How do you educate a teacher so brainless/racist that she assigns students to give 3 good reasons for slavery?

How do you educate a teacher so brainless/racist that she assigns students to give 3 good reasons for slavery? How do you educate a principal so brainless/racist that he defends the action by saying the assignment was intended to spark debate? Debate about what? About how good it felt for the slave owners? How much wealth the slaves produced? No, Mr. Van Dellen, an inservice about cultural insensitivity isn't going to fix this problem.

The problem is the inability of a huge proportion of teachers and administrators to think critically. 

Teachers need education. Too many of them come to the classroom with a credential but little ability or inclination to use their powers of reason. 

Many, if not most, teachers have no idea how to teach kids to use their brains to separate truth and falsehood.

Step number one is to evaluate teachers' abilities effectively. Then the top 15% of teachers should be used to teach the average teachers how to think analytically.

School Homework Asks Kids To Give 3 ‘Good’ Reasons For Slavery
Taryn Finley
Huffington Post
01/10/2018

A private Christian school in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, is under fire after asking fourth-graders to lay out three “good” reasons for slavery as part of a homework assignment.

On Monday, the students at Our Redeemer Lutheran School were handed a social studies worksheet that told them to “give 3 ‘good’ reasons for slavery and 3 bad reasons.”...

Principal Jim Van Dellen sent a letter to parents with an apology and said that the teacher didn’t properly describe the task to students,according to the station.

[So, Mr. Van Dellen, why don't you explain the "proper" way to describe the task?]

The assignment was intended to spark debate in the class, he told Fox 6, adding that it has been pulled from the curriculum.

Brown-Berry shared an update on Facebook stating that she met with the principal and that he agreed to mandate “cultural diversity/cultural competency inservice [training for faculty] to prevent this from happening again.”...

Improving children's executive functions

Why Executive Function Is A Vital Stepping-Stone For Kids’ Ability to Learn

iStock/manopjk

By Katrina Schwartz 

KQED.org

December 13, 2016

...STRATEGIES

• Breathing buddies: Students lie down on the floor with a favorite stuffed animal on their chests. They slowly breathe in and out, watching the animal rise and fall. This helps students calm down when they are upset and gives them a strategy to implement when they feel themselves getting worked up.
• Teachers keep “meta boxes” in their classrooms full of fidget toys students can use to help them pay attention when they feel like they need to move.
• When transitioning between subjects or recess, teachers often play calming music and let only five kids in at a time to limit the chaos.
• Many elementary school teachers have had the experience of asking a question, seeing many hands in the air, but then calling on a student who says he forgot. That could be a working memory problem. Some Carlisle teachers are proactively addressing this by letting those kids record their thoughts on paper or a device so they can contribute when they’re called on.
• Carlisle was an early adopter of Wexler’s Activate program, too. The iPad lessons focus on typical working memory games that require students to remember the order of things, progressively getting harder as the game develops. The physical games reinforce the online learning with social interactions that help embed the memories in movement. Mass ball is one game that requires students to throw a ball in a specific sequence. Students have to juggle paying attention to the order and catching the ball.
• Carlisle teachers also have students do a lot of balancing games, which help with executive functioning. Teachers might ask students to walk on a line balancing bean bags on their heads or to do the same walk on tiptoe. Teachers also use relay races to get kids moving, since exercise alone helps with executive functioning.

Adults have an attention span of about 12 minutes with a fully developed executive functioning system, so it’s no wonder kids can’t focus without a break. “It cannot be overemphasized that all of us need to be thinking about taking information in smaller chunks,” said Malinda Mikesell, the reading supervisor for the Carlisle Area School District. She said kids need an opportunity to do something with the information on their own before having the chance to reset for the next chunk of information...

How did a bunch of complete idiots end up accidentally running a school?

Update Sept. 19, 2015:

"They didn't think he had a bomb."

by BSSanders

Daily Kos
Sep 17, 2015

Great Post Sent to Me Today
I said: it's sad they thought that kid had a bomb.
She said: they didn't think he had a bomb.
I said: yes, they thought he made a bomb and even called the police.
She said: They just wanted to humiliate a little Muslim boy. They didn't think he had a bomb.
I said: Don't be a conspiracy theorist. They might be a little prejudiced, but I'm sure they thought he had a bomb.
She said: OK.
But they didn't evacuate the school, like you do when there's a bomb.
They didn't call a bomb squad - like you do when there's a bomb.
They didn't get as far away from him as possible, like you do when there's a bomb.
Then they put him and the clock in an office: not like you do when there's a bomb
Then they waited with him for the police to arrive, and then they put the clock in the same car as the police. 
Then they took pictures of it.
I said: Damn.....They never thought he had a bomb.



Boy arrested at school for building a digital lock

"How did a bunch of complete idiots end up accidentally running a school? Were you all yanked out of a zoo and given paychecks? Learning centers are for teaching...not for ruining innocent people's lives with your racism and pathetic stupidity!..."This kid is destined to be something great if the dimwits of Irving don't ruin him first."

--Kevin McKinney

Is there something wrong with teacher culture? 
by Maura Larkins

My explanation for the disgraceful incident in Irving, Texas where a boy was arrested for building a clock is that adults in schools so rarely engage in critical thinking. A teacher who engages in critical thinking will most likely be unpopular. There isn't a place for such teachers in the powerful cliques that run schools. I have long wondered why teachers are expected to teach critical thinking to kids when so many of them seem to be incapable of it.

Also, a culture of hostility and contempt toward students is cultivated by many teachers who are zealous in their efforts to catch students being bad--and then to run to the teachers lounge to denounce the children they are paid to nurture.

This culture creates a tendency toward paranoia among teachers and administrators.

Update Sep. 17, 2015:

...Ahmed spoke about his arrest today on ABC News' "Good Morning America," describing how his English teacher and police reacted to his clock, which is still in police custody.

"She saw a clock that, in her opinion, looked like a threat to her," Ahmed said of the unnamed teacher. "It felt really weird getting arrested because I never thought I'd ever get arrested.... 

--ABC News 

Original story:

 Muslim teen creates clock, shows teachers, gets arrested

By Ashley Fantz and AnneClaire Stapleton 

 September 16, 2015

(CNN) 

When Ahmed Mohamed went to his high school in Irving, Texas, Monday, he was so excited. A teenager with dreams of becoming an engineer, he wanted to show his teacher the digital clock he'd made from a pencil case.

The 14-year-old's day ended not with praise, but punishment, after the school called police and he was arrested. A photo shows Ahmed, wearing a NASA t-shirt, looking confused and upset as he's being led out of school in handcuffs.

"They arrested me and they told me that I committed the crime of a hoax bomb, a fake bomb," the freshman later explained to WFAA after authorities released him..

Another unarmed black man is shot dead--in the back--while running away; a deputy kneeled on his head as he died

Reserve deputy Bob Bates clearly was guided by a desire for control and punishment of perceived enemies rather than a sense of obligation to control himself.  How many people like him are involved in law enforcement?

Tulsa reserve deputy charged with manslaughter

John Bacon and William M. Welch 

USA TODAY  

April 13, 2015

Earlier in the day, Tulsa County Sheriff Stanley Glanz described Bates as a longtime friend who made "an error" last week when he fatally shot an unarmed man trying to flee deputies during an undercover operation to retrieve stolen guns, the Tulsa World reported. The newspaper said Bates had donated thousands of dollars in equipment to the sheriff's department since signing on in 2008 as an unpaid reserve deputy.

"He made an error," Glanz said. "How many errors are made in an operating room every week?"

[Maura Larkins comment:  Now that's a very interesting question.  I'm guessing that juries are just as unlikely to find negligent doctors liable for deaths (almost never) as they are to convict police officers for killing unarmed suspects (see next story below).  Both the medical and law enforcement fields need much better oversight.]

 ..Tulsa police Sgt. Jim Clark, who investigated the case, on Friday determined that the shooting was not a crime and did not violate department policy.

"Reserve Deputy Bates did not commit a crime," he said. "There's no other determination I could come to."

Clark cited "slip and capture," a psychological phenomenon where, under stress, someone's behavior "slips" off the intended path after being "captured" by a stronger response demanded by the brain...


Thousands dead, few prosecuted
by Kimberly Kindy, Kimbriell Kelly
Washington Post
April 11, 2015

Among the thousands of fatal shootings at the hands of police since 2005, only 54 officers have been charged, a Post analysis found. Most were cleared or acquitted in the cases that have been resolved.

On a rainy night five years ago, Officer Coleman “Duke” Brackney set off in pursuit of a suspected drunk driver, chasing his black Mazda Miata down rural Arkansas roads at speeds of nearly 100 miles per hour. When the sports car finally came to rest in a ditch, Brackney opened fire at the rear window and repeatedly struck the driver, 41-year-old James Ahern, in the back. The gunshots killed Ahern.

