Subtitle: Before you fix the problem, correctly identify the victim and the perpetrator.

I was just watching testimony in the House Education Committee, Minnesota Legislature, supporting a bill that would require some sort of financial literacy in schools. A long list of benefits was suggested, including fewer individuals succumbing to the effects of bad decisions about personal finance, and a healthier economy. This initiative was even touted as a life and death matter, since suicide is known to be linked at times to financial disasters that may have been avoided or lessened when a person is better able to handle their own finances and avoid depressing, troubling, personal disaster.

All these points are true and I do think that things would be better if students came out of high school with better financial literacy under their graduation caps than they might otherwise.

However, I don’t support this bill for several reasons. This bill is one in a continuous stream of bills our legislature introduces, one or two a year, in which a societal ill is linked in the minds of a few legislators to an inadequacy in our school system, which of course, we can fix by simply telling the teachers to get on the ball and make these newly molded citizens to be less flawed than they obviously are. These bills do not take into account several important facts, which almost always apply, regardless of the issue being addressed, such as financial literacy, critical thinking, civics and so on.

1) Chances are we already do what the bill is asking for. In this case, testimony demonstrated that FACS classes exist, and include financial literacy. So, the net improvement in all the things proposed by the legislation would be much less than suggested, because we have already done 80% or more of what can be done.

2) Schools sometimes ignore legislation of this type, because they simply can’t do what is required, and there is no mechanism for enforcement. Nobody is going to close a school down because some students graduated without civics.

3) (To integrate numbers 1 and 2 above) the schools least likely to actually implement the proposed changes are also the ones that are not doing this if this bill becomes a law. Basically, schools already want to teach financial literacy (or civics or what have you), but there is a reason a given school can’t, usually having to do with being underfunded. A law of this type will not close the above hinted 20% gap. The effect of the bill will be virtually nothing.

4) The plate effect. This is a plate:

This is a teacher’s plate:

So, where you gonna put this extra new thing you think teachers were not doing?

5) Teaching something in school does not guarantee that the specific thing that was learned is now a functional arrow in each student’s respective quiver. We teach kids how to learn, how to approach problems, how to think, by teaching teaching them a bunch of stuff to know. Then, over time, the stuff they know (at the time of the test) fades away, leaving a better person, but not necessarily a person who can recall that specific knowledge. Every one of those legislators would fail almost every one of the High School (or College) tests they took way back when, were they given the test right now. But we still regard them as educated individuals.

6) This other thing that makes this so unfair: Financial troubles are not the fault of the students (or the teachers). They are the fault of the corporations that control the finances. Fix that, legislators.

And now it is time for an instructive parable.

I was in financial trouble just now. I was suddenly knocked back on my financial heels by a $500 bill that came out of nowhere. Here’s what happened, in temporal order:

1) I had emergency eye surgery. It was covered by a health insurance plan.

2) Following an unfortunate divorce, I continued to have the same exact insurance. Same company, same primary payer, same exact level of coverage. Every single thing about this insurance was identical. IDENTICAL I TELL YOU! Except for one tiny little ting thing. The policy number changed.

3) I had a required follow-up appointment following this surgery. That appointment cost $500. Eye doctors are expensive.

4) The insurance company refused to pay the bill.

5) The insurance company sent me a notice that they figured out that I was being covered by a different insurance company, so that other company should pay the bill. It included a form that I could fill out saying either who that company was, or I could check a box indicating that I did not have another insurance policy. I did not have another insurance policy. I checked the box and mailed it back to them.

6) The insurance company sent me a notice that they figured out that I was being covered by a different insurance company, so that other company should pay the bill. It included a form that I could fill out saying either who that company was, or I could check a box indicating that I did not have another insurance policy. I did not have another insurance policy. I checked the box and mailed it back to them.

(Note: Yes, 5 and 6 are the same thing. They did it twice! I think each of these two letters originated from each of the two policy numbers. In other words, Company A, my insurance company, thought Company A, itself, was the other insurance company.)

7) Meanwhile, the health care provider had been me increasingly wrought notices that I must pay the bill or else.

8) Finally, my heath care provider sent me a note suggesting that I call my insurance company at the number on the insurance company’s insurance coverage card.

8b) The card has no number on it, but since I took a “business machines” class in high school last century, I knew how to get a phone number and was able to call them anyway.

9) I called. They looked up my account. The person on the phone intoned a paragraph of words no one would ever understand, not even a lawyer in the insurance industry. Eventually she translated for me: The problem was solved internally and I had no reason to call after all. The bill would be covered.

