When I was an exchange student, I borrowed a lot of books from the library. First, because I have a wicked reading addiction and I certainly couldn’t afford to buy books, and second because I was curious about the culture and particularly fascinated by the type of book I didn’t normally find in Portugal.
One of the things I binged on because fascinating was the self-help section.
Yes, even at seventeen I found a lot of it was absolute hokum. Other stuff was basically proto-Jordan Peterson: do this, do that, and some things about your life will move in the right direction. The things were fairly innocuous to obvious (doesn’t mean I hadn’t missed one of them by a mile. In this case “people will judge you by your appearance and put you in fairly broad categories.” It had never occurred to me that my habit of dressing like and engineer — is every relevant part covered. Cool — would lead people to think I wasn’t interested in boys, or that I was slovenly.)
However the subgenre that drove me nuts, because I couldn’t figure out what they meant by that was the whole sub-genre that existed at the seventies, which classified people into “winners” or “Losers” and claimed — in some strange spasm of misguided pseudo-freudianism — that whether you were a winner or a loser was set before you were vocal.
Look, yes I know. Your attitude towards life changes a lot of what you get out of life and how people view you. And I do know it’s possible to break a child’s perception before the child is verbal. But it was the almost astrological nature of the thing: if your destiny was set this way, you could never change it. Also, what was all-important was how others perceived you. Not whether you could actually do the thing you set out to do, not whether you were good at whatever the task was, but how much people perceived you as being a “winner.”
The feeling I got was that these self-help manuals were either mostly aimed at salesmen, or that the writers had a weird perception of life as “forever in high school” and worse, as the sort of high school you saw in movies. Now I think about it, a lot of the current advice on how to date, etc. seems to hinge on the same thing. Not how to be happy/create a happy life with another human, but how to be seen with all the cool babes/hot guys.
In the same way these manuals were how to trick the social signals into being thought “the cool one.” It might have worked or not. I won’t dispute that demeanor and how confident you are affect your success in every career. BUT none of it seemed to have anything to do with “be competent” or the actual work of doing …. well…. the work. I think the self-improvers assumed one already could do the work and they were just fixing the social stuff. Maybe that was true. Or maybe it would have been in a society that hadn’t already for two generations been hiring for “makes right” (left) “noises because those signal an excellent education.”
However the truth is at our point in time, fifty years later, we have a lot of people who signal very competent and who can’t tell their elbow from a flying elephant. And worse, in more recent years we have a vast number of people who are exquisitely trained to believe that “acting” is the same as being; that mumbling a certain amount of mumbo jumbo will change reality for reasons they don’t understand — and no one does, because they aren’t real — but which worked in school, and therefore must work in real life.
Part of this is how ridiculously borked our education system is. And no, if your kids didn’t go through school in the last 30 years (I hear it’s worse in the last 20) you have no idea how bad it is. (There appear to be some areas of “okayness” too, but since the bad comes from education schools, it’s extensively propagated. Okay is about the best you can hope for in most cases.) Like, everyone knows that “whole word” doesn’t work, but they might not realize that the buzzword by kids’ time had been changed to “whole language.” And it was…. the same thing. Any system where the teacher tells the kid to “just guess” it’s whole word. Because there’s no guessing in reading. Yes, sure, some words are pronounced differently, have different emphasis than you expect, but if you pronounce it, you either recognize it and change it, or you can correct the kid on how it’s pronounced, but kid is in general area. (As in, people KNOW what you’re saying, as all of us know, they just sometimes laugh at how mangled it because you never heard it aloud.) If the teachers tell you that phonics doesn’t work because “the kid can read everything, but he won’t know the meaning” the teacher needs to be told that’s what dictionaries are for. Learning to read shouldn’t give you an immediate meaning. For one a lot of meanings change with the other words around them. If you memorize “shape of word” and “meaning” together, not only are you going to make a lot of mistakes — a lot of words in English have the same general shape but are very different: wards and warts for instance — but also you’ll think of the word as a pictogram for the meaning.
How can I tell this is a rampant problem? Well, it was already a problem 20 years ago when I found myself reading/grading people’s essays or stories. I would come across sentences that made ward/wart mistakes that weren’t easily explainable by spell check. And it wasn’t a mistake per sentence, but a mistake every other word, so that you started at it and tried to divine the meaning by a process similar to reading the entrails of the sentence. Reading whole essays like that was…. uh. Mind boggling. Being expected to treat them as though they were in English was even more mind boggling. The fact that these were written by young people who presented as rational, even bright in person just made it very clear it was a literacy thing. They were not, in any functional sense literate. And at least 50%, sometimes 80% of the ones I interacted with wrote like this.
This is my private explanation for why we have a plagiarism crisis in colleges right now. These people who got graded/passed all the way through graduate school, but who aren’t in any way literate, are expected to produce work. … so they steal a sentence from here, another from there, (and sometimes the sentences contradict each other but how would they know) because the entire writing process is essentially magic to them and they can’t figure out how to do it.
The process is actually familiar to me both as a teacher and as a student of foreign languages. There is a level at which you generally get the gist of what you read, but you can’t get every nuance, and you’re not in any way shape or form competent for writing in it. If at that stage you’re compelled to write anything more than two/three words long, you’ll desperately regurgitate sentences you read that stuck in your mind, in what you hope is a coherent whole. Needless to say, mostly it’s not? The most I’ve managed is when I need a character to say a word or two in another language in a book, and even then I’ll run them by a speaker to make sure that it’s the right sense/connotation/tense.
Our schools have managed to make normal, bright students who have finished 12 years of schooling — and who don’t count as failures to learn — into the equivalent of ESL students with maybe a year or two of instruction.
Even with how much our tech enables voice to text and video communication, we still depend on writing in most professions. The result of each profession being hit by a wave of illiterates is unimaginably bad, and probably at the back of a lot of things from how strange corporate leadership is, to bridges that fall down.
Worse yet, because the teachers who get these people down the line are either themselves already illiterate or can’t figure out how to fix the problem, so that the students can “learn the thing” they concentrate instead on telling the students how to fix everything by thinking the right thoughts/saying the right words, mostly words that signal or integrate into a Marxist world view.
I honestly think that’s how we’ve arrived at “math is racist.”
But anyway, predictably, we have a crisis of competency everywhere. And we have already lost two, maybe three generations to this. And if you’re a member of those generations who can read, write and — rarer still — think it’s no fun for you either. You’re not even going to get ahead, because these people are not looking for competency. They might think they are, but no. They’re looking for things they “understand” as competent. Which… “Do an interpretive dance of bridge design” might be the kindest image for what they’re looking for.
And in the middle of all this, starting in the 90s or so we’ve been bombarded with mission statements for people, for companies, for small tiddlywink clubs. These “mission statements” are the equivalent of those “look like a winner” things of the 70s. As though putting on your mission statement “We strive for excellence” means that excellence is magically conferred. (Maybe the “write your own vows” thing is a subset of this general lack of competence. First, I never understood why anyone would want to. Second, what they write are not vows. Usually they’re weird prose poems that make no sense. Third, the ones that are vows are bizarre. “I promise to always love your smile.” Does this mean if her teeth get knocked out in a freak bicycle accident, the marriage is annulled?)
