I had a parent ask me if her daughter could come in for some extra help after school.

Um, no, and here's why.

First, she doesn't need extra help - she needs encouragement to use her own judgement on her work to improve it. She knows what she needs to do, and doesn't do it because she's relying on me to point it out to her. This particular kid needs more independence, not more dependence.

Second, and more to the point, is the concept of "extra" help.

How much help is extra? Where do I draw the line between the help I'm required to offer my students, and the help that is extra? Clearly, some kids will "get it" quickly and not need very much help at all. If I expect them to be in that group and it turns out they're not, is the help I offer them extra? How about a kid who usually has trouble? Is it "extra" help when she gets more of my attention than the kid who usually gets it right off the bat?

The idea of extra help is rooted in a concept of education that is out-dated. It's a view of children as passive receptacles, whose job is to soak up learning that the teacher tells them they need. If they're not soaking it up, it's their own fault. They need to seek out extra help to soak up what everyone else is soaking up. This is the view of education that gives us sentences like, "I taught it - it's not my fault if they didn't learn it!"

If they didn't learn it, then how well did you teach it?

My job is to teach, which means my job is to get kids to learn. If they aren't learning, part of my job is to identify and overcome the roadblocks to learning. Their responsibility is to be honest with me about what they can do and participate to the best of their ability in their learning. Asking for help during the school day is part of that - as is me offering suggestions as they're learning. That's not extra. It's integral.

So what does it look like when I'm doing my job? First, there's a pre-assessment. Do they already know the skill I'm setting out to teach? What will it look like if they already know it? For that matter, what is the skill I'm setting out to teach? I need to have it laid out and so do they, so they can start to develop the metacognitive awareness of when they've learned it. So, we do a pre-assessment, and I figure out some loose groups - who gets it completely; who gets it sort-of and is going to need enrichment, or to prove that they can do it on a higher level of material; who can see what the concept is but doesn't know how to do it; and who can't even formulate the questions to figure out what's going on. With any luck, most of my kids will fall in the last two groups, with four or five in the second group.

Since the material I'm teaching is about strategies for comprehending and communicating, it's rare for a student in my class to truly get it right off the bat. Pretty much all of them can benefit from practising the skill on reading materials that are at their level, because the questions I'm asking are the same big questions they're going to get in every class right up through university. What is the main idea? What is the author's message or theme? What does the author want us to think and feel about the topic/characters/themes? What are the clues to that? What techniques has the author used to get us to think or feel these things? How effective was the author at communicating their message? What can I learn from the author's techniques, which I can then apply to my own writing/media creations? Even gifted students can apply these same techniques and become better readers, writers, and thinkers, by using them - on material that interests them and is closer to their level.

So, I have the pre-assessment in hand, and I know where my kids fall on the rubric related to this specific skill set. I have tentative groups. I also have a specific goal for each kid. Not every kid is going to get it at the end of the unit. That's unrealistic. But my goal is for 75-80% to get it, and for every kid to make progress in at least a couple of the sub-skills involved. They can't articulate the author's message? I'll concentrate on getting them to pick out the main idea and some supporting details, because that's an important background skill for evaluating, and it can be taught as part of my regular lessons.

Now I design my whole-class lessons, which introduce the topic and provide an example. I do a read-aloud, I think aloud as I'm reading, and I write down my thoughts on chart paper. I focus on one or two of the questions for the unit - at the moment, I'm focusing on, "What does the author want us to think or feel about the topic? How do we know?" I pick a reading selection that will be interesting to everyone, even though the reading level will be too easy for some and too hard for a few others. When we've done one or two of these whole-class lessons, I do another small assessment. This time, I get the kids to talk with their peers about the answers to the questions, then I get them to write their answers. At this point, I solidify the groups. There are usually a couple who have moved and don't need much more direct instruction, and the lowest group should by now have a way to frame their questions.

Now I assign practice work to the kids who are ready for it, according to their reading level, and the kids who need more direct instruction come to see me for guided reading. Usually there are two levels of this - those who only need a bit of help to be ready for independent practice, and those who are barely able to grasp the meaning of the question. I take the first group first, while assigning different (busy) work to the lowest group. When I work with the lowest group, it's intensely. The other kids have probably finished their independent practice at this point and are doing independent reading, or the assignments related to independent reading. I work with the lowest group on a subset of the skill in question - probably main idea and supporting detail. This process generally takes a couple of days.

