New Hire

The student teacher I've worked with for the past school year has finally been offered a job--at my school.  She's gotten other offers, even in other districts, but she held out because she wanted to continue working with us.  Her patience (our district is exceedingly slow about such things) paid off both for her and for us.  I talked to her today about the classrooms that will be available next year!

By the way, she's the last student in her credential program cohort to accept a job offer.

They Say This Like It's A Bad Thing

Only a leftie would try to explain to you why a law shouldn't mean what it says:

Conservatives are controlling most of the Supreme Court's closely divided cases so far this term by sticking to the words written by Congress.

The justices have settled challenges involving the rights of workers, immigrants, prisoners and patent owners by painstakingly defining the meaning of "for," "shall," "any" and "other," along with "satisfy" and "salesman."

Yes, I understand nuance and interpretation.  I understand that "Congress shall make no law..." is a starting point, not an ending point, for 1st Amendment freedoms.  But contra the liberals' argument, first and foremost a law should mean what it says.  While a meaning can be interpreted, and legality can be declared or denied by courts, the text of the law should be an obvious starting point and should carry significant weight.

This is what Gorsuch, the newest justice now entering his second year on the court, promised during his Senate confirmation in 2017 — to "try to understand what the words on the page mean, not import words that come from us."

"If the words are plain, you stop," he said.

When Lewis Carroll wrote in Through The Looking Glass,

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.”

his intent was to show the silliness of allowing words to mean whatever we want them to mean at the moment.  The above was not intended to be a how-to for lefties.  Words have meaning.  And so do laws.  If a law is poorly written, it's not the job of the judiciary to fix the law, it's the job of the legislature.  And if a law is written in such a way that it's clear that the intent is different from what's clearly written, the legislature should rectify the law.

Courts should be less activist about making laws mean what people want them to mean.

Note:  since the meanings of words do change over time, as do turns of phrase, I'm less a proponent of "textualism" doctrine than I am of "original meaning" doctrine.

Summer Reading

One more week of work left.

As I walked by the library today, there was a shelf outside.  It was full of books with a note saying "free".  Turns out our librarian is emptying the shelves of book students don't check out so she can have more room for new books.

There were a couple dozen Clive Cussler novels, both paperback and hardcover.  That pained me, as I already have about a shelf and a half here at home full of Clive Cussler novels--the original Dirk Pitt series, and the current Oregon Files series.  I've paid so much money, and gotten so much enjoyment out of those books, and there they are at school, being given away because no one wants to check them out.

I'm going to have some reading time this summer. In a couple weeks I plan on being around a pool in Cancun--and I'll need some reading material.  A month after that I'll be on a cruise in Europe, and for our non-port days I'll need some poolside reading material.  So I picked up 5 paperbacks--two science fiction books, and three Clancy-type military thrillers. 

Being a slow reader, I'll probably not get through all 5 of those during my Cancun and cruise trips, but that's OK.  Better to have too much reading material than not enough.

I'm a big fan of Audible, but if I lie down by a pool and expect to stay awake while someone reads me a story, no matter how interesting that story is, well, I know that just isn't in the cards.

Today's Post Over At Joanne's

An Evergreen Headline
It's about Evergreen State College....

One Reader Has Been After Me To Move To Texas For Years

I wouldn't be the only one:

California’s schools are hiring teachers again. But California’s colleges aren’t producing enough new teachers to meet the demand. So where will the state's new teachers come from?

Not from other states, if recent history is a guide.

From 2003 through 2016, about 18,000 more elementary and secondary school teachers left California than came from other states, according to a Bee review of U.S. Census Bureau data. The worst losses were during the height of the housing boom, when home prices were peaking, but they have continued throughout the economic recovery.

California saw the largest net loss of teachers to Texas. About 6,000 more teachers left California for Texas than came here from the Lone Star State from 2003 through 2016.

The average teacher salary in Texas is about $52,000, far below the average teacher salary of $77,000 in California, according to the National Education Association. But when adjusted for cost of living, teachers in Texas make about as much as their peers in California.

If I retire from California, though, my retirement pay will be higher than it would be in Texas. Then I can move!