Anyway, this long rant — brought to you by “Why, yes, I do have a sinus headache” — is to say that things are bad, and the only way out is to really strive for excellence.
But wait, things are worse than that. Because the last three years have taken a massive bite out of the sanity of those of us who are “generally competent” at our thing. We’re enervated, depressed, and between the state of the state and fears for what the zanies will do in the future, not to mention living and working in clown world, a lot of us are phoning it in, barely functioning and doing the bare minimum.
I personally keep getting sick, which is probably stress and annoying, but not nearly as impairing as the fact I go through vast stretches of time when I can only read Jane Austen fanfic. This happened in the past, of course, but not to the point I did it for years at a time, unable to pull up. And I know it’s psychological/overstimulated/vaguely depressed because I’d also live on crackers and milk if I didn’t force myself to eat more rationally (at least some of the time.)
So I know I’m not “striving for excellence.” And mostly this post is for me, but I think it might help others too. Yes I do understand sometimes you can’t. Often I can’t, these days. But we really need to make an effort and strive to do the best we can at– well, everything. Because we know how to. And so many others don’t. And we need to bridge what’s going to be some very tough years when most people don’t have what it takes to keep civilization even pretending to continue.
Whatever it is you do, do it as well and as competently as you can. Yes, you’ll have bad days, but try — at least try — to work at things and do them well.
Do it for the children, do it for the future, do it for humanity. Do it for spite.
Go on.
According To Hoyt 
How can a person “strive for excellence” when people who stand out from the crowd are destroyed? [Angry]
It’s getting easier…. Partly because things are falling apart.
Ummmm … get into your own sub-crowd of excellent people? You won’t stand out from them. And the more people in your herd, the less likely the predators will come and try to cull you. Predators, by nature, like easy prey. Singletons are much likelier to strike them as lunch than members of a crowd. Strength in numbers. (I would say safety in numbers, but as the old Biblical joke tells us, safety is actually in exodus.)
True, brave antagonists might enjoy the challenge of taking you all down, but somehow the antagonists we’ve got don’t strike me as all that brave and sporting.
That’s just my spitballing, but it sounds good so far. [grin] Maybe I should take my own advice. [somewhat embarrassed grin]
Republica restituendae, et, Hamas delenda est.
Paul,
I don’t know your situation, but what helped me was changing my work environment. Basically a fresh start with a different attitude.
Switching from a small company where I was in a critical role, overworked, and not respected to being a cog in a much larger company where the expections were lower although the role was more utimately important helped.
Suddenly I had more normal work hours, better benefits and resources for training. The key was supporting my team and standing out just enough that the word got out that I was experienced and valuable. Knowing how to navigate office politics, deal with clients, and random corporate BS was easier when I approached it as an outsider.
Basically I was less reactive and less emotional, but more logical and tactical.
Covid really helped since the stress of the commute and the drama of the in-person workplace was gone. Plus home life became easier since it wasn’t crammed into a couple of hours a day. And it’s easy to ignore all the DEI sheet remotely. Out of sight, out of mind from all the drama queens. (On the internet, no one knows you are a marsupial…)
I basically went from a “high school” atmosphere to one that is more professional.
And I’m old enough not to want to be the “rock star” or the corporate crusader. I’m in a team that contractually requires experience, but isn’t desirable to any internal career climbers. We perform, keep our noses clean and get paid.
And the fun thing is I can use all my skills I learned at the small company to help at the new role. Very few “kids” know the true power of the command line and associated utilities. Or when to ask difficult questions and when to shut up.
It was a more general statement than about myself.
It was based on a legendary story about a young Greek dictator asking advice from an older Greek dictator.
Basically, the old man took the young man on a walk through a wheat field and while the old man didn’t say a thing, the young man watched the old man whack off the heads of the taller wheat stalks. So the young man went back to his city and killed anybody who was more powerful/successful than others in his city.
In C. S. Lewis’ “Screwtape Proposes A Toast”, Screwtape (a senior devil) talks about Hell convincing the British people to do the same thing as the young dictator.
IE The rulers of Britain didn’t have to kill those who stand out because the British people would do it for them.
When I got out of the military and college, I had several jobs where the old timers would do that to any talent that threaten their cosy roles. Also there were whole companies of “ladder kickers” where the older workers had superior benefits and shit on juniors becuase they could. Just had to find some places that need talent more than arseholes.
You can also “tune down” your visible skills while still learning the role/industry, then transfer or leave. Max out, then get out. Plus network your ass off.
Much earlier in my career, before everyone had an internet paper trail on social media, I met a woman who had been the class loser in high school. She was used to being looked down on and ridiculed. When she graduated high school, she realized over the summer that no one at the college she was going to knew anything about her. So she completely overhauled her attitude and her sense of style and her wardrobe. She was the belle of the ball in college.
Raises paw. I showed up at college determined to let my flag fly. So I did. I was instantly intriguing and cool. I found an Odd niche and never looked back. Enough so that at graduation, my classmates all said, “You have to do [thing!]” So I did, and the administrators just sighed and rolled with it.
Little bit earlier for me, elementary to junior high transition. “Oh yes I am so sad that we’re going to different schools” [really not sad at all]
I’m actually friends with several of my elementary school classmates now, because while I was low-status, I wasn’t full bottom-of-the-barrel status. I mostly just needed to get out of the overall dynamic and into a new one.
I…really needed to read this today. Thank you.
I grew up with a disability that is currently lumped into the mild dyslexia designation. I didn’t learn to properly read until second grade. Even now I don’t read fast, but it’s rare that a day goes by without doing some recreational reading (KU may regret their agreement with me…). My little sister, who has a worse version of it, learned to read because I would tape myself reading her favorite books, and then she’d listen to it over, and over, and over, and over, while following the words on the page with her finger. Between that and phonics, it eventually clicked. To this day she prefers audiobooks to dead trees.
I have a nephew that I used to constantly tell to get off the electronics and read something. He’d grumble and then reach for… web comics or manga. I told him over and over again that anything that had more pictures than words wasn’t reading, and pick something else. I’d wonder if he had a form of my sister’s dyslexia, except that I’ve actually seen him fall down the wikipedia hole for hours at a time.
It makes me wonder if he’s just not a reader (in which case, whoa did he choose the wrong family to be born into), or if this is another symptom of the recent generations not understanding how to entertain themselves and constantly needing outside stimulation to engage their brains?
Sometimes it’s just that they haven’t found the right book yet. My nearest brother—the rocket scientist—didn’t enjoy reading until a particular teacher in high school managed to his the right combo of text and explanation. This in a family with literal thousands of books in the house, mind you. So don’t freak out yet. It could just be a manifestation of “everything they make me read is depressing and the dog dies.”
We’re mostly a sci-fant, mil-sci, hist-fic, myst-fan, urban-fan, LitRPG household. But I so get the ‘they make us read depressing carp in school’ complaint. I’ve even tried to get him into fanfic, as he loves to research the lore from the various games he plays (Destiny, Elden Ring, etc). I’ve even pointed him at the fanfic pages for the specific games he loves expounding about most. Nothing.
…. maybe I’m not the cool aunt, like I thought all this time. Maybe he’s resisting because I’m actually lame and none of my suggestions are any better than what he’s forced to read in school…. I think deeper research may be needed on this.