Now I do another whole-class lesson, this one involving a lot more student participation. I want the ones who have got it to practise in a way that lets the lower-functioning kids listen to their thinking and see what they're doing. This whole-class lesson will usually involve mixed groups at some point, where I send kids off to answer questions on chart paper in groups that include a few people from each of my levelled groups. I get the groups to present their findings; other groups are responsible for coming up with a summary sentence of each group's presentation. The goal of all this talking is three-fold. First, it helps the kids themselves to articulate what they are starting to understand, and it supports the writing they'll eventually be doing about this topic. Second, it provides language for the kids who have trouble articulating it - a hook for their understanding and a vocabulary base for them to talk about it. (This is the point where the Word Wall is updated with vocabulary the kids decide is important to this topic.) Third, it allows for several levels of accountable talk - group talk, paired talk, and presentation-talk - which allows for the use of different levels of language, practice in various group-work skills, and practice in presentation skills and listening skills. This is where my oral communication marks come from, most of the time.

Now we do another assessment, a brief one. By this point, most of the kids who are ready to really get it, are getting it. I give them one more practice assignment for consolidation purposes, and then they have to demonstrate their learning.

The lowest group probably hasn't gotten to the point where they get it yet, but hopefully they can now find the main idea when they look for it and point out some supporting details. I will usually try to get them to begin to practise the skill everyone else has been working on, so that it won't be brand-new to them when they see it the following year.

Demonstrating learning takes several different forms. I usually break up the "understanding" part from the "creating" part, because being able to create using these concepts is a higher level thinking skill than being able to explain the same concept. So there will be a small task where I find out if they get it, and a bigger task that ties everything together. This stage generally takes half an hour a day for a week or two. This is also where I do writing conferences, so I can address any small misconceptions or issues with writing form or style that crop up. I strive to see every kid for at least two writing conferences. Usually, I see every kid at least once and about half of them twice.

The only part of this where I might conceivably feel the need to offer what most parents think of as "extra help" is right at the end, if I don't have time for all the writing conferences I want to do. (See previous post about smaller class sizes - 27 is just too many.) For the rest of it? The scaffolding of learning, the gradual release of responsibility to the kids, the pointers on what to do and how to improve their answers, are built so carefully into each step that 80% of kids won't need any mroe help with the concepts - only with the execution. The remaining twenty percent are probably being pulled by the spec. ed. teacher a few times near the end so that we can get a final product out of them, and they're getting a bunch of guided practice time directly with me. If they're still not getting it at the end, the reason probably has more to do with outside factors than with my teaching - which means extra help might not help them, anyway, at least not right now.

Oh, as for keeping them busy? I've got another smaller topic, text features, coming up the middle between the Big Idea we're just finishing - inference - and the one we're just starting - Evaluating. And of course, it's all tied in even there - how does the author use X text feature to make you think or feel something in particular? Everything is tied together.

Traditional teaching decides what the kids need to know, teaches it, and then evaluates it. It skips the practice steps and scaffolding that are the heart of my program. In a traditional model, yes, extra help is essential - because there was so little help built into the lessons. The smart kids are the ones who play the education game well enough to produce good work the first time they're asked for it, but they never get the chance to go deeper into their topic or Big Idea because they're focused on the fact that they're going to be marked on whatever they produce. My kids know which parts of their lessons are practice and which parts are evaluation, and they know that if they do poorly on the evaluation, I'm going to give them another opportunity to get it right and more teaching first, so there's little stress and absolutely no incentive to cheat.

In the end, I get kids who can talk intelligently about the author's message, techniques, use of text features, attempts to provoke an emotional response, and effectiveness. I was an advanced reader - but no teacher ever taught me that until grade eleven, and even then it was an accident.

x-posted to ontario_teacher.

This point brought to you by a debate in booju. It started out asking if parents would run back into a burning home to save their pets, but the thread I got involved in was actually saying that some people wouldn't tell the firefighters that there were pets still in the home. The reasoning is that they wouldn't want the firefighters to risk their lives for the pets, so they wouldn't inform the firefighters that the animals were even there.

Simply put, it's disrespectful.

