I’ve found it.

University of Hertfordshire in the UK will be offering an MA in Vampire Literature, beginning this fall. I’m not quite sure where Hertfordshire is, what the entrance requirements are, or how much it would cost, but I’m checking student visa requirements now.

On top of that, from April 16-17, the University of Hertforshire will host a two day conference entitled “Open Graves, Open Minds: Vampires and the Undead in Modern Culture”. Apparently some of the awesome papers presented at the conference sessions will be used in the graduate program:

• Gothic Charm School, or How Vampires Learned to Sparkle

• “Vegetarian” Vampires: Morality of the Anti-Villain in Selected Vampire Novels
• Fundamentalism, Hybridity and the Vampire body: Postmodern Vampirism and the Presidency of George W. Bush

If you were attending the conference, what paper would you want to concoct and present?

Via i09, the blog I wish I wrote.

One of them is a required “CBA paper” for their contemporary world issues class. Apparently CBA stands for curriculum based assessment. Or capabilities based assessment. Or combat body armor.

As I heard them discuss this assignment – the only topic given to all senior students, across the state, this year – I was pretty astounded.

The general subject area is government revenue and responsibility. The specific assignment is:

“Responsible citizenship requires an understanding of how government raises and spends money to implement policies and programs. For this research paper, select a level of givernment (federal, state or local) receiving funding from the 2009 Recovery Act (the economic stimulus). Examine the revenue sources and expenditures related to a particular policy or program.”

The troublesome part of the assignment was this:

“Provide an explanation of who pays for and who benefits from the collection of revenue and expenditures related to the policy or program.”

The assumption is made that it’s all upside, that it’s working wonderfully; the teachers do not want to hear about any issues or failures of the stimulus program. I have a problem with that. If you’re assigning a research paper, shouldn’t you let your student select the position he/she wants to support?

(And, for the record, I have no particular issue with the stimulus package, although I do have problems with much of the pork barrel legislation attached to it. I just have an issue with requiring a pre-determined outcome; it seems like propaganda creation.)

I have a basic bachelor’s degree, a BA in English – technical communications emphasis. I only worked in the field for a couple of years, but the skill has served me well throughout my career.

One friend has an executive MBA. A few have MBAs in telecommunications management. Another has her masters’ in project management. Others are working on resuming and finishing their bachelor’s degrees – general studies, information science, teaching, even math.

There’s nothing I am passionate enough about to spend 2-4 years on pursuing in graduate school. Sure, I like creative writing and fine arts – but not enough to pursue an academic degree in the subject matter, plus the return on investment isn’t really there.

In spite of my disregard for the whole going-back-to-school experience, I get to live it vicariously.

I’m the proud parent of a college sophomore. He’s pursing a degree in digital media engineering at the local community college, with a possible 4-year transfer. He typically sails through classes in his primary subject area, but some of the broader classes are a bit of a challenge.

His 8am class this fall is Effective Human Relations. (Are any positive human relations possible at 8am?) He’s writing the first of several analytical papers for the class, this week a critical analysis of a scholarly journal article on a management topic.

He chose “constructive criticism” as his topic and found an article on “Constructive Criticism and Social Lies: a Developmental Sequence for Understanding Honesty and Kindness in Social Interactions.” You’d think such an article would be pretty interesting; you’d be dead wrong. Academic writing can suck the life out of anything!

Tonight, my job begins with helping him understand the directions and ends with proofreading. No actual writing or – ugh – footnoting is required.

I sure don’t miss those days!

I am not a history buff. I am, however, a believer in a solid education, and I think our educational system should be turning out more students who are fired up about history.

I remember my history education as a blur of repetitive American history. Coumbus blah blah American Revolution blah Lewis and Clark blah blah Civil War blah blah Industrial Revolution blah World Wars then, well, the school year was over. (They didn’t want to tackle the tricky Vietnam and Cold War.) All the schools ever seemed to teach was the same tired stuff, year after year, and what they required from us students was rote memorization of dates, battles, places, and presidents. “In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue…”

I had only one class that stood out, a contemporary world problems seminar, where we read newspapers, debated current events and talked about issues as they unfolded through the eyes of the everyday citizen. It was the only class that engaged us on every level.

It’s no wonder that our American system turns out so few history geeks. We teach it as a dead field of study, we teach only dead facts and figures, and we skew it so heavily toward our own history that it distorts our young people’s view of the world around us.