#2 son could read just fine, however, he resisted it mightily. (He was homeschooled) The whole rest of the family reads everything they can get their hands on.
One day, we were at the fish hatchery and they had a Golden Book of North American Fish guide in the gift shop. It was a couple of hundred pages with lists of fish, habitats, identification photos etc. Hardly captivating prose. He begged me to buy it. Since he had never in his 10 years of existence asked for or willingly read a book, I bought it.
He followed me around the house for two weeks regaling me with Awesome Facts about Dolly Varden fish and other obscure types of which I’d never heard. It was, indeed, awesome.
I got him a subscription to In Fisherman magazine and he happily read it cover to cover the minute it came in the mail.
He’s now 40 and he rarely reads novels, but non-fiction he loves and he has quite a home library.
This sounds a lot like my son and the way he usually entertains himself and finds interesting information. Very little of it is the kind of reading you and I are used to, and in school he refused to produce any written work and as far as we could tell, did very little reading of any kind. As an adult now in his 20s, he still can’t spell for beans and doesn’t generally read for enjoyment — yet he has a powerful vocabulary, knows a surprising amount about a surprising number of subjects, and is a prolific and skillful writer of fiction (has a much better sense of story than I do, creates vivid characters, and builds interesting worlds…and has no desire to ever publish; drives me bonkers). So…all that to say that the kid might still be all right. 😊 This is a very different world than the one we grew up in as gen-Xers.
Our son is the same way. Writing stuff. Son always seemed to get his homework done. Only thing worse for him than writing is being in the center of attention and talking. Exception is showing and working to teach individuals/small groups. Except the last, the others were hurdles in scouting. Doing the work? Not a problem. Writing it down, like pulling hen’s teeth. Speaking about it if he was the focus? Helped if he wrote it down. See prior sentence. Board of reviews? Every single one the reminder was “You have to talk to them!” (He wasn’t the only scout who pulled this. But he was my scout. Wring (metaphorical) neck was contemplated. Some of the other scouts too. But dang it.)
I read fiction. Some might say excessively. Hubby doesn’t. We read the standards to our son, up through the early Harry Potter books. Bought the latter books, I think he read them, but IDK (I did). Our son is somewhere in the middle as a reader. Not the type of fiction I read. But since his prefers computer games that require extensive reading, even as one advances, he reads.
He loves to research the lore from the various games he plays…
Indeed – I have a whole house full of books, wonderful books, some of them with marvelous pictures, about practically everything under the sun. None of them the depressing crap that the current educamation industry thrusts on poor, defenseless children. Jamie the Wonder Grandson is already keenly interested in books, although he isn’t even talking yet. He opens books, turns the pages. I foresee a day when he does learn to read, goes into the den and begins ransacking the bookshelves, and doesn’t come out for weeks…
You’ll have to drag him out every once in a while, shower him and shove food in his mouth. We did tht for our boys.
But of course – we are expecting this!
Me. I was 8 when we moved grandma and the “little boys” (younger Uncles, they were older teens by then) across town. They found box of aunt’s childhood books (Bobbsey Twins, Black Stallion, Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, etc.) I devoured them. Up until then, teachers were saying “I couldn’t read.” Nope. Wouldn’t. Went back to school to 4th grade where reading was advanced through “reading comprehension” self advance during reading time. I flew through them. Then I got to read what I wanted during that time. Still couldn’t read out loud (still can’t). I did learn through phonics. But my tongue gets twisted and between my brain and mouth, new words I’ve never heard, come out wrong.
Knowing this, made sure son had plenty of options to read what he wanted to read. Just didn’t take the same.
Also know the story of my BIL. Hubby was doing his brothers homework and making sure his brother could do well enough to pass tests. Hubby is 5 years younger than BIL. OTOH put a diagram in front of BIL and he’ll improve the item covered in the diagram and instructions. BIL is a mechanic.
My second grade teacher used to bribe me with books so I’d be still during nap time. (Yes, I’m that old). At least 7th or 8th grade books.
My mother said my third grade teacher told her that I frightened her.
Our son was reading Natioal Geographic – and I don’t mean the childrens’ version – at 5. Now he’s making money as an AI tester – read two responses to a prompt and explain which one is better and why.
We had National Geographic, and Nat Geo. Had over 10 years worth when son came along. He went through most of them. Son prefers working with his hands and being active. He works with wood.
An interesting side effect of BIL and hubby. When hubby hit HS, of coarse by now BIL has graduated, but hubby had more than a few of the same teachers. Not only that but hubby also helped his two older sisters through HS too. They were also beyond the system grasp (graduated, hubby is the baby). Start turning in writing assignments on similar subjects. Teachers couldn’t accuse him of out right plagiarism (doesn’t have Eidetic memory) but what he wrote was awfully similar to his older siblings writings. It came out that in all likelihood he had written his older siblings homework. If not all of his sisters, definitely most of his brother’s written papers.
Can you sing from a lyric sheet, or from sheet music/hymnals?
Just curious, because sometimes music goes around that speech stuff, and sometimes it doesn’t.
Don’t answer if you don’t want to, obviously.
No.
Yes.
Can you sing from a lyric sheet, or from sheet music/hymnals?
Just curious, because sometimes music goes around that speech stuff, and sometimes it doesn’t.
Don’t answer if you don’t want to, obviously.
Probably has more to do with the grey goo of books right now. I used to go through a book a day, then family happened and it went to 1 a week. Now it’s 1 a month maybe as there just are not good books out. Indy is starting to get there so my reading is up, yea!
And the older books are good but they have a much different style then modern writing making the barrier to starting to read higher. Once you can get the kids past that, they tend to become READERS.
And nothing wrong with sequential art to start the reading bug, my dad grumbled for decades that handing me the Uncle Scrooge comics was a mistake, something about not being able to get my attention unless the book was physically yanked from my hands.
I tend to latch on to series. Love BookBud, as I will get first books for cheap. Then can decide to continue with the series. Don’t typically go after the “book club intellectual” fiction. Anaja Creed series, ended up with all 58, until the audio visual requirement kicked in. Would get the new ones if they’d put them out in ebook format. Stirling’s Nantucket & Emberverse series. The latter because of “Oh let’s see what happened to those left behind. And Oregon Willamette valley. Stuck out all 15 books, but the latter aren’t my favorites. Some other series are the same. Most the others were “read first and done”.
There are books I have that I’m not really interested in reading ($SPOUSE and I have Kindles, but I’m the one who orders. She doesn’t do SF/Fantasy, I’m picky about mysteries), but recall reading cereal boxes in grade school. Did mostly OK with book reports until I picked Tale of Two Cities in Jr HS and life got in the way. Oops. Lamest book report in my life. (“Best of times, worst of times.” About as far as I got. Read it in class Senior year in HS. Kind of liked it.)
Just finished Lord of the Rings again after 40 years. Did go Kindle so I could read when I’m having lunch in town (or waiting for medical stuff). Have much of the rest in hardback, but I’ll pricecheck Hobbit and Silmarillion as eBooks. Have others, and we’ll see. (I found a lot of nice bits I missed back in the ’80s. Looking forward to a revisit.)
They were $1.99 each on Kindle. Just hit the TBR stack.