Part of a firefighter's job is to evaluate risks. They're equipped and experienced to tackle much higher risks than you or I. If they don't think they can save Fluffy, they won't go in after Fluffy. Do they sometimes make mistakes? Yes. And they sometimes pay the ultimate price for those mistakes. But at the end of the day, it's their decision to make, not mine. I don't have the right skill set to make the decision for them.

By not telling them an important piece of information, not only am I dooming Fluffy to a horrible death, I'm also affecting the firefighters' ability to evaluate risk. I'm trying to do their job for them, rather than letting them do it for themselves. Any decision that involves taking on oneself a decision that should be left to the professional at hand is disrespectful of that professional. It's saying you don't trust them to be able to do their jobs, which in this case include protecting their own lives above those of animals.

Some other examples: changing schools and not telling the new teacher that your child has had trouble with X in the past, in the hope that the new start will be good for them and will help them outgrow their issue; not telling your doctor about your shortness of breath, because the doc can't do anything anyway (only applies to those with ready access to doctors, of course;) withholding a piece of information from your lawyer because it won't have any impact anyway; the list goes on.

When people take on a job, any job, they deserve the respect of trusting them to do it the way it should be done. If that means they need some information from me to get it done right, it's respectful of me to give it to them. Withholding it isn't saving them - it's disrespecting them.

Every time there's a particularly horrific and unexplained murder in Canada, a few things are brought up. I really do get tired of rehashing the same territory, so here are the answers:

1) Should we reinstate the death penalty for particularly horrific cases?

No. A life is a life is a life, and I don't want the state having the right to decide that some lives can be taken in cold blood by state-sanctioned murder. No amount of horror changes that. Furthermore, the vast majority of Canadians agree.

2) Isn't every murder indicative of mental illness? Isn't a criminally-insane plea really just a cop-out?

No. There's a big difference between a guy who hauls out a knife and beheads a stranger sitting next to him on the bus, and a guy who kills his wife when she tells him she's leaving him, or a robber who shoots someone in the course of their robbery. The latter two have motives that were obviously enough to trump the perpetrator's scruples about murder. The first has no motive, other than what's going on in the person's messed-up brain. They are two completely different things, and need to be treated differently. Yes, institutions for the criminally insane are better places to be, overall, than a maximum-security prison. That's because, having decided that someone is not guilty by reason of insanity, it would be hypocritical to punish them for the crime by putting them in a place that is hellish to live in. They're there for treatment and to protect society - not to punish them. And really, more sunlight and cleanliness and medical treatment and whatever else they get doesn't change the fact that they are not allowed to leave. It's still a prison - just one geared towards treatment instead of punishment.

3) If someone had had a gun on that bus, the victim would be alive and the murderer would be dead and everything would be much better!

No, no, and no. First, the victim was stabbed in his sleep; if he'd had a gun, the police would have found it on his dead body later on, because he had no warning that anything was about to happen. In fact, it would be far more likely that the perpetrator would have found the gun and used it on other passengers, thereby increasing the number of victims. If someone else on the bus had had a gun, they would have had to a) be aware of what was happening in time to stop it - a long shot at best in this case, since the victim was dead in just a minute or two; b) be trained to use it against people, without hesitation - in other words, cop or military, with experience; c) not catch anyone else in the friendly fire - again, highly unlikey in this situation, on a crowded bus; d) manage to avoid being shot by cops when they spot the gun and assume he's a perpetrator; e) avoid a manslaughter or murder charge when he kills a perpetrator who had not yet murdered anyone.

The most likely scenario is that the original victim would still be dead, the perpetrator would be shot and possibly killed, and a few other people would be wounded in the crossfire; it's fairly likely that the hero would end up dead as well, killed by the cops when they shot first and asked questions later.

4) We could have prevented this with better mental health care! The system is at fault!

We don't have enough information to make that call yet. The perpetrator is an immigrant, has been in Canada four years. If he's landed or a citizen, he'd have access to health care, but that doesn't mean he made use of that access. If he didn't realize anything was wrong with him, or if he realized it but didn't seek help, then the mental health system bears absolutely no blame in this case; you can't blame a system for not treating someone who didn't seek treatment. If, on the other hand, he sought treatment but was turned away as not sick enough, there may be a case to be made for blaming the system. But to jump immediately into blaming the health care system for its failure is premature at best. You don't blame the system for not preventing a heart attack if the patient never bothered to schedule checkups. And honestly, most of the time, you wouldn't blame the system anyway, because if someone is under treatment for a heart condition, it's entirely possible that the treatment won't work in time to prevent the heart attack that kills them. Even if he was under psychiatric care, if he wasn't taking his meds or the correct med or dosage had not yet been arrived at, he could still have had a psychotic break. In a nutshell, we can't cure everyone fast enough to stop things that are already in progress from continuing to their conclusions. It would be great if we could, and it's a goal to work towards, but we can't and it's ridiculous to expect that we could.

