When it Comes to It, Electability is the REAL Issue for Dems

Reuters is reporting that if the 2008 presidential election were held today and Hilary Clinton was the Democratic nominee, Rudy Giuliani could beat her.

So could Mitt Romney.

And John McCain. And Fred Thompson. And even Mike Huckabee.

I the same poll in July, people were unfamiliar enough with the most of the GOP candidates that Hilary would have won by a small margin. Not as big as the margin that Barack Obama or John Edwards would have won by, but she would have won. But people have had time to think about it.

The campaign for the Democratic Party's nomination has been about influence and money until now. Many Democratic women want a woman to be president. And Hilary is easily the most well connected of the candidates running for the Democratic nomination. Hillary has led until now. She still leads the other Democratic candidates in polls that ask Democrats who they plan to vote for.

There is a danger for the Democrats, a danger that they could lose sight of the real goal of the nominating process. The goal is not to find out who is most popular with other Democrats. The goal is to nominate a candidate who can become President. The concern has consistently been that Hillary Clinton may not be that person, regardless of her influence and popularity with the party.

The choices are really at the party level:

• Almost every Democrat wants universal health care administered by the Federal government; almost every Republican believes that it can be left in the hands of private insurance companies and employers.
  
• Almost every Democrat wants to get out of Iraq; almost every Republican want to stay in Iraq.
  
• Almost every Republican wants to privatize social security and reduce benefits for future generations; almost every Democrat wants to extend the payroll tax so that the wealthiest one or two percent of Americans pay that tax on all (or at least most) of their incomes (like the rest of us) so that we can fund the system as it currently exists in the future.
  
• Almost all Democrats are pro-choice; almost all Republicans are pro-life.
  
• Almost all Republicans want to take our education system toward government financed private education; almost all Democrats want to strengthen public education and repeal many aspects of the disastrous No Child Left Behind law.
  
• Almost all Democrats want to simplify the tax code and make it more progressive; almost all Republicans want to simplify the tax code and make it less progressive (or do away with it and replace it with a federal sales tax).
  

So take your pick. Do you want a Republican or a Democrat in the White House in 2008. If your answer is that you want a Democrat, that person is probably not Hillary. And if we nominate her, there's a good chance that we will end up with eight more years of George Bush's policies and a President name Mitt or Fred....

Why Teach About Blogs and Blogging?

Note: Visit my education blog, The Green Cup.

Blogging is a literary form. It has become very much a genre in its own right. It’s a growing genre, an influential genre, and it is genre that we need to acquaint students with at an early age.

The word “blog” is a shortened for of the word weblog. The “we” gets amputated from the front of the word. That word formation process is just one example of the new level of creativity that online writing brings to our language.

Blogging has become for literature today something like what keeping a diary was in the 18th and 19th centuries. But not exactly. On the one hand, a blog can be private and personal. On the other hand, it can be designed to promote an opinion, a perspective, or to give advice – to the point of being commercial. It can be closed, accessible only to people you allow to see it. Or it can be very public, easily accessible.

Because blogs have become so numerous and influential, it’s important that students be aware of them and have some understanding of how to evaluate a blog. The skill of discerning fact from opinion is more important now than it has ever been. It’s important that students have some idea of how to find a blog if they want to look at one. Google, for example, has a special search engine that only searches websites it classifies as blogs. And, finally, it is important that students know how to create a blog for themselves if they want to – and that they understand the privacy issues and the liabilities that come with setting themselves up with a blog at a site like MySpace or FaceBook.

I personally think that digital self-expression is a wave of the future that could revive and regenerate the skill of composition in our language. Blogs have a profound impact on literacy in America and we need to be sure our kids are positively impacted by that…

What is ADHD?

Note: Visit my education blog, The Green Cup.

Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is among the most controversial and troublesome of educational and child health issues of our day.

Gaining an understanding of ADHD is only made more difficult by the controversy that surrounds it.

The National Institute of Mental Health says this:

• "Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is a condition that becomes apparent in some children in the preschool and early school years. It is hard for these children to control their behavior and/or pay attention. It is estimated that between 3 and 5 percent of children have ADHD, or approximately 2 million children in the United States. This means that in a classroom of 25 to 30 children, it is likely that at least one will have ADHD."

