I feel that whatever subject we are assigned to teach, an underlying goal should be to also prepare students to be active participants in a democratic society. And yet, it is undoubtedly the case that during the most formative period in their lives, K-16 education, young people are immersed in an authoritarian system that gives them little control or decision making powers. In short, we seem to be training them to think of authoritarian systems as the norm. I was very much guilty of being part of that system until I started reading about the nature of education and after that I proceeded to change my teaching practices to make them as democratic as I could.

I tried to understand how and why our classrooms have become so authoritarian and felt that it was symptomatic of the breakdown of trust in the student-teacher relationship. I wrote about that and the changes I made and my experiences in an article that I published in Change Magazine, vol. 37, no.3, May/June 2005, p. 50-57.

Moving Away from the Authoritarian Classroom

I do not follow the Olympics but have seen many headlines concerning the current games in China saying that some highly regarded competitors have had ‘wipeouts’, meaning spectacular falls. I looked it up to see what was going on and from what I saw in the clips below, it seems like the winter Olympics events are a hell of a lot more dangerous than the ones in the summer Olympics, apart from the curling events of course.

Skiers can reach speeds of around 150 mph while people in the luge event are going down a narrow tubular track feet first at speeds of around 80 mph. Even in slow motion it looks scary. The slightest misjudgment and you could have a very nasty, even life-threatening, accident. That requires a considerable level of mental toughness to overcome one’s natural fears.
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(Via David Pescovitz)

All people are flawed but we are not flawed equally. There are many axes that can be drawn along moral and ethical dimensions and each one of us will fall at different points along them, having different strengths and weaknesses. It is next to impossible to extract an overall single score that would define our ethical and moral worth for comparison purposes, unless one decides to pick one axis as determinative over all the others. Doing so is what enables some people to feel morally superior to others. But even then, while it is hard to do that for positive values, there can be a particular moral and ethical dimension where someone is so bad that it overrides everything else and we can conclude that they are simply bad people, even if they have some redeeming qualities in some area. Sociopaths fall into that category.
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I find that some of my published articles can no longer be freely accessed on the web and so I have begun to do what I had been planning to do for a long time, and that is to post my non-technical articles on this site and not depend on the publications to maintain the links and provide access to them.

I posted the first one yesterday in response to a request from someone who could not access the article on the original journal site. That article garnered a huge response in the educational community. I will be adding posts with links periodically. The title of the posts will have the article title and my name so that they can be found easily by search engines.

When I moved to Monterey here from Cleveland nearly three years ago, one of the first things I noticed was the difference in butter sizes. A one pound pack of butter comes in four quarters but the length of each quarter was less and the girth greater for the Monterey butter than for the Cleveland butter. The butter dish I bought seemed designed for the Cleveland dimensions in that the sides of the sticks in Monterey just barely fit under the cover while there was plenty of space at the two long ends. The only exception I have found is when some manufacturers break the butter up into eight segments. When you put two of the smaller segments end to end, you get the size of the quarters I had been used to.

At first I was puzzled by this and wondered whether I had just bought a brand of butter that was idiosyncratic in the butter cutting machine it used. But no. All the brands seemed to be the same stubbier size. I put that down to one of the great mysteries of life but then came across this article that explains how this difference came about.
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Shane McInerney, a 29-year-old man from Ireland, was on his way to Miami to start a new job at a football academy but was arrested because of his behavior during the flight there.

McInerney, from Galway, is also accused of repeatedly refusing to wear a face mask and throwing a can which hit another passenger on the eight-hour journey which departed on 7 January.

He is said to have walked from his seat to complain about the food being served before pulling his pants down, exposing his buttocks to an attendant and nearby passengers.

The pilot tried to speak with McInerney who is said to have responded by telling him not to touch him.

He also put his fist close to the pilot’s face, it is alleged.

McInerney is further accused of refusing to stay in his seat as the plane made its descent to JFK – instead choosing to stand in the aisle.

He was taken into custody after the plane landed.

Legal papers filed in New York said: “During the approximately eight-hour flight, the defendant repeatedly refused to wear a face mask despite being asked dozens of times by flight crew personnel.”

He has been charged with interfering with flight crew – a crime that carries a maximum sentence of 20 years behind bars.

My guess is that he thought that actions that would have passed with little notice during a football game were equally acceptable on an international flight.

No word on whether his job offer is still open.

When numbering years, the system using BC (Before Christ) and AD (Anno Domini, which is Latin for “in the year of our Lord.”) is commonly used, especially in the Christianity-dominant part of the world. More recently, there has been a move to change BC to BCE (Before Common Era) and AD to CE (Common Era), a shift that I applaud. The actual numbering would not change since the switch from BCE to CE occurs at the same time as the switch from BC to AD, but the label would be more religiously and culturally neutral.

Miriamne Ara Krummel describes how the BC and AD system came about. She says that part of the motivation was to marginalize the competing Jewish calendaring system.
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