A Philosophy of Education II (Things Schools Do Besides Teach. Safeguards for Society...)

Before a child is taught anything in school, the school system provides a service that is indispensable: it ensures that the child has been inoculated against diphtheria.

And tetanus. And whooping cough, measles, rubella, polio, and a few other things. Through the various carrots and sticks available to society from universal schooling, public health in America has been greatly advanced in the last century; I can't think of a more reasonable agency to carry out this service. The decline of child mortality in America that has resulted from every parent knowing that eventually they'll have to produce that shot record at the door of a school house may by itself be make the cost of schooling in America worthwhile.

Without establishing a timeline for what services (or mandates) entered the public school system at what point in time, I tend to just push the blame for all of them off on Lyndon Johnson. He started the modern trend, at least, of providing services that were not directly educational in nature. Among my favorite is free and reduced lunch. It serves society (and students) with a safeguard against poverty. Children are disproportionately impacted by poverty. The free and reduced lunch program has served to keep large parts of America turning into scenes from a Charles Dickens novel. And the school system has been the tool society used to achieve that.

Another example has to do with the treatment of people with disabilities in our society. Forty year ago America may have been far above much of the world in the treatment of disabled individuals; but families were still largely on their own in dealing with and supporting their disabled members. Today, disability laws in America require that children with disabilities be sought out early during the preschool years, and that services be provided under many circumstances to families with disabled children. This is part of the reason the life expectancy of a person with Down's Syndrome has more than doubled in the last few decades. And it is the public school system that at least seeks out identifies the children with disabilities and, often, provides the actual services. The quality of life for the retarded, the hearing impaired, the visually impaired, and those with other disabilities has been greatly improved as a result. That safeguard against neglect of the disabled is part of what makes us a civilized society.

Some socialization also takes place, and I would argue that much of the weight of socialization in American society falls upon the public school system. It is where kids learn to stand in line in the cafeteria the way they will have to sand in line at the Department of Motor Vehicles of the Post Office later in life. It is where they learn that you can't hit people just for what they say (even if your father says you can). It is where they learn not to steal, not to bite, how to act in groups, and how to relate to authority.

Of course, some of the safeguards provided by the school system are in fact educational, or academic, in nature. The school system should infuse a minimal level of literacy and math skills into all the children who come through its doors. And there are economic safeguards - the hope that schooling will provide employability skills at some minimal level to the majority of students. Society currently disagrees about what that minimal level of literacy is; perhaps there has never been a consensus - just an idea. And the employability skills need to survive in society are rapidly changing. It becomes easy to lose sight of the many other things the school system does when success with the educational goals becomes difficult to measure.

These things are as they should be in a society with our resources (in my philosophical view of education, or at least of schooling). Society should have an institution that ensures that public health measures are being instituted in small children. Society should have an institution that aids parents in socializing their children. Our society should have a mechanism for identifying individuals with disabilities early in life and ensuring that they receive services. The purposes of education should be multiple and complex in a society as complicated as ours. And individuals and their families should be able to avail themselves of the system for their own purposes while society still achieves its own in some measure. Educational institutions must resign themselves to the fact that those who come through their doors have their own motives and values. And in America that's allowed.

In my philosophy of education, the purpose of schooling is to serve multiple ends for both the learners and the providers. There is no singularly important or outstanding particular purpose for education in America that stands alone. And education, or more properly schooling, has become an institution that is central to the core of our society and legitimately serves a variety purposes.

Why Blog? (Have a Smorty Day...)

I talked last month about reasons to blog. I enjoy writing, but (as I said in that blog) three different companies in the last 10 years have paid me to blog. Kind of. Two of the actually paid me to create content - articles like I would have written for a newspaper or magazine - and blog about my content. One, China Venture News at Creative Weblogging, pays me to maintain a blog on a particular topic.

In recent years it has become possible to generate income from your personal blog. Having Google ads in your blog will get you a few pennies if you manage to attract significant traffic to your site. But a more realistic option is a service like Smorty, where you can get paid for blogging...

