Carpe euro
I've taken the liberty of translating this funny item in full, from the German "law blog":

A client of mine was walking in a pedestrian zone. A practically naked lady, flanked by a camera team, offered him a pink paper bill. "There, my gift to you." My client took the 500 Euro bill, stuck it in his shirt pocket, and wanted to walk on. A young man appeared from behind the camera man. He outed himself as a producer and was completely thrilled. "Terrific, finally someone who just takes the loot and doesn't ask any questions. Or gets embarrassed."

In any case the producer still wanted a signature. Permission that the scene could be televised. "Nah," said my client. "I don't want to be on TV." When further attempts to convince him failed, the producer asked for the 500 Euros back. My client took the point of view that a gift is a gift. A cop on the beat who happened by thought so, too. Nevertheless, he took down the addresses of all the parties.

The TV company just doesn't give up. Now they're requesting the return of the 500 Euros in writing. It was only a case of a "pseudogift." Any passerby could have recognized that "taking the money was implicitly tied to the condition that we could medially utilize the scene."

Let them sue, says my client. I think we can't lose either. As long as Ms. Salesch [a "Judge Judy" of German TV -ed.] doesn't try the case.

Via Jens Scholz. The lab rats bite back now and then, eh?



=====
TRANSLATION NOTES: "There, my gift to you.": "Da, schenk ich dir."; pseudogift: Scheingeschenk; medially utilize: medial verwerten (pompous legalese/professionalese). posted by Thomas Nephew at 11:27:00 PM -- |    

 
Isabel approaching
Repeated "SKREEEE"s of my computer's UPS -- the county's power grid is already under assault by Hurricane Isabel. The wind is gusting, nothing too bad yet, maybe 30mph, but the trees are swaying. There are too dang many of them, and big suckers, too, hundred footers plus. The rain has eased up a bit, but the ground is pretty wet from the rains all summer. I think some will come down tonight. We'll be in the basement tonight when the storm hits for real; together with the slope we're on, that should be pretty safe if worst comes to worst.

The neighbor kids have come over, and are playing upstairs with Maddie. Time to look after them.


=====
UPDATE, 9/19: We're fine, the neighborhood is fine, this area is doing OK, considering; there's some flooding down near the Potomac. The winds were still pretty stiff around here about midnight. The storm took a western track, so the DC area didn't take a direct hit, but Richmond and the Shenandoah Valley did, and a lot of water got pushed up the Chesapeake Bay, flooding low lying areas. posted by Thomas Nephew at 5:41:00 PM -- |    

 
Volunteer Tailgate Party
...is up at Mr. CJ Hoyt's blog, "Up for Anything." Check it out! I have the feeling CJ got Democratic Veteran's gender wrong -- not that there's anything wrong with that! I guess you never know on the Internet. A couple of reactions:

I think Rich ("Shots across the Bow") makes the beginnings of a reasonable point about Blix's guess that Saddam never had any WMD:

So, it is conceivable that Hussein no longer had any weapons of mass destruction; he was just pretending he did. Does this mean that the US and its coalition shoudn't have moved on him? Well, let me ask you this. You're in a bad neighborhood, and a guy walk up behind you and sticks a gun in your back and demands your wallet. Do you give it to him, or do you assume it's just his finger and say "Hell No!"

I agree that Saddam pretending to have WMD is evidence, in a way, of Saddam demonstrating he'd like to have WMD, UN or no UN.

Of course, the problem is that Saddam didn't exactly stick us up (as far as I know) with the alleged WMD. Also, we pay billions a year to try to get our intelligence about the rest of the world straight, not for guesswork that may turn out to be completely wrong, and not to start wars on the basis of that guesswork. I'm still holding out hope that evidence of post-1991 weapons development programs -- clearly illegal and actionable under SCR 687 -- will be discovered. But if they aren't, a lot of people will have been badly wrong, and should stand down. From George Tenet on up. And I guess I'll probably need to to take care of some mea culpas myself.

