Vocabulary Woes . . .

Friday afternoon, Liz was scrambling to make photo-copies in the English office, but the machine was jammed, and so I gallantly offered to walk across the school to the copy room and make her the copies (I actually wasn't being that chivalrous, I was hung-over and needed some exercise and a purpose in my life) and she thanked me and said, "Can you judge it for me, also?" and for a moment I was stumped-- I assumed "judging it" was some obscure photo-copy terminology . . . perhaps it meant to shrink down the text and copy it horizontally, like leaves in a book or something . . . and so I said, "I don't know how to do that," but she explained that she just wanted me to attempt the quiz and decide if it was fair-- so as I walked across the building I took a look at it, but when I saw it was a matching vocabulary quiz I nearly lost interest (because as everyone who has the patience to listen to me knows, I claim to be a walking dictionary) but then I noticed that this was no ordinary vocabulary quiz . . . it was only seven words, but these were the words: convivial, congenial, amicable, affable, jocular, levity, and cordial . . . and, you had to discern between seven extremely similar matching definitions, and needless to say, I did NOT get 100% and perhaps my claim that I am a walking dictionary is a bit overblown . . . but perhaps I'm a walking thesaurus.

The Professor and the Madman Lives Up to Its Subtitle

The subtitle of Simon Winchester's book The Professor and the Madman is "A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary," and it comes through brilliantly on all accounts; there is a mysterious murder in the "louche and notoriously crime-ridden" London neighborhood of Lambeth Marsh; there is a detailed account of American military surgeon Dr. Minor, who-- despite his paranoid fantasies of Irishmen and pygmies living beneath his floorboards, depraved folk waiting until dark to come out and commit lewd and indecent acts on him-- manages to be the most significant contributor to the OED; and, as any book that is about making the OED should, it has some really hard vocabulary words, here are a few that I had to look up: louche, tocsin, breveted, and (warning! spoiler!) autopeotomy.

Peccary vs. Pessary

The Group (by Mary McCarthy) is a frank book about eight Vassar girls in the 1930's who speak candidly about men, sex, contraception, finances, and sexism-- and though I pride myself on my extensive vocabulary,  I had to look up the word "pessary". . . and I'll bet that you don't know what a "pessary" is either, and we are not talking about a "peccary," we are talking about a "pessary"-- and believe me, they are not interchangeable at all.

Dave Learns Something! Maybe Even Two Things!

Although I am a self-proclaimed Master of Vocabulary, every so often a student stumps me with a word (and I'm not talking about slang . . . I learn slang from the kids all the time -- my favorite new term this year is "ratchet") but last week I learned about word that's in the actual dictionary that I never dreamed exist -- a girl in my Creative Writing class wrote a poem about working in a shoe-store (she actually works in a shoe-store) and she used the word "brannock," and apparently a brannock is the device used to measure someone's shoe size.

Sometimes It Is Good To Vent Your Anger

I skimmed this insane article and it seems that Play Doh really is non-toxic and edible (although there is a petroleum based lubricant in it . . . it could also serve as a laxative) and so I am wondering why  Hasbro makes the Play Doh container more difficult to open than a bottle of Percocet; I have strong guitar playing fingers and the colorful plastic tops still cut a deep ravine into my calloused fingers . . . so how are my children ever supposed to be ever to take initiative and become sculptors if they can't open the containers? . . . and while I am on this theme: why did Didier Boursin write a book for children titled Origami Paper Airplanes which-- if you would like to comprehend the instructions and actually complete one of the airplanes-- requires that you have a PhD in geometry and an extensive technical vocabulary (including the understanding of such terms as "mountain fold" and "water-bomb base" and "pleat fold") when he knew it was going to be placed in a elementary school library? . . . I think it might be easier to let my kids play with matches.

Short Attention Span Literature

It's nice when an excellent author writes something easy and fun . . . so though you may not have had the literary endurance to digest Cormac McCarthy's masterpiece Suttree, at least you can breeze through No Country for Old Men or The Road . . . and I never made it through Denis Johnson's Vietnam epic Tree of Smoke but I whipped through his new one, Nobody Move, a dead ringer for a classic Elmore Leonard novel (complete with precise Leonardesque vocabulary, the car door squeaked because the bushings were shot).

Can You Build a Teacher Bigger, Faster, Stronger?