Prosecutors charged Brackney with felony manslaughter. But he eventually entered a plea to a lesser charge and could ultimately be left with no criminal record.

How the analysis was done: The 54 criminal prosecutions were identified by Bowling Green State University criminologist Philip M. Stinson and The Washington Post. Cases were culled from news reports, grand jury announcements and news releases from prosecutors. For individual cases, reporters obtained and reviewed thousands of pages of court records, police reports, grand jury indictments, witness testimony and video recordings. Dozens of prosecutors and defense attorneys in the cases were interviewed, along with legal experts, officers who were prosecuted and surviving relatives of the shooting victims.

Now, he serves as the police chief in a small community 20 miles from the scene of the shooting.
Brackney is among 54 officers charged over the past decade for fatally shooting someone while on duty, according to an analysis by The Washington Post and researchers at Bowling Green State University. This analysis, based on a wide range of public records and interviews with law enforcement, judicial and other legal experts, sought to identify for the first time every officer who faced charges­ for such shootings since 2005. These represent a small fraction of the thousands of fatal police shootings that have occurred across the country in that time.

In an overwhelming majority of the cases where an officer was charged, the person killed was unarmed. But it usually took more than that.

When prosecutors pressed charges, The Post analysis found, there were typically other factors that made the case exceptional, including: a victim shot in the back, a video recording of the incident, incriminating testimony from other officers or allegations of a coverup.

South Carolina shooting

Editor's note: This video contains graphic content. A police officer in North Charleston, S.C., has been charged with murder after shooting a man during a traffic stop. Authorities said the decision to charge officer Michael Slager was made after they viewed video footage of the incident that showed him shooting the other man in the back as he was fleeing the scene. (Obtained by The Washington Post)

Forty-three cases involved at least one of these four factors. Nineteen cases involved at least two.
In the most recent incident, officials in North Charleston, S.C., filed a murder charge Tuesday against a white police officer, Michael T. Slager, for gunning down an apparently unarmed black man. A video recording showed Slager repeatedly shooting the man in the back as he was running away.
“To charge an officer in a fatal shooting, it takes something so egregious, so over the top that it cannot be explained in any rational way,” said Philip M. Stinson, a criminologist at Bowling Green who studies arrests of police. “It also has to be a case that prosecutors are willing to hang their reputation on.”
But even in these most extreme instances, the majority of the officers whose cases have been resolved have not been convicted, The Post analysis found.

And when they are convicted or plead guilty, they’ve tended to get little time behind bars, on average four years and sometimes only weeks. Jurors are very reluctant to punish police officers, tending to view them as guardians of order, according to prosecutors and defense lawyers...

The Danger The Planet Faces Because Human Instinct Overpowers Human Reason

The Danger The Planet Faces Because Human InstinctOverpowers Human Reason
David Ropeik
Jan. 16, 2015

...You woke up each day last year and went about your business as any human does, compelled by deep and ancient instincts to do the things necessary to get yourself safely to bed at night. You acquired the resources necessary or helpful for safety and survival - food, water, shelter, warmth/cooling, transportation, friendship and social/tribal cohesion - and on a good day maybe you also acquired some fun stuff or did some fun activity or filled in the upper levels of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs.

But chances are pretty good you cared more about fulfilling your needs than anybody else's. And you cared about now and today more than tomorrow. You didn't Think Globally. You thought, and acted, and lived your life and fulfilled your needs, locally. PERSONALLY. As did most of the seven BILLION human animals on the planet, taking from the system the resources necessary for safety and survival, and putting back into the system both their products and their wastes. Each us us satisfying our own needs but cumulatively taking from a system more resources than it has to offer (the once abundant New England cod fishery was finally closed by government fiat last year because of overfishing), and putting back more waste than it can handle (air pollution in Beijing recently got so bad it was "off the charts" rising beyond the highest and most dangerous levels on the health scale designed to measure such things.


Right now the global temperature records are making all the news. But climate change is just one symptom of the larger problem that makes very little news but which lies at the heart of why we, and all current Life on Earth, face an unavoidable crash. We are compelled from the deepest level of our genes and survival instincts to taking more from the system than it can provide and put back in more waste than it can handle, and no amount of human brain power outwit the natural instincts that are driving us 150 miles an hour toward a cliff.

We are not the only animal that does this. Many species live unsustainably in their finite ecosystems and when their demands on the system outpace supply, move on. We are, however, the only animal where the system limits are the entire biosphere itself. Silly visions of moving to other places in the universe notwithstanding, there is no place for humans to move to, and there surely won't be within the relatively short time frame - a couple hundred years - in which the natural system we depend on will become "much less hospitable".

Many people, myself included, see rays of hope in this dark sky; technological solutions to some of our challenges (cleaner power, advances in agriculture and food production, reduction in pollution and waste), less violence as more of us live closer together (see: The World is Not Falling Apart), and even the faith that human reason itself can, when the crises really start hitting the fan, figure out ways to stop doing the damage we're doing, undo the harm we've already done, or adapt to at least some of the harms we face.

But to live in the delusion that these solutions can entirely save the day...to believe that they can do any more than head off the worst of what is to come...is dangerous. Dangerous, because the belief that our intellect can provide the tools and enlightened leadership that will ride to the rescue, arrogantly denies the inescapable truth that we are still mostly instinctive animals, each of us compelled by deep subconscious urges to do what we can as individuals to survive today; and the day after that, and everybody else, are just not as much of a concern. And they never will be.

Can we do a lot to address these challenges? Yes, of course. And we should. Can we do enough to address them all and forestall the serious damage that lies ahead? Almost certainly not. But if we get a little more realistic about just how much/little human reason can help us conquer our deepest animal instincts, and a little less naïve that we can 'live with restraint' as Bill McKibben has put it, we might sooner get to the task of preparing for what's to come rather than pretending we can head it off.
It is probably in the best interest of Life on Earth As We Know It (LIFE long term is another matter entirely) if humans accepted that there will be a steep price to pay for our unsustainable ways, that given what we've already done this price is unavoidable, and that pretending we can head this off and preparing as soon as possible is urgently needed if we're going to at least keep that cost as low as possible...

Don't Send Your Kid to the Ivy League The nation's top colleges are turning our kids into zombies

Don't Send Your Kid to the Ivy League: The nation's top
colleges are turning our kids into zombies
By William Deresiewicz
New Republic
July 21, 2014

...“Super People,” the writer James Atlas has called them—the stereotypical ultra-high-achieving elite college students of today. 

A double major, a sport, a musical instrument, a couple of foreign languages, service work in distant corners of the globe, a few hobbies thrown in for good measure: They have mastered them all, and with a serene self-assurance that leaves adults and peers alike in awe. A friend who teaches at a top university once asked her class to memorize 30 lines of the eighteenth-century poet Alexander Pope. Nearly every single kid got every single line correct. 

It was a thing of wonder, she said, like watching thoroughbreds circle a track.

These enviable youngsters appear to be the winners in the race we have made of childhood. 

But the reality is very different, as I have witnessed in many of my own students and heard from the hundreds of young people whom I have spoken with on campuses or who have written to me over the last few years. 

Our system of elite education manufactures young people who are smart and talented and driven, yes, but also anxious, timid, and lost, with little intellectual curiosity and a stunted sense of purpose: trapped in a bubble of privilege, heading meekly in the same direction, great at what they’re doing but with no idea why they’re doing it...

Shaming kids at mealtime: kid's school breakfast trashed over 30-cent debt

UPDATE: Jan. 30, 2014

Utah hops on the bandwagon, throwing out 40 lunches in front of children who were in debt. See story #4 below.

ORIGINAL POST:

We frequently see poor judgment among school personnel. Recently a cafeteria worker in Texas actually threw a child's breakfast in the trash! Locally, superintendent Lowell Billings of Chula Vista Elementary School District thought it was a good idea to shame school children at meal time (see the second story below). The third story below tells about a breakfast meal that was thrown away--but not in the trash--when Lowell Billings was in charge at CVESD.

Of course, the cafeteria worker wasn't paid a huge salary by the taxpayers in the expectation that she would use good judgment, but Mr. Billings was.

STORY #1: TEXAS

Kid's school breakfast trashed over 30-cent debt
by FaithGardner
Daily Kos
Nov 08, 2013

How's this for petty? A student on the reduced meals plan at Barber Middle School in Dickinson, Texas, was 30 cents short in his meals account when he came to the cafeteria to get his breakfast. Rather than figure out some kind of solution to the problem, a cafeteria worker decided it would be totally okay to throw the kid's breakfast in the trash.

Jennifer Castilleja of Dickinson County said she received a call from her son's school Wednesday morning and was told the cafeteria refused to let the boy eat unless she came in and paid the 30 cents owed.

