Hello everyone, Randi here.
As you now know, there are major changes taking place at the JREF.
We’ve been successful in our mission as an educational resource, but for some time we have felt that we could be doing more to make a difference, especially with regards to cultivating a new generation of critical thinkers. So, our prime focus for the future will be to build our educational content, and to develop more and greater opportunities to promote critical thinking in the classroom.
I also want to reassure you that, never fear, the Million Dollar Challenge lives on!
And, in exciting news, we are beginning to plan TAM 2015 — our 13th! JREF Fellow and long-time volunteer Ray Hall has agreed to be the Program Chair for the next summer’s meeting. Ray says to expect a full agenda of scientific skepticism, critical thinking, Sunday Papers, informative and inspirational talks, new insights, the warmth and family of the TAM community, and all the usual magic that is The Amazing Meeting.
Well, that’s vague enough. It’s not at all clear what they’re going to be doing specifically to refocus on education, and that they’ll be having TAM in 2015 is optimistic…but they don’t say anything about what the program will be like.
We’ll just have to wait and see.
Not buzzword-laden enough to be an actual mission statement, but it’s in the same spirit.
Incidentally, DJ Grothe’s Twitter bio still has a reference to him being JREF president, and he’s been uncharacteristically silent on the whole thing. I wonder if that’s significant somehow.
I would have thought a change in the top leadership position would have also warranted a mention, but it seems not.
Like — if not details of the change, or a short retrospective of DJ Grothe’s time and works as president — at least “we thank him for his 4 years with us and wish him well in his new endeavours” or something.
Curious, that.
You can read a lot into the way large, or even not-so-large organizations announce the departure of executives. There’s usually a lot of flowery “leaving to pursue other ventures” and “wish him well in his future endeavors” stuff that means “We fired him, but are trying to be gracious about it.”
“DJ Grothe is no longer with the JREF” just means “We fired him and are glad he’s gone but there’s a legal agreement in place not to disclose any more.”
“We™ always detested the festering little weasel but…”
‘What do you mean they blew up the Death Star? … Who’s “THEY”?‘
(Sorry, not even slightly relevant. Just comes to mind every time that phrasing gets used…)
I think wait and see is all we can do for now; it’s just as productive as endless speculation and yet not anywhere near as counterproductive. I for one am looking forward to see what happens and I’m hoping that it is genuinely something new and productive. Who knows, I might even make donations again.
On one of my only slightly paranoid days I could read that as a slap in the face for all those who have been hurt or greatly inconvenienced by D J Grothe’s behaviours.
No acknowledgement, no explanation, not even the mansplaining! In short, a snub.
As someone who did not encounter Randi during his Popov or Geller exposés, nor through any Carson appearances, I must say: the JREF has always seemed to me to be a rather blatant Randi-pension-plan-&-fan-club posing as an educational non-profit. I have yet to encounter something which nudged me off that initial impression, this statement included.
Whatever the reason, whatever the agreement, whatever.
DJ Grothe has lost a major platform for his abuse and that’s a good thing.
Kagato:
Combined with the general vagueness, I don’t find it encouraging. My cynical reading is that they’re keeping their heads low, hoping the whole scandal will blow over. Then they’ll go back to the same mistakes all over again.
Corvus:
I used to hang out at the website, read Randi’s blog every Friday, and argue with trolls on the forums. It was a pretty educational experience for me as a budding skeptic. Never went to TAM. Kind of drifted away as I got into my own blogging.
Then I started hearing about sexist crap going on over there and decided to maintain my distance. (Admittedly, it might have been there while I was a regular visitor. It might have been less pronounced, and/or my blinders were too thick to notice it much.)
I wouldn’t expect an announcement about the theme and speakers at TAM 2015 until at February or March. If we hear nothing then, it would be time to worry.
Mmmm, randi.org seems down.
