An assistant football coach of the Texas Longhorns had sex with a UT student at the 2009 Fiesta Bowl:

In separate statements released Friday night, Dodds and Applewhite called the incident a one-time occurrence. [UT Athletic Director Deloss] Dodds said it happened during activities related to the 2009 Fiesta Bowl, when [UT Offensive Coordinator] Applewhite was UT’s assistant head coach and running backs coach.

Dodds said he learned of the incident later that month, and that Applewhite admitted his “inappropriate conduct.” Applewhite “fully accepted his discipline, including counseling,” Dodds said.

“Several years ago, I made a regretful decision resulting in behavior that was totally inappropriate,” Applewhite said in his statement. “It was a one-time occurrence and was a personal matter. Shortly after it occurred, I discussed the situation with DeLoss Dodds. I was upfront and took full responsibility for my actions. This is and was resolved four years ago with the university.

The university may have had reason to make this belated disclosure:

Last month, Bev Kearney, the women’s track coach at the University of Texas, resigned over an affair with “an adult student-athlete” in 2002. Was the African-American, gay, woman forced out over a consensual affair while the white male football coach (who was also a star football player at the school) received preferential treatment? In Applewhite’s case, the affair was not with an athlete, but there may have still been a supervisory role. It will be interesting to see how Texas spins this.

It seems to me the central question is whether or not there was a supervisory role (and if there was, what was the nature of it). That, to my mind, is a critical difference between the two incidents. I could be convinced that Applewhite should have been fired for his transgression (UT is reviewing the policy). The case that Kearney shouldn’t have been fired is much more difficult to make. Even at the professional level, where there is a much more ambiguous power relationship between coach and player and the players are older, that is a fireable offense under any reasonable handbook. Such things are almost certain to cause instability within the team the coach was hired to lead.

In the Applewhite case, I can really see it going either way. It seems inappropriate for anybody who is even technically a sorta-member of faculty to be sleeping with students. It also sets a bad standard for the student athletes and their conduct (how they handle the attention and adulation they receive, if of course we care about such things). It can be hard enough to get coaches to crack down on inappropriate (or illegal) personal conduct without coaches having inappropriate relations with students ten years their junior. On the other hand, it’s consensual and there is very little to indicate that their was sufficient power differential to cause concern for coercion.

One suspects that the Applewhite case is one of those things that is going to depend heavily on factors unrelated to the allegation. Which means that someone more prominent like Applewhite stays, while a lesser-known figure would be quietly dispatched.

Though most of my substitute teaching was at the grade school level and comparatively little at the high school level, when I did get high school it was often towards the end of the year for a variety of reasons. As such, I got a glimpse into what many of the Redstone students’ post-secondary plans were. A number of them were planning to go to college. Others, however, were planning to go to eastern Montana and North Dakota. There’s jobs in them there plains. The New York Times recently published an article about it:

Less than a year after proms and homecoming games, teenagers like Mr. Sivertson now wake at 4 a.m. to make the three-hour trek to remote oil rigs. They fish busted machinery out of two-mile-deep hydraulic fracturing wells and repair safety devices that keep the wells from rupturing, often working alongside men old enough to be their fathers. Some live at home; others drive back on weekends to eat their mothers’ food, do loads of laundry and go to high school basketball games, still straddling the blurred border between childhood and adulthood.

Just as gold rushes and silver booms once brought opera houses and armies of prospectors to rugged corners of the West, today’s headlong race for oil and gas is reshaping staid communities in the northern Plains, bringing once untold floods of cash and job prospects, but also deep anxieties about crime, growth and a future newly vulnerable to cycles of boom and bust.

Even gas stations are enticing students away from college. Katorina Pippenger, a high school senior in the tiny town of Bainville, Mont., said she makes $24 an hour as a cashier in nearby Williston, N.D., the epicenter of the boom. Her plan is to work for a few years after she graduates this spring, save up and flee. She likes the look of Denver. “I just want to make money and get out,” she said.

Some people have picked up a sense of concern from the NYT articles, though I think it’s a fairly good write-up without too much coloring one way or the other. (Or, at least, I’d give them the benefit of the doubt if this weren’t an installment of a series of articles poo-pooing the oil boomtowns.)

For those expressing concern, I think this is actually a generally quite positive development. In a time where we are worried about a generation of graduates becoming unemployable, these kids are going to get jobs, work experience, and skills. Might it be better in the long term if they went to college? Well, that depends in good part on who “they” are along with a few other things. To the extent that college degrees are in good part about getting people in front of the employment line, then it might be good for any individual one of them to go to college, but as a group it would be an example of running in place. Those that think that college should be the norm are likely going to disagree.

I honestly don’t know what the appropriate number of kids going to college is. Back when I was living in Deseret, I knew a number of people that I felt should have gone to college but had roadblocks that prevented them from trying. Back when I was in college, I knew a number of people that really shouldn’t have been there. Whether the ideal number is somewhere above or below the number of kids currently attending, I consider it a necessity to have a path for those that really aren’t college material. I think it’s fantastic that they have this sort of opportunity.

And for those that are going to college? More opportunities still (well, in resource exploitation more generally), at least for the right kind of college student. Graduates of the South Dakota School of Mines are outearning graduates of Harvard. Which touches back a little bit on something that doesn’t get enough press: white collar jobs in blue collar fields. One of the reasons that mining engineers are able to demand such a mint is that most people don’t think they are going to college to work in such a field. The same applies to industrial production. Writes The New Republic:

The country’s business schools tended to reflect and reinforce these trends. By the late 1970s, top business schools began admitting much higher-caliber students than they had in previous decades. This might seem like a good thing. The problem is that these students tended to be overachiever types motivated primarily by salary rather than some lifelong ambition to run a steel mill. And there was a lot more money to be made in finance than manufacturing. A recent paper by economists Thomas Philippon and Ariell Reshef shows that compensation in the finance sector began a sharp, upward trajectory around 1980.