HOLY MOTHERFUCKNIG CHRIST PEOPLE !!!!!! The insurance company and health care providers probably spent a couple of hundred bucks on these useless paperwork shenanigans. I spent close to an hour messing around, which is below the average amount of hapless consumer time spent on this sort of thing. So, nearly HALF OF THE COST OF MY FOLLOW-UP APPOINTMENT can be attributed to the inability of a huge insurance company to handle a change in an account number.

All insurance companies should be forced to take a financial literacy in high school.

People don’t have financial woes because they did not learn about interest rates in high school. They have financial woes because usury interest rates are allowed by our representative government. People don’t get ripped off by charlatans or sold bad mortgages because they did not take a financial literacy class in high school. These things happen to them because of regulatory creep, allowed by our elected representatives. People don’t live hand to mouth, barely, and have their finances fall apart over the littlest thing because they did not take financial literacy in high school. These thing happen because our minimum wage standard is laughable, our tax burden is unfairly distributed, and there is very little done in our society to develop job security. These are all failures of our legislative bodies. People don’t have health care related financial disaster because they did not take a financial literacy class in high school. This happens to them because our legislative bodies can’t modernize our health delivery system

Stop blaming the teachers, stop blaming the schools, stop blaming the kids. They are the victims, not the perpetrators of all that cause personal financial disaster.

And I’m sure this is excellent advice.

I’ve been advisor to college students, directed an admissions program, and I tutor college bound high school kids, so I know something of what I speak. I found the approach taken in this recently published book to be refreshing and very much on the money. I also know Phelan and Burnham pretty well. Jay Phelan and I taught together at Harvard for years, and I was one of Terry Burnham’s PhD thesis readers. I’ve been waiting for years for them to write this book, and now that they’ve done it, I’m very happy to recommend it.

The perspective Phelan and Burnham take is in part anthropological, in part rational-economic theory based, but mostly just plain creative and innovative. How to study. How to study a language. How to be job-marketable. How to have an effective plan for your college major and coursework, instead of the usual bone-headed plan everyone else has (and so often fails at). How to get a mentor and develop a productive relationship with them. This series of dependent clauses may not make great sentences but they accurately describe what you will get out of this book.

As with their earlier work (this is not their first book), Phelan and Burnham have their magic fingers on the pulse of current culture, and fold this into an engaging and humorous writing style. I know that these two authors have been through a lot, and they’ve turned their long and diverse experience into valuable advice.

If you have a kid heading for college, or even one who has been there for a year or so, just give them this book. If you are an advisor, counselor, or just the sort of prof or high school teacher that students look to for guidance, read this book, it will make you look wise. If you are a first or second year college student and want your instructors to be more helpful to you, and want to feel better about the choices you are making, put this book on your must-have list and actually read it when you cop a copy of it.

Here’s a video of the authors talking about The Secret Syllabus. Man have they grown up!

I’m not going to mention any names. All I’ll say is this: A person I know visited a major research center last year and saw a demonstration of organ removal and some other experimental stuff. A person also visiting asked the famous high-level researcher doing this work if blood was ever blue. What he said was not recorded in detail, but it was very much like this statement I found on the Internet:

… human blood is red as soon as it is oxygenated. Blue blood flows through veins back to the heart and lungs…..
[source: Some Guy on Yahoo Answers]

My friend was disturbed by this, as s/he had been teaching high school students for years that blood is not blue. Her understanding of the situation was that people thought blood was blue because standard anatomical drawings and models depict arteries as red and veins as blue, and because if you look at your veins they are blue. Obviously veins are not clear, but if you don’t think that out you might assume that you were seeing blue blood.

So another year goes by and the same thing happens again. Another visit to the operating theatre, another person asks about blue blood, another confirmation that blood is blue.

Now, I’ve seen both veins and arterial blood either seeping or gushing (respectively) out of various organisms, including humans and various other mammals, on a number of occasions. My grandmother used to spurt out blood now and then because of a condition she had. As I study hunting, I’ve observed lots of thrashing around blood spurting and seeping mammals. I’ve cut myself and I’ve donated blood. And so on.

I’ve never seen blue blood. I’ve seen darker red and lighter red blood. But never blue.

Now, going back to Yahoo Answers, which I am NOT recommending as a source for actual information, but which is a good source for what regular people sometimes think, we have the following three quotes:

Melissa says: When blood gets oxygen it turns red but in your veins it is blue just look at them.