When Castilleja told school officials she was on her way to the school to pay and asked that they let her son eat until she arrived, the school refused.

According to KTRK-TV, Castilleja says her son is on the reduced meal cost plan and her prepaid account had simply run out of funds.

Needless to say, not only was this petty and unnecessary (and waste of a perfectly good breakfast!), but it was humiliating for the kid. "There were kids all around him," his mother said. "I think he may have been a little embarrassed and upset and, of course, hungry."

Even besides the point this was 30 EFFING CENTS, I don't understand why anyone would feel it's acceptable to punish a sixth grader for insufficient funds in the meal account. And it's pretty common knowledge that skipping breakfast leads to poor focus and health in children.

Here's to hoping that cafeteria worker was reprimanded for their behavior, and that the school district takes a look at their policy of punishing schoolchildren for insignificant debts like these.

COMMENT: Samantha Kilgore
"This makes me both so sad and so angry. And I wonder, too, if the child had not been part of the reduced meals program, if the server would have just shrugged off the 30 cent difference, or allowed the child to have the meal and charged later for it."


STORY #2: CHULA VISTA


The Scarlet Cheese Sandwich
by Gerald Pugliese
June 18, 2007

Apparently elementary schools in California are having a tough time with delinquent school lunch debts. So, if the parents won’t pay, the kids will. Instead of a customary school lunch, children with debt get a meesly cheese sandwich. Richard Marosi of The Los Angles Times reports...


The Lunch of Shame
By Joe Deegan
San Diego Reader
Oct. 25, 2007

...Nobody seems surprised that Chula Vista Elementary School District's cheese sandwich menu wasn't nominated as one of this year's candidates [in the School Lunch competition]. The sandwich is two slices of American cheese slapped dry into whole-wheat bread.

[Maura Larkins' comment: No one likes being forced to eat something. The whole wheat bread is wonderfully healthy--but I fear that CVESD is doing aversion therapy with it. I fear that CVESD's policy will serve to make children prefer the less-healthy white bread. And of course, American cheese has little nutritional value.]

In June, harsh spotlights were shone on the district's practice of offering the "alternative meal" to kids whose parents were delinquent on their school lunch bills. Both the San Diego Union-Tribune and the Los Angeles Times singled out the Chula Vista district for using one of the more draconian approaches to the problem. Subsequently, the Union-Tribune ran an editorial condemning the practice. All critics seem to agree that children shouldn't be shamed in front of other kids by depriving them of schools' regular lunches. And they shouldn't be punished for their parents' irresponsibility.

The intent of the bland alternative meal, of course, was to induce the children to pester their parents to pay up. Chula Vista claimed that serving the cheese sandwich reduced its delinquency balance from $285,000 in 2003 to $67,800 this year.

For comparison, San Diego Unified School District, which is kindergarten through 12th grade, reports that as of June, its outstanding balance was $13,500. Joanne Tucker is food services marketing coordinator for the district. "The problem of delinquent accounts in the School Lunch Program is serious everywhere in the country," she tells me by phone. "After all, we're a business. I feel sorry that the Chula Vista district has gotten so much negative publicity over their program. The cheese sandwich meal is nutritious. I went to a conference in Chicago not long ago, and an official from a Kansas district told us, 'We're in the black.' People wanted to know how they did it, and he said that when parents had unpaid balances, his district didn't give their children anything to eat. Well, we would never do anything like that in San Diego."

I ask if San Diego Unified used the alternative-meal approach to collecting debt. "No," says Tucker, "our food services director is much too kindhearted. Each of our schools calls delinquent parents to remind them that they're past due. Some schools are more successful than others. Soon we are going to an automated calling program in the hopes of doing better."

On June 25, Speaker of the California State Assembly Fabian Núñez wrote a letter to all school districts in California to discover how many "are providing an 'alternative' -- and intentionally undesirable -- meal to their children.... These districts are...stigmatizing children to put pressure on their parents."

Lowell Billings, superintendent of the Chula Vista Elementary School District, responded to Núñez three days later. "We serve six entrees each day, one of which is a cheese sandwich on whole wheat bread.... Additionally, with each meal [including the alternative cheese sandwich meal] we offer a full salad bar, a full fresh fruit bar, a promotional item, and milk, all for the price of $1.50 for full-pay students and $.75 for low income half-pay students.

"The alternative meal largely targets students with families most able to pay.... I have great difficulty understanding this as a 'stigma meal' or a less than nutritional offering. We serve approximately 400 cheese sandwiches daily. [Sometimes] they are the meal of choice. Feedback from principals indicates that some students have been found to throw away a packed lunch to get an alternative meal. [Billings confessed to eating and liking the cheese sandwich too.] Furthermore, principals do not find widespread student self-esteem issues associated with our practice....

[Maura Larkins' comment: I'm sure Mr. Billings hears exactly what he wants to hear from principals. CVESD is a very top-down organization. I wouldn't be surprised if sycophant principals are actually agreeing with Mr. Billings that children don't have any problem being forced to eat something as a punishment for their parents. Why does Mr. Billings think that kids throw away a packed lunch? For exactly the same reason that they don't want cheese sandwiches shoved down their throats.]

"The delinquent meal balances are owed by the highest income families in our District. Why should we allow their indiscretion to impact those students who are most needy? There is a lesson in this for our students. Data [from] the Junior Achievement of San Diego and Imperial Counties show that the number one cause of college dropouts is not poor academic standing but credit card debt. Where do they learn this important life skill set? "Our state legislature," Billings concluded, "could benefit from this same lesson. I am fearful that the ongoing structural state budget deficit undermines our children's future."

[Maura Larkins' comment: I know for a fact that Lowell Billings has wasted $100,000s of taxpayer dollars trying to cover up wrongdoing in the district. Also, huge amounts are wasted on expensive programs that don't work. Maybe someone should make Lowell Billings eat cheese sandwiches. Perhaps then he'd be more careful with taxpayer dollars.]

Apparently, Núñez, who was recently skewered in a Union-Tribune editorial for using campaign funds for personal trips, was not convinced. In the July 5 Los Angeles Daily News, he wrote of "at least four school districts in the state [that] serve substandard lunches to children whose parents fall into arrears on payment into their child's lunch accounts." "If the 'dunce cap' were still in use as a schoolhouse punishment, there are several school officials in California who need to be assigned corners and fitted with cones.... Make no mistake," Núñez went on, "parents have a duty to fulfill their responsibilities.... But leave the kids out of it. Any dunce who allows the punishing of kids over their parents' mistakes is the one who deserves to be shamed."

But what of the superintendent's defense? It is not a good sign that at the end of his letter he changed the subject to the legislature's problems. To address the alternative meal's inclusion of salad and fruit bars made more sense. Even that, however, is less than reassuring, given kids' notorious aversion to salads. The additional fact that the Chula Vista district recently started serving a ham-turkey sandwich as another alternative meal was a concession to critics. Many parents had been arguing that constant repetition of only the cheese sandwich alternative would provoke kids to throw it away. Now there is even talk among district employees of occasionally offering tacos as the alternative meal.


STORY #3: CHULA VISTA

Here's another story of a school breakfast that was thrown out--but not in the trash. This also happened during Lowell Billings' term as superintendent of CVESD.

Formerly President of
Chula Vista Educators,
Peg Myers now works
for the district's
Human Resources Department,
keeping teachers in line










The morning after the May 27, 2008 meeting at Castle Park Elementary, one of the parents who spoke out at a meeting took her children in to the school, and came back to find that someone had thrown cereal and milk on her car.

Children are not normally allowed to leave the school cafeteria, where breakfast was being served at the time of the vandalism, with milk and cereal. At least one adult who is connected to the "Family" was in the cafeteria.

What interest would a child have in someone else's mother who spoke at a meeting? The speaker's own children are too young to come to the attention of kids old enough to pull a stunt like this.

But several staff members and teachers at Castle Park Elementary have demonstrated out-of-control hostility in recent years, attacking fellow teachers and principals with shocking malice. The longtime leader of the Castle Park Family was Peg Myers, whose work history demonstrates the bizarre interactions between the Castle Park Family and the district office. Two of the last three CVE presidents (Peg Myers and Gina Boyd) have come to the CVE presidency directly from Castle Park Elementary, and the other one, Jim Groth, aided the cover-up of wrongdoing at the school.


Story #4 Utah School Threw Out Students’ Lunches Because They Were In Debt
By Annie-Rose Strasser
Think Progress
January 30, 2014

A Utah school’s child nutrition manager threw out the lunches of about 40 elementary school students this week after the kids’ parents fell behind on payment.

Some parents at Uintah Elementary in Salt Lake City say they didn’t even realize they were indebted to the school. The school apparently made calls Monday and Tuesday telling some parents that there was a balance on their accounts, and the children of those who had missed the call were the ones whose lunches got thrown out.