Elizabeth Green's book Building a Better Teacher: How Teaching Works (and How to Teach It to Everyone) avoids most of the politics that Dana Goldstein covers in The Teacher Wars: A History of America's Most Embattled Profession and instead focuses on the quest to find out what good teaching is and what characteristics a good teacher possesses; along the way she dispels some myths-- one is that teachers are "natural born" . . . it would be convenient if this were so, because then it would be simply a matter of firing the worst ten percent of teachers (which is a LOT of people-- there are 3.7 million teachers in America . . . it is by far the largest number of white collar workers in any one profession, as a comparison, there are 180,000 architects and 1.3 million engineers) and replacing them with folks that are "born to teach" and then all our test scores would rise, but though there have been plenty of attempts, there are no particular characteristics or personality traits or intellectual capacities that make a good teacher-- as long as you are smart enough, it's something you learn . . . then there are the folks that just think if there were enough accountability and testing, we could figure out where the problems are-- but these sort of data collection set-ups don't actually help teachers improve and generally collpse under their own weight, and on the other side of the coin are the autonomy people, who believe that good teaching results from teachers being completely on their own, free of testing and data . . . but there's no indication that this is the case either; Green goes to Japan, a country that test far better than us in math, and she finds that they use a system very different than ours, where teachers have a lighter class load, but much more time to collaborate and observe colleagues, and then study and criticize their lessons in an intense fashion-- and, ironically, the Japanese learned this system from the United States-- we invented it, but we never implemented it (the book closely observes math teaching and an easy way to spot the difference is that American classes progress in an "I, We, You" fashion-- the teacher demonstrates, the kids work together, and then they try it alone, while Japan works in a "You, Y'all, We" manner, where the kids work on a single problem-- carefully crafted by a team of teachers-- and they work alone and struggle at first, then discuss possible methods with each other, and then have a teacher directed discussion on how they might go about solving the problem) and Green comes to the conclusion that though we've tried some noble experiments (the "zero tolerance" charter schools in impoverished areas and plenty of collaborative programs in certain schools) that we have no national infrastructure for this sort of thing, no shared curriculum and vocabulary in disciplines, and a general incoherence because of state, national, and district mandates (which may or may not conflict with each other) and that more observation (especially by people outside of one's discipline-- which is what is happening now in schools everywhere around the country) is not particularly helpful unless the teacher is a complete trainwreck-- and most teachers are not (in fact, teachers which are rated ineffective one year, have a very good chance of being rated effective the next, so there's a lot of subjectivity in these ratings) and so they need very specific feedback and lesson ideas for their subject area, not more administrative data, but-- as Michael Roth points out in this review of the book, American teachers clock far more hours in the classroom than teachers from other countries (especially successful countries) and so there is no time to collaborate or watch other teachers lessons or team plan, and -- because of the particular American obsession with business and productivity-- I can't imagine our course or student loads ever diminishing, so in a sense, we will remain islands unto ourselves (I am very lucky that a lot of collaboration goes on informally in my department, but it's pretty random and essentially determined by what English teachers you have lunch with . . . which is no way to improve national test scores in reading and math) but you never know, the book is worth reading just for the math ideas alone, which might help you to help your kid with his math homework.

Ten Year Journey to Genius

Every year at the end of October, there is a hellish week of school that combines two things that do not belong together: parent conferences and "spirit week."

For some godforsaken contractual reason we have four days of parent conferences in a row at East Brunswick. Two of these are night sessions, which run from 5:30 PM to 8:30 PM. So teachers either stay at school for 14 hours straight, or-- as I do-- run home to other events and that head back to school for a second time to chat with parents. It's exhausting.

In the midst of this awful week of conferences are the events and preparation for the Homecoming football game and dance. Every day at school is some absurd spirit day, Hippie Day, Hall Decorating Day, Hawaiian Day, Twin Day, etc.

The end of this silly and taxing week culminates with the pep rally. The pep rally is very very loud. Only people who are full of pep enjoy it. Football coaches, cheerleaders, and student council folk.. Soccer coaches are generally not full of pep.

Some teachers have drawn the unlucky duty of having to supervise the students in the bleachers of the stadium, where the amplification of pep is at it's loudest. For the last decade, I have been blessed with a quieter duty, what is known as "flagpole duty." Year after year, the same four teachers and I convene at the flagpole, and I rarely see these teachers during the school year, so "flagpole duty" has the feel of a reunion.

The flagpole is at the entrance to the stadium, far from the pep. The other "flagpole duty" teachers and I have the very important job of directing the sophomores to the left and the juniors to the right. The seniors are already seated in the stadium, as they arrived early for their senior class picture.

East Brunswick High School has over 2000 students (and we don't have any freshman in our building) so this means we need to direct 1400 kids in the right direction. We've always done this by shouting and pointing.

"Sophomores! This way!"

"Juniors! This way!"

We get the herds moving in the right direction, the juniors across the turf to the far section of the bleachers, and the sophomores on the perimeter path, to the near section.

But after ten years of this, my brain said, "Enough!" I was taking a walk around the school-- getting prepared for the pep-- and my brain gifted me with an epiphany. This flagpole session, we didn't need to yell, or even talk at all. I went back to my room and wrote the words "Sophomores" and "Juniors" on a large sheet of paper. I then put a marker in my pocket, and carried my half-completed sign out to the flagpole. Once I had confirmed which grade needed to go which way needed, I drew the arrows. And then I sat on the concrete planter, holding my sign, and everyone walked in the correct direction (except one sophomore, who asked me what a "sophomore" was . . . I told him a 10th grader, and he walked in the proper direction . . . and learned some vocabulary to boot).

What the Hell is a Harrow?

Reading Joy Williams is like scrambling up a muddy embankment . . . but there is no top of the cliff, it's all scrambling; Harrow is set at a cryptic boarding school with strange slogans and then the school closes and then the main character Khristen-- if you could call her that-- finds herself in an odd post-apocalyptic world, a world that has gone beyond the "verge" that we've been at for so long and falls into a slightly more chaotic state-- there are strange episodes at a bowling alley, where a cake with a depiction of Goya's Saturn Devouring His Son offends a youngster, and then a long strange section about seditious geriatrics living around a toxic lake, plotting revenge against ecologically corrupt humans . . . but these plans come to naught, raising the question: why aren't old people more violent and rebellious? they've got nothing to lose, right? . . . I think Joy Williams might be a modern-day Kafka, and she refers to him-- I don't think this book is her best work-- I was more compelled by The Changeling and now I'm making my way through The Quick and the Dead and that one has some roots and rocks in the mud to hang on to, but it does feel a bit like reading Pynchon, except the vocabulary is right there and easier to ascertain and comprehend-- each sentence a little masterpiece, but how do you connect them together . . . or should you?