Oh, if it was that simple...

Let me list some of the difficulties faced in a discussion of ADHD:

• The subjectivity of ADHD's symptoms, the difficult nature of diagnosing it.
• The vested interests that educators are sometimes perceived as having as they contribute to the diagnosis of ADHD.
• The pliability of the average family doctor when faced with parents who seem to want (or not want) such a diagnosis.
• The risks and controversies associated with medicines for the disorder.

All of these have made ADHD one of the most troublesome of medical and educational issues.

The problem is simple. Most professionals agree that ADHD exists (which is also to say that there are some in the field who don't agree that the disorder is even real). The main symptoms are inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity; but these can all be caused by some other problem and exist to some lesser extent in perfectly normal children. And the symptoms develop over time. A child may exhibit one of the symptoms, that symptom may get worse over a course of months (or years), and then other symptoms may emerge.

To confuse the issue even further, ADHD comes in three different types, according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM IV-TR). There are kids who are predominately hyperactive, kids who are predominately inattentive, and kid who have combined those first two types.

Some absolute standards do exist in the diagnosis of ADHD. First, the child has to have exhibited the symptoms of ADHD before age seven. And those symptoms have to have continued for at least six months. In addition, the behaviors must be bad enough to create "a real handicap" in at least two areas of the child's life. So if the child's only problem is school, it's almost certainly not ADHD. To be ADHD, the symptoms have to create problems in the sandbox at the park or at home, as well. The symptoms have to be "excessive, long-term, and pervasive."

The NIMH's page has much more on diagnosing ADHD.

A number of good resources on ADHD exist online. Among them:

• ADHD News
  
• Eli Lilly and Company's ADHD Dot Com page
  
• The ADHD Owner's Manuel by Child Psychiatrist Neil Alex, MD
  
• The National Resource Center on AD/HD
  
• The ADHD e-Book by Martin L. Kutscher, MD
  
• The ADHD page at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)
  
• Kids' Dealth Dot Org

The 2008 President Race - Some Tidbits...

You've all probably heard the joke about the agnostic dyslexic insomniac who used to lie awake in bed at night and wonder if there was a dog. But did you know he was running for president? Okay, I don't really know how well Mike Gravel (D-Alaska) sleeps at night. And he's a Unitarian, not an Agnostic. But he is dyslexic.

There's a lot we don't know about this batch of presidential candidates. The information is out there; it just doesn't seem to float to the top very often. Maybe that's because it doesn't really matter much (or matters less tan it used to, at least). Here's another example....

Almost everyone is away that candidate Mitt Romney (R-Mass.)is a Mormon. What rarely gets mentioned is that the wife of candidate Chris Dodd (D-Conn.), Jackie Marie Clegg Dodd, is also a Mormon. Dodd's father was a U.S. Senator. In 1970, Dodd, a Catholic, married his father's speech writer, Susan Mooney. They divorced in 1982. Dodd dated for 17 years; his romantic interests included Bianca Jagger (Ex-wife of Rolling Stones singer Mick Jagger) and Carrie Fisher (who player Princess Leia in Start Wars). The in 1999 he married Clegg.

If you had to guess which presidential candidate was the bass player for a band that had opened for or played with stars like Willie Nelson, REO Speedwagon, Charlie Daniels, Alabama, and Grand Funk Railroad, who would you pick? Would it confuse you more if I told you the candidate was a Republican? Mike Huckabee is the answer. The former Arkansas governor is a blues and rock band leader as well as an ordained Southern Baptist minister (he went to Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas).

There are 17 declared candidate in the two major parties. Where did your favorite go to college?

Hillary (D-NY) went to an all-girls school, Wellesley College, before doing her law degree at Yale (ironically, the alma mater of our current president). On the other hand, Romney, Obama (D-Ill.), and GOP hopeful Alan Keyes all get their last degree at Harvard. So will the fact that Harvard beat Yale this year make a difference in the campaign?

