It’s been over half a century since I have seen my favorite teacher. That I still recall him means he made a lasting impression.

The year I first met him, counting substitutes, we had five teachers in the first semester of our junior-year English. One left due to pregnancy. One got married and moved. One went into the army and there was a substitute in there somewhere.

Max Vann came just a couple of weeks before the semester ended. He was trained as both a teacher of English and math.

In a class of over 400 I was the second shortest guy. That was true when the school year began. When it finished I was the fifth tallest – from 5’2″ to 6’3″ in nine months. My weight gain was probably no more than five pounds. Even my mother was among those calling me Stringbean McPole.

I was just a little self-conscious, a little shy and, to be kind, somewhat awkward. Mr. Vann assigned various members of the class roles from Hamlet. We were to stand and read our lines.

Though I had a minor part, I stammered, stumbled and stuttered through it. After class, Mr. Vann asked me to stay a moment. He asked why I had such difficulty. I referenced my obvious shyness and tried to prevail upon him to avoid selecting me the next day. He asked if I would be more comfortable reading the lines while sitting. I supposed so.

The next day he assigned me the lead after announcing that we would be reading our lines sitting down. The Royal Shakespeare Company would not have been impressed with my performance but I was. It didn’t cure my shyness but I made it through with minimal trauma.

The results may not have pleased everyone. Since, I have run for and held public office, given speeches across the country, taught a little and testified before legislative bodies. Mr. Vann helped me master my problem but cannot be blamed for all of the results.

He wasn’t hired to teach English. That was just to cover a vacancy. He was hired to develop a special math curriculum. He created a class that covered subjects reserved for the college level. Among other subjects, we were the first school in the South to offer calculus.

Those first classes were not available to everyone. Mr. Vann was allowed to handpick a class of 15 from among the seniors. There was a guarantee of a 5-year, full, work scholarship at either Auburn or Georgia Tech for anyone passing his course. All 15 passed.

How did I come to be selected? Why? At the time I was considering becoming a professor of History. Mr. Vann used that.

He invited all of the selected students to his home one Summer day before school restarted. We were told to look through his extensive library for books to read. Knowing my interest was in History, he directed me to the biographies of famous mathematicians. I became hooked on the subject.

I never did find out how he discovered that I had a facility for math. It was something of which I was unaware. That was a time when we were either hiding under our desks or being urged to master science, in order to out compete the USSR. Math and science is where the money, glamor and duty were.

In college I wandered from math to various physical sciences. I became enthralled with anthropology. That is a special subject, as there is both physical and cultural anthropology. One is a physical science. The other falls into the realm of social and behavioral sciences. Later I wandered around those ‘other’ sciences.

The math and science background provided me a perspective rare among those in the social and behavioral sciences. When studying economics I quickly found its basic problem. While enamoured of econometric models, I never found a professor of economics with a background in math.

Later, when researching my book on mental illness, I discovered why the pharmaceutical companies preferred that their studies be “run” by MDs, rather than PhDs. The former have no training in research. They usually accept whatever they are told. PhDs must learn at least basic research for their dissertations.

Though I strayed from math and science, the training has proven valuable in various endeavors. It even helped my accumulation of eight patents. Mr. Vann is more than deserving of a belated thank you.

Class Reunion

I was back in my home town at the time of our 25^th class reunion. I was induced to be on the organizing committee.

It was fun. It was interesting. I recommend it.

There came a time when we discussed inviting our class sponsor and a few other teachers. Mr. Vann’s name never came up so, during a break, I asked one of the guys about including him. He said they didn’t have a contact for him. They heard he had moved to Nashville.

I was told that after our graduation he had been put in charge of all math instruction in the local school system. Later, he was found to have a steady male friend. I don’t recall the subject of homosexuality ever coming up back then. Perhaps we were living in a cocoon. I have since gotten past any sense of surprise or concern over the sexuality of others. I still knew the effect he had on my educational development.

The story continued that he was dismissed and possibly took a position with the state Department of Education.

I now live in a suburb of Nashville and have made some initial efforts to locate him. He would be about 85 years old. I could find no one at the Department of Education that would provide any help. They wouldn’t even confirm if he had worked there. Privacy rules can be a bummer.

I may not recognize him after all of these years. He was short and stocky. His hair may still be somewhat kinky but I doubt that it’s still red. I really would like the opportunity to tell this teacher that he had an effect.

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Who is the handsome guy in the picture?

The frame is taken from the movie Blackboard Jungle. The credits give the name of Jameel Farrah. Later, he changed his name. Does Jamie Farr ring a bell? Would he be more recognizable in a dress? Don’t you remember Corporal Klinger?

