Banana Republics

The Reagan years for me were observed from high school and college. And the lens through which I came to see those years were our Central American policy. My intention is not to go into that topic, but rather to point out that our moral/political world view is very much actualized during the teenage years. For me Vietnam and Watergate merged seamlessly with the geopolitics of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua.

It still resonates. My high school education (Jesuit Catholic) emphasized ethics, history, and textual analysis. I came to my political conclusions (at that time) via my parents' politics (liberal, and for a time, Reagan Democrat), my own anti-authoritarianism, and the social justice doctrine still emphasized by the Jesuits at that time. Not very sophisticated, I grant you, and very emotional.

I wonder about some of my students. Perhaps one's political bent is largely a combination of these factors: parents, temperament, and the immediate political atmospheres of adolescence...

With this in mind (see the whole post):

Below the headlines about rocketing food prices and rocking governments, there lays a largely unnoticed fact: bananas are dying. The foodstuff, more heavily consumed even than rice or potatoes, has its own form of cancer. It is a fungus called Panama Disease, and it turns bananas brick-red and inedible.

There is no cure. They all die as it spreads, and it spreads quickly. Soon - in five, 10 or 30 years - the yellow creamy fruit as we know it will not exist. The story of how the banana rose and fell can be seen a strange parable about the corporations that increasingly dominate the world - and where they are leading us...

The Life of Reading

Andrew Sullivan referenced this very interesting post:


Despite the attention once paid to the so-called digital divide, the real gap isn’t between households with computers and households without them; it is the one developing between, on the one hand, households where parents teach their children the old-fashioned skill of reading and instill in them a love of books, and, on the other hand, households where parents don’t. As Griswold and her colleagues suggested, it remains an open question whether the new “reading class” will “have both power and prestige associated with an increasingly rare form of cultural capital,” or whether the pursuit of reading will become merely “an increasingly arcane hobby.”

Head over to The New Atlantis for the whole entry...

Good Morning, All

Welcome Back to the week...It is sharp and cold.

The Age of Numbers...

There is a lot of data out there, and some creative people crunching it. For instance, Freakonomics, and the NYT column of the same name. There is Nate Silver, who was brilliant in the last political campaign. And me being a baseball nut, I see a lot of innovative analysis being done all over the sport.
The latest entry, and a pot stirrer no doubt, is outlier. You don't have to be into a sport to see the implications for education here:

In his latest bestseller, Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell argues that great success is driven not purely by talent or genius, but by a combination of ability, determined practice over a long term, and fortunate circumstance. The book is full of challenging ideas and conclusions, some of them debatable; one of its most provocative and irrefutable arguments comes in regard to sport, and is broadly applicable to baseball. Gladwell notes that an overwhelming preponderance of high-level athletes are born in the days and months immediately following the annual cutoff date for youth sports leagues.

The example he uses in the book is hockey. Canadian youth hockey programs have a January first birthday cutoff date. That means a kid born on the first day of the year will play on the same age level team as a kid born on the last day of the same year, even though he is practically a year older. Not surprisingly, the kid born on January 1 has a big advantage—he's basically a year older, stronger, faster, and more experienced than the kid born on December 31, even though they're on the same team. When the league those kids play in choose its all star squads, guess who's more likely to get selected: The older kid. And then you have a self-reinforcing loop. Because the older kid is perceived to be more talented, he gets better coaching and spends ever more time playing the sport under ideal conditions. Soon what was only the advantage of age develops into real advantage, thanks to all the extra work and coaching.

To prove his point, Gladwell only needs to look at the birth dates on Canada's youth hockey championship teams. The kids are all born in January and February. Baseball is a little different. The youth baseball year in the US doesn't begin on January 1. It begins on August 1. He notes that in 2005, MLB had more than 500 players born in August, and just over 300 born in July. That's a huge discrepancy. And it does make you wonder about Alex Rodriguez, born on July 27, just 4 days short of the cutoff. Did he somehow manage to get himself put into the post-August 1 group? That would have given him a big advantage on his peers. Or could it be that his talent was so immense, that he is such an outlier, that he somehow developed into the generational player that he is despite being one of the youngest kids on his youth team? Food for thought.

(swiped from Yankee Fan vs. Sox Fan)