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     Jerry Moore (Admin) Board Administrator Username: Admin Post Number: 30438 Registered: 01-2000  Rating: N/A |
A Submarine Captain On The Power Of Leadership Language Posted by Michael Keany / School Leadership 2.0 July 24, 2012 BY L. DAVID MARQUET | 07-23-2012 | From Turn the Ship Around!: How to Create Leadership at Every Level Captain David Marquet was supposed to command another submarine but was vectored to the USS Santa Fe at the last minute. The Santa Fe was in the hurt locker: morale was low, performance was low, retention was at the bottom of the fleet. The subsequent journey caused him to rethink everything about leadership he'd been taught. This excerpt is part of that story. "Conn, maneuvering, reactor scram!" The reactor had just shut down. The engineer inserted the shutdown deliberately, testing his department's ability to find and repair a simulated fault. The Officer of the Deck was my senior department head, Lieutenant Commander Bill Greene, and he was doing all the right things. We had shifted propulsion from the main engines to an auxiliary electric motor, the EPM, to turn the propeller. The EPM can only power the ship at low speed and draws down the battery. The ship was coming shallow in order to use its diesel engine to provide electrical power and keep the battery charged until the reactor was restarted. During the long troubleshooting period while the nuclear electronics technicians were isolating the fault, I started to get bored. I fiddled with my flashlight, turning it on and off. Things were going too smoothly. I couldn't let the crew think their new captain was easy! I nudged Bill and suggested we increase speed from "ahead 1/3" to "ahead 2/3" on the EPM to give the nuclear-trained enlisted men a sense of urgency. This would significantly increase the rate of battery discharge and put pressure on the troubleshooters to find and correct the fault quickly. At "ahead 2/3," there is a near continuous click-click-click on the battery amp-hour meter. An audible reminder that time is running out. "Ahead 2/3," he ordered. Nothing happened. The helmsman should have reached over and rung up ahead 2/3. Instead, I could see him squirming in his chair. No one said anything and several awkward seconds passed. Noting that the order hadn't been carried out, I asked the helmsman what was going on. He was facing his panel but reported over his shoulder, "Captain, there is no ahead 2/3 on the EPM!" I had made a mistake. I'd been shifted to command Santa Fe at the last minute and unlike every other submarine I'd been on, there was only a 1/3 on the EPM. I applauded the helmsman and grabbed Bill, the officer on deck--the OOD. In the corner of the control room, I asked him if he knew there was no ahead 2/3 on the EPM. "Yes, Captain, I did." "Well, why did you order it?" I asked, astounded. "Because you told me to." He was being perfectly honest. By giving that order, I took the crew right back to the top-down command and control leadership model. That my most senior, experienced OOD would repeat it was a giant wake-up call about the perils of that model for something as complicated as a submarine. What happens when the leader is wrong in a top-down culture? Everyone goes over the cliff. I vowed henceforth never to give an order, any order. Instead, subordinates would say "I intend to…." Mechanism: Use "I intend to . . ." to turn passive followers into active leaders Although it may seem like a minor trick of language, we found "I intend to…" profoundly shifted ownership of the plan to the officers. "I intend to . . ." didn't take long to catch on. The officers and crew loved it. A year later, I was standing on the bridge of the Santa Fe with Dr. Stephen Covey. He'd heard what we were doing and was interested in riding a submarine. By this point, the crew had fully embraced our initiatives for control, and "I intend to . . ." was prominently visible. Throughout the day the officers approached me with "I intend to." "Captain, I intend to submerge the ship. We are in water we own, water depth has been checked and is 400 feet, all men are below, the ship is rigged for dive, and I've certified my watch team." I'd reply "Very well" and off we'd go. The Power of Words The key to your team becoming more proactive rests in the language subordinates and superiors use. Here is a short list of "disempowered phrases" that passive followers use: Request permission to . . . I would like to . . . What should I do about . . . Do you think we should . . . Could we . . . Here is a short list of "empowered phrases" that active doers use: I intend to . . . I plan on . . . I will . . . We will . . . Later, I heard from a friend of mine who had taught future submarine commanders how frustrated he was by the inability of too many officers to make decisions at the command level. He said that these officers "came from good ships" but would become paralyzed when it came to tough decision making. I took issue with his categorizing them as "good ships." By using that term, he meant ships that didn't have problems—at least that we knew about. But this had obviously been accomplished using a top-down, leader-follower structure where the captain made the decisions. Had those officers practiced "I intend to…" when they were second-in-command, they would have been practiced in decision making. This shows the degree to which we reward personality-centered leadership structures and accept the limitations. These may have been good ships, in that they avoided problems, but it certainly was not good leadership. 
