When I first wrote this review, PNC rejected it because I dared to mention competitors.  Then they suggested I revise it — but provided no link and no obvious way to do.  The second time, the site froze on my and crashed my browser.  So I’m posting this on my blog as well as on the PNC site, so maybe the word can get out.

I didn’t win the prize but I did get to spend some time thinking about why I’m doing what I’m doing.  That’s worthwhile.  And since I was once instructed by a very wise professor that anything worth writing is worth using at least three times, I figured I’d recycle my statement here.  Enjoy.

I entered the profession of teaching without any clear educational philosophy.  Having done well in school myself, I more or less assumed that the key to being a good teacher would lie in offering an environment like the one I had experienced.  And even though I had taken many advanced education courses in pursuit of my degree, what I encountered in them lay fallow in my mind — the seeds of good ideas that had not, yet, found fertile ground.  It did not take long in the classroom to convince me that my recollections and preconceptions would be wholly inadequate to the daunting task of teaching.  My thinking perforce had to evolve.  What has emerged as my philosophy of education is therefore somewhat ad hoc and eclectic, but I believe it serves me well.  This is what I have learned about the arts of teaching and learning.

The foremost truth I have learned is:  Students will perform to our expectations of them.  Oh, of course it is possible to set the bar too high and be disappointed; or to underestimate your students and be surprised.  But by and large, students perform to our expectations.  Tell your students that you believe the material is beyond them, and their learning will suffer.  Show them that you believe that, and you make it irrefutably true.  On the other hand, set high expectations and consistently hold the students to them — show them by your own persistence that you believe they should master the material, can master it, and will master it — and they will move heaven and earth to prove you right.  They will not even know they are doing the amazing.  In my second year of teaching, one student complained, “Mr. Gilroy, you act like we’re so much smarter than we are”, to which another opined, “But that’s better than if you treated us like we’re dumb”.  I have encountered students who do not know how to learn and too many who do not care to — but I have yet to encounter one who cannot learn.

This was brought home to me by my experience teaching our course on Space Science and Astrophysics.  Due to the vagaries of our scheduling process, it turned out that most of the students in SSA were not “science kids” (most of whom opted for Advanced Placement courses in biology or physics).  Indeed, most SSA students had not even taken introductory physics — which I expected would make the astrophysics part of the course extremely limited.  But I was mistaken.  Despite little formal training, these students dove into the topics and wrestled successfully with some of the more abstruse topics in modern science: the evolution of black holes, the origin of the Universe, the possibility of life elsewhere.  Moreover, they learned to teach each other and to share what they found — so much so that fellow members of the faculty actively sought to sit on the panel of experts judging their final projects.

My second precept is, time is too precious to waste — mine and theirs.  There is little point in spending a year rushing through a litany of disconnected facts that make no impression on their lives.  My courses are organized, as is my discipline (physics), around problem solving:  The retention of definitions and figures has value only in that it speeds the solution of problems.  My students learn to dread four infamous letters — HDYK? — which festoon their papers, because I am relentless in forcing them to answer “How do you know?”  It is not the answer but the process that matters — even more so in this century, when the answers we take for granted are liable to change beyond recognition.  Many of my students enter my courses with only a rudimentary problem-solving ability, and so we linger on topics more than other teachers might.  I cover less, but I like to think that collectively, we uncover more.

Because time is so precious, very few of the lab experiments we run center on cookbook verification of accepted fact.  Instead, the experiments usually ask the students to predict the outcome of some procedure.  Along the way, they must measure the content-relevant parameters.  For example, my introductory physics class just recently completed a “race” wherein each group measured the acceleration of two carts and predicted where they would cross.  We then videotaped the actual race so that they could use video analysis software to precisely measure how far from their predicted location the actual crossing occurred.  In many classes, measuring the accelerations would have been the explicit point of the experiment; for us, it was just a waypoint.  Having a specific goal helped focus the students and allowed them to see some application of the material.  (Of course, the element of competition also helped motivated them!)