Avondro says: Myth, it’s always red. It goes a darker red, purple-like (Some call it blue) when starved of Oxygen.

SS Agent Dick Wakka says: Somewhat true. Blood is very bright red when it is in the pulmonary vein in the lungs, when it is highly oxygenated. During it’s journey back to the heart after circulating through the body, it is a little blue when it is deoxygenated, but more of a maroon-blue mix. … This is the truth.

Agent Dick gives as a citation a “medical student.” Well, I’ve got a citation of a leading blood researcher at a major research institution that says blood is blue.

I think there are two things going on here, one having to do with physics and the other with culture.

The physical issue is about color. Is “purple” a kind of red, or is it a kind of blue? Beyond that, is blood that is “dark red” or “purple” really purple? Or is it dark red. See my point?

The cultural issue is that more surgeons and folks like that, for much of recent history, are males, and males are bad at color, on average. I’m not talking about color blindness, but rather, color indifference.

So here is what I think: If a person who says to themselves “Blood is blue in our veins” thinks either of the following:

… That blood is blue, like this:

… Or, that blood is “blue” in that you look at your veins and see blue, thus you are seeing your blue blood….

… Or, that you look at an anatomical chart and see the veins drawn in as blue, therefore the blood inside them is blue…

… then that person is laboring under a misconception.

If a person thinks that this “blue blood” is purple, then they may also be laboring under a misconception. The HTML Internet Purple looks like this:

(I know, it looks dark blue to me as well.)

And the Pantone purple looks like this:

(I’ve never seen blood that looks like this)

Pantone Dark Red looks like this:

… but not very much like the darker shades of blood that I’ve seen.

I think dark blood looks a little like this:

This color is 24% red, 2% green, 2% blue, but at a saturation of 92 with a color value of 24 and a hue of 0 degrees. Whatever that means.

(By the way if your computer’s video display is not set to a high value for number of colors shown, all of the above may look like only one or two colors. And, since all video screens are different, I might be seeing something different than you are…)

Anyway, the color that I personally think resembles blood in its darker state is not purple. It is red with a lot of darkness added to it. Or a lack of lightness, or whatever. But it is red.

Human, mammal, and many other organism’s blood is red. But finding out if this is “true” is like squeezing blood from a stone.

If you would like a PDF version of this post, for use in class, here it is.

Photo Credit: postbear via Compfight cc

Here is a recent, disturbing, but typical example. Christians in Boundary County, Idaho, mobbed the local public library board, demanding the removal of a large number of books, including Gender Queer: A Memoir* by Maria Kobabe**, a book the library did not actually have.

These thugs intimidated the administrator of the libaries, Kimber Glidden, into resignation, in which she noted:

“My experience and skill set made me a good fit to help the district move toward a more current and relevant business model and to implement updated policy and best practices. However nothing in my background could have prepared me for the political atmosphere of extremism, militant Christian fundamentalism, intimidation tactics, and threatening behavior currently being employed in the community.”

Gidden told reporters at Route Fifty that “If [this] was really about banning books, we’d have to have the books.” Food for thought. They don’t care about the books, they only care about being bullies, and intimidating people who love books, and the kids the books are there for.

In another case, MAGA-Republicans and Fundy-Christians took over the Lafayette, Louisiana library last year and this happened:

• The library board rejected a grant to fund a program about voting rights, saying it was too left wing.
• A display about Pride Month was cancelled, and today library displays are forbidden about any distinctive group — even French Cajun culture, of which Lafayette is the unofficial capital.
• And this summer, when a popular librarian, Cara Chance, ignored that order and put up a display that included queer teen romance books, the board tried to fire her.

The actual police showed up at the Granbury High library in Granbury Texas to investigate a complaint made by book-burning-fundies last May. Five books were subsequently removed from the library shelves. The removal of these books was targeted harassmement of Trans students and other non-heteronormative-binary people by the school admins. This sort of thing has caused loss of life among school children. Even in relatively liberal Minnesota suburbs, a school board member went out of his way to indicate his discomfort with non-heteronormative school children, as noted in this LTE written by Yours Truly:

Locally, where the Jay Hesby problem recently emerged, we have an open seat on the Wayzata School District board. Hesby is one of a few candidates running. Sheila Prior, an active member of the school community especially interested in reading education, is also running, and she is by a gazillion miles my choice for the upcoming special election. (Feel free to visit her web site and donate ten bucks or more to this great cause. I just did!)

I gets scarier. Recently in the Reno Nevada area, suited up members of the “Proud Boys” (I call them Cucked Children) actually entered a library to disrupt a children story time because they did not like the book that was being read. They did the same thing near San Francisco, South Bend, Indiana, and Woodland California. There was violence. Over books. At events involving children. Derek Chauvin got extra time on his murder sentence because he carried out violence in the presence of children. For christakes.

Yesterday, South Bend, IN:

Seven Proud Boys disrupted Rainbow Story Hour event at Tutt library.

They harassed the presenter, event organizer, staff, and library patrons until police were called.

Any assistance IDing them would be appreciated by SB comrades. 1/4 pic.twitter.com/VCjvJ3Z41a

— Indiana Mutual Aid Coalition (@INMutualAid) June 28, 2022

Alleged Proud Boys members attempt to get into The Mojo in Woodland, CA and are met with pepper spray. The bar had planned an all ages Drag Show tonight, which was postponed due to security concerns pic.twitter.com/7Boln64uJ6

— Luke Cleary (@LukeCleary) July 1, 2022

Notes:
-* Links to books on Amazon help support this blog, see note below
-** From the publisher:

2020 ALA Alex Award Winner
2020 Stonewall — Israel Fishman Non-fiction Award Honor Book

This special deluxe hardcover edition of Gender Queer features a brand-new cover, exclusive art and sketches, a foreword from ND Stevenson, Lumberjanes writer and creator of She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, and an afterword from Maia Kobabe.

Minnesota Extremist Republicans have not only fought tooth and nail the famous “Walz Checks,” they also left billions of dollars in federal money on the table, a huge state surplus that could be used to fund education, give money back to families, and do other good things, for one reason only: to have a bigger and better hissy fit than otherwise possible.

Demand the extremist Republicans running the Minnesota Senate either do their jobs or step aside. Then, even if they do (they won’t) vote them out in November.

Vote #DFL. For example, these candidates.

A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.

What does this quote mean to you? If you don’t know its context, you may be in for a surprise.

You see this quote all the time on K-12 educational material as a header, footer, slogan, logo, inspirational message, and so on. It obviously means something good about teachers. Maybe something good about education. The quote is by Henry Adams and comes from his book “The Education of Henry Adams” which sounds an awful lot like a title for a porn movie. Since this is a book, first circulated in 1907, about education it must be the case that this quote refers to the positive power of educators back then, and presumably, now. Right? Certainly that is the meaning that is usually attributed to it.

A Google search of

“A teacher affects eternity”

… yields 56,000 hits, many of which are examples of the term’s use as an inspirational maxim in one or another dialog about education. So clearly people are in tune with the positive message of Henry Adam’s sentence.

A Google search of

“A teacher affects eternity” -adams

… (thus leaving off a direct reference to Henry with the minus sign in front of ‘adams’) yields about 26 thousand hits and I’ll wager almost every one represents the use of the quote as a positive maxim in the dialog about education. One teacher uses the phrase as the title for a web site on teaching.

Via Google I find the phrase tweeted on Twitter, and checking directly with Twitter, we find a gazillion recent instances over the last few weeks. I estimate that approximately four times an hour someone tweets “A teacher affects eternity” and sometimes gives the rest of the quote, sometimes mentions it’s Henry Adams’. But they always seem to mean it to be a nice thing to say about teachers and about how important they are.

You can buy note cards or posters with the phrase, and if you know any teachers, ask them how many pillows embroidered with the phrase or a version of it they have been given. Or shadow boxes or little signs held by teddy bears. Which they give to the teacher as a way of saying that they like teachers.

The book* The Education of Henry Adams is a complex work that I will not try to characterize, but at least in part I take it as a literary act of cynicism. Adams speaks of himself in third person and by the time we get to the quote in question he is discussing Henry’s first nine months as an Assistant Professor in History at Harvard.

For the next nine months the Assistant Professor had no time to waste on comforts or amusements. He exhausted all his strength in trying to keep one day ahead of his duties. Often the stint ran on, till night and sleep ran short. He could not stop to think whether he were doing the work rightly. He could not get it done to please him, rightly or wrongly, for he never could satisfy himself what to do.

Henry thinks of himself as inadequate, not up to the job, apparently.

But part of the problem was with Harvard itself, and its inattention to quality education.