We Can't Even Get Voting Right In California

Errors in registration in the one-party state that is the People's Democratik Republik of Kalifornia?  Shocked, shocked I say:

California's elections officials have found themselves with an unexpected headache ahead of the June 5 primary: potentially thousands of cases where two voter registration forms were created for one person, errors caused by the state's "motor voter" program that launched last month...

State elections officials said a software error affected some 77,000 voter records generated at the Department of Motor Vehicles over the past month. Some of those records — how many remains unclear — resulted in two registration forms for a single voter, a problem reported in several county elections offices across California. Left unfixed, it could keep a voter from casting party-specific votes or, in the most extreme cases, cause two ballots to be issued to a voter. 

If that isn't bad enough, throw this into the mix:

The head of California's campaign watchdog agency resigned her position on Tuesday…

Remke's resignation comes amid ongoing turmoil among members of the five-member commission. It also falls one week before Election Day, a period which typically draws dozens of campaign ethics complaints to the agency.

So it goes in the People's Republik.

What Makes People Do Such Stupid Things?

Summer's approaching.  This teacher could be looking forward to several weeks off work--but instead...

A Las Vegas teacher was arrested this month on terrorist threat charges after she sent texts saying she was forming a plan to shoot up a concert and wanted to empower women to be serial killers.

Leslie McGourty, 48, was exchanging texts with a friend May 16 when she made a threat to “poke a lot of holes in a lot of people” and kill herself, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported, citing her arrest report.

The friend took the texts to cops and McGourty was arrested later that day as she was teaching a physics class at Bonanza High School, the paper reported.

She was accused of targeting a May 19 concert at a downtown bar.

In the texts, McGourty romanticized “being remembered” and said she hoped to start another #MeToo movement “but this time in which women feel empowered enough to become serial killers,” the paper reported.

*sigh*

When Math Applies to Politics

Being a conservative, I want to minimize the power that Washington has over our lives.  In general I want to minimize government at all levels, but especially at the federal level.  The laboratory of democracy has served us well for a couple centuries, and every assumption of power by Washington moves us closer to a national as opposed to a federal government.

One of my favorite classes in my 5-year odyssey to get my master's degree was Discrete Optimization.  One of the concepts I learned in that class involved describing the efficiency of algorithms.  If functions grow like polynomials, algorithms have an easier time of handling them than they do for functions that grow exponentially or even faster.  The notation used for describing that is "Big-O"; functions that grows "polynomially" might be O(n-squared) (read, big-O of n-squared) or O(n-cubed).

How do those previous paragraphs fit together?  This morning I was reading an article called Why Government Doesn't Scale, an article on why central governments can't be very efficient, and what makes an appearance but Big-O:

But local networks were becoming big. We knew our office would need one. But what kind? The big debate then was client-server vs. peer-to-peer. In P2P, every machine on the network carried some responsibility for the management. It was difficult. It was messy. It was OBVIOUS to me that the superior solution was client-server: a really powerful central server made all the decisions and routed all the traffic, and the rest of the machines were mere clients that talked to it. It was simple. It was elegant. If the network got bigger, you just needed a bigger, smarter server. And I confidently told management to go with client-server.

And then slowly, inexorably, the industry went peer-to-peer. (The modern internet has elements of both. That’s a subject for another discussion…) And I could only scratch my head and wonder why.

So I read. I researched. I tried to understand. And eventually I found articles that pointed out O(n^2) (order n squared), a familiar concept from computer science. It describes a system where the work grows as the square of the number of elements.

And I realized: every node in a network has to potentially speak to every other node. A classic bit of communications theory is that such a network has O(n^2) potential relationships between the nodes. 2 nodes have 1 potential relationship. 4 nodes (twice as many) has 6 potential relationships (6 times as many). 8 nodes (twice again) has 28 potential relationships.

100 nodes = 450 relationships [I believe this should be 4950--Darren]
1,000 nodes = 499,500 relationships—nearly half a million.

And in a client-server network, the server has to be ready to manage every single relationship. In peer-to-peer, each node has a hand in managing its own relationships, and maybe a few others along the way. The work is distributed.

And it finally got through my head: NO server, no matter how large and how powerful, could keep up with O(n^2). Even if it were perfectly designed and never broke down, there was some number of nodes that would crash the server. It was mathematically unavoidable. You HAVE TO distribute the management as close as possible to the nodes, or the system fails.

