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politics

Hagee and the Messiah

Monday 31 March 2008 | 0 Comments

This race has been odd for the religious right. First, there was the issue of whether or not to support a Mormon -- a non-Christian in the eyes of many Evangelicals. Now comes the troubling Hagee endorsement of McCain.

Yet it's not only those on the left side of the spectrum that are troubled by this -- or at least, it shouldn't be. Those same Evangelical Christians who hesitated to support McCain should also be leery of Hagee and his less-than-orthodox theology, as seen below:

[Video removed from YouTube.]

Out Before the Count

Tuesday 29 January 2008 | 0 Comments

If Giuliani is a prize fighter and the primary season is a title bout, Giuliani just bonked his head on the way out to the ring, knocking himself unconscious to the cheers of virtually no one.

Teaching to Standards

Tuesday 17 July 2007 | 2 Comments

One of the problems of teaching to No Child Left Behind standards is the risk of teachers becoming nothing more than their students’ test scores.

Via Eduwonk.com I found one such teacher’s story:

I teach in an inner city school where inequity is apparent. The neighborhood has a high poverty level. Violence and poor housing conditions tuck my students in at night!

Underemployment, unemployment, lack of health insurance is the norm. It has only been of late that a “real” grocery store was available for residents to purchase fresh foods.

We are locked into teaching reading practices that are driven by federal government’s bad research. I witness a lack of all that made school a joy for my students. Literally the things that helped to build community and self-respect and self-esteem for children have disappeared. In their place is rigid schedules and long periods of disjointed phonics, and disjointed language practices.

One of the reasons many teachers are not fans of NCLB is that it’s a one-size-fits-all solution. That “one-size” is often, as this teacher comments, “disjointed.”

This teacher writes of her students’ lack of satisfactory achievement according to the NCLB-mandated state testing.

My Unsatisfactory “grade” was followed by the comment:”This teacher�s students made minimal growth in her classroom this year.”

Most of my children are reading on or above grade level. The amount of “progress/growth” made this year by most of my children was no where near minimal.

I asked my principal if she believed that statement that appeared on my evaluation. She said “Yes, I do, based on your DIBELS scores!”

Her statement hurt me because I know the amount of work I did this year with my precious students. The amount of growth the children had in all areas was in no way “minimal.” I mentioned that the reading levels of some of my first-graders were equal to the end of second grade. She said the district didn�t recognize non-standardized test scores. (susanohanian.org)

Having worked with at-risk kids, I can understand (to a degree) what this teacher is going through.

Such “teaching” turns both students and teachers into little more than cogs in some great bureaucratic machinery. No one is working toward “learning” in any real sense here, and as far as teaching critical thinking, it’s probably non-existent.

Very often, kids coming from such backgrounds need so much more than simple reading and writing instruction. They step into school with huge disadvantages to begin with, and to some degree, reading and writing alone will not help them. They need work with social skills and an understanding of the social framework that exists outside the inner city.

This is not to say that I am advocating a sixties-style “go where the students take us” type of teaching, and I am not suggesting that all standards are a bad thing. However, NCLB’s cookie-cutter approach seems to do little for many students and teachers.

Ron Paul

Friday 29 June 2007 | 2 Comments

Ron Paul is Exhibit A in the case of why we need more than two viable political parties. Granted, there’s the Libertarian Party, and that was RP’s party of choice some years ago, but now he’s running for the Republican party nomination — even though most of the Republican party shuns him.

He does seem fairly un-Republican in some ways. His ideas about Iraq win him more applause from Bill Maher than any of the Democratic candidates.

If we think we can do what we want around the world and not incite hatred, then we have a problem. […] They don’t come here and attack us because we’re rich and we’re free. They attack us because we’re over there. (Republican candidate debate)

I don’t know of any Democratic candidate who’s talking about blowback and 9/11. It sounds like something out of a Chomsky book, as do his comments about the folly of spreading democracy with a gun.

And yet, Paul was talking to Cobert, he indicated that he’d be more than willing to have a small a government as possible, eliminating various agencies such as the Department of Education and the Department of Homeland Security.

What he is, in reality, is a real Republican — an isolationistic, small-government, states’-rights, federal-government-butt-out, old-fashioned Republican. The Republicans have strayed so far from their original principles that a “real” one stands out.

Ty Pan Du Sie Tu Vous

Tuesday 12 June 2007 | 0 Comments

When learning Polish, for some reason I had the hardest time initially using the formal voice of address. English-only speakers might not know what I'm talking about, even though the formal/intimate distinction existed in English for hundreds of years.

In French, it's a question of "Vous" and "tu." "Vous" would be "you all" -- second person plural -- and is used in all formal occasions; "tu" is informal, and used with intimate friends or family. In German, it's "sie" and "du".

This is why Martin Burber's wonderful book Ich und Du is translated I and Thou and not I and You.