Like Dungeon Master Like Son

I've been really proud of my boys the past week-- it seems they've forsaken the behaviors that dominated this school year: fighting, insubordination, vandalism, candy smuggling, not looking both ways when crossing the street, getting ISS, losing all their shit (Ian lost five lunch coolers!) and forgetting to do homework . . . this week has been different; Alex has managed to organize a large Dungeons and Dragons game with a number of his friends . . . and he included his brother . . . they've been cooperating, planning, setting things up together, and Ian contributed to the game by getting a game mat and some mini-figures for his birthday and while there's been six or seven 6th and 7th grade boys in my house quite a few times lately, they've been really focused and well-behaved and they sound super-smart, they're talking probability (Ian figured out that opposite sides of the twenty sided die all add to twenty-one) and poring over arcane tomes, learning crazy vocabulary (mace, flail, druid, laying hands, melee, etc.) and speculating about very weird stuff-- can a human have sex with a dragon?-- and while there's been the occasional argument, they've been battling each other in the game more than in reality . . . the thing I like the best about the today's session is that my son Alex-- who is the dungeon master-- made a "phone bin" and forced everyone to turn off their phones off and put them in the bin, so they could focus . . . the apple doesn't fall far from the tree.

A Word To The Wise About A Word

This sentence is about a word that I learned you should NOT to call your wife on a Friday afternoon . . . to explain: my vocabulary lesson began Friday third period, when Eric recommended the movie Super 8 to me-- explaining that it was in adventure in the spirit of The Goonies-- and so I asked him if it was okay for my kids to watch (they are 6 and 7 years old) and he said, "Absolutely," and though he has no kids, he does have a baby on the way, and he once was a kid . . . so I trusted his review and went to the local Redbox and got a Blu-ray copy and proceeded to get my children all amped up for movie night-- a movie that not only would they enjoy, but that mommy and daddy would enjoy as well! and we would order food! and watch the whole thing!-- and then my wife came home and I told her my awesome plan-- to order some food and watch this movie that the entire family would not merely tolerate, but actually enjoy, and she said, "Super 8? I don't think that's for our kids . . . I think that's too scary for them," and Alex, Ian, and I claimed it was NOT too scary and that Eric had recommended it, and when my wife pointed out that Eric didn't have kids, we ignored her logic, and then my wife-- who was already feeling a bit sensitive as a parent because that afternoon my mom and some other teachers gave her a guilt trip about our kids not believing wholeheartedly in the whole Santa myth-- looked up Super 8 on the internet and found some reviews that said the film was a bit scary and inappropriate for young children (perhaps that's why it's rated PG-13) but I found a review by Roger Ebert that said it's like The Goonies and then I called my wife a word that I should not have called her . . . I called her a "buzzkill," which she did not take kindly . . . but because we (meaning all the boys) were adamant that the movie was going to be great, we sat down together and watched it . . . and it really is an excellent film, but it is also mildly inappropriate for young kids: there's an F-bomb (Alex turned to Ian and said, "That was the F-word") and there's some drug use and some major violence and suspense and a fair bit of cursing-- all of which Eric remembered when he was reminded about it, but skipped his mind when he offered his endorsement-- and due to this content, Alex claimed it was "the greatest movie ever" and Ian concurred-- though he hid under the blankets during one scene . . . and every time there was an inappropriate part I had to suffer the withering stare of my wife and her sarcastic, "So I'm a buzzkill?" refrain . . . and though I've banned the use of sarcasm in the house, I let it slide this time because I certainly deserved it.

8/6/2009

Alex has discovered the artifice of modern art, and while he claims that his younger brother Ian draws "real things," he now only works in the realm of the "abstract"-- and it's my fault for teaching him the word-- so while his vocabulary is increasing , his art skills are regressing toward the primitive (and he's quite happy about it).

Enough of That . . . Or Is It?

I finished Dana Goldstein's book The Teacher Wars: A History of America's Most Embattled Profession and while there's certainly fascinating stuff in there (the reason, in the1800's, politicians embraced females invading a traditionally male job was because they would work on the cheap) and the book lays out, in a comprehensive and unbiased manner, the history of teachers and unions, education and desegregation, the various attempts to use testing and teacher evaluation to improve schools, the political and moral panic that often resulted in teachers being persecuted for reasons other than incompetence, the charter school movement, Teach for America, the Race to the Top, No Child Left Behind, and all sorts of other things that I knew only passing information about, but for the layperson the interesting part of the book is the epilogue, where she makes some recommendations based on all her research, and these are logical and worth taking a look at; but for those of you who don't feel like it, which I totally understand (you could be reading a Don Winslow book) here is a short summary:

1) teacher pay matters and while teachers aren't paid poorly in America, they aren't paid nearly as much as in countries with very successful education systems,  such as Finland, South Korea, and Japan-- if teaching jobs aren't coveted, and if teachers aren't as respected as doctors and engineers, then you won't be able to attract excellent candidates;

2) we need to focus on using good teachers as models and creating communities of excellent practice, rather than creating systems of evaluation purely to ferret out the bad teachers-- as these systems always fail because of the insane amounts of paperwork and data they create;

3) tests need to return to their rightful role as diagnostic tools, not as methods to achieve high stakes funding-- which resulted in teaching to the test, gaming the system, and all sorts of illustrations of Campbell's Law;