Sometimes senseless killings happen. That's just the way it is. We have to trust that our legal and healthcare systems will do their best to get to the bottom of it, but the fact remains that a young man is dead for no reason other than he sat next to a very sick man on a bus. This is not something we can stop from happening from time to time. It falls under the heading of "serenity to accept the things we cannot change."

My letter is in the paper today, alongside one from a Flamborough resident claiming their services have decreased since amalgamation and they're going to refuse to pay the increase in taxes. All of the service decreases have happened across the city - I don't have bulk garbage pick-up either, and it's not because of they city saving money, it's because they want those items being recycled as often as possible, so getting charities to pick them up instead of the city saves both money and landfill space.

The reason: social services costs were downloaded to municipalities by the provincial government around the same time as amalgamation. Hamilton is the poorest big city in the country by a significant margin, so we have more social service costs. The city is not allowed to run a deficit budget (thankfully.) The result: money for services that actually should be governed by municipalities, like sewers and roads, is being diverted to social services, which Hamilton needs far, far more in the inner city than the pleasant, semi-rural suburb of Flamborough ever will.

Meanwhile, Harper and Flaherty sit on their high horses (constructed of equal parts moral superiority and oil revenues from Alberta) and refuse to cough up any of the federal surplus to help aging cities cope with their infrastructure maintenance or new growth, and the provincial government is struggling to stay balanced and still fund all the stuff they've committed to funding - which doesn't include infrastructure cash. (Of course, there's a proposal on the table for a light rail system in Hamilton, which is a fabulous idea if they do it right, but I suspect they won't.)

This didn't start out as a political rant. I suppose I should start over with the other stuff in a new post and leave this one public. :)

Last Saturday, as soon as my friends collected me from the airport, we all drove over to Wild Oats, an organic/health food supermarket with a nice deli and eating area. While there, Q picked up a tract to show me. I snagged it to blog about, and briefly considered going back and snagging all the tracts on the rack so as to limit their exposure for a bit, but I didn't.

On to the snark!

The tract starts out with an imposing title: "ARE YOU LIKE MOST PEOPLE?"

The answer is presumably supposed to be yes, but since I have a pathological aversion to being considered normal, my immediate response was, "Of course not." Thus I was quite relieved upon reading the next line: "If so, you're going to HELL."

But my chortle of relief was stopped in its tracts (pun intended) by the next line: "Don't laugh, it's not a joke." Oh, okay. I stopped laughing and started reading with an eye to refutation. Exactly what arguments were they going to try to use to convince me that most people living in the Bible Belt of Tennessee (we were in Memphis at the time) under the shadow of a church my friends had dubbed "Fort God," were in fact going to HELL?

The first argument is known to debaters as an appeal to authority - in this case, the authority of the Bible, specifically the King James. (More on that later.) The tract reads, "You've heard that Jesus said "wide is the gate; and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat;" but, "narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it" (Mt:7:13 & 14). In modern English, what that says is, "The road to Hell is like a major freeway that is packed with cars; but the road to Heaven is like a little side road that hardly anyone takes." Ah, so that's how it works. Most people are taking the freeway, because, well, it's faster and less inclined to leave chips in the paint of your car, and there are fewer water-filled ditches. (This is the Mississippi valley. Ditches are always full.) Leaving aside the fact that they used an archaic translation and then translated it for a modern audience, I noticed that they didn't bother to give a reason why we should believe this particular authority. After all, that's what an appeal to authority usually entails: "This person is so smart, and so knowledgeable about his topic, that we should believe everything he says. He clearly knows better than we do." But the tract didn't say that. I read on, looking for it. I didn't have to read far.

The next paragraph reads, "In Luke chapter 13, when He was asked, "Lord, are there few that be saved?" Jesus answered, "Strive to enter in at the strait gate: for many, I say unto you, will seek to enter in and shall not be able." In other words, "Yes, very few will be saved, most people will try to get to Heaven but won't make it."" This is just another section of the appeal to authority above, no new information, except that it directs the tract towards people who already consider themselves Christians. I find it intriguing that the people writing the tract clearly consider themselves to be authorities, and by extension, to be among the saved, and I have to wonder where that surety comes from if their mostly-Christian audience can't also be sure of their salvation.