A very nice 9/11 memorial was created on short notice by UT College Republicans. Way to go, Andy Groves et al, from a Democrat, and a fellow American.

Thanks for the "Open Source Politics" tip, Deb!

posted by Thomas Nephew at 5:35:00 PM -- |    

 
Madeleine va a l'ecole
Yeah, there are probably a couple of accents missing up there.

The main drama of the last couple of weeks has been Maddie's jump up from easy-going day care days to the big time of Montgomery County, Maryland public school kindergarten. It's been an education all around.

There wouldn't have been any drama to speak of had we not been told two days after classes began that a spot in the "French immersion program" at a different elementary school had opened up. These are classes where the teachers speak only French; we're told over half the kindergarteners are speaking reasonably well by the end of the school year, and virtually everyone is by the end of first grade.

Maddie's an old hand at changing schools now, but not after two days. She'd already become attached to the kindergarten teacher and classmates, and there were repeated melt-downs when the subject of the new school came up.

We're pretty sure the notification could have come before classes started, since the drop-out family had to notify some other county school during the summer that they were coming. Given the predictable hurt to a five year old soul, I wish they'd made more of an effort to not put kids through a kindergarten switch. Dream on, I guess.

With regrets that there weren't German immersion classes in my area, I was pretty sure I wanted Maddie in this kind of school for a couple of reasons. One is that I'm sold on the benefits of knowing a second language -- the wider horizons, the intangibles of knowing there's more than one way to express something. The other, related a bit to the Gatto article I mentioned on Sunday, is that I hope that both the students and teachers will be challenged and motivated in ways that go beyond the usual classroom experience.

Ironically, it turns out that part of the approach is to emphasize routines and be repetitive even more than in regular kindergarten; at an orientation meeting I went to, the teacher said "we have a song for everything, and we sing them." It may be repetitive, but it has an educational purpose.

The staff are nice, Maddie's teacher was nice the one time I've met her. But you get the impression they either believe or know that they're right on the edge of handling the class sizes (22 per class) and programs they're trying to handle. That may add to the need for routines, I'm afraid. Beyond the language barriers -- teacher to Maddie to us -- there's also a practice of keeping parents at bay that takes some getting used to: no access to the classroom, little contact beyond notes with the teacher.

We already look back on the Maddie's prior situation, the day care provider School for Friends, as a kind of halcyon, happy interlude. The teachers there let kids follow their noses to whatever activity they wanted.

She's in the program now, and has more or less adjusted. The school is bigger than the first one, which has an impact when kids come to school in the morning. The school has all the kids wait in line until the school doors open, with the kindergarten kids at the front of the line. This has the unintended effect of creating a scary, noisy gauntlet of "big kids" for my gentle little girl to walk through, and just the thought of it can reduce her to tears. There's no meanness by the older kids, they're just being regular, noisy kids for a few more precious minutes before order is imposed.

Worry, smile, worry. We had to arrange switching Maddie's lunch program money to the new cafeteria. Maddie and I walked there with her sweet little voice proudly giving me the directions, her warm hand in mine. We sat down and waited for the manager to arrive; looking around, I saw a poster that said "TEASING HURTS," and wondered whether it will prompt more "hey! Let's tease Maddie, that'll hurt" responses than it prevents. Give it a rest, Dad. She'll be OK. I hope. posted by Thomas Nephew at 4:14:00 PM -- |    

 
Against school
...is the title of the quaintly unlinkable feature article in the September Harper's Monthly. The author, John Taylor Gatto, is "a former New York State and New York City Teacher of the Year." He is now something of an education gadfly; the Harper's article is a thought-provoking and sometimes glorious polemic that apparently draws from Gatto's "The Underground History of American Education."

