09:05 am - Professional sports as opiate of the masses
While watching a baseball game a few weeks ago, I wondered why people have affiliations with sports teams. What makes them care so much about the fortunes of an organization from which they receive no tangible benefit? More surprisingly, why is it that so many people care more about the progress of the sports teams they follow than they do about things that directly affect them in significant ways, like local and national politics or environmental dangers to their health and well-being? I have a friend who eschews the nightly news in favour of ESPN. Newspapers have long known that they could finance the rest of the paper by selling the sports section. Why is this?
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surprised
Current Music: Heart Cooks Brain - Modest Mouse
08:25 pm - Books everywhere!
The East Palo Alto Charter School was formed nearly a decade ago with the intent of ensuring that kids in the educational backwater of EPA would have a chance at being accepted to and graduating from college. Their library has held the same old books for a long time but a few months ago they were able to procure a ton of new books through a fundraiser. Today afternoon my Teamworks crew wrapped these books up in protective transparent plastic covers and labelled them by reading-level with colour-coded stickers. When we were done the principal talked to us about the successes the school has enjoyed as well as the challenges it faces.
Until now it has been a K-8 but last year the school applied to be a K-12 so that it could finally realize its dream of seeing kids graduate and go on to college. So far they have demonstrated significant success with testing scores about a third higher than the district average, thanks largely in part to an approach of consistently measuring and analysing the results of their techniques in order to improve them. A passionate and driven staff unhampered by union restrictions hasn't hurt them either. But sometimes too much success sparks an unhealthy reaction. The district school board denied their application to expand into a high-school on a technicality last year, although EPA currently lacks so much as a single high-school. Apparently there were certain misunderstandings that lead some board members to believe that expanding EPACS would deprive the other K-8s of funding.
But they have not given up on the dream and are determined to convince the board next month that making EPA home to a local high-school will be a win-win move.
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energetic
Current Music: One Man Army - Our Lady Peace
09:25 pm - Of apostrophes and injustice...
On Friday morning I visited the DMV to apply for California state ID. It's almost as useful as a driver license but doesn't permit you to drive. However, they don't make you pass a test of skill to get it. Anyway, I'd made an appointment via the Web a couple of weeks ago and wanted to confirm it before I left home in the morning so I tried looking my appointment up on the Web by providing my full name and phone number but the system insisted that it couldn't find me. Frustrated, I called them and spoke to customer service rep. She asked me for my last name so I spelt it out for her but she stumbled after the 1st letter, having apparently never heard of an apostrophe before! This did not fill me with much confidence in the competence of DMV staff. After informing me that the DMV "didn't use apostrophes" she tried to look me up by last name (minus the apostrophe) and phone number but was unable to find me. I wasn't surprised. I told her that my appointment should be for 9 am that day and asked her to look it up by the time slot. After a few moments she discovered that my last name had been recorded by the system as simply "D", dropping the apostrophe and everything that followed! I'm certainly unimpressed with the degree of care taken by the DMV to handle such exceptional cases in their online data-processing code.
Every year Stanford puts on a production of the Vagina Monologues to raise money for, among other things, the "comfort women" who were forced to serve as sex slaves under inhumane conditions by the Japanese government during WW2 and continue to be denied so much as an apology for this horrible mistreatment by the current government of Japan. I'd heard about the deplorable treatment meted out to Canadians of Japanese descent during the war by the Canadian government but I see now that both sides have their respective skeletons. But the Canadian government eventually did issue a formal apology for their misdeeds so there may be hope yet that their Japanese counterparts will come around too. The monologues were both educational and entertaining for the most part although they did betray glimmers of misandry at a few points.
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discontent
Current Music: Savage Garden - Hold Me