a local health center; start a program to keep young people out of gangs; and she’s on track to graduate high school with honors and go on to college.

Jazmin, Andoni and Shantell aren’t any different from any of you. They faced challenges in their lives just like you do. But they refused to give up. They chose to take responsibility for their education and set goals for themselves. And I expect all of you to do the same.

That’s why today, I’m calling on each of you to set your own goals for your education – and to do everything you can to meet them. Your goal can be something as simple as doing all your homework, paying attention in class, or spending time each day reading a book. Maybe you’ll decide to get involved in an extracurricular activity, or volunteer in your community. Maybe you’ll decide to stand up for kids who are being teased or bullied because of who they are or how they look, because you believe, like I do, that all kids deserve a safe environment to study and learn. Maybe you’ll decide to take better care of yourself so you can be more ready to learn. And along those lines, I hope you’ll all wash your hands a lot, and stay home from school when you don’t feel well, so we can keep people from getting the flu this fall and winter.

Whatever you resolve to do, I want you to commit to it. I want you to really work at it.

I know that sometimes, you get the sense from TV that you can be rich and successful without any hard work -- that your ticket to success is through rapping or basketball or being a reality TV star, when chances are, you’re not going to be any of those things.

But the truth is, being successful is hard. You won’t love every subject you study. You won’t click with every teacher. Not every homework assignment will seem completely relevant to your life right this minute. And you won’t necessarily succeed at everything the first time you try.

That’s OK. Some of the most successful people in the world are the ones who’ve had the most failures. JK Rowling’s first Harry Potter book was rejected twelve times before it was finally published. Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team, and he lost hundreds of games and missed thousands of shots during his career. But he once said, "I have failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed."

These people succeeded because they understand that you can’t let your failures define you – you have to let them teach you. You have to let them show you what to do differently next time. If you get in trouble, that doesn’t mean you’re a troublemaker, it means you need to try harder to behave. If you get a bad grade, that doesn’t mean you’re stupid, it just means you need to spend more time studying.

No one’s born being good at things, you become good at things through hard work. You’re not a varsity athlete the first time you play a new sport. You don’t hit every note the first time you sing a song. You’ve got to practice. It’s the same with your schoolwork. You might have to do a math problem a few times before you get it right, or read something a few times before you understand it, or do a few drafts of a paper before it’s good enough to hand in.

Don’t be afraid to ask questions. Don’t be afraid to ask for help when you need it. I do that every day. Asking for help isn’t a sign of weakness, it’s a sign of strength. It shows you have the courage to admit when you don’t know something, and to learn something new. So find an adult you trust – a parent, grandparent or teacher; a coach or counselor – and ask them to help you stay on track to meet your goals.

And even when you’re struggling, even when you’re discouraged, and you feel like other people have given up on you – don’t ever give up on yourself. Because when you give up on yourself, you give up on your country.

The story of America isn’t about people who quit when things got tough. It’s about people who kept going, who tried harder, who loved their country too much to do anything less than their best.

It’s the story of students who sat where you sit 250 years ago, and went on to wage a revolution and found this nation. Students who sat where you sit 75 years ago who overcame a Depression and won a world war; who fought for civil rights and put a man on the moon. Students who sat where you sit 20 years ago who founded Google, Twitter and Facebook and changed the way we communicate with each other.

So today, I want to ask you, what’s your contribution going to be? What problems are you going to solve? What discoveries will you make? What will a president who comes here in twenty or fifty or one hundred years say about what all of you did for this country?

Your families, your teachers, and I are doing everything we can to make sure you have the education you need to answer these questions. I’m working hard to fix up your classrooms and get you the books, equipment and computers you need to learn. But you’ve got to do your part too. So I expect you to get serious this year. I expect you to put your best effort into everything you do. I expect great things from each of you. So don’t let us down – don’t let your family or your country or yourself down. Make us all proud. I know you can do it.

Thank you, God bless you, and God bless America."

Note that he repeatedly invokes "no excuses" and "work hard," both of which are themes that currently are being studied by education researchers. Basically, it looks like kids who work hard to overcome adversity continue to work hard once the adversity is gone and they are more successful in school, life, and work. Amazing.

so, I haven't updated in a while

It's not that I don't have anything to say or that I've stopped having strong opinions. It's more to do with the fact that the news has turned into a parody of itself and my personal life is at a point where there's not much that I can discuss publicly.

On the personal front, my wife has had our second child (two months ago) and, like much of the country, I'm under-paid for my family's needs. Professionally, I'm still teaching and now working mostly as a Social Studies teacher. I've taken on a Government class, which means that I get to instill my obsession with US politics and governance in a new generation of learners. That's actually pretty exciting, and if I had time to do it the right way, this would be an absolutely incredible class. As I don't have that time, it'll likely be a good class.