The fault he had found with Harvard College as an undergraduate must have been more or less just, for the college was making a great effort to meet these self-criticisms, and had elected President Eliot in 1869 to carry out its reforms. Professor Gurney was one of the leading reformers, and had tried his hand on his own department of History. The two full Professors of History — Torrey and Gurney, charming men both — could not cover the ground. Between Gurney’s classical courses and Torrey’s modern ones, lay a gap of a thousand years, which Adams was expected to fill. The students had already elected courses numbered 1, 2, and 3, without knowing what was to be taught or who was to teach. If their new professor had asked what idea was in their minds, they must have replied that nothing at all was in their minds, since their professor had nothing in his, and down to the moment he took his chair and looked his scholars in the face, he had given, as far as he could remember, an hour, more or less, to the Middle Ages.

In other words, the History Department at Harvard was a mess, a chain of rusty links of which Henry himself was the weakest. Henry Adams does not think the teachers at Harvard were doing what needed to be done, the system of education was not doing what was required, and the students were probably being damaged more than assisted by participating in this system. And this worried him.

Not that his ignorance troubled him! He knew enough to be ignorant. His course had led him through oceans of ignorance; he had tumbled from one ocean into another till he had learned to swim; but even to him education was a serious thing. A parent gives life, but as parent, gives no more. A murderer takes life, but his deed stops there.

In other words, all those important people in your life: Your mom, a person who kills you, and so on, have only limited effects on you as a person. But, according to Henry Adams,

A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.

OMG. That sounds like bad news. The system of education sucks, the professors suck, the students are getting the shaft, and this will affect the students for their whole lives, and through them society in general, and the course of history itself. Bad teaching, Henry Adams is telling us, ruinz everything for everybody!

But this is not what people think is happening, is it?

A teacher is expected to teach truth, and may perhaps flatter himself that he does so, if he stops with the alphabet or the multiplication table, as a mother teaches truth by making her child eat with a spoon; but morals are quite another truth and philosophy is more complex still. A teacher must either treat history as a catalogue, a record, a romance, or as an evolution; and whether he affirms or denies evolution, he falls into all the burning faggots of the pit. He makes of his scholars either priests or atheists, plutocrats or socialists, judges or anarchists, almost in spite of himself. In essence incoherent and immoral, history had either to be taught as such — or falsified.

From here Adams goes on to an interesting discussion that misunderstands (modern) evolution, and very rightly laments the thorn that the Middle Ages is in the side of western civilization. And in that discussion he reiterates that while all this is interesting stuff, it is not what is taught to the students. Because the teachers, really, don’t have a clue as to how to interpret the material they are responsible to cover or how to convey it to their pupils.

Here is Henry Adam’s famous quote translated into modern parlance:

Be careful. The system of education is inadequate, and a half baked attempt to educate is dangerous. A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell how badly fucked up everything will be when he is done with it.

I had always seen the quote as what most people seem to see to as: The nice phrase you embroider on the pillow and give to your favorite teacher. My friend Josh Borowicz, who happens to be an historian and a Henry Adams scholar, pointed this interesting irony out to me. Knowing this is likely to affect me for an eternity. And a half.

You can read the full text of The Education of Henry Adams here.

You need to know the following three things. These facts will save you from getting tossed out of college or having a mark on your high school record.

1) Teachers hate plagiarism more than they hate stepping on puppies and kittens. If there are two students in a class, and one has plagiarized an assignment and one has crushed some puppies and kittens, and the teacher only has time to turn one of them it to the administration, they’ll turn in the plagiarizer.

2) There has almost never been a case where a student was proved to have plagiarized something (by matching the original to the student’s paper) where the plagiarism wasn’t already blindingly obvious to the teacher to begin with. In other words, when you plagiarize something, it is always spotted immediately. If some other student tells you that they got away with it, they are lying to you (like House says, people always lie) or the teacher chose to not turn them in. Yet.

Given this, you should understand that plagiarism is never a good strategy for improving your grade. Just don’t do it.

Check out our new science podcast, Ikonokast.
________________________________

Having said that, and recognizing that you didn’t come to this blog post to learn how to cheat, we can examine the marginal, rare cases that seem to happen so often; There are times, according to some students, when they didn’t really mean to plagiarize but they did anyway by mistake. For instance, the student copies a bunch of text from various web sites into a document file, then proceeds to write his own prose, deleting these “notes” as he goes. Then he saves the file and just at that moment the computer crashes. When the computer comes back up again, the file seems to be there but he has to get to basketball practice so he doesn’t look at the file. Then the next day he just turns the file in and never realized that the file had reverted to the earlier version which was nothing but snippets of text from various Wikipedia pages.