But now we get to the real kicker: the reason why you should trust the authority they're offering. The next line reads, "If you don't believe that, you're not alone. Most people don't!" I would love to see their stats on that, especially for Bible-Belt Memphis, but they didn't offer any stats so I can't comment on them, except to say that I think they're wrong; I suspect most people, that is, more than fifty percent, of the population of Memphis are in fact churchgoing Christians. But when your worldview requires you to see the depraved around every corner, and to try to save them, of course you're going to have to convince people that they're more depraved than they think they are. Otherwise you're going to have to go to a place that actually needs preachers, and that involves an awful lot of work. Directing tracts at nominal Christians in a grocery store in your own city is much easier, and provides that nice glow of having done something good for the Lord.

The title under the unsupported assertion that most people don't believe they're going to hell even if they're trying not to, reads, "Noah's Ark." Then the paragraph: "Most people didn't believe they were going to die in a flood but they did! (I'd add a couple of commas to that sentence if I were the editor, but that's nitpicky so it's my last grammar comment. Really.) Noah warned them but it just seemed too far out for most people to believe back in Noah's time either. Only eight people boarded Noah's Ark and were saved from the destruction of the flood. What happened to the several billion other people who were on the earth at that time? God drowned every one of them!" First, we've got an appeal to the same authority as before - the Bible - without any reason why we should trust the Bible as an authority. That says to me that their target audience is people who already accept the authority of the Bible - or people who aren't educated/smart enough to see through an appeal to authority without support of that authority's credentials. Second, we've got some very Old Testament theology there, though the tract is theoretically Christian and Christianity is supposed to supplant the Old Testament. The God of Christianity doesn't smite whole peoples. He sends his Son to save them. They've missed a key evolution in Christian theology. Their version, unfortunately, is central to Fundamentalist teachings, and very, very wrong.

There's a paragraph about how no one draws pictures about the terrified people and bloated bodies during the flood. Can we say hyperbole? How about scare tactic? Following that is another Old Testament story, this time about Sodom and Gomorrah, with a reference to how homosexuality is just another form of love, but they were wrong about that. Apparently you can still smell the fire and brimstone in the air at the ruins of Sodom and Gomorrah. Really? I didn't think archaeologists had found Sodom and Gomorrah! *checks Wikipedia* Nope, no consensus as to where they were or what happened to them. I doubt you'd be able to smell anything some four thousand years after the event, unless of course the two infamous cities happened to be sitting on top of an active volcano. Actually, that would explain a lot. Bottom line: more unsupported assertions, graphic readings of disputed texts, and appeals to an unsupported authority.

We finally get to the reason after that - we're at the middle panel of the fold-out tract now, by the way. Apparently, most people are going to Hell simply because they don't believe it will happen to them. Further down, under the heading, "Hell", the tract says that the reason Jesus talked about Hell more than anyone else was because he created it. And here I thought it was because Jesus was schooled in the apolcalyptic traditions of Daniel and a few other prophets that didn't make it into our Bible, and was teaching their view of things. It's the same viewpoint that saturates Revelation, depending on how you interpret that book. But I digress. The next bit is interesting: "That's why He came to save us from Hell. You've probably heard of John 3:16, "For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life." Perish means "spend eternity in Hell!"" That seems like an extrapolation to me - last I checked, "perish" simply meant "die."

We get into another debate technique next - the personal appeal. It says, "Friend, I didn't write the Bible, I'm just telling you what it says. You will have to make up your own mind about whether or not you want to believe it, but just remember that your beliefs will not change reality." Oh, so he's not going to bother to support his authority. It is what it is, and if you don't believe it, it's your funeral. In fact, that's almost verbatim from the next section, which talks about funerals all over the world happening right now for people whose souls are crying out for mercy in Hell. It's too late for them, but not for us! Then there's the appeal to accept Jesus' free gift of Salvation, which he's waiting on baited breath to give you.