According to the Salt Lake Tribune, the child nutrition manager’s original plan was to withhold lunches for kids whose parents hadn’t paid. But cafeteria workers were unable to distinguish who was on that list before serving. Once the food had been dished out, food safety codes say it can’t be given to another student and must be thrown away.

The children were given milk and fruit instead of a full lunch — the meal that the school says it gives any child who isn’t able to pay.

“So she took my lunch away and said, ‘Go get a milk,’ ” recalled one student, a fifth grader named Sophia. “I came back and asked, ‘What’s going on?’ Then she handed me an orange. She said, ‘You don’t have any money in your account so you can’t get lunch.’”

Parents were outraged by the move, calling it “traumatic and humiliating.”v Salt Lake City’s school district has apologized to parents and students for the incident. “We again apologize and commit to working with parents in rectifying this situation and to ensuring students are never treated in this manner again,” the district said in a Facebook note.

Still, the incident raises longstanding questions about child nutrition and low-income families. It is not the first time that students have had their lunch thrown out for insufficient funds. In November, a Texas middle school student’s lunch was thrown away because he was 30 cents short on payment.

But depriving children of food — and embarrassing them in front of their peers — isn’t the only option. In Boston, for example, public schools provide all students with cost-free breakfast and lunch no matter their financial situation.

A compelling set of evidence drives such decisions. Child hunger has lasting impacts on children’s mental health, as well as cognitive and social ability. And while more than one in five children lack stable access to food, only half of the students who are eligible for free breakfasts actually receive them.

The more education people have, the better they are able to stand up to authority

Five white women, including the wives of a lawyer and an engineer, convinced juror "Maddy" that she had to find Zimmerman innocent even though "Maddy" believed he was guilty of murder.

Why was Maddy unable to stand up to these women? Education is a likely reason. It has been proven that higher education enables people to stand up to those who misuse the authority that they are perceived to have.

See Milgram’s Experiment on Obedience to Authority

Stanley Milgram's famous "obedience" experiment showed that most people will set aside their moral inhibitions if someone wearing a white laboratory coat tells them to inflict horrible pain on a stranger.

Milgram found that education levels had a big impact on behavior.

Milgram found that people who have confidence in their own thinking ability are less likely to obey someone just because he is in a position of authority.

Juror B29, ‘Maddy,’ says ‘Zimmerman got away with murder’
Video: A member of the jury that acquitted George Zimmerman in the killing of Trayvon Martin told ABC News that Zimmerman got away with murder.
By Ruth Tam
Washington Post
July 25, 2013

Two weeks after George Zimmerman was acquitted in the death of Florida teen Trayvon Martin, the only person on the jury who is a member of an ethnic minority said in an ABC News interview that Zimmerman “got away with murder.’

Juror B29, identified only by her first name Maddy, sat down with ABC’s Robin Roberts, to discuss the trial for “Good Morning America.” As the first juror to show her face on camera, Maddy expressed both conviction and regret.

‘Justice for Trayvon’ rallies across the U.S.: Protesters chant and march, calling for a federal investigation and changes to “stand your ground” statutes after the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the 2012 shooting death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in Florida.

“You can’t put the man in jail even though in our hearts we felt he was guilty,” Maddy said of Zimmerman.

[Maura Larkins: Actually, yes you can. It's called manslaughter. He followed Trayvon, sneaking up on him with a hidden gun, and ended up shooting Trayvon dead. Zimmerman was intentionally aggressive toward Trayvon, precipitating a shooting. Zimmerman had no right to be stalking Trayvon. He disobeyed police and caused a death.]

A nursing assistant and mother of eight children, Maddy, 36, who is Puerto Rican, said she believed she owed Trayvon Martin’s parents an apology because she felt “like I let them down.”

She also said that the case shouldn’t have gone to trial and that it was “a publicity stunt.” Despite this, she said the decision weighed heavily on her.

“It’s hard for me to sleep; it’s hard for me to eat because I feel I was forcefully included in Trayvon Martin’s death. And as I carry him on my back, I’m hurting as much [as] Trayvon’s Martin’s mother because there’s no way that any mother should feel that pain,” she said.

In the interview with Roberts, Maddy also discussed the different options the jury was presented and how she “fought to the end.”

“I was the juror that was going to give them the hung jury,” she said.

In response to Maddy’s interview, Trayvon Martin’s mother, Sybrina Fulton, released a statement Thursday night.

“It is devastating for my family to hear the comments from juror B29, comments which we already knew in our hearts to be true. That George Zimmerman literally got away with murder.”

Excerpts of the interview aired on ABC’s “World News with Diane Sawyer” and on “Nightline” Thursday night. The full interview aired Friday morning on “Good Morning America.”


The 6 Decisions That Could Have Saved Trayvon Martin's Life
By Ryan Grim
Huff Post
07/15/2013

It's impossible to know whether it was Trayvon Martin or George Zimmerman who threw the first punch in the confrontation that ended Martin’s life. The jury apparently relied on that ambiguity to acquit Zimmerman of murdering Martin, because he said he killed the 17-year-old in self defense. But despite the confusion, there are plenty of facts that both sides can agree on. While Zimmerman may have been found not guilty, that doesn't mean he wasn't responsible. Trayvon Martin would be alive today, but for at least six decisions made or not made by Zimmerman and the state of Florida.

1. Zimmerman could have decided not to follow Martin.

For starters, George Zimmerman is not a law enforcement official trained in spotting suspicious or criminal behavior. Zimmerman told a 911 operator that Martin seemed suspicious and appeared to be "on drugs or something. It's raining and he’s just walking around, looking about." It was not 3 a.m. when Zimmerman spotted Martin. Rather, it was early evening, a time when people typically "walk around, looking about." Had Zimmerman simply gone about his business, we never would have heard about either of them.

2. Zimmerman could have listened to the 911 operator and not followed Martin. Talking to an operator, Zimmerman complained, "These assholes, they always get away." He later narrated, "Shit, he's running.”

"Are you following him?" the operator asked.

Zimmerman confirmed he was. "Ok, we don't need you to do that," the operator told him. If Zimmerman had simply let Martin run away, he'd be alive today. Martin, it later emerged, found Zimmerman as deeply suspicious as Zimmerman found him. Only one of those judgments turned out to be correct.

3. If Zimmerman had not been secretly armed, he probably wouldn't have followed Martin. Zimmerman knew that he had an advantage in any possible confrontation with a neighbor: He was concealing a weapon. If a fight started, and Zimmerman began losing, he could pull out the gun and shoot his opponent. The state of Florida allows Zimmerman to patrol his neighborhood armed, which emboldened him.

4. If Zimmerman's weapon had not been hidden, Martin probably would have dealt with him differently. When a man follows another, tensions rise. One way or another, those tensions led to a physical confrontation. But if Florida law barred concealed carry, Martin would have been able to see that Zimmerman was armed. Zimmerman defenders suspect Martin threw the first punch. But even if that's true, would he have done so if he knew Zimmerman was carrying a loaded weapon?

5. Zimmerman could have been barred from carrying a weapon.

Zimmerman had a long history of violence, including a restraining order for domestic violence, felony charges of resisting arrest, and assaulting an officer (the charge was pled down to a misdemeanor and then closed; Zimmerman's dad was a magistrate at the time). He was bounced from a job as a bouncer for being too aggressive with patrons, the New York Daily News reported. And a family member accused him of a pattern of sexual molestation. He wasn't convicted of any felony charges, which could have barred him from a gun license, but in some societies, people would determine that such a history makes someone less than an ideal candidate for the right to carry around a hidden loaded weapon.

6. Zimmerman could have not shot and killed Martin.

Regardless of who threw the first punch, a series of aggressive decisions by Zimmerman led toward the fight that broke out. Zimmerman therefore bears some responsibility for the altercation. If one starts a fight and loses, the result is generally a bloody nose, a fat lip, a black eye, a concussion or even a broken bone. That's the price one pays for getting into a fight, and it tends to be a deterrent to starting a fight. Zimmerman could have chosen to take his lumps and rethink the decisions he had made that landed him where he was. Instead, he pulled out his gun, squeezed the trigger and killed Trayvon Martin.

Of course, there's a seventh decision that could have been made that night -- Trayvon Martin could have chosen to not defend himself.

It's important to note that the jury's verdict sends a message to anyone confronted or pursued by another man: If you engage the confrontation, even an act of self defense could be used as justification to shoot and kill you. What led up to the confrontation in the Martin-Zimmerman case was ruled irrelevant; only Zimmerman's state of mind at the time he shot him was to be taken into account by the jury. That doesn't leave someone being followed through their neighborhood many options other than fighting back.

Why the teen brain is drawn to risk

"...[W]hile adults tend to prefer the certainty of misery to the misery of uncertainty, as family therapist Virginia Satir once put it, the same may not be true for teens."

