Here’s the deal.

Many teachers use playing cards in their teaching, to employ a readily understood and recognized symbol system (suits, numbers, face cards, etc) in a thought exercise, lab, or what have you. A deck of cards that also provides pictures and biographical information about actual scientists adds value to that activity. And, displaying a panoply of women in physical sciences reminds people that there really have been, and are now, many such women! So this is a great girls-in-stem patriarchy-fighting device.

So, if you buy a deck of educards depicting a sampling of the great women of the physical sciences, you help teachers get cards for their use in shcools, for free. The profit from selling cards to retail buyers (you) is converted into cards for use in schools. Everything should be like this. Educard also distributes cards to educators using moneys that come in from donations.

You can read about the Educard Project here.

You can purchase cards at the links above or here.

You can donate to the project here.

The future holds great things, as Educard is planning more decks with more different sciences and more women.

Help science teachers and their students play with a full deck, by buying one or a few decks of Educards, giving them to someone worthy as a gift, and thus, spinning off some free cards for use in some needful schools.

Before answering that question, I’d like to remind you that you need to go here and donate ten or twenty bucks to the Donors Choose program. Then, when you come back, you can read the rest of this post.

The answer: They’re all the same. In each case, you’re dead (or somebody’s dead). All of these are also very newsworthy, but had I included on this list driving your car into a ditch and rolling it, having a heart attack, or just fading away from respiratory failure (all three fatal in my thought experiment) they would be less newsworthy but you would still be just as dead.

Lately, I’ve been discussing the idea that there should be laws that require that gun owners keep their guns properly secured, and that these laws hold firearms owners responsible when the guns are acquired and used in a way that causes injury or fatality. For instance, when a teenager gets dad’s gun and accidentally shoots little sister (or self). There are several arguments against such laws. One is that such laws already exist, even if in a different form. That is a bad argument because they don’t or are not enforced, so any existing laws are ineffective. Laws can be written and implemented in different ways that more or less require their enforcement. Another argument is that it can’t be done. That is, of course, wrong. It can be done. Another argument is the particularistic scenario of innocence argument; Some contrived sequence of events by which a person really really locks up the gun really really good but somehow the gun ends up in the wrong person’s hand and … bam. That is no a valid counter argument because the same argument can be made against ALL laws. We have the system we have in part to account for real life. If such an unlikely scenario occurred, the courts would handle it properly, as long as the defendant was middle class and white. Like all laws.

One of the arguments that is often made is that something worse can happen. The fact is that very few teenagers are actually killed becuase of an accidental discharge of a gun that should have been locked up. But a LOT of teenagers are killed because of a purposeful discharge to cause a self inflicted wound, often using a gun that should have been locked up. So, if we include suicide, there are actually quite a few cases of guns that should have been locked up but were not. But still, more people die in car accidents and more teenagers are shot by each other in a criminal setting (gang fighting, etc.). Therefore, the argument goes, these guns-not-locked-up scenarios are not important.

And that argument, of course, is wrong. Because in the end, you’re still dead and somebody is still (at least partly) responsible.

The argument is a fallacy, because if it was true, we would be able to identify one problem and declare that that is the only problem and all other problems are not really problems (at least, until we solve the One Problem). Medical research on all forms of cancer should stop because heart disease kills more people. Airline safety is not important because relatively few people die in plane crashes. In fact, homicide should not really be illegal until we’ve solved this whole natural death problem.

The argument is a fallacy and we almost always hear it from people who have run out of other ways to argue their case.

Now, getting back for a moment to Donors Chooose. There are schools in the United States that need your help, because they are underfunded. A few dollars here and there can make a big difference, as exemplified by the projects I chose for you to consider for the Donors Choose campaign. But, the same amount of money donated to a school in the Southern Sudan could hire a teacher for a month or pay for life saving vaccines for 50 children or fund the construction of new and clean bathroom facilities. Or whatever. Therefore, you should not donate to Donors Choose, but rather, to the Sudan.

Right?

