Category Archives: Education

Sunday morning started off sort of bleakly when I read an article on the front page of the LA Times about the UC and its slide into mediocrity.  Roughly, here are the figures:
 

In 1970, the state spent 6.9% of its budget on the University of California. Today it spends 3.2%. In 1965, the state covered 94.4% of a UC student’s education. Last year it paid 58.5%.

Students are paying more because, of course, the system is receiving less from the state: 

This year, California will spend an estimated $3.3 billion to operate UC. It will spend three times as much — $9.9 billion — to run the state’s prisons.

In 2000, 160846 people were in CA prisons.  There are more now and conditions are worse.  They are warehousing prisoners, one of top of another.  The situation is so bad the federal government is looking into “correcting” things.  What they may do is order that a bunch of prisoners be released.

And why not, the great bulk of prisoners are there for minor drug offenses and then they get stuck there 25 years to life because of the Draconian three strikes and you are in there 25 years to life laws that the state government and the people of CA passed over the last two decades in an effort I guess to make CA safe for tourism.

So who knows maybe there really is no money for those Venetian blinds in that classroom I was complaining about.  Maybe, I guess.  Surely the funding levels must be restored.  But if the UC is so damn broke why do I keep seeing buildings going up all over the place at UCSB like mushrooms.  All sorts of buildings and fancy parking structures though the number of students at UCSB has remained constant, by law, for about 20 years.

And who gets stuck with the bill for all this crap but the students.  The article is all about how the UC is deteriorating as an educational system, while it would seem, given all these buildings that it is flourishing as a research institution.  Let’s face it.  Students are getting screwed in part because of UC priorities.  The guys who set these priorities of course can argue back that they have to build these buildings to have the labs to do the research to attract private money so they can go into business with business.

So the article suggests the UC may go the way of the University of Michigan which has in effect privatized itself.  So what’s the deeper problem?

Long gone are the days when Californians were willing to pay taxes to build three new UC campuses in a five-year span and subsidize annual student fees of less than $250.

"There is this myth out there that citizens can get better roads, cleaner air, get their garbage picked up twice a week, be protected by police and fire and it won’t cost them anything," Reed said. "People have been singing that song for 20 years."

The very people who went around saying there was no such thing as a free lunch are exactly the people who don’t want to pay taxes.  They want something for nothing.

Welcome to the consumer society where you can have your cake and eat it too constantly.

I don’t know where this week went.  It sort of slipped by me or something, but here it is Friday.  Maybe that night with four hours sleep put me in a waking coma, or maybe I was absorbed in getting through the first week of classes.  I just don’t seem to have been thinking about much of anything.  I can’t remember doing anything in particular either but here it is Friday.

I can’t tell much about my classes yet.  Well, probably there isn’t much to tell.  After 27 years of doing it, they seem pretty much the same and all blur into each other.  Yesterday, I am in this class room with a bank of windows along one wall.  It’s good to have windows because that’s ventilation and some of the other rooms in other buildings don’t have that. But this is an old building and one side has windows running from about four feet up to the ceiling.  Lots of windows.

They have Venetian blinds—I think that is what they are called—and none of them work.  They just hang there.  Some of them are rolled half way up and are just stuck there—with the little blinds open, and others are hanging all the way down with the blinds open and I tugged on the string this way and that and couldn’t get them to move. I got one to move and it went up on one side but not on the other and when I wanted it to go down, and I couldn’t get it unstuck.

This wouldn’t matter but I want to show part of a documentary on the development of the consumer society.  Just 30 minutes or so and then we will talk about it.  But it’s late afternoon, about 4 and the sun is streaming directly into the window.  Really bright.  So when I turn on the DVD you can hardly see the documentary on the screen.  It’s like ghosts swimming around on the screen…the light is so damn bright from the windows. 

People have complained about those blinds over the years.  I have complained about those blinds.  But nothing happens; they remain dysfunctional.  I console myself by thinking that sometime in October the clocks will change and it will be dark outside when I want to show my DVD.  At least I think the clocks will change sometime in October.

This is kind of absurd though really.  Over in my old parking lot they are throwing up a multi-million dollar building, but they don’t seem to have any money for Venetian blinds.  Or more exactly they don’t have the money for Venetian blinds for a classroom where students sit.  It’s a little diddly thing I know, but symbolic, to use a big word, of the general attitude of the UC towards students, undergraduate students I mean.

They just don’t care much for them or about them.  If they did care at all really certainly that room would have had new Venetian blinds by now.  I just don’t get it.