Why the teen brain is drawn to risk
By Maia Szalavitz
TIME.com
October 8, 2012

If you're the parent of a tween, be warned: your cautious 10-year-old is bound to turn into a wild child in a few short years, with seemingly no regard whatsoever for safety. Indeed, teenagers have the double the risk of dying compared to their preteen selves.

Adults have long reckoned with ways to protect adolescents from their own misjudgments. Only recently, however, have researchers really begun to understand how the teen brain is wired and that some of what appear to be teens' senseless choices may result from biological tendencies that also prime their brains to learn and be flexible.

Take teens' perception of risk. It's certainly different from that of adults, but not in the ways you'd expect.

Research shows, for instance, that teens tend to wildly overestimate certain risks -- of things like unprotected sex and drug use -- not to lowball them as one would predict.

So, it may be that teens' notorious risk-taking behavior stems not from some immunity to known risks, but rather, as a new study now suggests, from their greater tolerance to uncertainty and ambiguity -- that is, unknown risks.

"Relative to adults, adolescents engage more in unknown risks than they do in known risks," says Agnieszka Tymula, a postdoctoral student at New York University and the lead author of the study, which was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Teens, it seems, love the unknown.

TIME.com: The half-baked teen brain: A hazard or a virtue?

To examine the differences in risk-taking between teens and adults, researchers studied 33 healthy adolescents aged 12 to 17, along with 30 normal adults aged 30 to 50. They all engaged in a gambling game, in which they could take a definite $5 reward or choose between the possibility of getting a much larger payout or nothing at all.

The payout was based on whether there was a greater number of red or blue poker chips in a stack of 100; to vary the ambiguity, larger or smaller portions of the stacks were hidden from view.

In this way, the trials provided different amounts of information about the risks involved: for example, in some trials, participants could choose between the $5 and a clear 50% chance of winning $50. In others, however, they had a choice between $5 and varying amounts of money, up to $125, but the probability of winning appeared to vary from 25% to 75%. In reality, they always had a 50% chance of winning, but were led to believe their odds varied, which allowed researchers to look at how participants thought about ambiguity.

Survey: 17% of high schoolers drink, smoke, use drugs during school day

"If the risks are known, adolescents engage (in risk-taking) less than adults do, but if they are unknown, this is reversed," Tymula says. In fact, when the payout was known to be $125, adults always gambled -- but this was not so for teens.

"I think (the finding) adds very nicely to the literature," says Valerie Reyna, professor of human development and psychology at Cornell University, who was not associated with the research. "The new breakthrough here is that it extends our knowledge about adolescent risk-taking into the realm of ambiguity aversion."

Reyna's own research has shown how excessively teens tend to overestimate risk: for example, when asked about the risk of AIDS in one study, adolescents estimated that a teenage girl who is sexually active has a 60% chance of contracting HIV. (The actual odds are miniscule for most Americans.)

This perception, however, doesn't prevent teens from engaging in risky behavior. Why? Because teens have a different style of information processing, Reyna argues. They may get lost in the details about specific risks and overly focused on possible rewards, while ignoring the overall "gist" of the problem -- i.e., the ultimate consequences.

In the case of unprotected sex, for example, even if the odds of contracting HIV are low, a bad outcome would be irreversible. Unlike teens, adults tend to focus on the end result and the consequences.

TIME.com: Teens' IQ may rise or fall over time

Oddly, teens' information-processing style seems to rely on the uniquely human "rational" parts of the brain. Reyna's work has shown that adolescents carefully think about risks most adults wouldn't even consider taking -- like, say, playing Russian roulette -- using their prefrontal cortex.

They use quantitative reasoning and take about twice as long as adults do before responding, while adults immediately have a negative reaction to such risks, stemming intuitively from the insula, and almost automatically say no.

So why might the teenage brain be wired this way? Their greater tolerance for uncertainty and the unknown -- and an increased desire for and focus on rewards -- probably helps them leave the nest.

Such explanations are speculative, Reyna cautions, but notes that "in rats, for example, adolescent rats are more likely to explore a new environment. You don't know what you're going to find: that's sort of the definition of a novel environment. If you are more ambiguity tolerant, that would enable that sort of exploration."

In other words, it takes some acceptance of uncertainty and comfort with not knowing in order to learn and to be open to new knowledge.

"We come into the world with limited knowledge about what kind of consequences we will experience after making decisions and also about how likely these different outcomes are," says Tymula. "But, of course, we want to learn, so this tolerance for unknown risks might stem from an underlying biological feature that makes learning about the unknown less unpleasant for adolescents than it is for adults."

An early part of learning any type of new skill -- from typing to teaching -- is accepting instruction and consciously thinking about all of the tactics and techniques involved in performing the skill.

While novices need to think step-by-step, however, experts will have incorporated the best routines into their brains to the point that they become automatic. This may be why the teen brain uses the higher-order cortex for risk decisions: it hasn't yet made enough of them to develop an intuitive reaction that it can "offload" to other brain regions.

Such new information about how the teen brain works -- and why its characteristics shouldn't simply be seen as negative or dysfunctional -- is only just beginning to inform teen health programs.

Reyna, for example, has studied how teaching "gist"-based reasoning can help teens avoid dangerous sexual choices, finding that teens who are taught to focus on potential, catastrophic negative outcomes, rather than the odds, make fewer risky sexual decisions and have fewer partners.

Tymula suggests that allowing teens opportunities to safely experiment -- for example, a simulator that shows sober teens what drunk driving is like -- could also help, by making an unknown risk seem more real and known. Allowing teens the opportunity to take risks in a safe context could also help them develop expertise that underlies gist-based thinking.

Meanwhile, it's interesting to note that while adults tend to prefer the certainty of misery to the misery of uncertainty, as family therapist Virginia Satir once put it, the same may not be true for teens.

TIME.com: What goes on inside the brain of a misbehaving boy?

This story was originally published on TIME.com.

Study finds that avoiding lies can improve your health

Research results about the stress of lying applies only to normal people who have a conscience. Four percent of the population has no conscience, and is not the least bit stressed by lying. I would guess that a bell-shaped curve would describe how much the other ninety-six percent of the population is bothered by lying. Probably most people are bothered somewhat, and a few are highly indisposed toward lying.

Study finds that avoiding lies can improve your health
By Sharon Jayson
USA TODAY
Aug. 5, 2012

Each week for 10 weeks, 110 individuals, ages 18-71, took a lie detector test and completed health and relationship measures assessing the number of major and minor lies they told that week, says lead author Anita Kelly, a psychology professor at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana. She presented findings at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association, which ended Sunday.

"When they went up in their lies, their health went down," says Kelly. "When their lies went down, their health improved."

Researchers instructed half the participants to "refrain from telling any lies for any reason to anyone. You may omit truths, refuse to answer questions, and keep secrets, but you cannot say anything that you know to be false." The other half received no such instructions.

Over the study period, the link between less lying and improved health was significantly stronger for participants in the no-lie group, the study found. When participants in the no-lie group told three fewer minor lies than they did in other weeks, for example, they experienced, on average, four fewer mental-health complaints and three fewer physical complaints. Mental health complaints included feeling tense or melancholy; physical complaints included sore throats and headaches.

Linda Stroh, a professor emeritus of organizational behavior at Loyola University in Chicago, says findings are consistent with her own research on trust. "When you find that you don't lie, you have less stress," she says. "Being very conflicted adds an inordinate amount of stress to your life."

Evidence from past research suggests that Americans average about 11 lies a week. Kelly says the no-lie group participants were down to one lie, on average, per week. For both groups, when participants lied less in a given week, they reported their physical health and mental health to be significantly better that week.

"It's certainly a worthy goal to have people be more honest and more genuine and interact with others in a more honest way," says psychologist Robert Feldman of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. "That would be ultimately beneficial. I'm a little skeptical that it makes us all healthier, but it may make us healthier in a psychological way."

Tony Robbins event ends in 'wails of pain' as attendees walk on hot coals

UPDATE: THE SCIENCE OF WALKING ON COALS
(SEE ORIGINAL STORY AT BOTTOM OF POST)

Burning Question: Why Do People Walk Across Hot Coals? By Piper Weiss Yahoo News July 23, 2012 In 1986, motivational speaker Tony Robbins explained his fire walking ritual to a captivated audience: "People have gotten first, second and third degree burns . . . Some have had skin grafts and three people have died...None of them attended my seminar." As of Thursday, that's no longer true. During a four-day seminar in San Jose, California entitled "Unleash the Power Within," 21 participants in Robbins' famed "fire walk experience" suffered injuries, including second and third degree burns. ...But physicist Bernard Leikind, who tried Robbins' fire walk years ago, has a different theory of why walking across burning coals is often less dangerous than it seems.

