Burque Babble Hiatus Status Report: 5/24/08

Yes, having a "hiatus status report" is an oxymoron. But it's not the first time the terms "moron" and "Burque Babble" have been linked. I've had a few folks wonder if I was sticking to the "hiatus" idea (okay, it was actually just one drunk guy at a bar and he really wasn't that drunk), and for "them" I submit the following short bulleted report, executive summary style:

• Yes, the novel is being written. It's too early to tell for sure, but it already appears to be better than Moby Dick, Light in August and The Corrections put together.
• If by "better", one means "considerably shorter than"
• Yes, it has been very, very hard not to blog about certain recent events, especially:
• the whole Benny Shendo "Ben Lujan is gay...no his parents are gay...no it's not a big deal, but vote for me anyway because some shadowy people might think it's a big deal and I'm really good at things like telling who is gay and not gay, and that's an incredibly important skill to have as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives"
• anything coming out of the mouth of Hillary Clinton these days, even if I think the hullabaloo over the "assassination" mention is being overblown just a bit (but is still about the stupidest comment that has been uttered during a long, bitter campaign of stupid comments)
• oh, and I forgot to mention her whole "hard-working white people" comments
• oh, and there's the "Karl Rove says I could win" thing...priceless
• not to mention the fact NARAL endorsed Obama. Quite seriously, I think this is the single funniest thing I've heard this entire decade. Monumentally funny. And yes, my definition of the word "funny" differs from that of a lot of folks.
  
• Yes, school is out now and the air smells cleaner, colors appear brighter and the entire APS District did not implode. Well, at least not yet. $20m is alot of cash, but there should be plenty of skeleton-filled closets from which to to uncover funds. And I'm gonna miss those Linda Sink weekly e-mails...

Speaking of schools and education, better get back to that novel now. I'm guessing there will be occasional oxymoronic (and just plain old moronic) "hiatus status reports" over the summer, especially when the thought of writing one more Moby Dick-comparable word of novelistic genius becomes too much for me.

Now that I think about it, I might end up blogging ten times a day from here on out.

Burque Babble Is Taking A Summer Hiatus

The Goat would just love to eat the pages from an unpublished novel! Yum!

Yep, Burque Babble is taking the Summer off.

I don't sense any temblors, tsunamis or rifts in the surface of the Earth developing over the above headline/statement. I guess blogs, at least this one, aren't capable of fundamental reconfiguration of much of anything, when it comes down to it.

That's not to say blogs aren't good and wonderful and a keen way to spend some time reading/writing. It's just that I'd like to take this Summer trying to write something else.

And yeah that something else is a book. A novel about a charter school and educational system gone haywire. Or maybe about baseball. Or both. Let's keep it flexible.

I'd like to keep things going here at the blog, but I want to throw as much energy into this "book writing" shindig as possible...you never know when you might end up on that oft-envisioned "death bed" and have to say to yourself "hey, I forgot to write that terribly unpopular book I'd planned on".

Speaking of planning, I do intend to be back here by August, whining and pontificating about the same crap you've come to expect as faithful readers. School, schools, politics, newspapers, this damn wind, etc. All the same, no offense is taken if you, dear readers, decide to delete your links to this here blog, take me off your RSS list and whatever other Internet burial methods you might employ.

If I don't "see" you again, thanks for having stopped by at least once. Perhaps one or two of you might check in from time to time to see if I've come to my senses early, and finally figured out once and for all that anything with a word count of 1,500 is beyond me.

Or maybe I'll have some fat manuscript under my arm, patches on my frayed suit jacket, unkempt hair and a Magritte pipe held jauntily in my mouth as I eagerly shout "I finished it! I finished it!"

Something like that.

Again, thanks for dropping by, and I hope you might find yourself wandering round this particular Internet Tube again come August. Or so.

Happy Summer trails, everyone.

The Wednesday Link: Remembering The Reason For The Political Season

Last night was weird. We all sat around refreshing websites obsessively to find out how much a candidate would lose by. Some of us were rooting to lose only by six points in the same way that European soccer fans root for their team to get fourth place so they can play "in Europe".

And after hours of refreshing (and learning much about counties in PA), we found out nothing had changed and our long national nightmare, 2008 edition, would continue.

Okay, it's not a "nightmare". It's Democracy in Action and that's beautiful, and we still have history-making candidates. And yes I, too, saw that exit poll breakdown where African-Americans voted for Obama at a 92% clip. African-American men were 96%-4%.