4) the principal matters as much as the teachers-- exceptional leadership improves the bottom third of teachers and the top third of teachers-- not excess evaluation paperwork;

5) star teachers were not necessarily the best students--so simply hiring people with higher math SAT scores isn't necessarily going to improve American education-- research shows you're better off hiring someone with excellent communication skills, who adeptly uses a large vocabulary, and can explain things well-- even if they once struggled to learn them in the past (and I agree with this, because I was a horrible and disorganized student, and so I know how to contend with this in class);

6) teachers benefit from watching each other work-- but there's usually no time for this (although since I started teaching Serial, a number of my colleagues have observed my class, and it's great-- they're not administrators filling out paperwork while I teach-- so there's no pressure-- and I can ask them for suggestions during the lesson or afterwards);

7) end outdated union protections-- there needs to be a faster way to fire incompetent veteran teachers, and a streamlined way for the teacher to appeal being fired (because teacher appointments and terminations have certainly succumbed to political whims in the past);

8) we are not as homogenous as Finland and there are limitations to our educational system, which is very decentralized, so it's near impossible to use top-down reform to improve our schools-- there's no federal body to check how schools are implementing federal standards, and federal funding is fairly minimal (compared to state and town funding) and we have schools in America with incredibly different study bodies and educational problems, so every school might need a slightly different plan to improve;

and finally, if you want to hear something more condensed on these issues, which features an interview with Dana Goldstein, then listen to this week's episode of Freakonomics: "Is America's Education Problem Really Just a Teacher Problem?"

It's Delicious . . . Enough Said

Stone Delicious IPA lives up to its name-- it's tasty, but not overwhelmingly hoppy, and at 7.7 percent alcohol, it packs quite a punch; the words that come to mind when I drink this beer are:

1) crisp;

2) beer-like;

3) good;

and now for the words that did not come to my mind when I drank this beer-- and I have culled these words from the reviews on Beeradvocate-- so these words really and truly came to someone's mind when they drank this beer:

1) herbaceous;

2) sweet lemon grassy;

3) bready;

4) sweet lemon candy;

5) piney;

6) resinous;

7) not abrasive;

8) fluffy sponge;

9) pungent;

10) orange rind;

11) burlap;

12) burlap?

13) grapefruit pith;

14) black pepper;

15) mellow booze;

16) dirty brass;

17) blurry;

18) parching and numbing;

19) yeast cake;

20) lemon zest;

21) tropicalness;

22) tropicalness?

23) minty touch;

24) antique white head;

25) bold drippings;

26) frothy ice-cream;

27) funky yeast;

28) funky hoppy note;

29) very floral;

30) faint jasmine;

and the contrast between these lists leads me to wonder if my palate exists on the same plane as these poetic, aesthetic and rather prolix folks who write the reviews on Beeradvocate . . . I do appreciate a good beer and I am voluble guy with a prodigious vocabulary, but I am loathe to admit it: very few adjectives come to mind when I drink a beer-- I don't know if this is a skill I can foster, or an attribute I don't possess-- but the next time I have a beer in a relaxing setting . . . after a long day of teaching and coaching, I like to drink a glass of beer while I spray water on my wife's garden, and this might be the perfect venue to find some new and creative flavors and capture them with precision . . . but I have a feeling I'm still going to come up with words like "cold" and "refreshing" and "unlike the bitterness of red wine."

These Regions Go To Eleven

Colin Woodard's 2011 book American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America is just as relevant today as it was when it was published. 

Perhaps more so.

Woodard's thesis is pretty simple. He's actually expanding on a book written in 1981 by Joel Garreau called The Nine Nations of North America. Garreau suggests that North America can be divided into nine nations, which have distinctive economic and cultural features. 

Woodard turns up the history and the conflict between these "nations" to eleven. It's a fun read (for a history text). And timely, of course. It will make you think about the various regional responses to the COVID pandemic. 

For example, I've been browsing rental houses on VRBO. Before you can rent a house or travel to Vermont, a number of requirements need to be met. They want tests, quarantining, and they are wary of travelers from New York and New Jersey. They don't have many cases and they want to keep it that. 

On the other hand, this is what North Carolina has on its website:

Here are some important facts about traveling in North Carolina: 

• All North Carolina borders are open.
• There is no national quarantine.

We ended up renting a house in North Carolina.

This is how Woodard divides things up:

Woodard gets deep into the history that formed his "nations." He begins with the Founding Fathers and notes:

Our true Founders didn’t have an “original intent” we can refer back to in challenging times; they had original intents.

Here are some other selected passages you might find interesting (probably far too many to read through, but I love the highlighting feature on my Kindle. I can then export the notes to a Google doc and vomit them here on the internet).

First of all . . . the big premise:

The United States is a federation comprised of the whole or part of eleven regional nations, some of which truly do not see eye to eye with one another. These nations respect neither state nor international boundaries, bleeding over the U.S. frontiers with Canada and Mexico as readily as they divide California, Texas, Illinois, or Pennsylvania. Six joined together to liberate themselves from British rule. Four were conquered but not vanquished by English- speaking rivals. 

Woodard makes a case against dividing an authentic culture with an artificial barrier.

Mr. Trump, tear down your wall!

 
The borderlands on both sides of the United States–Mexico boundary are really part of a single norteño culture. Split by an increasingly militarized border, El Norte in some ways resembles Germany during the Cold War: two peoples with a common culture separated from one another by a large wall. Despite the wishes of their political masters in Washington, D.C., and Mexico City, many norteños would prefer to federate to form a third national state of their own. 