..."You're walking on things with poor thermal conductivity and poor heat capacity," he says in a Scientific American video. "Even though the coals are at a high temperature, they don't have as much energy as you might think and aren't good at putting it into your foot."

According to Leikand, you don't need confidence or a heightened mental acuity to fire walk successfully, you just need science and a little bit of luck. "Throughout the course of the walk, energy moves from embers to feet, then the walkers' blood carries some away," Leikand tells Yahoo! Shine. "If the energy carried away doesn't equal the energy moving in, then the tissue's temperature will increase... The degree of a burn arises from a combination of temperature and time...If they make it to the end before any damage occurs, the fire walk was successful."

As to why so many weren't successful, Leiklind speculates: "Some people may have walked slowly. Some people may have stepped out of the path of earlier walkers into deeper, hotter coals. Some people may have jammed embers between their toes. The organizers may have built their ember beds differently than they had before, perhaps on a different surface. Gusts of wind might have increased the rate of combustion. It's really hard to say." He does believe other participants who suffered less severe burns may not have even reported injuries. "They just would have headed for home and visited their physicians or the emergency room later."...



Walking on hot coals is not something I can imagine myself doing, but I think I understand how people do it. (Oprah succeeded!) The feat is accomplished, I believe, through concentration, confidence and relaxation. I suspect that those who succeed are able to maintain a steady transfer of weight, keeping a fast, even rhythm and steady pressure of their feet on the coals. If you don't believe it will work, it won't. Maybe it's also a bit like the old English legal test for truth in which a hot coal was placed on the tongue of an accused person to find out if he was innocent or guilty. Theoretically, an innocent person would be relaxed (hmmmm--not necessarily!) and would have a normal, wet tongue, but a stressed, guilty person would have a dry tongue. The innocent would not be burned.

Twenty-one people in California tried walking on coals, and wound up the unhappy victims of old-fashioned peer pressure.

Did twenty-one people suddenly forget all they had learned from Tony Robbins about mind-over-matter control of their bodies? Yes, I think they lost faith (and concentration!) when they heard other people screaming.

So why didn't they back off and say, "I think I'll pass this time. Maybe another time."

That's where the peer pressure came in. It seems that herd instinct took over when mind control was lost.

People stayed in line, kept walking, and ended up miserable. Let's not laugh at them. Normal people do exactly this every day. (We suffer economically, but we don't even institute banking regulations, much less put some bankers in jail. It's business as usual.)

And why didn't somebody step in and stop the catastrophe at the Tony Robbins seminar? Because our normal, everyday culture tells us not to question authority, to keep a low profile, to keep quiet. Lately we've had a lot of books calling this "girl culture", but boys are taught the same thing, just not to the same degree.

Whistle-blowers are too often ignored, and too often punished. If one of the supervisors had stopped the event, would he or she have been fired? If one of the participants had tried to stop it, would he have been thrown out?


Tony Robbins event ends in 'wails of pain' as attendees walk on hot coals
Over 20 people treated for burns after multi-day motivational event encourages attendees to take a leap of faith on coals
Matt Williams in New York
guardian.co.uk
21 July 2012

Burnt soles rather than cleansed souls awaited attendees at motivational speaker Tony Robbins's latest life coaching seminar, with 21 people needing treatment after a painful walk across coals.

During a four-day gathering in California entitled Unleash the Power Within, the famed lifestyle guru encouraged participants to take a leap of faith and test their luck on the red-hot surface.

Emergency services were called to deal with the fall-out, as many in the group suffered second- and third-degree burns. Three needed hospital treatment, the San Jose Mercury News reported.

"I heard wails of pain, screams of agony" one witness told the newspaper.

"First one person, then a couple minutes later another one, and there was just a line of people walking on that fire. It was just bizarre, man," Jonathan Correll, 25, said.

The injured fire walkers were among thousands who attended the Robbins event. As part of the multi-day seminar, a crowd were led to a park where 12 lanes of hot coals had been laid out.

A brochure for the Unleash the Power Within event suggests that once you overcome the fear of walking on coals of between "1,200 and 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit" you can "conquer the other fires of your life with ease".

A spokesman for the San Jose fire department told the San Jose Mercury News that it does not recommend that people undertake the endeavour.

Robbins has used fire-walking throughout his career as a motivational speaker and life coach.

In a statement, the Robbins Research International told the newspaper: "We have been safely providing this experience for more than three decades, and always under the supervision of medical personnel … We continue to work with local fire and emergency personnel to ensure this event is always done in the safest way possible."

Rutgers Trial: Tyler Clementi's nemesis Dharun Ravi Sentenced to 30 Days in Jail

Trying to gain popularity by abusing outsiders seems to be a typical tactic of human beings. It's the preferred strategy of both student and teacher cliques in schools. It's known as "girl culture" but obviously it's practiced by men, too.

And, of course, witness tampering is very common in schools. I saw it firsthand in Chula Vista Elementary School District. Administrators do it as a matter of course. It's appropriate that there should be some punishment for a crime that undermines our justice system.

Rutgers Trial: Dharun Ravi Sentenced to 30 Days in Jail
By MICHAEL KOENIGS, CANDACE SMITH and CHRISTINA NG
NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J.
ABC News May 21, 2012

Former Rutgers student Dharun Ravi was sentenced to 30 days in jail by a New Jersey judge today for spying on his roommate's gay tryst. Ravi's freshman roommate Tyler Clementi committed suicide days later.

"I do not believe he hated Tyler Clementi," Judge Glenn Berman told the court. "He had no reason to, but I do believe he acted out of colossal insensitivity."

Ravi must report to Middlesex Adult Correctional Center on May 31 at 9 a.m. for his probationary sentence.

"I heard this jury say, 'guilty' 288 times--24 questions, 12 jurors. That's the multiplication," Berman said. "I haven't heard you apologize once."...




Rutgers webcam case: Victim's family wants prison for Dharun Ravi
By Tina Susman
May 21, 2012

...A jury last March found Ravi, who is now 20, guilty of invasion of privacy and a host of other crimes, including hate crimes, which could bring at least 10 years in prison. Ravi denied wrongdoing and denied allegations he was motivated by anti-gay attitudes toward Clementi.

“I believe Mr. Ravi exploited my budding … relationship with Tyler Clementi in his vain attempt to gain attention and popularity with others,” M.B.’s statement, read by attorney Richard Pompelio, said in part. M.B. wrote that he was “devastated” to learn he had been “placed under a microscope for the sole amusement of Mr. Ravi and his friends,” and that his emotions had not lessened. In fact, he said, they had only intensified.

“I just wanted him to acknowledge that he had done wrong and take responsibility for his conduct,” M.B. said in asking for Ravi to be sentenced to some prison time. He did not specify how much time Ravi should receive. Neither did Clementi's family members.

The statement was one of several made to Judge Glenn Berman in the run-up to the sentencing. After M.B.’s statement, Clementi’s father, Joseph, spoke, as did Clementi’s brother, James, and his mother, Jane, who said Ravi had given her son the cold shoulder from the moment the two young men had met at the start of classes in the fall of 2010.

Joseph Clementi accused Ravi of acting “without a thought” of how his actions might affect his son or his son’s date when he set up the secret video cam. “And he did it in a cold and calculating manner and then he tried to cover it up,” said Clementi, who at one point seemed about to break down but who kept on speaking after briefly halting.

“Mr. Ravi still does not get it, he has no remorse, and he has said he was genuinely surprised that a jury could find him guilty,” Clementi said before his surviving son, James, delivered another impassioned statement tinged with bitterness toward Ravi.

“My family has never heard an apology…the behavior I saw in the courtroom…suggests a complete lack of concern for my brother or the pain inflicted on him,” said James Clementi. “I watched as Dharun slept through court as if it were not something worth staying awake for,” he said of the trial, which ended with the guilty verdicts in March.

“Through it all, I bit my tongue.” But James Clementi added that his brother’s “fate was sealed” from the moment a computer randomly assigned him to share a room with Ravi. “He could never have known the viper’s nest he was walking into,” he said...



Guilty verdict in Rutgers webcam spying case
By David Ariosto
CNN
March 17, 2012

...His roommate, Tyler Clementi, killed himself in 2010 after learning of webcam spying
Ravi was not charged directly with Clementi's death

A former Rutgers University student accused of spying on and intimidating his gay roommate by use of a hidden webcam was found guilty Friday of all counts -- including invasion of privacy and the more severe charges of bias intimidation -- in a case that thrust cyberbullying into the national spotlight.

Dharun Ravi, 20, was also found guilty of witness tampering, hindering apprehension and tampering with physical evidence, and could now face up to 10 years in jail and deportation to his native India.

Are the wrong people chosen as "experts" in education?

