We should be grateful for Sojourner Truth, we should be grateful for the women’s suffrage movement, we should be grateful for Howard Zinn‘s preservation and telling of history, and we can be grateful for inspired readings of original works by great performers like Alfre Woodard.
Alfre Woodard reads “Ain’t I a Woman?“, a speech delivered by abolitionist Sojourner Truth at the Women’s Convention in 1851. Part of a reading from Voices of A People’s History of the United States (Howard Zinn and Anthony Arnove,)February 1, 2007 at All Saints Church in Pasadena, CA.
In my year at the University of Arizona I had the joy of working with David Williams’ speech department students in readers theatre. We had a couple of performers whose readings of Sojourner Truth stirred audiences greatly (Martha Isom, where are you?). This is a piece one does best to absorb from oral performance. It is a piece that one should hear repeatedly, to understand.
Woodard nails this one well, I think.
Ms. Truth’s speech needs careful reflection. She was not just speaking for women’s rights, but was lecturing the suffragists as well on their having overlooked the plight of women of color and working women, and women in poverty. She’s talking to you, and to me, and asking us to confront our stereotypes of what women are and what women do, to recognize that women are humans, deserving of full respect for that reason alone.
Home page for The People Speak, the performance pieces from the history collected by the late Howard Zinn, and Anthony Arnove (a lot of good history, a lot of good performances)
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Here’s a preview of another piece of television that many Republicans hope you will not bother to see, a piece that explains exactly how and why the health care reforms championed by President Obama will help you and millions of others:
Program: U.S. Health Care: The Good News
Episode: The Good News in American Medicine
Journalist T.R. Reid examines communities in America where top-notch medical care is available at reasonable costs and, in some instances, can be accessed by almost all residents. Included: Mesa County, Colo.; Seattle; Everest, Wash.; Hanover, N.H. In Mesa County, for instance, doctors, hospitals and insurers place an emphasis on prevention; and a program that offers pre-natal care to poor women has proved popular.
Clifford Berryman drew some of the best and most famous political cartoons ever, for newspapers in Washington, D.C., over a career of more than 50 years. Berryman drew the cartoon of Teddy Roosevelt and the bear cub TR refused to shoot, that caused the story of TR and the bear to become famous, which led to the creation of the “Teddy bear” stuffed animal we all know today, for one example.
Our National Archives featured an exhibit of Berryman cartoons on running for office. The exhibit is long gone, but the materials from the exhibit live on, on line, waiting for students to study, and teachers to use for presentations, assignments, and tests.
Some of the cartoons seem awfully prescient to today:
"Nearing the End of the Primaries," cartoon by Clifford Berryman published May 3, 1920. Caption from the Archives: "Today candidates usually secure their party’s nomination during the primary season, and the nominating convention merely provides the party’s official stamp of approval. In 1920, however, when the primary process was still new, it did not produce a clear winner for the Republican Party. As the Republican convention neared, there was no front-runner for the G.O.P. Presidential nomination. This cartoon shows the frazzled Republican elephant surrounded by conflicting newspaper headlines while the Democratic donkey makes pressing inquiries. Warren G. Harding was eventually chosen as the Republican nominee. U.S. Senate Collection Center for Legislative Archives"
When Bugs Bunny earned the sobriquet, “Oscar-winning rabbit,” there was a good chance that a good cartoon nominated for an Academy Award would be shown at a movie in your neighborhood. In the past two decades, it has grated on me that so many of the Oscar-nominated short subjects, documentaries and cartoons could not be seen.
If you watched the Oscar broadcast, you may have been tantalized as I was by the view of the “The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lesmore,” which ended up winning the award for Best Animated Short Film
Wonder of wonders: The makers of the piece put it up on YouTube, so you and I can see it. God bless “Conceptual designer Brandon Oldenburg and children’s book author/illustrator William Joyce” for doing that, and may they have much more success with similar projects, even and especially out of their New Orleans, hurricane-wracked studio.
The past decade has been the hottest ever recorded since global temperature records began 150 years ago. This video discusses the impacts of the sun’s energy, Earth’s reflectance and greenhouse gasses on global warming.
Credit: NASA
Vital Signs of the Planet: Global Climate Change and Global Warming. Current news and data streams about global warming and climate change from NASA.
