Save me from the New York state of mind – Amanda Green

276 thoughts on “Save me from the New York state of mind – Amanda Green”

1. There are only a limited number of major ways of learning. The lesson plan is currently a list. It should be a table. Reverse the classroom so that lessons are for home and taken in via lectures that cover each point in the various major learning methods. Each family picks which style fits the kid. What is now homework is done in school. If you can get the problems done at school correctly, the system worked. There will always be a minority of kids who need intervention on a particular learning item. They can get individualized attention from the teacher because the kids who learn the item without intervention no longer have to wait for further lecture delivery.

   This is not rocket science. It does, however, require a conversation to happen in every school district to answer the question what is school for. Here’s a start:

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   1. That and it requires the state and federal governments getting out of what is a local matter. Until that happens, we are going to continue seeing idiocy like the FitnessGrams.

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      1. That’s not going to happen until we who are parents pry control from their cold, dead hands. That’s the only way they’re going to give it up. Control (power) is what it’s all about — current control over what and how your child learns, and future control via manipulation as the child grows into an adult. The Obama misadministration has convinced me it can no longer be done without bloodshed. I’m just going to make sure it’s not my blood, or the blood of any member of my family (unless they side with Obama, at which point all bets are off).

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         1. A significant part of the Anarchist MO is not to fight back, but simply to withhold consent and participation.

            We homeschool our daughter.

            We withhold our consent, and if I could figure out a way to withhold my taxes I would.

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            1. Well, we would too, if they didn’t throw us in jail for it.

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            2. Another method is to expose false consensus by asking “what is school for”, ask what are the metrics that make a good school (or other govt unit), and insist on a system that delivers those metrics in an actionable way.

               Welcome to my business plan.

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2. Don’t get me started on the crock of BMI.

   Ooops, too late.

   According to BMI, Arnie was at least overweight if not obese when he was Mr. Universe. Anyone with anything other than a runner’s physique is overweight.

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   1. Indeed. Anyone taking a BMI measurement seriously is in dire need of some education. If they’re working in a field anywhere remotely connected to health care, they should be fired for incompetence.

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      1. I have to agree with you, Robin. Frankly, if I were Dr. Cooper and the Cooper Clinic, I’d be sending a cease and desist to NY for tying what they are doing to what CC has and is doing.

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      2. Nit: BMI is useful as a comparator amongst a group with generally similar physiques or issues (it’s a fairly good predictor of c-sections when used with late stage pregnant women). You just have to throw out the scale and recalibrate for the group you’re actually looking at

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         1. True, but it is just one factor to be considered when making the determination of whether or not someone is overweight and not “in shape”.

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         2. The military has used it in the past. Don’t know if they still do or not. I had to threaten to sue them to get them to let me show them I wasn’t obese, and shouldn’t be placed on the Control Roster.

            I joined the military in 1965. At that time, I was 5’11” tall, weighed 210 pounds, had a 32″ waist and a 45″ chest. In 1990, when I had my first cervical surgery, I was 44 years old, was 5’9″ tall, weighed 200 pounds, had a 36″ waist and a 44″ chest. The only way I could get the Air Force to leave me alone was to retire, which I had planned to do anyway. It took a visit to the base swimming pool and my laying flat on the bottom in 15 feet of water to convince them my body was denser than water and I couldn’t be “obese”. Even then I had to beat a few people across the head (metaphorically, otherwise I’d have been court-martialed) to be able to retire at my then-current rank. Since then, I’ve come to the inescapable conclusion that government bureaucrats have no common sense, and the condition extends into many parts of the military.

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            1. Last time I was in (2008, AF Reserves) they “taped” you and used that in combination with your height and weight.

               There was a mechanism to challenge it, but it was generally accurate.

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               1. they tape you only after their generic BMI math says you’re fat

                  OF course, the point which they started taping me , I had been on crutches for three months…

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   2. Yep, and most of those who still use BMI use it as only one part of the overall evaluation. Something it doesn’t appear NY schools are doing.

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   3. One of my personal hates too. Aside from the fact that it was started by a totally unscientific SURVEY of a Belgian who asked his friends what they *thought* was healthy, and that it only gained traction because it was adopted by insurance agencies who wanted to be able to charge groups of people more, but they couldn’t get actual health statistics, as well as the fact that lean muscle is denser than less-healthy fat, it’s mathematically flawed, and I can explain that in simple terms.

      BMI is measured with a square (x times x.) Volume is measured with a cube (x times x times x.) Which means that when you move away from the middle, both high and low, the result becomes more and more skewed. (Which is why there is that story of the very short college student pestered by her health department for being anorexic—when the truth is, she was just small.)

      There are so many other things wrong with using BMI—like no gender or phenotype difference in the calculation, or its utter irrelevance to actual health—that I just can’t get into it, lest the top of my head blow off. Eating disorders are the psychiatric disorder with the highest DEATH rate of all—twenty percent over twenty years, mostly due to malnutrition fallout. Pushing BMI is irresponsible and deadly.

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3. Here’s my problem with all this. First, it is obvious the girl isn’t overweight. More than that, she is active and healthy. Yet the NY Department of Education is using a questionable test to tell her the exact opposite. PE teachers are measuring, weighing and taking the heights of their students and this is what these reports are based on.

   It’s worse than that. Ms. Williams BMI is actually in the low end of normal as it is. They blew this one on every single level.

   My son is overweight. Then again, both his parents are currently as well. That’s on us, and we know it. We’re working on it. I damn sure don’t need the schools involved in that crap. If they wanted to help, they’d go back to my day when PE was a regular class in middle school.

   In the district I live in, it’s not. The school year is divided up into three sections, and he got PE for exactly one of those. Of course, they can have Individual Learning Time, or ILT, which basically lets students do whatever they want. My son, for example, got to learn how to play chess (called “chess club”). Nothing against chess, but board games are extracurricular activities, not class activities.

   Luckily for my son, he has parents who actually give a damn. Contrary to what proponents of things like “fitnessgrams” might think, schools don’t. If they did, they’d have made sure Gwendolyn Williams had the right score for one, since that girl has nothing to worry about regarding her weight at this point in her life.

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   1. Unless you go to junior high at that place in Brooklyn, where they actually do have a lecture class on chess taught by a chess whiz from Romania or somewhere. The documentary made it seem a lot tougher than a lot of elective classes, gotta say.

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      1. Yeah, not even close.

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         1. Then it’s a study hall period, really, but they’ve gussied it up with options because they don’t want the kids needing study hall supervision. (Picture me rolling my eyes.)

            It’s nice to have clubs at school, but they should be able to meet after or before school, or at lunch. Not during classtime.

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            1. Agreed. That’s what bothered me so much. I mean, it wasn’t a technology course, or computers, or even just keyboarding. Nothing of actual use.

               It’s an extracurricular that they’re calling a class or something.

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               1. Chess not useful?

                  learning how to stare at a complicated problem and building a predictive model in your head that informs your actions isn’t useful?

                  Isn’t useful compared to what?

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                  1. They weren’t learning how to do it. They were essentially thrown at it. Big difference.

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                     1. er… Tom… it could be worse. Robert had this and after he won against his “teacher” the teacher had it in for him the rest of the year in that school.

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                        1. True.

                           And really, that’s kind of pathetic. I mean, that sounds like someone who essentially does it just so they can have easily defeated foes, rather than a challenge.

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                        2. Which totally crazy. I teach fencing. My goal is to get all my students to be able to routinely beat me in a bout. Anything else is to fail them as a teacher.

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                           1. It’s only crazy from the point of view of rational people.

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                           2. I teach writing (mostly for free.) I want all my students to be better than I. I could use some decent reads.

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   2. So much of the problem started when the districts took away recess and “real” PE in elementary school and middle school. The need — and I use that term loosely — to coddle our kids and make sure they never bump their elbows or skin their knees has done a disservice to those kids. Not letting them stay outside in the playground to play and talk before school also takes away a chance to exercise. Instead we wrap them in cotton wool, feed them a state mandated meal that may or may not fit what each individual student needs.

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      1. Oh, don’t get me started on most of that crap. Particularly letting kids mill about outside before school.

         It’s like they’re terrified the kids might get picked on (that’s the excuse they use here), but miss out that most kids seem to be bullied by kids their own age. Unfortunately, the real world doesn’t divide people by age. Sooner or later, they’re going to have to learn to interact with people of different ages.

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   3. It’s worse than that. Ms. Williams BMI is actually in the low end of normal as it is. They blew this one on every single level.

      It didn’t occur to me until just now to check what BMI values are considered “normal” or to calculate Ms. Williams’ BMI for myself. Her BMI score is 19.3, which is in the low end of normal for adults. However, according to the “BMI for girls” chart at https://www.bcm.edu/research/centers/childrens-nutrition-research-center/bodycomp/bmiz2.html her BMI of 19.3 lands her right around the 88th percentile for 9-year-old girls, and the school’s health materials apparently has the 85th percentile as the cutoff for saying “You’re overweight”. (It can be seen in the NY Post article that Amanda linked in the main post — I won’t duplicate the link, so that I can stay under WordPress’s 2-links-and-you-go-to-moderation limit). On the basis of which, the school judged her to be overweight.

      In other words, the school’s “fitnessgrams” were designed to report 15% of their kids as overweight, by definition. Which means that they would get… let’s see, how much funding from gubmint programs? The kind that Michelle Obama is pushing because “there are too many overweight kids in our schools”? And that school’s funding is safe, because no matter the actual health of the kids, they’re going to be reporting 15% of them as overweight.

      I’m only just now realizing that “Qui bono?” is, as always, the question I should have been asking all along.

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      1. What’s funny to me is how we have a childhood obesity “epidemic” at the same time we simply have to combat child hunger.

         It’s not like you have to really look for the irony here.

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         1. Nope. There’s a regional program to send kids home with food so they won’t starve to death if their parents/guardians are greedy a$$holes who don’t buy groceries. None of the kids I’ve seen that qualify for the charitable aid are anywhere near starvation weight. And no one but no one will ask what the adults are doing with the grocery money.

            Hey, who shoved the soapbox under my feet? I can see perfectly fine without it, thank you.

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            1. Hey, good thing there’s enough room on this soap box for two of us.

               FWIW, I see that a lot too.

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      2. It is potentially worse than 15% being reported as overweight. That’s a percentile rank (which incidentally only goes from 0 to 99, not 0 to 100), so it really depends on what sample of scores they used to generate the score range. A percentile rank means that percentage of scores that fell at or below that score in a given sample. So a BMI of 19.3 scoring as 88th percentile means that 88 percent of the BMI’s in the sample used to generate the ranking were at 19.3 or lower. IF the sample used to generate the scale does not include a representative sample of the population (i.e. all 9 year old girls in that state/region/nation) then you’re results are useless because the scale you’re comparing them to is biased.

