A Fraud

New York City area talk radio is all abuzz with the A-Rod story.  He just received a 162 game suspension, coincidentally the length of an MLB season, for what seems to have amounted to a ton of circumstantial evidence that he used steroids, or PED's, or HGH or some other performance enhancer.

What is left unsaid and yet is obvious about this story is the utter uselessness of it all.  The average American Imbecile will call up Mike Francesa's show, or the cloddish front runners on the Michael Kay show, and complain to whoever will listen about how horrible A-Rod is, and how he's a cheater and a lowlife and a Benedict Arnold to the Yankees and Baseball in general.  They decry the use of PED's (the trendy term for steroids, 'Performance Enhancing Drugs), and explain how they have ruined baseball.

This seems odd.  The ratings for Francesa's show are God-like.  He is paid a ton of money to talk sports (he does it quite well) for five hours a day.  Easily 90% of the call are anti-ARod.  Today Francesa was battling callers who were up in arms about how wretched A-Rod is, and how he should be banned for life, drawn and quartered, and then the pieces blasted into space.  Francesa was simply and correctly pointing out that there is little to no hard evidence against A-Rod, and although he is a distasteful person, the evidence is not ironclad and MLB, particularly the commissioner, seems to have a vendetta against him.  Francesa is right, and by the fans' reactions, you'd think he'd just nominated A-Rod for Yankee captain and demoted Derek Jeter to latrine duty.

I realize that this is all part of some sort of show, some kind of Kabuki theater.  Do the fans really care about PED use?  Does A-Rod and his $27 million salary offend the most rabid, mouth breathing fan?

Not at all.  Attendance at Yankee Stadium last year was 3,279,589.  3.5 million dedicated moneyspenders showed up the previous year.  Alex Rodriguez could show up at the park, inject himself with HGH and Fetal Horse Cells while at home plate and the Herd will still show up and blow gobs of cash on watching these people.  At least the Seattle fans, A-Rod's original team, showered him with fake dollar bills upon his first return to their city after he signed monstrous contract with the Texas Rangers.  Yankee fans bark on call in shows, but that seems to be the extent of it.

I've been following the Yankees for the past 30 years, closely for the past 25.  I go to no games, watch about 3 games a year from the comfort of my living room, and read great books about the game.

Follow my lead - get with the program NY fans.

Cask of Amontillado in 10 minutes

You didn't read or study? You should read the story because it is fantastic, but if you DIDN'T, I am here to help. Look over and listen to this screencast, pausing when necessary and get the info you need to do well in class, on the quiz, or on the test.



More test prep and resources can be found at marolla.wordpress.com

The Glory of Their Times - book review

In the section of Bill James' Historical Baseball Abstract (one of the best baseball books ever written), that discusses the 1960's, he mentions the best baseball books of that decade.  Of Lawrence Ritter's The Glory of Their Times it says "often imitated, never excelled."  I know why he wrote this about the book - it is glorious in many ways.

The book is really a history book.  The author's poignant introduction states that his motivation was to write about the stars of the early era of Major League Baseball before they were forgotten, or dead.  Ritter traveled the country with what we would consider today archaic recording equipment and interviewed people like: Rube Marquard, Sam Crawford, Joe Wood, Chief Meyers, Rube Bressler, Specs Toporcer and Lefty O'Doul.  The most recent interviewee (Hank Greenberg) retired from playing baseball in 1947 and died in 1986.

Most of the players were not stars (Bill Wambsganss?).  This regular guy flavor makes the book seem like walking into a time warp.  The men were farm boys and country boys mostly.  Greenberg's youth in the Bronx stands out as most of the chapters start with the humble beginnings of boys in rural America or small town America.  The men came from families where the father worked, usually self employed and the mothers mostly stayed at home.  We hear of dad being a lawyer or a farmer or anything in between.  Most of the men had little growing up in terms of money but lots of life experience.

This was a time that according to today's Intellectual Elite, today's Guardians of Established Opinion, could not have existed.  Why?  The way my mind works, I thought about all of the things that were going on in the early 1900's when these people were growing up.  There was no FED.  The world (until 1914 and the USA until 1933) was on a gold coin standard. There were no unions to speak of, the federal government was minimal, the EPA, OSHA, minimum wage, welfare, and Department of Education didn't exist.  Were a person to suggest abolishing all of those things today he'd be considered dangerous.  Hand wringing and wailing would ensue: "what would happen to the poor - who would care for the downtrodden?  Yet there is not a spec of evidence that life was miserable.  On the contrary, they all talked about how they had immense freedom and exciting amounts of opportunity.

