Steven Harper's Blog, page 25
August 4, 2022
The Teacher Shortage--Now
https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/08/03/school-teacher-shortage/
The TL;DR version is that thousands and thousands and thousands of teacher positions are going unfilled across the country. Every single school and school district is feeling it. My own district in Wherever is one of the higher-paying districts in the state. Not long ago, a single vacancy garnered dozens of applications, and we had very few vacancies. Wherever was able to poach teachers from other districts, in fact. A few years ago, we had a special education position open up in mid-year, and Wherever persuaded a teacher one town over to leave and teach for us.
Now? I see the HR department putting out several vacancies a week. Just yesterday, they posted three more. And they can't get applicants. Keep in mind that teachers used to fight to teach in Wherever. Now there just aren't enough teachers to go around.
The trouble is, all the solutions are long-term. You've heard it before, and it hasn't changed. We need to increase salaries, improve benefits, reduce class sizes and workloads, and stop vilifying teachers. (Funny that when the pandemic started, we were heroes who restructured schools in less than 24 hours in order to teach and help and reach students during a national emergency, then less than a year later, we were mustache-twirling villains who are trying to wreck every child's life.) But all this will take time. Even if the legislature passed budgets that gave all teachers a 20% raise and restored all benefits and retirement to what they were in 1990, the shortage will continue. It takes four or five years of college to make a teacher, and right now teacher-education programs are empty. Young people aren't going into teaching. Meanwhile, the old guard is bailing out to retire early, and the middle guard is taking jobs elsewhere. If all the problems surrounding teaching were solved tomorrow, it would still be four or five years before the shortage ended.
And rather than address the big issues, some places are trying to lure people into teaching by loosening the licensing. Are you a vet? You can teach! Are you married to a vet? You can teach! Do you have a degree of some kind, any kind? You can teach! Are you in the National Guard? You can teach!
Some people are hearing the call and marching into the classroom, but it's not enough. You can't solve a staffing problem of thousands by hiring a few hundred. And in any case, I doubt retention from the National Guard/vet/business degree set will be very high. The school will be lucky if these people get through three months before they throw up their hands and flee. It's not because the kids are awful, but because they just don't know how to do the job. (I wonder what their state-mandated evaluations will look like?)
No one is allowed to act surprised that this shortage hitting so fast and so hard. Teachers and schools have been shouting about it since the pandemic began. But as I said above, I think the general public (and the legislature) said, "Yeah, yeah. We have time. The shortage is a few years away yet."
It isn't. It's here. It's now.
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Why Tom Swift Was Cancelled
Why? The ratings were, frankly, shitty. No one was watching. Was it because of the gay Black lead?
No.
The show was awful. It really was. I could see what they were trying to do, but it was all done ... badly. Tom himself simply wasn't very engaging. I didn't really much care about his personal struggles. The networked hyped that he was gay, and they did make it very clear that Tom was gay, but his relationship with his sort-of boyfriend ... failed. There was no chemistry between them. Meanwhile, Tom does show serious chemistry with his bodyguard Isaac, but Isaac also has a thing for one of the women on the show. It looks like the studio wanted both a love triangle AND a "will they/won't they?" couple. What they got was a half-hearted, uninteresting tangle.
I also looks like the studio thought Tom's thing for cars and shoes would make him a cool-guy icon, but that didn't work, either. Yeah, there are the sneaker-heads, but most male viewers don't care what kind of shoe the character wears, even if it has some kind of tech embedded in it, and most female viewers don't care about men's shoes. And the cars such obvious product placement, it was painful. Also, the guy who gets to choose which multi-million dollar car he drives from an entire garage of them automatically becomes less relatable. I didn't envy Tom for his cars, nor did I wish to be him. I only felt he was spoiled.