One of the tricks is not letting kids check out books unless they’re cleared for them.
I got put in special ed, the guy let me read anything I wanted, and then he ordered the librarians to let me check out anything in the library.
(Inhaled all the Hank the Cow Dog books, and picked over everything else in teh stacks, both high school and grade school.)
So, anyone have any good resources on teaching reading and writing effectively?
Especially for people who’ve already been told they can read and write, and really don’t feel like going through the drudgery of learning it again?
I would love to find some of those, myself.
Jerry Pournelle used to write about his wife’s, Roberta’s learn-to-read program. Never experienced it myself (I think I can read well…), but Jerry thought it was really good.
The site says it’s good to help people read better.
Arggh: https://www.readingtlc.com
We used the program for one of our children–it worked!
After the FIU bridge collapse (March 2018, time’s flying), I found a site (engtips dot com) where extensive discussion and analysis was done. One of the inferences that came out was that the person who actually did the CAD work had a rough idea of “the things the structure needed”, but absolutely no clue as to where those things should have been located. (Didn’t help that the senior guy who was the Engineer of Record thought that since it was merely a pedestrian bridge, the design details didn’t matter, even when red flags were popping up all over the place.)
“I have this tool. I don’t really know how it does what it does, but it says things are OK. Must be right. Right?” Narrator voice: No!
I remember landscape architecture people grousing about contractors who groused about “baby architects” who leaned on Auto-CAD instead of actually learning what materials did or could not do.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/17/Lawrence_Alma-Tadema_11.jpeg
_Cutting the tall poppies_, artwork by Lawrence Alma-Tadema
plus
https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm
_Cargo Cult Science_, 1974 Caltech commencement address by Richard Feynman
(Not just applicable to science, of course)
equals
Our current socio-political-economic (and religious, moral, et c.) catastrophe.
Roberta Pournell Has a Program. https://www.readingtlc.com/
Yes, an utter lack of comprehension can be hidden by a person who is deperately trying to “pass” as having the requisite skill. I’ve seen this in electonics and fluid systems- in both arts there are schematics which show the logic of how the connections interact and give the desired results, and piping/wiring diagrams which show how to build the system, but don’t really show the logic.
I encountered two people working for me, one an employee and one a contractor, who simply Could Not Comprehend a schematic and its logic, but could read a wiring or piping diagram and build the wanted circuit… and as a result could never, ever understand how it worked or how it could be improved. Sometimes they could troubleshoot simple problems, but were useless during product development. With our task being R&D of novel systems, when their dissembling and doubletalking to cover up incompetence got in the way of progress too much, I had to let them both go.
My father was a genius when it came to looking at circuits, understanding them, and being able to build them better. TVs, radios, any kind of radio controller (DHS would have sabertooth cat kittens if they knew what he could do to boost a drone controller). And he got his start with GED in the Navy (he dropped out of school before graduating), and radar repair technician training. Interestingly enough, it’s been 12 years to the day since he passed away.
One of the reasons young people cannot produce literate writing is because they no longer teach anything but the bare minimum handwriting. Kids are put on tablets in Kindergarten and never even learn to hold a pencil correctly nevermind how to write words and letters.
Because of the lack of actually writing things out there is a section of the brain that is not fully formed as neurological studies are showing.
If you find it helpful to take notes during a talk, you know what I mean. Even if you don’t look at the notes, having taken them down by hand helps cement the thoughts.
If language is just floating around in space, so to speak, you don’t learn how to create it in the concrete yourself by putting thoughts on paper.
Typing is NOT the same either. You need to physically form the letters and words with your own hands to create the necessary brain pathways.
So for teaching reading and writing you need a strong handwriting instruction component.
My kids’ schools (when we moved we switched districts) still teach cursive. We live in a backwards, backwater area of the country, so that’s probably part of the reason they still do, but I was surprised and pleased to see them still practicing it. At least up here.
The Reader notes reading can be taught without an association to handwriting, although it is much harder. The Reader’s son managed, with a lot of extra work at home, despite his cerebral palsy preventing him from holding a pencil and limiting him to typing with 2 fingers on an adaptive keyboard. He did manage to learn to read well enough to become a lawyer.
I used to memorize stuff by handwriting it, over and over and over, until I could recite it. So, yes – strong correlation for some of us by mind-hand coordination.
I live in California, and the shutdowns pretty much took out ALL of the in-person writing instruction for my littlest. (Unfortunately, between dealing with the logistics of three kids on Zoom PLUS the adult wage-earner, I missed the obvious until it was almost time to send him back. And yes, that’s my own flakiness.)
That’s one of the reasons why the essay section of the SATs was so critical. It required you to demonstrate that you had the minimum knowledge to effectively communicate at a college entry level. I believe they nuked that when they started admitting to college based on how many participation awards you had.
Nah. I saw the people who did well on that. It was graded by MACHINE and it had key words that cost you points (think political incorrectness)
Son was first year it was introduced, and he had to figure out in advance so as not to get penalized. Fortunately teachers had the “keys” already.
Machine testing and grading is why schools are putting kids in electronic devices as soon as they walk into kindergarten.
Government testing requires the devices to be used for testing so that’s how they teach ’em.
The very newest teachers don’t think this is a problem. They haven’t ever learned any other way than by looking at a screen. The old hands are leaving the profession in droves.
Types through gritted teeth Do. Not. Get. Me. Started. about devices in the classroom, and computers in the classroom. Just. Do. Not.
Computers are great in a classroom, if you’re teaching a programming language, and only after you’ve planned out the modules and the code first.
Also effective for teaching typing without so much paper use. It’s how I learned.
Had brief exposures* to the Plato** system in college. With a hell of a lot of instructor work, it’s moderately useful. Better than books? Nope.
((*)) More like beta testing. Whee.
((**)) Control Data Corp was behind it. No idea if it made commercial success.
There’s a very good reason why all the Silicon Valley bigwigs send their kids to low-tech private schools. They are…not unaware…of the problems their technology can cause.
Important to keep in mind that the US education system these days is designed to create interchangeable widgets who will blindly do what The Party tells them to do in full “Ignorance is Strength” mode, with an added dose of poisonous “Conformity is Diversity”.
They want a society of pod people.
“These days”?
That was the primary and ONLY goal from when it was first instituted.
Even so, they still taught functional knowledge for a long time. Looking back on my time in school in the 80s and 90s, that’s when the whole system started to tip toward leftist indoctrination at the expense of literally everything else. The political correctness craze of the late 80s/early 90s was the tip of the wedge.
1977. Jimmeh Cahtah’s Federal Department Of Education. The rot took a while to spread, but now it’s everywhere. That should be the first branch of government to get pruned off with a chainsaw. 47 years, OVER $2 TRILLION, all of it wasted.
That is because too many people who had been taught in the old ways, or taught by the people who had been taught that way.
It took several generations for the lag to be worked out of the system. But we have the writings and lecture transcripts of the people who set the schools up. There is not the faintest shred of a possibility of doubt about what they wanted to create.
And in some cases they got closer to their goal in the first generation. Parents objected pretty strongly to the idea of having their kids taken and isolated from them the entire time they were growing up……
……but the indian schools were able to pull it off.
Some of them.
