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December 16, 2024

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It might just be me, but the whole "DOGE" meme, from a picture of cute dog giving the viewer a side-eye, with a caption...

It always seemed that it was a haxxors-speak version of doggie => DOG-E => DOGE

I think it should be pronounced "doggie" to give it the appropriate dignitude that it has earned.

Muskie and Rammie

I'm not sure why this is, but people who are successful in business seem prone to thinking they will therefore be good at other things as well. Other things like, for example, government.

Or, it might be more accurate to say, people who are successful at making a great deal of money, which overlaps success in business but is not exactly the same.

I'm not sure if other disciplines are prone to this to the same degree. I can't really think of notable examples outside of the absurdly wealthy.

I wish they'd cut it out. Go enjoy your ten, eleven, or twelve (!) figure hoard and leave the rest of us alone.

Galt's Gulch, right? Go there. Deny us your productivity and have a ball. We'll muddle through somehow.

The US students, on the other hand, have a very relaxed attitude towards deadlines. Part of it is that they are studying in a residential situation, so they might not understand the Japanese penchant for lists and schedules, but that doesn't really explain the failure of any kind of organizational skills, so I suspect they are also showing some of the same COVID hangover, manifesting itself in a different way.

COVID hangover, bigly. We talk about this a lot in staff meetings. The first years are all very quick to let us know if they are under the weather and unable to perform their best, or if they need to take a day for self care. And it's not their fault. This is exactly what was modeled to them during their teen years and after.

And all of the instructors I know who were in grad school during that time and just starting to teach are all fully on board with this. This is all they have known as well. They take it upon themselves to make allowances and to try to accomodate those who are not in class on any particular day, making sure that no one misses any information, and eroding any of the work they have done to build a learning community in their classroom.

The rest of us are all just hoping that this is not the new normal, and that we will get back to having students who can sustain effort, talk to each other, and not opt-out whenever they are feeling stressed.

I do worry, however, about the teacher shortages, and the fact that most new teachers leave the profession within the first three years. I fear that a lot of the veteran teachers - especially those who went through school themselves before the NCLB years - have left the profession and the bulk of those who remain have never known anything but the new regime of standardized content delivery and students on the struggle bus.

We shall see.

Despite this, though, I still have hope for our young adults. They still want to take on the world and make a better social future, they just need more help to get up to speed and a few formative experiences to galvanize them and get them out of themselves and back into the world.

Exchanges are good for that. I have the tremendous advantage of teaching in a very diverse classroom environment, so the domestic students who were sheltered and isolated during the COVID lockdowns are busy working with other students who were at IB boarding schools during that time, who were not being sheltered in the same way, and who felt the time as a sort of pressure cooker, so we do start to see some of that cultural exchange happening, and the IB students get their own regimented approaches to thinking and writing broken down and opened up a bit in the process.

It's not as fast or dynamic as it was pre-2020, but it's still happening.

I grew up in the "sink or swim" era, which was particularly pronounced in engineering school. We got the "half the people in this room will be gone at the end of this semester" speech on day one of the introductory class for electrical engineering my sophomore year.

I don't have the same contempt for today's kids that many people my age do, only because it's, as nous mentioned, how they grew up. I'd be the same way if I were born however many years later. I was the product of my environment, and so are they - not to mention that it's the world they inherited from people my age +/-15 or so years.

Honestly, they should be f**king pissed at us.

I'm not sure if other disciplines are prone to this to the same degree. I can't really think of notable examples outside of the absurdly wealthy.

The one example that leaps to mind is academia. People who have achieved full professorships, especially outside the STEM fields, seem to assume that the real world will necessarily work the same way that their models do. And not only give advice on that basis, but think they should be in government implementing policies based on their (almost inevitably flawed) models.

I think getting the immersive experience you mention is particularly difficult for American students. The reality is, almost anywhere you go, educated people will speak English. Probably fluently; even indistinguishably from native speakers. Even not particularly educated people (taxi drivers, shop keepers, etc.) probably are reasonably able to interact in English.

As a result, merely travelling to a different country/culture doesn't give you the immersion one might expect. You have to be imbedded somewhere where everyone, even if they are able to speak fluent English, is talking another language -- say enrolled in school or living with a family.

Speaking of DOGE-ies

https://newrepublic.com/post/189490/maga-victoria-spartz-doge-republican-majority

She's not the typical MAGA looney, but it is sad that her experiences don't translate to unerstanding
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victoria_Spartz

The rest of us are all just hoping that this is not the new normal, and that we will get back to having students who can sustain effort, talk to each other, and not opt-out whenever they are feeling stressed.

