Hallooooo from the past!

[amy c.]

It's still 2008 here, and I'm pleased that Florida's science-curriculum developers have the moxie to sneak around the fact that they're not supposed to talk about radiocarbon dating of fossils or evolution. Spin, world, and carry me to the new year.

I listened on the radio today to an interview with two old men with AIDS, two early San Francisco victims of the "gay disease". They were wonderful to listen to, the best of Protestant virtue and the best argument for gay marriage rights I've yet heard. When they discovered, in 1987, that they were HIV+ and had been for years, they resolved immediately not to blame anyone, to embrace and help all who needed help, to learn all they could about the disease, to save as much as they could against the day when they were too sick to work, but not too sick to die, and to fight; but if the fight failed, to die with all the grace they could. Because they wanted to live, of course, but also because they'd been together only a few years, and it seemed so wrong for their life together to be cut short. They've kept each other for 20 years, going through clinical trials, joking, taking care of each other. Now they find that 20 years with HIV and antiretrovirals seem to have aged them very quickly, and it's true they sounded more like 80-year-olds than 60-year-olds. The doctors are watching and studying them. They're still together, with -- from the sounds of it -- much calm and humor.

[amy c.]

Ha! First! (Undoing all the good of the last post.)

[challenge]

They're still together, with -- from the sounds of it -- much calm and humor.

one can only hope that something like that comes along ..... (not th disease obviously).

I find these kind of stories the best to believe in mankind/love/all things that are good. Of course, it is sad that they have AIDS but it is a glimmer of hope that we maybe can find a cure and that all is not lost!?

[second in]

[Dr Mike]

Intriguing if anti-retrovirals/chronic disease do cause premature aging, literally. Is that a known phenomenon? Not sure why the drugs would, they should be specific to a process that our cells aren't really doing, right?

[Beatrice]

Hell, I was more intrigued by the idea that a science textbook can't discuss dating fossils! WTF?!

If it were 1 April instead of 1 January I'd suspect you of having us on. Sadly, I suspect you are serious?

[amy c.]

Sadly, you're correct. 14C tends to argue with the idea that God created the world 4000 years ago. Ha, it just occurred to me that I used Ötzi the Iceman as an example somewhere along the line, and put down his approximate age. (5300 years old and doesn't look a day over 3000.) Well, I'll leave it and see if it gets by.

The interesting thing is that the science standards for Florida are in general ambitious, exhaustively articulated, and written quite well. A little weirdly abstract and narrow, but still, I've seen much, much worse. Looks to me like some pretty good polarization, with the science folks way over here doing their thing, and the statehouse way over there.

[amy c.]

Intriguing if anti-retrovirals/chronic disease do cause premature aging, literally. Is that a known phenomenon? Not sure why the drugs would, they should be specific to a process that our cells aren't really doing, right?

Well, that's the thing, how're you going to distinguish effects of the virus from effects of the drugs? That was glossed a bit disturbingly in the radio piece. As for aging, I don't know anything about it, except by looking in the mirror. But I'm suddenly reminded of some photos someone -- Diane Arbus? -- took of people in the days before they died, and one striking thing is how the people just fell off a cliff at the end. One week they merely look old, the next week they look sunken and ancient, like death. You see it in animals, too, Something's happened, and I don't know why a serious chronic disease wouldn't hasten that. I suspect we're talking in the wrong language, though, and would have to define 'aging' better.

[amy c.]

ahaha, I'm working on the theory-that-dare-not-speak-its-name section for the FL book, and I see we don't talk about "adaptation", we talk about "survival". Quick, hide your shortwave radio.

Boy, are these kids going to be confused. I wonder if there's an efficient way to slip them the code. More writing follies, btw -- I've gotten a freelance gig in an engineering writing center grading lab reports for...er...style and apparent clarity, I suppose. The problem is, of course, that I'm not an engineer, so I can see how this might just be an exercise in turd-polishing. I can see why they don't hire engineers for this; an engineer who writes well wouldn't bother with this kind of money. Same problem they've got in K12 science. Still, though, there ought to be some way of seeing that the kids understand the limited value of what they're paying for.

[The Prof]

Amy, is it that the textbook authors (as opposed to school systems/buyers/audience) don't believe in evolution so don't want it in the book, or is rather a matter that they want their book to be marketable and the lowest common denominator is catering to the denialists? I imagine textbook publishing must be terribly competitive and if nixing references to the unmentionable helps flog that many more copies, you might have to do it to survive? (Oh, how laughably *meta*.)