Corporate and business people who have lived through serious quality improvement programs, especially those based on hard statistical analysis of procedures and products in a manufacturing plant, know the great truths drilled by such high-quality statistical gurus as W. Edwards Deming: The fault, dear Brutus, is not in the teacher, but in the processes generally beyond the teacher’s control.
Here’s the shortest video I could find on Deming’s 14 Points for Management — see especially point #14, about eliminating annual “performance reviews,” because as Dr. Deming frequently demonstrated, the problems that prevent outstanding success are problems of the system, and are beyond the control of the frontline employees (teachers, in this case). I offer this here only for the record, since it’s a rather dull presentation. I find, however, especially among education administrators, that these well-established methods for creating champion performance in an organization are foreign to most Americans. Santayana’s Ghost is constatly amazed at what we refuse to learn.
Wise words from the saviors of business did not give even a moment’s pause to those who think that we can improve education if we could only get out those conniving, bad teachers, who block our children’s learning. Since the early Bush administration and the passage of the nefarious, so-called No Child Left Behind Act, politicians pushed for new measures to catch teachers “failing,” and so to thin the ranks of teachers. Bill Gates, the great philanthropist, put millions of dollars in to projects in Washington, D.C., Dallas, and other districts, to come up with a way to statistically measure who are the good teachers, the ones who “add value” to a kid’s education year over year.
It was a massive experiment, running in fits and spurts for more than a decade. We have the details from two of America’s most vaunted and haunted school districts, Washington, D.C., and New York City, plus Los Angeles and other sites, in projects funded by Bill Gates and others, and we can pass judgment on the value of the idea of identifying the bad apple teachers to get rid of them to improve education.
As an experiment, It failed. After measuring teachers eight ways from Sunday for more than a decade, W. Edwards Deming was proved correct: Management cannot identify the bad actors from the good ones.
Most of the time the bad teachers this year were good teachers last year, and vice versa, according to the measures used.
Firing the bad ones from this years only means next year’s good teachers are gone from the scene.
Data have been published in a few places, generally over complaints of teachers who don’t want to get labeled as “failures” when they know better. Curiously, some of the promoters of the scheme also came out against publication.
A statistician could tell why. When graphed, the points of data do not reveal good teachers who constantly add value to their students year after year, nor do the data put the limelight on bad teachers who fail to achieve goals year after year. Instead, they reveal that what we think is a good teacher this year on the basis of test scores, may well have been a bad teacher on the same measures last year. Worse, many of the “bad teachers” from previous had scores that rocketed up. But the data don’t show any great consistency beyond chance.
At first I was a bit surprised that Bill Gates and Michelle Rhee were opposed to publicizing the value-added data from New York City, Los Angeles, and other cities.
Could they be experiencing twinges of a bad conscience?
No way.
That’s not it. Nor do these educational Deformers think that value-added mysticism is nonsense. They think it’s wonderful and that teachers’ ability to retain their jobs and earn bonuses or warnings should largely depend on it.
The problem, for them, is that they don’t want the public to see for themselves that it’s a complete and utter crock. Nor to see the little man behind the curtain.
I present evidence of the fallacy of depending on “value-added” measurements in yet another graph — this time using what NYCPS says is the actual value-added scores of all of the many thousands of elementary school teachers for whom they have such value-added scores in the school years that ended in 2006 and in 2007.
I was afraid that by using the percentile ranks as I did in my previous post, I might have exaggerated or distorted how bad “value added” really was.
No worries, mate – it’s even more embarrassing for the educational deformers this way.
In any introductory statistics course, you learn that a graph like the one below is a textbook case of “no correlation”. I had Excel draw a line of best fit anyway, and calculate an r-squared correlation coefficient. Its value? 0.057 — once again, just about as close to zero correlation as you are ever going to find in the real world.
In plain English, what that means is that there is essentially no such thing as a teacher who is consistently wonderful (or awful) on this extremely complicated measurement scheme. How teacher X does one year in “value-added” in no way allows anybody to predict how teacher X will do the next year. They could do much worse, they could do much better, they could do about the same.
Even I find this to be an amazing revelation. What about you?
And to think that I’m not making any of this up. (unlike Michelle Rhee, who loves to invent statistics and “facts”.)
In summary, many of our largest school systems have spent millions of dollars for a tool to help them find the “bad teachers” to fire, and the tools not only do not work, but may lead to the firing of good teachers, cutting off the legs of the campaign to get better education.