The World Conspires to Make Expertise Unreliable
By Rick Hess
Education Week
November 23, 2011

Note: This week, I'm giving RHSU readers a look at my essay in Richard Elmore's recent Harvard Education Press volume I Used to Think...And Now I Think. If you find this stuff at all interesting, I'd definitely encourage you to check the book out. For days one and two, see here and here.

Say something smart once and there are huge rewards for spending a career saying it, in increasingly elaborate forms. Academics who own an idea get hired by prestigious universities, deliver keynotes, and get all kinds of attendant perks. Consultants who own an idea become must-haves for districts, foundations, and contractors. The result is a familiar kabuki of hyperspecialists airing their prebaked views.

The world is composed of niches. In each, a thinker may be iconic so long as she stays in her little crevice. Thus, an expert in pharmacology may speak to a cheering conference hall of awe-struck attendees only to walk across the campus or the hotel and quickly become just an anonymous face in the crowd. An expert on school violence or science instruction might be feted as legendary by those in her field but sacrifice that respect and deference should she wander outside that circle. The result discourages individuals from spending much time wrestling with thorny questions or complexities that reach beyond their core expertise. Hence, enormously respected thinkers will offer prescriptions for educational policy or practice that are woefully naïve in terms of political dynamics, organizational realities, institutional pressure, incentives, or practical constraints. Why? Because many of these experts have never spent much time thinking about how their expertise intersects with all the stuff in which they're not expert.

Meanwhile, within niches, the interest in weighing competing arguments or determining how one's expertise translates to the larger world is massively undervalued. Expertise promotes deep knowledge, which can too readily lead to inflexibility and self-assuredness (along with the expectation that one's biases and assumptions will be afforded deference). There are always exceptions, but most thinkers become expert by struggling to the top of their niche on the back of their big idea, and then do all they can to extend the reach of that idea and of the acolytes who aid in that quest--incidentally, or quite purposefully, stymieing heterodox perspectives. In fact, the very nature of expertise is that it stifles dissent and reifies the orthodoxy of the moment.

Moreover, since established figures typically find themselves addressing friendly audiences and gatherings where it is deemed impolite to contest their assumptions and evidence too ardently, it is frighteningly easy for experts to settle into a comfortable bubble where they are surrounded by like-minded peers and adoring disciples, their word is gospel and they are buffered from anything more than occasional interaction with those who might disagree.

Finally, our criteria for expertise are, almost inevitably, relational (e.g. my colleague tells me Trang is terrific) or formulaic (e.g. Wylie was executive director of X for a number of years, launched Y program, or has published eleven articles on this). Why? Our ability to form independent judgments of the hundreds or thousands of individuals most directly engaged in our field of endeavor, much less the thousands more peripherally engaged, is limited by our own inexpert grasp of the world. Only the arrogant or the deluded imagine they perfectly understand the strengths and skills of hundreds of friends, acquaintances, and strangers. Thus, we turn to proxies that are themselves deeply imperfect--but that can lead to our investing great authority in this or that expert for a season.

Done with sufficient skepticism and care, this manner of finding experts is natural and normal. But there's a decided temptation to lodge excessive influence in our choice of the moment. I can't tell you how many times I've been talking with a superintendent who has become a guru for a foundation and found myself wondering why this unremarkable man was deemed any more deserving of that status than any of a dozen other superintendents. The difference, in many cases, is nothing more than a personal relationship, experience in a few big districts, or the fact that a superintendent was an early adopter of a reform--all of which, perhaps bizarrely, results in an individual being invested with presumed expertise across a broad range of issues.

So why does any of this matter? Does it make any practical difference when it comes to schools or schooling? I think it does. In education, for instance, despite decades of research, experts have no systematic way to tell who will be a good teacher or how to design practices that lead to predictable improvement at scale. This state of affairs means at least four things.

First, we ought to be hesitant in casually suggesting that we can name, based on our experience, a list of the nation's best school districts, superintendents, or reading programs. Short of some protocol that helps us identify excellence in a transparent and consistent fashion (for better or worse), we ought to be much humbler about such exercises. They frequently amount to nothing more than an echo chamber, with participants passing on names that they themselves have received second- or third-hand.

Second, we should be wary of prescriptive advice, especially when it's based on the assumption that expertise easily and immutably travels across contexts. In fact, given its narrowness, expertise can exert a gravitational pull that distorts how one thinks about the larger world. Expertise can come at the cost of perspective when an expert starts contemplating efforts to change policy, organizations, or human behavior. After all, expert advice tends to reflect what experts know, which may not reflect what is most useful for solving the larger problem in the real world. For instance, grand assertions about merit pay, school choice, differentiated instruction, or class size reduction that overlook the practical impact of contracts, policies, existing incentives, and embedded routines can yield results quite different from those the experts are touting.

Third--all that said--expertise has a terrifically useful place, as long as we understand what the experts actually know, which is how to do specific, concrete tasks right. I'm always eager to turn to an expert when the question is how to build a bridge, estimate how many people will visit Vegas next month, design an assessment, erect a new school, or conduct a complicated statistical analysis. I'm less inclined to do so when the questions are bigger, messier, and more dependent on judgment and values.

Finally, we need to recognize that individual experts ought not be invested with too much prescience, but the right mix of experts can help identify tensions, incentives, and the contours of possible solutions. If one assembles the right mix of experts, their competing views can prove enormously helpful in crafting smart policies. The key, however, is not to empower any one expert to play guru but to allow competing expertise to illuminate and inform complex decisions.

One last thought. For what it's worth, my approach nowadays is not to casually reject educational expertise but to regard its acclaimed ministers with the same attentive skepticism I reserve for financial advisers and real estate agents. They know stuff that's useful, but that doesn't entitle them to blind deference or even trusting obeisance. At least not in my book.

Vindicated: Ridiculed Israeli scientist wins Nobel

"I was thrown out of my research group. They said I brought shame on them with what I was saying," he recalled. "I never took it personally. I knew I was right and they were wrong."

This story reminds me of high school girl culture. No, wait. This is simply typical of human beings, right?

Vindicated: Ridiculed Israeli scientist wins Nobel
By ARON HELLER
Forbes.com
10.05.11

JERUSALEM -- When Israeli scientist Dan Shechtman claimed to have stumbled upon a new crystalline chemical structure that seemed to violate the laws of nature, colleagues mocked him, insulted him and exiled him from his research group.

After years in the scientific wilderness, though, he was proved right. And on Wednesday, he received the ultimate vindication: the Nobel Prize in chemistry.

The lesson?

"A good scientist is a humble and listening scientist and not one that is sure 100 percent in what he read in the textbooks," Shechtman said.

The shy, 70-year-old Shechtman said he never doubted his findings and considered himself merely the latest in a long line of scientists who advanced their fields by challenging the conventional wisdom and were shunned by the establishment because of it.

In 1982, Shechtman discovered what are now called "quasicrystals" - atoms arranged in patterns that seemed forbidden by nature.

"I was thrown out of my research group. They said I brought shame on them with what I was saying," he recalled. "I never took it personally. I knew I was right and they were wrong."

The discovery "fundamentally altered how chemists conceive of solid matter," the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said in awarding the $1.5 million prize.

Since his discovery, quasicrystals have been produced in laboratories, and a Swedish company found them in one of the most durable kinds of steel, which is now used in products such as razor blades and thin needles made specifically for eye surgery, the academy said. Quasicrystals are also being studied for use in new materials that convert heat to electricity.

Shechtman is a professor at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, Israel. He is the 10th Israeli Nobel winner, a great source of pride in a nation of just 7.8 million people. Shechtman fielded congratulatory calls from Israeli President Shimon Peres, who shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

"Every citizen of Israel is happy today and every Jew in the world is proud," Netanyahu said.

Staffan Normark, permanent secretary of the Royal Swedish Academy, said Shechtman's discovery was one of the few Nobel Prize-winning achievements that can be dated to a single day.

On April 8, 1982, while on sabbatical at the National Bureau of Standards in Washington - now called the National Institute of Standards and Technology - Shechtman first observed crystals with a shape most scientists considered impossible.

The discovery had to do with the idea that a crystal shape can be rotated a certain amount and still look the same. A square contains four-fold symmetry, for example: If you turn it by 90 degrees, a quarter-turn, it still looks the same. For crystals, only certain degrees of such symmetry were thought possible. Shechtman had found a crystal that could be rotated one-fifth of a full turn and still look the same.

"I told everyone who was ready to listen that I had material with pentagonal symmetry. People just laughed at me," he said in an account released by his university.

He was asked to leave his research group, and moved to another one within the National Bureau of Standards, Shechtman said. He eventually returned to Israel, where he found one colleague prepared to work with him on an article describing the phenomenon. The article was at first rejected but was finally published in November 1984 to an uproar in the scientific world.