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| Jerry Moore (Admin) Board Administrator Username: Admin Post Number: 30051 Registered: 01-2000 Rating: N/A |
Fair Isn't Always Equal Amazon undated Differentiated instruction is a nice idea, but what happens when it comes to assessing and grading students? What's both fair and leads to real student learning? Fair Isn't Always Equal answers that question and much more. Rick Wormeli offers the latest research and common sense thinking that teachers and administrators seek when it comes to assessment and grading in differentiated classes. Filled with real examples and “gray” areas that middle and high school educators will easily recognize, Rick tackles important and sometimes controversial assessment and grading issues constructively. The book covers high-level concepts, ranging from “rationale for differentiating assessment and grading” to “understanding mastery” as well as the nitty-gritty details of grading and assessment, such as: * whether to incorporate effort, attendance, and behavior into academic grades; * whether to grade homework; * setting up grade books and report cards to reflect differentiated practices; * principles of successful assessment; * how to create useful and fair test questions, including how to grade such prompts efficiently; * whether to allow students to re-do assessments for full credit. This thorough and practical guide also includes a special section for teacher leaders that explores ways to support colleagues as they move toward successful assessment and grading practices for differentiated classrooms.
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| Jerry Moore (Admin) Board Administrator Username: Admin Post Number: 30018 Registered: 01-2000 Rating: N/A |
Fiske on Stewart, A World-Class Education By Catherine A. Cardno / BookMarks blog April 26, 2012 Today's guest post, written for BookMarks by Edward B. Fiske, is a review of Vivien Stewart's A World-Class Education: Learning from International Models of Excellence and Innovation (ASCD, 2012). Delving into Vivien Stewart's new book, A World-Class Education: Learning from International Models of Excellence and Innovation, is, to indulge a metaphor from Chinese cuisine, a simultaneously sweet and sour experience. The savory part comes from the fact that no one is better qualified than Stewart to discuss what the United States has to learn from other countries with successful school systems, and she does so clearly and persuasively. The sour taste emerges as it begins to dawn on you that most reform-minded educational policymakers in the United States are not only oblivious to most of these lessons but are, in fact, moving in exactly the wrong direction. Stewart, who is the senior education adviser at the Asia Society, knows her subject well. She has traveled the globe and written with authority on the characteristics of successful school systems in both Western and Asian cultures. In this book, she introduces us to the usual high-performing suspects: schools in Singapore, Canada (Alberta and Ontario), Finland, China, and Australia. In each case, she talks about how and why the strong, effective system evolved in the particular culture, what makes it successful, and what insights it might hold for U.S. policymakers. Stewart is no Panglossian. There are, she writes, "no quick fixes in education" or, for that matter, countries that stand as ideal models for the United States. She is frank to discuss the challenges that each of these countries are facing—high dropout rates in Ontario, a growing immigrant population in Finland, an oppressive college examination system in China—and why some of these challenges may limit their relevance as lessons for the United States. Nevertheless, Stewart comes up with a compelling list of characteristics that run through each and every one of these countries, including ambitious standards, strong early childhood and preschool programs, curricular coherence, alignment of goals and practices, and high quality teachers who are treated as professionals and respond accordingly. Above all, she says, policymakers and leaders of the successful school systems around the world start with "a sense of moral purpose about the need to deal with inequities