Maybe. But I don’t actually see you donating any money to schools in the Sudan at the moment, do I? Click here, dog. Just do it.

I am a bit worn out. I spent the last two days in a High School classroom bringing the wonders of rodent anatomy and evolution to a group of eager students. Well, three groups of eager students. I try to spend at least a few days in a local K-12 school every semester, both to lend a hand and to keep in touch with what goes on in such places. And, not that I needed reminding, but quite a bit goes on.

Being a K-12 teacher in an American public school is like being a sailor on a leaky naval vessel under fire from a superior enemy closing in fast and you have been assigned by the Captain six jobs to be done ASAP, and half of them involve finding a bucket of steam, and the other half are life or death matters. I’m not talking about my teaching. As a guest, I just show up and do the classroom thing with the students. No, I’m talking about what the teachers are doing other than teaching. Every few months the typical school board or administration comes up with some neat idea to improve education without actually reducing class size or providing more resources, but that does involve making the teachers fill out more forms and go to more meetings and so on and so forth. All of this happens at the beginning of the year and the teachers, just getting their new courses under way, just don’t have time for that, yet they make time. There are constant interruptions in the classrooms. I spent a total of about 9 hours teaching in classrooms this week and was inturrupted by the public address system no fewer than 12 times, with the last interruption being a full five minute announcement that took up the last five minutes of the last hour of the last day. Which is when I would have normally said some important stuff, don’t ya think? As a person who has taught far more than the average professor in colleges and universities, I’m always astounded at how much interruption and distraction is tolerated in the K-12 classroom. The classroom needs to be restored to a higher status than it currently has, in my opinion.

One thing I noticed that I think is pretty typical. In this particular department, and this is probably an exemplar of similar things elsewhere, there is a shortage of microscopes. (In some other school, some other place and time, there is a shortage of some other thing.) Therefore, quite a bit of time was spent moving microscopes back and forth across a rather large building for use in different classes, and quite a bit of time and mental energy was spent trying to figure out how to arrange access to a limited amount of this equipment. Microscopes are expensive, but teaching scopes are not that expensive and tend to last for many years. An investment in more scopes (which I’m actually sure will happen in this particualr case) will serve everyone very well, but the sad irony is that at no point will it ever be officially acknowledged that purchasing 12 microscopes will save hundreds of hours of teacher time distributed over the next few years. Because nobody really cares about teacher time. The teachers themselves seem to have given up on being treated fairly. And, there is no wonder that one of the variables that determines state-wide educational quality is whether or not your state has unionized teachers.

I’m very grateful that I get the chance to help out in this way now and then in local schools. I get to bring something that otherwise might not be available in a particular classroom, I get to interact with mostly great kids, and I get to give a teacher or two a couple hours of time so they can get some more prep done or spend more time with grading or planning or helping students or going to the bathroom or breathing or whatever. If you have a chance you should do something for your local teachers as well. All schools have volunteer programs, as far as I know.

Oh, and it turns out that this is a school that does the Pledge of Allegiance every Monday. They don’t take up class time, but rather a bit of the student’s “news break” time. And, in total, the student’s news break was impinged on by various outside demands somewhat more than my teaching time. The only thing sacred in the average school is the right to interrupt, it would seem!

Check your twitter feed, your facebook streams, your other snorking tools over a period of time and you’ll see the occasional comment on either what is wrong with our system of education, or what can be done to fix some problem or another. If you’ve got nothing along these lines in your recent snorking streams, try an experiment: Put up a facebook post, or send out to the twittosphere a tweet that brings up something about the education system. With that bait, you’ll see what is annoying me.

I promise you, whatever you are thinking is wrong with the system of education is either something that simply isn’t true (and you don’t know what you are talking about) or it is something that has been noticed.¹ You have nothing to bring to the table that wasn’t already there. And, there is little doubt that any suggestions you might have to make things work better are useless, dumb, stupid, or if they are good ideas, they are already being done.

