Monthly Archives: February 2016

Colorado School Performance after Millions Invested

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The subtitle of an article by Jennifer Brown in the Denver Post is, “Colorado ‘turnaround’ schools received $50 million since 2010 but many have not improved.” “Among the 29 schools in Colorado that have one year remaining on their ‘accountability clock’ before the state school board could move to shut them down or turn them into charters, most have not made significant progress, and some have gotten worse.” The analysis of student achievement data for schools receiving federal “…School Improvement Grant funds (and) found little correlation between money and academic gains.”

A spokesperson for the non-profit Bellwether Education Partners commented, “If you funnel a lot of money to the same dysfunctional districts that have been running the dysfunctional schools, these are the results you should expect…What’s mystifying to me is that people thought the school improvement grant program was going to get dramatically different results from the dozens of other similar efforts at school turnaround in the past.” That statement reminded me of the saying that doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results is the definition of insanity.

The article is filled with statistics and examples, and it was obviously researched quite well. I wish there had been more about why school performances are so universally abysmal. There is one example of a new principal at a school “…where 90 percent of the kids are minorities and almost everyone is eligible for free or reduced lunch…” She realized she had to change the culture of gangs, drugs, and fighting. She used grant money to hire two additional assistant principals. They were told to learn the student’s names, greet them in the morning with fist bumps and high fives, and celebrate with them when they demonstrated good performance. The school had a 24 point improvement in math proficiency. Maybe other schools should try making the kids happy to be coming to school and acknowledging when they do well on a test. Refusing to allow gangs, drugs, and fighting would seem to be a good idea also.

Life – Rare or Ubiquitous?

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All the interest in NASA’s search for life on Mars led me to revisit old favorites.

People who want to write about life on other planets instead write about life on Earth. It’s the only life we know. These two books share the same information sources but the authors have very different perspectives.

What you’ll find
rare earthRare Earth presents the paradox that microbial life may be nearly everywhere but complex life almost nowhere. While some exobiologists assume Earth is an average, typical world, Rare Earth shows how unusual Earth is. The Sun’s uncommon richness in heavy elements, the narrow habitable zone in space, our oddly large moon, and the unexpected role of plate tectonics make Earth a rare planet in a rare position.

Fierce volcanic ocean vents are supplanting the idea of gentle pools of prebiotic soup as the site where life began. Current thinking on global catastrophes from Snowball Earth to the giant meteor that destroyed the dinosaurs makes life’s persistence seem remarkably lucky.

Ward and Brownlee present the rich controversy in this active and far-ranging science. They explore lines of evidence and important clues that lead to competing theories. Their prose conveys the uncertainty without awkward phrasing. It is a wonderful book to read.

Rare Earth ends with a chapter assessing the famous Drake Equation. Captured captured by aliensopens with the creators of that equation, Frank Drake and science’s gatekeeper for wild ideas, Carl Sagan. We meet an array of people including NASA’s controversial administrator, the Mars Society (founded in Boulder), and UFO fans. These strong, flamboyant characters are obsessed with the thought of intelligent life on other worlds. How they go about designing laser-powered space ships, imaging the pareidolidal Face-on-Mars, searching for planets around distant stars (today found!), and arguing over the constraints on life makes interesting reading.

Same and different
You will learn more about science from Rare Earth and more about people from Captured by Aliens. From the number of words I wrote, I guess I like Rare Earth better. But both books draw the same conclusion. “To us, … it appears that Earth indeed may be extraordinarily rare.” [W&B] “You start adding these things together and you get a bit of a chill, an omen of present and future loneliness.” [A]

What Amazon says
These books are over a decade old – I could only find print versions on Amazon – so the details are out of date. They have fared quite differently over the years. Rare Earth is highly rated with many reviews and a high “Best Sellers Rank” on Amazon. Captured by Aliens is also rated highly but by fewer reviewers, with a modest sellers rank.

Thank You Charles Dickens

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For this week’s expression I’m working backwards – on words.
We know the origin of these terms – the works of Charles Dickens.

“It’s a sign of an author’s genius when his characters step out of the stories and become words in the language. Dozens of Dickens’s characters are now part of the English language.” wordsmith.org

Wellerism: Dickens’s novel Pickwick Papers. Earliest documented use: 1839. A familiar phrase followed by a humorous invention. “Prevention is better than cure,” said the pig when it ran away from the butcher.
Fagin: From Dickens’s novel Oliver Twist. Earliest documented use: 1847. One who trains others, especially children, in crime. A fagin crook led a gang of young thieves.
Gamp: From Dickens’s novel Martin Chuzzlewit. Earliest documented use: 1864. A large umbrella. “By the time we fumble with our gamps, the air is dry once again.”
Scrooge: This is the only one I’ve ever used, and it took a while to enter the language. From Dickens’s novel A Christmas Carol. Earliest documented use: 1940. A miser. “He was not entirely a Scrooge. There were times when he secretly helped poor people.”
Thanks to wordsmith.org

Savers and Interest Rates

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My father lived through the Great Depression and was forever nervous about whether he had saved enough to pay his bills after he quit working. He always saved all he could and put his savings into safe Certificates of Deposit (CDs). He had to move to assisted living and then began to fret that the interest he was earning wasn’t enough to keep him from beginning to use up the principal. I can’t imagine how upset he would be with the miniscule rate of return available to savers for the past few years. There must be millions of older Americans trying to figure out how to stretch their retirement savings to pay their bills while they earn less in interest than the rate of inflation.

