I Speak of Dreams

It's Mean to Laugh

Teresa has looked too deep in the vodka well: O dere ghod

but I laughed out loud at the post and the comments:

If she gets any drunker, can she write earlier Indo-European languages? This could lead to a paleolinguistic breakthrough!

Effective Teaching

Doug, a teacher in Alaska, has written a post summarizing an Australian study of  Effective Teaching.

Given equal preparation and background knowledge, what are the qualities of a teacher who is able to engage students in deep and meaningful ways?

How to disagree online without being disagreeable...

Suzette Hadin Elgin is starting a conversation about How to disagree online without being disagreeable....

... A while back, we had a long discussion in this journal on the topic of how to disagree -- face to face, or perhaps on the telephone -- without being disagreeable [see http://ozarque.livejournal.com/234229 and http://ozarque.livejournal.com/235188 ]. Several people asked questions about whether the strategies and techniques that were talked about in that discussion would transfer to the Internet, and I promised to give that some thought and come back to it. I'm now ready to start working on that, with your help; consider it a work in progress, please, and not intended as The Last Word on any aspect of the topic.

Acceptance Therapy

From the journal article  A qualitative investigation of changes in the belief systems of families of children with autism or Down syndrome.

Entrez PubMed.

The themes indicated that raising a child with a disability can be a life-changing experience that spurs families to examine their belief systems. Parents can come to gain a sense of coherence and control through changes in their world views, values and priorities that involve different ways of thinking about their child, their parenting role, and the role of the family. Although parents may grapple with lost dreams, over time positive adaptations can occur in the form of changed world views concerning life and disability, and an appreciation of the positive contributions made by children to family members and society as a whole. Parents' experiences indicate the importance of hope and of seeing possibilities that lie ahead

It Was Just A Dream Some of Us Had

Rexwroth's daughter It Was Just A Dream Some of Us Had:

I have been feeling very crabby lately. Some of it had to do with accepting that my lifetime dream of a better world was really just a utopian fugue, and some of it was the current spin coming out of Washington, which had me twirling in a vertigo funk.
[snip]
Everything is manipulated and manipulable.

I've been in a similar crabby state. 

Send a Seven Year Old to Jail

Fabian Alvarez is seven years old. He has a speech problem and has an Individual Education Plan (IEP).  He was a student at Hillcrest Elementary, and ran into trouble at school in November.   Remember, this is a second grader. He weighs 48 pounds.

He spent four days in Pocatello's juvenile detention center, miles from his mother's house.  According to the principal, "behavior disorders were detected while Fabian Alvarez, who is speech impaired, was being detained, but the school’s staff was unaware of the problem beforehand."

Let's see, take a seven-year-old, remove his clothing, dress him in too-large orange garments, prevent him from seeing his mother....and you don't think some "behavior disorders" would be detected?  This makes me sick.

Overdiagnosed? Underdiagnosed?

In A Rough IEP, Dick Dalton gives us a brief view of an IEP meeting (Individual Education Plan) for a student on a regular diploma track.  There's an urban myth that well-to-do parents get "a note from a psychologist" and the kid gets accomodations for the SAT.  I suppose it does happen, but the reality for most kids on track to matriculate at college is far different.

Visiting Blog Friends

The recent road trip to the Boston area and New York let me meet up with three blog friends: Michael Drout (Wormtalk and Slugspeak), Lisa Williams  (Learning the Lessons of Nixon &  H2OTown ) and Ronni Bennett ( Time Goes By ).

University Diaries

Link: University Diaries.

That “contempt for the business” thing in particular interests me. UD’s been following plagiarists for a long time, and many of them have been raised by amoral, ambitious parents who believe in nothing, who believe that everything is corrupt, and who want all social and financial goodies for themselves and their families.

Life, they believe, is brutal winner-take-all warfare. They pride themselves on their ability always to figure out an angle whereby each corrupt game of life can be won, as with plagiarist Blair Hornstine’s father, who figured out that if he could lie and say his daughter had a physical impairment, she could be exempted from gym and therefore get a higher GPA than anyone else at her high school.

What’s striking about many of the plagiarists UD has followed is that they don’t have to break rules to do well in life, but they appear to derive gratification, along with a confirmation of their Hobbesian view of life, from continually breaking them and winning. These are the ‘thesdanians in UD’s world who insist on building their mcmansions bigger than the already-generous rules allow - not because they care about the extra space, but because it’s important to them to show their neighbors their rule-breaking, contemptuous superiority.

Selective Enforcement

Paul Prather is musing on the behavior of Cumberland University (and other Christian institutions)

Homosexual activities and extramarital heterosexual sex indeed are contrary to biblical and historical Christian standards. Yet, they're about equally as errant as pride, gluttony, stinginess, temper tantrums, disrespect for parents and lying.

But when have Baptist schools ever disciplined fat people for ignoring biblical prohibitions against gluttony? When have you seen a Baptist professor reprimanded for getting caught up in the hubris of his Ph.D.? When has a Christian student ever been expelled for pitching a conniption fit on his roommate?

It seems that whenever religious organizations decide to exorcise the sin in their midst, they invariably go for sexual impropriety. They tend to enforce their laws selectively. Very selectively.