Smorty is a service connecting advertisers with bloggers. Advertisers can then pay bloggers to write opinion posts that include links back to that advertiser's site. (Haven't you always dreamed about getting paid for saying what you think about people and products?)

There are a few basic requirements, but they're not hard at all to meet if you're a serious blogger. You're blog has to be at least three months old, for example. You also have to have a history of publishing something at least twice a week. And, of course, there are a few very reasonable content requirements; if your blog is about how much you hate people who are a different color than you are(for example), or about some topic that involves violence or pornography, chances are good that no advertiser cares what you think about their product or service and your log won't get accepted.

So if part of your reason for blogging is to make a little money, get connected with the advertisers who want to pay you to do it by. Smorty seems like a good place to start, in my opinion...

What PEIA Won't Pay For...

I don’t really like being on the phone – which is not to say that I dislike it, I just prefer to be face-to-face with people. But, I spent about two hours on the phone Tuesday anyway and another 90 minutes today trying to get my health insurance providers to pay for a drug.

My family is covered through PEIA, the West Virginia Public Employees Insurance Agency. It went like this…

We called our pharmacy and asked them to refill a new anti-smoking drug, Chantix. When I went to pick it up on July 3rd I learned that:

• July 1st marked the start of a new plan year so I had to pay my deductible on prescriptions again.
• The co-pay has gone up on brand name drugs from $30 to $50 per month's worth.
• The insurance company had not reauthorized Chantix.

Sometimes that’s a matter of paperwork. PEIA farms out management of prescription services to a company called Express Scripts. I called them. My wife had already called them once and been told to call a tobacco-free hotline; it was a dead end and, later we learned, it was a contractor who had stopped dealing with West Virginia employees some seven or eight months earlier. Express Scripts was giving out the wrong contact number for “step two” in this process.

During the course of the day Tuesday I spoke to Bob, Linda, and Sherri at Express-Scripts. I learned to get their phone extension out of them before I hung up so that the possibility existed that I might speak with the same person a second time if I had to call them back.

Eventually we figured out that we needed to be talking to the people at the Free & Clear Quit for Life Program. The people at Express-Scripts told me that Free & Clear had the power to reauthorize the medication. The people at Free & Clear didn’t know that Express-Scripts existed. And the people at Free & Clear thought that their job was to pass information along to Rational Drug Therapy at the West Virginia University School of Pharmacy so that they could decide whether to reauthorize the drug. (Rational Drug Therapy, incidentally, doesn’t speak directly with patients.)

Linda, a "patient care advocate" at Express-Scripts, was eventually convinced to read me my benefits. She’d been trying to convince me that we could have a 90 supply of Chantix, but that we had to wait a year before they’d pay for it again (even though the drug’s manufacturer says at their website that if you’ve quit at the end of the 90 day course you should ask your doctor if it would benefit you to take the drug for another 90 days). When she read me the description of benefits it stated that Express-Scripts would pay for a 90 course of the drug three times in the life of a patient and only once per plan year. Her conclusion was that I’d have to wait a year. I pointed out that the plan year had just changed, that it was now a new plan year and that I wanted the 90 days for this plan year to now be authorized. She was confused; she agreed that it was a new plan year, but was skeptical that the drug would be reauthorized.

The last person I spoke to Tuesday was Mary at Free & Clear. God bless Mary. She read me what the contract between PEIA (she’d never heard of Express-Scripts) and Free & Clear. That contract said that Free & Clear wasn’t supposed to authorize the drug if a patient had received the drug within the last 12 month. I told her what Linda had said. Mary “escalated” my case to her supervisor to try and resolve exactly what our benefits were, evidently spent an hour or more in research and in discussions up the chain of her command, and called me back at 8pm at night. Rational Drug Therapy doesn’t take her phone calls after 2:30 in the afternoon, so it was already too late to get the drug reauthorized Tuesday, but Mary said someone from her office would call Rational Drug Therapy today for me, and suggested I call PEIA’s customer service number (which she gave me).