Here's a list:

• Joe Biden when to the University of Delaware and did his law degree at Syracuse University.
  
• Chris Dodd went to Providence College before doing his law degree at the University of Louisville.
  
• John Edwards (D-NC) started at Clemson, graduate from North Carolina State, and did his law degree at the University of North Carolina.
  
• Rudi Giuliani (R-NY) went to Manhattan College and on to New York University School of Law.
  
• Mike Gravel went to Columbia University.
  
• Mike Huckabee did his undergraduate work at Ouachita Baptist University.
  
• Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.) got his BA and his law degree from Thomas Jefferson School of Law in San Diego.
  
• Alan Keyes did his undergraduate work at Cornell.
  
• Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) went to Case Western Reserve University.
  
• John McCain (R-AZ) went to the Naval Academy.
  
• Ron Paul (R-Texas) went to Gettysburg College before getting his medical degree from Duke.
  
• Romney attended Stanford, but ended up doing his undergraduate work at Brigham Young.
  
• Obama finished up his undergraduate work at Columbia University before going on to Harvard.
  
• Bill Richardson (D-NM) went to Tufts University.
  
• Tom Tancredo (R-CO) went to the University of Northern Colorado.
  
• Fred Thompson (R-TN) got his undergraduate degree from the University of Memphis and did his law degree at Vanderbilt.
  

That's eleven lawyers, one doctor, two soldier, one minister, one Peace Corp volunteer, one real live knight, one actor, and one real estate agent.

Other tidbits worth mentioning:

Ron Paul is a Republican, but he is also a member of the Libertarian Party. Bill Richardson was a French major in college. Mitt Romney's father ran for president in 1968. Duncan Hunter won a Bronze Star in Nam as an Army Ranger and went to college on the GI Bill. Rudi Giuliani was knighted by Quenn Elizabeth. And Fred Thompson was the GOP mole in the Watergate Hearings.

Getting Up and Going Back...

I like my job. I like teaching. I like the people I work with at the moment - my boss, the other teachers, all of them. I like the kids. Every teacher has had a child or two come through their room that they thought, "life sure would be easier if that kid would move..." But I don't have one of those this year.

After a three day weekend it's still hard to get up in the morning. And it's not even morning yet, but I know I don't want to get up tomorrow

Part of it is sleep cycles. I came home Friday with the intention of watching Numbers at 10pm. At 8pm I laid down on a bed in our guestroom and slept for 11 and a half hours instead. Saturday I took a nap. Sunday I took a nap. Monday I took a nap. And here I am wide awake at 10:30 at night, blogging...

Part of it is health. Cheryl and I have had our first winter colds. I'm back to 85% I guess. Cheryl's closer to 60% healthy.

I used the weekend to write: 10 blog posts on three blogs and three articles for Suite 101. I also used the weekend to cook: a corned beef brisket that I plan to take for lunch, a backlog of bacon for breakfasts this week, some breakfast sausage patties, a meatloaf to freeze.

The clothes are irons, the coffee's made, the lunches for tomorrow are ready, the dog's been out, and no one I care about is playing on Monday Night Football. So I guess I'll go to bed. And then I'll get up in the morning and go to work anyway...

Google's Veterans Day Logo

I pointed out last month that Conservatives had decided to tag Google as unpatriotic because of its habit of tinkering with it's logo to celebrat holidays tended not to focus on America holidays. Google has produce logos, for example, about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Birthday (May 22, 2006); the Persian New Year on March 21, 2006 (that can't be very patriotic, can it?); Chinese New Year when the year of the Dog came in on January 29, 2006; Mozart's Birthday; Earth Day in 2004; Michelangelo Birthday; Picasso's Birthday; Canada Day; Bastille Day (Viva la France); and even the Japanese festival of Shichi-go-san.

In retrospect, one of the things that made the discussion so ludicrous is that Google has had a new logo for the Fourth of July in 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007.

You can find a larger list of Google logos here.

Whether they've simply caved in to political pressure or have some other reason for the first ever Veterans Day logo, we'll probably never know....