Weird, how teaching your kids that it’s OK to torture outside-the-tribe folks to death, among other issues, gets that kind of reaction.
Even odder, everyone acts like that extremely rare case was normal…rather than the ones still around, that just offered better education than was available at home. Often in boarding schools, but the real outrage was that they taught what was needed to be able to freely interact with the general population. The folks who ‘translated’ before that, disliked it.
So, basically, exactly the opposite of the ‘keep them helpless, require experts for everything’ setup folks are going for now.
Oh of course; the “indian school” thing is……… shall we say a bit more complicated than it is usually held to be.
It is also an excellent way to very quickly convey to people who are unfamiliar with the origins of public school as we know it the sheer magnitude of what was intended.
And then you fill in the gaps / oversimplifications once the surprise has turned off their automatic “badthink! reject!” response.
:coughs: Since my ancestress is one of the folks teaching said school– well enough that they offered attending the school on the sly as a job benefit for their hands, and quite proud of giving folks the tools to do ANYTHING– I don’t much care if you think the falsehood is effective. It’s still a falsehood when it’s a deliberate one, and one that plays into enemy hands, besides The Enemy.
They never had the essay sections of the SAT’s when I took them (yes, as old as dinosaurs, hubby is older than dirt, per son).
Regarding taking notes by hand. OMG if I could actually read them? Note, my hand writing is not particularly bad, normally. Taking notes? Not a chance in the world. I tend to zone out listening in lectures and meetings. A lot better off when I could have taken notes with a keyboard in class. Now for meetings, better have an laptop, or detailed agenda I can add notes to and highlight. Ironically I get praise for how fast I get minutes out for the family annual graveyard meetings. Sure because I show up with them all but written. All I have to do is add who proposed what and seconded on which line item, add any extra discussion (not always limited), then add to the already typed version and post it.
Note on having a laptop in class. Never have. Too old for that. Not even when I could take seminars. Or participate in Woodbadge, either taking, or part of staff. (Not working, didn’t have a laptop. Sure most not suitable for laptop, especially in Oregon (both winter, at Camp Baker, wet. But part of it would have been.)
/sigh
Woodbadge was a waste of my time. It presented zero new information, did nothing to reinforce any skills as I could have taught the entire course content. The batch of instructors I had literally didn’t care for the people they were supposed to teach/supervise, and while I met a bunch of people, there wasn’t any bonding in the group.
Of course, the point is moot now that BSA is a dead Woke organization of sexual predators.
Material was new to me. Know a lot of people who said it wasn’t. Mostly retired military, some business majors. Bonding? My patrol bonded big time, immediately, too fast to experience the group process. Didn’t last more than a few years. OTOH when I volunteered as staff (once, not that stupid) the material really kicked in, and I observed the group process. The project process, that I had experienced a lot in the work I did, and I was always a group of one. Just never had the material. Didn’t change anything. Just knew it was normal.
I disagree on your last statement. Big time. What has happened is the cost is now prohibitive to prevent. Too bad SOA got nailed for the incidents that did happen. What part of the Charter owns the unit, they okay the adult leadership? In many cases the Charter assigns the adult leadership. Guess which units had problems in the past? Not all but enough. Not involved anymore. We are big believers of the parents of the youth involved need to be unit leaders, and we had no interest in being involved at the district or council level once our son went away to college (which kind of limited his involvement even in Venture). But others who comment here are.
The Youth Protection Policy for the BSA (soon to be dba Scouting America) is the best in the nation…
when it is followed.
I can guarantee that any cases from the last 20-30 years will have at least one and probably multiple clear violations of the policy, most often not following 2-deep leadership and not doing the background checks because “we trust him.” And yes, that is more prevalent in certain chartering organizations and areas because of the group culture. If you have a group that already works on the trust system, predators are for sure going to infiltrate it.
As for “woke,” heh. I really don’t think you’d say that if you knew the leaders I know. Especially the ones in charge of the *cough* Field and Range Sports Event. (National won’t let us have cannon anymore…)
I know.
Same.
100%. Exactly my point (and yes, I realize your post was agreeing with mine. We have been not registering as adult scouters since 2010. Son Eagled 2005, hit college Fall 2007.) For years later, offered our expertise if they wanted (would register if they did). But no one asked.
Even with the policies in place they try to infiltrate. That is why the first requirement for cub bobcat and scout rank is to ensure all scouts know they can report if they are ever approached, a scout outing or not. Not required, but it was an annual discussion for our son, through cubs. Scoutmaster always did the one for scout rank.
Excellent mirror for the stuff I’ve been thinking and writing about recently.
On LinkedIn, where all of us looking for work tend to hang out, there’s this culture of shrieking about “what leadership really need to do!” All the people looking for work validate the comments. “Yeah, we really need leaders who care! Yeah, we really need leaders who are competent at all the things! YEAH!” This continuous echo chamber.
The only people who have no interest in “hiring the best talent” are the people who are hiring. They couldn’t give a shite about you or their current employees. They hire for kowtow because they believe people won’t stay for more than 2-3 years and don’t deserve any effort to retain or care for them.
These people are stupid as posts but they’re in charge. They don’t have any idea how to prosper a company; they were hired for kowtow.
People are leaving the workforce in droves because of the feckless incompetence.
That’s why it’s important to have real people networks, and not HR networks.
My biggest issue with finding a new job after the Crow Flu hit was that simple thing-all of the resumes and such if you’re working for someplace bigger than a small outfit are being run through LLM (I refuse to call it “AI” because they don’t think, they’re just really fast and fancy Mad Lib generators) systems looking for specific keywords and periods of time and similar things.
It used to be that you could make sure to quote back several sections of the job posting in your resume and that would knock your resume up the queue. Doesn’t work anymore.
They aren’t looking for “best talent,” because they are “B” or “C”-rate people that fear the coming of an “A”-rate talent that can show them up. Especially if the person is in any way possible competition for a position someone in HR wants.
🙂 You know whereof you speak. Yes. Exactly. Low rent employers looking for kowtow.
They’re great at playing the office politics and being “one of the lads” with the senior management. Actually doing things, on the other hand, is not in their skillset.
Dunno if the resume scanner filter-ers ever were twigged to this, but it used to be a thing that an applicant could add a line of white 3pt text to their pdf resume somewhere and include therein every keyword imaginable, thus satisfying the keyword-match filter that it could find the mandatory magic words and and advancing in the process.
I’m a low-level bureaucrat in my local government, and I’m going through state classes right now to move up to mid-level bureaucrat because some day I want to own a sports car while not shorting my wife and kids of anything they want, too. Anyway, the teacher of our last class was a former Michigan Tax Tribunal guy (he specifically said he Tribunal guys aren’t judges) and he spent the first 45 minutes of our class berating those among us who can’t string sentences together without turning things into a mess. I know that literacy is kind of an issue in my class. We are given 50-question tests to finish in an hour, and I generally finish in less than half the time, while others are pulling their hair trying to figure things out until the very last second.
Online, I suppose I have self-selected into groups of people with fine writing skills, because almost everyone I see post anything comes across as more thoughtful and more articulate than I could ever hope to be. It has always been hard to imagine that there are people with worse communications skills than me, written or otherwise.
The other thought I had was about mission statements. I always thought those were stupid. If you have tell someone you’re striving for excellence, you’re really not.