and promote a more just society." Step back from Stewart's observations, and you realize that, far from moving to emulate the features of successful schools in other countries, the current thrust of school "reform" in the United States is moving in opposite directions. None of these countries draw their ideas from the corporate world or suffer from the delusion that successful hedge fund managers intuitively understand what's good for education. None of them views choice and competition as elixirs, rely on top-down management, worship standardized tests, or define the public interest in education as the sum of private benefits. Above all, none of them believes that the way to improve teacher performance is through shame and humiliation. These successful systems prefer quaint concepts like "trust" and "professional." In one revealing passage, Stewart recalls visiting a school in Finland in 2009 as part of a delegation of American chief state school officers and encountering a group of Chinese educators who were there to observe how the Finns were implementing cooperative education—a practice that they first learned about from the United States. Yes, as Stewart emphasizes a number of times in this volume, there was a time when Americans where known around the world as educational innovators. Think individualized learning, special education, and even the research that undergirds Singapore math. The global marketplace of ideas about school improvement can and should work both ways. While leaders of other successful school systems are frank to admit that they want to learn from us, the "benchmarking" bug does not seem to have infected the ideologically driven national- and state-level policymakers and leaders of private foundations who are currently driving the school reform agenda in the United States. Maybe if they read this insightful book, it might dawn on them that their ideas are out of sync with those of just about every other successful educational system, East and West. Edward B. Fiske, a former education editor of the New York Times and author of the Fiske Guide to Colleges series, is currently working on a study of gender equality in developing countries for UNESCO.
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| Jerry Moore (Admin) Board Administrator Username: Admin Post Number: 26197 Registered: 01-2000 Rating: N/A |
-- Hating 'Superman': Teachers unions are on the moral defensive, A WALL STREET JOURNAL Editorial, October 5, 2010.
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| Jerry Moore (Admin) Board Administrator Username: Admin Post Number: 26045 Registered: 01-2000 Rating: N/A |
Are these the top education policy books of the decade? Mike Petrilli / Flypaper blog August 31, 2010 Education Next, where I’m an executive editor, is running an online poll to determine the top books of the past decade. (We’re celebrating our tenth anniversary this coming winter.) Here are the 41 nominees in chronological order; did we leave anything important out? 1. Richard D. Kahlenberg. All Together Now: Creating Middle-Class Schools Through Public School Choice. (Brookings Institution Press, 2001) 2. Terry M. Moe. Schools, Vouchers, and the American Public. (Brookings Institution Press, 2001) 3. William G. Howell and Paul E. Peterson. The Education Gap: Vouchers And Urban Schools. (Brookings Institution Press, 2002) 4. Deborah Meier. In Schools We Trust: Creating Communities of Learning in an Era of Testing and Standardization. (Beacon Press, 2002) 5. William G. Ouchi. Making Schools Work: A Revolutionary Plan to Get Your Children the Education They Need. (Simon & Schuster, 2003) 6. Abigail Thernstrom. No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning (Simon & Schuster, 2003) 7. Richard Elmore. School Reform From The Inside Out: Policy, Practice and Performance. (Harvard Education Press, 2004) 8. Frederick M. Hess. Common Sense School Reform. (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) 9. Jay P. Greene. Education Myths: What Special Interest Groups Want You to Believe About Our Schools–And Why It Isn’t So. (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc, 2005) 10. Joanne Jacobs, Our School: The Inspiring Story of Two Teachers, One Big Idea, and the School That Beat the Odds. (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) 11. Joe Williams, Cheating Our Kids: How Politics and Greed Ruin Education. (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) 12. E. D. Hirsch. The Knowledge Deficit: Closing the Shocking Education Gap for American Children. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2006) 13. Alfie Kohn. The Homework Myth. (Da Capo Press, 2006) 14. Karin Chenoweth. “It’s Being Done”: Academic Success in Unexpected Schools. (Harvard Education Press, 2007) 15. Gareth Davies. See Government Grow: Education Politics from Johnson to Reagan. (University Press of Kansas, 2007) 16. Richard D. Kahlenberg. Tough Liberal: Albert Shanker and the Battles Over Schools, Unions, Race, and Democracy. (Columbia University Press, 2007) 17. Linda Perlstein. Tested: One American School Struggles to Make the Grade. (Henry Holt, 2007) 18. Clayton Christensen, Curtis W. Johnson, Michael B. Horn. Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns. (McGraw-Hill, 2008) 19. Chester E. Finn Jr. Troublemaker: A Personal History of School Reform since Sputnik. (Princeton University Press, 2008) 20. Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz. The Race between Education and Technology (Belknap Press, 2008) 21. Jeffrey R. Henig. Spin Cycle: How Research Is Used in Policy Debates: The Case of Charter Schools. (Russell Sage Foundation Publications, 2008) 22. Daniel Koretz. Measuring Up: What Educational Testing Really Tells Us. (Harvard University Press, 2008) 23. Charles Murray. Real Education: Four Simple Truths for Bringing America’s Schools Back to Reality. (Three Rivers Press, 2008) 24. Charles M. Payne. So Much Reform, So Little Change: The Persistence of Failure in Urban Schools. (Harvard Education Press, 2008) 25. Paul Tough. Whatever It Takes: Geoffrey Canada’s Quest to Change Harlem and America. (Mariner Books, 2008) 26. Tony Wagner. The Global Achievement Gap (Basic Books, 2008) 27. David Whitman. Sweating the Small Stuff (Thomas B. Fordham Institute, 2008) 28. David K. Cohen and Susan L. Moffitt. The Ordeal of Equality: Did Federal Regulation Fix the Schools? (Harvard University Press, 2009) 29. Linda Darling-Hammond. The Flat World and Education: How America’s Commitment to Equity Will Determine Our Future. (Teachers College Press, 2009) 30. Gerald Grant. Hope and Despair in the American City: Why There Are No Bad Schools in Raleigh (Harvard University Press, 2009) 31. Eric A. Hanushek, Alfred A. Lindseth. Schoolhouses, Courthouses, and Statehouses: Solving the Funding-Achievement Puzzle in America’s Public Schools (Princeton University Press, 2009) 32. Jay Mathews. Work Hard. Be Nice.: How Two Inspired Teachers Created the Most Promising Schools in America. (Algonquin Books, 2009) 33. Terry Moe and John Chubb. Liberating Learning: Technology, Politics, and the Future of American Education. (Jossey-Bass, 2009) 34. James Tooley. The Beautiful Tree: A Personal Journey Into How the World’s Poorest People Are Educating Themselves. (Cato Institute, 2009) 35. Daniel T. Willingham. Why Don’t Students Like School: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom. (Jossey-Bass, 2009) 36. Anthony S. Bryk et. al. Organizing Schools for Improvement: Lessons from Chicago. (University Of Chicago Press, 2010) 37. Frederick M. Hess. Education Unbound: The Promise and Practice of Greenfield Schooling. (Association for Supervision & Curriculum Development, 2010) 38. Paul T. Hill. Learning as We Go: Why School Choice is Worth the Wait. (Hoover Institution Press, 2010) 39. Paul E. Peterson. Saving Schools: From Horace Mann to Virtual Learning. (Harvard University Press, 2010) 40. Diane Ravitch. The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education. (Basic Books, 2010) 41. Marguerite Roza. Educational Economics (Urban Institute Press, 2010)
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| Jerry Moore (Admin) Board Administrator Username: Admin Post Number: 25152 Registered: 01-2000 Rating: N/A |
"Our school system is filled with good people but it's a relic of the 1940s." --Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty, St. Paul (MN) Star Tribune: School system 'a relic,' gov says, April 6, 2010.  We need schools for The 21st Century Student now.