The financial crisis resulted in the government intervening by “increasing the monetary supply” and reducing the interest on loans to near or at zero. It has struck me as beyond baffling that the result was a boom in the stock market while elderly savers suffered. I know I wasn’t the only investor who decided to take the additional risk of buying stocks with dividends that were higher than anything to be found in CDs. While politicians were railing against people who have money (the “investor class”), they supported policies that enriched those same “evil Capitalists” to the detriment of elderly savers.

I wonder when the millions of elderly savers who are voters will rebel against the economic policies that have punished them. I acknowledge that the current stock market has begun to look risky for the “investor class” that has been willing to take risks for higher returns. My father would probably say something such as “Learn from this and stick with CDs.”

The Federal Reserve has actually introduced negative interest rates into their recent discussions of the economy. Perhaps the “saver’s revolt” will happen when the message is that you will receive less than what you put in your CD when it matures?

Stalin’s Barber

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stalins-barberThis is an excellent book by Paul M. Levitt, but it is not the easiest book to read. The author is a professor of English at the University of Colorado, and I think he distracts from a great story to discuss literary figures. That might be a positive to those who are interested in Russian writers and poets. On the positive side, the book provides insight into a brutal time in the Soviet Union when millions of people were dying in the “Great Terror.” Describing the experiences of a barber who is sufficiently skilled to shave and trim Stalin is an interesting way to frame the historical fiction. There is the undercurrent of mystery as the barber realizes that he is barbering Stalin and body doubles. He works hard at attempting to identify the real Stalin by engaging him in reminiscences about his life experiences. That’s a clever way for the author to work information about Stalin into the narrative.

The book begins as the barber decides he and his wife have to leave the desolation of Albania and make their way to the Soviet Union where the rumors say life will be better. They are on a train that travels through Moldovia and then the Ukraine. There are women and children showing obvious signs of starvation holding their hands out begging for food. One woman beseeches him to take her emaciated son. A soldier declares the child is as good as dead and throws the boy “…off the train as carelessly as one would dispose of a cigarette.” That startling episode and vivid descriptions of “death trains” should be a warning that this book, which I’m convinced accurately portrays a brutal time, can be difficult to read. The prosecutor of the “show trials” proudly declared that “…confession of the accused is the queen of evidence…” in describing confessions extracted by torture. One passage in the back half of the book that “…the proliferation of labor camps and denunciations had turned the country into an asylum inhabited by cowed citizens too terrified to speak their minds or ask innocently, “Can you tell me why my husband was arrested?” (I suppose there could be some consolation that many of the worst officials who were the head of the Soviet secret police at one point or another as millions were dying in the “Great Terror,” to include Genrikh Yagoda, Nikolai Ivanovich Yezhov, and Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria, were all executed.)

One son of the barber’s wife is a Soviet secret police official and a homosexual who is interestingly described as dispelling his homoerotic feelings by studying “…his signed photograph of Iosef Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, who had taken the revolutionary code word ‘Stalin,’ which combined the Russian word stal (steel) with Lenin…” He is also called “Vozhd,” “Supreme Leader,” “Soso,” “Koba,” and “the Boss,” among other names. The son inadvertently alerts the barber and his wife that their apartment is bugged. They take to going to a park when they wanted to talk about sensitive matters and notice the park is always filled with people even in freezing weather.

The barber, in Russian tradition, has various names, but settles on “Razan.” There are numerous descriptions of his skill as a barber. The trimming of hair and beard is described as being done in the “Turkish manner.” However, the feature that seems to gain Razan widespread admiration is his ability to use alcohol and a match to singe hair from the ears without burning the ears. This is described many times. Razan is declared to be “an artist” when he perform this little ceremony on Stalin (or the body double) during his audition. Perhaps to test Razan, Stalin tells a joke about himself. He says that he told his driver he knew the driver has told jokes about him and that are impertinent. “I am after all the Great Leader, Teacher, and Friend of the people.” The driver replies, “No, I haven’t told that joke yet.” Razan is given permission to laugh, laughs too loud, and then explains he wasn’t laughing at the joke but “…at the artful way you told it.”

Another joke is that an old man was at a May Day parade holding a placard that read “Thank you Comrade Stalin, for my very happy childhood.” A policeman tells him everyone can see Stalin hadn’t been born when the man was a child. The man replied, “That’s precisely why I’m grateful!” And another is that a dozen workers from the Urals were visiting Stalin, and when they left Stalin found his pipe was missing. He ordered the workers held and questioned, and then found his pipe. He ordered the workers released, but was told, “But Comrade Stalin, they’ve all confessed.” There is a hint of the fear that pervaded all the jokes. Telling a joke about Stalin would undoubtedly result in torture and execution or banishment to starve working in the Gulag. Continue reading →

A Penny Saved is a Penny Earned

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I’m using this expression as a companion to a commentary about saving and interest rates. According to the Phrase Finder its obvious meaning is, “It is useful to save money that you have as it is to earn more. Forms have been around a long time. George Herbert’s Outlandish Proverbs observed in 1633 “A penny spar’d is twice got.” Deciding to save instead of spend puts you a penny up instead of a penny down, thus “twice got.” The expression evolved to the current form, which is said is incorrectly attributed to Benjamin Franklin. The obvious wonderful message of the expression is that saving instead of spending is a really good idea.