Customer service was closed…

Today I talked to Judy at Free & Clear. For 75 minutes the Free & Clear people worked with us to determine if there was a way to get the prescription reauthorized (covered by our insurance). Eventually Judy decided that the best approach was to call the pharmacy side of Express Scripts and have a conference call with them so that I could be on the line. Kendra there at Express Scripts told us the computer had rejected the authorization. Kendra read the rules about authorizing the drug – a different set of rules (different verbiage) than what Free & Clear had. With Judy from Free & Clear on the phone, Kendra gave us the toll free phone number for the West Virginia Tobacco Quit Line. (The Quit Line told me Tuesday that they couldn’t understand why Express Scripts still gave out their number since PEIA decided seven or eight months ago to do business with Free & Clear instead of them.)

So I have three different versions of what benefits we are supposed to have regarding Chantix:

• Linda’s (at Express Scripts) version that she read from her computer screen, which says that we can get it three times in our life, but no more than once per plan year. Plan years align with fiscal years.
• Free & Clear’s version, which says that they’re supposed to ask if you’ve taken the drug in the last year and they’re suppose to say “no” to reauthorizing it if you say “yes” to that question.
• And Kendra’s (also at Express Script, but on the pharmacist’s side of it) who says that the medicine can be prescribe for 90 days in a 365-day period.

Kendra’s version is open enough to interpretation to be compatible with either the Free & Clear version or Linda’s version.

Bottom line, I don’t really know what our benefits are and if I have our benefits spelled out in writing somewhere, I don’t know about it. I called the PEIA customer service line to ask about it and a recording told me to leave my name and number.

It was an incredible exercise in getting the run around. And PEIA never returned my phone calls, so I guess I'll try them again tomorrow...

Pythagoras, Ben Franklin, and American Independence

I like philosophy. In my room I have a comfortable chair with a dim lamp, and in the wee hours of this morning I sat there reading A History of Western Philosophy, by Bertand Russell. The chapter dealt with Pythagoras, so I was surprised to come upon a section that discussed the U.S. Declaration of Independence!

The second paragraph of America's Declaration of Independence reads:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

In Benjamin Franklin: An American Life, author Walter Isaacson tells the story of how the term self-evident came to be in the Declaration of Independence...

On June 21, after he had finished a draft and incorporated some changes from Adams, Jefferson had a copy delivered to Franklin, with a cover note far more polite than editors generally receive today. "Will Doctor Franklin be so good as to peruse it," he wrote, "and suggest such alterations as his more enlarged view of the subject will dictate?"

Franklin made only a few small changes, but one of them was resounding. Using heavy backslashes, he crossed out the last three words of Jefferson’s phrase, "We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable" and changed it to read: "We hold these truths to be self-evident."

The concept of "self-evident" truths came less from Jefferson’s favored philosopher, Locke, than from the scientific determinism of Isaac Newton and the analytic empiricism of Franklin’s close friend David Hume. Hume had distinguished between "synthetic" truths that describe matters of fact (such as "London is bigger than Philadelphia" ) and "analytic" truths that are self-evident by virtue of reason and definition. ( "The angles of a triangle equal 180 degrees" or "All bachelors are unmarried." ) When he chose the word "sacred," Jefferson had suggested intentionally or unintentionally that the principle in question—the equality of men and their endowment by their creator with inalienable rights—was an assertion of religion. By changing it to "self-evident," Franklin made it an assertion of rationality. (emphasis added)

Where did Franklin's wording come from? Sheila O'Malley thinks the change makes the document angrier in tone. Another author suggests something similar - that Jefferson's words weren't strong enough. After all, people can deny anything – and frequently do. Maybe that was part of Franklin's goal. Rabbi Marc Gellman seems to think the change was intended to make America more secular - and perhaps too scientific (in his view).