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| Jerry Moore (Admin) Board Administrator Username: Admin Post Number: 24838 Registered: 01-2000 Rating: N/A |
Why you should[n't] read Diane Ravitch's new book By Valerie Strauss / Washington Post: The Answer Sheet blog February 26, 2010 Among the many important lessons in Diane Ravitch’s new book, “The Death and Life of the Great American School System,” this one keeps knocking about in my head: “Reformers imagine that it is easy to create a successful school, but it is not. They imagine that the lessons of a successful school are obvious and can be easily transferred to other schools, just as one might take an industrial process or a new piece of machinery and install it in a new plant without error. But a school is successful for many reasons, including the personalities of its leader and teachers; the social interactions among them; the culture of the school; the students and their families; the way the school implements policies and programs dictated by the district, the state and the federal government; the quality of the school’s curriculum and instruction; the resources of the school and the community; and many other factors. When a school is successful, it is hard to know which factor was most important or if it was a combination of factors.” If you were interested in producing more food to fight world hunger, would you read a book about how to farm more productively with horses? Wouldn't you rather read a book about crop genetics? You can't feed 6.8 billion people farming with horses and you can't educate 55 million American kids using 18th century technology. God, our schools were cutting edge when they were created, but history, tradition, statutes, regulations, contracts and more have frozen them in time. Glaciers are melting faster than our schools are changing and Diane's book is an anachronism--solidly entrenched in teacher-centered classroom instruction. What a waste of paper! We need schools for The 21st Century Student, but as long as the educated elite keep talking classrooms, we're not going to get them. Pathetic.
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| Jerry Moore (Admin) Board Administrator Username: Admin Post Number: 24794 Registered: 01-2000 Rating: N/A |
EIA Quote of the Week Education Intelligence Agency Communiqué Feb. 16, 2010 "Now is not the time to be handing out tax breaks to a small number of large corporations - everybody must be paying their fair share." - David Sanchez, president of the California Teachers Association, a tax-exempt organization. (February 5 CTA press release)
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| Jerry Moore (Admin) Board Administrator Username: Admin Post Number: 24540 Registered: 01-2000 Rating: N/A |
The EIA Public Education Quote of the Decade Mike Antonucci / Intercepts blog January 4th, 2010 It takes a special statement to become the EIA Communiqué Quote of the Week, and a singular one to be included as one of the Quotes of the Year. So you can imagine how difficult it was to choose the Quotes of the Decade. I found it impossible to chop it down to 10, so I’ve listed the 17 most memorable quotes of the 2000s. But for an unmatched combination of hyperbole, metaphor and faulty history, there can be only one Public Education Quote of the Decade: The struggle in which we are engaged is as vital to our future today as was the outcome of the Civil War to our nation in 1860 (sic). The goal of these locusts is to impose their will on state after state until they have completely demolished government as we know it. There is a time for every generation to rise to the call – when the very existence of our nation, our state, our values, our culture and our public schools are threatened with extinction. - Nebraska State Education Association Executive Director Jim Griess on Initiative 423, a ballot measure that would have limited state government spending to previous years’ amounts, with allowed increases for inflation and population growth. (October 2006 The NSEA Voice)
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| Jerry Moore (Admin) Board Administrator Username: Admin Post Number: 24433 Registered: 01-2000 Rating: N/A |
Never going to happen? Scott McLeod / Dangerously Irrelevant blog December 11, 2009 True statement by a teacher (said with all sincerity) in one of my workshops this semester: We’re so far behind our students. How do we catch up and move past them so that we can then teach them things they don’t know? How scary is that?