Thoughtful and articulate on paper is a heck of a lot easier for me than standing up and talking. Trying to find a good balance between speaking quickly enough to keep people’s attention, and slowly enough to keep your own thoughts in order, has never been natural for me, even when doing presentations for senior officers.
I tend to game out situations and speeches in my head well in advance. I’m a very carefully prepared extemporaneous speaker.
I have the reputation of being fast on my feet in meetings. What they don’t realize is that I spend hours preparing and going through as many situations as I can imagine. having been in the banking biz for 40+ years now, there’s seldom anything new.
Yes. I also read a lot around my field, so when students (and adults) toss something in from left or right field, I can generally get close to the right answer, or I know where to look.
“What did you learn in grad school?”
How to dig with a modicum of wasted time. You know, sort of like being an archaeologist – you learn to evaluate sources/dig sites very quickly. Yes, you sometimes miss things, but you also know not to look for, oh, Baltic prehistory in a work about Baluchistan.
That’s Winston Churchill’s MO, too. You’re in good company!
Yeah, this may be what I was talking at wrt to my assertations about magical thinking.
One of the key things I did not state is that I beleive that autistics can be more correct in perceiving the realities of social interaction, but that the truer understanding is also more pathological. Treating incomplete communications as complete, and assuming that everyone completely agrees, may be more functional in some ways.
I’ve been trying to learn several skills for some decades. Been some interesting adventures. Some surprising to me realizations along the way.
(One of those realizations is that seemingly many skills include an element of perception, which must be trained by a significant amount of practice. Considering step by step simple cases that do not always directly have real world applications.)
I have a lot of questions about, say, skill X, like ‘how does it work?’, and ‘where does the value come from?’, etc.
It seems like many skills, an advanced user needs to test the results carefully against reality.
That is not a very useful model for someone who is an outsider to that skill, and needs to understand how well they should trust someone with that skill. The alternative strategy is trust default, which saves on all of the cost of trying to understand specific people, and specific skills. Trust default is a strategy that works well up until it doesn’t. IE, until there are so many incompetents that the costs of betrayed trusts gets very large.
But, while learning a skill, trust default sets you up for problems. Two ‘opposing failure’ problems it can set you up for are overconfidence, and imposter syndrome. There are a lot of complicated skills that can be learned by studying a bunch of the correct simpler skills. You work at it, and eventually things surprise you by coming together. You would avoid trust default by accepting that you have had some experiences, and have incomplete information about how correctly or incorrectly you did various things. Assuming that you have the undefinable quality that bestows the trust results in overconfidence. Assuming that you still aren’t good enough, because you never received anything that you can accept as the dumbo magic feather, imposter syndrome.
I think autistic people often see too clearly. So much of social interaction is just humbug and BS.
When C and I got married (my word, it was eight years ago!), we did research into vows. I saw a whole lot of contemporary vows, and they consistently set my teeth on edge. For one thing, a lot of them were “I promise to feel so and so,” which had me thinking both that you CAN’T promise to feel anything, because feeling is not under your volitional control, and that there wasn’t any commitment to DO anything. So we went with the vows from the Book of Common Prayer, with the God stuff edited out but with the operative clauses all left in. That version not only was written in much more beautiful language than anyone writing their own is likely to come up with, but also makes it clear that the couple are entering into a business arrangement with real world consequences and creating real obligations: It’s for adults taking on the serious business of life, not for adolescents in a romantic haze. (We had lived together for 31 years and had enjoyed plenty of romantic haze, but we stuck it out through parts that were far from romantic.)
I used to work for a very large scientific publisher. When they adopted a mission statement, it started out with “To produce the products that X sells” or something along those lines. There was absolutely no commitment to any specific product with any specific sort of excellence. It was sort of the marketing analog of your comments about people-as-widgets. Any corporation could have used it, from a shipyard to a hospital to a head shop. I guess that’s what happens when you teach people business administration instead of the actual skill of producing something.
That is of a piece with the notion which apparently appeared sometime in the ’70s or early ’80s (but may have started long before) that there’s such a thing as a “manager” and it matters not at all what he “manages”; it’s his job to manage, not to be competent at anything the organization does. At the defense contractor where I worked from ’76 until I retired in ’06, they had the exact opposite culture; you could *not* be promoted past line supervisor unless you were an experienced engineer. It worked pretty well; at least the managers understood the issues involved in the development and production of state-of-the-art radar systems. That seemed to be beginning to change when I retired; I have no idea how it’s doing now.
The Reader believes we have Peter Drucker to thank for the idea that ‘management’ can be separated from what is being managed.
I think it may have been Michael Flynn who compared this to the idea that you can learn “education” separately from mastering the material to be taught.
Do not get me started on the value of “education” degrees. Just don’t. I was lucky; I got my EE degree in Hopkins night school, where all the engineering courses were taught by actual practicing engineers rather than academics.
Now imagine being taught by someone whose academic degree wasn’t even in engineering, but in education.
I’ll pass on that imagining, thanks; I’m about to have lunch. 😉
Of course, yet another divorced-from-reality “expert”; Austria and Germany seem to grow them like weeds. In an ideal world, with perfect people, that idea might be valid (but I wouldn’t bet the farm on it even then). But neither is true, and a manager who knows (sort of) only how to manage people is a disaster for anything more complex than sorting beans. Or, of course, setting up a “perfect” State. 😒🤢🤢
I know that I’m not the sharpest pencil in the box, and that I’m a good, but not great writer.
In comparison to far too many authors that I’ve read on Kindle (including one that I’m mostly following out of just how badly he can torture the English language…), I’m a positive genius.
Which makes me want to write more…
…and soon.
So, sharpen yourself. (Grin)
That is what all of my writing, editing, and research is about. If I can’t be brilliant, I can at least be good.
Graduates of the Infinite Number Of Monkeys School Of Writing? 😀
I’ve even seen a few of their dropouts.
And what’s worse is that most of them are better than the LLM systems trying to write long novels…
The Edgar Rice Burroughs school, “I can write better trash than that!”
…that’s where many of my story ideas come from. Somebody writes a novel that just offends the hell out of me, and I go “I can do better.”
The bar is NOT that high to jump…
Coff. No Man’s Land, aka the book that’s holding me at gun point just now.
Jump? As I recall, the currently accepted practice was to DEI your pants off and limbo it.
Well, if they’re limbo under it, at least they’re not DIGGING below it…
Given their penchant for disregarding inconvenient “rules” and things, I would not lay any money on that.
First, a passing comment in this post brought into focus why I hate mission statements with the fury of a thousand suns: It is not, as it is implied to be, a statement of an ideal toward which an organization is aiming. It is, instead, brain fog designed to distract from the lack of specific competency of the people who think it’s a Really Good Idea to have mission statements. (These are usually the same people who are Deeply Concerned with “the vibe” of where they work, and not at all concerned with solving problems and making sure they stay solved.)
Second, this makes me regret having run out of steam on a side project to bring public domain educational books back into print, specifically books on writing, thinking, and logic. It feels like bringing a thimble to deal with a tidal wave, but it’s better than doing nothing at all.
Mission statements are what they want to fool the customer into believing what they are, not what they really are. And I do believe Mel Brooks said best when he said.
