Young-adult letters

From a Boston Globe article on letter-writing among young adults:

Samuel Pearce, 20, a Brown University student from Milton, began writing letters to an African pen pal as a child and to a friend at summer camp when he was a teenager, and when his best friend went away to college he chose to stay in touch via snail mail. This experience inspired him to write letters with other friends as well.

“It’s cool,” Pearce said. “If there’s someone I’ve been friends with but haven’t written letters to, often times, beginning writing letters with them reveals dimensions of them that I just hadn’t thought of before.”

It is cool, and Pearce’s comments remind me that one of the great friendships of my life began by correspondence. You can read some excerpts from the letters of my friend Aldo Carrasco in this post. Believe me, it’s worth the time.

When did you last write a letter? My last was in April, to my fifth-grade teacher Mrs. Schorr.

[Thanks to Music Clip of the Day for pointing me to the Globe article.]

As Irene approaches

[“Palm trees blowing in the wind during hurricane in Florida.” Photograph by Ed Clark. September 1947. From the Life Photo Archive.]

Hurricane Irene is badly misnamed, as Irene comes from the Greek εἰρήνη (eiréné), “peace.” Wherever you are, reader, I hope that you and yours stay safe and sound as unpeaceful Irene approaches the East Coast.

Recently updated

Testing teachers for drug use: In 2009, a West Virginia school board abandoned a similar effort. Background on that case and on a Supreme Court ruling concerning random drug tests and public employees.

Testing teachers for drug use

In the tiny central-Illinois town of Glasford, teachers are on strike over their school district’s insistence that they submit to random drug tests. That’s random testing, without cause. No school district in the state has such a policy. A statement from the Illini Bluffs Federation of Teachers suggests that the drug-test proposal is a ploy to force union concessions on other matters. (We’ll drop the outrageous insistence on X, if you’ll give up Y.)

The Belleville News-Democrat, which the Illinois Federation of Teachers characterizes as a strongly anti-union newspaper, is taking a poll on the matter. If you, like me, think that teachers should not be subject to random drug testing (testing without cause), you might want to put your 2¢ in by voting. Click on the link, and you’ll find the poll to the left, under a photograph of a room full of empty desks.

8:08 p.m.: In 2009, a West Virginia school board abandoned a similar effort. The ACLU has the details and adds context:

The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that the government may only conduct suspicionless drug tests of employees in “safety-sensitive” job roles, such as air traffic controllers or nuclear power plant operators, whose job functions, if done improperly, would cause specific and potentially catastrophic threats to the public safety.

The court firmly rejected the contention that public school employees meet the criteria for random drug testing: “A train, nuclear reactor, or firearm in the hands of someone on drugs presents an actual concrete risk to numerous people — the same cannot be said for a teacher wielding a history textbook.”

In addition to violating public employees’ constitutional right to privacy, random drug testing programs have been found demonstrably ineffective by the National Academy of Sciences, among others, producing a false sense of security that distracts from true safety threats.

Random drug testing may also reveal extremely sensitive personal information, such as medical conditions, prescription drug use or pregnancy, and can produce an unacceptably high rate of false-positives.

Update, September 1, 2011: The strike has been settled. It sounds as though random testing is not part of the contract:

Neither side has disclosed details of the tentative agreement. Board attorney Karl Meurlot said drug testing remains in the agreement that the teachers ratified on Monday, but that it is “substantially different than [from] the random drug testing policy the board initially proposed.” He did not elaborate.

Illini Bluffs students get back to school after strike ends (Peoria Journal Star)

Update, September 2, 2011: For current teachers, the contract allows voluntary participation in random drug testing and requires drug testing when there is probable cause. But for teachers hired after August 15, 2011, random drug tests will be required. Read more:

Illini Bluffs teachers contract includes voluntary drug testing (Peoria Journal Star)

Words from Steve Jobs

Not from his letter of resignation but from his 2005 commencement address at Stanford University:

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

The Beloit Mindset List, 2011 edition

The 2011 edition of the Beloit Mindset List is out, and it manages to outdo the 2010 list in faulty perspective and tackiness. A few choice examples to characterize the “mindset” of the class of 2015 (“most of them born in 1993,” we’re told):

They “swipe” cards, not merchandise. [Have the listmakers never scanned groceries at a self-checkout?]

O.J. Simpson has always been looking for the killers of Nicole Simpson and Ronald Goldman. [Simpson has been imprisoned since 2008.]

Arnold Palmer has always been a drink. [Huh? Here’s an explanation.]

Perhaps the most ill-advised entry:

We have never asked, and they have never had to tell.

“We”? “They”? This odd sentence also obscures the fact that DADT [Don’t ask, don’t tell] prohibited gay and bisexual servicemen and -women from speaking about sexual orientation and same-sex relationships.

I prefer Angus Johnston’s Beloit Mindset List for the Real World. A sample:

Returning students have always been a growing campus demographic.

And have always been ignored in lists like this.

Related posts
Re: the Beloit Mindset List (“What bothers me about the Beloit list involves some unspoken assumptions about reality and young adults.”)
The Beloit Mindset List, again (the 2012 list)

[Thanks to Matt Thomas, whose tweet about my 2010 post brought the 2011 list to my attention.]

Plagiarism in the news

Dora D. Clarke-Pine examined 120 psychology dissertations in search of plagiarism. Checking for word-for-word sequences of ten or more words without proper attribution, she found plagiarism in four of every five dissertations. Checking for word-for-word sequences of five or more words, she found plagiarism in all 120. Read more:

The Seemingly Persistent Rise of Plagiarism (New York Times)

My intuition is that plagiarism is not generally the result of ignorance about what constitutes plagiarism. Think of the widespread habit of rolling through stop signs: everyone knows you’re supposed to stop, but doing otherwise is easy and almost always without consequences.

Related reading
All plagiarism posts (via Pinboard)

Tyne Daly, miner

Tyne Daly, interviewed by Charlie Rose last night on PBS, responded to a question about working in television, film, and theater, and whether she considers one more important than the others. She said that she doesn’t make such distinctions: “Everything has a different adventure.” And then:

“Except — theory: I’m a miner. And if you put me in the diamond mines, I will mine diamonds for you. If you put me in the gold mines, I can mine gold. Put me in the coal mines, I will mine coal, a good grade of coal. But I cannot mine diamonds in a coal mine. I’m just a miner.” [Makes shoveling gesture and laughs.]

Daly is now starring as Maria Callas in Terrence McNally’s Master Class. You can watch Daly, McNally, and Rose in conversation online.

Ross Barbour (1928–2011)

From the Los Angeles Times:

Ross Barbour, the last surviving original member of the Four Freshmen, the influential close-harmony vocal quartet that came to fame in the 1950s with hits such as “Graduation Day,” has died. He was 82.

Still up at YouTube: a great introduction to the Four Freshmen, in the form of a 1964 special for Japanese television: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. In the first clip, from left ro right: Ross Barbour, Bob Flanigan, Ken Albers, Bill Comstock.

A related post
Bob Flanigan (1926–2011)

“Hope is better than fear”

My friends, love is better than anger. Hope is better than fear. Optimism is better than despair. So let us be loving, hopeful and optimistic. And we’ll change the world.

The closing words of Jack Layton’s farewell letter to his fellow Canadians remind me of the words (in translation) from Marcel Proust in the OCA sidebar:

[O]ur worst fears, like our greatest hopes, are not outside our powers, and we can come in the end to triumph over the former and to achieve the latter.

There are any number of American politicians who could learn something from Jack Layton.