         It is theoretically possible that, if we could collect the BMI of every US citizen over a period of 3 days, that your BMI would give you a different percentile ranking on each of the three days the BMI scores were collected (not really because the sample size would eliminate the noise, but it helps to explain the concept).

         Another example, when I took the ASVAB in high school, I scored in the 99th percentile. I didn’t get 99% of the answers right, I just got a score that was higher than at least 99% of the people that took the ASVAB the year before.

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4. Back when I was a senior in high school, I was skinny as a rail and had a 27-inch waist. However, I’ve been genetically gifted with some naturally muscular legs and broad shoulders (I’ve since been gifted with pizza-broadened waistline) and when they looked at my numbers on the height/weight chart (5′ 11″, 150 pounds), they said that I was overweight. And this was before BMI magically ballooned my number. This had been repeated throughout my high school years. I didn’t stress out. Even at a young age, I had a fine nose for BS. Suffice it to say that I’ve ignored those numbers my entire adult life. Anyone with a single functioning brain cell should do the same.

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   1. I don’t know what it was you smelled, but it’s unfair to compare the BMI to bovine manure, which is after all a very useful substance. ;-)

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      1. Fresh chicken scat.

         With a lot of work and a light hand, it can be quite useful; without that, it’ll burn the entire area.

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      2. Point taken. No offense meant to actual useful excrement.

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   2. I am overweight, and I’d like to lose it. But my brother sent me pictures of my family the other day, and I was struck with a real uncomfortable feeling. See, every woman from her mid forties to her seventies …. you could take my body and it’s the same, except I’m taller, so I’m tipping the scales much higher. If anything I’m on the “lean” side of the group photos.
      These women lived mostly on fish and vegetables and even those who worked sitting down had to walk two miles every day just for their merchandising. Plus they cleaned by hand. Everything. Even ironing was an endurance sport as the coal filled iron weighed probably 4 lb weight. Laundry involved moving masses of wet clothes around and lifting them to hang. They were — for sure — far more active and ate fewer calories than I do. But you look at those pictures and you go “oh.”
      So my resolution is to not pig out — gluttony is a sin, anyway — and to try to walk a couple of miles a day — just to stay healthy. If I remain massive, well… do what?

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      1. The genetic component is a big deal. An example from the opposite side of things – the children: The pediatrician we had for our first child did NOT believe that our child was gaining weight appropriately. He thought she should be heavier than she was. She stayed towards the bottom of the charts though she made gains consistently. He kept trying to get us to admit that we weren’t feeding her appropriately. We kept trying to tell him it was genetic – the vast majority of kids in both our families stayed skinny little sticks until puberty hit. Even then, most of them stayed skinny and small until the next metabolism shift. I finally put together a photo album from a family reunion to show him.

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         1. At which point he probably assumed you were following standard family protocol; and not feeding your kids appropriately. :(

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         2. Our younger kid — who now is I’d say chubby, but not terribly, mostly he’s unexercised, and that’s something I intend to cure over pack/move/paint/clean — has always been either skinny or normal in weight. As in, he was 90th percentile for height and 20th for weight until age eight when he gained a bazillion pounds and looked like his brother who’s always been overweight (I feed them the same!) I worried, of course, then talked to dad who said “Oh, I did that too. If he’s like me, it’ll shed off at 12 as he starts growing.” And true enough, at 12 he grew a foot in a summer, and went skinny. He’s never been “overweight” as such since. As I said, he’s flabby now, which looks “chubby” but that’s more because he’s taking a double major and cut his practice of daily walks. (I need t get on him about that.) It’s not just hereditary, apparently it follows the same age-pattern my dad’s weight did.

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   3. Insurance companies are starting to penalize you for your BMI though. And the taller you are, the harder it is to stay within the acceptable range.

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      1. Oh yea– they want you to be 5ft8in and 120 pounds. If I was at that weight, I’d look like a prisoner on a hunger strike. *sigh 150 lbs was the lowest I have ever been and be healthy.

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         1. I am 5’8″ and 200 pounds and if I took off my shirt you could count my ribs. I’m not at all fat, just massive.
            And frankly, people who do struggle with healthy weight don’t need me lumped in with them. It’s cruel.

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            1. Oh yes– sounds like your bones are bigger than my bones. ;-)

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               1. Seen the Quiet Man? Pretend Maureen O’Hara and John Wayne had a baby. I have Sean Thornton’s shoulder’s and Mary Kate Danaher’s temper.

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                  1. Oh wow– solid– I wish I were more solid.

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                     1. In fairness, I’m still young, only 34, and hauling small children around as a daily weight regime. I’m sure I will soften over the years.

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                        1. I know a woman who never gained weight until her youngest went to kindergarten.

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                  2. Except for being taller, you sound just like the song about the “Irish Agricultural Girl.”

                     “Oh, she’s a fine, big, strong lump
                     Of an Irish agricultural girl,
                     She neither paints nor powders,
                     And her figure is all her own.
                     When she gives you a slap of the jaw,
                     Sure you think it’s the kick of a mule you’ve got –
                     The full of my arms of Irish love
                     Is pretty Kate Malone!”

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                     1. That is hysterical and awesome. I have got to find a copy of this for Himself, he will love it.

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         2. My sons call the pictures of when I was 5’7″ and 128 pounds (and considered “fat” on weight) “the famine pictures.” Looking back, yeah. Forget you can count the bones on my ribs. you can count them on my face. But people kept telling me I was fat (I was very muscular. Walked 2 to 3 hours a day to save bus fare, so I could write to Dan ;)) so I starved myself. I would go the entire day on a handful of popcorn and some espresso. I can’t do that anymore. And I might have ruined my metabolism doing it then.

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            1. Yea– there were four growing boys in the house when I was in my late teens. We got one bowl of soup and one sandwich a day. My brothers who were growing ate much much more. Those were the famine years. I got to 150 pounds when I left home, doing karate, and actually ate a couple of meals a day.

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            2. Fat at 128lbs, for 5’7″? That’s obscene.

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               1. And absurd.

                  Sorry, you just reminded me of an old riff on “girls should be seen and no heard” – “girls should be obscene and not absurd”, and it made my gutter brain kick in.

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            3. 5’7 @ 128 pounds gets you a BMI of 20, which is “normal”.

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               1. Not in Portugal, at the time.

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         3. I hit 125lbs at one point, which the military charts said was my ideal weight – I was in my mid-twenties and had a walloping case of post-natal depression, plus I hated my job to the point where I was throwing up sometimes before I reported for work. My family was horrified at some of the pictures they were sent of me. I looked like a just-liberated concentration-camp survivor.

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            1. Yep– and then they wanted you to be able to pass the physical exam in that shape- what a crock. I knew a girl who was short and considered obese… although she was all muscle and at five foot two inches could lift twice her weight. She would cart marines over her shoulder. They called her BR (bravo romeo for big red). AND the Navy wanted her on a diet. It was amazing. She was in better physical shape than some of the men.

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      2. Now there’s an economic opportunity that’s staring everybody in the face. If BMI is actuarially a crock (and I firmly believe, but haven’t done the science to prove it), then an insurance company would make good money working up something better and stealing away all those customers who are being unfairly penalized by BMI mismatches.

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         1. Body fat percentage is a much more accurate gauge and any doctor’s office worth a damn should be able to measure it. Calipers or tape measure can easily be used in office to measure during a physical. Water displacement’s better, but that’s a bit more specialized.

            Basically, there’s no need to reinvent the wheel. Unfortunately, insurance companies prefer BMI because it’s so simple. You have a height, you have a weight, and you just look on a chart. Body fat percentage requires someone who knows what they’re doing.

            Of course, that’s why it also is a much, much better indicator of health.

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            1. Sometimes simple measurements are better measures of health than complex ones. Not in this case, though.

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               1. True, often times they are and this isn’t one of them.

                  Really though, as technology advances, we’ll find even easier ways to measure BF percentage and make it even simpler.

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                  1. Tricorder/medical scanner. I give it a decade.

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                     1. Yeah, but I’ve been waiting for 40 years for the damn thing at this point.

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                     2. There’s a patent out there on IIRC nanometer x-ray. Last time I talked to the guy who wrote it (not the owner) it wasn’t being used. That, coupled with the appropriate logic/software will get it.

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                  2. Best test? Ask an experienced fitness coach. Most of the can eyeball you (in shorts and a t-shirt) and tell you within a percent or two what it is.

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            2. Based on water displacement, my body density was 1.12 at 5’9″ and 220 pounds. 8^) Almost flunked out of the Air Force Academy because I COULD NOT FLOAT! My body density then was 1.21. I want you to show me an obese kaydet.

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               1. My uncles flunked the “float” portion of the Navy’s bootcamp during Nam.

                  Thankfully, the process to waive it was put in for exactly that purpose.

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               2. Supposedly, one walked off the jumping board, fell to the bottom properly, then walked along the bottom of the pool and climbed out…..

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            3. For the vast majority 90%+ of the population their BMI is within 3 points of their body fat percentage, which is going to be within the margin of accuracy for any sort of statistical health models.

               People really *aren’t* all that different. Most of you/us don’t spend an hour a day engaging in intense physical activity (e.g. sprints, weightlifting *REAL* weights–exercises that leave you gasping, covered in sweat, shaking and looking for a bucket to puke in). Therefore most of us are soft around the middle (look, I’m there too–and I *can* do a full depth squat at my bodyweight).

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               1. Most of us might not engage in such activities, but enough do as to warrant not using a metric that doesn’t account for it.

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               2. If I’m reading this correctly, that’s not right:
                  http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18283284
                  BMI-defined obesity (> or =30 kg m(-2)) was present in 19.1% of men and 24.7% of women, while BF%-defined obesity was present in 43.9% of men and 52.3% of women. A BMI> or =30 had a high specificity (men=95%, 95% confidence interval (CI), 94-96 and women=99%, 95% CI, 98-100), but a poor sensitivity (men=36%, 95% CI, 35-37 and women=49%, 95% CI, 48-50) to detect BF%-defined obesity. The diagnostic performance of BMI diminished as age increased. In men, BMI had a better correlation with lean mass than with BF%, while in women BMI correlated better with BF% than with lean mass. However, in the intermediate range of BMI (25-29.9 kg m(-2)), BMI failed to discriminate between BF% and lean mass in both sexes.
                  CONCLUSIONS:
                  The accuracy of BMI in diagnosing obesity is limited, particularly for individuals in the intermediate BMI ranges, in men and in the elderly. A BMI cutoff of> or =30 kg m(-2) has good specificity but misses more than half of people with excess fat. These results may help to explain the unexpected better survival in overweight/mild obese patients.