Oh well, we'll keep working on that issues over color/gender thing.

Meanwhile, I want to shift the focus from overly long political campaigns to the reason many of us follow things political to begin with: civil disobedience.

Having lived in Seattle/Olympia during the late 80s/early 90s, I still drop-by the Seattle Times just about every day. I find reading it comes about as close to experiencing a parallel anti-'Burque universe as could be thought possible, especially considering the two cities are supposedly in the same country.

Anyway, I read today that a Seattle teacher was suspended for two weeks because he refused to administer Washington's standardized test, the "WASL". I find the story remarkable for several reasons.

One, the fact that teacher Carl Chew thought of the idea of simply refusing to administer the test before I did.

Two, instead of some whack-job rant about unfair oppressors, Chew simply said:

"When you do an act of civil disobedience, you gracefully accept what happens to you."

Three, instead of writing the typical Albuquerque Journal 137-word story about the incident, Times reporter Linda Shaw is allowed word count to get into Chew's philosophy, has quotes from teacher union representatives, includes comments from those on both sides of the issue and gives context for Chew's actions, stating that it is thought that only one other teacher nationwide has implemented the same very cool idea.

And lastly, fourth, the Seattle Public Schools just suspended the teacher for two weeks, didn't overly demonize the guy and had very professional references in the story about "understanding that there are debates over standardized testing...".

Like I said, a parallel anti-'Burque universe. Meanwhile, does anyone want to give me a hand making these "Carl Chew Fan Club" buttons and bumper stickers?

Stories We Just Don't Have Time To Sneeze At

"We're not trying to suppress dissension or criticism," he said. "We're just trying to find out where it's coming from."
-Eclipse Aviation CEO Vern Raburn on trying to find out the identity of commenters to blog posts about his company, Albuquerque Journal, 4.22.08

I'd love to opine sophomorically on the above quote, the microscopic thinness of the veil over the threat, and what it all means for blogging, airplane manufacturing and the future of the Free World. But we're far too busy over at our faux farm wrestling colds and harvesting allergies. And feeding the occasional goat between the sneezes.

So stories are getting left behind, stories like:

• Principal Reshuffle 2007: The One-Year Report. An update of how things are going at those schools that were supposed to be helped by having good principals sent to bad schools. Or was it bad principals to bad schools? Or was it one warm body exchanging offices with another warm body? And were the bodies really all that warm?
  
• High School Block Schedules: Joke or Really Cruel Joke? An in-depth analysis of the 137 different types of block schedules put in place at local high schools, and moves by some in the district to streamline all of them into the "bestest" one, and make all schools follow it. In other news, some in APS seek to build a 3000-mile, 50-foot tall "Great Wall of Education" using spitwads.
• The Dreaded State Visit. See the school cower as "somebody from the State" supposedly visits the campus. See teachers frantically put up "standards and benchmarks" all over the classroom in a failed attempt to dupe the "somebody" into thinking anyone really knows or cares about said "standards and benchmarks". Hear the rumor mill in action as teachers try to surreptitiously tell each other where the "somebody" is ("I think I saw somebody in a suit over by the portables....pass it on.")
  

But alas, I have to go sneeze and feed a goat. And then sneeze. And then I have to slap "benchmarks and standards" all over the poster of Richard Nixon bowling that hangs in my classroom. Teaching requires such dedication.

Let's Be Trite and At Least Think About Following the Money

Sometimes the story is what's not in the story. Take Andrea Schoellkopf's piece in today's Journal, "Funds For 19 Charters Put On Hold". The non-story is that APS has finally decided to actually require charter schools to have spending plans for capital outlay money (i.e. pork) before the District will release the money.

In keeping with a good non-story, there is no conflict here. Lisa Grover of the National Coalition for Charter Schools says:

"They just want to know how the money is being spent."

Allen Marks, principal at South Valley Academy charter says:

"I think they're (APS officials) trying to be even-handed."

Love certainly abounds now between charters and APS. Heck, even Robert Lucero's obligatory quote doesn't include some bombastic ultimatum or dire overreaction. So where's the story? Why was this non-story even in the paper?

Okay, those are rhetorical questions because you readers are way too smart to have not figured it out even before they were asked. Still, just to make sure we're all on the same page and level of cynicism here:

1. Exactly why didn't the District require such spending plans before?
2. What amazing sorts of tomfoolery, smoke, mirrors and educational mumbo-jumbo have charter schools spent capital outlay money on in previous years?