The ultimate goal of education, in my opinion, is to build in students the confidence, habits, and skills to allow them to ask intelligent questions and set about intelligently finding answers. The world into which they will enter is so different from the world I encountered at their age, as to be entirely uncharted.  I cannot tell them what they need to know, because I can’t possibly foresee that — what they need to know very likely hasn’t been imagined yet.  My best hope is to train their minds to be supple so that they can flex and adapt.  This finds its best expression in a yearly project of the Advanced Placement Physics course.  The XLP (extended lab project) challenges the students to formulate their own goals and questions, to design an experiment, and to commit to it for nearly half a year.  From conception to completion, the students drive the experiment, allocating their time and maintaining a budget.  Though I of course remain present to facilitate their work and to help them past roadblocks, within a few weeks of starting, they inevitably surpass my own knowledge of their particular question.  They shift from student to expert and must adapt their style accordingly.  The XLP is both daunting and exciting for them. Despite requiring considerable hard work toward the end of their senior year, the students rarely complain and never seem to suffer senioritis.  Indeed, they often ask (only half-jokingly) if they can skip other classes to get more time in lab.

A third truth I’ve come to is that learning is an emergent behavior.  It only happens in its purest form by collaboration.  This has posed a difficulty for me, as my discipline is traditionally evaluated primarily through individual performance on isolated exams.  It has taken persistent effort for me to craft assessments that accurately measure the interplay of learners — a goal that I readily admit continues to task me.  Wherever possible I have made the experimental portions of my courses acts of collaboration not only in the data-collecting but in its analysis and reporting.  This complements another strong opinion of mine, which is that science education should be viewed as a public art.  The output students create should be intended not for my eyes but for the larger world.  Thus, in SSA, each quarter ended with a research project conducted in groups and presented to a panel of reviewers drawn from the larger school community.  In AP Physics, for every experiment, every group must prepare a report that passes review by at least three other students; since we run every experiment twice, this means the second report must also respond intelligently to the feedback of the reviewers.  The XLP concludes with a tradition lab report but also with a public presentation to the school community.  All of these help underline the central point: Science is a human endeavor whose results are meant to be shared, not hidden away in a file somewhere.

I don’t have a grand theory on which to hang these precepts or sophisticated jargon for what they mean.  My philosophy of education is an unfinished product.  Every once in a while, though, I do have the satisfaction of speaking with a former student who regales me with a tale of a time when they encountered some phenomenon and said to themselves, “That’s the sort of thing we might have run into in Mr. Gilroy’s class.  I can understand that.”  For me, all the rest is window dressing.иконописikoni

So a debt-ceiling “deal” has been reached.  Going in to this, the President was willing to compromise but had a few lines in the sand:

1. Some deficit reduction would have to come from new revenues.
2. There would be an extension through the 2012 elections.
3. The big social safety net programs would be protected.

What did he get?  None of these.  None of them.  What he got was a temporary extension of the debt ceiling, but he must take ownership of it now and again in six months.  He got a “super congress” stacked against him with triggers that hurt only one side.  He got an agreement that the hostage-taker would not shoot the hostage at this time, though he let the hostage-taker keep the gun and even gave him more bullets.

He got rolled.  That’s what he got.

I am not a Tea Party default denialist.  I fully understand that the scope of a default would be unprecedented and uncharted and very likely catastrophic.  I just don’t see how surrendering the principle of democratic government is better.  The Republicans know that their policies would be unpopular — fatally so, in fact.  So they don’t try to enact them.  Instead they manipulate the far-too-easily-manipulated Democrats into making the hard choices, doing the hard things, and then getting savaged by an electorate that doesn’t understand what’s going on and can’t be bothered to learn.

There are many who say the President should have stared down the Republicans and bluffed harder about using the so-called constitutional option, invoking the 14th Amendment.  I’m not one of those; I don’t believe in bluffing.  He should have stared down the Republicans fully intending to invoke the 14th Amendment if need be,  He should have said, This far and no further.  He would have looked decisive because he would have been decisive.  He would have the public on his side.  More importantly, he would have been right.  And given the certainty of disaster implicit in the rise of the Crazy Caucus to power, a roll of the dice would have been preferable.

I’ve already called my congressman to find out where he’ll vote.  (It’s Yes for surrender.)  And I’ve implored him (or rather his intern) to reconsider.  The best option for the country right now is that this abomination goes down to defeat in the House.  (It seems assured passage in the Senate.)  Then, with the clock ticking, the President can demand a clean bill to save the nation’s credit rating, with these tough choices made not under pressure from a hostage-taker.  Sadly, on this, apparently the Democrats have found their message unity that they so often lack.