While reading about the young lives of these men, I kept waiting for some social commentary about how awful things were before the New Deal, or before American Empire post WWII.  It never came.  The interviews take you back to an era of communities and people that took care of themselves.  Parents who allowed their children to read and work and think for themselves.  Multiple times in the book dad tells the young baseball player that he'd rather he follow in his footsteps as a lawyer, or a shopkeeper (advice I have to admit I would probably give my child) but eventually tells him to go after his passion.  A few of them got seed money, but most hopped trains, hitched rides and slept in barns to get to the minor league town that sought them.  Re read that last sentence and think about the reaction from one of today's Caring Adults who Manage America's Youth.

The historical, first person accounts are rich in detail and will give you a snapshot of early 1900's America.  The baseball information is first rate, from the style of uniforms to the style of play.  Interestingly the former players are realistic about the amazing increase in skill and speed of the current (at the time 1966) players.  One might expect a biased lamenting about great the past player were and how overrated the new guys are.  But no, these seem like honest honorable men and they all realize that Willie Mays is a talent that exceeds just about all of the turn of the century players.

There is a look back to earlier times by Chief Meyers, a grizzled, tough American Indian catcher who didn't mind being called 'Chief'.  He talks about how things have gotten worse with regard to the money and the business of baseball and what happened to Jim Thorpe, but this snippet from page 184 caught my eye.  Remember, this is from 1966: "The world seems to be turned all upside down today.  Progress, they call it.  The radio and the television and all, brainwashing the children and teaching them to cheat and steal and kill.  Always violence and killing.  I think it's an awful bad example for the youngsters.  Why can't they teach people about the good things in life instead?"

The Glory of Their Times is a wonderful book of great depth and character.  I highly recommend it.

Chief Meyers in 1910

Idle End Year Thoughts

With two and a half hours left in 2013, here are some stream of consciousness thoughts:

Sports
The things people complain about are still rampant: HUGE salaries, PEDS (the substances formerly known as steroids), bad behavior, lackadaisical play, scandals - 15 minutes listening to sports talk radio will complete the list.  Yet, the people keep showing up to games.  Attendance is high, franchise values are skyrocketing (especially in the NBA), and the sports money machine keeps rolling along.  For something that people are fed up with, they sure have a weird way of showing it.

The NY basketball franchises are a laughingstock.  The Carmelo Anthony trade ruined the Knicks, as did deviating from the Donnie Walsh, D'Antoni, Stoudemire, Gallinari plan.  The plan was working.  It took a year and a half, but now the team is ruined - again.  The Brooklyn Nets gutted the future and blow up the payroll for a bunch of old guys (they called it 'leadership') past their prime.  I guess having Kevin Garnett scream and pound his chest every two weeks (about the rate he dunks nowadays) was worth it.  Their salary cap situation is horrible, they gave away all of their draft picks, and the future is grim.  When the Celtics are great in two years, you'll know it is because of the Nets lack of vision.

Politics
The political scene hasn't altered at all.  Government gets bigger, debt and deficits expand without any kind of brake, and the people seem to like it.  Congress, which seems to always have an approval rating of 9%, keeps getting reelected.  We're watching a slow motion train wreck called 'Obamacare' get implemented.  It is simply a transfer of wealth from the middle class to corporations and those on welfare.  As it is probably the last large government program to get implemented before the Great Default, it might be worth watching.  Jon Stewart has been having a field day with the cloddish incompetence with the Obamacare rollout…

A few people have recognized the the "Republican vs. Democrat" Show is a sham and a farce, but not the numbers to affect any change.  Only the bankruptcy of the Federal Gov't will truly show people how badly they've been duped.  I predict it happens sometime in the next 8 yrs or so.

Social Media
A big story for 2013 - the raging digital universe that is social media - Facebook, Twitter, Vine, Instagram, Tumblr…  Facebook is the big one on this list, but I think that social media is going to be very faddish.  MySpace, which was huge few years ago, collapsed quickly.  I think the same will happen with Facebook - already the young people are veering away from it and going with other venues.  The Facebook app on my students phones is just one of many.  I think FB's dominance is over.

Education
School, where I work, is on life support.  The culture of the building was bad, now it's just nonexistent. The trends never work - the latest one is Common Core.  The shame of Common Core is fourfold: 1 - it funnels tax dollars into for profit education corporations, who are more than happy to feed from the taxpayer trough.  2- It is borderline incoherent, and teachers are told what to teach, when and for how long.  The required literature (at the HS level anyway) is incongruous and bereft of any relationship to classical learning or literacy.  3 - It is another example of one size fits all.  The organizations who destroyed public education now have the answer, and you have to follow their plan.  Teacher freedom?  Gone.  4 - Establishment Hacks are jumping right on board with common core.  They expose themselves with long winded blog posts about student skills and literacy and then - - wait for it - - they say that this is why we must adopt common core!  It's certainly getting easier to spot those who don't, or can't think for themselves.