The next part is the fun part. It's titled, "No Accident." It reads, "This literature (that word in this context made me wince) did not come into your hands by accident. Jesus knew when and where you would receive it. He had it brought to you now because He is calling you now." Apparently, God directs the lives of believers and unbelievers alike to the point where it is HIS will, not our own, that has us glancing towards a rack of tracts and picking one up. Isn't this directly contradicted by the idea that God's will doesn't control us - our will controls us - as stated two paragraphs later? It's magical thinking at its absolute best.

There's a bit about not delaying, and then there's a prayer that you can pray to make yourself right with God. It has far too few commas. (Sorry. I said I wouldn't do that. But it really does.) The section after that is about taking up the cross, and includes a lot of imagery about spiritual warfare that always made me a little uncomfortable. (Yes, I grew up in the Salvation Army. That means I heard it a lot. That means I was uncomfortable a lot.)

It's the last section, however, that is the absolute gem of the whole tract. It is titled, "The Best Bible," and reads, "The King James Version of the Bible is the most accurate English translation. All of the others, although they claim to be easier to read and understand, have watered down God's Word to one degree or another. Most of these modern versions were translated by unbelievers and sinners and should not be trusted." Let's see, here. The modern translations have watered down God's word? What was the author of this tract doing when he quoted the King James and then reinterpreted it for a modern audience? Do I sense some hypocrisy? Furthermore, the modern translations were translated by unbelievers and sinners. Isn't everyone a sinner? Or just the people who believe differently from the author? He quoted the correct verse himself: "all have sinned," and "the wages of sin is death." (The comma that should be after the "and" is missing because the tract left it out, and I would not presume to interpret their meaning by putting it back in. Oh, wait.)

All in all, an entertaining read. I charge you, my loyal readers, with this task: every time you stumble across a tract written and published by "Oil For Your Lamp" Ministries (the quotation marks are theirs, not mine) please grab them all, take them home, and shred them. Or use them to fertilize your garden. They're worth a little less than their weight in cow manure for that purpose, but I'm sure they'd be better off there than in some poor unthinking sod's hands.

Complexity theory, and what happened to Yellowstone. Sent to me by my brother, and an interesting read. I'd love to see someone apply it to the accountability drive in education.

The guest speaker at yesterday's session was Dr. Ruby Payne, from Corpus Christi, Texas, and she was speaking on the mindset of different classes in regards to money, time, possessions, and "hidden rules." It was very informative and not what I'd expected at all.

First, I'd like to point out that every situation is different, and I'm hoping that no one will take this information and use it to stereotype all poor people as being this way. However, our brains function by discerning patterns, and knowing the patterns helps us to plan and analyze, so we need to hear the patterns. I'm speaking in generalities with the firm knowledge that there are many cases where they don't hold true.

There were quite a few questions of the "put up your hand if your answer to X was yes" type, and most of them simply proved that everyone in that room had a middle-class mindset. A poverty mindset - that is, the mindset of someone who grows up and lives their whole life in generational poverty - is very different.

For example: a middle-class person sees money as a tool to get what they value, which is possessions. Middle-class people define themselves and each other by their houses, their cars, their computers, their degrees on the wall. They also define themselves by what they do for a living. Rich people define themselves primarily by their connections, which is why the biggest faux pas you can make at a gathering of wealthy people is to introduce yourself. Other people should introduce you, and if they introduce you only as, "My very dear friend," the subtext is, "who doesn't know anybody important."

Poor people define themselves by their relationships, and see money as a communal thing that is used to keep the wolf from the door. If a poor person asks another poor person to lend them money, one of the hidden rules of their class is that they must lend it or risk alienating that person - and then who's going to help that person the next time the wolf is at THEIR door? The mindset that you can save money to buy something you want doesn't generally work, because they know that if they're the only person who has money when the baby needs medicine, guess who's going to be buying the medicine?

The generational poor often lack a future story, which means they don't know how to plan for the future - or don't believe that they'll have one, or believe that it will be exactly like their present. The existence of a future story for middle-class people is what keeps us from flipping the bird at a nasty boss and walking out; we're there because putting up with it means we'll get ahead in our jobs, or have a good retirement, or be able to put our kids through university. People who don't have that concept that life can be made better are living without a plan, without hope, and therefore with no reason to try. So they might as well spend it as they get it, because if they save it someone will borrow it anyway, and in the long run it doesn't matter because nothing is ever going to change until they die. That's why poor people might not be able to pay the rent, but they've got the latest game system. Entertainment keeps the emotional wolf from the door, and is more valuable to them than saving money.