A very quick count shows thirty-six Albuquerque area charter schools (.pdf), with four more opening in Fall 2008. As someone who knows a tiny bit about how charters operate (especially those in their start-up infancy) and a tiny bit about the capital outlay process, I'd bet capital outlay dollars to donuts that there are howlingly funny examples out there of how taxpayer money has been spent at charters. Beyond falling on the floor funny. Falling through the floor, through the crawlspace, and well into the core of the Earth funny. Funny.

Boy I sure would like to read a story listing some of the more outlandish expenditures. That'd be a real story, wouldn't it? And you can just tell it's sitting there like a plump toad slightly beneath the surface of this non-story. I say we poke that toad with a stick.

Speaking of which, I'm as hopeful about The New Mexico Independent as anybody.

Have a good weekend, folks.

The Wednesday Link on Tuesday Night: Laughing Through Tears

A very, very low-fi Power Point graph from
Professor Robert S. McElvaine at Millsaps College

Okay, we've had enough griping and arguing around here to last at least another 500 blogposts. Boring. Your not quite daily source of not quite news or information is threatening to turn from "Burque Babble" into "Slit Your Wrist, Here's How". Where's the fun in that?

What we need is a topic we can all agree on (or at least 98.2% of us). The New York Times tonight links to a "History News Network" survey in which 107 of 109 people who call themselves Historians consider the presidency of George W. Bush to be a failure.

That's 98.2%. The NYT Editorial Board post is then followed by the usual boatload of reader comments, ranging from the sublime to the highly-medicated. Check it out.

And be sure to check out the HNN link. The low-fi PowerPoint graphs (example at the top) are very, very funny.

Professor McElvaine's little survey goes on to say that 61% of "Historian" respondents thought our current President the "worst ever". Damn that James Buchanan.

As a Babble commenter pointed out a few days back in response to one of my recent maudlin, overwrought gripe-fest: "it would be funny if it wasn't so sad, sad it if wasn't so funny". I get the feeling we'll be saying that about George W. Bush for a long, long time. Even in History Books.


P.S.: I'll admit it crossed my mind that "History News Network" might be some satire-meets-research magazine, like the Annals of Improbable Research (AIR) for Historians, or The Onion for stuffy academics. It's still crossing my mind, but it looks like a legit site, legit enough for the NYT (insert media jokes here). By the way, as a long-time lover of AIR, it's great to see the site is completely free now. Check that out, too.

P.P.S.: Okay, I really want you to check out AIR. Here is still my favorite "study" of all time (and not only maudlin, overwrought blogposters think so). And here's a page of AIR classics. Now that's funny stuff, in your humble, formerly overwrought, now laughing half-controllably blogger's opinion. I suggest both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama stop with the Karl Rove crap, and just read this History News Network survey and old AIR articles out loud at all public appearances from now until the Democratic Convention. I strongly suggest this.

A Most Un-Civil War: Liberals and Clinton/Obama

The Clinton/Obama race has claimed at least one victim. Me. One wonders if it hasn't already claimed us all as victims, everybody except those in the immediate McCain family, but I'm referring to the fact that it certainly seems as though a long-time friendship of mine has ended because of this whole Clinton/Obama thing.

Oh sure, there's way more to it than that. There always is. Still, a rather sizable difference in opinion regarding Hillary Clinton (Friend: Hillary good candidate, better than Obama; Me: Hillary worse than not good candidate, Obama much better) started as a debate, then went to argument and finally to thermonuclear verbal warfare. Oh well.

I'm never comfortable getting truly personal in this here blog thing. Griping about my job is one thing, heck everybody does that, but talking about real "feelings" tend to creep me out. Consider me slightly creeped out now.

Nevertheless, I mention the little brouhaha here because I wonder how many incidents of falling-out are occurring around this greatly confused country of ours as the Clinton/Obama battle wearily wages forth.

How many good liberal friends are figuratively strangling each other over this drain-circling shitstorm? And how much of this strangling is based on a frustratingly simple "she a woman, he's a black guy" line of rhetoric?

It seems much longer, but it was only a very few months back we liberals were ecstatic that our choice to topple eight years of surrealistic nightmare would come down to deciding between a person of color and a woman. We would deservedly, given our recent political Hell, get the chance to mark 2008 as the year we helped elect the first ______ President.

Now, exhibiting the best in pre MLK/Billy Jean King sexism/racism, we've reduced ourselves to conversations/arguments better suited to a John Birch rally than a friendly dinner table. Or poker table in some cases.