In English, it used to be "you" and "thou," with "thou" being the more intimate. Because most of us are exposed to "thou" exclusively through liturgical language, we get the sense that it's incredibly formal. In fact, it's the opposite.

Po Polsku

In Polish, there are two options. The first is the common use of "Pan" or "Pani" -- literally, "lord/master" or "lady/mistress."

The older, now-obsolete form is to use "Wy" -- "you all." It's still used in the mountainous southern region, and K in fact speaks to her grandmothers this way. "Co robicie ostatnio?" "What have you been doing lately?"

Out of this came an amusing verb: dwoic. While this is related to the word "dwa" (two), it's not, strictly speaking, "double" (which is "podwoic"). Instead, a better explanation would be "to use the second person plural." In that case, one might ask another, "why are you [dwoic] me?" meaning, "Why are you using the formal voice with me?"

The second method, and the one used now, is to use "Pan" and "Pani." To be polite, a shop attendant, for example, doesn't ask, "Do you need help?" Literally, he asks, "Does the lady need help?"

The problem for me was not so much remembering the odd construction but learning when to make the switch from "Pan" or "Pani" to "you." I called people "you" when I should have used "Pan/Pani" more times than I care to recall. And there really are no guidelines -- it depends, somewhat, on the person.

Linguistics of Diplomacy

I got to thinking about all of this due to an article by Charles Bremner. It begins,

Here is one of those stories that are difficult to convey to people who speak only English. President Sarkozy's government has annoyed the "progressive" sections of the teaching establishment with an order that school pupils must address their teachers with the formal vous rather than the familiar second person singular tu. Teachers are advised to use the respectful vous to Lyc�e teenagers in their classes.

While I could never imagine students in Poland referring to teachers in the second person, I could also never imagine teachers using the formal third person with teachers.

The piece goes on to discuss how world leaders refer to each other -- tu/du or vous/sie?

Angela Merkel dropped German formality enough to call him "Lieber (Dear) Nicolas" but stuck to the formal "sie" not the familiar "du". Sarkozy's matey reply jarred on old-fashioned ears. "Ch�re Angela... J'ai confiance en toi." (In older English I trust thee not you). Lib�ration joked that Franco-German harmony was still lacking. "They are going to have to start by agreeing whether they use tu or vous," it said. (Charles Bremner piece)

While the article doesn't mention George Bush, it seems safe to assume that, like Gordon Brown, his dependence on interpretors will solve the tu/Vous problem. But considering the little back rub he once gave Merkel, it's fairly reasonable to assume that Bush would opt for "tu" over "Vous."

Bush in that Country East of Germany

Saturday 09 June 2007 | 0 Comments

Bush went to visit Poland during the G8 summit. Yesterday in the car, I heard two different NPR news briefs about it -- not whole reports, but simply a mention in the headlines.

Neither time did the reporter refer to the Polish president by name.

The first time was something about Bush going to Poland to visit "that country's president."

The second time, it was a mention of Bush meeting his "Polish counterpart."

I've wondered why they didn't use the Polish president's name. Is the Bush's Polish counterpart's name so difficult to pronounce? Did the reporter not know the name of the president of Poland?

For the uninformed, it's Lech Kaczenski. (That "n" should have an accent on it.) That would be pronounced "Ka-chenee-ski."

Can they not pronounce it? Can they not remember it? At least they didn't have to say "president of Poland" in Polish -- that is a mouthful: "Prezydent Rzeczypospolitej Polskiej"

President Clinton’s Last Days in Office

Friday 11 May 2007 | 2 Comments

Say/think what you will about him, Clinton had quite a sense of humor. I never knew this video even existed...

Romney

Friday 11 May 2007 | 4 Comments

Sharpton's words about Romney bring to the debate so much that it's difficult to know where to start.

CBS News has a great editorial about this.

Sharpton is entirely justified to question Romney on his views on the racist aspects of Mormonism. Blacks were excluded from assuming positions of power until the late 1970s. We all know, of course, that Romney will condemn that aspect of his religion -- it would be political suicide to do otherwise. In that sense, we'll never know if we got a straight answer from him. But I'll give him the benefit of the doubt.

What's most disturbing about Romney is his religion -- a cult, by the standards of many orthodox Christians. It has all the earmarks:

  • exclusivity
  • specially "revealed" information
  • a founder who was somehow closer to God than anyone else

Oh, wait -- I just described every major monotheistic religion, didn't I?

Romney's Mormonism will be problematic with many of his target constituency of conservative Christians. Evangelicals tend, I believe, to regard Mormons as misguided at best, Satanically deceived at best. Many of these same individuals (who would fall into the umbrella term "fundamentalists") call Catholics non-Christians, and Catholicism is much closer, theologically, to evangelicalism than Mormonism is.

The question is whether Romney's views on abortion and his generally conservative views -- he is a Republican candidate, after all -- will weigh more favorably with traditional Christian voters than his unorthodoxy.