Interestingly, though still off the point, he was the only member of the television cast of M*A*S*H to have actually served in Korea.

Although I sometimes bore you with statistics and facts to support my contentions, my usual modus operandi is to generalize. Shortly I will do a copy and paste of an editorial that covers some detail that supports my stance, without duplicating my last post.

Before that I need to unburden myself on one specific issue. Teachers’ unions. There is not a single problem with education that will be solved by reforming or eliminating unions. Those using unions to attack teachers are pursuing a political, not educational, agenda, or they are simply parroting lines they heard from those with that political agenda.

One more point and I relinquish the floor. Why is it a teachers’ union? There is a “professional organization” called the American Medical Association. What about the American Bar Association? Some groups have the power to soak you. They get together in associations. The teachers are at our mercies. They have to form unions. Is there a lower paid profession? Whatever, they are professionals.

From the New York Times, here is a professional, unedited:

Scientifically Tested Tests

By SUSAN ENGEL

New Marlborough, Mass.

AS children, teachers and parents sprint, slink or stumble into the new school year, they also find themselves laboring once again in the shadow of standardized tests. That is a real shame, given that there are few indications that the multiple-choice format of a typical test, in which students are quizzed on the specific formulas and bits of information they have memorized that year, actually measures what we need to know about children’s education.

There is also scant evidence that these tests encourage teachers to become better at helping individual children; in fact, some studies show that the tests protect bad teachers by hiding their lack of skill behind narrow goals and rigid scripts. And there are hardly any data to suggest that punishing schools with low test scores and rewarding schools with high ones improves anything. The only notable feature of our current approach is that these tests are relatively easy to administer to every child in every school, easy to score and easy to understand. But expediency should not be our main priority when it comes to schools.

Instead, we should come up with assessments that truly measure the qualities of well-educated children: the ability to understand what they read; an interest in using books to gain knowledge; the capacity to know when a problem calls for mathematics and quantification; the agility to move from concrete examples to abstract principles and back again; the ability to think about a situation in several different ways; and a dynamic working knowledge of the society in which they live.

This task is not as difficult as one might think. In recent years, psychologists have found ways to measure things as subtle as the forces that govern our moral choices and the thought processes that underlie unconscious stereotyping. And many promising techniques already used by child development experts could provide a starting point for improving school assessments.

For instance, using recordings of children’s everyday speech, developmental psychologists can calculate two important indicators of intellectual functioning: the grammatical complexity of their sentences and the size of their working vocabularies (not the words they circle during a test, but the ones they use in their real lives). Why not do the same in schools? We could even employ a written version, analyzing random samples of children’s essays and stories.

Psychologists have also found that a good way to measure a person’s literacy level is to test his ability to identify the names of actual authors amid the names of non-authors. In other words, someone who knows that Mark Twain and J. K. Rowling are published authors — and that, say, Robert Sponge is not — reads more. We could periodically administer such a test to children to find out how much they have read as opposed to which isolated skills they have been practicing for a test.

When children recount a story that they have read or that has been read to them, it provides all kinds of information about their narrative skill, an essential component of literacy. We could give students a book and then have them talk with a trained examiner about what they read; the oral reconstruction could be analyzed for evidence of their narrative comprehension.

Researchers have also found that the way a student critiques a simple science experiment shows whether he understands the idea of controlling variables, a key component in all science work. To assess children’s scientific skills, an experiment could be described to them, in writing, and then they would explain how they would improve upon it.

Of course, these new assessments could include some paper-and-pencil work as well. But that work would have to measure students’ thinking skills, not whether they can select a right answer from preset options. For instance, children could write essays in response to a prompt like, “Choose something you are good at, and describe to your reader how you do it.” That would allow each student to draw on his area of expertise, show his ability to analyze the process, describe a task logically and convey real information and substance. In turn, a prompt of, “Write a description of yourself from your mother’s point of view,” would help gauge the child’s ability to understand the perspectives of others.

Finally, we don’t need to exhaustively track every child every year in order to monitor how schools are doing. Just as researchers often use a randomly selected group to provide a window onto the larger population, we could test only carefully gathered representative samples from all the classes within a few grades. We would still get an empirical snapshot of a school, while freeing up students and teachers to do more meaningful work.

By shifting our assessment techniques, we would learn more of what we really need to know about how children, teachers and schools are doing. And testing could be returned to its rightful place as one tool among many for improving schools, rather than serving as a weapon that degrades the experience for teachers and students alike.

Susan Engel is a senior lecturer in psychology and the director of the teaching program at Williams College.