At least some things have gotten better...

The Marva Collins Story

Marva Collins is one of the educators you've never heard of.  The Establishment knows it would be politically incorrect to criticize her (she's a black woman), so it chooses to ignore her.  In my Education School classes, Collins was mentioned zero times, while hacks and frauds like Freire and Kozol were brought up repeatedly.  Collins should have been held up as a model, instead she was invisible.  She didn't exist.

What did Collins do in inner city Chicago?  She provided first rate education - superior to that of the Public Schools - for half the price.  She showed that a quality education is neither expensive or out of reach, and she did it where supposedly the public schools are the best and only option.

How did she do it?  With traditional methods that have been known for millennia (from Wikipedia): 

"Marva Collins uses the Socratic method, modified for use in primary school. The first step is to select material with abstract content to challenge students' logic, and that will therefore have different meaning to different students, in order to aid discussion. This is done specifically to teach children to reason.

Next, the teacher should read the material, because unknown material cannot be taught. New words, the words to watch, should be listed, and taught, for pronunciation, use and spelling before the material is read. Without this step, the reading is meaningless.

Next, one begins a series of pertinent questions as the reading progresses, starting with a reference to the title, and a question about what the material is about. Predictions should use logic, reasoning and evidence without fallacy. The reading must be out loud, so the teacher can ask questions at pertinent points. Students are taught to test their reasoning. Afterward, they write daily letters to the author or characters, and write a critical review. Why is the work important to them? The child must be taught to refer to what was previously learned to support their opinions."

This method is related to the Trivium - resources are online or in libraries for free.  In contrast to the fads that come and go in the Public School arena, Collins realized what John Taylor Gatto and Adam Robinson and Jaime Escalante did; that a quality education is inexpensive and the public system is both overpriced and ineffective, especially in areas where it is needed the most. 

In another parallel to my experience, and Gatto's, Collins has written:  "I have discovered few learning disabled students in my three decades of teaching. I have, however, discovered many, many victims of teaching inabilities."^[2] I make this comment frequently.  I have never met 'special ed' student, nor have a met an 'honors' student.  In the slow motion train wreck where I work, hundreds of thousands of dollars are being poured into 'Common Core' (the latest fad), and 'Special Education' (a monumental and spectacularly inefficient and ineffective bureacracy).  

Collins was in the same predicament 30 years ago: "During the 2006-2007 school year, Collins' school charged $5,500 for tuition, and parents said the school did a much better job than the Chicago public school system.[1]
Meanwhile, during the 2007-2008 year, Chicago public school officials claimed that their budget of $11,300 per student was not enough."

Collins' story is one that you are supposed know nothing about.  Mentioning her, Escalante, Gatto or, (God forbid) homeschooling, warrants shock and outrage from those limiting themselves to the 3x5 card of Established Opinion - regardless of facts or outcomes.

For years, "The Marva Collins Story" was difficult to find.  Now it is available for everyone for free.  Watch it.

George Will Explains the Political Situation Today

For many years, Will was what I called a "beltway conservative."  He wrote and spoke about things from the acceptable others side of the political debate.  He wouldn't go against things too much, he'd carry the torch for the Establishment Right and stay 'safe'.

Apparently those days are over.

Will was a 'Hamiltonian', meaning he was OK with a group of Overlords controlling and managing the people - as they were obviously unfit to do it themselves, and anyway, shouldn't they be saved from themselves?

Now he seems to be more libertarian - more Jeffersonian - more critical of the Federal Government.  Actually, he obliterates what has become a dangerous and rapacious Federal bird of prey.

You'll see why the key number when it comes to Medicare is 12.  "We are weaving a network of dependency".  I can't think of a better way of describing what is going on.

Notice: no notes, no teleprompter, no wasted words, no deviation from the message.

I recommend you watch the whole thing.  As a high school student, you'll never have something like this put in front of you.  Never.

Good Advice from Mike "Dirty Jobs" Rowe on College, Jobs, and Meaningful Work

This interview is worth watching.  Mike Rowe's saying "work harder and smarter" is one that you should adopt.  With $1 trillion in student loan debt out there, he sees a problem.  You, however, are not supposed to see a problem with that.  You're supposed to take out a huge loan, get a degree you don't need, or want, that has no useful purpose.

I have a BA in English and I wouldn't recommend that someone go into debt to get one.  Notice the wording.  People misinterpret my message all the time.  I'm not saying don't get a college degree.  I'm saying don't go into debt to get one, especially if the job market in that field is saturated.  Be careful.  Count the cost.

What are classically called "blue collar jobs" are going unfilled in the US - perhaps your change of thinking and going against the grain - going in the other direction than the rest of the herd will be your salvation.