                  This appears to be the response to those studies that the lady kept doing over and over when it turned out that being “over weight” made you more likely to live a long, healthy life.

                  Grr, already used my link, but I wrote about it here:
                  the-american-catholic DOT com/2013/01/02/new-shocking-study-finds-humans-are-not-standardized/

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               3. OK, you made me check. Yes, I can ALSO do a full-depth squat, and I am horribly, horribly out of shape. Right now, it hurt my knee too much to do more than one, but I made it.

                  I may have residual leg strength, though, because of the amount of time I spent on a trampoline when I was younger.

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                  1. I don’t have free weights in my house, but suspect most of us could do one full depth squat with their body weight. I haven’t lifted weights except on an occasional random occasion when with someone else, since high school. But while in high school I took body-building as a PE class for either two or three years (don’t remember, now) and we were graded on a variety of different weightlifting exercises and our time on running the mile. The exercises were graded according to a percentage of body weight, and in order to get an A we were required to do ten reps of squats with 200% of our body weight.

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                     1. Marshall loved weight lifting. I suspect if he had a weight lifting buddy, it’s the one thing he’d do.

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                     2. That’s all fine and dandy, but I AM nearly 200% of my correct body weight right now.

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               4. Let’s say that BMI is wrong for 5% of the population. That’s 15 million insurance policies that have bad underwriting. You can make pretty good money off 15 million insurance policies.

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            4. Oh, and tape has a margin of error of (IIRC) about 15 percent. Calipers have a problem because they can’t measure intra-abdominal fat.

               Bio-impedence has a 5-10 percent accuracy, and even the water weighing is bad because lung capacity can seriously throw it off.

               Back-scatter x-ray and CT scans are fairly accurate, but expensive.

               Rendering is the best way to tell body fat percentages, but it’s a bit destructive.

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         2. Actuarially it’s not a crock. As I understand it, the buckets they put people in (obese, overweight, normal, etc.) were generated from actuarial data.

            It’s applying that data to a *person* that is problematic. Saying that someone is unhealthy *solely* because some their height and weight come up with a number is stupid.

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   4. “when they looked at my numbers on the height/weight chart (5′ 11″, 150 pounds), they said that I was overweight.”

      Egads. I’m 5’8″ and if I hit 150 pounds, people would be detaining me to feed me. (I have what I refer to as “runner’s legs”—the smallest size I’ve ever been (which was underweight) was a size 10, simply because of muscular thighs and hip bones that aren’t going to shrink.)(Nor do I want them to. I like my body just fine; it’s the fashion industry I hate.) Thankfully, though I’ve calculated my BMI using those charts they keep on the wall, not a single one my doctors has ever said anything about my weight, probably because they have access to my blood tests. (My OB mentioned my weight gain with this last pregnancy was high, so I reminded her that it was perfectly in line with my prior two pregnancies, so she made a note and now considers me “on track.” I love doctors who listen…)

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5. Well, Michelle Obama’s peanut butter fixation proves she is a white supremacist because George Washington Carver.

   :)

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6. I know, ‘data is not the plural of anecdote’, but I hold that this speaks directly to causality, or the lack thereof in ‘healthy eating’.

   I live in Indiana, currently one of the most overweight states in the country. When I was in middle school and high school, childhood obesity simply wasn’t an issue (1983-1990). And we ate hamburgers and fries, pizza, spaghetti with ‘meat’ sauce, all kinds of things like that at school, all the time.

   The school lunches weren’t the problem, and changing them won’t be the solution.

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   1. On the other hand, the ingredients may not be the same. If the government just has to stick their noses into everyone’s diet, I’d like to see them start with a ban on HFCS, elimination of starchy fillers, and the addition of sugar or artificial sweeteners into so many non-dessert foods.

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      1. The history of governments and nutritional fads strongly suggests that they would end up mandating minimum requirements for arsenic and cyanide.

         Governments are not good at subtle. Keep them the hell out of my food chain, to whatever degree possible.

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      2. Oh yes taking HFCS out of food would help people with a lot of different diseases including mine and diabetes.

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         1. BUT it would stop subsidies (indirect) to corn farmers. Also, the sugar/sweeteners in non sweet items are there to compensate for the removal of fat. Don’t get me started.

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            1. Oh yea– I think we are on the SAME page. I saw the folks begin to widen when fat was taken out and corn syrup put into the food. *sigh

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               1. Exactly. We really started to see an obesity epidemic about the time we started eating so much fat free foods.

                  It’s part of the reason I’ve stopped eating anything fat free that’s not made by nature that way.

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                  1. Yep

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                     1. Bacon FTW!

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            2. The indirect subsidies to corn farmers for HFCS production are driven by the direct tariffs in support of sugar farmers.

               The government has a long nose, it goes sticking it in something it tends to knock other things over.

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      3. Drop the tariff on sugar and we will see the problem fix itself. Also, we could pick up more jobs in confectionery than we would lose in agriculture, quite possibly.

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         1. We’d see a smaller drop in ag than you ‘d think, because a lot of farmers will switch crops, reversing what they did with the corn ethanol subsidy, for example. (And don’t get me started on paying people to grow irrigated tall-grass crops in short-grass climates. Just don’t.)

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            1. HFCS, how I hat that mess! Why do you have to put HFCS in green beans, except to give the stuff a “sweet” taste? I like the basic taste of green beans. I don’t need ’em sweetened.

               Being a diabetic, my wife and I read labels of EVERYTHING. Yeah, they started putting HFCS in stuff about the same time they cut “fat”, but it’s in a lot of things that never had fat in them in the first place. The latest atrocity is the insertion of HFCS into tomato soup. The recipe used to be “tomatoes, water, salt”. The current ingredients are “tomato puree (water, tomato paste), high fructose corn syrup, wheat flour, water, salt, potassium chloride, flavoring, citric acid, lower sodium natural sea salt, ascorbic acid, monopotassium phosphate.” The amount of tomato is about a third less, the wheat flour is added to make up the thickening, and the potassium chloride and monopotassium phosphate are added to keep the color from changing due to adding the high fructose corn syrup. The amount of sugars tripled (from 4g to 12g), and the amount of potassium (another salt) has also doubled. What used to be a healthy meal and a pleasing addition to other foods has become another source of HFCS and other “carp” (I like that, especially on the Carpslinger’s blog… 8^)> )

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               1. that’s why I make tomato soup at home.
                  My older son is deathly allergic to fructose and HFCS being concentrated makes his tongue PEEL. yeah, I didn’t think it was possible to be allergic to fructose, but he clearly is. We figured it out when he complained of apples being “too spicy” He thought they were for everyone… But if a product has a lot of HFCS it will blister his tongue like he burned himself. And then it will peel. So, we, too, read labels.

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                  1. Sooo… what about the guy I used to work with who preferred corn syrup to maple syrup on his pancakes? Actually it’s not to bad, I tried it when working out of town with him and that is what he bought, but personally I prefer maple syrup, or vanilla syrup as a substitute if maple isn’t available. But to get back to my point, he certainly wasn’t fat, and he drowned his pancakes and sausage in Evil corn syrup in the mornings. The difference was he went out and did actual physical labor all day, not sat behind a desk. A lot of this stuff that is unhealthy (not all, some things like NutraSweet are just plain unhealthy) is not actually unhealthy, it is simply that the calories need to be burned off, your diet needs to be adjusted to fit your personal dietary needs, and everybodies will be different.

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                     1. No, it is just for whatever reason, something people are most likely to get an allergy to — maybe the concentration? At least people who are susceptible to fructose.
                        I think what Mike objects to is hiding it…

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                        1. Plus, since he said he has diabetes, he objects to adding it to things that shouldn’t need it.

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                           1. Oh, I agree with the adding it to things that don’t need it, I’m just pointing out that high fructose corn syrup is The Big Evil. Just like a lot (read practically all) of other foods, your intake needs to be adjusted individually, and a large factor in that individual adjustment is your physical output, genetics plays a role also, although I tend to lump it in with individual metabolisms because what matters is if you have a fast or slow metabolism, not why you have the metabolism that you do. For a different example, a high carb diet is great for most marathon runners, but not so great for your sedentary computer programmer whose idea of regular exercise is to walk a mile every Saturday, nor would it be good for someone like Sarah, even if she was running a marathon every month.

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                           2. in my case, it just triggers my eczema :/

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                     2. I think the objection is to HFCS in places where it doesn’t belong. If it’s a sweet or candy, well, you know what you’re getting into. If it’s bread (and it’s in a LOT of bread, I have to read labels carefully), you’re not expecting it to be there. Or as she says, tomato soup. Or canned vegetables.

                        I buy a lot of organic-style items not because I think everything needs to be crunchy granola but because these days, that’s the only way to get JUST the ingredients you’re looking for. Like organic cans of beans, for pete’s sake. I shouldn’t have to get organic CANNED BEANS just to get the beans. (P.S. Peanut butter should have two ingredients at most: peanuts and salt. It needs nothing else.)

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                        1. But shouldn’t peanut butter have butter in it?
                           /ducks/

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         2. We would also see an abatement of sugar refinery pollution of the everglades, which the greenies claim is a serious problem (I have no reason to doubt this). Since this pollution is a consequence of trying to grow sugar cane in a place that is only marginally suited to it, dropping the tariff will kill of this singularly stupid example of government meddling causing environmental damage.

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7. Pingback: Thursday thoughts | Nocturnal Lives

8. Oh this infuriates me. How DARE they send such a thing home??

   1. BMI is a shitty method of measuring individual fatness/thinness. Quetelet himself acknowledged this as a limitation of the measure.
   Frankly, given the reductions in childhood hunger in America, I’m wondering if BMI as a population measure isn’t increasing in inaccuracy. The amount of error increases with an individual’s height, and people are taller these days.
   2. Measuring BMI in children is especially complicated because they are supposed to grow. Obesity is therefore determined by BMI percentile in children, and should be interpretted within the context of a long term relationship with the child. My son has been ‘obese’ for years, but his pediatrician tells me every year not to worry about it (not that I was), because he’s obviously not obese.
   3. The role of genetics (or worse, epigenetics) have not been clearly determined, but it’s obvious they play a significant role. And the nation has been obsessed with achieving thinness instead of health for generations now. It will almost certainly take generations to recover from this sort of vanity induced metabolic disruption.

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   1. I share your outrage as well as a healthy dose of “are they stupid?” for sending something home and telling the kids not to open it. Are our educators really so far out of touch with their students to know that telling a kid not to do something is a challenge for them to do just that?

