Can all your worries add a single moment to your life?
Luke 12:25

“I don’t worry about nothing because worrying’s a waste of my time.”
Axl Rose, Mr. Brownstone

John Bennet, here.

Favorite Section:

All you big thinkers, please don’t try. As bards go, Bob’s a vatic. He just mumbles gibberish—at times quite tuneful gibberish—that somehow works its way into your bones, and into legal decisions. If you try to come up with a unified field theory about it, you sound like a dumbass.

“ideology makes it unnecessary for people to confront issues on their individual merits. One simply turns to the ideological vending machine, and out comes the prepared formulae.”

Daniel Bell

You could not step twice into the same river; for other waters are ever flowing on to you.

I’d only heard this translation:

No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.

(This sort of thing the Wikipedia does very, very well.)

Week 36: 3 runs, 8.1 miles. Quit drinking coffee (subtract about a quart of half-and-half and 28 tbls of sugar a week). WAS:221.4;WAE:219

Week 35: 3 runs, 9.2 miles, embarrassingly slow. Colin has ridden both Sundays with me (3.4 miles). WAS:219; WAE 216.4

For all those supervising tests for three weeks in March:

Imagine the school basketball season consisted of one game, played on the last day of the year, and the players do not know which of the hundreds of plays they have learned will be tested. Imagine further that this one game is not basketball as the adults play it, not basketball as professional players and coaches see it, but consists instead of a series of drills (a different selection of isolated moves and plays each year) devised by measurement experts and valid only to them. Imagine a scoring system therefore fully understandable only by the assessors, not by the student players and coaches. Finally, imagine further that students do not know until weeks later which plays, which have been taken out of game context and isolated from the shotting and making of baskets, have been judged successful. Who would improve at the game under these conditions? Who would understand the game and his role — the purposes at work — in such an assessment?

Grant Wiggins, Educative Assessment : Designing Assessments to Inform and Improve Student Performance (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1998),44.

The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.

Donald Campbell, “Assessing the Impact of Planned Social Change,” Evaluation and Program Planning 2, (1979).

Another sound defense of NPR; liked this quote from President John Kennedy, though:

“The artist, however faithful to his personal vision of reality, becomes the last champion of the individual mind and sensibility against an intrusive society and an officious state,” Kennedy said. “… In serving his vision of the truth, the artist best serves his nation. And the nation which disdains the mission of art invites the fate of Robert Frost’s hired man, the fate of having ‘nothing to look backward to with pride, and nothing to look forward to with hope.'”

President Obama while touring a Boston school with Melinda Gates made the following comment:

There is no better economic policy than one that produces more graduates with the skills necessary to succeed.

This idea emerges from a long tradition of linking education to jobs. Nothing new there. And maybe the President is embracing one of the few rhetorical strategies that works around education. You can’t win a public argument challenging the connection between jobs and a good education.

My issue, though, is with the assumption that skills will somehow shift labor markets, as if, in a global economy, the number of well-prepared graduates has a major impact on where the jobs are.