A path to quality schools...

I just read a great, innovative idea from the experts at the Brookings Institution on how to revitalize our nation's schools by increasing the number of qualified teachers. It works for private schools--why wouldn't it work for public schools?

I teach at a private school. Why not a public one? I would have to get certified, which means going back to school (for two YEARS) to be a teacher. Public schools could use more science and math teachers like me, but they aren't getting them. Ever wonder why?

Going back to school for certification can cost $1000s, and two years of my life are worth something to me--especially when I would just be training to do what I already do, and to get paid what I already get paid. It's just not a compelling value proposition. I know my subject pretty well. It's what I majored in in college, what I have tutored and TA'ed, and what I have substitute taught. I have learned more about teaching on the job in my first year than I could possibly learn in two years of certification classes.

Certification does not teach basic knowledge in science or math--it teaches how to teach. Since teaching is such an applied art, one has to ask: Is certification a waste of time and money? I don't need to spend two years to learn how to teach. Let the school evaluate me every year, and kick me out if I am a bad teacher.

Evidently private schools agree with me on this one, and no one hears about a crisis in the quality of private school education. The Brookings Institution, as part of their attention-worthy Hamilton Project, came up with the idea of abolishing certification and replacing it with teacher performance evaluations in the first two years. I am in whole-hearted agreement.

College students from across the nation line up to try out teaching in private schools because they hire uncertified teachers. Certification favors only education majors and the teacher's unions. It shouldn't be so difficult to become a teacher--or do teacher's unions want the current nationwide shortage of talented teachers?

How To Save the Earth

In honor of Earth Day, I would like to share what I did yesterday. I finished reading The Weather Makers, by Tim Flannery. A scary book, at times alarmist but most often a sobering look at the likely impacts of global warming on the natural and human world. Mr. Flannery says that the world must cut its CO2 emissions by 70% by 2050 in order to stabilize world climate, avoid a mass extinction of half of life on Earth, and prevent widespread disruptions to human society. I then went online to calculate my Ecological Footprint, or the amount of acres and resources on Earth required to support my lifestyle. The best I did was 2.9 Earths, which means I am definitely taking up more than my fair share. My car-less girlfriend, by comparison, is living an almost sustainable lifestyle already.

It turns out, for all my green pretensions, I use the average amount of resources for an American. I then decided to do something big: cut my own CO2 emissions by 70% over the next three years. Believe it or not, but the process is actually relatively painless. In the meantime, before I achieve my target goals, I will be reducing my carbon emissions by purchasing emission credits at either carbonfund.org or terrapass.org for about $50 a year. Saving the world is cheaper than you might think: let's see how little it will cost me over the next three years.

According to Flannery, replacing regular lightbulbs in my house will save 10%--check, already did that, so I am on my way! I don't have control over my gas or electric bill right now, but when I move in August, I am going to make sure that I am on a Green Power option with my local utility. If 20% of my electricity is produced by renewable energy and not coal, that's 20% less carbon dioxide emissions--potentially more since coal is a such a dirty-burning, inefficient fuel. Now, if I didn't rent, I could make further energy savings by buying more efficient appliances (20% savings) or even buying a solar water heater (30% savings) that would pay for itself in two years.

So, we are up to a 30% reduction after I bought expensive lightbulbs (that will pay for themselves in two years) and increased my electricity bill by $2-3 a month. Soon, I will have a roommate, and the calculator at carbonfund.org says that will save me 10-25% in electricty and natural gas consumption. Let's be conservative and call that a further 10% reduction, leaving me at 40% less. Now the biggest single producer of carbon dioxide in my life is my car, a 1996 Jeep Cherokee, a manual transmission, which gets 19 mpg in the city and 23 in the country--what you might call a good SUV or a below-average car. I bought it on the cheap years ago, before I really thought about global warming, and I drive it an average number of miles each year--about 11,500. It only took 3 or 4 tons of carbon dioxide to produce my car, but it emits (according to terrapass.org) about 11,171 pounds of CO2 a year, a huge amount. If I were able to reduce that amount by 30%, I would be at my target goal of a 70% reduction in personal CO2 emissions.

Enter the Honda Fit (or the Toyota Prius, or any number of new, fuel-efficient cars), which costs $15,000 or so and gets 31 mpg (city) and 37 city, an improvement of about 30%. I will definitely need a new car in a couple years, and the Fit is a cheap, quality car that I would like. So I will send Moira (my Jeep) off to retirement, save money on my ever-climbing gas bill, and meet my goal of a 70% reduction in carbon dioxide! YAY!!

Could you do it?

(Interesting aside: if I drive 1500 miles less a year to boot, I will save another 1500 lbs of carbon dioxide--that's another 10% drop. And really, that's just a little more walking to the store every week)

The again, some stories are not alarmist--they're visionary

Check this movie trailer out:

An Inconvenient Truth

Part 2: A certain fascination with the end of the World

Western civilization seems to find the thought of its own fall entertaining, perhaps even comforting. Is this a result of a civilizational "self-hate"?

For the average action movie-goer, I think this fascination is simply due to a surfeit of comfort on the part of modern Westerners. For many people, excessive levels of personal wealth and comfort have taken away many (or all) of the challenges that make life meaningful. We long for times with trouble and challenge. Our civilization is correctly seen as a mothering cocoon, protecting us from want, fear, and change. As our densities mount on the Earth and society grows more disconnected and digital, pressures mount on the individual. Each person secretly longs to strike out on their own, to make a life pregnant with meaning in uncertain times. So, we release our frustation with our happy, stable lives by envisioning the destruction of our society. When the movie ends, the sane go home and enjoy their happy, stable lives.

For many environmentalists, however, there is a much higher level of frustration with our stable, happily polluting, ecological destructive civilization. They can't WAIT for change. Judging from recent books, I think a certain amount of civilizational "self-hate" has crept into the hearts of foolish and uncharitable environmentalists. A violent end to civilization would be a terrible thing for humanity and for nature, but that doesn't stop many environmentalists from predicting it with a good measure of dark glee. This immature and unconstructive attitude is pervasive in popular literature, and limits the growth of the environmental movement as a political force.

People will only do so much from fear. They love fear--they will watch it in the movies and then go home to forget it. To lead people to a brighter environmental future, we need hope.

A certain fascination with the end of the World

For some reason, modern society longs for its own Last Battle, Gotterdamung in Norse mythology. Our Western civilization is constantly titillated by fictional and non-fictional works about being brought to the brink of destruction (and being saved), considering how close we are to destruction, or actually being destroyed. Why is this phenomenon so widespread? Does it imply a sort of "civilization self-hate" that is pervasive in our disconnected society? Are we impatient for Gotterdamung?

There are numberless popular stories about civilization being brought to the brink of destruction and being saved, often by a lone hero. The TV series 24 is a good example, James Bond is another, and the list of popular action/adventure/thriller/sci-fi movies is very long: Independence Day, War of the Worlds, The Day After Tomorrow, Armadgeddon, Deep Impact, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, Starship Troopers, The Hunt for Red October, The Terminator, The Matrix, V for Vendetta, etc. You can probably think of any number of hardback books that feature this type of story, most notably Clive Cussler.

We also seem to have a certain fascination with appreciating the closeness of destruction, and pondering life after the destruction: How close is it? How bad is it? Could it actually be better than what we have now? On the movie front, the answer is bad: The Day After Tomorrow, Blade Runner, V for Vendetta, The Matrix, Twelve Monkeys, Waterworld, Mad Max, and Robocop all paint dark futures ahead if Western civilization is lost. On the book front, it is interesting to note the number of popular non-fiction books that predict disaster: Collapse, The Future Eaters, The Weather Makers, and a LONG list of environmental and conspiracy theory books. It is immaterial whether or not these books contain factual information that is highly pertinent to future decision-making--in the environmental arena, they often do. It is highly interesting to think about whether these books are popular despite or because of their dark predictions about the future. These are books that make gloomy reading about the death of our civilization, yet we are spending our modern lives reading them, fascinated.

So, are we fixated and titillated by the prospect of the tragic end of Western society, at least in the abstract? I think so. Does this mean I think people want the world to end? Stay tuned for my next blog...

Poem: The Future

A space covered by innocent rhythms
Need calls blood, beating so strong
that my heart feels like it will break free
and run away from the possibilities.

I tell you that if I won 47 million dollars
Global warming would still eat New Orleans,
faraway children would still die of hunger,
my hands would be weak and shaking.

What is in the mind of a man? When
the woods are quiet, he closes his eyes,
and the morning goes on. He is powerless
as the future drums softly around him.