In order to pull out of generational poverty, you need two things: education, and a significant relationship. Usually, a poor person will have to give up relationships with other poor people in order to climb out of poverty. This is why many poor parents secretly fear their children's success: they know that if their kids are successful in school, they're more likely to leave, and the relationship that will take care of them in their old age will be gone. Parents who do help their kids succeed are attempting upward mobility, which usually takes about three generations, barring a catastrophe that sets the family back. The first generation is the working poor who struggle to make sure their kids can finish school and get a white-collar working-class job - as a bank clerk or a secretary, for example. The third generation, the first one to be firmly middle-class, are often civil servants, teachers, or in other extremely secure positions. (This is me, btw, and when she asked how many people in the room fit the profile of the third generation out of working poverty, three-quarters of the room put up their hands.)

The middle-class world is an abstract, representational reality. We can spend our entire paycheque without once handling cash. We teach our toddlers that the apple in the fridge can be represented by a red circle with a stem in a book. We know that when you see a picture of a person's head, you expect the neck and shoulders to be at the bottom and the forehead to be at the top. The language register that goes with this is also abstract and representational - and formal. Kids who grow up in this world have better vocabularies at age four than do the adults in the average family that has been poor for three generations or more.

The generational poor - and the more poor they are, and the further outside of a public education system they are, the more true this is - live in a world where the language is casual and referential. It includes a lot of gestures and general words, and often includes some code that only those in the same casual register and the same geographic area are going to get. Kids who grow up in this environment are expected to come to school and switch gears to formal language, the language of the middle class, and the language of most working environments. They have fewer actual experiences to back up what they know, and their language breaks one of the hidden rules of the middle class - that school is a middle-class place and you are expected to speak with school-type, formal language. They often get in trouble for not knowing how to speak "respectfully," i.e. using the formal language teachers expect. Furthermore, if they learn to speak that way and then take that language home and practise it there, they're going to get in trouble at home, because they've broken a hidden rule of their own class by speaking above everyone else around them. They don't dare do that, because those relationships are the most precious things they own, so they continue to speak the way they were raised. If the school is mostly kids from poor neighbourhoods, they'll resist speaking in the formal language that teachers request because their relationships with their poor peers are more important to their survival at that moment than their relationship to their teacher or their education. This is the root reason for gang formation.

I think that's the gist of it. It was a very informative and interesting talk, and has given me a window to see into the lives of some of my students.

Fallacy: "If the government hadn't taken all those Canada Pension Plan payments over the last forty years (read: Social Security) and instead had left the money in the hands of the people who earned it, those people could have gotten three times the return on it over the course of their lifetimes, compared to what CPP will pay out to them. Ergo, the government does a poor job of investing and should get out of the business of retirement funding, because obviously, individuals could do it better."

Logic problem #1: Most people don't save as much as they should. The majority of people, faced with a tax break of some kind (or a tax that was never implemented to begin with) will not invest the money thus kept in their pockets. They'll spend it. What's more, most of them will not even realize they've spent it. If that payroll tax was 6%, it's estimated that 60% of people wouldn't increase their savings at all, 20-30% would increase their savings by a fraction of that amount, and perhaps ten percent would increase their saving by the same proportion as the tax break they were given. End result: 90% of the population would be less prepared for retirement than they needed to be.

Logic problem #2: If fifteen million working Canadians suddenly invested 6% more of their income in RRSPs, the rate of return would not be the same as it is now; it would likely be substantially lower. (I don't really understand how this works, but my brother-in-law with an economics degree says it's true. If anyone can elaborate on it, I'd be interested to figure it out.) Judging prospective earnings of the past forty years based on the earnings of the people who actually DID invest is a "what-if" exercise at best. My history profs always slammed me for writing "what-ifs" into my essays. I can only assume the same would be true of economics profs.

Logic problem #3: Just because some people abuse the system (for example, moving back to their country of origin for retirement, where they live rich off their CPP) doesn't mean it's a bad system. It means there are loopholes that perhaps could use some closing.