Good news is I ran the pre-entrance seminar for our incoming students and out of a total of 70, 63 came. Last year, out of 50, about 20 showed up. So, maybe turning a corner.

The infuriating thing is that my colleagues don't understand how much socialization in secondary school shapes the students. I've suggested to them that we have to think about events and other possibilities to let them hang out with each other and they look at me blankly like I'm a martian.

I've suggested to them that we have to think about events and other possibilities to let them hang out with each other and they look at me blankly like I'm a martian.

Suspicions confirmed! 😁

Suspicions confirmed! 😁

A Musketeer...

I think getting the immersive experience you mention is particularly difficult for American students

While this is true to a certain extent, embedding with a family or having to live as something other than a tourist goes a way to opening eyes. Even if a person stays with a family in an English speaking country, it is a chance to see how a society can be ordered differently. Of course, it won't grant enlightenment and there are students who go overseas and seeing different ways of doing things only entrenches their prejudices ('you people have your toilets and showers in different rooms, why don't you do it like Americans?' sort of thing), but it can also create a learning opportunity.

A bit rantish, but I saw a shared tweet about how South Koreans rejecting martial law showed the power of an armed populace and a reply that said well, you know that South Korean gun laws are some of the strictest in the world, so I'd rethink your idea of an armed populace. I'd like to think that a lot of US problems could be avoided if Americans had a modicum of experience in other countries.

I'd like to think that a lot of US problems could be avoided if Americans had a modicum of experience in other countries.

It would, I think, require a lot more Americans getting out of the country, even if only as tourists. Just to get an exposure to the fact that our way is not the only way. Being a tourist is far from an immersive experience, but even that tiny exposure could wedge open minds a tiny bit.

As it is, way too many American's only exposure (if any) is Canada. Which, with apologies to any Canadians, feels about as similar to the US as it is possible to get. And most don't even have that. Which makes invincible ignorance easy to maintain.

Unfortunately, there is a mindset on the Right that the mere possession of a passport (unless you are a part of their elite) calls your patriotism into question* ('Why should you want to leave the country even temporarily? Don't we have everyting and better than anyone else?'). Knowledge of foreign languages is seen as even worse** ('They should learn American, not we their crappy tongue! Who do they think they are?')
But being unable to find the US on world map...
(one in seven USians is what I read).
I wonder whether the flat earthers put the US at the center.

*some years ago at least one red state tried to make a US passport an invalid ID as far as elections are concerned. It was rather obvious that those behind that thought that only liberals had one.
**when Dubya's gang looked for US personnel for running Iraq, knowlegde of Arabic is said to have been an exclusion criterium. Too much risk of empathy with the natives.
Also remember how both Kerry and Romney were targeted for speaking French and temporarily living in France.

some years ago at least one red state tried to make a US passport an invalid ID as far as elections are concerned.

The complaint has always been that a US passport identifies you as John Smith, but leaves open the question of state and local residency. The latter are critical in the US, with our large ballots and many location-specific races.

In my blue state, a passport is sufficient ID when voting in person if already registered. A passport alone is not sufficient for the registration process; some evidence of residency must also be provided.

The complaint has always been that a US passport identifies you as John Smith, but leaves open the question of state and local residency. The latter are critical in the US, with our large ballots and many location-specific races.

Thus a driver's license is the ID of choice everywhere. Everybody** knows those are impossible to forge.
/s

** Certainly every bartender.

which is WHY a utility bill should be the go-to voting ID, but RWNJs object.

...some evidence of residency must also be provided.

I should have added that there are provisions for various sorts of edge cases: homeless, temporarily resident out-of-state, etc.

Have commentators here experienced this kind of language immersion? 

[Raises hand] Yes, former exchange student here - one year in the US, time of my life.

I spent my junior year of high school in Rennes, the capital of Brittany in France. The program was called School Year Abroad; it's still going strong.

There were 60 of us Americans, juniors and seniors mostly from New England prep schools. We each lived with a French family and had our classes in the Institut Franco-Americain, which I'm told still exists although SYA has other digs now. We took math and English from American teachers who came with us; French lit and history from local teachers, entirely in French of course. During school vacation periods we went as a group on excursions to places like the Pyrenees (skiing), Avignon and Marseilles, a little island called Belle Isle, and of course Paris. It was a memorable year. Most of us made local friends our age. All of us were fluent in French by the end of it.

Now, 50 years later, some of us still have ties to France. (One of us imbibed French wine culture in addition to French wine to the extent that he made a career as a wine importer.) I can still read French for pleasure, speak more or less conversationally, and follow about half the dialog in French movies without looking at the subtitles.

