Nothing shows a man's character more than
what he laughs at.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Image of the Day
As a former Illinois resident, I've maintained an active interest in what's going on through email subscriptions since Mark Kirk was my Congressman. As I've mentioned, the GOP had dominated the governor's mansion over the last 3 decades until when Secretary of State George Ryan won the race; a corruption scandal involving alleged money for licenses on Ryan's watch. For those who haven't lived in Illinois, most of the state is red except the Chicago area, with purplish collar counties. So statewide contests often are decided by how big the turnout is in Chicago, if they pile up enough net Dem votes to offset GOP gains elsewhere in the state. (I don't recall if I mentioned this anecdote in a past post, but I remember in the 1990's I once had a job interview in downtown Chicago on some election day (I don't recall if it was a primary or general election). But the receptionist was some sort of Democratic operative whom spent nearly all the time I was waiting for the interview on the phone doing party business.) Since the Ryan scandal, the GOP has largely been shut out statewide except US Sen. Kirk and Comptroller Topinka (whom lost a nasty Blago reelection match-up). I thought the Blago scandal and deteriorating state financials might give the GOP a chance to regain power, but not to date.
I liked living in the western suburbs; as a road warrior I liked living near a great airport where I could fly anywhere, including both coasts, on little notice. It was a combination of lousy local consulting opportunities and an offer to work on a federal contract that led me to relocate to the metro DC area. I left before Obama was coronated at the 2004 Dem convention. I winced when the GOP drafted carpetbagger Keyes to replace Jack Ryan, a charismatic Wall Street trader turned inner city teacher whom won and later resigned the nomination; the Obama campaign (actually the media) uncovered some embarrassing intimate details alleged by Ryan's actress ex-wife in sealed court records. It's difficult to argue counterfactuals; some sources claimed early polls had Ryan ahead of Obama, but the polls after their nominations had Obama ahead by 8 points or more before the sensational allegations. It would have been an uphill but winnable race before the scandal implosion.
There have been multiple times since 2004 I've considered returning to Chicago; I had an in-person interview in the loop back in 2007. But to be honest, I lost interest after the 2010 elections. When voters returned Quinn to the mansion and left the Dems in control of the legislature, I all but ruled out returning to Chicago; it was now in the same category as the Left Coast and New York. That the Dems want to impose a class warfare tax hike is a typical play from the "progressive" playbook: if we have to have an income tax, the fairest form is a flat/proportional tax which recognizes economic decisions occur at the margin; when you raise the margin, it contracts the tax base. If I'm a business owner, I have the option of relocating to a more business-friendly state. (I have quoted Hayek and/or others on this issue.)
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| Courtesy of Illinois Policy Institute |
John Lott discusses a wonkish distinction about government subtotals of part-time workers for economic versus non-economic numbers, which sum is larger than a separate government number for total part-time workers. Mark Perry, recently purged from my blogroll, was not happy with this challenge to his perky economics, is playing up the discrepancy and also arguing that the data are distorted by March, an outlier month. Poor Mark; like Obama, he lives in the 57th state, named "Denial'. If you scanned Yahoo Finance over the weekend, you saw headlines like "Payrolls Miss, Tapering May Be Scaled Back", "Traders Struggle With Perfectly Terrible Jobs Number", "Jobs Market Bumping Along Bottom of Very Deep Hole", and "Krugman Overboard! Says Economic Policy a ‘Horrifying Failure’". Keep in mind that economists figure that you need about 200K jobs a month just to keep up with labor force growth. Not only is this economy failing to keep up, but part-time jobs are included in the job gains data. Perry doesn't have enough lipstick for these pigs. I don't think I've seen Perry mention the labor rate participation rate in any of his posts hitting a 35-year low... This is truly pathetic; consider the Fed has been rigging interest rates near zero for 5 years now, and this is the best we see 4 years into an economic recovery?