“We’ve got to save our phony baloney jobs, harrumph” Gov. Lepetomane.
About mission statements: I remember translating a set of “What we stand for at…” statements from the company into what the company really stood for such as
“We strive for excellence in everything we do,” became
“We get paid for everything we do,” which is what they actually stood for.
As to learning to read, I don’t care what a young person reads, just that he does. I was self-raised on DC comics and Baseball Digest. Also I got a good smattering of Latin from Church every Sunday. The missals had the Latin on one page and the English on the facing page, so it was a good if unintended education.
In the corporate culture, I was somebody who walked his own way, but my focus was always on how to give value to whoever had to use what I produced (and the client too hopefully). Once I was given a quality award by the site manager for my work improving our team’s output. After the ceremony, I sidled up to the site manager and said, “You know everyone who has gotten this award was told by their direct supervisor not to do what they did to get the award. We might want to think about that.” But then I’ve always been that kind of “difficult” person.
One large retail business had a “mission statement” that went like this: “Retail is a people’s business so we value our people”.
The “joke” told inside the business was “We’re not people, we’re associates.”. [Twisted Grin]
And everybody that worked there were called “associates”.
I am going to try to defend the indefensible, or at least explore if there is something worth saving in mission statements. We’ll start by throwing away any of the big words from the Weird Al video below. Next, consider ‘mission’: Missions have limits, and a goal. ‘Mission’ makes sense in the military at smaller scales: “Go capture specific thing, and shoot anybody in the way.”
So if we’re going to borrow the analogy for business, it will best apply in a couple circumstances. One, as a project goal: “We have 2 years to re-write our Tax-Master software to run in Chrome instead of IE6.” Two, if you’re a startup: “We’re Uber for dogs” may have all kinds of issues, but it fulfills the cardinal rule of writing – it conveys meaning!
No Fortune 500 company needs to have a corporate-wide ‘Mission Statement’. Everyone already knows what it is that you do.
You’re right. “Mission statements” are indeed misstated. As you say, a goal is a concrete end that doesn’t specify a means. When you achieve it, you’re done. That’s one thing corporate culture did teach me even if most companies ignored it. We were told to set 3-5 personal goals every year. Good goals are concrete, achievable, and time-constrained. “We will create a deliverable nuclear fission bomb before the end of the war” is a goal. When you blew up Trinity, you were done.
So-called “mission statements” are better characterized as statements of principle. “Ars gratia artis” for instance is closer to a principle rather than “Ad astra per aspera” which is more of a goal (even if a rather vague one). Likewise “Don’t be evil” is a principle albeit too vague a one to be worthwhile.
The company I retired from (after 18 years) was unique in my experience. I worked for and with many defense contractors over my career, and witnessed many shady dealings both by my companies and their competitors. My last company ran by what they called “Core Values”, among them “ferocious integrity”, “unflinching courage”, “passionate service”, and “collective ingenuity”. They weren’t empty words either. You were expected to create related goals for yourself every year and were evaluated for raises and promotions based on them. And they actually lived by them. When a low-level employee discovered that one of our major offices was working with illegal insider information in bidding on a contract, she reported it to corporate, and corporate reported it to the government, withdrew our bid, and fired those responsible. The government suspended the local office from bidding on contracts for a year, and the company used it as an example touting the low-level employee as a hero despite the negative consequences for the bottom line. Would that our government worked by such values. I don’t know if they can keep it up forever, but they’ve been around since 1914, still are proudly called by their founders’ names rather than some trendy pseudo-word. I purchased stock
Weird Al Mission Statement
What makes it even funnier is the tune is based on Carry On by Crosby Stills Nash and Young….which is a word salad of new age crap…and the people who grooved to it are the same generation that invented Mission Statements
I am an annoyance to my daughter, because every time the local rock station plays a pop hit from the 1980s and 90s, I flash on the Weird Al Yankovic parody!
Having listened to Weird Al since I bought the “In 3D” cassette tape on my class graduation trip, anytime I hear the original of pretty much anything he’s parodied…
I hear his version in my head…
I still want to go to a karaoke night at a bar / restaurant in Canada and do “Canadian Idiot”
Don McLean, of all people, says that he sometimes starts to blank in the middle of “American Pie” because his kids loved the Weird Al parody so much that it starts getting scrambled.
Someone near Nashville has written a parody song for, “My Sharona,” titled, “My Cicada.” Heard it yesterday on Hippie Radio in Nashville and smiled for miles.
Can’t find it anywhere online, darn it.
What I have always found insanely frustrating about “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” is not the lyrics, but that the music is all intro, with only a hint of good melody at the very end. I wanted a damn song with the melody, but all I got was intro, with a middle finger at the end essentially saying “Yeah, we could have made a good melody, but you don’t get that.”
In the comments on youtube someone said it wss Judy Blue eyes. I listened to that. As with a lot of music there is a sameness to it….either or, though I still think carry on is closet in musical structure and lyric sillyness
Ahem
(Singing)
This song’s just six words long.
(grin)
This is the song that never ends
It just goes on and on, my friends
Some people started singing it
A long time ago
But when they started sing it
How were they to know
It was the song that never ends…
There are things, man was nit meant to know
And songs man was not meant to sing
And this is one of them…
That fits the meter till the third line. 😀
Hilarious!
Between the time I became so profoundly hard of hearing and they came out with captioning telephones I used to carry a note pad around to deal with clerks and salesmen. I was astonished how many people couldn’t write me a simple note such as – “We close at 6.” or “We can have that in three days.”
Not just fast food clerks but people with responsible mid-level jobs in national companies.
“Master, I’ve set the warts as you requested.”
“I suspect, my young apprentice, that there has been a breakdown in communication. I believe I told you to set the *wards*.”
“I did, sir, but these wards give trespassers warts all over. (Impish grin) I suspect we won’t be bothered tonight.”
So… back about ten or twelve years ago – que old fart voice – good grief I’ve been retired now for over four years. Anyway, back to the old guy story – Back then, when there was still a real “Academy” I worked with and we had actual students in seats and held classes with tests for knowledge/comprehension and instructors evaluated students on participation, engagement and reactions. It wasn’t ‘pass/fail’ it was graded and if you didn’t get high enough grades or ‘failed’ instructor evaluations the candidate got let-go or, as a collage put it: “You are now free to explore other opportunities that do not include us!”
Report writing was often an eye opener. The ones that seemed to “get it” and could actually string a real sentence together and even do short paragraphs were mostly post-military. Theory there was they had to read/write to survive within their military environment so there was strong motivation to figure it out. The usual worst cases were the “professional” staff hires – BA, BS, often graduate degrees – they were awful and had to be really coached to get it close to being ‘passing’. A couple of that type actually were flunked because they just could not write or even present a verbal report that made sense.
I loved the older hires – they not only could write, spell and do math they actually paid attention and worked at learning something. The ongoing joke with that crowd was the prior “street cop” types had to learn to not use “The perpetrator did wantonly and feloniously with disregard to law, regulation or rule commit X.” We had them put it in plain English – “Offender Johnson hit Officer Smith with his closed fist in the chest.” After a couple of tries, and lots of jokes with ‘war stories’ they all got it too.
