Extra Ordinary Ideas

Writing Relief

Fantastic: It is apparently not too early to use the trusty old back-to-school newshook for columns. As long as you accompany it with some self-conscious diffidence, that is.

Noumenal Counterpart

The Goddess of Ice and Hope. You are a creative
wonder. Always calm and collected, you hold the
awe of many people and you are exceptionally
logical. You are an inspirational beauty.


Which goddess are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

So says Quizilla, anyway. Man, I need to rewrite that Ohio piece.

Aaaargh!

Tom Shurford reports that the average combined verbal/quant GRE score of an applicant for graduate school in Education Administration is 949 (429 verbal [youch!], 520 quantitative). This was lower than every field for which data was collected except for Home Economics, Social Work, Counseling and Special Education.

Some might suggest that this means we have a cultural problem (we don't respect teaching enough) or a compensation problem (we don't pay educators enough). I rather think this merely suggests that education administration, rather like home economics, isn't a real bl**dy discipline, and one probably shouldn't be able to get a master's degree in it.

This is, of course, coming from someone who studies "public policy," which isn't a real discipline either. But hey, we need to at least develop some basic competence in economics, political science and moral philosophy to do our jobs well, and the demand for graduates of policy programs is at least somewhat market driven.

Degrees in education administration, on the other hand, exist primarily because union pay scales mandate substantial pay premiums for educators possessed of graduate degrees even when these degrees are utterly useless. Demanding and compensating teachers who can scrape through, say a master's in math would yield far better results. But current union activists can't allow that. As you can see, they can't get into harder programs, and must therefore stymie changes that'd pull in a sharper crop of youngsters.

Vouching for Milwaukee

Click here to read my piece in the American Spectator today about how Milwaukee's voucher students are all right, recent negative news coverage notwithstanding.

Professor Excision

Does anyone know a good surgeon for this procedure? Professor Korsgaard is inside my head. I had a terrible dream about her off and on all last night. I needed to take her exam immediately and I hadn't studied for it. I couldn't remember the material in much detail. I was looking for my copy of Nagel's The Possibility of Altruism to take into the test (not realistic as the exams are closed book) but couldn't find it anywhere. The exam was due by midnight and I was blowing the deadline. I kept waking up and, wide awake, thinking things like, "Well should I get up now and try to finish that exam?"

ADDENDUM:
"A metaphysician is a man who goes into a dark cellar at midnight without a light looking for a black cat that is not there."
-attributed to Baron Bowen of Colwood

Failure Is The Condiment That Gives Success Its Flavor

I wonder what Turman Capote would have thought of a British teachers union proposal to replace the word "failure" with "deferred success."

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Breakthrough for Teenage Nerds

According to the Miami Herald, high school students can now take PE online.