The best hope for the nation, then, is that the Crazy Caucus, having been handed literally everything it wanted, will find itself still congenitally unable to take “Yes” for an answer — that the Tea Party’s visceral hatred for that upstart in the White House will compel them to vote against a bill their own leadership has negotiated and is whipping hard.

Yes, our only hope lies in the rabid right.  May Heaven help us all.икониПравославни икониикони на светци

A study referenced in Discover has the provocative conclusion that seeing a small American flag while completing a political questionnaire can induce the respondents into being more Republican, even up to 8 months later. Is our society doomed by our optic nerves to surrender to the rabid right?

First off, extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence. If the description given is accurate, this study doesn’t meet the bar. The sample size is smallish (worse for the followup) and the controls seem ill-defined. Correlation doesn’t imply causation, of course. There is also a danger in defining some policies as solely Republican, or pretending that the conservative position is monolithic. Serious replication efforts are called for.

But for the moment assume the causitive effect is real. Why would seeing a flag make one more identify more with Republican views? I would argue it’s because, since the 1960s, the Republicans have highjacked the symbols and language of patriotism. They have been aided in this by the tacit complicity of the media (which like simplistic us-v-them soundbites), the Democratic Party (which has been timid in defense of its country and of itself), and the American people (who have lazily accepted the sports-team approach to politics pioneered by Fox News and embraced by the rabid right).

What path of action is there for progressives and liberals, who perhaps might be driven to despair over the apparent psychobiological advantage this gives the Republicans? The same one as always: Fight back by reclaiming those symbols. The advantage comes from two crossed circuits in people’s brains: “flags = patriotism = good” and “flags = Republican”. This leads them to erroneously conclude “Republican = good”. Progressives must break the chain at the second link. If we concede owenership of the trappings of patriotism to the rabid right, we _will_ lose the public.

Granted, this will be a challenge. Firstly, a lot of time has been wasted and a lot of ground lost. People would have to unlearn their unexamined habits of thought, and no one welcomes that. More importantly, patriotism is more complex for progressives. The message of the rabid right is starkly simplistic: My country, wrong or right. America – love it or leave it. If you’re not with us, you’re against us. The progressive position is more abstract, more nuanced: I love my country, but I don’t always love what it does. I recognize its greatness but I also recognize the uncomfortable ugly truths that are part of its history. America is not the pinnacle of history; it is a path to a better tomorrow. That’s harder to sell. It’s harder to enforce message discipline. It’s harder to tweet.

But it is no less a stirring vision of America. Indeed, I believe it is more so. I think that the American people are sleeping, and in their slumber, the rabid right have been whispering illusions of a center-right nation. But at root, despite it all, the American people are a smart and a good people who will not dream forever. They believe not in an America that never was but in an America that should be. That is a message that finds far more resonance in the progressive ethos.

Do people associate the flag with Republicanism? Has the rabid right seized the symbols of patriotism? Maybe. But that’s not reason to surrender them. It’s a call to take them back.

Transformers: Dark of the Moon is a Michael Bay film.  That pretty much sums up exactly what the movie is, and you don’t really need to know any more about it.  It’s not a bad film, exactly, and it’s not a good film (definitely).  It’s a film, a Michael Bay film.

Spoilers follow.

Lots of stuff blows up.  (OK, it is a Michael Bay film, so that’s not really a spoiler.)  Interestingly, very little blows up in the first half of the film.  This means that Mr. Bay — to reach his contract-specified density of cordite use — has to really pack the last half, which is a numbing non-stop explosionfest that involves Chicago (for reasons the film never adequately explores, or indeed, mentions).  There is much loud boomage and lots of robots turning into and out of their vehicular disguises, again for little explained reason.  There is a brave assault by the humans, who nonetheless come off looking like ants attacking two children wrestling on a beach.  For most humans, it ends up about as well as it would for the ants.

Shia LaBeouf is, well, Shia LaBeouf.  He seems more or less stuck in the same place.  His Sam Witwicky is far less engaging than in the first movie.  (I did not see Revenge of the Fallen.)  Somewhere along the line, Megan Fox’s Mikaela dumped him, and it’s hard not to sympathize with her.  Sam is self-absorbed and a bit whiny.