I think I’ve heard this song before. The JREF has been “planning” educational resources for years, and believe me, I’ve been looking for them. Last I saw, said resources seemed to be geared toward a separate scientific skepticism course/curriculum, which is about the least useful thing I can imagine for most public schools, at least. I’d love to have individual, modular activities, projects, labs, and so forth that are aligned to standards and designed to be slotted into pre-existing courses (science especially, but it’d be easy enough to design ones for English or history or math courses too), but I don’t know many schools with the resources and inclination to whip up whole new courses just to make use of slow-to-appear lesson plans from the JREF.
So the new focus is on the classroom, cool. What was the current focus precisely?
3, Kagato,
“We would like to thank mr. Grothe for overseeing four troubling years for the JREF, during which time our income dropped precipitously and attendance at our flagship conference likewise plummeted.”
Well, I think we can reserve judgment for a while. It would be nice to know who the inner circle is, and what their priorities are. And whether they have any expertise whatsoever in the stated mission.
You can’t just drop educational programming into schools from a helicopter.
Another patented Unknown Eric Cynical Translation:
“Hi everybody,
We’re flailing. Seriously, we have absolutely no idea what we’re actually doing here, folks. And to be honest, we don’t really care all that much either. Give us money.”
Well unless they actually hire an educator, or better yet several specialists in education, that actually know something about designing materials for use in schools all of these announcements are useless flapping about.
Designing materials that are useful in the classroom is hard and takes work. There are already metric tons of junk out there purporting to be ‘curriculum materials’ (which is a real trick considering its all digital). It seems like every children’s book being published has some sort of lame ‘classroom activity’ that consists of a few lame leading questions – ‘how do you think lead character felt about this ? ‘ – and if you are lucky some vocabulary worksheets. If you want to see what a real guided reading lesson plan looks like, check this out Guided Reading Lesson Plan for Bud Not Buddy – note this is a word document that is 12 pages long. Note this is just for reading the book! There are whole other plans for putting the book into historical context.
Constructing materials that usefully tackle critical thinking, statistics, data collection, performing topical research and evaluating the material you find – this is non-trivial work.
Anyone want to make a bet that there is a single person left at JREF that can say a single sensible thing about Common Core Standards? Or the least idea how to make something that will actually be useful instead of some one off Do you have ESP? thing that looks pretty but in practice is utterly trivial ?
Sorry – I am just really, really sick of all these ‘educational’ materials being pumped out by organizations without the least clue what they are doing.
Yup.
The forum, however, is up. I spent half an hour or so yesterday perusing the forum thread on the topic. Then I got bored. The thread is now closed, although you can still read it. http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?p=10207403#post10207403
Corvus said: “the JREF has always seemed to me to be a rather blatant Randi-pension-plan-&-fan-club posing as an educational non-profit.”
Bingo. I basically like Randi, but this has been obvious since forever.
This doesn’t seem well thought out
I can’t imagine that the people who stopped supporting because of Grothe will fell at all reassured they are going to take those issues seriously now, but it also seems set up to turn away those who did support him
I have to agree with Corvus and others — the JREF’s problems run a lot deeper than Grothe.
But I’m sure TAM will proceed on schedule. Even with the slight decline in attendance, it’s still a pretty big conference despite a pretty big ticket price, and that’s a valuable enough asset that the JREF will either exploit it itself or “transfer” it to someone who will. (Sadly, Shermer’s organization is probably a good guess. CFI may be the only other candidate, and they have lots of conferences of their own.)
Randi.org is back up.
Tom Foss:
Hmmm. That also doesn’t have anything to do with critical thinking skills at all, which is what is emphasized in the letter. It’s not very hopeful that they don’t seem to know the difference.
I gotta say Randi’s got it tough. His first pick quit within months (due to wanting to start a show, of which I heard nothing since), and his second pick has been a toxic choice when it comes to women’s issues. I gotta wonder who’d be a good pick at this point, as I think there’s still room for a skeptic’s organization (for me, picking away at the “I have no real investment in this” nonsense along the sides is what got me thinking critically enough to actually start questioning beliefs of bigger import to me, and led me to being an atheist).
