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Wednesday, December 13, 2006

Weblog Awards update

IvyGate?  Who’s “IvyGate”?  Never heard of them.  The Best Educationizing Blog contest remains a two-blog race, but the two blogs are:

This Humble Blog You Are Reading Now—3063
SpunkyHomeSchool—2938

[Update, 12:45 pm December 14:  This Humble Blog 3551, TheOtherBlog 3502.  The drama is almost too much to take!]

But here’s the important story:  they’re gaining and gaining fast.  I started the day with a 400-vote lead.  Spunky cut that in half by 6 pm today.  I tried to tell her partisans that they could never catch up, because they’d have to cut the remaining lead in half, then cut that lead in half, and so forth.  I was hoping they’d skipped the bit about Xeno’s Paradox in the homeschool curriculum, you know.  Well, guess what?  They don’t need no Xenocation over on the Christian blogs!  They’re spreading the word, and spreading the word happens to be something they’re very, very good at. 

The fact that Spunky will almost certainly catch and pass me by morning, even though she retired from blogging over a week ago, is deeply, deeply unsettling. 

Still, I don’t want to characterize this race as a struggle between Christians and secularists.  That would be needlessly antagonistic, and besides, we’d be ceding to them all the advantages of being able to call on an omniscient supernatural being of some kind, while we’re stuck with our hopelessly sublunary appeals to Japanese horror monsters and triceratops graffiti.  (No disrespect to Gojira and 3Tops, but come on, they couldn’t create a universe in six days.) So I prefer to think of this as a struggle beween the forces of piety and the forces of irony.  Sure, people said that irony was dead.  They also said that God was dead.  But we like to think that when people said irony was dead, they were just kidding.  So if you’re willing to fight for irony, even (or especially) ironically, please cast your vote for me today—and tomorrow, and Friday, from as many computers as you can commandeer.

Otherwise I will resort to drastic measures.  And you don’t want that.

You may now resume the Chris Clarke Show Trial.  Remember, tomorrow is sentencing day!  Think of lots of good sentences.  There are many to choose from in The Phantom Tollbooth, but you may choose another text if you so desire.

Posted by Michael on 12/13 at 11:11 PM
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Tuesday, December 12, 2006

Showtime!

Day Three, December 14:  The sentencing phrase has begun here.  Join in now before all the sentences are taken!

Day Two, December 13:  The insolent defendant responds, using fancy jargon words like “affiants.” Fortunately, the prosecution has been joined by the crack legal team of Pandagon & Pharyngula, who have provided us with an extremely useful (and quite comprehensive) litany of additional charges along with a possible sentencing option for you all to consider.

Welcome, WAAGNFNP Friends and Patriots, to the Glorious Chris Clarke Show Trial. (Finally!)

First and foremost, the Ministry of Justice wishes to thank the brilliant if deeply misguided Chris Clarke for volunteering to be the object of the WAAGNFNP’s first-ever Show Trial.  (We certainly hope it’s not the last!) And we send our very best wishes to Chris’s beloved dog Zeke.

Now, for those of you in the WAAGNFNP fringe faction who may not have been following closely for the past few months (shame on you!), here’s a brief review.

This is a genuine bona fide internationally sanctioned Show Trial, and therefore the evidence and testimony against the accused must be merciless and overwhelming.

This is not a capital case. The purpose is to have our Wayward One understand the grave nature of his transgressions and repent his crimes against the Party. Once he has done this, he will gratefully affix his name to the Statement of Guilt, accept his punishment, and be welcomed back into the loving fold of the WAAGNFNP family.  Remember: we are always already splitting, and always already fused!

The WAAGNFNP’s ancient two-month-old ritual of Show Trial serves as a form of collective healing for the entire party. We do it this way because if we tried the volcano method, the wingnuts would go batshit crazy on us and have their entire Christianist agenda all up in our grill. I’m sure you know what we mean. (Warning: Language Alert!)

Schedule of events:

Days One and Two will be sworn testimony, accusations, and inquisitions.  (Note: Day Two is also Uniform of Brutality Day Formal Wear Day for the Prosecution.)

On Day Three, the Minister of Justice will declare the defendant “guilty”, and the jury (all of you) will celebrate joyfully as you deliberate punishments for the Guilty One and his depraved Defense Team. At the end of the day, The Guilty One will repent and sign the Statement of Guilt.