The term "self-evident" is a philosophical one that has greatly impacted mathematics, as well. And while Franklin may have taken it from Hume and/or Newton, the truth is that the idea dates all the way back to the Greek philosopher Pythagoras (who actually lived in Italy, by the way). Most of the self-evident truths that Pythagoras and his students espoused were mathematical (or geometric, if you want to separate out geometry as a field unto itself). And math and philosophy became intertwined from Pythagoras onward in history because the great truths of math could be contemplated in the privacy of your basement - without reference to observation of the world. Bertrand Russell, a mathematician (among many other things), calls the tangling of ways between math and philosophy "unfortunate" in his history...

In epistemology (the theory of knowledge, of how we know things), a self-evident proposition is one that is known to be true by understanding its meaning without proof. Rene Descartes (I think, therefore I am) introduced (or re-introduced) the importance of things that were self-evident. John Locke, Jefferson's favorite philosopher, worked to expand the list of things that were self-evident and explain how they pushed us toward conclusions about reality. But the idea of self-evident truths seems to have been first put forth by Pythagoras, expanded greatly by Euclid in his 13 volume math and geometry text book, Elements, and in Bertrand view, brought firmly and finally into philosophy by Plato.

As the fathers of America worked on the Declaration of Independence it was, after all, the Age of Enlightenment. So when Jefferson "slipped up" and fell back on religion by using the word "sacred" to explain why we should be free, Franklin corrected him. Franklin himself made at least 48 alterations to Jefferson's draft, but this one probably impacted the world the most. If Jefferson's "sacred" had been left in, the Arabs of Iraq and the Hindus of India could have looked at Democracy (at least in light of our Declaration of Independence) and said, "Ha, Christians! What do they know?" As a result of Franklin's change, the idea became rational (and secular) instead of being based on revelation from God.

Jefferson produced a second draft incorporating the changes, and it was presented to the Continental Congress on June 28, 1776. The vote for independence took place on July 2, 1776. A final draft of the document was approved on July 4. On both votes the delegation from New York abstained. On July 6, the Pennsylvania Evening Post published the Declaration of Independence for its readers. The new document was read in public in Philadelphia on the night of July 8 at bonfires around the city. The official signing on the parchment copy wasn't until August 2, 1776.

Grovetown, Ga. July 2

Cheryl and I spent Saturday night and all day Sunday at my mom's house in Grovetown, Ga. (near Augusta). Monday morning I got up and went to nearby Dearing, Ga., to take a test at the RESA office there.

My step-dad, Cliff, has a garden with some incredible tomato plants - trees, almost. We brought back two bags of tomatoes (ours won't be ready for a month or more in this climate). Cliff worked in his shop most of Sunday. Sunday night we grilled steaks. Mom baked potatoes, made a cucumber salad, and steamed some squash.

That night we sat in the living room and watched the Speed channel...

I got to meet Matthew while we were there. Matthew is a smart young man who will be in the fifth grade next year. He spends a lot of time at my mom's house. He reads a lot and plays computer games (maybe too much) and seems very well behaved, in general. He has become nocturnal for the summer. Sunday he slept until 3pm!

Georgia is hot; but otherwise it was a nice trip. I go back down there the first week of August to take another test.

(Matthew, you can email me sometime and tell me what you're reading...)

Taking Georgia's "Technology Test"

To be certified in Georgia (something I'm trying to accomplish), you have to prove computer skill proficiency. One way of doing that is to take the technology test at a RESA office.

Georgia has a 25-page list of technology skills they think a teacher should be able to show. I took their test on July 2.

The technology test took me about 40 minutes. It was actually 6 different test (in Riverdeep, believe it or not) and I had an hour total to take them all. Lowest possible score was 100. A passing score was 176. Highest possible score was 300.

I got my lowest score on WORD, which I suppose means that WORD does a lot I don't know about (since I use it 8 or 10 times a day). If I'd gotten one more wrong answer on WORD I'd have to take the test again. I got my highest score on EXCEL, which I learned to use mostly for this test. Whatever...

