I watched Idiocracy with my wife and older children on Saturday. It's the funniest dark comedy I've ever seen. The premise: a young man wakes up 500 years in the future and finds that America has dumbed down beyond belief. All of society engages behaves like the elements of society that we typically associate with the lower classes. The movie's language is filthy, but for a purpose: in the idiocracy, people use F and S words because they're too dumb to speak normally; they're obsessed with sex because it requires no intelligence and appeals to the most animal element. Perhaps the best part of the movie is the background: the middle and upper-classes stopped having children back in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, so the lower classes and their reduced IQs crowded out intelligence. A kind of reverse Social Darwinism.
Added bonus: The movie is short, about 90 minutes.
A very enjoyable romp. Rent it . . . but make sure no children are within earshot.
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From what I can tell, beer drinking has greatly decreased at the high school level compared to levels during my high school years in the 1980s, but sexual activity has greatly increased. Eight years ago, Tom Wolfe wrote about the teen culture of "hooking up" and oral sex. Those items don't appear to have decreased (is it possible to put that horned cat back in the bag?), but now it's gone technological, from racy Facebook pages to the new phenom, "sexting."
In an unusual legal case arising from the increasingly popular practice known as “sexting,” six Pennsylvania high school students are facing child pornography charges after three teenage girls allegedly took nude or semi-nude photos of themselves and shared them with male classmates via their cell phones.
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Tolerance and the suppression. The tolerance police want you to think they're buckets in the well: one goes up, the other goes down. That's not always the case. Too often, they rise and lower together. Just check out today's Netherlands.
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If you want to understand the credit crunch and bailout, this (unfortunately lengthy) piece is the best overview and analysis I've seen.
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One of the best educational ideas I've heard in a long time: We need to pay teachers who teach the hard subjects more . . . and pay the other teachers less. America continues to fall behind in the areas related science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). One reason: high quality people aren't motivated to teach those more difficult subjects because the pay scale simply isn't there. The answer: motivate them with more pay. The writer applies the analysis to K-12, but it seems to me that it's properly a high school issue for the most part.
Attracting such people to STEM teaching requires a compensation system that recognizes their talents. Unfortunately, though, the way we pay public-school teachers today–based exclusively on seniority and number of advanced degrees held–doesn't work.
Research consistently finds that these two attributes have little or nothing to do with teachers' actual ability to improve student learning. Paying the same salaries to teachers of widely varying effectiveness is inefficient, to say the least. But another big problem with the current pay system, especially when it comes to STEM teaching, is that it compensates teachers in different subjects equally, too, and this ignores labor-market realities. With the same number of years in the classroom and the same number of advanced degrees, a high school gym teacher earns the same salary as a high school chemistry teacher.
A better system would pay STEM teachers more than their counterparts.
Yeah, I know: The NEA won't allow it. But we can dream.
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This proposed new Detroit Lions helmet is flying through Michigan cyberspace right now:
