Santa Cruz, CA – In a classic clash between customer delight and business realities, the very busy Lulu Carpenter’s coffeehouse is throttling WiFi squatters to restore profitable client turnover! No Internet when I was in college, but I still managed to spend a lot of time at The Wooden Shoe coffee shop during all night study sessions amid throngs of friends. You had to supply your own Bennies, but the coffee refills were free!
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NYT today — “Panel Releases Proposal to Set U.S. Standards for Education“
“The standards, posted on the panel’s web site, lay out the panel’s vision of what American public school students should learn…”
Education is not the same as programming computers. Education is not about the content to be learned but the process of learning. Without methods, standards are worse than useless. Teachers will do whatever it takes to meet standards and students will learn to do whatever it takes as well — education be damned. Without a theory of learning and a methodology for promoting and facilitating learning, the educational enterprise will do more harm than good to human beings.
So what is the current educational methodology in America? Get a bigger hammer.
Come on folks! It’s not WHAT you know that matters. It’s HOW you know.
The news just keeps getting worser and worser. NYT today – Pressed by Charters, Public Schools Try Marketing
Nothing reflects the systematic destruction of the American dream more than the deconstruction of our system of public schools. Even president Obama is razzled and dazzled by the free competitive markets scam. Anyone who understands child development and education knows that performance-based pay for teachers and charter schools that compete with public schools for students is a recipe for educational disaster. Individual teachers do not determine educational outcomes and selective institutions with gimmicks do not make an educational system.
There are no low-performing schools in rich communities and the lowest performing schools are embedded in impoverished communities. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out what’s going on, though it might help if people had even a modest acquaintance with the art of thought rather than bellies distended from the crap dished out by corporate ad men, lobbyists, and political lackeys.
Such destruction! It makes a man want to cry.
Today’s NYT – “…consumers have become hesitant to buy Toyotas as questions remain about whether the recall repairs will solve problems with unintended acceleration and about how quickly the company reacted to the problem. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is investigating the timeliness of Toyota’s recalls.”
This “moving” graphic of unemployment rate changes in the U.S. over the past two years does a pretty good job of putting jobs, or lack thereof, in perspective.
The darker the shading, the higher the unemployment rate.
Archive for Short Takes »
I worked in restaurants while in high school and college and was always told by management that a key to profitability was ‘table turn over’. On a busy (say, Saturday) night turning a table over three times rather than two markedly affected profitability. The expectation was we (the waitstaff) would hurry patrons along to get that extra turn-over before closing. Maybe if he’d had a profit sharing plan I would have cared…
But I digress.
When I moved to Thailand I noticed that in clubs and restaurants there was no such pressure. One could get there early, dine and sit around the table and chat and never feel the slightest pressure to leave. You could go into a bar, order one beverage and ‘nurse’ it the rest of the evening. The waiter or waiteress would ask if you wanted another, but it was not done in a pressuring way.
What a difference in experience! Now, back in America, when in restaurants I always feel rushed and it dampens my fun in the social part of the experience.
Of course, the restaurant needs to be profitable to survive, but perhaps trading profitability off with the customers desires is not the best route to success. Maybe it’s just the most obvious.