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      1. You’d think educators would understand that just telling a kid not to do something ain’t exactly enough to stop them.

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      2. Hand anybody a ‘report’ on themselves and tell them it’s none of their business. The results are readily predictable.

         Hand such a report to kids? Any teacher worth the name can tell you the results for each kid, and make a fine approximation of the time limits involved.

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         1. Maybe we should use that instead of student standardized test results as a metric of teacher effectiveness. Especially with the younger grades.

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            1. Couldn’t be worse than now.

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               1. Don’t taunt Murphy. O_o;;

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   2. You also have to take into account how children grow. One common way is to put on weight just before shooting up in height. I can look at my childhood pictures and see times when I was a little chubster, and then a photo taken just a few months later showed me as a stick.

      NB: Speaking of health, apparently the muscle you build during times of development is a lifelong health booster, which means if your pre-teen is active, that will help their health for the rest of their lives. So the best thing you can do for them is to make them walk or bike to school (where possible, of course.)

      This probably explains the strength and stamina of my legs (four years of six miles a day on a bike) and probably my higher weight, too (fifteen to twenty pounds heavier than my mother at the same ages—but my legs and shoulders are certainly more muscular.)

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9. I remember the very first standardized tests. I looked forward to them because 1) they were easy and 2) if you finished early, you could read. I read most of the ‘Little House’ books that way. And teachers considered them something to be worked around rather than practiced for. After we moved to Texas, the first whiff of trouble came when I was in Junior High. One of my fellow science classmates asked about these little EE codes on our quizzes and tests. The teacher pulled an enormous (to me) 3″ binder out of her supply closet and showed us the Essential Elements that she was supposed to cover. She’d slapped the codes on the assignments so if someone audited her classroom, she could whip out the pages and show compliance. And it got worse from there. One of the many things I like about where I substitute is that private and parochial schools can get waivers from the STARS/TAKS-type tests.

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   1. Oh yes, I remember those days of being able to finish the tests and read. But then the tests weren’t tied in with what our final grades were or with what sort of federal funding we’d get. Districts used them to keep their accreditation for colleges and to help develop future curricula. And yes, the teachers taught around them instead of to them. I miss those days.

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   2. My son has to take the CRCT these days. Much more different than the California Achievement Test I took as a kid.

      You see, when we had the CAT, what we usually got was a note home reminding parents that it was coming up, asking them to make sure we got plenty of sleep, etc. The theory was apparently that if the teachers did their jobs properly, we were already prepared.

      My son, in contrast, tells me how he spends the first couple months of the school year reviewing (relearning from the previous year. We did that too), the last couple of months reviewing at the end of the year (which clearly does no good) and a couple of months reviewing for the CRCT. That’s six months out of nine total in school. That means he spends a grand total of three months tops learning new information.

      And people wonder why we’re lagging behind other countries in so many subjects.

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   3. For my (many) sins, I taught preservice teachers in Texas at the university level how to teach science in their public school classrooms for a decade. Part of that involved knowing what the state standards are and how they are implemented (or not) in the schools. I’m quite familiar with how things are done. Don’t even get me started on the insanity that has become our standardized testing in the state. Before science and social studies were added to the test, a middle school (or was it elementary) principal in the next town over one year refused to let his teachers teach science because it wasn’t on the test.

      Teachers are told to document which of the EE items any lesson covers. One of the majors in our department (Physics) taught at the local high school for a year. They were going to let him go because he was “too hard” until the test results came in. His students as a group outperformed everyone else. The district begged him to come back but he opted for graduate school instead.

      My son, who is completing his first year of middle school was more worried and stressed about the test this year than I’ve ever seen him. And once the tests are over, all semblance of education goes out the window and it’s party time for the last six weeks.

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10. The longer I watch the “Obesity Epidemic” hysteria, the more convinced I become that it is driven by older dieting addicts who are desperately afraid that the fashion for thin is changing and they will be out of fashion soon.

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    1. I hadn’t thought about it but you may be right. Like former smokers who are rabid in their condemnation of those who haven’t yet stopped smoking, the dieting addicts are much the same. They never met a diet they didn’t like, so the rest of us should be the same.

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    2. Yeah, I wonder how much of this epidemic is fueled by labeling perfectly fit people as “obese”, to justify more nanny-statism.

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       1. I don’t think it’s meant to justify nanny statism. I think it’s meant to preserve an artificial standard of “healthy” that a lot of people have put a huge amount of effort into meeting, or have built careers upon. Hard to be a diet guru if people are throwing the whole concept out the window.

          It has the EFFECT of justifying nanny statism.

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          1. I don’t disagree that some of the fuel may be being poured on by the diet/fitness gurus, in the effort to remain relevant — but there are also plenty of nanny-staters pushing the idea as well. This is a both/and situation, not an either/or one.

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             1. Robin, I agree. For those who don’t think there isn’t at least some nanny statism going on, just look at Bloomberg and what he did as mayor of NYC. Look at what Michelle Obama is doing. Heck, look at what has been going on for the last decade or more with the government deciding what we should and should not be eating.

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    3. People who have invested their whole lives and much of their energy into achieving an ideal are going to fight for that ideal and fight hard, because if that ideal is proven wrong, then their lives and energy were wasted. Think of that whenever you deal with the concept of beauty in our day—it’s pushed and regulated by women, because they’ve invested so much of themselves into it.

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11. Ah, don’t get me going on the BMI. Five years ago I was six feet tall and weighed 190 muscular pounds, and according to the BMI I was overweight. I was told this by a nutrician teacher, who I then asked if he could bench his own body weight twelve times (I really didn’t think his skinny ass could). Since I have become overweight, after blowing out a shoulder, and am working hard to get back into shape, but not sweating any BMI.
    I remember when I was a child we had the standard tests, administered in one day with no preparation. I was in Catholic school, and despite its shortcomings, they did teach us the basics. Years later, when I was responsible for a step daughter. I noticed that they spent weeks preparing for this test because the scores had become so important. That was time taken from regular lesson plans, you know, the things the kids really need to learn. One teacher wanted my step daughter excluded from the testing because Lauren had ADHD, and might lower the class average. We insisted Lauren test, and she had the highest score in the class.
    I learned early on that a lot of learning occured because I wanted to learn. My dad, a mere General Contractor, was probably the best read man in our town, more so than any of the doctors. Dad brought home three or four books a week from the local library and read each night. And so I read every day, and went into some classes knowing more about American and World history than many of the teachers. To me, the most important thing about school is to instill a love of learning, though, as I have just said, parents may have more influence on that than the teachers.

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    1. The problem is that now they instill a loathing of learning. I have a 19 year old nephew that can’t spell for crap and constantly uses the wrong words when he writes something. I’m still trying to figure out how to fix this, and he is not an idiot! (though, occasionally, he does make you want break out into obscenities, but that hardly makes him unique)

       A couple months of go, Dad was speaking to the hostess at the local Chili’s. She’s a junior at one of the local high schools and said that she really loved studying history. But she’d never heard of the Alamo or several other events and people in our history (Okay, technically the Alamo is not part of *our* history, but that of the nation of Texas). While I learned a lot about the Alamo and Texas history after moving there between 6th & 7th grades, I knew more about US history than this girl does, BEFORE I was out of the 4th grade!

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       1. Not only are they instilling a loathing of learning but of reading as well. As for history, well, they’re rewriting it. Common Core is also rewriting the Constitution. It is time to take back out kids and our education system. I just hope it isn’t too late.

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       2. In my experience there are two kinds of semi-literate people; those who don’t like reading, and those who don’t like reading what they have been given to read. With the former, there isn’t a lot you can foo unless you are willing to be the bad guy (and THAT probably won’t work too well either). But over the years I have noticed a strong tendency in modern Education to gravitate to books of mind-numbing idiocy. There is a lot of good, vigorous pulp out there – the modern equivalent to THE SHADOW and DOC SAVAGE – likely to be a hell of a lot more interesting to a 19 year-old than whatever he’s gotten in the classroom. Or if he’s a mechanic/engineer type there are manuals, engineering history, etc.

          Schools are too likely to be worried about him reading THE RIGHT THINGS.

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          1. Give him comic books. Seriously. It bridges the “I can’t read fast enough but want story” years.

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             1. Comics are good, granted. But the important thing is to give him a STORY he cares about. Most of the books I remember being pushed at me when I was in Public School were pretty goddamned dreary – full of message, and cardboard therefore – and I gather it’s gotten worse since.

                Children know when they are being force-fed a Moral. And they never consume one by preference. Hell, Kipling’s STALKY AND COMPANY stories have the boys mocking the Moral Stories of their day (ERIC, OR LITTLE BY LITTLE).

                “Let’s skip to where he goes in for drink”

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                1. If my kids didn’t know what FUN books could be, the school would have turned them off reading.

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                   1. Special ed can offer an “out” for the most stubborn, assuming a special ed teacher that is smart enough to let us read whatever we want.

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             2. I have to agree with Sarah. After my son was turned off reading by a teacher who used it as punishment, we got him started again by letting him read Manga and listening to audio books.

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    2. Doug, I hate the BMI and it hates me. It has nothing to do with how fit a person is, not really, as you know first-hand. As I’ve said before, what is happening with its use in NY and other places/industries is just another example of how common sense has left the building.

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    3. I loathe BMI with a burning intensity that can only be achieved by someone who was 225 lbs in fighting trim, who then went into the military.
       There, I was allowed to weigh a maximum of 180 lbs.
       There were alternate measures possible, but they were to be used at command discretion. In the USMC, command does not so discress.

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12. Questionable? BMI is designed for adults, as a pre-diagnosis thing so that when you’re triaging you have paperwork to tell you where to look– “Oh, BMI is in obese, let’s check to see.

    It’s not supposed to diagnose anything.

    How much of a rule of thumb is it?

    Well, they changed it a while back to make it faster to calculate. That change came to about 20 pounds on the average male.

    Incidentally, most charts of the “epidemic” do not show where the method was changed.

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    1. They didn’t change the calculation, they just dropped the overweight threshold from 28 (men) and 27(women) kg/m^2 to 25 kg/m^2 for everyone.

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       1. I consider that changing the calculation, since the equation for “overweight” is then different.

          Thank you for higher specifics, though.