My main legacy from the experience: a lifelong love of George Brassens, whose songs contain more wisdom and humor than any other body of work I know. I still remember the lyrics to most of them.

--TP

Ahh, Tony, c'est chouette! For me, it wasn't a home stay, I was an assistant des langues in Poitiers, right after I graduated. I had changed my major multiple times and was getting sick of school, so I looked and I could finish in a term if I went into linguistics because all of the language courses I had taken would transfer and count. My classics teacher was head of the FL department and since I had 2 years of French and there weren't any other applicants, I got to go.

I did a homestay with the family of the assistant who was at our university, she lived in the banlieue of Paris and I studied at the Alliance française in Paris for a month before taking up my post. I thought I was doing well, but I arrived in Poitier late on a Friday night and went to the Lycée Camille Guérin where I would be staying in the residence. There was no one at the school except the groundskeeper/janitor who showed me to my room and gave me an explanation that could not understand at all (it was telling me that I could get my sheets on Monday) The next day, I found that there were 6 other assistants, three brits (two women), a german (female), an austrian (a guy) and a russian. The Russian was in her late 40's but the others were all out of uni like me. They had been out at a "boum" (google tells me the word is out of fashion) and had some french guys from the University chat them up and the next morning, they came to the residence and said they were going on a picnic, which began an amazing year. The guys were all on a handball team and we'd go to their games and cheer them on, if they had an out of town game, we'd pile into the couple of Peugeots they had and there was always some sort of party afterwards.

None of them spoke English to any degree, but I met them 10 years afterwards (there was a bit of renunion) and they all were fluent. One of them had done a working holiday in England, another had married a girl from California. I was convinced they learned English by listening to our crappy French and then substituting English words and voila! fluent English.

Sometimes, irregularly, I dream that I am back in Poitiers. I don't see or talk to anyone, but I'm at the ground or walking in the town or doing some totally quotidian thing. And when I wake up, I'm always inexplicably happy.

For anyone interested in sending their child abroad for a year or maybe hosting a student, I went with these guys (love the name as well):

https://yfu.org/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youth_For_Understanding


Sadly not present in the UK, probably lack of interest, figures...

The whole year abroad (called "foreign exchange student" then IIRC) simply wasn't mentioned as a possibility when I was in high school. A lot of options weren't -- nobody mentioned the military academies, let along how one went about gaining admission.** Other kids families may have known about such things. But if your's didn't, you got no clue.

I wonder how true that kind of ignorance of year abroad programs still is across great swaths of the US.

** I'm still pretty ignorant on this. I know each member of Congress gets to nominate one kid each year to each. But how do you get brought to the member's attention? Are there other paths? No clue.

Regarding deadlines (so on topic, barely)...

By the time I graduated from high school, I knew that the answer to the Conan question "What is best in life?" is "Finishing your semester project a week early so you can enjoy the lamentations of your classmates." Held true in college, and even more in graduate school.

This month I finished granddaughter #2's birthday illustration on her birthday. But I've finished the holiday illustration early, except for mounting the copies.

For everyone who celebrates a holiday around this time, I give you the glorified doodle "Little monster characters decorate a tree".

http://mcain6925.com/obsidian/xmas-2024.pdf

I wonder how true that kind of ignorance of year abroad programs still is across great swaths of the US.

I have no idea what it's like now, but back in the day it was much more common for European teenagers to go to the US (or elsewhere) than the other way around. I have a hunch that this is probably true today as well (though the US might have lost a bit of its attractiveness).

It was maybe a bit of a middle class thing to do, though my organisation made efforts to be inclusive. Also, the host families needed to be fairly stable financially since they were not paid (at least in thd case of the non-profit providers). But it wasn't in any way elitist either.

The congressional sponsorship program was one way back then, I think you applied and it was a bit like a scholarship. But as far as numbers were concerned it was minor.

Apart from YgU, which I mentioned, there was also the AFS which has a very long tradition:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AFS_Intercultural_Programs

https://afs.org/

And then there were commercial providers like EF (Education First) but their reputation was and is a mixed bag.

Anyway, for me it was a formative experience and I strongly believe in the whole idea of intercultural exchange as a means to achieve a more peaceful world, even if that sounds a bit romantic. But one is much less likely to assign negative stereotypes to people with whom one has shared a year of one's life (let alone fight a war against them).

"Little monster characters decorate a tree".

Fun!!

"Little monster characters decorate a tree".

Fun!!

Seconded!

And TonyP and lj, I loved your comments about your French years. lj, the ending of yours is beautiful. Thank you.

Russell: "I'm not sure if other disciplines are prone to this to the same degree. I can't really think of notable examples outside of the absurdly wealthy."

Economics professors, law professors, politicians.

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