My scores:

• Internet - 288
• Access (Database) - 280
• PowerPoint (Presentation Tools) - 280
• Spreadsheets (EXCEL) - 300
• MS WORD (Word Processing) - 176
• Windows Operating Systems - 248

A Philosophy of Education (Why do we have schools, anyway...?)

Summer is a good time to think about WHY we do what we do. Whether you're a teacher of a parent, time off gives us all time to reflect...

A philosophy of education should include discussion of several basic components. Central issues should include the purpose of education, the nature of the curriculum, the place of students, and the role of teachers.

Education in America has no purpose - at least no one, singular, canonical purpose. The purposes of education are multiple and interwoven. Those purposes change with age, environment, and the peculiarities of individual students so that even within a specific classroom the primary purpose of schooling for this child may be one thing and the primary purpose for that child may be yet another. In the case of any given child, the parents' purposes for sending the child to school may differ significantly from the purposes of the educational agency requiring the child's presence. And in as much as the provision of educational services is a joint venture that usually involves at least three different government agencies (a local city or county, a state, and the federal government) the purposes of the various agencies taking part in this partnership may vary significantly, or even be at odds.

For all parties involved, the purposes of education change significantly with time. Kindergarten has a unique set of priorities for everyone engaged in the educational process. The nature of those priorities change significantly by middle school, are additionally altered in high school, and are further renovated in the college setting.

I am not avoiding the question. I am simply acknowledging its complexity - and the ambiguity of the semantics involved. "What is the purpose of education?" The answer depends on who you are, and on whether you're providing it or receiving it. And that is what the answer should depend upon. Because somewhere high on the list of the many and various purposes education serves in our society, the preservation of pluralism, the equipping of those who are somehow different in our society to maintain their membership in it nonetheless, holds a now prominent (and hopefully permanent) spot.

My view of the purpose of education (now, at the age of 47, with three degrees and 100 some odd graduate hours already under my belt) is mercenary: I continue to participate in education as a student for economic reasons. I'm paying through the nose for out-of-state tuition because doing so keeps me my job. That's not very philosophical; nor is it a complete picture. I have three degrees and 100+ graduate hours because I like going to school. And if I came into some large and unexpected inheritance this week (or won the lottery), my new financial security would probably only result in a change of major, not in a change in my status as a student. In the meantime, I am compelled to pursue professional development goals; I would prefer to have the time and resources to use education as tool in the hunt for self-actualization.

If the question were put, though, to me with the idea of determining why I want my children (ages both now adults) to continue as students in some educational setting my answer would be somewhat different. I see college (preferably at a liberal arts-oriented institution) as the logical place in our society for them to obtain skills (some cognitive, some technical) that will improve significantly their vocational prospects and the general quality of their lives (by which I mean their ability to understand the news and appreciate Steinbeck).

In both of these cases my answer to the question differs significantly from my answer when the question is rephrased more abstractly, more globally. If the question is phrased in such a way as to ask why I think that educational services (schooling) should be provided universally in my society at my expense (through tax dollars), I'd say that I am not particularly concerned with my next door neighbor's self-actualization. And while I think in terms of maximizing benefits from education for my own children, I understand that not everyone shares my values in this regard. Instead, I would say that school should be a universally available service in our society and that participation in it should be mandatory because it provides a huge number of safeguards (for lack of a better term) within our society.

Atalaya Castle at Huntington Beach State Park, SC

On Tuesday, June 19, we visited Huntington Beach State Park and walked through Atalaya Castle.

The castle was a winter home for Archer and Anna Hyatt Huntington built in the style of Moorish architecture from Spain's Mediterranean coast.

Anna Hyatt Huntington (1876-1973) was a well known American sculptor. Her father was a professor of paleontology and zoology at Harvard and MIT. Archer Huntington was the son of 19th Century railroad tycoon Collis Huntington (for whom Huntington, WV, is named. Archer himself is best known for his scholarly work in Hispanic Studies and for founding The Hispanic Society of America.