(Note: For whatever reason, the Veterans Day logo at Google has been replaced with their standard logo. I've left the link up to see if it reappears. And they did in fact run one. It had three World War I-era helmets capping the letters 'o' and 'e' in Google's name. You can see a copy of it at the moment here.)

The President, Big Business, and the Price of Gas

I wrote recently in another place about how the President really is to blame for the price of oil to some extent. How can I say that? In case you don't want to read the long version, I'll sum it up here:

• Petroleum is sold in U.S. Dollars. When a Russian business buys oil from a Nigerian exporter, the deal is priced in U.S. Dollars. When Australians buy oil from Indonesia, the deal is prices in U.S. Dollars. OPEC sells oil in U.S. dollars.
  
• The U.S. Dollar has weakened considerably against other currencies in the past few years. The euro, British pound, and Canadian dollar, for example all cost more now than they did a few years ago. The U.S. dollar is worth less than it used to be.
  
• Oil is more expensive in America because OPEC wants to keep getting the same amount of euros and pounds for a barrel of oil that it did last year and the year before. The only way they can do that is charge more for it, in U.S. Dollars.
  
• The reason the U.S. Dollar is weak is that President Bush has made policy decisions that make it weak.

You don't believe me...

There are a couple of things to consider. Let me start by saying that I understand that being President probably isn't easy. There are hard decisions. I'll accept that.

Four and a half years ago President Bush decided to invade Iraq. I don't mind saying that I think he misled Congress to get their consent to go to war - and that that was probably a crime. The projections at the time were rosy: it would be over in six months and we'd be welcomed as liberators. Iraqis would be so happy with us that they would pay for the invasion with their own oil. Fifty some odd months later those projects seem laughable. Iraqi oil hasn't help the U.S. pay off this fiasco. And President Bush has paid for the war instead by selling huge amounts of Treasury bills to other countries; he's borrowed money to fight a war while cutting taxes and increasing spending at home. Ronald Reagan's deficit meets Lyndon Johnson's unpopular war...

One result of that borrowing has been a weaker dollar.

How could it have been different? Most countries, when they go to war, institute an austerity program of some sort and raise taxes. If back in March of 2004 (a year into this war and at a time when the October 2003 budget was being formed) President Bush had suggested an austerity program to Congress and led it by making cuts to his own programs, would he still be President? That was an election year. If President Bush had repealed part of his tax cuts to pay for the war, would he still be President? I suspect the answer to both questions is "no." But political self-preservation is not an honorable motive for public policy decisions.

While the relationship between the price oil and the strength of the Dollar has received a lot of attention in the press, there is another effect that a weaker Dollar has - one that isn't getting quite as much press. A weaker Dollar is good for export industries in America and bad for imports. Boeing jets are cheaper in France now, and they French may buy more of them. BMW's are more expensive in the U.S. now, and many Americans may decide to buy a Lincoln or a Cadillac, instead.

A weak dollar is good for America's big businesses. And in it not inconceivable that the Bush administrations Dollar policy has been designed to help big business.

Remember that when the price of gas goes to $5 a gallon at the pump - probably just before the 2008 election...

Out, damn'd Spot! out, I say!

Okay, I capitalized the "s" in "spot." The original quote is from Shakespeare's Macbeth...

Robert "Spot" Steele lost his bid to keep his school board seat in Tazewell County's Northern District today by a vote of 615 to 483. He carried two of the 11 precincts in the district.

Spot wanted to be on our Board of Supervisors (which most states call the "County Commission"). He tried to gain the Democratic nomination for supervisor through the caucus process, but didn't seem to understand the rules very well. He showed up at the caucus and stood at the front entrance to the facility to shake hands and campaign - closer than election law allows to the entrance. He passed out flyers saying that a non-profit organization he helps run would provide groceries for anyone who came to vote. And questions remain about the voter registration drive his campaign for supervisor ran.

Spot is under investigation by a special prosecutor for violating Virginia election laws and, I believe, by the IRS for actions that could cost his non-profit its tax exempt status.

Spot's eight years as a school board member was an embarrassing time for the district. Hopefully the new board member, David R. Woodard, will do better.