In Harper's, Gatto writes:

...if we wanted to we could easily and inexpensively jettison the old, stupid structures and help kids take an education rather than merely receive a schooling. We could encourage the best qualities of youthfulness -- curiosity, adventure, resilience, the capacity for surprising insight -- simply by being more flexible about time, texts, and tests, by introducing kids to truly competent adults, and by giving each student what autonomy he or she needs in order to take a risk every now and then.[...]

...a considerable number of well-known Americans never went through the twelve-year wringer our kids currently go through, and they turned out all right. George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln? Someone taught them, to be sure, but they were not products of a school system, and not one of them was ever "graduated" from a secondary school.* [...]

... Once you understand the logic behind modern schooling, its tricks and traps are fairly easy to avoid. School trains children to be employees and consumers; teach your own to be leaders and adventurers. School trains children to obey reflexively; teach your own to think critically and independently. Well-schooled kids have a low threshold for boredom; help your own to develop an inner life so that they'll never be bored. Urge them to take on the serious material, the grown-up material, in history, literature, philosophy, music, art, economics, theology -- all the stuff schoolteachers know well enough to avoid. Challenge your kids with plenty of solitude so that they can learn to enjoy their own company, to conduct inner dialogues. [...]

After a long life, and thirty years in the public school trenches, I've concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress our genius only because we haven't yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves.

Yes.

This is on the occasion of my Maddie's entry into kindergarten -- even if it is a special one; more on that some other time, maybe. During our reintroduction to public schools, both my wife and I were taken aback by the long-forgotten atmosphere of drill, lines, announcements over speakers, etcetera that our gentle, brilliant little pumpkin now found herself in. And this in what is widely and no doubt accurately considered a model school in an exemplary county school system.

Maddie adapted quickly to that challenge and more. Adapting is practically her middle name. But adapting to what? As Gatto points out, "...you can't test for reflexive obedience until you know whether you can make kids learn, and do, foolish and boring things."

Gatto's article is more than just polemics, but I don't know the history involved well enough to judge the rest. Briefly, Gatto sees a direct, conscious, imitative adoption of the Prussian military state's school system, called for by educators like Horace Mann of the mid 1800s and brought to fruition, or at least recognized for the social engineering it was, by early 1900s educators like Alexander Inglis. Gatto recommends interested readers consult James Bryant Conant's 1959 book The Child, the Parent, and the State (friendly little title, ain't it?) to learn more for themselves. Conant credited Inglis' "revolution" for the 1950s successes, such as they may have been, of American schooling. (Conant helped develop the SAT testing system.)**

I don't mean to make a little rebel without a cause out of Maddie. But I think her mother and I agree we also don't mean to force her to adapt to boredom, or to someday enter on exhausting rounds of self-betterment and resume-building after school. I don't intend to go the private school or home schooling routes with Maddie. But I also don't intend to measure her by the same yardsticks a school system uses; their purposes and motives may well not be the same as mine, or, more importantly as the years go on, as Maddie's. I'm glad Gatto reminded me of that.


=====
* Gatto provides plenty of other examples of non high-school graduate American luminaries: Edison, Farragut, Carnegie, Rockefeller, Melville, Twain, Conrad, Mead.
** To be fair, Conant et al would have some rebuttal points to Gatto, I think. For example, it may be that standardized testing has helped create a system of unnecessarily standardized education, but it may also be that's preferable to the class- and connections-based system prior to ETS and SATs. And while Prussia is a useful bogeyman in Gatto's account, by the late 1800s its industrial development and scientific prowess were the envy of the modernizing world. Emulating its school system may have indeed been a worthy reform compared to the status quo, whether or not we should stick with all elements of that system today.

Formatting note: Since it's my convention to use italics when quoting other people's words, I've substituted the use of bold type in the pull quotes above for the author's use of italics.

UPDATE, 9/18: There are now at least a couple of web sites with the full text of "Against School," one by Devi Khuit and another by Mary Leue. posted by Thomas Nephew at 9:41:00 PM -- |