We weren't fortunate enough to be at the park when a tour was available. There are, however, narrated tours of Atalaya on a regular basis.

Evidently it was possible to see the ocean from the house when it was built in the early 1930's. Now the house is separated from the sea by a few sand dunes.

The castle is built in a 200-foot square with a large inner courtyard. Living quarters were spread over 30 rooms along three sides of the structure. Of those, 18 rooms were occupied by the Huntingtons and the other 11 were servants' quarters. A large square tower made from cypress wood sat in the courtyard; the tower held 3,000 gallons of water.

When you come in the front of Atalaya you see a gated doorway into the courtyard. To the left are the stables and kennels. To the right is the oyster shucking room. having shucked our own roasted oysters at a local seafood restaurant, we thought the oyster shucking room was delightful.

When you enter the courtyard you find a covered walkway of open brickwork. Planters still line the sides.

The portion of the house the Huntingtons lived in had a dining room, a separate breakfast room, a bath for him, a bath for her, a sunroom, a library, an indoor studio for Anna, and indoor studio for Archer, and bedrooms.

Most of the inner walls were covered with creeping fig vines.

Most of the rooms had a fire place that I'm sure heated the rooms during the winter. But during the summer I suspect the house was insufferable. There was a freezer room in the kitchen and note that said that 300 pounds of ice were trucked in each day. I suspect it was a pleasant room to stand in during the month of July...

The Huntingtons returned to Atalaya after the war for their usual stay in 1946 and 1947. These were the last years they used their home.

"Evan Almighty" and Our Moral Categories

One of the blogs I look at periodically belongs to Dr. Ron Ethridge, the pastor of Woodward Avenue Baptist Church in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. This week Ron posted a blog entry about whether it would be wrong for his flock members to go see the new movie "Evan Almighty." I enjoyed his opinion on the matter, particularly the Bible quote he used. Ron said:

“Everything is permissible for me, but not everything is profitable!” (1 Corinthians 6:12) I think that applies here…

I commented on Ron's site and told him that the quote reminded me of a conclusion I drew during my time overseas. As Christians from a Western European cultural background, we tend to want to reduce all moral choices to good vs. bad, right vs. wrong. We love morality, but we limit our way of thinking about it. Those limits are cultural, and not really Biblical (as this passage shows). And the desire to divide things up into binary “yes or no” categories comes from our pre-Christian philosophical roots, from Aristotle (not Paul or Moses). That desire for "yes or no" answers also tends to lead to extreme conclusions (followed by extreme actions, with Prohibition being a classic example).

I’ve lived in places where Muslims made up the largest portion of the population and I’ve worked with Muslim college students in an ESL setting. It struck me some years ago that for all the problems that a legalistic religion like Islam presents, their moral categories seem more Biblical to me than those of my own culture.

In Islam there are four main moral categories:

• Some things are commanded, or required in their moral framework. You simply must pray, for example.
  

• Some things are encouraged, like charity.
  

• Some things are allowed, or permissible. The Arabic word is halal and it means much the same think as “kosher.” You don’t have to do it, but you can it you want to.
  

• Some things are forbidden, or impermissible. The Arabic word is haram.

So in Islam, you must pray, you should give to the poor, you can eat beef (or be a vegetarian if you’d prefer), and you cannot eat pork (because the Qur’an teaches that it is unclean).

I think American Christians would do well to reconsider what moral categories they use and examine whether the Bible or the Ancient Greeks have more influence on their thinking…

My thoughts, at least...

Eating in Myrtle Beach

From our house it is 18 miles to an Applebees. A Bob Evans sits beside that Applebees. There is a Shoney's 26 miles from our house. And if we drive 35 miles to Princeton, WV, there's a Cracker Barrel, a new Chilis, another Applebees, another Bob Evans, an Outback, and another Shoneys. The nearest Red Lobster or Ruby Tuesday's? That's 67 miles. The nearest Olive Garden or TGI Fridays? They're about 125 miles from us, in Charleston, WV. heck, it's 55 miles to a danged Waffle House from where we live...