This little blog thing has always used as its informal "motto" the H.L. Mencken sentiment that one can "never go broke underestimating the taste of the American public".

Instead of racial advancement and sexual equality, liberal political taste right now runs toward the letting of blood and group-immolation.

We're like one of those morally sick "reality shows" on television, conniving and backstabbing each other to supposedly "win", when it's perfectly clear than a continuation of this behavior will leave us "The Biggest Loser".

It's Important To Have a Job That Allows One Time to Think

A lot can go through your mind in four minutes, even if it's four minutes spent staring at a computer screen. Yesterday, I had a chance in the middle of one of my seminar classes to do a lot of thinking. A student had emailed a Power Point presentation to herself and we were pulling it up to show the thing to a class of around 40 kids.

Being the way sophisticated blog reader you are, you know a 1.25 mb or so file ought to take about three seconds or so to finish. Well, this took right at four minutes, as the class became crazier and crazier, some students trying to fill in the time with jokes while others just got nuttier and nuttier in that middle school sort of way.

And the Power Point student and I just stared at that screen, amid the chaos, the little red Firefox download bar barely moving, if at all. And I thought. And thought some more. Here's some of what I had the chance to think:

• I gotta get another job
• The speed of the internet is a powerful symbol of everything that is screwed up with APS
• Maybe I should get a job at a private school, where the internet is screaming fast, the school cafeteria serves two-star Michelin level meals and golden wheat and honey wave and flow throughout the land
• Maybe I should get a job where kids don't burn down a tree on campus (this happened this week)
• I feel so embarrassed
• These kids deserve so much better than an internet that takes four minutes to pull up a 1.25 mb Power Point
• This better be some kind of killer Power Point, like the greatest Power Point in the awful coffee-stained business meeting of Power Point. Like a Rosetta Stone meets Magna Carta level of Power Point importance.
• If middle school kid energy could be bottled we could be off fossil fuels in a week
• Maybe I should get a job in another country (I have this thought about every other day)
• What country should I get a job in, this time...Norway, why not Norway?
• Oh, the cost-of-living is really high in Norway
• But should the "cost-of-living" include the cost of having to sit here for four minutes in an increasing storm of middle school energy? Isn't that cost higher than any "money"?
• When considering just why APS is so screwed up, you always see stories about our graduation rate, and never stories about teachers/classes waiting four minutes for an Power Point to load while crazy students attempt to tell really unfunny jokes over a PA system.
  
• Speaking of graduation rate, isn't it interesting that screwed up APS (and all public schools, really) is trying to do two incompatible things simultaneously: make the curriculum more challenging and raise graduation rates?
• If that co-teacher looks back at me one more time with that "when will the Power Point come up?" look on their face, it's all over
• Let's put together a list of U.S. cities that I could possibly talk my wife into moving to, and think about teaching jobs in those cities. Portland, no too cloudy and rainy. Bozeman, no too cold. Boise,.....(ad infinitum)
  
• How many APS teachers at this point are ignoring how screwed up the District is because they are basically prisoners to their retirement pensions?
  
• Am I already one of those teachers?
• I'm about three seconds away from picking this computer monitor up and hyper-symbolically throwing it through a window
• Tonight is "Pride Night" at my school. Maybe the school should show a video of me waiting four minutes for this Power Point to load in a class of 40 students to all the "Pride Night" attendees, while everyone chants our long-forgotten school song over and over and over
• I know there's a recession coming on, and that I have no qualifications to do a "real" job, but maybe employment outside education would be a good idea
• Or, of course, there's always writing that novel
• Maybe I could write most of a novel before this Power Point finishes loading
• Oh, let's just face it, the whole "novel writing" thing is an attempt to have something I can never have as a means to avoid thinking about making the most of my reality
• Hey, maybe I should write a novel about a guy whose "novel writing" thing is an attempt to have something he can never have as a means to avoid thinking about making the most of his reality
• Or maybe a murder mystery
• Or a guy who has to wait four minutes for a Power Point to load and stumbles upon Nirvana or some other deeply meaningful redemption
• Is it Summer yet? How many more teaching days are left this school year? How many hours is that? How many minutes? Times sixty...that's....
• I really have to applaud his Power Point student. She hasn't started crying or screaming at me about what an incompetent place I work at and how unbelievably lame this all is. I'll bet she's thinking that. Let me look at her and see if that sentiment is written all over her face. Yep, it is.
• Maybe Bosque Prep has an opening next school year....

Now it's Friday, and all that comes with it. Have a good weekend everybody...