You might need this: I’d Rather Be PLAGIARIZING

Which brings us to the third thing:

3) It does not matter if you did not mean to plagiarize or if you did it by accident or if your dog did it while you were not looking or whatever. Plagiarism is when you hand in work that consists wholly or in part of the work of another, unattributed. It does not matter how it got there. It does not matter what your intent was. It only matters that someone else’s work was passed off as yours.

You might be thinking that teachers and others are overplaying this. You might be thinking that it is not as though civilization will come to an end if plagiarism happens, so just get over it. If that is what you are thinking, then you are definitely not getting this: The truth is, that if plagiarism happens a lot, an important part of civilization will in fact end. The fact that you don’t understand this is of no interest to the keepers of civilization who will crush you like an ogre crushes a puppy if you do it. So deal.

So, what about the title of this post? How do you avoid getting caught plagiarizing? There are two steps to this process.

1) Don’t do it.

2) Don’t seem to be doing it, and for that, I have some actual helpful advice.

When you do go about copying and pasting text from the Internet as part of your research ALWAYS use a simple convention to make sure that this text is ALWAYS identified as someone else’s. Your convention needs two parts: Attribution and delimiters.

Delimiters first. When you copy something into a document file form the Internet, always use the same symbols to surround the text you copies. I suggest /slash marks/ or possibly [brackets]. Later, you can look at your document and know which parts are either notes destined to be erased or quotes destined to be put in “quote marks” or made into a block quote.

The attribution is the information you put just after the text you copied so you can reference it later. There are a lot of ways to do this. The simplest way for a small project is to make a list at the bottom of your document that has the URL’s you used as sources, numbered, and then use the numbers in your document to identify the text. It is not my job to tell you the proper way to provide attribution and bibliographic references for your work … that varies with the school, the academic discipline, and the instructor. But however that is supposed to be done, it is in this stage of assembling the notes and information that you must link the reference to the source to the actual material.

If you use the delimiters, and your computer crashes and returns your document to the “notes” version, and you accidentally hand that in, you wont’ get in trouble for plagiarizing! Why? Because instead of handing in this…

The aardvark (Orycteropus afer, from Greek ???????????? (orykterópous) meaning “digging footed” and afer: from Africa) is a medium-sized, burrowing, nocturnal mammal native to Africa.[2] It is the only living species of the order Tubulidentata, although other prehistoric species and genera of Tubulidentata are known.

Aardvarks have 4 toes on the forefeet and 5 toes on the hind feet, each ending in a spade-like claw that helps them to dig with great speed and force. Digging is used both to acquire food and as a means of escape. The stance is digitigrade.

… as though you wrote these words, which would actually be plagiarized from two sources, you’d be handing in this:

/The aardvark (Orycteropus afer, from Greek ???????????? (orykterópous) meaning “digging footed” and afer: from Africa) is a medium-sized, burrowing, nocturnal mammal native to Africa.[2] It is the only living species of the order Tubulidentata, although other prehistoric species and genera of Tubulidentata are known./ [1]

/Aardvarks have 4 toes on the forefeet and 5 toes on the hind feet, each ending in a spade-like claw that helps them to dig with great speed and force. Digging is used both to acquire food and as a means of escape. The stance is digitigrade./ [2]

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aardvark
2. http://animaldiversity.ummz.umich.edu/site/accounts/information/Orycteropus_afer.html

And then your teacher will be like, “What’s this” and you’ll be like “oh, crap, those are my notes! My computer crashed and this musta legit happened, man!”

You might get a crappy grade for this, but you won’t have that letter added to your file that will follow you around for the rest of your life.

There is something else you need to be aware of. Plagiarism isn’t just copying the exact words someone else wrote as though they were your own. It is also stating ideas that other people wrote and not attributing the ideas to them. There is something you need to know if you are writing an essay for high school or an intro college course: I promise you that your grader or teacher will be much more impressed by your frequent use of properly done citations than with some lame idea you claim (inadvertence or purposefully) to have had which is not really yours. Keep in mind that the people who are reading your essay have likely already read some or even all of the material you are using. If you present an idea as your own, and the idea is already in the literature, we know that either stolen the idea or you’ve had an unoriginal idea that you did not know was out there because you’ve not really done your homework.