Sometimes, real history is paradoxical.

English-speaking cowboys would later adopt other Spanish vocabulary, including rodeo, bronco, buckaroo (from vaquero), mustang (from mesteño), bandoleer (bandolera), stampede (from estampida), and ranch (rancho). Oddly enough, it was the Franciscans who introduced this cowboy culture to what is now Texas and California, as tallow and hides were among the only products the missions could profitably ship to the rest of Mexico. Short on labor, the friars trained their neophytes to be their vaqueros, flouting Spanish laws against allowing Indians to ride horses. When the governor of California complained about this practice, a friar responded, “How else can the vaquero’s work of the missions be done?” The first American cowboys were, in fact, Indians.

There were (and are) varying ways that the regions treated the natives. 

Champlain’s vision for New France was more radical and enduring than de Mons’s. While he shared de Mons’s commitment to creating a monarchical, feudal society in North America, he believed it should coexist in a friendly, respectful alliance with the Native American nations in whose territories it would be embedded. Instead of conquering and enslaving the Indians (as the Spanish had), or driving them away (as the English would), the New French would embrace them.

But the Virginia Company’s plan was based on the faulty assumption that the Indians would be intimidated by English technology, believe their employers were gods, and submit, Aztec-like, to their rule. The Indians, in fact, did none of these things. The local chief, Powhatan, saw the English outpost for what it was: weak and vulnerable but a potential source of useful European technology such as metal tools and weapons. 

In one notorious incident, they surrounded a poorly defended Pequot village and butchered virtually every man, woman, and child they found there, mostly by burning them alive. The slaughter was shocking to the Puritans’ temporary Indian allies, the Narragansetts . . .

 When people headed down the coast, to the southern states of Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas . . .

Visitors constantly remarked on their haughty sense of personal honor and their furious reaction to the slightest insult. While the Yankee elite generally settled their disputes through the instrument of written laws, Tidewater gentry were more likely to resort to a duel.

By a twist of history, the dominant colonies of New England were founded by men who stood in total opposition to nearly every value that Tidewater gentry held dear. 

These are the two reasons Americans are insane:

Here were the kernels of the twin political ideologies of America’s imperial age: American Exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny. The first held that Americans were God’s chosen people, the second that He wished Americans to rule the continent from sea to sea.

Woodard is definitely somewhat liberal, and not overly kind to the region he calls the Deep South.

From the outset, Deep Southern culture was based on radical disparities in wealth and power, with a tiny elite commanding total obedience and enforcing it with state-sponsored terror. 

Of course, the Deep South wasn’t the only part of North America practicing full-blown slavery after 1670. Every colony tolerated the practice. But most of the other nations were societies with slaves, not slave societies per se. Only in Tidewater and the Deep South did slavery become the central organizing principle of the economy and culture.

Until the end of the seventeenth century, one’s position in Tidewater was defined largely by class, not race. The Deep South, by contrast, had a black supermajority and an enormous slave mortality rate,
thousands of fresh humans had to be imported every year to replace those who had died. Blacks in the Deep South were far more likely to live in concentrated numbers in relative isolation from whites.
Marriage outside of one’s caste is strictly forbidden. So while the Deep South had rich whites and poor whites and rich and poor blacks, no amount of wealth would allow a black person to join the master caste. 

He admires Greater Appalachia, though I think he's a bit scared of those folk.

The last of the nations to be founded in the colonial period, Greater Appalachia was the most immediately disruptive. A clan-based warrior culture from the borderlands of the British Empire, it arrived on the backcountry frontier of the Midlands, Tidewater, and Deep South and shattered those nations’ monopoly control over colonial governments,

Proud, independent, and disturbingly violent, the Borderlanders of Greater Appalachia have remained a volatile insurgent force within North American society to the present day.

Indian wars and other violence in Appalachia had profound effects on the other nations, particularly the Midlands. 

His take on the Revolutionary War makes sense (but it's not as romantic as what we learned in school).

The military struggle of 1775–1782 wasn’t fought by an “American people” seeking to create a united, continent-spanning republic where all men were created equal and guaranteed freedom of speech, religion, and the press. On the contrary, it was a profoundly conservative action fought by a loose military alliance of nations, each of which was most concerned with preserving or reasserting control of its respective culture, character, and power structure. The rebelling nations certainly didn’t wish to be bonded together into a single republic. 

David Hackett Fischer makes the case for there having been not one American War of Independence but four: a popular insurrection in New England, a professional “gentleman’s war” in the South, a savage civil war in the backcountry, and a “non-violent economic and diplomatic struggle” spearheaded by the elites of what call the Midlands. The four wars, he argues, were fought sequentially and waged in different ways and for different goals. 

The way things finally shook out, The Native Americans were certainly the biggest losers . . .

The American rebellion was precipitated by the Seven Years’ War, a massive global military conflict between Britain and France that lasted from 1756 to 1763. It’s remembered in the United States as the French and Indian War, because here the British fought against New France and its aboriginal allies.

In the end, the French were defeated, and all of New France (save the tiny islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon) was handed over to the British Empire. This had two consequences for the people of the continent. First, it removed from the political and military stage the only European society on which Native North Americans could rely.

During the start of the Revolutionary War, New York and New Jersey weren't particularly interested in freedom, liberation and revolt (perhaps because we are so well situated for trade . . . why rock the boat?)