[amy c.]

Some of this comes from the Florida state board of ed, unfortunately -- their guidelines for what the kids are to be taught are quite specific about not teaching various "controversial" things. I don't know for sure, but I imagine it's a function of state politics and the heavy evangelical influence there. And yes, much of the publisher's sensitivity has to do with marketability. If you make a principal or teacher nervous about offending parents and local worthies, they're not going to buy your books. I'm guessing there's a fair word-of-mouth component in sales for these things, too, since they're discretionary and often purchased by individual teachers or schools. It's possible that if the word gets out that you're "edgy" or "controversial" on evolution, you could knock out a good percentage of sales for that state.

In the national market they used to call that "the Texas effect" -- Texas was for a long time the largest textbook market, so publishers wrote to please Texas educators, and the rest of the country got what Texas liked too. The stuff I'm doing now is for particular cities and states, so you feel the local interests & politics more. I still get a laugh out of Missouri -- the Engineer State. Everything's got to be practical, by God, or what kind of fool would pay for it?

Favorites? Massachusetts. California. New York. It turns into a game of spot-the-universities, I'm afraid, and then the question is how much of the ed brights going into the standards writing actually makes it to the kids.

[Octavia]

Why on earth shouldn't kids be taught controversial things? Surely it's important for future leaders and professionals to know how to spot and respond to controversial topics? I mean....duh.

[The Prof]

Well, to play devil's advocate, I suppose that a primary education is to a textbook as a post-grad education is to a scientific paper. You want kids to learn things that are well-established, not some cutting edge research that will be obsolete in a few years' time. Having said that, I think that learning about controversies in general, and learning to recognise when things are NOT cut in stone, and the various agendas out there trying to sway you one way or the other (whether in science or anything - politics, history etc) is priceless.

[amy c.]

Well, to play devil's advocate, I suppose that a primary education is to a textbook as a post-grad education is to a scientific paper. You want kids to learn things that are well-established, not some cutting edge research that will be obsolete in a few years' time.

Yes. Would help though to have competent science teachers and textbook writers (which I am not). I just alerted my editor that half his books mistake genealogists for geneticists.

Having said that, I think that learning about controversies in general, and learning to recognise when things are NOT cut in stone, and the various agendas out there trying to sway you one way or the other (whether in science or anything - politics, history etc) is priceless.

I agree. It was maddening growing up with a dad who responded with a gimlet-eyed "How do you know?" to every assertion I made, and who -- if I defended -- probed the defense and assertions apart until I was willing to finish them off myself or angrily dig in and pull a better defense up from nowhere. He made it clear he was unimpressed by, even contemptuous of, citations of authority. But he did prepare me very well for the idea that much, maybe most, of what I'd hear was just people making shit up, and that they'd have some powerful reasons to do it.

I don't know if I've written about this here, and, Jenny, maybe this is a future essay, but one of the things that struck me immediately as I started reading the Calvin interviews was how my dad's attitude existed in concentrated form in that lab. I mean it was immediately familiar. My dad went to school under a Calvin graduate, who said in interview that he'd modeled his lab after Calvin's. I don't know how much of the attitude is Calvin and how much is just a general Jewish-guy-of-a-certain-type thing, but it'd be interesting if you could trace an attitudinal lineage like that.

[frogfactory]

I agree with the above, but I miss where radiocarbon dating fossils or evolution come under the heading of 'controversial' or 'cutting edge' and soon to be obsolete.

[amy c.]

Why on earth shouldn't kids be taught controversial things? Surely it's important for future leaders and professionals to know how to spot and respond to controversial topics? I mean....duh.

The problem is that this is not the goal of the ed machine. The primary goal of the ed machine is to keep school administrators and college-of-ed faculties employed; secondary, to prevent the children from killing the teachers and, less important, each other during school hours; tertiary, to crank out graduating classes with happy scores (strongly related to Goal 1). Jonathan Kozol wrote a furious book some years ago on how the industrial-ed machine's goal was to produce malleable consumers and cogs for industry. There may still be some component of this but I think it's given way to hitting the right numbers.

I don't think I've seen a more evil manifestation of this than in the Chicago public schools project I worked on a few years ago. That one gave the children an absolutely huge analytical apparatus for reading, and the thing is that it works if you have teachers there constantly reinforcing it. The minute the kids leave school, though, it starts to fall apart, and I doubt whether any of them will remember the method five years post-graduation. Meanwhile they haven't learned to read. Sucks for them, but the test scores sure are purty.