If you really do have an original idea or observation, which is quite possible because you are clearly a very smart person if you’ve read this far in this very important essay, then make it clear in your work that it is your idea. How do you do that? Using language. Words. Sentences. Just say it. If you were busy writing your essay in the third person or in passive voice, then you may have a hard time phrasing a reference to yourself. Otherwise, just say that something is your idea. But just before you do that, google it. Maybe you’ll find someone else saying the same thing, and that will be a win because you’ll have yet another reference to properly cite in your essay!

To be clear, that “liberal arts degree” might be an AA, a BA, or a BS, depending on your particular situation. And you shouldn’t have to pay for it, or at least, not much. Or it might be something equivalent to a degree, and it might be obtained in any of number of different ways. But for the most part, when educators speak of the “liberal arts” we mean the classes one takes for an associates degree or to meet the distribution requirements for a bachelor’s degree. For some students, a good chunk of this can happen in high school.

This idea that a college education is only for some is a pernicious falsehood. The premises of the statement are largely incorrect, and it is the same kind of civilization ending policy that gave us Trump and McConnell. Maybe not everyone needs a college degree, but in fact, that is the status quo already. About 39% of Americans ever get a four year degree or higher. About 66% get some college. So, the number of Americans (and we are typical of industrialized countries) who get at least a portion of a liberal arts program may be about half, depending on how one counts. So, why are we speaking of “you don’t really need a college degree” like this is a new strategy that is going to save us from something? The truth is, the fact that so many Americans are not more liberal-arts educated than they are is a problem we need to address and fix, not one that we need to exasperate with platitudes.

Anyone can benefit from liberal arts learning. At a societal level, this is how a generation makes that transition from adolescence to thoughtful adults prepared to contribute in this complex world. The mantra in question tells us to separate our youth into two categories. One includes those what will be richly endowed with knowledge and ability sufficient to contribute to our various national conversations, to understand the law, history, civics, science, literature, language, arts, enough to have a meaningfully enhanced appreciation of the world around them. The others might achieve this state of contribution, or not, and if so, achieve it without the same resources and help everyone else gets, because we told them no, this is not for you.

Indeed, people may be excused in this educationally bifurcated future for assuming those in the trades have a lesser grasp of these important things, maybe even a lesser right to contribute to the conversation, a diminished right to be heard and, why not, no real claim to the voting franchise.

(Have you ever had the sense that a person “in the trades” who also has a high level of post secondary education has done something subversive? Well, that feeling is real because the subversion is often real.)

There is a window of time, of two to four years, when a person is both ready and available to engage in this liberal arts project. There is variation in when a student is mature in learning and can thus engage in this kind of education. Ask any experienced high school or intro college teacher. Variation among high school juniors, for example, in how well they do in a particular advanced subject is not explained by their native intelligence, but rather, by their stage of maturity with respect to learning. The high school junior who just does not grasp AP biology might be a biology wiz as a college frosh, and from there, be your next Nobel Prize in Biology recipient. (Oh, and there really needs to be a Nobel prize in biology, by the way.)

That defines the opening of that window: ready to learn in all the ways one normally would be. The closing of the window (and this is of course an oversimplification) comes later, when the individual is beyond the introductory level in their education, working on a major, or graduate work. Or maybe they are starting up a business and are fully occupied with that, unable to be taking two night courses. Or family matters, or some other thing. Very few people are set up to take two or three courses at a time for a couple of years at any arbitrary point in their lives. This tends to happen only during that window, in that age range.

(As an aside: I did not go to college. I got a college degree on my merits, graduated in the top of my class of 10,000 at the University of the State of New York Regents College, then went on to get my MA and PhD. So I’m very highly educated, but not traditionally so. At a later time, I was a principle in a program at the University of Minnesota to support adults who were decidedly past that window of maturity and opportunity, to get their as yet unfinished degree. I served variously on the board of advisers, as a faculty advisor, a student general advisor, and director of admissions. In that capacity I was among a handful of people across the country actively supporting and working in favor of non traditional education. I say this here and now so that you, dear reader, understand that I appreciate non traditional approaches as much as anyone, fully embrace them, and I demand that non traditional approaches be part of any education system.)

For most, this window typically opens any time during the first year of Highs School (rare) and it can run as late as the last year of college (rare). For most people, this two or three year period happens somewhere between the start of the third year in high school and the end of the second year in college, and that is also when the “lower division,” or “liberal arts” courses, in both advanced high school (AP, etc.) and intro college, are most available to everyone.

Go into a trade, fine. Tell your kid into going into a trade, fine. Make sure to tell everyone in ear shot that this is what everyone should do after your careful study of education and society’s professional and avocational needs. Fine! The trades are where many, maybe most, people should be, and this should be a good way to go. And there should be more unionization, and more respect for the people that actually make civilization work.

