School Daze(d) And Confused

Let me first add my voice to the chorus condemning University of Miami President Donna Shalala and her totally wimp-out response to the brawl between the Hurricanes football players and the players from Florida International University during their game last week. Florida International suspended 14 players indefinitely; Miami gave one player an indefinite suspension and one-game suspensions to 12 more (if memory serves). Shalala tried to justify this by claiming she didn't want to throw Miami's student-athletes "under the bus." Bull. She didn't want to lose the money the University would lose if they weren't in a bowl game.

She caims that Miami's policy regarding such incidents is "zero tolerance." Really? That's news to not only me, but just about everyone else on the planet. Miami has a long tradition of recruiting and playing thugs . . . ask any University of Nebraska fan about the Hurricane teams of the mid-80s if you don't believe me.

I used to think better of Shalala, but I am entirely appalled by her reaction here. What's worse, she didn't want to view the films of the brawl because she didn't want "the facts of the incident" to affect her judgment. Say wha'? The facts of the incident should form the very basis of her judgment.


Just one more example of how having lots of fancy degrees and national-governmental-level experience doesn't make someone smart. I'll bet the GOP is glad to learn they don't have a monopoly on stupidity, despite the fact of Dubya's existence.

While we're talking college football . . . will someone please explain to me why no one in Lincoln is calling for Bill Callahan's head right now? He installs the West Coast (passing-oriented) offense, and the Huskers proceed to stink for two years. This week, the weather gets bad in Lincoln and he--gasp--goes back to a running game. [Well, d'uh!--Ed.] But then, when Nebraska has an upset of Texas all but locked up, he calls for a passing play on a critical third down, the receiver fumbles the ball, and Texas gets enough field position (and has enough time on the clock) to kick a game-winning field goal. What a fiasco! The pundits at ESPN all thought the Huskers were going to lose, however, so the fact that they played the defending national champs "close" means the Huskers are respectible again. Right. I repeat: what a fiasco!

[Sometimes a good loss is better than a bad win--witness Tom Osborne going for 2 and losing the Orange Bowl and thus the national championship to Florida State in the mid-1990s. That was a good loss, because the attempt to win demonstrated Osborne's desire to either win or lose the national championship, not back into a piece of it by tying the game. But Callahan? Despite his Irish ancestry, he doesn't get it. He played too conservatively against USC, and lost. He played unnecessarily aggressively against Texas at the end of the game . . . and lost.--Ed.]

Still on the subject of college football--Joe Montana is not dead, but Brady Quinn must be channeling him at Notre Dame. Did you see the end of the Irish's game against UCLA yesterday? Talk about "wak(ing) up the echoes!" So now I can't get the Notre Dame fight song out of my head. It could be worse. It could be raining. Oh. It is raining. Maybe even snowing. But who cares? God's in his heaven (the Golden Dome) and all's right with the world.

I have to ask, however, if the Huskers were so dead-set on getting a former NFL coach, why didn't they get Charlie Weis instead of Bill Callahan?

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On to more academic pursuits. Critics everywhere of late bemoan the loss of teaching children the skill of cursive writing. On one hand, I concur. The traditionalist in me thinks that handwriting can be truly expressive (as can be no other form of writing), and that the discipline needed to master the skill is worth having. Nonetheless, the world is changing . . . and long has been, though the pace of change has increased. We no longer collectively mourn the loss of teaching Greek and Latin in our pre-college schools. Their mastery is an option open to those who wish to pursue such skills, and indeed, is required of certain university-level pursuits and career tracks . . . but their lack of mastery by John Q. Public is not tragic.

So, let it be, people. Even those of us who know how to produce cursive script are no longer writing as beautifully or even as neatly as we once did. I've been unable to decipher my own scrawls on occasion. And as I can no longer write faster than I can type (thanks to my computer), I choose to mourn neither the loss of my own nor anyone else's cursive writing skills.

This does not mean that I think everything should be 100% easy and fun for students, however. Two ostensibly unrelated news items reported earlier this week show why. According to the Associated Press, a study from the Brookings Institution's Brown Center on Education Policy shows that "nations with the best math scores have the least happy, least-confident math students."

The best and the brightest seem to be the least happy because they feel real pressure to excel, as opposed to current US policy, which misguidedly posits that students will have high self-esteem and succeed if they are praised no matter how poorly they actually do. I think the US kids know that at some level they are being fed a load of bull, but they are kids. Most of them don't have the self-discipline to try harder than adults expect. So when adults expect nothing, kids, being kids, do nothing. We need to rethink this notion that "if it's not fun, the kids won't learn." Just the opposite seems to be true, based on the study.

This reminds me of the old canard about how kids say they want more freedom and trust, but act stupid when they are given same. Despite what they say, kids want and NEED limits, rules, structure, and order. Deep down, they appreciate those who give them same.

Let's go back to teaching math in a way that makes us all miserable. We'll get better substantive results.

The other article, also reported by the AP, shows that some skills already wrongfully banished from our schools are still useful and should be retruned to prominence. According to an article published Thursday in Nature, scientists are finding that nasty, antibiotic-resistant bacteria can be conquered by artificial anti-microbial peptides that are created following the rules of GRAMMAR, of all things. The scientists discovered that the peptides which beat the bugs followed consistent patterns of construction and organization of their amino acid building blocks. Those patterns of construction and organization reminded all of the scientists involved of grammar--the placement of the subject, object, verb, and other modifiers affects meaning, thus effectiveness. [Computer techie-types could really stand to learn this.--Ed.]

I must confess that I learned more about English grammar from studying foreign languages than I did from studying English grammar directly. I'd not have been able to adapt what I leared from studying French and German, however, to my studies of English if I'd not already have had the English grammar lessons to give me the vocabulary to make sense of what studying French and German taught me. So let's go back to making 8th graders even more miserable by teaching them some grammar . . . but let's make sure their teachers get comprehensive training first!