Back to the actual topic – YES, strive for excellence, require it of others and when ever able pass on what you know and gather in what you don’t. In the end, we win.
You worked with a talking collage? Sorry the typo was too delicious to leave unremarked. LOL
‘Excellence’ hell, at this point I’d settle for ‘doesn’t suck’. 😦
On the bright side, a lot of people give out tons of praise now, at my day job, for us just being a little better than competent.
People spend so much time _not_ being in good hands, dodging the crazy drivers, etc.
So if you do a good job that’s a tad better than expectations, that makes them feel unreasonably happy and secure. And if you do it almost all the time, they really love it.
It’s a bit unsettling, but it’s also nice to feel useful. If people want to lean on the fact that I can make change and get them food with a smile, it’s just doing my job and not anything weird that they’re asking.
Part of it is that I was there all during the Coof, and I’m still there. And they leaned on me being around, back then, so they still are a little comforted.
To quote the late, great Richard Mitchell, “A bare minimum of competence to all, and to all a good night!”
Trump had a rally in the Bronx today, went very well. They keep saying it’s the South Bronx, which it ain’t. You’d think the morons who work at the NY papers would know the geography of their adopted city, they’re mostly foreigners from Rich suburbs, but everything in the Bronx other than Riverdale is the south Bronx now. It’s maddening.
It’s mostly Hispanic around the rally, and Trump has a good chance at swinging some of that vote, Black guys too, he has always been personally popular with black guys, the women not so much. Of course, this is just Trump, the republicans are uniformly awful.
Trump won’t win NY, not even close even without the margin of fraud, but losing any of-the black vote is an existential threat to the dems. This is like the Mitchell raid in WWII, they’ll have to respond and they don’t actually have the resources to do so since they haven’t had to do anything for the black or Hispanic vote….. ever. Trump understands these things, it’s a pity the rest of the GOP doesn’t.
The polling numbers (the real polling numbers) are apocalyptic for the Dems. They’ve lost the black vote in the lockstep they have needed and relied on for forty years, from 90% down to somewhere around 60%, with most of the loss going to Trump (not Republicans; Trump). The hispanic vote is more complicated, but also appears to be worse in terms of sheer numbers.
That fact explains why they are losing their ever-loving minds and doing things that are patently insane. They are going to lose power, and they know it. They have established terrifying precedents, and know that they deserve the reckoning that’s coming.
I was thinking the other day that this trial keeping Trump restricted to NY city/state and environs might actually be a problem in disguise for the Dimocrats because, although it keeps him out of the swing states he could otherwise be campaigning in, he can mount a figurative blitzkrieg right in the heart of enemy territory.
It looks very, very bad for Democrats to have this guy pulling off a series of rallies with attendance in the multiple thousands in a state and city we’ve been assured he cannot ever win. If they have to actually put resources into campaigning against Donald Trump in New York…not a good look for them at all. If Trump is this popular in a place that’s supposed to hate him, well, voting for him as a non-party voter or a swing-state resident who might otherwise have voted D doesn’t seem like such a leap.
If people can read and understand what is written they can educate themselves. If they can not, they are at the mercy of the so called experts. It enables those who want to rule others an easier path to control. Unfortunately for them, incompetence is all they have created mostly in their own ranks.
Words?? like Tear and Tear, Bow and Bow, Bass and bass? I’ve seen a bit that looks like poorly translated Chinese instructions.
Anyway,
As noted likely here and certainly on Discord (I’m way behind, y’all. just busy, and tired and the new phone hasn’t had it installed yet.) my job of 19 years is dead and I’ve been moved to the department I, in part, supplied. The company (a form of Strive For Excellence is right there in the mission statement) decided to make my new product line work area “The Model Line”. The line is … poorly designed for the purpose it originally was intended and never used for, bodged and hacked to become something it is even more unsuited for, and then they decided, that as we had so much trouble with some of the equipment, to go with another line of Identical equipment to expand things, except it is not “exactly” the same, works very differently and is even more frustrating. Also, Head Pressure? Whazzat?
Bandaids on Duct Tape, only less effective.
Regarding modern literacy. I have two friends who are elementary school teachers with degrees in Library Science. One in public and one in private school. Both inform me that it is perfectly acceptable for students to ‘read’ audio books to fulfill grade level reading requirements. Now an audio book may be very entertaining and/or educational, but it’s not a substitute for learning to read.
So, I was hired a few years back to do the voiceovers on construction safety videos. I got halfway through the project before the script started…diverging from recognizable English.
In speaking to the company owners, (it was a small operation), they informed me that an English Major had written the script. As an English Major myself, I offered to rewrite the lines, which I did for several more sessions.
Eventually, the script became so indecipherable, we had to stop the project, I couldn’t even figure out what they were trying to say. The lack of competence on the part of the writer, and on the part of the proof reader still leaves me shaking my head.
I got my degree in broadcast studies (for my sins) and an early exercise that our professor had us do was analyze everything that was wrong with a training video for crew (rowing) judges. And there was a LOT. Several basic things, like the clips weren’t white-balanced, going through structural things, like saying out of nowhere that an athlete with a challenge has to pay a judge $25 without saying why* or putting it chronologically at the end of a race, and onto fun things like having a shot of a crew going one direction and then the subsequent shot showed them going in the opposite direction. (The implication being that they would crash.)
Our professor had it because the association had come to him to ask him to create an updated one. They’d been using this one for years and found nothing wrong with it.
The kicker? It had been created by the students at a well-known UC film school in southern California. Explains a lot about Hollywood, doesn’t it?
*The money paid down was a bond to be given back to the athlete if their challenge was found to be justified. That way, they could keep from having frivolous challenges to decisions.
I ranted somewhere (a private forum, I think) about how film schools were a mistake. After the first generation of USC film school grads, the ones who had (of all people) Jerry Lewis as a professor, they stopped being about learning to make narrative films and became about networking and keeping the wrong sorts out of the business.
That USC class (it was a few classes, but still) gave the world George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, John Milius, and John Carpenter.
For comparison, the Roger Corman “school” (on the job training making an exploitation film for one of Roger Corman’s production companies) gave the world Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Jonathan Demme, Ron Howard, Joe Dante, Robert Towne, Bill Paxton, Carl Franklin, James Cameron, Gale Ann Hurd, Jack Nicholson, Peter Bogdanovich, and too many others to list, really.
Generic Author Mission Statement
As an author, my mission is focused on several core aspirations I continually strive to achieve, including surpassing other authors in the realms of quality and excellence, as well as to achieve supreme excellence in the content area. Readership satisfaction is also an aspirational goal and aim toward which I endeavor tirelessly.
EW
The Reader thinks you have a future as a writer of mission statements. The skill is in high demand right now.
Imma smack you.
That’s hideous. I salute you.
I assign this a C-. Call it a seventy-three percent. The product, customer, and process are all still identifiable in the Mission Statement and inadequately bafflegabbed into oblivion.
Once these deficiencies are ameliorated, a holistic resynergization may be conducted to elevate your grade valuation to maximalize your excellences.
The Reader thinks you should form a partnership with Mr. Fleming. The two of you could do great things for all those in need of aspirational mission statements.
He could understudy as our VP. Word salad expert.
we must live by excellence, or perish from the lack of it