The overall stakes are too low, or perhaps too abstract. In the first episode, Tom's father boards a Saturn-bound ship that Tom himself built, but the ship explodes after it reaches Saturn. At first, Tom--and everyone else--thinks Dad is dead, but Tom learns his dad is still alive and that a global conspiracy (sigh) sabotaged the ship. Tom now has to rush around the country trying to gather what he needs to rescue his stranded father. The trouble here is that, once the ship explodes, we don't see Dad. We don't feel that he's in danger. And he isn't. The show makes it clear that Dad has plenty of oxygen and whatever else he needs to survive until rescue comes, and in the series, Tom goes off on long, non-Dad tangents, and doesn't seem to be all that concerned that his dad is stranded in space. We have a "we'll get around to it" feeling here. Additionally, Tom doesn't like Dad very much, and for good reason. Dad is cold, homphobic, and plain ol' bitchy to Tom, who would frankly be better off without him. The viewer is left wondering why Tom is so bent on rescuing him at all.
The world-building was also lacking. The show is set in modern-day America, but Tom somehow has access to Star Trek technology--a faster-than-light drive, nanobots, easy retroviruses, and of course, an omniscient AI that malfunctions whenever the plot requires it. Tom's inventions show up lightning-quick, too. In one episode, Tom is able to whip up a miracle drug from some tree sap in just a few minutes. Star Trek can get away with it because of the far-future setting. Tony Stark in the Marvel movies can get away with it because of the super-hero setting. But for this show, the viewer is forced to wonder why all this fantastic tech hasn't made its way into the mainstream.
We also have no decent antagonists. The antagonist is a nebulous conspiracy called The Road Back. The heavy hitters in the organization are, frankly, bland. The group's aims are vague, but they seem to want to roll technology back to prevent ecological disaster. How is this a bad thing? Their members also act with astounding stupidity, which Tom himself fails to take advantage of. In one late-season episode, Tom is talking one-on-one with a tiny, Hollywood-thin woman who is a heavy-hitter in Road Back. She possesses a bit of tech Tom needs to rescue Dad, and she snottily refuses to tell him where it is. I watched this, thinking, "When is he going to grab her and force her to talk? When is he going to conk her over the head and tie her up in the basement until she talks? She's a third his size, has no bodyguards, no weapons, nothing, and she's making threats. Come on, Tom! Get her!" But she simply walks out of the room, leaving Tom shrugging helplessly.
Bad world-building, unsympathetic characters, no romance. It all equals a bad show.
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August 2, 2022
Ice Cream Evening
The closest ice cream place to us is Go Ice Cream. It's a retro ice cream parlor, complete with counter and stools inside and spindly metal chairs outside. All the ice cream is made on site--the kitchen and its shiny equipment are visible through plate glass windows--and the selections rotate every week.
It's freakin' fantastic. The best ice cream I've ever had, anywhere.
Darwin and I took a pleasant 10-minute drive to downtown, where we easily found parking, and we strolled to Go Ice Cream. The summer air was soft, and other people were wandering about. The ice cream parlor is down an alley strung with lights, giving both a modern and a retro feel. I ordered Banana Brulee and Darwin got Three Bean Vanilla. We settled on a bench outside, enjoying the weather, the retro view, the ice cream, and each other's company. When we were done, we decided to buy a pint and a pair of GIC's huge ice cream sandwiches. It was a fine mini-date.
This is what I love about summer.
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August 1, 2022
NOIR Is Live!
Colt Smith, private eye, deals with a select clientele. The Fae come to him, and only him, with their problems, and Colt has spent extensive time in the fantastic and addictive Fae realm, even though every trip exacts a terrible price. But now his time in the other realm is running out, and the Fae want him to use it to solve a murder among their own, a murder that will uncover the secret of Colt's own past.
Check it out: https://www.amazon.com/Noir-Esther-Friesner-ebook/dp/B09YSZNBVS/
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July 28, 2022
Huge LGBT Victory!
https://www.freep.com/story/news/politics/2022/07/28/michigan-supreme-court-law-bans-discrimination-sexual-orientation/10175560002/
This is huge. Absolutely huge! It not only sets law for the State of Michigan, it creates a precedence for the rest of the country. People in other states can cite this to get similar rulings in their own states.
And note that the majority (5-2) opinion was written by a Republican-nominated judge.
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July 26, 2022
I Have Questions
https://news.yahoo.com/a-north-carolina-city-hired-a-black-town-manager-then-its-entire-police-force-resigned-224423896.html
TL/DR: The entire police force, two city clerks, and the police chief--all White--resigned en masse a month after the council hired a Black woman to be town manager. The cops and clerks say she created a hostile work environment. Now the town has no police force. The White cops and clerks say race had nothing to do with it. Residents of the town disagree.