Ethnocentrism is the tendency to look at the world primarily from the perspective of one’s own culture. It often entails the belief that one’s own race or ethnic group is the most important and/or that some or all aspects of its culture are superior to those of other groups.

I did a survey of Washington state’s educational standards, and here’s an oversimplified summary of the 12-year history curriculum:

1st grade – none
2nd grade – none
3rd grade – US history
4th grade – state and US history
5th grade – US history
6th grade – world history
7th grade – state and US history
8th grade – US history
9th grade – US history
10th grade – modern world history
11th grade – US history
12th grade – Contemporary world problems or other social science (elective)

That’s 7 years of US history, 2 years of world history, and one social science elective. Pardon me, but is the last 500 years of one country’s history on one continent proportionally – 7:2 – so critical? Are we Americans really so special that we need to review the American Revolution and Lewis and Clark seven times in seven years, cover multiple milennia of Chinese history once for three weeks in sixth grade, and never touch on modern Middle Eastern or Southeast Asian history at all?

History could be so much more compelling to students if we taught about the people behind the dates, places & battles, their stories, hopes & dreams. We need to cover the ideas and philosophies that were flashpoints for historical change, and why, in the context of their times and culture, they drove people to such passionate measures. We need to not be so afraid of religion, in the historical and comparative context, in schools, religion was and continues to be a significant impetus for conflict and political change.

I’ve often been told that the reason we study history is so that we will learn from our mistakes.

Is quisnam does non perceptum ex history est fatum ut revolvo is.
He who does not learn from history is destined to repeat it.

That would be a $371 value AND a running start on his college credits. He’ll get the same college credit opportunity for another class this year, and two classes his senior year, as long as he keeps his grades in those qualifying classes at a 2.5 or above.

Pretty darn cool.

I am NOT a fan of the WASL or other standardized testing, for many reasons. I am so much against it that I have considered, in years past when it wasn’t serving as his exit exam, pulling him from the classroom during testing week and keeping him at home as a form of grass-roots protest.

I think that standardized testing dumbs down our educational system as teachers focus on teaching to the test, and then sacrifices further valuable instructional days to the lengthy testing process.

I think that the ability to perform on a single, high-stakes test is only one small measure of a young adult’s educational competency, and to require it as a mandatory criterium for graduation is grossly inappropriate.

I think that rating our schools’ and teachers’ performance on our students’ test scores is also unfair. Why should our teachers be penalized because some of our highest risk kids come from a culture and living environment that doesn’t support any sort of school achievement, much less test performance?

I think that these particular tests are poorly designed, written in a biased and unclear manner, and scored inconsistently by unevenly qualified staff.

Most importantly, as a management professional, I am well aware that you cannot test quality into a process! By the time you find out you’ve failed, it’s too late. Quality begins at the beginning – you design quality in – as parents, as teachers – and later, as self-aware students.

And, one last question – if Zach, and some significant percentage of the 10th graders of Washington state, are able to pass the WASL in 10th grade, what does that say for the value of 1) 11th and 12th grade education, or 2) the value of the exam in evaluating a K-12 education?

I’m still pleased that Zach passed, but I’ll be more congratulatory when he takes college entrance exams like the SAT and ACT – I think those tests are a little more worth the investment of time and effort.

Wilson has made a name for herself as an up-and-coming country singer/songwriter, winning numerous awards in the last five years – and has a reputation for eschewing the glamor-girl track in favor of a tomboyish, rabble-rousing redneck image. Her most widely known song is “Redneck Woman”:

Well, you might think I’m trashy, a little too hardcore
But in my neck of the woods I’m just the girl next door
I’m a redneck woman
I ain’t no high class broad
I’m just a product of my raising
I say, ‘hey y’all’ and ‘yee-haw’
And I keep my Christmas lights on
On my front porch all year long
And I know all the words to every Tanya Tucker song
So here’s to all my sisters out there keeping it country
Let me get a big ‘hell yeah’ from the redneck girls like me

So, here she is, getting lots of press for her shiny new GED. Perhaps I’m just an elitist snob, but I never considered a high school diploma to be a big achievement, just a milestone on the way for truly preparing myself for life. I’ve also considered a GED to be a less-desirable alternative to actually sticking it out for a diploma. On the other hand, a bachelor’s degree? Worth celebrating. A master’s or PhD? Definitely an achievement – that I haven’t yet earned.

It’s sad that there are still parts of our fairly progressive, well-educated nation where people shrug their shoulders and drop out of school years before finishing. I understand family problems, economic challenges, even academic problems. There are those who struggle with all of those issues and still earn a high school diploma, even go on to college. And there are those who want for very little and still drop out.