Rosie Huntingly-Whitley plays his romantic “interest”, Carly.  Apparently Ms. Huntington-Whitley is a Victoria Secret model.  She is not an actress.  In fact, she is the most robotic character in a movie about robots.  As made clear by the rear-end lingering establishing shot (itself taken from a Victoria Secret commercial, I expect), her primary purpose is eye candy.  She is also of course the romantic MacGuffin (that is, hostage) whose capture “motivates” Sam for some fraction of the movie.  (Because, apparently, he wouldn’t go save the world and all unless he had a direct personal stake in it.)  Finally, she is also there to play a pivotal but silly role in reminding Megatron that he is, in fact, a bad guy and nominal leader of the Decepticons — a realization that leads to him backstabbing the Autobot who back-stabbed Optimus Prime.  This makes Megatron this movie’s Starscream, and he does an even worse job of that than the actual Starscream (who eventually meets exactly the end foreordained for that type of character).

Optimus Prime takes a level in badass for this movie.  I know the character starts out pretty bad-ass, but in this one he becomes pretty dark — very nearly an anti-hero.  For one, he outright lies to his best human buddy Sam, when the latter asks him what his plan is once the Autobots are exiled from Earth (again).  Optimus tells Sam there is no plan, which makes the subsequent destruction of the Autobot’s spaceship all the more emotional.  At least it would, if it wasn’t telegraphed better than Western Union ever could that this is not in fact the end of the Autobots.  They hid in the first stage, you see, and played dead while everyone wept over their destruction.  So, on the one hand, +10 bonus points for the Autobots being genre savvy and realizing the Decepticons would, well, be deceptive and betray them.  On the other hand, -1,000,000 for bald-face lying to the only human who’s ever been totally on their side.  But on the gripping hand, +2,000,000 because said human — that is, Sam Witwicky — was in fact betraying them at that very moment, spying for the bad guy. (That’s the whole MacGuffin/hostage thing mentioned above.)

Anyway, back to Optimus.  He not only straight-up lies to Sam (of whom, remember, Optimus should have no suspicion whatsoever).   Optimus also allows the Decepticons to ravage Chicago, more or less to teach us humans a lesson.  When he eventually decides to intervene, he tells the Autobots “Kill them all”.  He’s talking about the Decepticons but still, that’s cold.  He eventually beats up his mentor Sentinel Prime (who, to be fair, had just betrayed Optimus and all they had ever fought for) and kills him by shooting him in the head with a blaster.  Earlier, after Carly’s improbably reverse-psychology trick, Megatron swoops in and disables Sentinel Prime.  He tells Optimius that the two need each other.  “What would you be without me?” asks Megatron.  “Let’s find out,” replies Optimus — and he rips out Megatron’s spine. Wah??  This is the good guy?

In fact, by the time the movie ends, Optimus is giving off a deeply disturbing psycho vibe — which, in honesty, would be a way cool path to take the next movie: The Autobots have lost their world, been betrayed by their greatest leader, and been thrown off Earth no fewer than three times by the soft bags of meat they’ve decided to ally with.  Who could blame the ‘bots for getting tired of the entire scene?  Maybe it’s time for some Autobot-mandated order here.

By far, the best human is former agent Simmons (played by John Torturo).  Simmons was a surprising breakout character — not only because he’s been transformed (get it?) from an obstructionist bureaucratic man-in-black to an O’Reilly Factor-appealing obscenely wealthy conspiracy-theory author whose wisecracking and over-the-top outrageousness is genuinely funny.  He’s the surprise breakout character in that he is a character, an actual human being who stands out from the mass of fleshy targets that define the rest of the breathing cast.  Also, his assistant Dutch is played equally well by the always-stellar Alan Turdyk, who steals every scene he’s in despite the tremendous dearth of lines.  I was mildly disappointed that Dutch never said, “I am a leaf on the wind, watch how I soar” but I understand.

I’d describe the climax of the movie but it would really be lost in print.  Plus, it doesn’t really matter.  It doesn’t make sense and it doesn’t really follow from what came before, but plot isn’t why you see a Michael Bay movie anyway.  In this case, you have to sit back and let it wash over you.