And this is the part that is just crystal clear in my memory over a quarter century later: in an instant, I realized that the same is true of governments.

You just never know when that math education will be useful!

Today's Post Over At Joanne's

The pearl-clutching:
Overreaction?

Today's Post Over At Joanne's

Do We Have A Right *Not* To Be Offended In School?

Seems Like A Pearl-clutching Interpretation To Me

I guess that if you try very hard you can infer some sort of threat here, and then overreact:

A Missouri high school student who, as a senior prank, put his school “up for sale” on Craigslist has been suspended and banned from participating in graduation ceremonies.

Truman High School student Kyle Scheele offered up his school for the fire sale “rate” of $12,725. But school officials weren’t giggling.

“It was Scheele’s choice of words that got the A-student in trouble,” The Kansas City Star reports. “In addition to including several amenities, such as a new football field and what he called a ’20+ room facility, his post also said, ‘The reason for the sale is due to the loss of students coming up.'”

That “loss of students” is what set off alarm bells. Before an investigation showed there was no actual threat, worried parents had pulled their kids out of school. The district never sent out notification of any possible danger.

“Out of an abundance of caution, administrators and police investigated and determined there was not a credible threat,” the district said in a statement. “A student who makes a real or implied threat, whether it is deemed credible or not, will face discipline"...

Scheele said he was OK with the suspension but wished he could have walked at graduation. He carried a final GPA of 3.96 and had never previously been disciplined at school.

It's Enough To Make You Weep For The Future

Over at Joanne's blog I linked to my own post about appropriate attire at graduation.  Some of the comments there (many obviously by teenagers) show such a profound lack of knowledge that one wonders if they've learned anything in high school.

They're certainly learning from lefties.  So far I've been accused of hating black people, as well as of being a Nazi white supremacist who supports slavery.  Why?  Because in the post above I support a school's policy about what graduates can wear during their graduation ceremony.  Lefties do love their name-calling.

Lawrence v. Texas was mentioned more than once.  "Read Lawrence v. Texas. It says that people can do what they want even if you don’t approve."  That's, uh, a unique interpretation of what Lawrence says, but it's certainly not an interpretation to which I'd subscribe.

Tinker was mentioned more than once.  "Free speech means we get to express ourselves in any medium we want, including clothing. It doesn’t just protect the spoken word. Read Tinker!"  Tinker was about the suppression and expression of ideas, not about what clothing you can wear to school.

The First Amendment makes an appearance, too.  "The first amendment means we get to decide how we’ll present ourselves to the world, NOT YOU!!!!"  That's so precious.

Want a two-fer?  Here's the Bill of Rights and Tinker!  "What makes you think the bill of rights doesn’t apply at graduation? Her taxes are paying for the graduation ceremony? Her taxes paid for the school to begin with? That makes it a public school and therefore she’s free to be herself under the first amendment–read Tinker, it ended school-enforced slavery."

It's honestly painful to see such ignorance. 

Schools don't have to have graduation ceremonies.  If the stupidity shown above gets too far out of hand, I'd dump graduation ceremonies altogether.  People can have their own celebrations and wear whatever they want.  Problem solved.

Cow Burps

There's no mention of what the cost difference would be if this new feed were introduced, but here's the science taking place at nearby UC Davis:

Early indications of a UC Davis study show feeding dairy cows seaweed may reduce methane emissions caused by their belching, the university announced Thursday.

UC Davis animal science professor Ermias Kebreab and animal biology PhD candidate Breanna Roque separated 12 Holstein cows into three groups, two of which received different doses of seaweed in their feed and one of which got no seaweed at all.

"The numbers we’re seeing are amazing — well beyond the target that farmers will need to reach," Kebreab said in a media release. "This is a very surprising and promising development."

The two test groups eat seaweed sweetened with molasses for two weeks at a time before returning to a normal diet for a week. Each cow eats a snack from an open-air device that simultaneously measures their breath's methane content. Their milk is also tested for yield, flavor and nutritional content throughout the experiment.

Why worry about this? Burps=methane=global warming.  It's California, you knew global warming had to be in there somewhere.

