A cat, a shed

LAST WEEKEND, my sister visited, and she brought her beloved and devoted cat, "Tiger."

Tiger is a darker, larger version of Sunny Girl, the Pocket Puma. She's very calm and still. I think I saw her givin' me the Stink Eye.

TODAY, IVC's first summer session came to a close. I'm glad. My class was a good group, but eight hours a week with the same bunch of "yutes" is a bit much.

As I drove past Cook's Corner, I noticed, for the thousandth time, an old shed or garage. This time, I stopped and took a couple of pics. The shed is very cool.

I imagined the garage as it was in 1935. Maybe a bank robber came through and hid in it for a night. Maybe, for a time, a drifter worked at Cook's as the handy man and got friendly with Cook's old lady.

They had some fun. Some evenings, in the shed. He threw a rock at her cat once. She got mad. "What's the matter with you?" she said.

It didn't last. The guy just left. Nobody knows what happened to him.

In 1967, she died, I widow. She almost never thought of him. She never spoke of him.

She thought of him toward the end.

Where did he go

How do they get that far?

People in education—with advanced degrees—who can't pass a basic skills test?

Sure.

I say we give Chancellor Raghu P. Mathur a pop quiz. We can do it on live TV!

Well, maybe not. Our board would likely give the fellow a hefty raise for every word he managed not to misspell, every fact he managed not to mangle.

Then they'd give him an award for his "excellence."

Next, of course, they'd give him a raise for having earned an award.

Then they'd arrange to give themselves a prize for recognizing such excellence.

This morning, Inside Higher Ed reports that

The National Council on Teacher Quality on Wednesday released a report criticizing most states for their teacher education policies. Among the criticisms: too few “alternate routes” to teaching for liberal arts graduates and others and insufficient monitoring of the academic skills of those entering and graduating from teacher education programs....

I downloaded the part of the report (a large pdf file) pertaining to California and I do recommend that you read it, for it appears to be excellent.

Here are some graphics that appear in the California report—they give you a good idea of the report's content.

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If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war. As it stands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves. We have even squandered the gains in student achievement made in the wake of the Sputnik challenge. Moreover, we have dismantled essential support systems which helped make those gains possible. We have, in effect, been committing an act of unthinking, unilateral educational disarmament.

—From A Nation at Risk, 1983

(If Nation were written today, what would they call it? A Nation Up Shit Creek?)