However it goes down, it’ll be interesting, that’s for sure, though I haven’t actually visited Randi’s forums in…. almost a decade at this point.
@comment 19, pHred
Do you mind if I use the guided reading you posted?
I’ve never actually seen JREF as anything remotely educational (which is why I’m specifically mocking it in my Thinky King thing). It is really always been a fan club, social group, and place for people to get confirmation of how smart they are compared to “regular” people.
Seems to me that they can only go up, because they can’t really do negative education… or can they?
@Maureen Brian #8
I don’t agree. I think Trebuchet’s comment at #4 sums the situation up nicely.
It’s highly unusual for an organization to let a President go without even the vaguest explanation or most lukewarm thanks. There’s a snub there, all right, but it’s directed at DJ Grothe, not at the people he’s hurt.
@Iyeska #25
The loudest TAM boosters–the ones who idolize Grothe and fight tooth-and-nail against “Social Justice Warriors” and “mission drift”, don’t even know there is a difference.
It would be wonderful if the JREF really did start promoting critical thinking in the classroom. A girl can dream.
@ Jamie #27
Sure! It is from the Guided Reading page at Warsaw Community Schools. They have a whole library of them there. My understanding is that they are freely available for use as long as you credit the Literacy Center there and don’t try to sell them.
http://www.warsaw.k12.in.us/component/docman/cat_view/171-guided-reading-lesson-plans.html
I just used it as a quick example of how difficult creating real lesson material is – I am glad you found it useful. I was worried it was too off topic. My own fields are environmental geoscience and forensics but I don’t have anything easy to share at the k-12 level.
BTW – that ESP thing I mentioned – it’s real. Now that JREF is back up you can just go there
http://www.randi.org/site/index.php/component/content/article/37-static/1132-classroom-materials.html and see them yourself. The ESP thing is supposed to be for grades 9-12! Can you imagine trying to do that for real with high school students?
They also have http://www.randi.org/site/index.php/jref-news/2208-new-jref-in-the-classroom-lessons.html
Sigh.
negative education could be equated with misinformation.
ergo, yeah, they really could.
That would be Phil Plait, whom I’ve been following for a decade or more. I even moved to his forum from the JREF one. The TV show, “Bad Universe” was a colossal failure, running only three episodes on one of the Discovery communications channel, the third of which was buried somewhere late at night.
I’d like to think things would have been better at the JREF had he stayed around, but I kind of doubt he’d have lasted all that long anyhow.
The more I think about this, the more suspicious this seems. Whenever I’ve encountered Randi in person, I’m always struck by how gracious the man is. No matter how annoying the person, Randi was unfailingly polite and charming. I attended TAM 8, where it was announced that Linda Shallenberger, longtime office manager, had retired. Linda was thanked profusely from the TAM stage by Randi and several others. She was given flowers and maybe a plaque or something.
When Phil Plait resigned, Randi wrote, “We are grateful for the leadership of our current President Phil Plait, and while we’re sad to see him go in a formal capacity, he will always be a part of the JREF family.”
To publicly dismiss a man who had been president of your organization for over four years without even a lukewarm boilerplate “thanks” is definitely a snub. Especially since, by now, Randi has been informed that the JREF’s first announcement of DJ’s termination was perceived as a snub. My best guess is that DJ was finally caught screwing over either Randi or the JREF, even more than his previously documented unethical and vindictive behavior had already damaged the JREF.
You know what happened right?… WE happened. FTB, Amanda Marcotte, etc etc. I bet many of us here started at the JREF or the Dawkins Foundation. It’s just that those of us who care about humanist issues lost interest in ‘skepticism for skepticism’s sake’…. But I do wish them well and it’s a big tent… I’d bet my ass that if they’d start taking a greater interest in humanist advocacy, they’d lose a fair number of the old guard pretty fast, but those numbers would be made up for in spaqdes by newcomers AND return ‘business’ fro those of us who found more meaningful and productive net-spaces