When we go to places like Myrtle Beach, we enjoy the opportunity to eat in nice restaurants. On our way to Myrtle Beach we ate at the Olive Garden in Florence, SC (and discovered you can't buy alcohol on Sunday there); on the way home from Myrtle Beach we ate at the olive Garden in Greensboro, NC. In Florence I had the Chianti Beef and Cheryl had the Mixed Pasta Misto with Shrimp and Alfredo Sauce. In Greensboro I had the mixed grill (skewers of Chicken and beef with grilled squash and zucchini) and Cheryl had the Tour of Italy.

The best food we had in Myrtle Beach wasn't in Myrtle Beach; it was in Murells Inlet, ten or 12 miles south of Myrtle Beach. On Tuesday we ate at Nance's Creek Front Restaurant and Oyster Roast. We both ordered a seafood platter and we got an oyster roast as an appetizer with the intention of having leftovers to take back to our room. The oysters can in a plastic bucket - about 30 of them - along with a shucking knife. We pried them open and dipped them in butter and lemon juice. Shucking the oysters was work; I'd guess we spent half an hour opening them. The restaurant had a beautiful view of the inlet and seated about 200 people, I'd guess. We spent about $60. I gave it a "nine." We'll go back...

Myrtle Beach acts like it invented the buffet. There are probably a couple of dozen buffets in the city. All of them have a variety of calabash seafood items ("calabash" is a batter fried seafood dish where the batter includes milk instead of water and more flour than corn meal). Almost all advertise crab legs (meaning snow crab legs), You get what you pay for. The cheaper places ($17.99 range) have a buffet with 50 or so items and crab legs at an additional price, not included on the bar. The top of the line places have 120 items on the buffet - raw oysters, crab legs actually on the buffet, prime rib or t-bones (though not cooked to order), desserts, soup and salad, etc.

We ate at the Sea Trawler on Monday because it was close by the hotel, on King's Highway in South Myrtle Beach. It was the bottom side of okay; we gave it a four or five on a scale of one to ten. It was abut $33 with a coupon that saved us eight bucks and it did not have crab legs on the buffet. On Wednesday we ate at Bennetts. Bennetts claims to be Myrtle Beach's first buffet; it was started in 1984, I think. The 120 item buffet included prime rib and t-bone (I ate some of both). I tried crawfish for the first time (mostly they were small). There were several shrimp dishes. The raw oysters were still in the shell and soaking in warm water (I'd rather have the cold). And I had a cluster of crab legs. The food was good (I'd be stretching it to say "great") and the buffet was $55 with tax for the two of us. We gave Bennetts a 7.5 on a scale of one to ten.

After Bennetts we stopped eating at buffets. The bottom line is that you get a lot of food (more than we wanted) for the same money you'd pay for a menu item at most restaurants. And the quality of menu food is better (IMHO).

Breakfast buffets are different. It's hard to screw up bacon or scramble eggs wrong. Our best breakfast was at Mammy's Kitchen on the corner of King's Highway and 10th Ave. N. It's a buffet. Our worst breakfast was at County Kitchen the morning we left; the establishment is at the corner of Kings Highway and 2nd Ave. S. My pork chops were good and my hash browns were crunchy. Cheryl's biscuits could have been used for golf balls at a nearby putt-putt. We sent them back because she couldn't cut them and the replacement biscuits never came. The manager figured it out at the cash register and got us to hang around an extra 6 or 7 minutes waiting on a complimentary "to go" order of them. To be fair, it was Saturday and they were busy; but the waitress took a 10 minute break in the middle of our meal. Their bathrooms were truly disgusting.

Other meals included the free breakfast at the hotel, Denny's twice, a dinner at TGI Fridays, and a dinner at Cheese Burgers in Paradise.