New Netherland’s patriot uprising met with sudden and complete defeat in the summer of 1776 following the arrival of a British armada of 30 warships, 400 transports, and 24,000 soldiers. This invasion force scattered General Washington’s army, retook the city, and by the end of September occupied an area conforming almost exactly to the boundaries of the New Netherland nation. The rebels dispersed and ecstatic townspeople carried British soldiers around on their shoulders. New Netherland had fought a war against liberation and had lost badly. 

New Jersey simply fell into anarchy. “The state is totally deranged [and] without government,” a Continental Army general observed before the British moved in. “Many [officials] have gone to the enemy for protection, others are out of the state, and the few that remain are mostly indecisive in their conduct.” 

Why are we still arguing about the Constitution? 

In the end, the U.S. Constitution was the product of a messy compromise among the rival nations. From the gentry of Tidewater and the Deep South, we received a strong president to be selected by an “electoral college” rather than elected by ordinary people. From New Netherland we received the Bill of Rights, a set of very Dutch guarantees that individuals would have freedom of conscience, speech, religion, and assembly. To the Midlands we owe the fact that we do not have a strong unitary state under a British-style national Parliament; they insisted on state sovereignty as insurance against Southern despots and Yankee meddling. The Yankees ensured that small states would have an equal say in the Senate.

Why does Canada exist? Perhaps to show us the things that we screwed up . . .

If you’re an American, have you ever really asked yourself why Canada exists? When the American Revolution came about, why did only thirteen rather than eighteen North American colonies wind up revolting?

We’ve been taught to think of the ratification of the 1789 Constitution as the crowning achievement of the American Revolution. Most people living in the United States at the time, however, didn’t see it in quite those terms. Outside Tidewater and the Deep South, many were alarmed by a document they regarded as counterrevolutionary, intentionally designed to suppress democracy and to keep power in the hands of regional elites and an emerging class of bankers, financial speculators, and land barons who had little or no allegiance to the continent’s ethnocultural nations. Indeed, the much-celebrated Founding Fathers had made no secret of this having been one of their goals. They praised the unelected Senate because it would “check the impudence of democracy” (Alexander Hamilton), and stop the “turbulence and follies of democracy” (Edmund Randolph), and applauded the enormous federal electoral districts because they would “divide the community,” providing “defense against the inconveniences of democracy” (James Madison). 

 
The competing philosophies of these eleven nations become abundantly clear during the Civil War.

There is no question that the Deep South seceded and fought the Civil War to defend slavery, and its leaders made no secret of this motive. Slavery, they argued ad nauseam, was the foundation for a virtuous, biblically sanctioned social system superior to that of the free states.

Indeed, many of their leaders even argued that all lower-class people should be enslaved, regardless of race, for their own good.

The planters’ loathing of Yankees startled outsiders. “South Carolina, I am told, was founded by gentlemen, [not by] witch-burning Puritans, by cruel persecuting fanatics who implanted in the north.

“There is nothing in all the dark caves of human passion so cruel and deadly as the hatred the South Carolinians profess for the Yankees,” he continued. “New England is to [them] the incarnation of moral and political wickedness and social corruption

From central Pennsylvania to southern Illinois and northern Alabama, Borderlanders were torn between their disgust with Yankees and their hatred of Deep Southern planters. Both regions represented a threat to Borderlander ideals, but in different ways. The Yankees’ emphasis on the need to subsume one’s personal desires and interests to the “greater good” was anathema to the Appalachian quest for individual freedom; their moral crusades

On the other hand, Borderlanders had already suffered generations of oppression at the hands of
aristocratic slave lords and knew that they were the people the planters had in mind when they talked about enslaving inferior whites.

And there are some fables of the Reconstruction:

In all three nations the resistance to Reconstruction was largely successful. There could be no return to formal slavery, but the racial caste system was restored, backed by laws and practices that effectively prevented blacks from voting, running for office, or asserting their common humanity. In the Deep South and Tidewater, single-party rule became the norm and was exercised to resist change, social reform, or wide citizen participation in politics. 

Meanwhile, in Greenwich Village . . .

From that single square mile tucked inside the tolerant cocoon of New Netherland would spring much of what the religious conservatives of the Dixie bloc would later mobilize against: the gay beatniks and their hippie successors, left-wing intellectualism, and the antiwar movement. Like seventeenth-century Amsterdam, New Netherland provided a sanctuary for heretics and freethinkers from more rigid nations.

This conflict finally came to a head during the Civil Rights movement:

In 1955 the three nations of the Dixie bloc were still authoritarian states whose citizens—white and black—were required to uphold a rigid, all-pervasive apartheid system. 

In Mississippi, it was illegal to print, publish, or distribute “suggestions in favor of social equality or of intermarriage between whites and Negroes,” with perpetrators subject to up to six months in prison. Klansmen and other vigilante groups tortured and executed blacks who violated these rules, often with the public approval of elected officials, newspaper editors, preachers, and the region’s leading families.

Across the Dixie bloc white Southerners initially reacted to the movement with disbelief, having been conditioned to think that “our Negroes” were “happy” to be oppressed, patronized, and deprived of basic human and civil rights. 

And the liberal folks from NYC were to blame:

Clearly, their beloved blacks were being manipulated by what Deep Southern politicians called “outside agitators”—Yankees and New Netherlanders—who were often also believed to be communists.

Damn Yankees!

Take the environmental movement, for instance. The entire history of the movement prior to Earth Day took place in the four Public Protestant nations, where the spiritual emphasis was on bettering this world rather than preparing for the next. 