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| Jerry Moore (Admin) Board Administrator Username: Admin Post Number: 23975 Registered: 01-2000 Rating: N/A |
The Man Who Defused the 'Population Bomb' One of America's greatest heroes remains little known in his home country. By GREGG EASTERBROOK / WALL STREET JOURNAL SEPTEMBER 16, 2009 Norman Borlaug arguably the greatest American of the 20th century died late Saturday after 95 richly accomplished years. The very personification of human goodness, Borlaug saved more lives than anyone who has ever lived. He was America's Albert Schweitzer: a brilliant man who forsook privilege and riches in order to help the dispossessed of distant lands. That this great man and benefactor to humanity died little-known in his own country speaks volumes about the superficiality of modern American culture. Born in 1914 in rural Cresco, Iowa, where he was educated in a one-room schoolhouse, Borlaug won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for his work ending the India-Pakistan food shortage of the mid-1960s. He spent most of his life in impoverished nations, patiently teaching poor farmers in India, Mexico, South America, Africa and elsewhere the Green Revolution agricultural techniques that have prevented the global famines widely predicted when the world population began to skyrocket following World War II. In 1999, the Atlantic Monthly estimated that Borlaug's efforts combined with those of the many developing-world agriculture-extension agents he trained and the crop-research facilities he founded in poor nations saved the lives of one billion human beings. As a young agronomist, Borlaug helped develop some of the principles of Green Revolution agriculture on which the world now relies including hybrid crops selectively bred for vigor, and "shuttle breeding," a technique for accelerating the movement of disease immunity between strains of crops. He also helped develop cereals that were insensitive to the number of hours of light in a day, and could therefore be grown in many climates. Green Revolution techniques caused both reliable harvests, and spectacular output. From the Civil War through the Dust Bowl, the typical American farm produced about 24 bushels of corn per acre; by 2006, the figure was about 155 bushels per acre. Hoping to spread high-yield agriculture to the world's poor, in 1943 Borlaug moved to rural Mexico to establish an agricultural research station, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. Borlaug's little research station became the International Maize and Wheat Center, known by its Spanish abbreviation CIMMYT, that is now one of the globe's most important agricultural study facilities. At CIMMYT, Borlaug developed the high-yield, low-pesticide "dwarf" wheat upon which a substantial portion of the world's population now depends for sustenance. In 1950, as Borlaug began his work in earnest, the world produced 692 million tons of grain for 2.2 billion people. By 1992, with Borlaug's concepts common, production was 1.9 billion tons of grain for 5.6 billion men and women: 2.8 times the food for 2.2 times the people. Global grain yields more than doubled during the period, from half a ton per acre to 1.1 tons; yields of rice and other foodstuffs improved similarly. Hunger declined in sync: From 1965 to 2005, global per capita food consumption rose to 2,798 calories daily from 2,063, with most of the increase in developing nations. In 2006, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization declared that malnutrition stands "at the lowest level in human history," despite the global population having trebled in a single century. In the mid-1960s, India and Pakistan were exceptions to the trend toward more efficient food production; subsistence cultivation of rice remained the rule, and famine struck. In 1965, Borlaug arranged for a convoy of 35 trucks to carry high-yield seeds from CIMMYT to a Los Angeles dock for shipment to India and Pakistan. He and a coterie of Mexican assistants accompanied the seeds. They arrived to discover that war had broken out between the two nations. Sometimes working within sight of artillery flashes, Borlaug and his assistants sowed the Subcontinent's first crop of high-yield grain. Paul Ehrlich gained celebrity for his 1968 book "The Population Bomb," in which he claimed that global starvation was inevitable for the 1970s and it was "a fantasy" that India would "ever" feed itself. Instead, within three years of Borlaug's arrival, Pakistan was self-sufficient in wheat production; within six years, India was self-sufficient in the production of all cereals. After his triumph in India and Pakistan and his Nobel Peace Prize, Borlaug turned to raising crop yields in other poor nations especially in Africa, the one place in the world where population is rising faster than farm production and the last outpost of subsistence agriculture. At that point, Borlaug became the target of critics who denounced him because Green Revolution farming requires some pesticide and lots of fertilizer. Trendy environmentalism was catching