Important information regarding sworn testimony:

VERSE AND PROSE WILL HAVE EQUAL WEIGHT IN THE EYES OF THE COURT.  Those who find it difficult if not impossible to write in prose will be neither penalized nor rewarded for the form of their testimony/ accusations/ inquisitions.  While the villanelle has emerged as the unofficial verse form of the CCST, sestinas and sonnets are also welcome, and we encourage the stately but rarely-used ottava rima.  Those who are already writing prose without knowing it may continue to do so.

Our Show Trial Patron Demon, Lord Astaroth, Prince of Accusers and Inquisitors, is our VIP guest for this distinguished proceeding. He is here to lend guidance and inspiration to the Loyal Prosecution, which should be nearly all of you. He reminds us not to forget to engage in plenty of “inquisiting” as well as accusing, so be sure to ask plenty of hard-hitting show trial-worthy questions. Questions that are more comments than questions® are also appropriate.

Finally, by participating in the Glorious CCST, you accept the following oath:

I do solemnly swear upon the Immortal Vision of Gojira, that I will faithfully and honestly testify in the Chris Clarke Show Trial as ordered by the Highest Court of the WAAGNFNP and its Minister of Justice.

And I do sincerely and truly declare and affirm that the evidence I shall give shall be the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. So help me Astaroth.* (Warning:  Imagery Alert!)

*Under WAAGNFNP Show Trials Rules, the “truth” (especially for the Prosecution) includes but is not limited to: truth, truthiness, speculation and supposition, insinuation and innuendo, ad hominem invectives, wildly unsubstantiated rumors, hearsay, vindictiveness or “payback,” and “burning the straw man.” Also, feel free to just make stuff up!

The Court is now in session.

Yours in Service,

Oaktown Girl
Minister of Justice
We Are All Giant Nuclear Fireball Now Party

_______
Credits:
Chris Clarke Show Trial Poster artistically executed by peter ramus
Original artwork of Astaroth (detail) by Central Content Publisher
Photograph of 3Tops (detail) by Bill Benzon

A production of the WAAGNFNP and its affiliated Secular Elitist Ministries.

Posted by Michael on 12/12 at 07:54 AM
(206) Comments • (4) Trackbacks • Permalink

Monday, December 11, 2006

Making the grade

When Jamie entered kindergarten nine years ago, my wife Janet and I worried that he wouldn’t be ready.  Our concerns were not unusual—but Jamie was: he would be the only child with Down syndrome in Westview Elementary.  He was assigned a paraprofessional and “pullout” sessions for occupational and speech therapy: standard fare, these days, for “special needs” children of all kinds.  But at the age of six, Jamie wasn’t very verbal, and we had no idea how he’d adjust to a real classroom after four years of child care.

Imagine our relief, then, when we went to our first parent-teacher conference in October and were informed that Jamie was “advanced” academically but needed some work with his social skills.  He knew the alphabet and lots of fun facts about animals; he had shown off his amazing memory.  How, we were asked, had he managed to learn so much?

Last fall, our first meeting with Jamie’s seventh-grade teachers was not nearly so cheering.  Despite his math skills—he can do two-digit multiplication with ease—he was failing to grasp the concepts of area and perimeter.  He wasn’t paying attention in science class, where his paraprofessional was doing much of his work for him; and he didn’t seem to get French at all.

We’d asked for Jamie to be included in those three “regular” classrooms, on the grounds that he’s good at math, fascinated with the natural world, and exceptionally curious about languages.  But when we discovered that the next item on the math agenda would be the area of irregular shapes, we agreed to bail out.

We pleaded for French and science, though.  “I know he’s not getting it all,” Janet said to his science teacher.  “But he truly loves learning about the world around him, and we don’t want that world to close in on him . . .  just yet.” His French teacher, unsurprisingly, had never had a child with Down syndrome in her class; she assured us that Jamie did not speak when he was called on and did not understand how to write complete sentences in French.  “He doesn’t write complete sentences in English, either,” I replied.  “And he’s shy about speaking up.  But he already knows the days of the week and the months of the year, and he’s beginning to understand about time.  Now, we don’t want him to slow down the rest of the class.  So if it’s possible for him to take the class pass/fail, we’ll do everything we can to help him.”