Why? Is it a values issue? A character deficiency? A social problem? Are we in America continuing to fail part of the next generation?

Don’t get me wrong, it’s a good thing that Wilson earned her GED. And I’m always encouraged by those who earn their success with substance, rather than style – and she seems to belong to that club.

Still and all, I think that the amount of press – carefully worded, non-judgmental press – that she is getting for this relatively minor achievement does our youth a disservice. It trivializes the importance of staying in school, of making a GED a priority, of pursuing the basic educational competency required to function in today’s world.

Send out another press release when she earns a degree, starts a charitable foundation or adopts some worthy cause. I’ll applaud then.

I suppose the answer to that question depends on your perspective, whether you’re the censorer or the censoree.

My son is writing a paper on censorship – Merriam Webster defines it: to examine in order to suppress or delete anything considered objectionable ; also : to suppress or delete as objectionable . We also talked about what it is not – media bias, religious freedom, children’s rights, copyright or criminal law issues. Janiece had a good post on the subject today, too.

Tonight, at the dinner table we talked about some fairly major examples of controversial, often-criticized censorship.

• The banning of books from our curriculum, school & public libraries.
• China’s harsh censorship and prohibition of external information, including the Internet, print, video and audio media.
• The Islamic world’s prohibition of media, styles, and cultural influences that are considered to be Western.
• The MPAA, PMRC and ESR ratings and restrictions on movie, record and game content.
• The FCC’s restrictions and penalties on tv and radio content deemed obscene or objectionable.
• Private or public funding tied to restrictions on public information, for example, sex education in the schools.

We also discussed whether there were any instances where censorship was perhaps appropriate and justifiable in western culture. The only examples I could think of were:

• The revelation of covert CIA agent Valerie Plame’s identity by White House staffer Lewis Libby.
• Restrictions and penalties for volatile or harassing speech in the workplace.
• Restrictions, controls and removal of speech in a privately-owned forum. See my blog comment terms and conditions for an example.

Can you think of examples of justifiable or acceptable censorship in today’s society? No extra points for actually requiring me to apply censorship according to above terms and conditions.

I’m really proud of him for making it to this step! Even if it does make me feel old.

This afternoon, the younger smug son is working on rebuilding a PC for gaming with a friend and, when successful, he’ll recover the tax files that were saved on the hard drive last spring. He’s reaching the point where he knows more than me about computers and applications, and I’m pretty geeky.

I’m also proud of him for taking on such a project. Even if it does make me feel old.

I think I’m going to take some aspirin and then indulge in a nap.

I went through and counted. Not including winter and spring break, our school district has:

• 7 Learning Improvement Days
• 6 Half-days
• 3 “Most employees don’t get the day off” holidays

That’s 13 days in 9 months of school! Coincidentally, that’s exactly what my employer gives entry level employees in combined paid time off and floating holidays.

I realize that schools do not exist to provide childcare; their purpose is education. Nonetheless, we families structure our lives around the school year, and schedule disruption is problematic. I’m fortunate; my older teens require little supervision so it doesn’t much affect my professional life. Parents of younger children, though, can end up burning all their paid time off just to make up for the district’s lackadaisical commitment to actually providing classroom education.

I actually taught for a year and a half, as a long-term sub for Department of Defense schools in the UK, so I can see this from a teacher’s perspective too. Many of my colleagues and I found the in-service days to be a complete waste of time; we’d show up late, for the minimum required time, and duck out early. The only days that were useful were parent teacher conferences and the quarterly grading/prep day. In today’s age of electronic grade reporting, I’m not sure why a grade compilation day is necessary, the information is already in the system.

So, my question is, why do districts get away with this, especially with today’s pressure to perform well on standardized tests (another subject for another rant)? Is it a concession to the teachers’ union? Is it simply an established institution that’s become bloated over time? I don’t recall more than a couple of in-service days a year when I was in school.

It certainly indicates no respect for the students or families attending schools in the district, nor a commitment to consistent classroom instruction.

What it does do is instill a sense of reciprocal apathy. If the school is going to treat classroom days so cavalierly, then I as a parent can treat my son’s school schedule with equal disregard. The easiest time for him to get into the dentist is during the school day? No problem. We can’t get a decently-priced flight back from our family vacation until a couple days after break? Oh, well, we can live with that. (I do realize two wrongs don’t make a right.)

Given the institutional indifference, it’s no wonder our children’s performance is falling behind that of Asian and European nations.