The windows of my office have not been washed in ten years and the Venetian blinds there don’t work either.  But then I am a teacher.  I expect neglect. Also my office smells of mold, but I open my window and turn on the fan I bought and the smell goes away.

Well, damn, but I guess my long summer of fire and smoke is nearing an end.

The other day, lying down for a nap, I suddenly remembered that I have to prepare a “reader” for the writing classes I will be teaching in the fall.  This filled me with a vast irritation that did not, nonetheless, keep me from napping.  But I woke up thinking about it.

Damn.

For a few quarters, I tried not to have a reader and put the readings up on the net so students could download them, print them out and read, but they were not doing it partly because the ink for those damn printers costs so much, and when they did sometimes print they all used different formats and so sometimes the page numbers didn’t match and we would all be looking at different page numbers, so I went back to constructing a mini-reader with articles gathered from here and there all about, in this case, “the consumer society.”

Speaking of which—the consumer society, I mean—those guys who make printers were not the first to sell the product, i.e., the printer for next to nothing or very little, knowing full well that they would make fortunes selling the stuff that makes the printer work.  In this case the ink.

Kodak did it back in 1906-07.  They were practically giving that damn Brownie away.  It sold for 1 dollar.  True, I don’t know what a dollar was worth back in 1907 but it couldn’t have been an awful lot. Lured on by the very low introductory offer to the machine itself one might have failed to note that the cost for film and developing ran about a dollar a pop.  That’s what kept the dollars rolling in. 

On their celebratory website marking the 100^th anniversary of the Brownie, the Kodak people proudly note that they were one of the first businesses to advertise their product extensively to children.  Indeed one finds in their print ads, many references to children, and in their magazine ads children are frequently presented in the pictures.  An interesting tactic indeed, employed all too frequently since.  An absolutely new product is introduced; and because no one really knows what it is or what it does, it is advertised as a toy or plaything that does not necessarily have a use.

I mean what the hell is a “top.”  What does it do—it goes in circles; and what is it—well, a top or thing that goes in circles.

I must say the Brownie web site is pretty cool.

My friend who had her ear cut off had at another time another ear problem.  I forget when but she had some ear infection and had to go on an airplane and went to a doctor to get something for the infection, so he gave her some powerful antibiotics that went and killed off the bacteria, I guess, but along with that bacteria some other strain of bacteria that lived down in her colon.  This set off an ecological crisis in her colon, but this bacterium had apparently made its living by feeding off another type of bacteria.  So when these bacteria died off, the other type just went crazy growing.

Then my friend began to have horrible dizzy moments and moments of occasional horribly frightening blindness.  Turns out the bacteria that were out of control were “s…t…g” up a storm and the feces from the bacteria was going to my friend’s brain.  So she was being “s…t” to death by bacteria.  To restore the ecological balance in her colon, the doctor said she had to eat nothing but protein for three months or something like that.  The idea was to starve the crazy bacterium back into submission because it lived on carbs not on protein.  I guess it worked because my friend got better.

I was thinking about this because I was watching the Jon Stewart show and they had some science guy on who said that in one centimeter of the colon one could find more bacteria than all the people on earth.  That’s nuts.  More than six billion bacteria in one centimeter.  It’s a strange thought to think or at least I find it strange to think that these bacteria that live in our colon see us and our colon as in the same way a beaver might see a river.  Our colon is an ecological niche; our colons and the bacteria that live in them have co-evolved over millions of plus years. Thank god for these bacteria since they are essential to helping us digest and utilize stuff particularly as I understand it vitamins and minerals. 

Let us take Michelangelo’s David.  Well, that gives us a representation or depiction of the human body in space, but space only.  It’s a beautiful depiction I guess, but only an abstracted husk, as it were of the real thing, the thing as it exists in time.  If we could view the human body in time and also microscopically we would get an entirely different picture of the human body. 

First the surface area—the skin itself—would not be clearly define.  Instead, where the skin should be we would see this kind of haze or fog of bacteria and other microorganisms living on and just off the surface of our skin.  We would not even be able to see the features of the face clearly because of this haze and when the body breathed in and out there would be this sort of tidal ebb and flow of mouth bacteria.  Also occasionally big hunks of stuff—skin—would come flying off the surface.  As we moved along it would appear that we were in a constant state of disintegration. Then, in this time lapse picture, if we could see inside the body we would see blood and fluids sloshing all around and shooting this way and that and deep down there in the core a veritable volcano caldron of bacterial activity.

Which brings me to the question of the day?  I know that a bullet moves too fast for us to see it, and is it also true that a thing can move to slowly for us to see it.  I mean honestly, I have never seen a tree grow one iota.

Our cleanup proceeds apace though recently we have stalled a bit.  Now we are into the dinky stuff.  I wander around from here to there, pick up stuff, and put it in a pile with similar stuff that needs to be sorted through.  For example, a pile of manuals for different sorts of software we have acquired over the years.  So now we are starting to build up rather all over the place, on this book shelf, or that part of the floor, little anthills of junk for further sorting.

While investigating an anthill of junk that had fallen out of a shoebox, I came across this Roman coin (featured here pictorially) or more precisely this coin from Roman times.  I have had this coin for 30 plus years.  I was in downtown San Diego for some reason and while walking where ever it was that I was going I walked past this coin store and stared into the window.  Over in one corner was a little pile of coins labeled “Roman” or something to that effect.

I remember being startled to think that Roman coins were out there for sale.  I figured Roman coins were in museums or something.  But no, here was a pile of Roman coins apparently for sale to John Q. Public.  So I went in.  The coins seemed to be priced by their size and also by their possible historical significance.  They were sort of like baseball cards.  The more important the guy on the coin the more the coin was worth.  There were some pretty important guys on those coins.  I remember a Tiberius, the guy that came after Augustus, and a real pervert.  He went for quite a bit.

 I got this one for three dollars.  Remember this was 1973 or something, so three dollars was worth a lot more.  But I wanted a Roman coin, so I got this one.  Unfortunately I appear to have lost the little information card that came with the coin.  But the guy featured on this coin was a pretty nobody emperor.  He was from around 200 AD and didn’t last long as emperor.  He warranted a couple of lines in the Britannica and was described, I think, as “sickly.”

But while my emperor is not very significant, I have done a pretty good job over the years of not losing the coin.  That would be easy to do.  It’s about a half inch across and wafer thin.  Much lighter than a dime.  I have no idea what it was worth in Roman terms and adjusted for inflation.  I figure maybe you could have bought an orange with it.  But that is absolutely speculative.  Maybe part of an orange.

Any how, I am glad I found the coin. I could too easily have thrown it out.  Eventually I would have missed it had I done so and gotten perturbed.  But there it is.  I just find it interesting to hold between my fingers something that is pretty close to 2000 years old.  Now I have to stick it some place where I make sure I don’t lose it.

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The first picture shows the sickly emperor and the second shows the symbolic stuff on the back of the coin.

A quick web search indicates that there are a huge number of Roman coins out there that one might purchase. 

Continue reading Some Old Emporer→

I got an email yesterday morning saying the UC Regents were meeting at UCSB, where I work, and that the union to which I belong was going to be part of a rally protesting some of the things the Regents have been doing, like changing the pension plan for the worse, and continually allowing the costs of the medical plan to go up.  The pension plan is particularly irksome; they want to turn it into one of those two tier deals, with the guys in the second tier, newer hires, to get less than us old folks.  Also they want us all to start paying more straight out of our checks into the plan after years of not having as do so at all. 

They say the plan is in danger of going bankrupt.  Now you would think that maybe they would have known there was going to be some crisis with the retirement plan what with the multitude of baby boomers, such as myself, coming down the pike.  I don’t know what the hell they were thinking about.  Surely, prudence would have dictated that we pay in, though in lesser amounts, over the years to insure the security of the plan.  Nobody would have squawked. But the increase they now propose is enormous.  What the hell ever happened to prudence—an 18^th century virtue, I guess—and the Regents are all supposed to be big wigs with connections to business and money in all shapes and forms, and they didn’t know better. 

So I decided—well, ok—I would go over to the noon rally the union was supposed to be part of.  It was a long walk from the parking lot to the meeting place, and when I got there I couldn’t find any rally, so I wandered around the building, noticing as I did so cops every where, on the balconies, the stair wells, at every entrance to the hall where the Regents were meeting.  Eight or nine cops were hanging out at the main entrance to the hall; and I mean hanging out, just doing nothing.  So I went up to a group of them and asked if this is where the Regents were meeting.

They said yea, and did I want to go in since today was the public meeting.  Sure, why not, I said, and was directed around a little chain link barrier and before I knew it this guy was waving a metal detector all around me and making me empty every bit of metal from my pockets.  You would have thought I was a terrorist or something.  So I get into this huge hall, and the regents—there are sure a lot of them—were sitting there all suited up, and every one of them with a lap top in front of him or her—and they are jawing on about something to do with academic freedom, the UC system, and whether or not UC researchers have legally or illegally taken research money from tobacco interests.