I turned out to be wrong about time: Jamie never did understand why the French perversely insist on calling 7:40 eight hours minus twenty, so I eventually agreed with him that sept heures et quarante would get the general idea across even if it was marked “wrong” on the test.  And even though he learned what voyager means, he never remembered that tu voyages has an “s” even though je voyage and il voyage do not.  But he negotiated the hyphens and apostrophes of qu’est-ce que c’est with élan, he mastered the form of est-ce que tu? and he turned out to be a whiz with adverbs—getting them right quelquefois at first, then souvent.  (Though quelquefois remains his favorite.) His pronunciation got better and better, too—no small thing for a child who didn’t learn to read fluently until he was eight.  It was hard enough for him to master English vowels and silent letters the first time around, let alone foreign imponderables like ils aiment and les yeux.

One day when we were walking Lucy, our dog, I told him how proud I was of all his hard work in French.  He was in no mood for kind words: “it’s too hard,” he grumbled.  “I always fail.” He’d said something similar about science as well, when he had trouble keeping track of all the parts of a cell and began to realize that he might not achieve his dream of becoming a marine biologist.  (I told him he could still shoot for the position of marine biologist helper.) Jamie is fifteen years old; he knows he has a disability, he knows that it’s called “Down syndrome,” and he’s very well aware of how hard he struggles just to stay in the same room with “normal” kids a few years younger than he.  He even had an odd moment of illumination in January of this year when the science class turned to the details of human reproduction, and he learned that most of us have 46 chromosomes but that people with Down syndrome have 47.  “Wow, one more,” he said, intrigued and a little bit impressed.  I wonder if he thought to himself, you know, that explains a lot, and whether this was any comfort to him in those rare moments when he thinks of himself as someone who always fails.

But despite his moments of despair, he never failed to remember that étudier and décembre take accents aigus and that mère and père take accents graves.  When we asked him, parle-tu français? he never failed to say je parle français souvent or très bien—even though those answers are not quite true.  And although he failed his science test on rocks, he learned a great deal about living things—which is where his real interests lie, anyway.  When, in response to his query about why one of his Challenger League baseball teammates was bald, I tried to explain to him what cancer is, and how cells could be sick, he replied, “like the cell membrane and the cell nucleus.” When we went through the digestive system on one long homework night, I said “let’s skip the pancreas—I don’t think you know that one,” and he shot back, “Lucy had pancreatitis and cannot eat any spicy food.”

At the end of the year, Jamie’s teachers and caseworkers advised us that eighth-grade science and French would definitely be too much for him.  Perhaps they feared that Jamie’s parents, the double-barreled Ph.D.s, would push their disabled kid until he broke.  “That’s fine with us,” we said, to their palpable relief.  “We just wanted him to get a sense of it all, and to stay in some regular classes for as long as he could.” From this point on, we figure, we’ll hire tutors for him, and they can teach him at his own pace. 

It’s true, he failed quelquefois.  But in eight years of inclusive education, he learned more about the world than we—or, possibly, he—could have hoped for when he started kindergarten.  Now, as Jamie finally leaves the “regular” classroom, all we can hope is that he taught his teachers and classmates a few valuable things about people with 47 chromosomes.  And that they’ll remember the lesson, too.

Posted by Michael on 12/11 at 08:35 AM
Jamie • (50) Comments • Permalink

Sunday, December 10, 2006

Weblog Awards Emergency

We interrupt the highly entertaining but fictional cage match between Michael Bérubé and Ted Haggard to inform you that this blog is locked in a real cage match.  At the moment, the tally in the Wizbang Weblog Awards (All-Important Educationesque Division) is as follows:

IvyGate 839
Michael Bérubé 756
SpunkyHomeSchool 636

No other blog is close.

This is serious business, people.  The outcome of this competition could affect the very existence of this blog.  IvyGate has resorted to the extreme (and possibly illegal) tactic of exhorting their readers to vote for them, and even though SpunkyHomeSchool is a defunct blog, having put up its final post on December 5, its allies are rallying the Christian soldiers against the “elite, secular blogs.” That means IvyGate and me!  (Well, they’re elite and secular, and we’re elite and nuclear.  But still.) So all of you who have been voting for trendy and fashionably-titled blogs like EduWonk and Education Policy Blog and The Education Wonks, please don’t throw away your votes on what are clearly mere “protest” candidates.  “But my conscience tells me to vote for the Education Wonk Blog of Policy Wonks,” you say, “and I have to vote my conscience.” To this I reply, “who are you?  Pinocchio?”