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13. I had the entertainment of having to explain to my hubby and housemate why I basically freaked out when I discovered that Common Core was being used in my son’ school. It took some time before I was able to make my housemate understand that the Common Core in the US is not the same as the Common Core that they’re using in education here in Australia. Common Core here in Australia is used to help assess a child and see if he or she needs more help in the lessons, and targets where that help is needed. In the US, it seems to have been used as a replacement for everything entirely. We looked at examples of the questions posted online by the critics of US Common Core and one of the things we realized was that it looks like most of the questions were all translated to Chinese, and then back to English, since half the data needed to solve the problems were often missing.

    A kid’s NOT going to enjoy learning if the questions make no sense and they’re pressured to solve them anyway, then derided as unintelligent if they can’t. If the goal is to ensure that children no longer enjoy learning, discovery and self-challenge, then they’re succeeding admirably. Actually, it would not surprise me at all if this IS the end goal – After all ignorant people are easy to control and manipulate, and the Left seems to love doing that.

    Also, since when was ‘a new crayon’ a unit of measurement?

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    1. Yeah, it isn’t. Not even over at The Register.

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    2. Do not get me started on Common Core. If my son was still in public school and going to a district that used it, he would be home schooled. There is no way I’d let him be taught under that system.

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       1. Same here, in spades.

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       2. It’s not just public school. Private schools are being forced to toe the line to maintain their accreditation. My kids go to a Catholic school, they still get hit with it. The area charter school gets hit with it. The accredited “virtual” schools (AKA: homeschooling with a support network) get hit with it. The publishers of homeschool materials are being pressured to make their lessons Common Core compliant.

          It’s a bad scene.

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          1. The whole point is control. They don’t care if it’s a good system They want everybody under their control. .

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       3. I was trying to find out how the hell did it get pushed through as a curriculum at all. Its like they were given a proposal and that was approved, but what was received wasn’t what was approved.

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          1. I know what has happened down here has been parents have been given one description of it and are all excited. Then the curriculum is implemented and it isn’t anything like they were expecting and the cries of “foul” begin. But how it is getting through the district approval is beyond me. No, it’s not. Not really. Common Core is a business and they use lobbying and money and the promise that they will make it easier for districts and teachers, all the while making for better students. Educators haven’t learned the lesson yet that if something appears to be too good to be true, it probably is.

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    3. I’m a bit hot about Common Core at them moment. My Kindergartners have an hour of homework a night (if they knuckle down and do it, which after a full day of school, doesn’t happen very often).
       As of last night, this started including algebra.
       If children are learning concrete basic addition, you have no business hitting them with abstracts like the transitive property.

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       1. Are kindergarteners capable of that level of abstraction?

          I still remember a time when I was wearing a red shirt and carrying a puppet in a red dress with long brown hair like mine. A pre-schooler told me that the puppet looked like me. I gave my usual answer — from her point of view, I looked like her — and instead of the usual laughter, got the kid’s eyes popping. After a few moments, he burst out, in a great tone of discovery, that both of us looked like each other.

          Kids pick up these notions in normal development. They aren’t born knowing them.

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          1. No, they’re not. (Like, totally squared. And stuff.)

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          2. No, they are not capable of that level of abstraction. They are still in the “concrete” stage of development at that point and we’ve known that for a VERY long time (hey, I’m pulling this out of my butt, my child psych class in college was over 15 years ago. I’ve, like, slept since then…at least once or twice). Kids at that age, and for several years after, are interested in finding the answer to the problem (well, as interested as they are in anything having to do with school). Algebra is not about finding the answer to a problem, it is about figuring out HOW to find the answer.

             Now, teaching foreign languages at that age, or at least introducing them, would generally be meaningful and productive.

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             1. Now, teaching foreign languages at that age, or at least introducing them, would generally be meaningful and productive.

                Yes, it would. Before the age of… about eight, I think? (Sarah can probably correct me) is the best time to start learning a foreign language, because your brain slots it into the “language(s) I speak natively” category. After a certain cutoff age — which is different for everyone, of course, but is pretty close for most people — then languages get slotted into the “foreign languages I have to work at to remember” part of the brain.

                But of course, that would actually benefit the kids, so naturally our school system isn’t doing it.

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                1. Sigh. I’m tired of this. It’s a myth. No, seriously. It’s a myth. For pronunciation, sure. You need to be fully immersed in the language before 18 or 19 or you’ll never lose your accent. If accent is all important to you, carry on.
                   HOWEVER I’m sick and tired of hearing that if you don’t learn a language before 6 (or some people say 3) you’ll never speak it like a native.
                   There are no actual studies on this. It’s just “everybody knows.”
                   There are no studies for the opposite either, but I can tell you that in college the difference between the classmates who were well off and had gone “the expensive route” and learned languages in kindergarten in places like the French (English/American/German/French) institute at great expense, sometimes being fully immersed in the language while at school, and those who learned it as adults was… zero. Sometimes the rich kids were better. Sometimes people like me who learned French at 11 and English at 14 were better. QUALITY of the teaching is far more important than an arbitrary cut off date. I never took to German, not because I learned it at sixteen, but because my very first teacher sucked on ice and subscribed to the parrot method of teaching a language “I say this, you say that, never mind if you have no idea WHAT you’re saying.”
                   So, if you don’t get the kids to learn as infants/toddlers, don’t fret. If they are interested, they can pick it up later. (And yes, I know I do weird things in English on occasion and people imagine foreign syntax. It’s not. I no longer translate from the Portuguese — haven’t done so since my first year of English — and the weirdness I perpetrate has nothing to do with Portuguese syntax. It’s just some days I swear my brain wakes up on the wrong side of this whole speaking in words thing. My spelling is SOMEWHAT Latin, but only because Latin is more phonetic. Even in Portuguese, f is a recognized letter, but iph you get me tired enough, I think that the phinal representation of the sound is ph.)

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                   1. What you start with matters, too.

                      I was exposed to Mexican spanish very early.

                      The result is that I’m mildly incoherent in it, and randomly use it when I mean to use Japanese…..

                      (I am also known to use “Miss Malaprop” as a game character name, so YMMV.)

                      I do know that our daughters have picked up the Japanese lady style of kneeling from watching anime, and will tell us what’s going on– if that’s reading the characters’ actions or not, no idea.

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                   2. In my case, I’m basing it on my own personal experience. French, which I started learning at age 4, I can speak like a native. German, which I studied for four years starting at age 11 or so, I can’t — and now that I’m learning Thai, German tends to slip into my Thai and/or vice versa, but French doesn’t. (Because I can think in French — I’ve even dreamed in French at least once that I can recall — but I can’t really think in either German or Thai, not yet at least.) I’ll readily grant that the teachers who taught me German in French school were not necessarily doing it well, so for all I know I could be making your point rather than mine.

                      As for the “native” vs “foreign” language areas of the brain, I got that concept from the study that my parents read about when they were first contemplating the move to France and figuring out what to do about language for me and my sister. (Which they told us about later — I certainly wasn’t able to discuss those concepts when I was four!) It showed that kids who grew up bilingual with clear social separations between the two languages (you speak English when it’s just the family at home, and French with the guests, or you speak Japanese with Mom and German with Dad, or whatever) ended up using different parts of their brain for the two languages (different areas lit up on the MRI when they were answering questions in either language), and could switch between them easily but didn’t mix vocabulary, grammar, etc. between the two. Whereas kids who grew up with no clear distinction (sometimes it’s English, sometimes it’s French, there’s no way to tell) would tend to use Frenglish a lot more, inserting words and/or grammar from one into the other.

                      Anyway, I just wanted to say that I wasn’t just repeating a claim with no basis behind it but hearsay; my own experience is what led me to that conclusion about learning languages early.

                      Weird that nobody’s done a study on that idea, though. That’s a really odd omission.

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                      1. No, no. there have been TONS of “studies” like the one your parents read, but they aren’t really scientific, just someone’s humanity thesis.
                         Yeah, I think the issue is HOW you were taught. Like this — I could think in French — and English — within a year of learning it. And yes, I do occasionally dream in them. I don’t think I’m exceptional because I have other friends who work now as translators who learned their language late in life and are native-fluent.
                         The thing that puzzles me is one language slipping into the other which you and Foxfier mention. I have that issue with English syntax bleeding into Portuguese, but I suspect I’m thinking in English and translating — just very fast. This stops after about day two in Portugal. But I don’t MIX them. In fact, sometimes I get crossed wires and will speak in Portuguese to my husband and English to my parents and if you add my childhood best friend (who married a Frenchman) and her family to the mix, it can become arbitrary whom I address in which language, and I don’t notice till I go back, carefully.
                         But the languages don’t MIX as such. It’s like… I use a different CD for each of them. Impossible to corrupt.
                         Now, the languages I learned after German are a mixed bag for permanence. Swedish is largely gone, but I only learned it for two years so it lacked permanent imprinting. Also, I haven’t used it at all. I can’t speak/write Italian, but I can read fluently in it. And it’s not the proximity to Portuguese, because that actually made it difficult to learn. I suspect, again, is that most of what I used Italian for was translating into English, so it’s a matter of practice. I also suspect if we went to Italy for a month, I’d come back speaking it fluently.

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                         1. I get the bleed over as well, but only in some languages. English and Portugues have their own mental “compartments”, but for example, I tried Spanish a couple of times, and if I didn’t know a word, my brain would insert the roughly corresponding German word (I use Portugues words semi-deliberately in Spanish, but that’s a conscious choice, based on “Well, it might be similar enough to get the point”). I don’t really have that problem anymore because I’ve forgotten pretty much all the German I ever learned.
                            On a tangent, the ad hoc mixture of Portugues and English that I often spoke with the Americans in Brasil who had gone half-native was terribly amusing (we’d switch languages mid sentence, or drop a word from one in a sentence of another. Can’t remember if that would be a creole or a pidgin) and the three-to-four language mashup that my brother and I speak together is mind-bending for bystanders. It only got worse when he picked up Hindi.

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                      2. I didn’t know there was ANY subject that someone hadn’t done a study on.

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       2. I’ve got to ask for clarification. Did you say your kindergarteners have ALGEBRA?! O.O

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          1. It’s called “algebra” and it has some similarities, but it isn’t all “find x.” Of course, I have a kindergartener who LOVES math to the point where he independently picked up multiplication (from a module on the school computers), so I honestly have no idea how difficult it is for the general population. (Seriously, the thing he’s been asking about is what kind of math they’re having in first grade. I’m rolling with it, and am looking for a good math-based introduction to reading music.)

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             1. If he’s fiending for math, I highly recommend the Khan Academy. My minions have been enjoying the heck out of it, and the points and badges make it feel almost like a game. The video lectures are handy, too. I mean, we’re bribing them to do their chores with homework. It’s awesome.

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14. 1) Teaching to the test. I don’t like this argument because everyone teaches to a test. Hell, life is a test. The problem is that the test isn’t a very good one.

    2) BMI. I know the current fad is to blame carbs for being the debbil, but I think that a significant role is played by sanitation. Clean water and sewers mean lack of parasites and diseases and stavation that limited the growth of our ancestors. To put it another way, it may be not that we’re overweight, but that most of our ancestors were underweight.

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    1. “most of our ancestors were underweight.” <- this!

       Better childhood nutrition and lower parasite load= bigger smarter people.

       zuk

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    2. Yes. ALL our ancestors lived with intestinal worms. I did until my twenties, too. It makes a difference.

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       1. I also suspect it’s part of the reason for the increase in allergies. One thing parasites can do is suppress the immune system.

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    3. 1) Teaching to the test. I don’t like this argument because everyone teaches to a test. Hell, life is a test. The problem is that the test isn’t a very good one.

       I made this argument to some teachers I know. It took several applications of the nerf bat, but finally they explained what they mean: They have to teach the expected answers to the tests. Not drill the younger ones in basic skills, nor teach the older ones theory or background information. They teach specific answers to the specific questions on the tests, per requirement from the school board.

       It doesn’t matter if teaching them properly will still get them good grades on the tests. They are taught a very limited and specific bit of information, without context, without background, without relating it to anything else at all.

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       1. Hence why I said that the test is poorly written.

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          1. It seems to me that for things like math, science, basic grammer and vocabulary, it should be pretty easy to build a database of 1000+ questions that cover the material and then pull a random 10% every year. This ensures that they can’t teach to specific questions.

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             1. You misunderstood what I was saying. They don’t want what you just suggested. They want it the way it is (the Dept. of Ed. and the school administrators). They think this is the way they can bring up the scores to make us look like we are being educated better than we are.

                THIS is why the teachers complain about teaching to the test. They aren’t allowed to do anything else. If anyone actually commits education, they basically have to break the rules to do so.

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             2. Have every employee of the state universities in a teaching position write 10 questions they expect an incoming freshman to be able to answer on day 1. There’s your test bank.

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             3. We’ve had this argument here before, like you I don’t like the phrase, “teaching to the test.” For the same reasons as you point out, BUT it is like disagreeing with calling Liberals, Liberals, because they are not liberal. We may have a point, but the phrase is already well established in the language, and we are just beating our head against the wall trying to change it. Just accept what has become the standard definition if you want to argue any other point, otherwise your point will be completely lost and forgotten in the ensueing conversation about why the phrase means something completely different than what the words mean.

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          2. it’s not the test. It’s the requirement for how to teach. There is no way to write a test which will result in proper learning if the only thing taught is how to answer the questions on the test.

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             1. Maybe this is a feature not a bug. They want to prevent learning.

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       2. Yes, exactly. In the 7th grade in Texas, the teachers pulled out the previous year’s TEAMS test and went over every stinking question on it for two weeks prior to us taking the test. Guess what, most of the questions were identical to the previous year’s exam – even down to the answers being in the same order. I raised that point with one of my teachers because I thought I had been handed the previous year’s exam booklet. She pulled out the one we’d been working from and compared the tests. Five or six questions were different out of 70 or 80. When I took the MMAT in Missouri in high school, it seemed like eternity but I’m sure it was only a month we spent reviewing the previous year’s exam.

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       3. I have a friend who teaches seventh-grade English. She spends the first part of the year fixing deficiencies from prior years and teaching test answers for the required tests (each of which eats up almost a week in prep, test, and aftermath.) She’s not ALLOWED to teach a full-length book until spring, though she has managed to sneak Flowers For Algernon into the syllabus.

          How are you supposed to get kids interested in the language if they’re not allowed to experience it?

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15. At least Texas has so far managed to avoid adopting common core.

    A few minutes with the wikipedia entry for BMI will disabuse anyone rational about its usefulness for almost any purpose, and especially its usefulness for children or the physically fit. Almost every paragraph has a disclaimer about how it doesn’t work well for this or that, or how it shouldn’t be used for these things, or that there are much better proxies for health. Add the contradictory findings that BMI in the overweight class correlates with better health and longer life, and you will quickly decide that it should be ignored by any individual.

    Use of BMI seems to be just one more facet of collectivism. (Developed in the mid 1800’s at the birth of sociology, by a guy who believed that he could develop a “social physics” that would help to understand (and by extention control) crime and other aspects of society.) Everywhere you look you see it. Instead of treating each person as an individual, they are grouped and treated as a collective. The need to avoid individual consideration is everywhere- BMI, cholesterol levels, the rise of credentialism, mandatory sentencing, ‘zero tolerance’ policies, quota hiring. The question that rarely gets asked is “who sets the standard, and WHY?”

    According the wiki, the ranges were reset in the US in ’98 which moved millions of people from normal to overweight. Stroke of a pen, and suddenly they are subjected to name calling, higher insurance rates, intrusive social policies, and more. What a massive bump in influence for some people. What a huge windfall for anyone who makes money off of ‘overweight’ people. Sound familiar? It should. The demonization of drugs, alcohol, and guns follows a similar playbook.

    And for laughs, take a quick look at the table at the end of the wiki. Look at which countries fall into the WHO ‘normal’ range. 3rd world shite holes. Places where a significant part of the population doesn’t get enough to eat. And note that NO countries fall more than one point below normal– in other words, according to WHOs definition of underweight, NOT ONE SINGLE COUNTRY has a preponderance of underweight people. Yet when compared to the table (elsewhere) for food security, most of the “normal” and all of the countries near “underweight” score in the bottom half of food security. (and for my height/weight one point is pretty much 1 inch of measuring error, or 5 pounds of weight error.)

    So I’m calling bullshite on BMI and by extension anyone who uses it on individuals. It was formed as a tool of classification and control, and I’d put it right up there with phrenology in usefulness.

    zuk

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    1. A few minutes with the wikipedia entry for BMI will disabuse anyone rational about its usefulness for almost any purpose, and especially its usefulness for children or the physically fit.

       Might like this– one of the tests to see if you are actually obese is to sit on the floor.

       Cross your arms.

       Stand up without using your arms.

       If you can easily do it, you’re over-weight, not obese.

       I can not only do that but I do it with kids in my arms and abused knees!

       I’m not GRACEFUL, and I’m not as snake-like as I was when I was 5’3 and 130, but I’m also a decade older and three c-sections in. (Got down to almost 120. My parents thought I was dying, and I lost a lot of energy.)

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       1. I’m not too sure how good an indicator that is. I would have been able to do that 5 years ago, when I was about 275, which is about 60lbs over my (personal opinion) ideal weight. But I used to do a lot of gymnastics when I was younger, too.

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          1. I KNOW I’m fat, and you describe yourself as being fat at the time– but there’s a difference between fat and obese, or there’s supposed to be.

             Instead, the way it’s applied is more like “probably fat, or maybe chubby depending on the bones.”

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       2. Got a link to where that’s discussed somewhere? Not arguing with you or anything. I just tried it and was successful, and I’d LOVE to show that I’m not as fat as I thought I was, so to speak. :D

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          1. IRL, sorry.

             Might have luck with “obesity tests” or similar searches.

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             1. Not really finding a whole lot.

                I’ll put my wife on it when she gets home. She likes looking for stuff online. :)

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       3. It’s possible to be even “normal” weight and be unable to do that. Muscles matter too.

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          1. As I understood it, it was another screening tool– “BMI says maybe obese; did the handless stand, so no.”

             If you couldn’t do it then you start looking at stuff that takes more time/effort.

             Just like the BMI, a screening tool.

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             1. If you have arthritis or balance issues the handless stand might not work for you.

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                1. Kind of like BMI fails if you’re not a couch potato of the right build?

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    2. Actually, Zuk, while Texas as a whole has yet to mandate Common Core, there are districts that have adopted and that is a problem. The state board of education has, iirc, approved CC as a curriculum. I know my neighbor, who still has children in the school system, is keeping a close eye on it.

       As for BMI, I agree with you completely.

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       1. We had a long interview with the elementary principal of the school we are looking at for our kindergartener. Our district (near Houston, but not HISD) as not adopted it, but according to the principal, her curriculum is “compatible”. I took her comments to mean that her school wouldn’t be teaching to CC, but was mindful of it and wouldn’t be doing anything that would adversely affect students who might LATER be under CC. They adopting a version of Singapore Math, which has it’s own set of concerns for me.

          What I see of CC is after stripping out the political choices and indoctrination, you are left with a really low set of ‘least common denominator’ standards. Really low in that my 3 year old meets most if not all of the math and language standards for leaving kindergarten, and my soon to be kindergartener exceeds them by a great deal.

          As a victim of the ‘new math’ of the late ’70s I’m exceptionally skeptical and wary of the flavor of the week pedagogical method. These new methods are mostly some phd candidate’s research project, that after a few years has benefits ONLY to him, and not to the students who are being experimented on. “Wow, turns out the whole word reading method of teaching doesn’t work effectively. Sucks for you to be semi-literate in a world increasingly based on textual interaction.”

          I’m definitely at a higher stress level as we deal with this transition for our oldest child.

          zuk

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16. Taking one point and throwing anecdotes at it:

    I was appalled to learn the new circular track put in place of the fenced open field on the campus of a nearby elementary/middle school complex was to be used for recess. They take the elementary kids out there and let them walk in circles! No running you understand, someone might fall. Free play? HAH!

    How many things does this corrupt?

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    1. Everything. Play isn’t just about burning off energy, it’s about learning how to interact with the world and developing the skills necessary to survive in society. Play is work for children, and when adults destroy it and render it harmless, and worthless, they destroy souls.

       Personally, I learned more about how to deal with other people by playing pick-up basketball games and football games in the middle school field than I did in class.

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       1. Yep. The ‘problem’ being, socialization through physical interaction and ‘play’ trends more to boys. So that’s right out!

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          1. No, girls do different socialization through physical interaction and play, but they also need it just as much. It’s just that somewhat less of their play is “burn off energy through large muscle groups” and somewhat more is “burn off energy through elaborate patterns.”

             Have you ever SEEN the complexities you can toss into hand/clap/song games like “See See My Playmate”? Do you even want to think about the elaborate lengths that jumprope can get into, much less the huge number of songs and gestures and tricks associated with it? If you’re not doing forty things at once and trying to perform them all perfectly for as long as possible and without getting anything dirty, it’s not a girl’s game.

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             1. Granted, all true. But less visibly boisterous and often more ‘acceptable’ as activities.

                Though, these days I rather doubt such is acceptable anymore.

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             2. If you’re a young girl and don’t have the co-ordination to jump rope you won’t fit in.