Sociology problem #1: Just because some, or perhaps even many, people are capable of doing for themselves something that the government is offering to help them do, doesn't mean the government is wasting its effort or its money by helping. It is reasonable, in our nearly-post-scarcity society, to ensure a minimal level of prosperity for all citizens. That's a fancy way of saying there is no excuse for allowing people to starve or live in squalor when the rest of us are (comparatively) rich. The Canada Pension Plan is not like pension plans through companies or private RRSPs. It's not an investment in your own future as much as it is a method of paying it forward through taxes. It's a fundamental element of the social safety net, and I am unwilling to risk finding out what our society would be like without it.

Other than, "not me?"

merlyn4441 posted a link to a site that actually defines the five principles of conservatism, and proves that pretty much none of the current republicans in Washington meet any of them. I find them interesting, and I'm sure there are other rebuttals from a liberal point of view out there, but I'm going to post mine anyway, because that's what a blog is for. :)

So, the itemized list:

-The first necessary ingredient for a conservative is a belief in smaller government. Particularly at the federal level. Statism is Leftism--an all-powerful, centralized government. Conservatives oppose this, embracing state's rights and a smaller, less centralized federal government. This is the foundational cornerstone of conservatism.

Okay, I'm off to a bad start. I believe in efficiency. I want things done in such a way that we spend minimal resources on administering the job and maximal resources on actually doing it. I abhor waste, especially when it comes in the form of back-room payouts for services never rendered. Thus far, I do actually agree with most conservatives. However, I don't believe that government is always the wrong way to go about efficiently doing the job. If a large segment of the population needs a service, and the service is such that many people would be unable to afford it if it were not public, and if private, for-profit provision of that service will serve shareholders better than customers (for example, in the insurance industry, particularly heath insurance) then perhaps the government is the right organization to provide the service. Also, it is sometimes easier to hold a government accountable for their actions than an individual company.

-The second necessary ingredient for a conservative is a belief in national sovereignty and isolationism. Conservatives do not believe in foreign aid or foreign entanglements. They revere American sovereignty. Yes, conservatives do believe in a strong national defense--but national defense as mandated by the Constitution and the Monroe Doctrine. An invasive military empire is not mandated. Therein lies a crucial difference.

I don't like invasive military empires. I'm also not particularly crazy about isolationism. I believe in the UN - or rather, I believe in what it stands for, not in what it is currently capable of doing. So, I want a happy medium on this one.

-The third necessary ingredient is a belief in the Rule of Law---beginning with the Constitution of the United States. The Bill of Rights is essentially sacrosanct. A conservative does not believe in a "living Constitution".

This is one of the ones where I agree, in a Canadian context, of course. Naturally, that muddies the waters: our Charter of Rights and Freedoms is younger than I am and created by the most liberal of the Liberal Prime Ministers, Pierre Elliot Trudeau.

-A fourth necessary ingredient to conservatism is a belief in traditional values. It is here that politics over such things as Roy Moore's Ten Commandments come into play. However, traditional values, are, by their very nature, regressive. It is true that there is no constitutional separation of church and state, as commonly stated, but there is also Freedom of Worship, and a generalized restriction of government authority. Therefore no allowances exist for the federal government to dabble in the religion business one way or the other. Real conservatives, being strict constructionists, would protect the religious rights of the individual without exploiting Christianity for seizure of power.

I think this one needs more explanation, but I have a feeling I'd disagree with it. In the words of the same great liberal mentioned above, "The State does not belong in the bedrooms of the nation." As far as I'm concerned, consenting adults can do whatever they want so long as it doesn't impinge on anyone else's freedom to do whatever THEY want. My personal values are fairly traditional, but they don't necessarily spill over into the political sphere, nor is there any reason why they should.

So, I'm not sure if I disagree or not. I can see points of agreement there, but I frame them differently.

-The fifth necessary ingredient to conservatism is adherence to principle. The stubborn instinct to stand firm on issues, rejecting political expediency, in other words. Conservatism cannot exist without an ideological backbone, because one of the most basic philosophies behind conservatism is preservation of tradition. Traditions cannot survive in the absence of principles.

Aside from a knee-jerk reaction based, I think, in the anthropology and psychology I've studied, (which say that tradition can certainly exist in the absence of principles and that principles are usually justifications for existing traditions rather than reasons for them - at the very best, there's a serious chicken-or-the-egg question inherent in that statement) I mostly agree here. I try hard to be consistent in my beliefs, though I've certainly been known to change them, usually because someone convinced me through reasoned and respectful debate.

So, basically, two out of five. That settles it, then. I'm more liberal than conservative.