But I want to know a few things.
1. Why does a town of 2,000 people have a police force of six (five officers and a chief) full time officers and three part-time officers?? By comparison, the town of Stockbridge, Michigan has about 1,500 people. They have a total of TWO cops--one officer and one chief. Did the new manager notice a bloated list of employees and talk about letting some of the officers go?
2. Every person who resigned has refused to say exactly what the manager did to create a hostile work environment. Every. Single. One. It wasn't in their letters of resignation, and they haven't gone on record with any news media I could find. Could it be that they have no documented evidence of a hostile work environment?
3. Does anyone actually believe this wasn't motivated by racism and misogyny?
I didn't think so.
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July 17, 2022
Love and Thunder
It was a fun and funny, even silly, with the spectacular special effects we've come to expect. A good evening's entertainment. Though it could have done with 100% less screaming goats.
For fun, we also decided to try the D-seats. These are a block of theater seats that vibrate and rock according to what's happening on the screen. "Haptics that make you feel you're part of the action," runs the ad copy.
They were kind of cool. I liked the sensation of drifting the seats created when something was floating in space or something. But in the end, we both decided they weren't worth the extra money. The motion and vibration became distracting, even annoying, after a while. It was worth trying them, but we probably won't do it again.
And, like millions of other people around the world, we got to see Chris Hemsworth's butt.
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Move: Shopping!
One of the great things about this place is that it's close to both an At Home store. At Home is like KMart, but funky. The stock continually changes, and they always seem to have new stuff. Darwin and I love the place and they've shamelessly lured us in over and over. We found some wonderful rugs there that were exactly what we needed, and we've found bathroom mat sets and towel sets and bar stools for the kitchen island and a table with a shelf underneath that turned out to be perfect to hide cords for the sound system--and it had matching end tables. We've practically worn a trail to that place.
We've been spending money like water. But it has to be done, so I'm going to enjoy it. :)
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Move #6: Shopping!
One of the great things about this place is that it's close to both an At Home store. At Home is like KMart, but funky. The stock continually changes, and they always seem to have new stuff. Darwin and I love the place and they've shamelessly lured us in over and over. We found some wonderful rugs there that were exactly what we needed, and we've found bathroom mat sets and towel sets and bar stools for the kitchen island and a table with a shelf underneath that turned out to be perfect to hide cords for the sound system--and it had matching end tables. We've practically worn a trail to that place.
We've been spending money like water. But it has to be done, so I'm going to enjoy it. :)
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Move: Loving the Location
First, there's the house itself. Downsizing from a large house to a smaller condo taught Darwin and me that we aren't smaller place people. We like room to sprawl. Darwin says that rather than having shared spaces, he likes "dedicated spaces," meaning a space for office work, a space for food prep, a space for recreation, a space for exercise, and so on. There's a part of me that says a three-bedroom house with a finished basement is a waste of money and resources for two men with no kids at home, but another part of me likes having a big house.
So we like our big house. We have an office area separate from the bedroom. We--or I--have a huge kitchen with a gas stove (after thirty years, I finally have a gas stove again). We have a wonderful open concept conducive to entertaining.* We have a finished basement with plenty of room for the exercise machines. We have wood floors that are easier to keep clean than wall-to-wall carpeting. We have a first-floor laundry room. We have a garage.
And there's the location.
The house is on the outer corner of a subdivision. The subdivision is, unfortunately, one of those plastic, every house alike, no trees place. But we're on the edge, so we don't actually have to look at or drive through the plastic. There's also a border of trees on our back yard. Literally a block away, we have farmland and forest and dirt roads, which makes me insanely happy--I can ride my bike in the country again.
We're ten minutes away from downtown Ypsilanti. We're 13 minutes from downtown Ann Arbor. A major grocery store, hardware store, and big-box variety store are all within 5 minutes. And Cottage Inn Pizza delivers to our house.
We love this place quite a lot.
*I know current thinking in housing is to denigrate open concepts on the bounds that your kitchen is in your living room, and what about the smells and the mess when you have people over? My answer to that is, why are you cooking something that smells so awful, and why are you leaving a mess in the first place?
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