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                1. That’s just what I was thinking of. All the variations on double-dutch rope jumping, the different chants and tricks, turners who delight in random speed changes . . . I was a miserable kid until I mastered basic double-dutch.

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                   1. I never learned how to jump rope.

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                      1. Me either. None of my dad’s family CAN. Mom was baffled by this.
                         You know, one of the editors in my field was holding forth on his kid’s autism diagnosis which was mostly based on a) other kids hated him (in kindergarten) and b) he couldn’t jump rope. and c) he couldn’t ride a bicycle. I tried to point out that IF that’s the only criteria then my entire family for GENERATIONS is autistic, but he was convinced. Because his doctor told him so. (Rolls eyes.)

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                         1. An autism diagnosis without a proper hours-long evaluation by experts is pretty much valueless. (I didn’t learn to ride my bike until I was nine—which was a symptom of physical timidity, not autism.) My oldest is on the spectrum, and the interesting thing is that random people who encounter him have no idea, but people who work with autistic folk spot it in minutes. It’s like a lot of things, where expertise counts.

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                      2. I can jump rope (or could… I suspect it would hurt, now), but I was never able to do double-dutch. It took me until I was twelve, almost thirteen, before I could ride a bicycle. Also, I think when we discussed this before, it’s a commonality with most of us who also identify as Odds, to not have the physical dexterity of our peers at an early age.

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                         1. Robert thinks our nervous system might be “denser” which takes longer to grow. This would be fine, if society weren’t “standardized.”

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                            1. And that is where much of the problem lies, trying to get every person to fit in the same mold, isn’t it. We wound up with broken humans from being pounded into the wrong size hole.

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                   2. Eh. In Portugal it was the elastic game, which is sort of the same thing. And I WAS miserable. So, in elementary I subverted it into playing LARP (I invented it, for that time and place.) Middle school I WAS miserable, but I read a lot. (It was bigger, and there were other issues, so I couldn’t subvert it.)

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                      1. “Elastic game”? Is that the one with the elastic loop held around the legs of two people, while a third jumps around and eventually on the loop? We called that “Chinese jumprope” when I was a kid for no apparent reason.

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                         1. yep. Exactly that. Well, it was very popular that I knew of in two places: Portugal and Japan.

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                2. I could never jump rope. Not that I wanted to. I wanted to be out there playing ball with the guys. It was much more fun. ;-)

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17. Ah, homework. When I was a grade schooler, I received a list of 25 words every week — twice a week, depending on the teacher that year. I was to look them up, write down the definitions, and bring the results to class the next day. In third through sixth grade, I read dictionaries for fun.

    As for BMI, somehow I am reminded of a scene in Pournelle’s “Exiles to Glory,” where a college student finds out that colleges have a covert policy of not graduating students until they pass a psych evaluation geared to insuring that they are sufficiently docile. Give a kid psychiatric issues early on so he depends on the state for life. It doesn’t matter WHAT the drug is; just that Bid Daddy continues being the only pusher.

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    1. “Big Daddy.” Darn those telephone marketers!

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    2. I remember the day in high school when I realized two minutes before class that we were supposed to choose five words from a list, look them up, cite an antonym and synonym, and use in a sentence, and I had forgotten.

       Got an A on that.

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    3. We were expected to use each of the words in our weekly lists in a sentence; the dictionary was suggested as a helpful tool, not as the assignment itself.

       This was harder for me and my brothers than for the other kids, because we all somehow got the idea that the sentence should be clever, or mean something, or use multiple vocabulary words together, or some combination of these. It’s hard work, trying to write things that are as satisfying as the Jack London book I wanted to get back to.

       (One teacher complained when I used two weekly words in a single sentence. Said it wouldn’t count. So I wrote the same sentences twice each. So he said I could go back to the way I wanted to do things.)

       But I developed a broad vocabulary I could actually use. The “look up the definitions” method gets you word-lists that fall out of the kids’ heads the minute the school-year ends.

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       1. I got un-sought praise from my 6th grade English teacher because I couldn’t bear to write essentially the same sentence for each one of our vocabulary words. I didn’t try particularly to be “clever”, I just thought it sounded horrible to, for example, start every sentence with the same word, the way everyone else did.

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18. In a lot of ways, government intervention in our diets scares me worse than anything else our government has done. It worries me more than excessive ammunition buying, more than gun grabbing, more than PC speech enforcement replacing the First Amendment and even more than the IRS repressing political speech. As a matter of fact, it worries me worse than all of those put together. The reason for my reaction is simple: I’m not aware of a single time in history when this has even been attempted. Think about it.

    Governments purchase weapons to police their populace. From the town watches of Medeival Europe until now, that hasn’t changed. Sure, the types of weapons have changed with the technology, but the principle hasn’t changed. The amount of ammunition is worrisome, but it’s not a new thing historically speaking. I’m against gun control. They can have mine when they pry them from my cold, dead hands. If it comes down to it, I’m taking as many of them as I can when I go too, but that’s not new either. Weapon seizing goes way back. Early Tokugawa Japan had sword control laws before they even knew that guns existed. Again, I have a problem with the policy, but it’s nothing new. Here’s a brain twister for you: Name a repressive government that A.) Didn’t ban free speech and B.) didn’t tell people it was for their own good. Yeah, I don’t know of one either. Josef Goebbels would have agreed that it was the media’s job to enforce proper belief as well. Forcing dissenters to pay additional taxes is common in Muslim countries, where it’s related to religion instead of politics and referred to as jizya. It has a history going back centuries. None of these are practices I approve of, but they all have some kind of historical precedent and a way to put them in perspective. Forcing people to eat healthy does not.

    Yes food has been restricted in the past, but always due to a shortage. Rationing makes sense sometimes, even if it does suck. It’s better to give everyone a limited amount of food than to watch them all starve because they ate all the supplies the first week. This is not that. The United States has so much food right now that we’re paying to not grow it. Telling a person what they’re allowed to feed their kid is a lessening of their freedom sure, but what is the point here? Yes, I know about the obesity epidemic but I don’t trust government enough to accept their stated intentions. Is it just to get us used to following orders? Or is there something else going on here? It doesn’t make any sense.

    Also, why do we have a First Lady with a program that has the power of legislation? She has no official power whatsoever. I’m not saying women shouldn’t be allowed to hold office. I’d vote Condoleeza Rice for president if I were given the chance to. The point here is that Michelle Obama IS NOT AN OFFICE-HOLDER OF ANY TYPE. If she wants to legislate at the national level she can run for Congress. That’s their job.

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    1. There have been food control laws that were basically supposed to be set against conspicuous consumption (mostly by the middle class with moolah). There have also been cases where certain foods were reserved as high status for only certain religious or royal figures (maybe the same thing but in a more primitive society). And of course there are religious laws on foods in many societies (kosher and halal rules are probably most prominent). And there’s the Temperance Movement.

       But in general in most societies, yes, you can buy whatever food you can afford and eat whatever you hunt or gather.

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    2. Ever hear of Lady Bird Johnson, and the Highway Beautification Act?

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    3. I heard some doctorate lady on the radio* the other morning (Coast to Coast AM, interestingly enough being broadcast on FM) going on about how Bill Gates and Monaco have colluded to put some enzyme in GMO foods that causes obesity, and how this ‘obesity epidemic’ is going to cause widespread starvation. No I didn’t mistype that, what this lady with a doctorate (meaning supposedly educated enough to be articulate) said was actually that nonsensical.

       *Anybody who plans to replace their car stereo in a mid-90’s Ford, there are numerous wiring diagrams for them online. They all copy each other, and are all wrong. Go to one of the Ford enthusiasts forums and people there will have posted the correct wire color/application, because they have pulled their stereos out of the dash to also discover that the official wiring diagrams found everywhere have no basis in reality.

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19. “Telling a person what they’re allowed to feed their kid is a lessening of their freedom sure, but what is the point here? Yes, I know about the obesity epidemic but I don’t trust government enough to accept their stated intentions. Is it just to get us used to following orders? Or is there something else going on here? It doesn’t make any sense.”

    Well, here’s some random stuff strung together, stream of consciousness style ;-)

    The “obesity epidemic” is only that because the definition was changed, moving 29 MILLION people in the US from “healthy” to “overweight.” Control the words, control the thoughts, control the discussion.

    Collectivism- everyone is alike and must be made to be the same. You MUST feed your kids the same crap as everyone else or they might do better in life. Otherwise some individuals will make bad choices, and some will make choices that are better. Same with public education- the anti-homeschooling laws in Germany are because Hitler saw the schools as the best way to indoctrinate the people. There was no ‘opt out.’

    Your kids don’t belong to you, they belong to US and we know better what they should eat than you do.

    Break them down physically thru obesity and the diseases that result. Use coercion and punishment and mental abuse to break them down mentally. Fat demoralized proles won’t revolt.

    The point IS control.

    The queen’s diktats have exactly the same origin and legitimacy as the king’s diktats.

    zuk

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20. Yes public schools many places are horrible. That does not mean you have to take it for your kids. There are many options. In the early 1980’s our kids were in the NYC public schools. My work was in a field that pretty much only existed in 3 cities in the USA. It took time, luck, and a career change, but we moved out of NYC largely to get our kids out of those schools.

    Today there are far more options for parents. If the schools are intolerable change something to protect your children. It can be done.

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21. “she saw the notation that she was overweight and needed to consult a physician”

    Does her school get a budget increase for every child diagnosed as overweight?

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    1. Maybe. But the ‘healthy foods’ lobby certainly gets a PR boost every time a child is diagnosed as overweight.

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22. That is the one advantage of BMI – it’s easy to calculate. But BMI can see me in hell. Who wants to participate in a study to determine if chest circumference can be used in conjunction with height as an easy way to estimate actual body density?

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    1. That depends. What method of measurement? Oh, wait. We’re both married. Um… never mind. :-)

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       1. Shame on you. I am a professional scientist, not some tape measure trollop. :-P

          Kidding aside, chest circumference is easy to measure and most people know it for clothing fitting purposes. And all torso cross sections have roughly the same dimensions. I’d love to know if there’s a factor that could convert chest circumference into torso cross sectional area, which multiplied by height would give a rough body volume. Divide by weight and you have a rough idea of body density. And with an easy measure of body density, we can compare the predictive value of body density to that of BMI, and hopefully kick BMI to the curb.

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          1. Ok, (more) serious hat here (I’m hardly ever truly serious):

             Looking in the mirror, I’d say you would need to measure hip circumference, too, to account for the more pear-shaped among us

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             1. Well, I picked chest circumference because most people will know it, it’s easy to measure, and it’s neither the thickest nor the thinnest part of the body. If we want the kind of accuracy that takes pears and apples and bananas into account, you pretty much need water displacement to get volume. And that’s an enormous pain. I’m not so much interested in a precise density, as whether a rough density can be easily determined and serve as a better predictive value.