The business schools had their own incentives to channel students into high-paying fields like finance, thanks to the rising importance of school rankings, which heavily weighted starting salaries. The career offices at places like Harvard, Stanford, and Chicago institutionalized the process—for example, by making it easier for Wall Street outfits and consulting firms to recruit on campus. A recent Harvard Business School case study about General Electric shows that the company had so much trouble competing for MBAs that it decided to woo top graduates from non-elite schools rather than settle for elite-school graduates in the bottom half or bottom quarter of their classes.

No surprise then that, over time, the faculty and curriculum at the Harvards and Stanfords of the world began to evolve. “If you look at the distribution of faculty at leading business schools,” says Khurana, “they’re mostly in finance. … Business schools are responsive to changes in the external environment.” Which meant that, even if a student aspired to become a top operations man (or woman) at a big industrial company, the infrastructure to teach him didn’t really exist.

I think this mentality extends beyond “top business schools” and some degree down the chain. My own school and the college within it was more vocational in nature. But I did minor in industrial supervision and my first job out of college was being the IT guy at a fabrication plant (in the industry of resource exploitation, actually). How I got into it was entirely an accident. Of course, there are a number of engineers who specifically go into this sort of thing (and that’s responsible for at least some of the South Dakota Mines statistic). But comparatively little on the business side. My college had a major that was, at the time, commanding really good salaries even for the 90’s. But who was going to go into something that included the word “industrial” in it? They’ve since changed the major’s name in part to reduce the stigma. That such a stigma exists, of course, is interesting in itself.

My Linkluster post last week to Matt Yglesias’s comments seemed to get the most attention. So I’ve been doing some more thinking on it. I also read an article that he linked to:

According to the Institute of International Education and U.S. Dept. of State, there now there were around 720,000 international students at U.S. colleges in the 2011 academic year. They estimate that these students contribute $21 billion to the economy through tuition and spending. I don’t know where they get their estimate, but this is around $30,000 per student and that sounds like a sensible enough number for a back-of-the-envelope estimate.

So how many international students could we handle? There are currently around 21 million college students in the U.S., with around 18 million in undergrad and 3 million in graduate. If we increased the number of international students by 5 million then around 1-in-5 college students would be international. Is this unthinkably high? Well it’s still below the ratio at the colleges in this country with the most international student enrollment. At the New School, for example, about 1-in-4 students is international. Given that Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and MIT have 10% or more international students, it doesn’t appear that a high ratio holds a university back academically.

Ozimek addresses my primary concern, which is that increasing the number of foreign students would have the end result of crowding out American students. Not crowding out American students from college generally, but rather shuffling them off directional schools due to enrollment caps and the like.

There is no reason that there would have to be enrollment caps, of course. And Ozimek could just as easily reply that if there were, then that wouldn’t actually be his plan in action and so perhaps I shouldn’t criticize the plan on that basis.

I do harbor the fear, though, because enrollment caps do exist. They exist in universities that could expand if they were so inclined. They exist precisely to tighten entrance requirements and propel schools up the USNWR list and others.

My alma mater, Southern Tech, is one such school. Sotech is not exactly in the upper echelon of universities, but presently rejects over a third of its applicants and that number is climbing. Purposefully so. The problem that Sotech faces is that when it admits more students, it gets hit twice by the various rankings. First, because it’s admission profile is lower than it otherwise would be. Second, because some higher percentage of students will fail out.

The main reason that the university doesn’t limit expansion more is… money. Recruiting more international students could be a nice way around this.

There is the argument that if students are failing out then perhaps it is best not to admit them in the first place. This is often used as a knock against for-profit schools. The students are failing and therefore it’s an indication that they are being taken advantage of. Is Sotech doing the same? Maybe. On the other hand, both for-profits and Sotech are arguably doing a disservice to those who would graduate by keeping those who wouldn’t out. (Beyond which, it’s often external circumstances rather than academic profile that makes students hit graduation benchmarks).

On the other side of things, if there is so much money to be made here, why aren’t more schools already doing it? The US apparently doesn’t limit the number of student visas it gives out (this suggests we don’t). Why are schools and states leaving this money on the table?

I particularly think of some of the schools in lower population states. The University of Wyoming and the University of North Dakota - to name two - aggressively recruit out-of-state students because without them, their schools would look like the University of South Dakota (half the size of the other two).

It’s also the case that some of these states could use people. There’d be no way to necessarily hold on to them after graduation, but there is at least some degree of inertia involved. You go somewhere and you leave if you’re uncomfortable but stay if you are and if you don’t go there to begin with it would never occur to you that you would be comfortable staying. That sort of thing.

I might expect one of them to be fear of becoming an “Asian school” (not that all International students would be coming from Asia, but a significant number would).

I am also reminded on this piece about former Boston University president John Silber. Silber sought to limit enrollment to the University of Texas (where he was a high-ranking dean) because he feared what would be lost along the way towards a mega-university. It should come as no surprise that I am glad he lost that particular battle, but it would help explain why at least the more prestigious large schools might be antsy.

None of this would explain why schools like DeVry wouldn’t do it. I mean, every student is another ounce of profit for them, isn’t it? I doubt they’re worried much about student composition.

I assume that there is something holding this back. I just can’t figure out what. Despite my above-mentioned concerns, I see significant room for opportunity here. Not just as a money-making venture, but as general policy as well. If handled right. I’m not sure how much confidence I have of that.http://www.texasexes.org/alcalde/feature.asp?p=2240

Like most people, I was surprised to hear of General Petraeus’s sudden resignation on the account of an affair. Not so much that he’d had one (I don’t spend time thinking about such things), but I didn’t know that even CIA chiefs would resign due to them. I will note that some are suspicious that this had more to do with his pending testimony on Banghazi, but it’s nonetheless noteworthy that this is the explanation that was given. Anyhow, Dr. Phi - having spent time in the same room as the man - is not the least bit surprised.

Back in high school there was a coach. Coach Montgomery. We never actually saw anything occur, but the… I don’t know… familiarity with which he presented himself to the female students did not go unnoticed. Well, we partially noticed because during indoor free periods the less popular among us were having basketballs thrown at our heads while he was too busy talking to female students to notice. We didn’t like Coach M. Partially due to the fact that he wasn’t there to instill order when it was needed. But also because when he was paying attention to us, he terrified the crap out of us. He honestly struck us as a roidhead. A roidhead who would probably sleep with a female student if he had the chance.

A couple years after he graduated he was arrested. It was actually his suicide attempt that got him in the news. Our response to this was… not generous. We thought it was funny as heck. We could just imagine Big Strong Coach M scared spitless of what was an impending arrest and taking the proverbial coward’s way out. I can’t say I am remarkably proud of this response. In one sense, I am not hugely bothered by what he did. She was sixteen. A teacher (or coach) should be fired for such a thing, but I’m not sure about arrested (a subject worthy of exploration in the future) absent a degree of coercion beyond the basic power differential. A year or so after that I would be exposed to the destruction of suicide (not mine, obviously) and the funny part didn’t seem so funny anymore.

But before my better angels got a chance to catch up with me, I have to believe that I would smile all over again at having my negative confirmations of a man I disliked intensely being confirmed.

So a question for all y’all… has this ever happened to you? Wherein you’re looking at something that just doesn’t quite seem right and later it turns out that everything is unraveled in a rather public fashion?

At some point in the past, I remember seeing some interaction between a colleague of my wife and his nurse and getting a definite vibe of something. As far as I know, nothing ever came of it. It was probably nothing. Of course, if you’d asked me in all seriousness in high school, I probably would have said the same of Coach M.

John T. Tierney gives the case against AP tests:

AP courses are not, in fact, remotely equivalent to the college-level courses they are said to approximate. Before teaching in a high school, I taught for almost 25 years at the college level, and almost every one of those years my responsibilities included some equivalent of an introductory American government course. The high-school AP course didn’t begin to hold a candle to any of my college courses. My colleagues said the same was true in their subjects.

The traditional monetary argument for AP courses — that they can enable an ambitious and hardworking student to avoid a semester or even a year of college tuition through the early accumulation of credits — often no longer holds. Increasingly, students don’t receive college credit for high scores on AP courses; they simply are allowed to opt out of the introductory sequence in a major. And more and more students say that’s a bad idea, and that they’re better off taking their department’s courses.

The scourge of AP courses has spread into more and more high schools across the country, and the number of students taking these courses is growing by leaps and bounds. Studies show that increasing numbers of the students who take them are marginal at best, resulting in growing failure rates on the exams. The school where I taught essentially had an open-admissions policy for almost all its AP courses. I would say that two thirds of the students taking my class each year did not belong there. And they dragged down the course for the students who did.

The AP program imposes “substantial opportunity costs” on non-AP students in the form of what a school gives up in order to offer AP courses, which often enjoy smaller class sizes and some of the better teachers. Schools have to increase the sizes of their non-AP classes, shift strong teachers away from non-AP classes, and do away with non-AP course offerings, such as “honors” courses. These opportunity costs are real in every school, but they’re of special concern in low-income school districts.

To me, the most serious count against Advanced Placement courses is that the AP curriculum leads to rigid stultification — a kind of mindless genuflection to a prescribed plan of study that squelches creativity and free inquiry. The courses cover too much material and do so too quickly and superficially. In short, AP courses are a forced march through a preordained subject, leaving no time for a high-school teacher to take her or his students down some path of mutual interest. The AP classroom is where intellectual curiosity goes to die.

Michael Williams talks about his own experience, concurring.

I personally do not have any experience in the way of taking AP courses. As far as my school district was concerned, I was closer to “remedial” than “advanced” despite my being a top performer in most of the (non-honors) classes I took. In middle school, my math teacher inquired about putting me advanced math, but was denied on the grounds that I had been tagged a near-remedial student (I was actually making mostly A’s and the rest B’s at the time, but that wasn’t what they were looking at). Honors classes were out of reach in high school, and AP classes moreso. The colleges took a different view, and I was being recruited by a directional school specifically for their honors college. Southern Tech, where I did attend, accepted me unconditionally into its Honors College.

When I got to Southern Tech, they had me take a placement course. This wasn’t for college credit, but was for bypassing the sequence as Tierney mentions. I scored into the highest English and Math courses, though it turned out not to matter: The Honors College required that I start at the bottom floor in English and the College of Industrial Technology required that I take specifically designed “technical math” courses, which were not appreciably different than the sophomore and junior high school classes I did take. I could see why I otherwise would have tested out of them.

I am, on the whole, glad that I did not take AP classes. It may not have done me any good for math and my Honors English classes were awesome. The only ones I would have wanted to test out of are those that I might not have (namely, science) and ones I would have (Social Studies, English) are ones I was glad to take at the collegiate level.

Tierney points to what I consider to be some solid reasons why AP classes have gone off-track, as far as that goes. On the other hand, some of the same arguments can be used against tracking (Honors/Standard/Remedial/etc) and I am a fan of those. The bit about intellectual curiosity comes is interesting because my impression from my friends - many of whom took honors classes - were that it was much more freewheeling than the classes I was taking. Without thinking about it, I would have guessed AP classes would have been the same. But if the class itself is geared towards preparing for a specific test, I suppose that makes sense. It does seem a little bit odd to me that the best teachers would be teaching these classes, though. I’d have thought that teaching to a test is something that they would avoid (and, along those lines, that non-AP honors classes were considered better because the framework was not as rigid).

Marc Ambinder thinks that the era of affirmative action may be coming to an end.

[Justice Anthony Kennedy] endorses the idea that affirmative action can be used to achieve a diverse student body, so long as race is considered as one part among many others, and so long as applicants are considered individually. It is hard to imagine him not finding fault with the racially conscious 15 percent admissions process. For Kennedy, race-conscious policies are permissible (barely) if (and only if) diversity cannot be achieved any other way. Plainly, the University of Texas has found a way to achieve some measure of diversity without affirmative action before it takes race into account.

Perhaps Kennedy will try to salvage affirmative action, but it is hard to see the court’s conservatives allowing him to do so. They have their chance to end it, not mend it. Though John Roberts has said (and told Congress during his confirmation hearings) that he values precedent and wants the court’s decisions to be incremental rather than sweeping, it will be hard to resist the temptation to sweep away racial preferences.

It seems to me that he actually put his finger on why affirmative action won’t be banned wholesale. If Kennedy wants to preserve affirmative action, but can’t justify it in Texas, he can merely write an opinion stating that affirmative action is not permissible where the aims are being met by other means. That would abolish affirmative action in Texas, while continuing to allow sympathetic jurisdictions an opportunity to keep with the policy. To universalize from Texas’ experience, Kennedy must be judicially confident that any state could achieve the manner of diversity through a Top 10% policy like Texas has. This may be true, but it’s far from certain for a whole host of reasons.

It seems to me that Kennedy remains relatively sympathetic to affirmative action. If I’m wrong on that, then maybe it is dead in the water. But if I’m right, he can either uphold it in Texas (by declaring that the existing racial diversity is insufficient) or uphold it everywhere else (with the above argument).

{Comment with care.}

I turned in a pretty lackluster day today substitute teaching. The class itself wasn’t the issue. They weren’t perfect - what second grade class has perfection - but on the whole they were better than expected as students of the school in question and given a gender imbalance (2/3 boy) that always makes me nervous.

But I was exhausted. I have been for several days now. I’ve been getting less than six hours of sleep a night for almost a week not. My days over the last couple have included some exhausting chores (driving a lot of miles in uncomfortable conditions). It was hard to keep moving around the room (and second grade demands it). I had a lot of difficulty retaining any sort of focus.

On the drive home, I was reminded of the things that my wife, and doctors like her, are expected to do on a lot less cumulative rest than I’ve had.

It’s a rather good thing that she is taking the maternity leave she is in light of the newborn coming our way later this month. I hear newborns sometimes cut down on quality rest.

Southern Tech, like many schools, is considering a smoking ban on campus. I was thinking as much as a decade ago that this might be the natural extension of the bans in bars and restaurants. Of course, to voice this back then was to be building up strawmen and making slippery slope fallacies and all that jazz. To be honest, I wasn’t even sure back then. I mean, a bar or a restaurant is one thing, but an entire campus of hundreds of of acres? When office campuses started going entirely smoke free, I stopped feeling that I was perhaps paranoid.

I am against the ban, to what I am sure is nobody’s surprise. So is the Student Association. I find it difficult to believe that on a campus that is nearly 500 acres in size that you cannot find places to accommodate smokers. I feel oddly dispassionate about it, though. It will likely happen at some point, it will likely be ignored. Potential compromises may be passed along the way, but even workable compromises will be deemed insufficient.

In the case of Sotech, there are rumors that it is not entirely the school’s choice and that cancer institutes are threatening to stop giving grants to schools that don’t have smoking bans. Which, if it comes down to losing significant amounts of research dollars, I guess I understand.

Rather than objecting on an ideological level, it’s mostly the sense of loss that nags at me. Not the loss of our freedoms, but that being able to smoke on campus provided extraordinarily good social opportunities for me as an undergraduate. The bans around doorways actually just made it better because it got us all clumped together. No smoking on campus and I never meet Dharla (I mention her, but there were others). This is no thing for a lot of people, who instead of going out to smoke might go to the commons area and meet people there. Me being me, I’d probably have stayed in the dorm and not met anybody. At least, my pre-smoking college experience bears that speculation out.

That’s not exactly a defense of smoking in any logical manner. Which is to say, if there weren’t other issues at stake, my introversion would not be justification for inconveniencing other people. And though I have my objections to a lot of the smoking bans, I can’t at all say that it is an altogether bad thing for smokers to make smoking inconvenient. So it’s not a rational reaction. But dang, man, one of my college experiences is about to be consigned to a period piece.

A little bit back I commented on teacher sex with students and suggested that, in the case of inverse genders the man would not get off as lightly as many of the women. Well, here is a counterexample:

A former North Texas high school teacher was convicted Friday and sentenced to five years in prison for having sex with five 18-year-old students at her home.

The Tarrant County jury decided on the sentence for Brittni Nicole Colleps, 28, of Arlington after nearly three hours of deliberation. It took jurors less than an hour to find her guilty earlier in the day of 16 counts of having an inappropriate relationship between a student and teacher. The second-degree felony is punishable by two to 20 years in prison per count.

The former Kennedale High School English teacher had sex with the students at her home over two months in 2011, authorities said.

Colleps is married and has three children. She turned herself in after a cellphone video of one encounter that involved multiple students emerged. That video was shown a trial.

Which I guess just goes to show, we might take women having sex more lightly than men, or maybe not, but definitely not freaky sex. Probably best not to have five partners, but if you do, not all at once. Eighteen or no.

I absolutely loved this quote:

No sketch of Harold Berman can be complete without a reference to an epigram in which he summarized children’s natural grasp of natural law: A child says, ‘It’s my toy.’ That’s property law,” he said. “A child says, ‘You promised me.’ That’s contract law. A child says, ‘He hit me first.’ That’s criminal law. A child says, ‘Daddy said I could.’ That’s constitutional law.”

At some point I will have to post on a kid I had who used the concepts of arguing for gay marriage so that he may talk to his friend that he was not supposed to be talking to. It was brilliant. I told the kid he should go to law school. But I didn’t let him talk to his friend.

When I was in middle school, one of the things we had to do for physical education was “dance.” Like, partnered dancing. To do this, obviously, you needed partners.

The way that the coaches had it set up was that they lined up all of the guys on one side of the gymnasium, and all of the girls at the other, and you picked your partner. Guys or girls would walk across the gym and ask someone to be their dance partner. By rule, if asked, you cannot decline.

I’m not entirely sure what the purpose behind this ritual was. Maybe there was a confidence-building aspect to it. “Hey, I asked a girl, and she said ‘yes’! (never mind that she had to)” Maybe it was just a way that partners could partner off by their own volition and that allowing people to decline would be fraught with hazard (because junior high kids don’t know rejection)? Maybe it was a way in which nobody could be blamed for saying yes.

I remember that when I learned of this, my thought was that I hated it. I didn’t care if they had to say yes because, if they didn’t want you to be their partner, you’d find out about it. As conspicuously as possible. I had visions of the girl I was dancing with trashing me relentlessly just to make sure everybody knew she was only doing it because she had to. That was the way things worked. You made dang sure that even if you were partnered with someone, if you didn’t want to be associated with them, you made sure that everyone knew it. It worked this way with school assignments. With dancing? That times ten.

So I sure as heck wasn’t going to ask anyone. And it was doubtful that anyone would ask me. So I’d end up in the randomly assigned group. This, too, lent itself to conspicuous disassociation, but at least then you could both claim that it’s not what you wanted. That was how it worked with school assignments. If they rolled their eyes loudly, I would do my part to make sure that everyone knew this was an assigned partnership. I didn’t want to be associated with someone that didn’t want to be associated with me. Which meant asking nobody.

I didn’t expect many people to cross the gym. I figured most people would do what I was going to do. We shuffled our collective feet for what seemed like half an hour but was maybe a couple minutes. Then, finally, #14 (a jock) crossed the threshold and asked a hyperpopular girl. She looked relieved. I recall her having a boyfriend of higher stature than #14, but I guess she thought that he would do and was much better than the alternatives (like, me).

Come to think of it, it was the ultimate opportunity for the worst reject to put a cog in the works of the way that things were supposed to work. The nerdier, the more power you had. It was a transient power, because you wouldn’t get anything more than a dance partner, but it was something. Only if you were willing to do what I was not.

After he broke the ice, more people started moving. Almost entirely from the boy’s side. This was my worst nightmare. The more people who boycotted the ritual, the more safety there was. At the rate things were going, I was going to be among a small group without the gumption to pick a parner. The only upside is that I would get coupled with a fellow reject who would have little room to loudly roll her eyes. Oh, but who was I kidding? She’d roll them anyway.

Then, out of nowhere, came Ashley. If the class photo is still expandable, I’m pretty sure the Ashley is the girl next to #30. Ashley and I had conversed very lightly before, of the “Can I borrow your pencil?” variety, but that was about it. She was leagues and leagues above me. She was… actually kind of attractive. It was, in retrospect, quite amazing that she hadn’t been picked yet. Then there she was, picking me. She didn’t “ask” like she was supposed to, instead opting for “let’s go”, but who the flip cared.

It was all kind of chaotic, so I don’t know who I might have been partnered with otherwise. But having avoided the lottery, I was on cloud nine. That she was attractive was nice, but not as important as that she wanted to be there. Well, that may have been an overstatement: she wanted to be there more than all of the other available options. Well, that may have been an overstatement: she felt a warm enough pity for me that she picked me rather than let me twist in the wind.

She was also a great partner. By which I mean, she was patient with me. She never rolled her eyes. We did okay together. It was a good thing, too, because my class critics/bullies didn’t relent. A few people, perhaps assuming that we were an assigned pair, made fun of the asymmetry of our partnership. “Oooh, look, Will is dancing with a real live girl!” and more than once she would say “Because I asked him.” (Standing up for me! In a fashion.) One of the more persistent critics was actually #27, who was dancing with #30, both of whom would later become friends (and #27 my guardian protector). Boy I hated him then, though.

I really don’t know why she did it. Very few guys would have rolled their eyes at being picked by her. If any. She wasn’t a 10 by our school’s standards, but she was a solid 8. Maybe minus one for her general dress.

I always felt an immense appreciation for what she did that day. I consider it a grand favor on her part, though looking back at it almost 20 years later she surely had her reasons. I just can’t imagine what reason it might have been. She went into it with a positive attitude and made what could have been a very long six-week term one of the highlight of my days.

One of the odd things about this picture are all of the people who aren’t there. The class was cut by roughly a third in between the 7th and 8th grade. The end-result being that a lot of people I have a lot of memories with aren’t in the 8th grade picture.

Another of the odd things are people who bring up visceral reactions, but that’s all I remember. I singled out #3 below and thought about singling out more, but they are too numerous. Not all of them are negative. Some of them I can immediately remember their name and that’s it. I don’t even know how I remember their name. Often it’s just “LIKE!” or “DON’T LIKE!” without much recollection of why.

Below is a list of recollections of various people. It’s far from inclusive, but I had to draw the line somewhere and chose 25 (though there are two #9’s and I should have combined #1 and #2). Assuming I remember this time, I will be fuzzing this picture up in a week or so. The row descriptions are inexact, but include both the cheerleader and faculty rows. I will neither confirm nor deny guesses as to which person in the photograph I am.

#1 (Third down, center-right): Stabbed a bully in the eye with a pencil

#2 (Middle row, off to the right): Was stabbed in the eye with a pencil by the Bullyslayer (he survived).

#3 (Third down, center-left): I hate this girl with a passion. Seeing her face makes me think “HATE! HATE! HATE!”… I cannot remember why.

#4 (Top-right): The Weatherby Twins

#5 (Bottom-left): At least two guys I know had a crush on her. Pre-cheerleader.

#6: The principal. She was an unremarkable principle, except that she followed a completely inept principal. The district loved her, though. She was promoted to a high school, then sub-intendant, then super-intendant, and how has a friggin’ school named after her. It’s the weirdest thing.

#7: Gave me my first F, changed my life.

#8: Got me grounded for three-and-a-half weeks. She was just out of school and quite attractive.

#9: Pink had an FBI agent for an ex-husband. Aqua had a former NFL linebacker. These are great ways to win points with middle-school boys.

#10: The infamous counseller who informed my parents that their son was not college material. (She did this while the counseller of my elementary school).

#11: My remedial reading teacher. She called my parents in for a conference. Scared me half-to-death. It turned out the meeting was to ask why I had been put in remedial reading and if it would be okay if I just played at the computer lab across the way since I was obviously so bored.

#12: Ex-marine who fixed shop class.

#13 (Fourth row up, near-center): The inexplicable wallflower.

#14 (Top row, right): This kid was a good example of the upside of athletics. He was a brute until he had coaches to tell him not to be.

#15 (Top row, left): He was a friend I don’t talk about much. His parents were deaf, but he wasn’t. He also appeared to have different ethnic routes than they. That suggested adoption, though the story was otherwise. In any event, he was the only good friend I had who had trouble in school for reasons other than lack-of-effort.

#16 (Fourth row up, far right): Clementine!

#17 (Third row up, mid-left): Nice girl, smart girl, cute girl. My friend dated her (a few years after this picture was taken) on this basis. It was a nightmare within weeks. A future post, I think.

#18 (Middle row, mid-left): I still feel guilty for how I treated this guy, theoretically a friend. He’s one of only a couple I’d like to go back and apologize to. The other guy I treated rotten deserved it.

#19 (Fourth down, center-right): The only kid my parents ever forbade me from hanging out with.

#20 (Third or fourth row up, near-left): A nerd’s nerd who somehow “made it” in high school. It was like his father needed to die for him to be comfortable with himself and therefore make friends.

#21 (Fourth row from bottom, mid-left): Moved to Deseret and joined an atypical religious sect.

#22 (Center): A friend with this sister… she was not remarkably attractive (indeed, I wasn’t positive when I first met her that she was a she instead of a non-masculine he, though to be fair she was 12), but man did I fall for her and hard when our families took a trip together.

#23 (Middle row, far-left): Did okay for himself.

#24 (Third row up, far right): Pregnant the following year.

#25 (Fourth row up, center-left): Lived a couple houses down. We were never friends, but I did get along with his older brother and had a special relationship with his younger sister. He had some behavioral issues, though I hear he turned himself around.

Sarah Kliff says that maybe medical school debt isn’t the problem behind the absence of primary care docs. She cites a couple of reasons:

1. A program for medical student loan reimbursement had absolutely no applications.
2. Those with the largest student loans tend to actually go into primary care, rather than avoid it.

It might be overstated as a reason, but there are other factors going into what she’s taking about that should be addressed. Clancy took a pass on Arapaho’s student loan reimbursement program. It had nothing to do with being unworried about student loan debts. Rather, it was based on (a) the bureaucratic difficulty of signing up and (b) committing to the job for six years. She signed a three year contract, and there will be a financial penalty when she leaves early, so San Mateo’s more generous program might have been something we’d have signed on with when we didn’t sign on with Arapaho’s. But specific programs that offer reimbursement often do so precisely because they are among the most uncomfortable jobs. the jobs that someone is least likely to want to commit to. And the repayment is often backloaded. And you’re making payments in the meantime anyway and interest is accumulating. And the jobs will often pay less than you could make elsewhere, with the student loan reimbursement failing to account for the difference.

As far as the second thing goes, well, there it’s more complicated as well. My wife graduated in the top third of her class and didn’t have to go into primary care. But a lot of doctors who end up going into primary care do so with little choice. I suspect that these people are also those with the most amount of student debt. They couldn’t get into a state flagship (as my wife did) and end up going to an expensive (non-elite) private college. I don’t know this to be the case, but I think it’s a factor.

To me, the really pernicious effect that student loan debt actually doesn’t have all that much to do with the dearth of doctors willing to go into primary care, however. Rather, it has more to do with the medical culture itself. The desire to make as much money as early as possible in order to get out from under. This makes high-paying jobs that, on the face of it, are questionable. There were jobs that paid significantly more than the job Clancy took. She took a pass, but the ability to pay off student loans in a year is tempting nonetheless. And while you might tell yourself that it’s temporary, I think that once you’re making that sort of money, it’s hard to go back. It sets the pace for contributing to The McAllen Problem.

So what’s the solution? I’m not sure. Relieving student loan debt for doctors who want to go into primary care may help, but since such programs are often so back-loaded, I’m not sure how much of an effect they would really have. Since they’re not something you can really count on, I think a lot of docs would end up taking the enterprising course anyway.

Not that I wouldn’t mind someone stepping in and taking care of that for us.

David Feldman pushes back against the notion that college is a poor investment:

Okay, but the price tag is still very high; is it worth it? Absolutely. A college degree is an asset whose average value is $300,000 to $600,000 of extra lifetime earnings, measured in today’s dollars. And this value has risen steadily for the past 30 years. Your mileage may vary, depending on what you choose to study, but earning a college degree remains one of the best financial investments a person can make.

Nobody is saying that earning this degree is a guarantee of financial success. Even today, 18% of the college-educated workforce in prime working ages earns less than the median wage of a high school educated laborer. But in 1972, the figure was 30%. Think about that the next time someone claims that a college degree simply doesn’t pay off like it used to.

The “your mileage may vary” is understated here. It’s not just a matter of what you choose to study. It’s also a matter of who you are and where you go. People who go to some schools will make more than people who go to other schools. This is attributable to both the who and the where questions (because the who can determine the where). I am not sure where Feldman is getting his numbers, but it’s typically based on averages. And that’s problematic because the people who go to college are not the same people who don’t. Those who graduate and not the same as those who don’t. If anyone wants to point me to some numbers that are comparing apples-to-apples, I’d like to see them.

When we talk about who should and shouldn’t go to college, we should be talking about the borderline cases. Are the bottom quartile of those who go to college better off than financially than the top quartile of those who don’t? This is an overly simplistic way of putting it, since college admissions is inexact and the top quarter of people who miss out on college may well be smarter and more capable than the bottom quarter who go and even graduate. Of course, if those are the results, they are telling in their own way. So you might need to find more apples-to-apples comparisons. Though even that could be problematic because Person A may forgo college because they already have a great opportunity waiting for them while Person B is smart, has good grades, but doesn’t actually know anybody.

If I were to guess, I would say that even if you account for all of the variables, a college degree is still probably going to pay for itself over the course of a lifetime. This does not speak to the value of education, though. Rather, it speaks to (a) the networking opportunities available at college and more to the point (b) the credentialism. People with college degrees get to cut in front of a lot of lines. If everyone has a college degree, it negates the advantage.

Barring something unforeseen, Clancy and I will likely be encouraging our children to go to college. To some, this would make us hypocritical skeptics of universal college education. Actually, it means that we live in the real world. It’s reconciling ourselves to the system we have. A system that says everybody should go to college. It means contributing to a perpetuation of the system, but not supporting it on any ideological level.

Last week, at the League, Nob Akimoto linked to to a story about a girl getting tossed in jail for skipping school:

A judge threw a 17-year-old 11th grade honor student from Willis High School in jail after she missed school again.

Judge Lanny Moriarty said last month Diane Tran was in his Justice of the Peace court for truancy and he warned her then to stop missing school. But she recently missed classes again so Wednesday he issued a summons and had her arrested in open court when she appeared.

Tran said she works a full-time job, a part-time job and takes advanced placement and dual credit college level courses. She said she is often too exhausted to wake up in time for school. Sometimes she misses the entire day, she said. Sometimes she arrives after attendance has been taken.

It’s tempting to chalk this up as a clear abuse of judicial discretion and leave it at that. It’s tempting because it is an abuse of discretion, but we really shouldn’t leave it at that. We should instead be asking ourselves why there was a crime for which the judge could do this. We should be asking ourselves what kind of pressures exist to make this a crime, and perhaps lead the judge to believe what he did was okay. (more…)

Heebie-Geebie complains about fences being built around a nearby school playground.

Going through, my school did not have fences around its playground. You could walk on the premises freely.

And get ticketed for trespassing.

In light of that, I think fences are okay.

There was an article in the Redstone Gazette the other day about Ryersen Gas Stations donating $1,000,000 to St Matthews. Redstone is the blue collar town where I substitute teach. Ryersen is a very large chain of gas stations in the region that has its corporate HQ in Redstone. St Matthews is the local catholic school.

The whole thing left a rather bad taste in my mouth. Some of it is pure partisanship. I substitute at Redstone High School, St Matthew’s public alternative. And my thought on reading the headline was that St Matthews doesn’t need that money, and Redstone schools can use it! St Matthews is where the rich kids go (and select others) while most of the town is struggling to get by. Even setting aside my biases (I don’t substitute at the high school all that much anyway and wouldn’t expect the money to go towards my getting a raise), this raises some class-hackles.

But, no doubt, Ken Ryersen went to St Matthews. Because most people of note in Redstone went to St Matthews. The city’s leaders (most of whom aren’t ethnically from Catholic countries, despite most of the town itself being so) tend to have gone there. So of course that’s where a lot of the emphasis is going to be. Notably, St Matthews’s football team gets to play at a district stadium, free of charge (this has been a point of contention with some).

Anyhow, it’s natural that Ryersen would want to support the school that he went to. It does create a genuine problem, however, when this school soaks up a lot of the kids that could otherwise be lifting Redstone’s district up. And it does seem to create a wall of sorts.

I thought about writing a (more significant) post, but there’s not much I can touch upon that James Joyner didn’t here. There’s no single snippit that I want to excerpt, so I would recommend going over and reading the whole thing.

I am not anti-corporation or anti-profit, though I have to confess some skepticism of for-profit universities. I’ve been contemplating going back to college in an online capacity and have been sticking to state colleges (and WGU). There are so many bad incentives involved that make me skeptical. Bad incentives from the government. Bad incentives from society. Bad incentives for and from the potential customers.

Some of this is related to my very strong belief in the State University. I am not as skeptical of the non-profit privates as the for-profits, but I am still not a huge fan. This does qualify as a bias. When I see a list of state universities that are struggling, I am more likely to come up with alternative explanations as to why this doesn’t mean that the model is necessarily bad. Of course, sometimes I think the model is bad. I think it’s problematic to send ill-prepared kids to college. I question whether open enrollment universities should even exist (I’m more sympathetic to community colleges). But even here, I don’t think the universities themselves are the problem. Even though, if I were running things, at least some of them would cease to exist. But I’ll still take them over their for-profit alternative, so I guess as long as we have the University of Phoenix, we should have a lower-cost alternative.

A school in Nova Scotia suspended a student for five days because he wore a shirt that said “Life Is Wasted Without Jesus.”

The South Shore Regional School Board suspended William Swinimer from Forest Heights Community School in Chester Basin for five days for wearing a shirt emblazoned with the words, “Life is wasted without Jesus.”

School board Supt. Nancy Pynch-Worthylake said the wording on the shirt is problematic because it is directed at the beliefs of others.

“If I have an expression that says ‘My life is enhanced with Jesus,’ then there’s no issue with that, everybody is able to quickly understand that that’s my opinion about my own belief,” she said.

I do see that as a distinction with a difference, but it’s a rather murky terrain.

Jonathan McLoed argues thusly:

That�s some nice hair-splitting Ms. Pynch-Worthylake is attempting, but it demonstrates an ignorance towards Mr. Swiminer�s faith. Christianity is, certainly, an incredibly personal faith, but it is not introverted and it is not weak. The message of the t-shirt is a universal declaration. It is unequivocal, but it is not pointed.

Granted, the shirt did not say “My life would be wasted without Jesus” but rather that life in general is. That can easily be taken as suggesting that your life would be wasted without Jesus. And so there can be a little provocation construed there. Having said that, the ambiguity involved does not lend itself to an ideal situation for administrative discretion. They might be more willing to pull the trigger in some cases and not in others. They might see one instance through the prism of tolerance to the wearer, and the other through the prism of intolerance to people other than the wearer, even when they are essentially the same thing. James Hanley argues in the comments to McLoed’s post:

Yes, that�s what it�s saying to those students. And a student saying �Jesus is not real� is making a clear statement against the Christian kid�s life.

And both T-Shirts ought to be allowed.

Both should, or neither should. You can argue that “Jesus is not real” is a statement of belief not directed at anyone else, but it makes an implicit statement every bit as much as the Wasted shirt does. Murky.

It’s hard to say whether the administration is in error with this ban without knowing how they would respond to similar messages from other groups. What’s not hard to say is that regardless of their decision, they suspended the kid for five days. At my old school, you could punch someone in the face and be suspended for fewer than five days. I want to know what sort of mediation was tried here. This comes across not as conflict alleviation, but punitive action. I am not certain why they couldn’t have simply said “each and every day you wear that shirt, you are suspended for the rest of the day.”

-{Sorry for the relative silence. I plan on picking things back up more solidly next week. We’re trying to get everything together for a brief trip back to Delosa for a wedding. Below is a NaPP post that touches on some themes I have mentioned here before.}-

I’ve always been torn as to whether or not to write about my adventures in substitute teaching on NaPP since it’s not really political and most non-political stuff goes on Hit Coffee but it is sociological. I had a two-fer assignment today, with the first period a 3rd grade class and the second period a 5th grade. The former was probably the best performance I have turned in to date. The latter was one of the most challenging classes I have filled in for. I’d actually filled in for the class before. It was a bad experience, but I thought I had screwed up. Nope.

Anyhow, the observation of the day is that there are really three kinds of male troublemakers in school (maybe in life).

The Bad Egg Group

The first are Bad Eggs. There’s usually one or two of these in every class. Sometimes it seems to be a manifestation of other problems they’re having. The overlap between Bad Eggs and special instruction is not insignificant. Sometimes, though, they’re just Bad Eggs. You know that the future holds nothing good in store for them (and, likely, people around them).

The Impulse Group

The second group is perhaps the most perplexing. It’s also the smallest group. It’s the kid who is basically a Really Good Kid, save for some serious impulse control problems. They want to be quiet. They want to be good. They try harder than any other student in the classroom to help you. But they’re also among the biggest troublemakers. They just can’t help themselves. I had to report to the teacher that the single-most helpful kid in the room was one of a handful on the Worst List. He was also the first kid I have yelled at since beginning my substitute teaching tenure. Bad Eggs may be less pleasant to deal with insofar as the Impulse Kids, who are at least good or great half or a majority of the time, but they’re easier to deal with.

The Osmosis Group.

The third group are those that absorb the mood of the class. You get the sense that in a good environment or on a good day, they’re fine. But they become a part of any problem that exists. These are actually the most problematic only because they are the most numerous. You try to get them to behave and they simply point the finger at someone who is behaving worse (typically an Egg or an Impulse). These are also the Give Them An Inch kids. You give them an inch, which they may or not be able to handle, but then Bad Egg and Impulse will take a mile and these kids will be right behind them.

It’s only the Bad Eggs that you feel good about writing up. One of the interesting aspects is that when I make my list at the end of the day, even in a really bad class like this one (this class apparently drove two different substitute teachers into retirement over the course of the year), there are only two or three Bad Eggs at most. Then you throw in a couple Impulse Kids and the Osmosis Brigade comes out of the woodwork and at that point, there is so much cover for noise that you can’t single anybody out because almost everyone else is talking and goofing around.