Today's Post Over At Joanne's

NEA Thinks High Court Will Rule For Mark Janus

Nature and School

The school at which I teach backs up against a levee, followed by a greenbelt, followed by a river. We have plenty of wildlife in the immediate vicinity of our school.

A few weeks ago I posted a picture of a hawk that was watching some nearby ground squirrels. This week our head custodian mailed out a few pictures he'd taken recently, including this one of a hawk "guarding" the back fence. Our custodian said that the raptor allowed him to get within about 5 feet in order to take this picture:

While I don't have the bird's consent to post this picture, I did receive the permission of the photographer!

Today's Post Over At Joanne's

USC Joins Yale

I Side With the School In This Case--Up To A Point

I'm an army veteran.  My son was in JROTC in high school, and is now in the army.  My mother is a veteran.  3 of my 4 grandparents served in uniform in World War II.

You get the idea.  I'm a supporter of the military.

But just because someone is in, or is about to be in, or has been in, the military, that doesn't mean they get to throw out all other norms and do whatever they want:

A Nebraska high school is speaking out and defending its actions after receiving major backlash on social media for denying a graduating senior’s request to wear her U.S. Army sash during the graduation ceremony

Megan Pohlmeier was planning on participating in her high school’s graduation ceremony in May. To celebrate the occasion, the teen said she wanted to wear her Army sash, which was given to her by her recruiter at the Grand Island office in Nebraska four days before graduation, she told Fox News.

Pohlmeier said she called the school to see if she could wear the black and yellow sash during the ceremony.

"It was something I worked really hard to earn. They told me ‘no’ and did not really give me a reason," she told the Omaha World-Herald.

When she gets in the army, perhaps she'll learn the concept of a "uniform".  There is a "uniform" for graduation, and at this school it doesn't include an army sash.

Anyway, the girl decided to see what she could get away with.  And neither she nor the principal come out looking very good at this point:

Despite being told no, Pohlmeier decided to wear her sash tucked under her graduation gown so she could take pictures with it after the ceremony.

However, Principal Szlanda saw the sash peeking out under the black gown and pulled her out of line, she said.

“He pulled me out of line and said, ‘I talked to you and your father and you are not to be wearing that. If I see you wearing that again, you will not receive your diploma,’” she told the World-Herald.

Since the graduation, which Pohlmeier did participate in sans sash, her story has gone viral on Facebook with many calling the school's actions “unacceptable” and “disrespectful.”

Now, Hastings Public Schools Superintendent Craig Kautz is defending his school’s graduation accessories policy, saying “if we don’t award it, you don’t wear it.”

The superintendent at least comes across as an adult here.

So, what does "peeking out" from under the gown mean?  Was this inadvertent, or was she trying to create an issue?  Was the principal just being a you-know-what?  Hard to know.  Even in the military, at least in my day, if what you're wearing under your uniform cannot be seen when the uniform is properly worn, then it is OK.

As I said, neither the student nor the principal covered him/herself in glory here.

Today's Post Over At Joanne's

Useless Jobs?

Professors Are To Blame For Low On-time College Graduation Rates

Who says so?  Soon(but not soon enough!)-to-be-former governor Jerry Brown, who says that because professors teach their "pet projects", that "there are thousands and thousands of courses, and then the basic courses aren't available...."  That's why students can't graduate in 4 years.

Crazy ole' Uncle Jerry.

Couldn't a much bigger reason be the administrative bloat that's occurred in the past, say, 20 years, which sucks up money for more of those "basic courses"?

Couldn't a much bigger reason be the tremendous number of students who we let into our 4-year universities but who actually need remedial math or English help?

Think about it.  If you got rid of students (mentioned above) who are least likely to graduate, and you freed up some of that administrative and program money to actually do some good around the school, wouldn't there be a greater opportunity for students to graduate in 4 years?

But it's all the professors' fault.  Sheesh.

This Is Why Actors, Especially Pretty Ones, Should Just Keep Their Mouths Shut About Politics

As math teacher Jaime Escalante said to the school principal in the movie Stand And Deliver in reference to his students, "It's not that they're stupid, they just don't know anything."

In the case of most actors, though, they're just stupid.  Like in the case of Chris Evans: