Let me just say how tickled I am that Martin Scorcese finally won an Oscar. I have not yet seen The Departed (it’s next in my Netflix queue), so I can’t comment on whether this is the role he should have finally won for, but as a movie buff, I’ll take it. The Last Temptation of Christ and Goodfellas are two of my all time favorite films, and it’s good to see a man with such a love and respect for the film industry finally be recognized as he should be.
Monthly Archive for February, 2007
This commentary from Wired News columnist Regina Lynn caught my attention (See also this commentary from Mark Rasch of Security Focus). Basically, a substitute teacher from Connecticut is going to jail for 40 years because she was surfing the net on a classroom computer, and thanks to an attack of spyware, there were hardcore porn popups, and some of the kids saw them because their parents heard about it and demanded swift and terrible retrobution.
I’ll get to my main point in a second, but let’s start with this basic thought. The woman in question was a substitute teacher. In order to get on the computer in question, she had to use someone elses credentials, because substitutes were not given usernames or passwords to log onto the computers. While most spyware gets onto computers without any user interaction, you usually have to go to a website that will download it onto your computer (so-called drive-by spyware). How do we know that the other teacher who logged her onto the computer wasn’t visiting inappropriate websites that could have put that spyware on the computer? You would think people would know better, but from working in the IT field for a while now, people are still dumb enough to surf to inappropriate sites with their work computers, even though internet usage is monitored in most places. If that was the case, this woman has suffered an even bigger injustice for the fact that it wasn’t even her fault the popups were on there in the first place.
My main point, however, is this. We live in a society that is so sex-phobic and so consumed with “protecting the children” (when I hear that phrase, I always think of Helen Lovejoy from The Simpsons) that we make any sort of incident involving sex and children into this massive black-and-white, right-and-wrong scandal that we fail to see the reality of things clearly. In this case, this poor woman might have broken the letter of the law, but not the spirit of it. Yes, the kids accidentally saw porn, but both commentaries make note of statistics that show that over 40% of kids accidentally see porn at some point. It happens. This woman may have been dumb for surfing personal stuff in the classroom, but she shouldn’t be going to jail for 40 years because of some popups. By all accounts, she appears to have tried to shield the children from the graphic content, although it would have been easier to just shut down the comptuer and call it a day. Administrators didn’t seem to think it was an issue, it was only a small set of parents (isn’t it always?) that turned this into a capital case that their children were irrevicably ruined by seeing this stuff for a minute or two.
Beyond all of this, cases like this take time and resources from what these laws are meant to protect against. While authorities ran around like chickens sans heads convicting a woman who is guilty of little more than checking her email when she shouldn’t have, there are thousands of real internet preditors who are doing their best to persuade impressionable kids to meet them and really, really fuck up their lives. Where are the priorities, people?
By the way, this isn’t just happening to teachers. This young man was on his way to being a college football star when the same letter of the law came and threw him in jail mercilessly. In his case, even the prosecutor and the victim think that he shouldn’t be in jail.
I would hope that at some point, we could have an honest and fruitful debate about these sorts of cases and why the spirit of the law needs to prevail. We have examples of people who did some dumb stuff and are now serving (or about to serve) major time because some people can’t realize that life isn’t always black-or-white
Let me just say that it’s crap like this that kept me far, far away from the Greek system when I was in college. I mean, let’s review the really important part about the girls that got kicked out of this sorority:
 The 23 members included every woman who was overweight. They also included the only black, Korean and Vietnamese members. The dozen students allowed to stay were slender and popular with fraternity men — conventionally pretty women the sorority hoped could attract new recruits.
So basically, if you’re fat or not white, you don’t belong. You would hope that in this day and age, we’d be beyond petty things like that, but then again, what are the images you have of most Greek organizations? Weren’t they trying to fix these image problems? I suppose not. Elitism will be elitism forever, I suppose. I mean, if you look at the article, there’s a picture of the girls who got removed, and most of them are attractive women. Maybe they don’t fit that traditional Barbie-doll definition of beauty, but they’re attractive nonetheless. That’s dirty pool, as they say.
My other question is this. In the article, it states that only 12 of the girls who were in this sorority chapter were asked to remain. Six quit in protest over the goings on. What about the other six? Why didn’t they resign in protest too? This whole Greek thing. It’s supposed to be your family, sisters to the end, and all that stuff. If they’re going to do this crap to your sisters, shouldn’t you stand with them in solidarity too?
All in all, this just reenforces what I thought about the Greek system in college and makes me even happier that I avoided it at all costs. When it comes to the desire to be part of one of these organizations, it’s all Greek to me.
This is an interesting commentary by Leander Kahney, Wired News’ chief Mac blogger, and a guy who seems to usually be knee deep in the famous Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field. Basically, he lays the smackdown on the comments that Señor Jobs had about teachers unions and how they jack up the educational experience.
I’m not entirely sure what to make of it all, myself. On the one hand, Jobs is sort of right. The protection of lousy teachers who will teach what they want, how they want knowing there will be no reprisals due to their union does represent a serious issue in our educational system. It’s the same issue that affects most, if not all, public serivce unions. I have no doubt that such arrangements cause issues like this. However, I strongly disagree with jobs in two fundamental ways:
First, Jobs’ solution to this problem is the usual school vouchers and choice talking points that most conservatives espouse. Kahney takes issue with this, and so do I. Vouchers don’t actually solve the problem, they just shift it around. Let’s look at the scenario like this: you have an underperforming school district with 1,000 kids. Into this comes a charter school that is great, but it can only take 250 kids. There are several issues that immediately arise:
- How do you fairly decide who gets access to that school and who doesn’t? Let’s be frank for a moment. If the area we’re talking about is mixed-race, you know those white and asian kids will get preference long before blacks and hispanics do. It’s not pretty, but it’s reality. Racism isn’t dead, it’s just under the rug. My point is that you’ll never manage to do it in a truly fair way. You could do it by test scores, but say 500 of those kids have good test scores. How do you narrow it? Do the other 250 that didn’t get in really deserve not to?
- What have we done with the other 750? They’re still stuck in the crappy public schools, and now there’s even less money for those because we’re putting all the money in vouchers and school choice. How have we solved anything there?
- What happens if the charter school is eventually run by some people who think the sun revolves around the earth, the dinosaurs were on Noah’s Ark, and the earth is only 6,000 years old? Suddenly, we’re back to shortchanging all 1,000 kids of a good education.
All in all you’ve put kids in a slippery slope from which there is little escape. It’s better to spend the money to improve all of the schools and give all 1,000 a fair shake.
Secondly, the union criticism is a bit unfair in some ways. Yes, there are rotten apples. There’s always rotten apples, no matter what industry you’re in. Most teachers are hard-working people that have this notion of making a difference in this world. Why else would they teach? Most teachers could easily make thousands of dollars more by going into a private sector job. The unions help these teachers get okay salaries and benefits that school districts would love to just wash away if they could, because elected district officials only hear the calls of potential voters who are angry about taxes and big government, not what is necessarily best for our nation’s children. They’re not perfect, but there is a reason they exist. We need to not forget that.
If you want to honestly fix schools, it starts with acknowledging where the real problems are. Only then can you realize that the problem is not with the unions, but at the very heart of how we run our education system. Until we can get to that point, we’re all just going to be stuck here, living in Jobs’ Reality Distortion Field, not knowing the difference.
By the way, you can get your fix of D6 whenever you want, from pretty much any device. Thanks to the WordPress Mobile plugin by Alex King, you can view D6 from pretty much any cell phone or other mobile data device (I know it works with my Blackberry 7250). Just another way that D6 brings the service to you.
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