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                1. My chest circumference is, ah, inflated. So maybe this would work for men but not most women?

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                   1. Chest circumference is the band measure for a bra, and is taken beneath the breasts.

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                      1. Ah, that works. If you ever do the study, I’ll participate. I’m curious.

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                         1. I’ll need to come up with an easy way for people to measure their torso width and depth, then I’ll open the study. :-)

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                            1. You need help to measure the chest at all, right?

                               Maybe a variation on how baby’s height is measured? Piece of paper on the wall, arms up, draw a line in front and back and then both sides?

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                            2. That’s what I’m thinking, but using something like a carpenter’s square, so one bit if the ruler can be flat against the wall and help take a straight measure.

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                      2. So what is the best way to measure for bra size? Experiences in department stores have been varied.

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                         1. The Oyster Wife has found one, one store that does it thoroughly and properly. My lady wife is… very generously endowed, so finding something the right size is a challenge. She’s dealt with a lot of the “sister size” nonsense over the years. Anyway, they’re up in the SLC area, if you’re willing to drive that far for something that truly fits well. Ping me by email if you’re interested, and I’ll get the name and address from her.

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                            1. What’s your email?

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                            2. free range oyster with no spaces at google’s free mail service.

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                            3. Mrs. Dave shops for hers at one in the DC area (there a *few* reasons to venture toward that wretched hive) called Trousseau that is truly excellent. At one point while we were there, the ladies manning(womanning?) the shop were on a video teleconference with the Smithsonian explaining what they do. They even have comfy chairs suitable for gentleman-type creatures who are waiting on their lovelier halves. They are not cheap, but taken care of (upon how the helpful ladies will advise), the merchandise will last for years, and they offer free tailoring services. Mrs. Dave has had great success with them all through pregnancy with Wee Dave (not actual title, because Interwebz) and into this immediately postpartum time.

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                         2. It’s ridiculously complicated for a comment. I’ll write a blog post if I can ever get the sleeping baby off my lap.
                            … He just raised his head, grunted at me, and flopped back down. It may take a while.

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                         3. The best way to measure for bra size is to find a hole-in-the-wall lingerie store that isn’t just one brand, and which is run by middle-aged to older ladies. THEY know what they’re doing in terms of measurement—it took thirty seconds, three measurements, and one question to hand me a stack of bras which fit well and one which fit perfectly. (The question was “Do you like underwires?”)

                            Of course, I’ve been wearing cheap “sports bras” of the type they sell at pharmacy/stuff stores, which are not sports bras in any meaningful sense of the word (because sports bras have to be ultra-supportive.) They’re basically a spandex sleeve with some tailoring, and they’re comfortable and CHEAP. I don’t need to be spending $50 per bra in a hot climate where they should be changed daily, thank you.

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                            1. I feel the pain – I had a reduction just before I retired from the military (hey, the plastic surgeons need to do something to keep their skills in hand!) because I was tired of having to having to pay $50 per bra, and having deep grooves in my shoulders from the straps. I’ve gained some weight since then – but the cheap stuff still fits OK and is comfortable.

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                            2. What’s your band size?

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                            3. Used to be 32 – a bit more now more like 38. Sigh – the post menopause weight gain snuck up on me so slowly!

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                            4. Mine is 50.

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                            5. That reminds me of something, not specifically related to the issue of measurements: The wife and I were watching a show where they were studying runners, and the best bra type for support. It turns out that a well-fitting bra made from a non-stretchy fabric gave much better support for a runner than the stretchy, “sports-bra” types.

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                            6. Note that I’m not even in the category of “expensive” when it comes to bras. (The perfectly-fitted one I mentioned cost about $30, but it’s unusually low.) I have friends who have to pay more than $100 per bra, and as these things go, as soon as they find one that works, the manufacturer discontinues it. And heaven help any woman who is busty but with a small chest circumference. It’s almost impossible to find bras that fit. (I know several—one of whom gets hers tailored down for her.)

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                            7. There’s also the vice versa, small busted women with broad shoulders and large chest circumference.

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                            8. These descriptions really require visual aids.

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                            9. Fashion magazines aimed at 6 foot tall women.

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                            10. THWAP!!

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                            11. :-D

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                      3. So is chest circumference on guys measured down at brisket height also, or is it measured just below the armpits? Because I just checked and I have over four inches difference between those two measurements, and I haven’t nearly the muscles I used to.

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                         1. IIRC, it’s just below the “boobs”.

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                            1. Typically the “fullest part of the chest,” or “measurement of greatest circumference.” The Art of Manliness (dot com) has a great many articles directly related to dressing well.

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                2. Eh, actually I would say most women know their chest circumference, I don’t know of any men who do. They just know whether they wear a medium, large, or XL shirt.

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                   1. Then they should learn, so they can dress better.

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                      1. Properly fitted men’s clothes are expensive, because so many of them are generic sizes.

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                   2. Two options: tell them to ask their wives, or to go check the tag on the shirts. (I can’t remember Elf’s, but his says 34-36.)

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             2. I think there’s one that involves the wrist, to help adapt for build.

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       2. Wayne, I don’t think British Standard Handfuls can be made empirical enough to be useful in an actuarial sense. That and the male-half of the population generally lacks the, hmmm, attributes commonly measured in BSH. (Aaaaannnnd I’m going to stop there before the comment sails off the R-rating cliff.)

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          1. I’m really good at adjusting for differences in measuring… um… units.

             Heh.

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          2. I believe the standard unit for measuring men is the British Standard Handspan. Not sure there’s much correlation to body composition however.

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          3. i find the whole BS system to not be empirical enough.

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23. A school district practicing medicine without a license.

    Brilliant.

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    1. Doctor of Ed., M.D., same difference. It’s for the children, after all, so it’s all good, right? *ducks hurled copies of law textbooks*

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    2. OT: Have you heard from Kent Budge, lately? Haven’t seen him around.

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       1. No. I miss him.

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          1. Yes.

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    3. Connecticut passed a law forbidding teachers to require the kids to be medicated to be in the classroom, for just that reason.

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24. Both my kids knew their alphabets,numbers and had started reading before they started school. Eldest is a smart cookie, her “reading age” at age 10 was off the education system charts, which only went up to 16. Youngest is left handed so bloomed later (perception issues), but is now running ahead of the academic curve in most of her subjects. In both cases, most of the learning was done at home rather than school, teaching them both how to apply reason and logic to their studies. Both doing well despite the state of the academic system in the UK. We also opted out of all the “health check” garbage. At every parents evening we were praised by the teachers for “taking an interest”, who then got short shrift for trying to take credit for the work we put in with our kids. The state of the modern education system appeals me, frankly.

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25. That should be appals , Damn kindle autocorrect.

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    1. Figured. Yeah. Not impressed by education anywhere in the Western world.

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       1. Some parents are fighting back though – the advent of the “Free Schools” – schools that are effectively outside of local education authority control – seems to be making ripples in the socialist enclave that is teaching in the UK.

          Parents need to do way more, and challenge the teachers rather than accept that they know best.

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26. Ah kindle, I slew the well.

    z

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27. Disclaimer, I do not have kids in school, however i played one when i was younger.

    As i read this one question came to mind.

    Are the parents giving their permission to let the schools do this?

    Because, unless i’m misremembering incorrectly, it’s none of the school’s damn business how tall, short, heavy, or light a child is. Nor do they have any right to touch children unless given express consent by a parent or legal guardian. Except in the cases of imminent grievous bodily harm.

    Am i missing the study that proves conclusively with repeatable, verifiable results, that your size is a determination in your ability to learn? I understand malnutrition can cause learning issues, but i still have yet to see a study that shows me obesity does.

    if it exists please correct me with a link and i’ll be happy to redact any of this.

    I take this crap very personally. I got kicked out of the army because i didn’t fit some standard mold that seemed to exist. And yes, i was high on BF% when weighed and taped. I also could incline leg press 1000 lbs, bench around 350, and was running 11 miles a day, 7 days a week.

    It was bad enough to experience this when i was 19, to imagine my son or daughter(when i have one) having to go through this in school… all i can say is i hope i enjoy prison food cause i’m not sure my rational sides gonna win if i got one of these notes.

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    1. When my two kids were in Primary were were asked for consent to weigh / measure them – that was 5 – 7 years ago though so Im not sure about now, especially as it seems to be a government target thing.

       A lot of it seems to hinge around the “Holy BMI” which most people dont understand, but apply as if it can do no wrong. Another symptom of terminal leftism in society imho.

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       1. Agreed on BMI being a stupid tool, make the same argument about Body fat measurement too.

          Even if they were 100% accurate, i still don’t think that they are good measurement of ones overall fitness.

          All they tell you, if 100% accurate(this is a very big if), is how much body fat there is. It doesn’t tell you any other single important health statistic. BP, Heart rate, how fast you can burn calories, how fit you actually. These are much more useful indicators of someones health.

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28. A nurse (regular doc office) mentioned to me the other day that daughter, who is two, is heavier than she is supposed to be for her height, that I shouldn’t be worried because the child is solid muscle, and added “She plays a lot and doesn’t watch much tv, right?” I’m not sure if it was the skinned knees and elbows or the fact that the toddler in question was succeeding in her climb up to join her older brother on the examination bench half again her height that clued the nurse in. So the ideal height/weight charts are apparently calibrated for basically sedentary children, and as we all know, muscles weigh more than fat.
    Common core concerns me not so much because of the academics–the kids already weren’t learning much of anything anything–but because of the private companies holding and tracking all this data for the rest of the kids lives. Anyone want to bet the six year old who bites his sandwich into the shape of Idaho gets on a list of potentially dangerous offenders who shouldn’t be allowed to own a gun? Or get a job? But then, I am a cynical home schooler whose reaction to the whole NSA data collection reveal was “Told you so.”

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    1. A good doctor will look at cues. (For this, I count a nurse as a doctor, ‘k?)

       It may have been small-talk, but… well, I’m a Hobbit, my husband’s a half-Elf. (Not literally. It’s a great shorthand, though, to know what our builds are like.)

       Princess, the Eldest, got my height and his build; Duchess, the second, got my build and his height. They’re nearly two years apart but can steal each other’s clothes. (four and two)

       Our doctor, once Duchess went from being born skin-and-bones to gaining more weight than he’d ever seen a kid gain in the first week, just rolled with it. They’re active and healthy, they’re fine. Here are the actual risks of various foods.

       LOVE our baby doctor.

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