In 1987, friends in France and Japan succeeded in growing crystals large enough for X-rays to verify what he had discovered with the electron microscope.

"The moment I presented that, the community said, `OK, Danny, now you are talking. Now we understand you. Now we accept what you have found,'" Shechtman told reporters.

Shechtman, who also teaches at Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa, said he never wavered even in the face of stiff criticism from double Nobel winner Linus Pauling, who never accepted Shechtman's findings.

"He would stand on those platforms and declare, 'Danny Shechtman is talking nonsense. There is no such thing as quasicrystals, only quasi-scientists.'" Shechtman said. "He really was a great scientist, but he was wrong. It's not the first time he was wrong."

Shechtman's battle "eventually forced scientists to reconsider their conception of the very nature of matter," the academy said.

Nancy B. Jackson, president of the American Chemical Society, called Shechtman's breakthrough "one of these great scientific discoveries that go against the rules." Only later did some scientists go back to some of their own inexplicable findings and realize they had seen quasicrystals without understanding what were looking at, Jackson said...

Why critical thinking skills are important: hospital emergency staff didn't pay enough attention to critically ill child

Sacramento girl needed amputations after 5-hour wait at emergency room
By Cynthia Hubert
Dec. 31, 2010
Last Modified: Jan. 3, 2011

...A Methodist [Hospital] spokeswoman, Erin MacEneaney, said the hospital cannot comment on specific cases because of privacy laws. "However, Methodist Hospital does everything to ensure the appropriate level of care for our patients," she said.

The family's ordeal began on a Sunday morning in early December, when the normally rambunctious Malyia developed a fever and became lethargic, Ryan Jeffers recalled.

When her symptoms persisted the next day, Jeffers and Yang, his fiancé, took their daughter to an urgent care center, where specialists told them to go to the emergency room. By the time they arrived at Methodist, he said, splotches that looked like bruises had developed on Malyia's cheeks, and she was "getting really weak," he said. "After a while, she couldn't even walk," and her fever had jumped to 103 degrees.

Jeffers, 29, said he pushed for immediate care, but was rebuffed. After about five hours, he said, he ambushed a nurse and demanded to see a doctor. The physician took blood samples that suggested Malyia was in liver failure, Jeffers said. She was taken by ambulance to the pediatric intensive care unit at Sutter Memorial Hospital. Doctors there had her flown to Stanford aboard a helicopter...

2010: The year of politicking insanely

2010: The year of politicking insanely
By Eugene Robinson
Washington Post
October 15, 2010

Okay, I want to make sure I understand. Two years ago, with the nation facing a host of complex and difficult problems, voters put a bunch of thoughtful, well-educated people in charge of the government. Now many of those same voters, unhappy and impatient, have decided that things will get better if some crazy, ignorant people are running the show? Seriously?...

And we thought we had problems! How not to design a city

Here is the purported plan for Juba, using the well known rhinoceros solution to gridlock

Misadventures in Urban Planning
by Chris Blattman
August 23, 2010

[Quote from Alan Boswell blog:]

South Sudan is planning to literally re-build its city centers from scratch…into the shape of some of the safari animals the rest of the world comes to these parts to chase around in open-roofed vehicles.

The multi-decade project is estimated to cost over $10 billion (the government’s annual budget this year was less than $2 billion).

These new urban centers will be owned initially by the private companies who finance the construction, under a public-private partnership model currently all the rage here in the wider region.

Voters' anger at Washington may overpower any fixes

This is why the world is such a mess. People just want to hurt the ones they're angry at, even though they hurt themselves in the process. What do people want after bankers blew up the economy? Tea Baggers don't want financial reform, they want the government to let the banks fail--and the whole economy go down in flames.

Voters' anger at Washington may overpower any fixes
By Dan Balz
Washington Post Staff Writer
May 19, 2010

Voters sent a clear message on Tuesday: They don't like the way Washington works. But they sent a mixed message on what would make it work better, which adds up to a virtual guarantee that it might be a long time before Washington actually does work better. ..

Are some angry parents-- and teachers--actually motivated by other problems?

What's up with the nasty anti-Obama emails I've been receiving? I think sometimes people are actually angry about something different from what they're talking about, whether it's health care or the local elementary school.

ANGRY PARENTS, TEACHERS AND ADMINISTRATORS: TOO MUCH IN COMMON?

A lot of kids have been given less-than-stellar educations by our local school districts, and many of their parents are angry. I agree entirely with these parents' demands for better treatment for students. I also agree that many parents who complain have been bullied shamefully by school lawyers. Some of these lawyers have violated professional codes of conduct and state law to the extent that they deserve severe reprimands, even disbarment or jail time. Of course, these lawyers are unlikely to be called to account for their unethical and illegal actions.

But some of these parents are too angry, in my opinion.

I suspect that some parents are angry about situations that have nothing to do with schools, but they unleash this anger on a handy, accessible target: their kids' school. Sometimes it's really hard to keep track of exactly what these people are furious about.

Recently one of these parents sent me, for no apparent reason, an email claiming that President Obama was "first born"* in Kenya. Apparently the theory is that he was first born in Kenya, then born for a second time in Honolulu. (Sometimes it's hard to figure out exactly what these "Birthers" are trying to say.) The email I received included a photo of Obama's elementary school application to an Indonesian Catholic school. Very clearly on the application, right after his name, Obama's place of birth was listed as Honolulu. The person who filled out the form, Obama's Indonesian stepfather, was in no way trying to make his stepson sound more American. Obama's birthplace was a matter of record, and no one had yet cooked up a plan to pretend otherwise. Yet this email was sent to me, as the sender indicated in the subject line, "to fuel the debate over Obama's qualifications." How does the human brain malfunction so spectacularly?

If anything, this San Diego parent should be angry at her own teachers for not training her adequately as a critical thinker.

But I must say that many teachers and administrators were not taught how to be critical thinkers, either. During my years of teaching I saw plenty of teachers and adminstrators spewing anger (at kids, parents and each other). Many of them made no more sense than the confused parent who emailed me. To top it off, I heard teachers make disparaging remarks about high intelligence itself. Smart people were not considered cool by the most popular and powerful teachers at my schools.

My suggestion? Critical thinking classes for school professionals.

Everyone involved would benefit from better decision-making by school personnel, and students would benefit from the improved thinking skills of their teachers.



------------------------------------------------------------------------
* Full quote from email:
"This document provides the smoking gun that many of Obama's detractors have been seeking - that he is NOT a natural-born citizen of the United States - necessary to be President of these United States . Along with the evidence that he was first born in Kenya , here we see that there is no record of him ever applying for US citizenship...Gary Kreep of the United States Justice Foundation has released the results of their investigation..."

It's disturbing that there are so many people who have so little respect for democracy that they believe they have the right to use any means, including dishonesty or violence, to bring down the elected leader of the United States, just because they're feeling angry. See Tea Party and Christian Militia posts.

Next installment: Muslims versus Mormons: whom do Americans trust less?

__________________________________________________

Here's another story about a nasty email. The woman who first sent this racially offensive email was angry that a recipient forwarded it to the NAACP, and caused that recipient to be fired. This is just the sort of thing that happens in schools, in my experience. School officials want bad behavior covered up, and they take action NOT against the bad actors, but against those they fear might reveal the truth about the bad actions to the public. That's what Chula Vista Elementary School District and its lawyers did to cover up the crimes of Robin Donlan and Linda Watson. In the end, the district committed felonies like perjury and alteration of documents to cover misdemeanors. Things really get out of control once the cover-up starts. What a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive.

The angriest administrator? The Jenny Mo case at WCCSD.


NAACP: SunTrust Mortgage worker fired over e-mail
CHRIS I. YOUNG TIMES-DISPATCH STAFF WRITER
March 18, 2010

The NAACP says a 14-year employee was fired from SunTrust Mortgage Inc. in Richmond after she was accused of sending a chain e-mail she received at work that ultimately was forwarded to the NAACP.

The fired African-American employee said she found the e-mail offensive.

The e-mail contains pictures of 40 bumper stickers such as, "Clinton ruined a dress, Obama ruined a nation," "So I guess we're even on that slavery thing eh?" and, "Diversity -- It killed 13 at Fort Hood."...

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People released a copy of what it said was the e-mail sent by a SunTrust official to 13 office employees and one outside recipient under the subject line "FW: Bumper Stickers that Make Sense."...

Russ, an accountant, said SunTrust conducted an internal investigation and then brought her into a meeting. There, she was told she was being terminated because her supervisor had "trust issues" with her and because of the e-mail, she said in a telephone interview.

She said SunTrust accused her of trying to go public with the e-mail by forwarding it to someone who would give it to the NAACP.

The official who sent the e-mail collected Russ' belongings and escorted Russ out of the building immediately after the Feb. 18 meeting, Russ said. She said she was paid through March 4...