As always, I have an anecdotal experience which does a good job of illustrating what's going on. A few weeks back, I was contacted by a local recruiter for a position requiring an initial interim secret clearance. However, the client was only willing to commit to 2 to 3 billable days a week and wanted a multi-year commitment. The recruiter quickly verified my eligibility for an interim clearance; since an active clearance is a competitive barrier to entry, I was willing to consider a shorter-term commitment but wanted the recruiter to push for more hours or at least push for a full-time hire after several weeks. The client thought they could get a DBA willing to moonlight from another position and apparently located and offered the gig to another candidate.
Pro-Liberty Quote of the Day
Education, Kling and Econtalk
Now that I've worked through the Cato Event backlog, I've resumed working off the Econtalk backlog. Although the podcast is nearly a year old, I recommend the Kling interview; I've plugged Econtalk in the past; the website does a good job supplementing the podcasts with links to papers, URL's, etc.
As a former professor (I might welcome an academic offer but haven't been in the market for a decade), I'm fascinated by discussions of university teaching. I realize when I've taught, I haven't had students like me, so how do you reach less able students with little intrinsic interest in the course, without the same motivation level and work habits; I'm not saying all, but probably most were simply getting their graduation job ticket punched, with minimal effort to get high grades. I still recall fighting with my academic adviser to get into Sister Morkovsky's metaphysics class; my adviser wanted me to take art history, and other students warned me Professor Morkovsky didn't issue A's. At UH, instead of taking an easy-A psychology research class, I took a ball-busting QMS research design course. I wouldn't say grades didn't matter, but I figured they would take care of themselves; I was more interested in making my time in college worthwhile and challenging myself. I was so angry with my adviser I walked out on her; of course, I had to apologize to her later (she was the chair of the math department). She laughed, saying she was so much into arguing her point she hadn't realized I was gone for 10 minutes. But, for me, I was considering the priesthood, and I had brought 4 volumes of Aquinas' Summa Theologica to the university, a gift from the base chaplain for whom I had served early morning mass before going to high school.
So how do you reach students? For one thing, I routinely typed out lecture notes; I often tried to talk about what was going on in the practitioner ranks. One example was when I was teaching software design at ISU and worked in discussions on object-oriented computing. Some students noticed; ISU took pride in being a teaching (vs. research) oriented university. But I'll never forget one student whom remarked in his class evaluation that in his 4 years, my class was the first one where he heard things being discussed in tech periodicals.
Another thing I was interested in was cultivating a discipline for keeping up what was going on in the profession; yes, I had to test over DOS applications like Word Perfect and dBase, but I wasn't really interested in whether 5 years from then, they would remember the key combination for italicizing text. I wanted them to develop personal application projects; one I still remember was a farmer whom developed a database application for immunizing his cows, with configured alerts, etc.
Whereas there's a lot to say about dealing with sociopolitical issues in group projects--which simulates real life (you have to deal with freeloaders, personality conflicts, etc.), we still have to deal at core with individual development, and in classes you deal with a mixed bag; I remember I gave out computer assignments that some students could do in a half hour and others, who considered themselves A/B students, were still struggling after several hours (I remember one student on the verge of tears).
A lot of what I did focused on careful evaluation of open-ended questions and certain assignments. This is where mentoring takes place. Yet I know many, if not most students never looked beyond the grade I issued.
Kling makes an interesting distinction between transformers and sorters. The former, in a simplistic summary, considers student minds as blank pages on which the teacher tries to imprint knowledge and/or skills; the latter deals with recognizing clusters of students.
I will simply hint that I think I see a principal threshold of achieving basic skills, like reading and math. Many highly structured/low-level types of learning can or are easily computer-augmented, freeing up instructor time for higher-order mentoring. Clearly the idea of minds as little xerox copiers is a failed model.
Political Humor
Yeah, I can just hear a Ronald Reagan voice-over; remember how well the Lebanese intervention worked out?
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| Courtesy of Ken Catalino and Townhall |
Lionel Richie and Diana Ross, "Endless Love"