Another New Yorker, President Theodore Roosevelt, pioneered federal government involvement in environmental protection, founding the national forest, park, and wildlife refuge systems. Roosevelt’s Yankee cousin, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, created the National Wildlife Federation in 1936.


Not every region is as concerned about the environment (or the people who work in it) as Yankeedom.

To keep wages low, all Dixie-bloc states passed laws making it difficult to organize unions—which their politicians sold as protecting the “right to work."

Taxes are kept too low to adequately support public schools and other services.

From the gas fields of Louisiana to the industrial hog farms of North Carolina, environmental and workplace safety rules are notoriously lax.

The goal of the Deep Southern oligarchy has been consistent for over four centuries: to control and maintain a one-party state with a colonial-style economy based on large-scale agriculture and the extraction of primary resources by a compliant, poorly educated, low-wage workforce with as few labor, workplace safety, health care, and environmental regulations as possible. 

There is some discussion of one of my favorite books on regionality:

This is the strategy Thomas Frank described in What’s the Matter with Kansas? which revealed how the oligarchs of his native state used social and “moral” issues to rally ordinary people to support the architects of their economic destruction.

Vote to stop abortion, receive a rollback in capital gains taxes. Vote to make our country strong again; receive deindustrialization. Vote to screw those politically correct college professors; receive electricity deregulation. Vote to get government off our backs; receive conglomeration and monopoly everywhere from media to meatpacking.

Vote to stand tall against terrorists; receive Social Security privatization. Vote to strike a blow against elitism; receive a social order in which wealth is more concentrated than ever before in our lifetimes, in which workers have been stripped of power and CEOs are rewarded in a manner beyond imagining. 

The important thing to understand is that within our country there are regions that predominantly believe and value completely different things than you. 

Tidewater senator Jesse Helms tried to block the creation of the Martin Luther King holiday on the grounds that the civil rights leader had been a “Marxist-Leninist” who associated with “Communists and sex perverts.”

Tom DeLay proclaimed in the early 2000s, “The causes of youth violence are working parents who put their kids into daycare, the teaching of evolution in the schools, and working mothers who take birth control pills.” “Nothing,” DeLay told bankers in 2003, “is more important in the face of war than cutting taxes.”

After the 2010 BP oil spill, Representative Joe Barton (from Deep Southern Texas) publicly apologized to the company for having been pressured to create a fund to compensate its victims, calling the initiative—but not the spill—“a tragedy of the first proportion.”

I'm not very keen on George W. Bush and the horse he rode in on. But some people love this stuff:

His domestic policy priorities as president were those of the Deep Southern oligarchy: cut taxes for the wealthy, privatize Social Security, deregulate energy markets (to benefit family allies at Houston-based Enron), stop enforcing environmental and safety regulations for offshore drilling rigs (like BP’s Deepwater Horizon), turn a blind eye to offshore tax havens, block the regulation of carbon emissions or tougher fuel efficiency standards for automobiles, block health care benefits for low-income children, open protected areas to oil exploration, appoint industry executives to run the federal agencies meant to regulate their industries, and inaugurate a massive new foreign guest-worker program to ensure a low-wage labor supply. Meanwhile, Bush garnered support among ordinary Dixie residents by advertising his fundamentalist Christian beliefs, banning stem cell research and late-term abortions, and attempting to transfer government welfare programs to religious institutions.

By the end of his presidency—and the sixteen-year run of Dixie dominance in Washington—income inequality and the concentration of wealth in the federation had reached the highest levels in its history, exceeding even the Gilded Age and Great Depression.

If you're someone from New France, Yankeedom, the Left Coast or the New Netherlands and you want to drive yourself batshit crazy, imagine this . . .

Consider for a moment what U.S. politics and society might be like if the Dixie bloc never existed, or if the Confederacy had peacefully seceded in 1861. You don’t have to stretch your imagination, because this very scenario has been playing out north of the U.S. border.

Comparative early-twenty-first-century sociological surveys have found that New France is the most postmodern nation in North America. It is the region with the lowest proportion of people who believe in the devil (29 percent) and hell (26 percent). Asked if they agreed that the “father of the family must be master in his own house,” only 15 percent of Québécois said yes, compared with 21 percent of Far Western Canadians, 29 percent of New Englanders, and 71 percent of respondents in Alabama, Mississippi, and Tennessee. Another academic pollster found them to be more tolerant of homosexuality, extramarital affairs, prostitution, abortion, divorce, and having neighbors with AIDS, large families, drug problems, or emotional instability. Québec, one scholar found, was the region of North America with the highest degree of enlightened individualism and the least respect for traditional forms of authority.

While the Dixie bloc pulls the U.S. federation hard to the right, New France pulls Canada well to the left.

So Woodard sees this scenario playing out over and over, until there's something so cataclysmic that it tears us apart:

One scenario that might preserve the status quo for the United States would be for its nations to follow the Canadian example and compromise on their respective cultural agendas for the sake of unity. Unfortunately, neither the Dixie bloc nor the Northern alliance is likely to agree to major concessions to the other. The majority of Yankees, New Netherlanders, and Left Coasters simply aren’t going to accept living in an evangelical Christian theocracy with weak or nonexistent social, labor, or environmental protections, public school systems, and checks on corporate power in politics. Most Deep Southerners will resist paying higher taxes to underwrite the creation of a public health insurance system; a universal network of well-resourced, unionized, and avowedly secular public schools; tuition-free public universities where science—not the King James Bible—guides inquiry; taxpayer-subsidized public transportation, high-speed railroad networks, and renewable energy projects; or vigorous regulatory bodies to ensure compliance with strict financial, food safety, environmental, and campaign finance laws.