You are no more able to identify the problems in the educational system of the US or elsewhere than a lawyer or bank manager or truck driver is to identify flaws in what Physicists call their “Standard Model” (how everything works) and your lame-brained idea of how to fix your delusional concepts of what is wrong are no more likely to work than some dumb-ass perpetual motion machine.

The only difference between physics and the system of education vis-a-vis the crap you are thinking is this; Physicist’s have a simple answer to your suggestions: “Show me the math. Oh, you don’t have that worked out yet? Then get back to me later on that…” The field of education has no such easy answer.

I first realized that every single person on this planet has a) thinks they have identified what is wrong with our system of education and b) thinks they know how to fix it, while I was sitting in the audience at a Skepchick Track panel at CONvergence three years ago, and five or six people in a row … representing humanity in general (I should note that all were audience members) felt the need to stand up and regale the rest of the room with their wisdumb and experience regarding the American System of Education. There were actually people who were using their own personal experiences in high schools in the 1960s as a reference to make their point about what is wrong with “teachers these days.” There were actually people who prefaced their mumbled missive with something like “I am not an expert in this field” and then, instead of just listening to themselves say what they just said and sitting the hell down, they followed that with a, “… but …” and then, annoyingly, kept talking. OMG.

None of this would be more than mildly annoying except for the transition that I’ve noticed over the last few months, with the last straw coming at me via a tweet from the National Center for Science Education.

Here’s the thing. Our system of education in this country has remained the same or gotten worse in most measures, objectively and scientifically. What are the major trends behind this? There are two, with the second one having very specific consequences, although there are many other factors. Trend one: More kids are being filtered out of public schools, or, in the case of comparative statistics, kids are being differentiated between public and charter schools, with the charter schools, being fully filtered, making the public schools look bad and, probably, be bad. Trend two: Less and less money per student, and the specific consequence is larger class size.

How do we fix this? Money.

Money. Money. Money. Money. Money. Money. Money. Money. Money. Money. Money. Money. Money. Money. Money.

Spend. More. Money. On. Education. Not less. More.

All the other ideas everyone has are pretty much useless as long as the per capita spending relative to inflation stays the same from year to year except in those all to frequent years when it goes down.

The shift that has happened in recent months, maybe a bit longer, is that this part of the process has been left out of the conversation. Over the last 8 weeks I’ve listened to two major interviews or panel discussions by top educational experts on how to improve education, and neither one once mentioned either funding or class size. The assumption is, apparently, that these will not change. If you mention funding you will probably run into the phrase “taxes” and everyone has been beaten into submission in regards to taxes. Taxes will never, ever, ever be raised again in the United States. They will only go down now and then when a tax cut for privileged individuals or powerful corporations is arranged. So mentioning taxes is a big no-no. Thus, class sizes can not be mentioned either.

And this tweet from the NCSE sent me to an on line article at Oxford American where average citizens are being asked to say how to improve the system of education, in which it is said:

What matters most about education is what you choose to teach and how you choose to teach it. That seems almost axiomatic to me, so it’s strange that so much of the intense ongoing debate about education ignores these topics and focuses instead on structural issues like teacher tenure, administrative control of schools, and class size.*

Emphasis added.

First, no one is talking any more about class sizes. And, if they are, how is it that class size is a “structural issue” like “administrative control of schools”? Has the most fundamental variable in teaching and learning just been thrown under the big yellow bus? One on one tutoring vs. large lecture, vs interactive lab groups? Number of students requiring individual attention per tech er in a class of N individuals? Structural? No, I don’t think so.

The problem with our system of education is obvious: We have stopped talking about the problems with our system of education and rather engaged in some sort of cynical semi-professionalized circle jerk. The way to solve this problem is obvious. Give up. Or, see above. The parts about money. And taxes.