This one guy goes on forever with some sort of vague and diffuse comment/question, and then this lawyer lady goes on forever with some vague and diffuse answer, and I doubt anybody understands any of it, since they are both talking legalese about some finding—I guess it was a finding—that a judge had made about academic freedom and doing business with tobacco companies.  So they talked and talked and some guy finally said maybe we should table this item, and move on to the next which was a report on the state budget for education.  I listened as long as I could stand it and left.

I was there—not that long I guess—maybe 30 minutes and never once heard the words “education” or “student” spoken.

I saw the name of a guy, Mark Bracker, that I know who writes about teaching, literature, and psychoanalysis in an email announcement, and I sent him an email just saying hello.  His return email indicated he had published a book, Radical Pedagogy, which I didn’t know he had published.  So I checked to see if it was in the UCSB library, and it was, and I asked Carol who was going to the library, if she would get it for me, and she did.  When she got back, she said, my book, Self-Development and College Writing, was mentioned a number of times in his book and did I want to hear what he had written about it, and I said, OK, why not? 

Turns out Mark had quoted from my book several times at some length.  It was odd and funny hearing myself quoted in that way.  I liked the quote best where I write:

            One is trying to write and to think in a way (to gain entry to that closed society [of academia]) that cuts one off exactly from those audiences from which one most desires recognition.  No wonder students become enervated.  No wonder they write things they don’t care about or don’t understand.  The psychological roots of BS run very deep.

I liked that—the psychology roots of BS—that sounded like me, alright.  And I didn’t remember having written it, though when Carol read it, I knew I had written it.  It has been almost 3 years since that book was published.  I haven’t opened it since even though I spent four years working pretty assiduously on it.  I think writing it wore me out; I don’t know if a single sentence from the first 300 page draft ended up in the book.  Also I write real fast and maybe because of that don’t always remember what I have written.   Maybe I write so fast as a way of hoping to hit the material down below my censor.  That censor is an evil guy who cuts me off at the knees and fills me with self-doubt.

Mark writes a lot more intellectually than I do.  My book gave him some sort of psychology of the writing teacher raw material to work with.  It was nice of him to quote from my book, and I was happy that what I had written was of use to him.  I was feeling blue and Carol cheered me up some by reading from Mark’s book.

 Above—that’s a picture Cousin BC a geologist by education, sent along of some gypsum crystals found in a cave in Mexico during a mining operation.  Those crystals strike me as pretty spooky.  They could be living things, that grow in the dark, like what a potato does when you leave it a dark place—those pale tendrils come out.

An absolutely atrociously awful five restless hours of sleep was followed by a good, late breakfast, at a place across the corner from the Hilton. The rest of the day was spent, until about an hour ago—hoofing and taking the subway.  We took the blue line down to the Brooklyn Bridge—which I believe America’s foremost architectural wonder.  Screw Frank Loyd Wright and his artsy-fartsy ilk.  The man build homes people could live in—that had leaky roofs and fireplaces that wouldn’t draw.  Give me a break.  Enough with the l’art pour l’art BS.  Roebling and his crew built a bridge that worked and still works.  Roebling studied with Hegel; I think the bridge imbued with the spirit of Transcendental Idealism and Speculative Reason.

Many died building the bridge.  The pilings were sunk so deep into and under the river that workers would get the “bends” when they came to the surface.  But they didn’t know what the bends were in those days.

I cannot believe it has been 20 years since Carol and I spent 6 weeks here up by Teacher’s College.  The town has been absolutely scrubbed since then.  The poor have been forced out of the area, as the town gentrified and I hear that Major shipped the homeless to New Jersey.

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They intend to replace my beloved parking lot, formally and formerly known as Lot 21, with this stinking little picture.

Actually they intend to replace it with what’s in this fruity little picture of some sort of hazy airbrushed reality.  Apparently, four buildings will go up, as far as I can tell, that might be called collectively the Education and Social Science Building.

Specifics are offically as follow:

Gevirtz Graduate School of Education – 4-story building, approximately 97,300 GSF of classrooms, faculty offices, meeting rooms and related staff support spaces. College of Letters and Sciences – 4-story building, approximately 96,700 GSF of classrooms, faculty offices, meeting rooms, film screening rooms and related staff support spaces. Center for Film, Television and New Media (CFTVNM)- 2 story, approximately 15,570 GSF theater building with 298 seats.

For a total cost of somewhat over 101 million dollars.

It is scheduled to open sometime in 2009.  Fat chance.