Instead the "red" and "blue" nations will continue to wrestle with one another for control over federal policy, each doing what it can to woo the "purple" ones to their cause, just as they have since they gathered at the first Continental Congress.

We don't have a shared cultural history in this country. Woodard believes our only hope is this:

The United States needs its central government to function cleanly, openly, and efficiently because it’s one of the few things binding us together.

Yeah right.

U-10 Soccer Players Say the Darndest Things (to their mothers)

Not only is my son Ian's travel team (which I coach) playing some wonderful soccer, but they've also got excellent diction and vocabulary; one player told his mom his favorite part of the Sunday's game was "the anticipation," which is a fairly abstract way to enjoy the sport (although he added that his second favorite part of the game was "getting the ball") and another player confided in his mom that he doesn't need words to get his friend to go where he wants him to go on the field, he uses "telepathy" to communicate with him.

Tooziest Toozday

Tuesday is obviously the worst day of the week-- it has none of the earnest go-getter initiative of Monday, none of the hump-day inspiration of Wednesday, none of the thirsty pub-night charm of Thursday, none of the happy-hour/weekend anticipation of Friday . . . and it ain't the weekend-- and this was a very Tuesday Tuesday . . . our new block schedule features 84 minute periods, which is a hell of a long time in the normal world, but even more so in a mask, and I got assigned another period of cafeteria duty-- for a sum total of 84 minutes of cafeteria-duty . . . because, as I found out after I wrote a bunch of irate, all-lowercase, unedited and unvetted emails to administration with lovely vocabulary like "shafted" and "sucks," that if you're off period 3 or period 7, then you're going to end up in the cafeteria for extended amounts of time, because with the block schedule they don't have many teachers off at the same time . . . so I made the best of it and ignored the children and graded as much Rutgers expos stuff as I could, which makes for a brutal Tuesday . . . but it can only get better from here (I'm also tired because we had an epic night game against our rival Metuchen yesterday . . . it went into overtime and ended in a 2-2 tie . . . their goalie laid out and made an incredible PK save with two minutes left, but it was still a good result and Alex played well . . . but wow, today felt like I really had a job, which I guess I do).

My Master is Good

I am very, very sorry for my poor typing yesterday -- my paws are large and clumsy and my vocabulary is rather limited, but after hours of intense practice, I have learned to accurately slap the letters on the keyboard with my neutered penis . . . Master, I hope you can find it within your pure and bountiful soul to forgive me, and when you come home, I will come to the door, greet you, and then roll unto my back, prostrate, and wiggle in obeisance to your greatness and munificence; I also miss both the sub-master (who I sometimes believe to be your master, but who is not my Master, which confuses me greatly, despite my knowledge of the transitive theory) and the two tiny-masters . . . though they are often cruel to me for no reason . . . but I stray from my point (stray . . . ha!) which is that you are a great master and that I will sit in complete deference to you when you arrive back from your vacation, though you did not take me, though you know that I love the snowy mountains . . . but you are a virtuous and wise master, and must have your reasons why you left me home, and who am I to question you, my Master, and plus, this gives me plenty of time to lick my testicles, which I know you don't want to see or hear . . . and so I will take advantage of this and get it "all out of my system" while you are gone, and then return to perfect behavior once you return.

If It's Not Spanish, It's CRAP!

On my car ride to work this morning, in order to lexically prepare for our big family trip to Costa Rica, I listened to several episodes of Coffee Break Spanish, but I ended up learning all the wrong things; Kara and Mark, the hosts of the show, are Scottish and (of course) when they speak in English, they have distinct Scottish accents . . . and I'm not blaming them for where they were born, but I do find this is very distracting and so during the lessons, instead of practicing my Spanish pronunciation and vocabulary, I found myself trying to mimic their genuine Scottish accents-- I kept repeating words like "additionally" and "download" in the style of Kara and Mark, instead of focusing on rolling my r's; and while I certainly subscribe to the maxim "if it's not Scottish it's crap," I still think I'm going to have to find a different podcast to brush up on my Spanish (but I highly recommend this one, both for the lovely accents and the insanely upbeat music).

Dreams Deferred, Destroyed, Depressed, Disintegrated, and Damaged

The boys and I just finished watching the epic documentary Hoop Dreams-- it streams on Netflix-- and if you haven't seen it, it's something you have to watch . . . but beware: the film keeps it very real, and the various dreams of the characters in the film are often deferred or shattered . . . and if you're a real glutton for punishment, check out where the main figures in the story are now . . . there are a few bright spots, but also plenty of tragedy; if you're still in the mood for even more depressingly frank anti-dream reality after watching Hoop Dreams, then go see The Big Short-- it has a documentary feel, and documentary-like moments, though it's not documentary, and Christian Bale and Steve Carell do a fantastic job playing real people (Michael Burry and Mark Bain) . . . but be prepared to confront the destruction of the American Dream (and you're also going to need to prepare a bit so you understand the vocabulary and the main concepts, you could either read a bunch of books and watch an actual documentary, or you could read my sentences about them . . . here are my suggestions: The Big Short, House of Cards, The Black Swan, After the Music Stops, Unintended Consequences, Griftopia and Inside Job).