on, and affluent environmentalists began to say it was "inappropriate" for Africans to have tractors or use modern farming techniques. Borlaug told me a decade ago that most Western environmentalists "have never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for 50 years, they'd be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists in wealthy nations were trying to deny them these things." Environmentalist criticism of Borlaug and his work was puzzling on two fronts. First, absent high-yield agriculture, the world would by now be deforested. The 1950 global grain output of 692 million tons and the 2006 output of 2.3 billion tons came from about the same number of acres three times as much food using little additional land. "Without high-yield agriculture," Borlaug said, "increases in food output would have been realized through drastic expansion of acres under cultivation, losses of pristine land a hundred times greater than all losses to urban and suburban expansion." Environmentalist criticism was doubly puzzling because in almost every developing nation where high-yield agriculture has been introduced, population growth has slowed as education becomes more important to family success than muscle power. In the late 1980s, when even the World Bank cut funding for developing-world agricultural improvement, Borlaug turned for support to Ryoichi Sasakawa, a maverick Japanese industrialist. Sasakawa funded his high-yield programs in a few African nations and, predictably, the programs succeeded. The final triumph of Borlaug's life came three years ago when the Rockefeller Foundation, in conjunction with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, announced a major expansion of high-yield agriculture throughout Africa. As he approached his 90s, Borlaug "retired" to teaching agronomy at Texas A&M, where he urged students to live in the developing world and serve the poor. Often it is said America lacks heroes who can provide constructive examples to the young. Here was such a hero. Yet though streets and buildings are named for Norman Borlaug throughout the developing world, most Americans don't even know his name. Mr. Easterbrook is a contributing editor of the Atlantic and author of the forthcoming "Sonic Boom," due out by Random House in January 2010.
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| Jerry Moore (Admin) Board Administrator Username: Admin Post Number: 23504 Registered: 01-2000 Rating: N/A |
Bill Moyers' interview of W.S. Merwin Bill Moyers Journal June 26, 2009 Bill Moyers did an excellent interview of American poet W. S. Merwin, during which Merwin read "The Nomad Flute." You that sang to me once sing to me now let me hear your long lifted note survive with me the star is fading I can think farther than that but I forget do you hear me do you still hear me does your air remember you o breath of morning night song morning song I have with me all that I do not know I have lost none of it but I know better now than to ask you where you learned that music where any of it came from once there were lions in China I will listen until the flute stops and the light is old again "I have with me all that I do not know. I have lost none of it." What great insight! When you hear someone say something that you question, simply say, "I see you have lost none of all you do not know," or more simply, "X has lost none of all s/he does not know." This works especially well for NY state senators. There's more great insight from Merwin, e.g., "From what we cannot hold, the stars are made." Why not spend a few minutes with Moyers and Merwin?
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| Jerry Moore (Admin) Board Administrator Username: Admin Post Number: 23008 Registered: 01-2000 Rating: N/A |
Many are unaware that NY public employees also collect Social Security benefits, when they become eligible, on top of their pensions. Also, since pensions are state income tax free for public employees, many make more money retiring at age 55 than they could if they kept working. Actually, many do keep working and drawing their pensions at the same time, which is the new top-step on the salary schedule--pension plus salary. 
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| Jerry Moore (Admin) Board Administrator Username: Admin Post Number: 22567 Registered: 01-2000 Rating: N/A |
Bill Moyers' interview of David Simon Bill Moyers Journal 4.17.09 David Simon is "[t]he executive producer of HBO's critically-acclaimed show THE WIRE," the story of "the America that got left behind." The entire interview is worth watching or reading. Here are my favorite quotes. We don't need ten or 15 percent of our population. And certainly the ones that are undereducated, that have been ill served by the inner city school system, that have been unprepared for the technocracy of the modern economy. We pretend to need them. We pretend to educate the kids. We pretend that we're actually including them in the American ideal, but we're not. And they're not foolish. They get it.
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