It’s a scandal, really, or an unrolling series of scandals. Just try to find someone reporting it that way. Is anyone?
You wanted evidence that Michelle Rhee’s plans in Washington, D.C., were not coming to fruition, that the entire scheme was just one more exercise in “the daily flogging of teachers will continue until morale improves?”
G. F. Brandenburg ran the numbers. It isn’t pretty.
Click the top line, which should be highlighted in your browser, to see the original post; or click here.
At first I was a bit surprised that Bill Gates and Michelle Rhee were opposed to publicizing the value-added data from New York City and other cities.
Could they be experiencing twinges of a bad conscience?
No way.
That’s not it. Nor do these educational Deformers think that value-added mysticism is nonsense. They think it’s wonderful and that teachers’ ability to retain their jobs and earn bonuses or warnings should largely depend on it.
The problem, for them, is that they don’t want the public to see for themselves that it’s a complete and utter crock. Nor to see the little man behind the curtain.
I present evidence of the fallacy of depending on “value-added” measurements in yet another graph — this time using what NYCPS says is the actual value-added scores of all of the many thousands of elementary school teachers for whom they have…
Typewriter of the day. Royal ‘Apollo 10’ model from 1969. Electric that got us to the moon! It’s noisy but types fine. Hanx
Do you think there’s a movie about typewriters coming?
Confess, Dear Reader — are you taken in by the magic, charm and dinging carriage-return bell of these old typewriters? Do you remember the machine you used to use? Do you still use a typewriter? Minds soaking in the Bathtub want to know.
Grateful tip of the old scrub brush to Judy Crook @Jude2004.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Grist infographic: Idea of climate change hoax makes no sense
The problem? Far too many people not only don’t weigh ideas to see if they make sense, but instead they actively seek out ideas, no matter how crazy, just because they like the concept.
In short, the fact that such a chart is necessary at all suggests that it may not be useful. Anyone who had the common sense to figure out that the globe is warming, and the scientists who say so are mostly honest as the day is long (and warm), won’t accept the judgment of Grist, either.
Will it make a difference to state the facts, the common sense version of reality? My actual hope is that I am in error, and that such a graphic, if pasted around the internet, will make a difference.
Is my hope wholly misplaced?
Update: At the Washington Post blogs, Stephen Stromberg wrote that Gleick erred by failing to follow the rule that climate scientists must be more than twice as morally straight as the “skeptics.” I’m not convinced Gleick erred; he’s done yeoman service to exposing the truth. I’m struggling to find any illegal act he committed. Heartland claims there may be some fraud, but not all the elements of any crime of fraud are present. If, as Heartland argues, the documents are fakes, there was no value lost. If, as most of us suspect, the documents are not fakes, I still see no harm to Heartland in their having their feet held the fire on being honest with the IRS and the public. Heartland claims an absolute right to fib to the public, and somehow Mr. Gleick interfered? Where’s the harm to the public good? Certainly not in exposing Heartland’s dark secrets. No harm, no crime, in this case.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
It’s not really a fair comparison, is it? In 2008, Sen. Barack Obama was in a hotly contested race for the Democratic nomination to be president. His team worked to get the crowds out, at a rally before Super Tuesday.
In 2012, it’s former Gov. Mitt Romney who is in a hotly-contested race for the nomination — but of the GOP, not the Democrats. So it’s not really a fair comparison, Democrats against Republicans, just before Super Tuesday, is it?
Still, we see these two photos making the rounds. These two photos were taken four years and 20 days apart:
Political rallies for presidential candidates, in Detroit, Michigan, 2012, and Hartford, Connecticut, 2008
Oh, that’s not straight up, is it. One was in Detroit, the other in Hartford. Okay, let’s compare Detroit rallies. Here’s Mitt Romney in Detroit:
And here is Obama in Detroit in 2008, in Joe Louis Arena:
If you’re a red-blooded American, you’ll find Obama’s speech in Detroit frustrating, in retrospect. Where Obama said America can’t wait to solve problems, Republicans since then have said “Yes, We Can Wait,” and they’ve frustrated action to fix so many problems. We’ve lost so much time.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Of course, C. S. Lewis was a Brit, and Britain is close to Europe — heck he’s almost a Frenchman, and Russian communists used to like to go to Paris. On one of those hooks, Obama bashers will hang their refusal to agree with Martin Bashir.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
I have observed that the world has suffered far less from ignorance than from pretensions to knowledge. It is not skeptics or explorers but fanatics and ideologues who menace decency and progress. No agnostic ever burned anyone at the stake or tortured a pagan, a heretic, or an unbeliever.