Now, I know some of you have been angered over the past year by my insistence that the We Are All Giant Nuclear Fireball Now Party is the only viable alternative for secular elitists, and I know some of you have broken away to join the Even More Radical Than the Radical Caucus Caucus.  I come before you now, WAAGNFNP cap in hand, to ask for your vote.  Together we can defeat, we must defeat, we will defeat not only the clever twentysomethings of IvyGate but the spunky homeschoolers of SpunkyHomeSchool.  And we will all share in the glory, except of course that I’ll keep most of it for myself.

And remember, the Wizbang Weblog Awards are a wonderful thing.  They take bloggers who have never heard of each other, get them together, and make mortal enemies out of them.  So stop by and support Wizbang—and me—today!

Thank you, and may the Giant Nuclear Fireball bless you.

Posted by Michael on 12/10 at 10:13 AM
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Friday, December 08, 2006

Cage Match!!!

Finally!  It’s the announcement you’ve all been waiting for!!!

ANOTHER PRODUCTION OF THE WAAGNFNP MINISTRY OF JUSTICE

The Religious Right’s evangelical “kingmaker,” the Reverend James Dobson, reluctant to undertake a lengthy four or five year recovery project to save Ted Haggard’s soul from teh gay, has proposed instead a revolutionary new “shock and awe” rehabilitation technique to save Ted’s life once and for all:

A manly, virile, über-heterosexual Steel Cage Match against a certain feral, spectral, and extremely dangeral Liberal Professor!

And so . . .

The battle unfolds as you, the cadres and fellow travelers of the We Are All Nuclear Fireball Now Party, chronicle it!  This means that all of you get to call the action, play-by-play style, in this very comment section!!!  With exclamation points aplenty!!!!!

In the spirit of this group event in which we are always already splitting and always already fused (Communislamofeminiliberamexicadisabilitifascistically speaking), please allow others to respond creatively to the beautiful set-ups you give them. You may of course post a response to one of your own action-packed posts (because your idea is so brilliant and no one else has thought of it yet), but you might give others a chance to respond first.

There will inevitably be multiple story lines happening as people post and respond to posts in a myriad of ways. Embrace the chaos and go with the flow.

You are not allowed to declare either of the participants to be “dead” or no longer able to continue in the match.  And when one combatant compares another to Hitler . . . the thread is not over!!!!

If you would like to post graphics, please link to images that are hosted off-site.  Because these giant nuclear illustrations and norquist particle accelerators don’t come cheap!

And have fun!

Oaktown Girl
Minister of Justice
WAAGNFNP

****************************************

Cage matchup by Oaktown Girl

Cage match poster written by Oaktown Girl, artistically executed by peter ramus
Technical consultant: Bill Benzon
Ongoing thanks to: Michael Bérubé

Posted by Michael on 12/08 at 11:00 AM
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We interrupt these announcements

to bring you a moment of seriousness, with our abject apologies.

I have an essay up at Inside Higher Ed on the MLA Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion.  The essay is located in a nearby Internets tube so that, if you’re reading this on a computer, you can “cross-link” to it right here by clinking on the screen.

No, this isn’t today’s big announcement.  Today’s big announcement is scheduled for 11 am Eastern Liberal Elite time. 

But in the meantime, since this regrettably serious post is actually about educationistic matters, I’d like to take this opportunity to point out that I am once again running in a weblog award competition as a runner-up, this time to the tawdry sex-and-gossip site called “IvyGate.” (It’s basically a two-blog race.  And we’re number two.) Here’s what IvyGate has to say about this:  “the other finalists actually, um, appear interested in pedagogy and helping people, but nevertheless we intend to mop the floor with them.”

Well, I resent this deeply.  Pedagogy and helping people? This blog specializes in stereotypical liberal sneering and advanced crapulence.  We have no interest in people helping people helping people like you, pedagogically or educationalistically or otherwisedly.

And we will not be mopped the floor with!  We must defeat the scandalmongers and chattering classes (remember, they’re classes, not cultures) at IvyGate!  Now is the time for all good readers to come to the aid of their We Are All Giant Nuclear Fireball Now Party!  Vote!

Posted by Michael on 12/08 at 08:06 AM
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