Here's my newest rant (not that you haven't read it already in a hundred other places):

What kind of supposedly responsible parent would keep a child out of school on Tuesday?

What good can possibly come of keeping your kid from hearing President Obama speak? I've read of places where schools are starting to realize that they will lose money by not having kids in school. I've read numerous accusations that this speech is an attempt to force socialism on our kids. I've read numerous paranoid assertions that this is unconstitutional or in some way a failure to separate politics from education. Folks, here's the reality of it. It doesn't matter if Obama is a socialist (he's not) or if he wants to indoctrinate your kids (he may) or if he's not separating politics from education (his speech is on staying in school - not sure where the politics are there). What matters is that this is a great opportunity for students to hear the President of the United States of America address them directly and begin a conversation that should continue in the classrooms after he has finished speaking.

Seriously, now. We show kids video of Hitler and Hussein, give them transcripts of Churchill and Roosevelt, and have them study maps of Waterloo and the Somme. We expect them to analyze forms of government around the world and assess various political ideologies for their strengths and weaknesses. Surely, their fragile little minds can handle one speech encouraging them to take their education seriously. I don't care about the fact that GHWB and Reagan both addressed students like this. I don't care that most schools fail to teach adequately the things that I've listed above. What I care is that this is a great opportunity for students to actively learn how our government really operates, and they are being taught all of the wrong lessons in far too many places. Ironically, timing and technology may keep me from being able to show it live to my Government class, but I certainly plan to get it recorded and use it as soon as possible.

letter to Bashas' customer service

Below is the text of an email that I just sent to Bashas' customer service. I expect stupidity from teenaged cashiers, but managers with 36 years in the business...

I just got home from a trip to your Camp Verde store. While there, I had an experience that I think you should be aware of.

While in the produce section, I chose to pick up some cucumber. I looked to see the price and was first pleased, then astounded. It was supposed to be listed for 79¢, but someone had erred and posted .79¢! If I were unscrupulous enough to point this out to a manager and force the issue, I could get 100 cucumbers for the price that one was supposed to cost!

As I headed out of the produce section, I noticed that the same error had been made on kiwi fruit and on honeydew melons. I can only assume that other items were mis-marked as well, but I could have easily obtained several hundred pounds of produce for five dollars or less, according to the posted prices.

I called this to the attention of my cashier, who insisted to me that the decimal was absolutely necessary in order to indicate "cents" (he's very, very wrong). Instead of arguing with a dumb high-schooler, I chose instead to point the issue out to the customer service manager. He made a small excuse or two and seemed similarly unaware of how significant an error in labelling that was. On my way out the door, I noticed that my cucumber (marked at ".79¢ ea.") had actually cost me 89¢! Rather than press the issue, I walked outside and related this story to my wife, who was as amused and disappointed as I.

I don't really know if there is some sort of restitution that I should be asking for here, but I WOULD really appreciate if you could make sure that your employees understand the difference between marking an item as "seventy-nine cents" and marking it as "seventy-nine hundredths of a cent" (or simply stop using the "¢" symbol in your produce section).

Hope this helps!

Sarah Palin resigns, grammarians breathe sigh of relief?

Ladies and gentlemen, the time has come to put rhetoric back in school curricula.

In her resignation press conference, Palin said:

And so as I thought about this announcement that I wouldn't run for re-election and what it means for Alaska, I thought about how much fun some governors have as lame ducks... travel around the state, to the Lower 48 (maybe), overseas on international trade - as so many politicians do. And then I thought - that's what's wrong - many just accept that lame duck status, hit the road, draw the paycheck, and "milk it".

Several transcript paragraphs later, she mentioned having just returned from a trip to Europe where she was visiting with Alaskan soldiers. Before that trip, she was notably in New York City, where she was able to catch a Yankees game. She's also made it to Indiana for a fundraiser, DC for some dumb Alfalfa dinner, DC again for a major GOP fundraiser, and Auburn, New York. For a governor whose state has suffered earthquakes, volcanoes, mudslides, and food shortages (all since January), it sure seems that she's managed to do a decent amount of traveling to "the Lower 48" as well as overseas. Oddly enough, though she's drawing the paycheck, letting Alaska foot the bill for her ethics investigations, hitting the road, and milking it, she's not yet managed to travel around her own state. She has been notably absent from Emmonak, despite the fact that their lack of salmon for subsistence and profit has gotten national attention.

OK, I can't really read any more stuff about Sarah Palin. The woman has always driven me crazy. It's not that I mind women in positions of power; the last two states I've lived in have had female governors. It's not that I can't deal with people espousing political positions I find idiotic; I live in Arizona and read the local paper. It's that she talks like idiocy is a virtue. She may not be a moron, but you wouldn't know it from listening to her or observing from a distance. For further reading on Alaskan politics and how Sarah Palin failsed as a governor, check out The Mudflats.