_________________________
¹Obviously I’m speaking here to people who are not in the education field.

There are several reasons that this is objectionable and I hope you will assemble some of these reasons and add your own, to craft an email to the principal and school board superintendent where you pay your taxes. I promise you that there are people pressuring the school boards to require the Pledge to be said daily. In one local school in Minnesota, teachers were told during their first staff meeting “The pressure’s been on for years. We’re giving in this year because we really can’t hold out any longer,” and thus, henceforth, a few minutes of the first period of every day would be devoted to organizing the students, making them stand up, reciting the pledge with them.

Before we get to the reasons to oppose this policy (and to take action in doing so), let me make a few things very clear. First, do not assume that I’m against the Pledge of Allegiance of that I am not a Patriotic American. Noting about the pledge itself, or pledges in general, or my love of country, will be found in reasons to oppose this policy, except for one detail that will be made plain. Second, while it is technically true that a student can opt out of the Pledge (probably), this is irrelevant. In fact a student is not able to sit out the pledge, especially in grade school or middle school. Rules are rules and rulings on rules are fine, but anyone who thinks a Middle School kid can buck the trend without serious consequences is kidding themselves. Third, any opt-out policy for students simply does not apply to teachers. They can in fact be told to say the pledge of allegiance in class or lose their jobs. In sum: a) this is not about patriotism or pledges; and b) in practice, a “say the pledge” rule is an unavoidable requirement for all regardless of any technicalities.

Here are the reasons to not require that the Pledge of allegiance be recited periodically, especially daily or weekly, in American Public Schools:

1) In all schools some an in many schools many students are not Americans. If you are not an American citizen and you are required to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, you may feel uncomfortable, you may be doing something that you feel is wrong, and in many cases … and please do take this seriously … you may be committing an illegal act. My daughter is currently in High School. If she was required to say a Pledge in her school, she would be carrying out an Un-American Act and probably violating some law, because she is an American Citizen in high school overseas. In one school near my house, up to 25 or 35% of the kids in a given class are not US citizens. There, they were required to say the pledge and teachers who taught there were well aware of the discomfort they felt, with some teachers eventually just giving up and not requiring it in their classroom against school policy.

2) Americans have freedom of speech and this also means freedom of silence. A pledge to the principles of our nation should acknowledge that. Therefore requiring people to recite the pledge endlessly is an absurdity which can to little other than fuel cynicism among our students for our system of government and our society.

3) A pledge, if taken seriously, normally lasts for longer than one day or one week. The President of the United States does not recite the Oath of Office every day. Just once every four years, max. We are sending the message that we don’t trust or believe our children.

4) Here’s the specific-to-the-pledge part: The Pledge of Allegiance includes the term “Under God” and it is therefore a violation of the Establishment Clause of the Constitution of the United States and an offense to people who do not wish to utter those words for one reason or another. The “jury” as it were is still out on this officially, but if I recall correctly the last challenge to the God Clause ended because of an issue of standing. But even if the courts do not rule any time soon that you can’t force a bunch of school children to pray in this manner, it should still not be allowed in our public schools. See above if you were thinking that students could simply opt out of this phrase.

5) Did you notice that forcing the Pledge of Allegiance into the school day was not an act of patriotism but rather an attempt to get at least a tiny bit of Christian God Fearing prayer into the public schools? This is not OK.

6) Society is willing to make constant and repeated demands on our schools to address endless social issues, but is rarely willing to do the most important thing it could do to make public schools work: Reduce class size without reducing the professional nature of the system. As long as society refuses to provide schools with the resources and support they need to educate our children, society should refrain from chipping away at the precious hours of time available for our educators to work with. A daily pledge interferes significantly with learning. Don’t allow it to happen in your school.

Please take this seriously. It can not be hard to find the email of the principals of the schools in your district, and the school board members and superintend or whatever administrative overlords your local system keeps on the books. Don’t bother trying to find the current policy in your school; It is their job to tell you that. Just craft a letter indicating that the Pledge should not be required on a daily or weekly basis, give a few reasons, and ask what the current policy is now and what changes are planned for the future. Even if your school does not require the pledge now, there IS pressure for them to do so in the future. Your letter or email will help balance that pressure.

OK, everybody. You know what to do. Move out!