Congratulations Mr. Woodard.

Fun day tomorrow....

The monitoring team comes tomorrow. They're supposed to arrive at 9am and be gone by noon or so. The rumor is that they will be looking at how well we've implemented the response to intervention approach and the three tier model. But since one of the three team members is director of compliance and monitoring for special education for the state's department of education, they may look at other issues.

We're not being singled out. Every school in the county is getting a visit. Just the same, everyone at our school is a little stressed out...

Being sick doesn't help. I'm on day six of a run of antibiotics and I think I've almost defeated whatever evil microbe took up residence in my lungs and sinuses. One or two other teachers are quite that lucky yet.

I've spent part of the night studying questions the team might ask and answers I'm suppose to give. Most are either technical answers involve data any reasonable person would have to look up or fairly obvious, simple questions any teacher ought to know the answer to (for their school).

The weather will make tomorrow just a little more trying. It seems like just three weeks ago we were all wondering if summer would ever end. Now the third cold wave in a row is coming through and temperatures have dropped enough that we may see a little snow. Snow or no snow, we will likely see a day of clouds and moisture. We need the rain, so I shouldn't complain.

My twice-per-year dental appointment was today. I left an hour early from work and got my teeth cleaned. No cavities; and Dr. Francisco says my gums and teeth are nice and healthy. I killed two birds with one stone by getting my flu shot on the way to the dentist.

I should go to bed early. My second favorite pro football team, the Steelers, is on tonight. Perhaps I'll have a shot first and watch a few minutes of the game. I’ll have to try and remember tomorrow that if I feel stressed I should try and think about how happy Heinz Ward always looks…

What is Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD)?

Note: Visit my education blog, The Green Cup.

Among the less talked about disabilities encountered in education today is Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder, or FASD. The fact that it is not a topic of conversation doesn't mean that it is uncommon.

Outside a medical setting the technical definitions often get blurred in conversation and literature, but it is important to make a few distinctions. FASD is a broad term that covers almost any physical, behavioral, or educational problem that is thought to be the result of exposure to alcohol in the womb. Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, on the other hand, is a more specific and profound term. According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), a diagnosis of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS) must include: at least three facial abnormalities; growth deficits for both height and weight; and central nervous system abnormalities. Some other terms (and acronyms) get used occasionally, as well:

• Alcohol Related Neurodevelopmental Disorder (ARND)
  
• Alcohol Related Birth Defects (ARBD)
  
• Fetal Alcohol Effect (FAE)

Since FASD is the broadest of the terms and covers basically anyone who suffers from a problem related to prenatal alcohol exposure, I'll use that term. But readers should be aware that the term FAS and FASD are used almost interchangeable much of the time.

FAS is a tragic problem in light of its preventable nature. A group called Better Endings New Beginnings has some relatively up to date U.S. statistics on FASD available. About four million babies are born in the U.S. each year. About one out of a hundred (40,000) have FASD. Of these, about one in five could be medically diagnosed as having FAS. That's 8,000 babies born each year with FAS. That means that about 100,000 children with FASD between the ages of five and 18 are in school are in school today.

Learners with FASD tend to have one or more of the following obstacles to effective learning:

• They are easily distracted
  
• They are easily frustrated
  
• The lack some motor skills
  
• They have a poor attention span
  
• They lack of organizational skills
  
• They have difficulty with concrete thinking skills
  
• They do not related well with their peers

The National Organization for Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, NOFAS, has some excellent suggestions available online for instructional strategies to use when working with FASD students. They range from simple ideas like preferential seating to assisting with social behaviors and modifying curriculum.

There is also an excellent listserv for FASD available at http://www.faslink.org/faslink.htm. It is archived at the address above and there are instructions as to how to subscribe to it there. The archive is searchable - making it a valuable Internet resource on the subject since the listserv is now ten years old. And the listserv has the advantage of being active and somewhat international. And because of the long history of the listserv it has a feel of community. People share personal information and views that, while sometimes creating discussion threads that are off topic (and heated), result in a very useful Internet experience for people who want to follow FASD issues and events.