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As young males we were told that a certain private activity could cause warts on your hands and/or blindness. That appears not to have been accurate.

However, I have since learned that ideology and politics can cause blindness. Blindness has become pandemic across the country.

Those that suffer from this form of blindness also seem to have language difficulties. They can’t seem to appreciate the differences between the meanings of climate and weather.

It snowed, so Al Gore is proven wrong. Yeah, sure.

Well, DC did have three blizzards around last Christmas, didn’t it? Yes.

Heat is a form of energy. Warmer air can carry more moisture. More energy plus more moisture equals more precipitation. It only has to be freezing for that precipitation to come in the form of snow.

Winters may not be as cold as in my youth but I still but on a jacket when going outside in December. It does not have to be a record cold to produce snow in the northern climes. The temperatures in DC last December were considerably warmer than its record low.

These blind people love to pretend to be basing their position either on science or the fact that there is still some question. The question, surprisingly, is based almost exclusively on ideology and politics, not science.

This little graphic is what the blind people are missing. Most people look at this and estimate that, since 1979 (the red line), a bit more than 20% of the ice cap has disappeared. That is strange since they seem to include Greenland in their computations but not withing the red perimeter.

Both the Polar Ice Cap and the ice on Greenland are receding, but at very different paces. The ice of Greenland is on land. The Polar Ice Cap is on water. The factors involved are very different on land and on sea. Based on just the Ice Cap itself, there is an obvious receding of about one-third.

There is one positive in all of this, at least for some corporations. They will soon be able to save a few millions on the voyage of large ships between certain important ports. It is the fabled Northwest Passage. Yes, it will become a reality.

Rotterdam, the Netherlands is the busiest port in Europe. Yokohama is the busiest port in Asia. We in the US don’t generally pay much attention to such places and the commerce between them but it is very sizable.

The melting is opening up a route between these two ports that reduces the trip from 11,200 miles to 6,500. For a large container ship, that could mean a savings of $3.5 million. The savings would be even larger for ships too large for the Suez Canal or the Panama Canal. They presently take the scenic route around the Cape of Good Hope.

Sense About Science

Even the most rabid of deniers acknowledge that global temperatures have been rising over the past couple of decades. What they argue is that temperatures go up and down and that there have been warmer periods in human history. There was no industrial factor in those earlier periods so it cannot be caused by humans. Therefore, humans should continue doing as they please. In other words, ego reigns supreme. I want do to what I want to do and nothing else matters.

Have you ever seen something coming out of a smokestack? Most of it does come down, low enough where you can breathe it.

Back in the 1970s the FAA required jet aircraft to install what we called tin cans. These were devices that significantly reduced the black smoke that used to be seen when jets took off. The airlines decided on first retrofitting one engine at a time on each plane. Even though it meant having to take that same plane out of service again to retrofit the other engine(s), they had their reasons.

Watching a plane take off with one engine spouting out obvious pollution while the other appeared clean was thought to be a good public relations. There was just one small problem. The tin cans reduced the big, visible particles. There remained the invisible particles, including the ones created by the devices. So, there were more particles staying airborne much longer. People in the area didn’t receive much if any real benefit from those “cleaner” engine. The impact of science is not always grasped at first glance or upon superficial observation.

It is undeniable that humans produce pollutants, lots of them. It is undeniable that lots of those pollutants stay airborne for long periods. It is undeniable that those pollutants have an effect on the amount of heat that is retained by the hothouse effect. It is impossible to visualize the amount of tonnage of pollutants known to be put into the atmosphere on a daily basis.

There are differences between now and earlier historic periods of higher temperatures. This time the change is much faster. This time our dependency on technology and our vastly increased population leave us more vulnerable. It is the old analogy: taking out the bridges of Hanoi meant that the people put their bicycles over their heads and waded across, while taking out the bridges to Manhattan would create massive chaos.

Most of the major cities of the world are on water. Just imagine the results of all that melting ice. Consider if desertification moved north. The Midwest, the core of our agriculture, the source of the bulk of our exports, would be another, but much longer, dust bowl. Canada and Siberia would become the world’s breadbasket. I am very hopeful that curling will not become the national past-time nor borscht replace the Big Mac.

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Who do you trust? John Belushi got it right. Most academics get it wrong.

Everyone in academia knows just what a symposium is. At least they think they know. Have you read Plato’s Dialogues? One was named Symposium. Yes, the Greeks had a word for it: a drunken party. I could have heard much more intelligent talk at an Animal House toga party than I heard at a medical symposium held at Vanderbilt University.

Just remember, these are the people into whose hands you put your health, well-being and life. Take no aspirin and call me in the morning.

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