It’s always fun to volunteer for an extra lecture — this time it’s for an honors series here at UMM. The theme is built around the essays of the late Renaissance humanist Montaigne, on the subject of “Of Family.” It’s also prompted by a visiting professor.

Monday September 18, 7pm in Imholte 109

Mark your calendars for the other three lectures in the series, all held in the same place at the same time: Dr. Stephen Gross on 9/25; Dr. Paul Z. Myers on 10/2; Dr. Sarah Buchanan on 10/9

Michelle Janning is a writer, social science researcher, speaker, and sociology professor and endowed chair of social sciences at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington. She teaches and consults on human-centered design, roles and relationships in families and workplaces, technology and social life, education, and inclusive data-driven assessment and strategic planning in organizations and architecture projects. Janning employs qualitative and quantitative methods in her academic and applied research, and has published numerous books, articles, and essays, including The Stuff of Family Life: How our Homes Reflect our Lives (Rowman & Littlefield, 2017), Love Letters: Saving Romance in the Digital Age (Routledge, 2018), and A Guide to Socially-Informed Research for Architects and Designers (Routledge, 2023). She has been interviewed about homes and family life, along with other social issues, in numerous media outlets, including Real Simple, Vox, The New York Times, BBC, The Atlantic, NBC News, and Parents.com.

There I am, on 2 October, speaking on the cryptic subject “Of Boundaries.” I’m a biologist, so they’re going to have to expect something a little different from those other speakers in the humanities/social sciences. Would you believe I’m squeezing in some material on spiders, in a lecture series on families? Yes, you would. It’s not all spiders, though. You’ll have to come on out to Western Minnesota to find out.

For now, you can try guessing what “Of Boundaries” is about.

After a few stressful days in which our host was balking at doing its job, Freethoughtblogs is back online!

Now I suppose we have to resume providing content.

I got an interesting comment over on Mastodon, in response to the Tommy Tuberville story. There’s a classical scholar always ready to sic some ancient poetry on philistines.

Sappho, “To One Who Loved Not Poetry,” ca mid-600BCE:

κατθάνοισα δὲ κείσῃ οὐδέ ποτα
μναμοσύνα σέθεν
ἔσσετ’ οὐδὲ †ποκ’†ὔστερον· οὐ
γὰρ πεδέχῃς βρόδων
τῶν ἐκ Πιερίας· ἀλλ’ ἀφάνης
κἠν Ἀίδα δόμῳ
φοιτάσεις πεδ’ ἀμαύρων νεκύων
ἐκπεποταμένα

But thou shalt ever lie dead,
nor shall there be any remembrance of thee then or thereafter,
for thou hast not of the roses of Pieria;
but thou shalt wander obscure even in the house of Hades,
flitting among the shadowy dead.

That’s a fitting end for a stupid old football coach — eternal obscurity, lost and forgotten, with only mockery left to remember him by. Respect poets, or suffer that fate yourself!

This week’s Oglaf is some kind of metaphor or something.

I was going to mention that it’s totally safe for work, but if you put that up on the wall of your cubicle you might find that it annoys the bosses.

So sad. A bunch of privileged people who wanted to be hippies for a few days while ripping up the desert went to Burning Man on the playa, and got a surprise.

It rained.

Everything turned to mud. They’re stranded because all the transportation is stuck, and they’re having to slog on foot through the glop, and they’re rationing the food.

Tsk, tsk. It’s another Fyre Festival. Maybe they’ll learn the lesson that fragile environments aren’t your playground? Nah.

I encountered this little message on Shitter, and was appalled at all the comments that enthusiastically agreed. This is not a curriculum. It’s a hodge-podge of random topics that the creator thinks they have mastered, and shame on you if you haven’t.

Look, what educators do is design a program of instruction that builds the basics first, that the student can then build on to reach more complex topics. It’s a tree, where attention must first be paid to the trunk, and then the branches. The stuff in this cartoon is a collection of twigs…some useful, others specialized, others mostly irrelevant.

Look at the first one, for instance: taxes. You have got to be kidding me. Doing your taxes is an exercise in following somewhat arbitrary instructions, doing basic arithmetic a step at a time. In a sense, most education is already all about obeying a series of instructions, are you seriously suggesting that tax forms are an important or interesting part of your schooling? Fuck off.

Then, coding. I’ve noticed that a lot of programmers have an inflated sense of the importance of what they do — it’s useful, but not essential for most people’s lives. This is basically vocational instruction that’s not going to be at all useful unless you get into a career in IT. (I’m not an outsider looking in here: I spent about fifteen years of my life doing lots of coding for laboratory work. I enjoyed it, but I haven’t had to fire up a compiler in an even longer period of time.)

Cooking? Really? Schools already offer classes in cooking. It’s called home economics. It’s usually optional; in my education you could take either home ec or a shop class. I did both because I wanted to. I spent a year learning the skills I’d need to be a line cook (vocational ed again), and another year in shop, which at my school was largely about drafting and printing. Both were cool, I’m glad I took them, I acquired some simple skills I use even now, but mandatory? Students don’t have infinite time.

The rest are similar tiny twigs on the tree of education. Isn’t high school basically already a gauntlet compelling you to learn a combination of survival skills, social etiquette, and stress management? You think a class would be more effective than navigating the protocols and cliques of your first prom?

I notice what’s missing here: math, history, literature, art, science. Maybe they just assumed they’re already teaching those, but sometimes standards are terribly low. I remember learning US history, which is an important subject, but some of the students were lucky enough to get a teacher who was actually qualified to teach it (Hey, Mr Richardson, I saw what my peers got in that class, and I was jealous.) I got the basketball coach, and the class was a semester of pure jingo and superficial memorization of dates.

Forget this uninformed list of random topics, which was probably cobbled together by a programmer, and instead teach what educators say forms a good framework for learning, and maybe instead give teachers the resources they need and enforce good standards.

This looks like something an unqualified home-schooler would assemble, and that’s what I’m afraid of — that there are a lot of people thinking “basic home repaire” trumps spelling and math and civics.

They’d probably fail the vocabulary section of the SAT.

Many students have no choice about working with the College Board, the company that administers the SAT test and Advanced Placement exams. Part of that relationship involves a long history of privacy issues. Tests by Gizmodo found if you use some of the handy tools promoted by College Board’s website, the organization sends details about your SAT scores, GPA, and other data to Facebook, TikTok, and a variety of companies.

Gizmodo observed the College Board’s website sharing data with Facebook and TikTok when a user fills in information about their GPA and SAT scores. When this reporter used the College Board’s search filtering tools to find colleges that might accept a student with a C+ grade-point average and a SAT score of 420 out of 1600, the site let the social media companies know. Whether a student is acing their tests or struggling, Facebook and TikTok get the details.

No one should be surprised that Facebook and TikTok are stealing their users information. No one should be surprised that the College Board is pulling this crap, too. It’s cute that they were flat out caught lying.

“We do not share SAT scores or GPAs with Facebook or TikTok, and any other third parties using pixel or cookies,” said a College Board spokesperson. “In fact, we do not send any personally identifiable information (PII) through our pixels on the site. In addition, we do not use SAT scores or GPAs for any targeting.”

After receiving this comment, Gizmodo shared a screenshot of the College Board sending GPAs and SAT scores to TikTok using a pixel. The spokesperson then acknowledged that the College Board’s website actually does share this data.

Yeah, that’s the College Board all over the place. They’re a for-profit company(it claims to be a non-profit, but keep in mind the CEO makes over a million dollars a year) founded during the era of eugenics on the lie that a standardized test can be used to quantify the intelligence and ability of young people.