A final note:  While the special effects were good, the 3D was a complete waste.  Not a single scene benefited from it.  I’ve heard that Mr. Bay wasn’t keen on adding them but his backers insisted.  He should have stuck with his intuition.  One nice side effect, though, is that the technical requirements of 3D forced Mr. Bay to use wider shots than is his wont.  Unlike earlier Transformer movies, in this one you can actually see the Transformers.  It makes a difference and makes them a least little more relatable.

Is this a good movie?  Yes, for certain values of the word “good”.  It’s a decent summer blockbuster; in fact, it might be the quintessential one.  If what you’re looking for is soggy-cardboard thin plot just about barely holding together a string of explosions and fights, you will not be disappointed.  If you want something reaching the higher reasoning centers of your cerebrum, this won’t be it.

I picked up Perdido Street Station because I was looking for a good steampunk novel, especially after Dreadnought, and the reviews were strong. This book was supposed to b amazing, sweeping, and alluring – a detaile new world to explore. After finishing it, I felt the praise was overblown. The world is complex and involved, but the steampunk setting was wildly inconsistent. Though the book starts as hardcore steampunk, it eventually decomposes into low fantasy – all the trappings of industrial magic but no clear concept of what that would mean. Though much of the setting is explicit in using steam, there are “aetheric flows” and, for some reason, literally miles of insulated cabling in a society that seems to have very little electricity. There are zepplins, of course, and steam-driven automatons. But it all seems, well, lazy.

The story is OK but hardly epic. Its initiation and its resolution both depend on astonishing coincidence, of the sort that sinks high school writing. The characters have moments of depth and substance but never really take off. Character threads start and trail off to no resolution. The first part of the book is quite slow. The middle third is well-done and sets up situations and themes that offer much promise. Once the actual action starts, though, it all goes out the window and the plot lurches to its frenetic end a complete mess.

My overriding impressions is that China Meiville bit off way more than he coukd chew, and left us with the partly-masticated glop that was left over.

4. The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned. But neither the United States nor any State shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or any claim for the loss or emancipation of any slave; but all such debts, obligations and claims shall be held illegal and void.

That last bit is not particularly relevant right now.  But the first part (in bold) — it is said — could be.  President Obama could cite that portion of the 14th Amendment and direct the agencies of the United States Government to issue debt pursuant to the existing budget, regardless of whether that debt exceeds the amount authorized under the debt ceiling.  Voila! Crisis averted!  (See, for example, this piece by Jonathan Zasloff in the Washington Monthly.)

This 14th Amendment option is decisive, elegant — and completely irrelevant.

As appealing as it is to dream that the President can resolve this issue with a stroke of the pen, it’s a fantasy or, better, a delusion.  The Constitutional argument may seem reasonable but it’s certainly no slam dunk: reasonable legal minds can differ on its validity.  Whether or not it ever gets litigated before the Supreme Court, it would be argued in the public square forever.  And that’s the clincher: The fact that it would be hotly contested — and not just by reflexive anti-Obamites — renders it pointless.

Why?  Because debate over the debt limit is a crisis for one reason only: It’s pointing up the increasing dysfunction of the American political process.  A default by any debtor is bad for creditors and, eventually, for the debtor as well, as he/she will have to pay a higher interest rate to compensate investors for their lack of confidence in his/her ability to repay.  But a default by the US is infinitely worse.  No one is seriously worried that the US can’t repay its debt.  The market is worried that the US won’t repay it — that our political process has become so broken that we would rather endure a deadlock that cripples our economy than compromise on any principle.  We face not economic bankruptcy but political bankruptcy — a sense that our historic form of government is unequal to the problems we face.

With that in mind, it clearly doesn’t matter if the President waves a magic wand, or a magic signing pen, and declares the debt ceiling obviated.  The mere fact that he would need to do so would indicate that the political process has collapsed — that partisan rancor and madness have overtaken deliberative government.  The market would be further dismayed by the all-too-certain immediate explosion of anger and acrimony — the calls for impeachment, the impassioned bewailing on FOX News, etc.  Many investors might well refuse to lend, not knowing the ultimate legal status of debt incurred under this executive action.

A failure to raise the debt ceiling — no matter how artfully the President and the Treasury dance around it — confirms our transformation into a banana republic.  The market will not look kindly on that.  History, I suspect, will be even harsher.

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