But going into the trades should not sentence someone to a significantly reduced general education. At present, we don’t sacrifice high school for the trades, though there is a move to do that. What I’m suggesting here is that we embrace the basic liberal arts as part of our paid for and well attended to expectation for most people, regardless of the direction they have chosen, including trades, professional training, a military career, business, or any other thing.

But training in a trade with no liberal arts education produces a high proportion of adults who are not really ready to help us as much as they could in this whole civilization thing, and who effectively then become a burden on our system of government and politics. Thomas Jefferson pointed out that the ability of the people to self govern is closely linked to education. It is generally understood that public opinion is often simply wrong on the facts or easily manipulated by nefarious actors, and it is also understood that these effects are a product of differential education as much as anything else. (There are multiple factors, of course.) An education system that sorts out our children is a burden caused by policy intentionally and intentionally promoted, promulgated to produce a large angry, aka “populist,” middle and working class voting base that for the most part comply with the wishes of those who push for this policy.

Part of this is, of course, keeping college expensive, and using tax based funding to support private colleges that are generally out of reach of regular people. The 1%ers, the 10%ers, and the wanabee-%ers, strategize to make good education (at all levels K through PhD) deferentially available for the rich, mainly through private offerings, and to keep public education inadequate and use as little public money for it as possible.

The “go into a trade, it is the thing to do now” trope is simply more of this, and it is exactly what the Koch Brothers want you to say, think, and embrace.

Everyone deserves the opportunity to get that basic liberal arts education.

A few years ago I was tasked by the University of Minnesota to visit a giant military base where we expected thousands of troops standing down from the front lines in the Middle East to return for redeployment or homecoming. My job was to make contact with soon-to-be veterans or reservists who needed to fill out their education to obtain a BA/BS, certificate, or maybe a Masters.

It turns out that the large number of military personnel expected went to a different base, and only special forces soldiers arrived at my location.

Several had MAs. More commonly, though, they had PhDs or were working on their PhD. Most of the MA-only holders planned some sort of further graduate education, including law. Not a single one had only a bachelors degree or less. Not one.

Guess what folks. The most intense trade of them all may well be that of professional soldier. The top echelon of professional soldiers go way beyond a handful of liberal arts classes. This is not an accident, it is by design. It is also paid for.

Just like Medicare, this is a micro example of a way of doing things that is very very good but that we do not do. But we should.

Go into the trades. Meanwhile, society owes you a BA (or AA or similar). Good for you, good for all of us.

One of President Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms” was embodied in this painting by Norman Rockwell.

This is a man standing up at a public town hall style meeting and speaking his mind.

He is not screaming at a school board demanding that excellent books be kept away from our school children, and prohibited for use by our educators.

But, that peak will be nothing compared to the Superpeak that will pile on top of that one, because Omicron will sweep through the region. Expect the biggest peak ever to pretty much coincide with the month of January.

And this is really going to mess up school in January. World epidemic expert Michael Osterholm was recently asked what should happen in schools. He was essentially unable to answer because the question is so ridiculous, framed as it is as a request for options. There are no options. He did say, “We may think we are done with Covid, but Covid is not done with us.”

For those who don’t know, the following are entirely or mostly true, as far as I know:

1) 1 In X P-12 teachers will be out with Covid in January.

2) 1 in Y P-12 teachers will be unable to go to work because their daycare shuts down because of Covid in January.

(X and Y are unknown but the ratio is not insignificant.)

3) Same for administrators and students, at various levels.

4) There are no substitutes. That is not the beginning of a sentence where the next word is “for” like “there are no substitutes for good study habits.” There are no substitutes, as in substitute teachers. Short term subs are gone, long term subs were hired up as teachers long ago.

5) There are very few, if any, new teachers coming in to replace those who retired, went crazy and ran away, or died, during this pandemic. Our society has shoved its problems up the nether regions of teachers for long enough, Covid is the last straw, only an idiot would become a teacher these days, and most possible teachers are not idiots. Maybe they will go be truck drivers. So, there is probably a rapidly growing systemic shortage of teachers going on independently of Covid, made worse by Covid.

By mid January we are going to be herding the kids who show up to school into large rooms where cameras controlled by Covid-riddled deans working from home will watch them during the school day, after which they will be picked up by their parents because whatever is left of the school bus system is going to collapse again.

Now’s your chance, Children of Covid! You don’t need no education!