Isn’t that eerily similar to Kin Hubbard’s observation? From Boorstin, the former Librarian of Congress, it carries the heft of more academic language than Hubbard’s version, but it clearly echoes the idea, doesn’t it?
Below the fold, the statement in greater context of the duty of historians.
After organizing our bookshelf almost a year ago (http://youtu.be/zhRT-PM7vpA), my wife and I (Sean Ohlenkamp) decided to take it to the next level. We spent many sleepless nights moving, stacking, and animating books at Type bookstore in Toronto (883 Queen Street West, (416) 366-8973).
Everything you see here can be purchased at Type Books.
Presidents Day this year brought out columns and commentary in newspapers and other media across the country, with trivia about presidents.
Millard Fillmore in a daguerreotype by Matthew Brady in March, 1849, in a sitting at the U.S. Capitol. In 1849 the presidential inauguration took place in March — this may be a photo taken on inauguration day, but almost certainly when Fillmore was Vice President. Wikipedia image
What did we learn? We learned that the old hoax, that Millard Fillmore put the first bathtub in the White House, still stands strong. The ghost of H. L. Mencken, the guy who started the hoax, high-tails it to the nearest hotel bar for a beer; the ghost of Santayana smiles and shakes its head. Fillmore’s ghost looks around for a good book to read.
Did one of the wires services run a story on the trivia that reporters picked up?
º For some reason, Millard Fillmore, the 13th president, has been the butt of a lot of jokes over the years and I don’t know why. The guy seems pretty upstanding. When Fillmore moved into the White House, it didn’t have a Bible, so he corrected that oversight. He and his wife, Abigail, installed the first library at the White House, plus the first bathtub and kitchen stove. Fillmore could not read Latin and refused an honorary degree from Oxford University, saying a person shouldn’t accept a degree he could not read. (So how did the first 12 presidents take a bath?)
Give Mr. Eighinger credit. In that parenthetical question, he begins to see the problems with the story, the hoax Mencken wrote. Too bad he didn’t chase it down.
Yes, the Fillmores installed the first library in the White House — though it was more out of their love of books than a lack of a Bible. And they updated the kitchen, but certainly someone had some sort of stove to cook on prior to 1850.
13. Millard Fillmore wasn’t really the first president to have a bathtub installed in the White House. The actual answer is more complicated. See the link below under “Additional Sources.” He was, however, a member of three political parties during his lifetime: Anti-Masonic (1828-1832); Whig (1832-1856, including his presidency of 1850-53); and American (1856-1860).
I didn’t find the link to “Additional Sources.” Perhaps the author referred to the notes under the Wikipedia article on Fillmore, which was linked from the site. You should remember that the “American Party” to which Fillmore belonged, and on whose ticket he ran for the presidency in 1856, was also known as the “Know-Nothing Party.”
How many other newspapers carried the hoax in the past week, that my news hounds did not find?
Or, until that account is unsuspended by the forces supporting Donald Trump: Follow @FillmoreWhite, the account of the Millard Fillmore White House Library
We've been soaking in the Bathtub for several months, long enough that some of the links we've used have gone to the Great Internet in the Sky.
If you find a dead link, please leave a comment to that post, and tell us what link has expired.
Thanks!
Retired teacher of law, economics, history, AP government, psychology and science. Former speechwriter, press guy and legislative aide in U.S. Senate. Former Department of Education. Former airline real estate, telecom towers, Big 6 (that old!) consultant. Lab and field research in air pollution control.
My blog, Millard Fillmore's Bathtub, is a continuing experiment to test how to use blogs to improve and speed up learning processes for students, perhaps by making some of the courses actually interesting. It is a blog for teachers, to see if we can use blogs. It is for people interested in social studies and social studies education, to see if we can learn to get it right. It's a blog for science fans, to promote good science and good science policy. It's a blog for people interested in good government and how to achieve it.
BS in Mass Communication, University of Utah
Graduate study in Rhetoric and Speech Communication, University of Arizona
JD from the National Law Center, George Washington University
Posted by Ed Darrell 
by Pasi Sahlberg, with a foreword by Andy Hargreaves, Teachers College Press, 167 pp., $34.95 (paper)
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 