1201

Good grief. Yesterday was post number 1200. Yaketty yaketty yak...

Anyhow, I’m finally getting a few things off my to-do list. Last night I put together and edited my series on PF, and saved it out as a PDF over there on the right-hand column under the Greatest Hits heading. I also added it to the Sailor website. Feel free to grab it for yourself, and use it as either the bible or as the quintessential guide on how not to PF. Your call. At least I’m done with it for now.

I don’t seem to have any Sailors on the immediate PF waters in October. I can’t say I’m wildly enthusiastic about the topic. It’s virtually identical to an old LD rez aside from the UN part of it. What torpedoed it in LD was that people would run “sustainable development,” thus totally ignoring the conflict. Sustainability is a compromise between the two sides, not a choice between the two sides. My blood boiled for two months straight, if I recall correctly. The PF wording shouldn’t have that same result, but the UN aspect sort of throws me. I guess an agent of action is required, but given the lack of authority in that particular agent, I suspect a lot of smoke and mirrors will be employed in people’s cases. But, as I say, it probably won’t affect me at all, so I won’t bother about it herein.

We had a most intimate chez last night with the Panivore and SuperSquirrel. SS has returned from Camp WTFaMucka with a list of case positions on Sept-Oct that makes one wonder if people out there have ever heard of the concept of inherent contradiction. I love when one side runs the other side’s position and doesn’t even know it. Needless to say there’s plenty of mutton-headed approaches to the topic (both independent of and stemming from Camp WTFaMucka), but buried among them are a couple of obvious ones, and I have a feeling that people seriously seeking bids will quickly dispense with the silly stuff and get down to the real business of the pros and cons of testing. I certainly hope so. What are the pros? Well, I hate to tell you, but separating the elite from the riffraff, one popular case position, isn’t really one of them. But tests that objectively measure knowledge seem to be useful when there’s a need to do that measuring. Against it one could say that the objectivity is impossible, which is cute and current (if you think CT from the 80s is current, but LD does usually run about a generation behind state-of-the-art academics) but maybe not necessarily true. Can you create an algebra exam devoid of social context? Frankly, how can you not? I mean, the day X+Y=3 is biased against [fill in identity] is the day X+Y actually <> 3. Oh, well. Anyhow, there’s better arguments in the purer areas of pedagogy, in the goals of knowledge and teaching and education, and there will be a few lost souls in LD land who will attempt debating at that level. I salute them.

Long weekend coming up, so you probably won’t hear from me for a few days, unless I don’t get the instructor suggestions from O’C real soon now. In which case you’ll see me on the Eleven O’Clock News being dragged away from his bleeding, battered body. Although, of course, I’ll claim innocence. “His mother did it,” I’ll say, pointing to her Facebook messages. I’ll be back on the streets by midnight.