Teaching in Kansas sure must be different

The pedagogical methods of Mark Samsel wouldn’t fly here. In fact, they weren’t even successful in Kansas.

Kansas state Rep. Mark Samsel was arrested on charges of misdemeanor battery on Thursday after getting into a physical altercation with a student while substitute teaching in Wellsville.

Samsel, 36, was booked into the Franklin County Adult Detention Center after 3:30 p.m. Thursday. He has since been released on $1,000 bond, Sheriff Jeff Richards said.

Superintendent Ryan Bradbury said that Samsel will no longer be allowed to work for the district.

Yeah, he’s a Republican state representative, and he works as a substitute teacher. He’s screwing over the citizens of the state in two ways!

I can’t quite figure out what courses he was supposed to be teaching. It sounds like he thought he was in Sunday school, and was wandering about moralizing and wagging his finger at everyone and giving incoherent advice.

On Wednesday, Samsel, R-Wellsville, was substitute teaching at the Wellsville school district’s secondary school. Throughout the day, high school students began recording videos of the lawmaker talking about suicide, sex, masturbation, God and the Bible.

In one video shared with The Star, Samsel tells students about “a sophomore who’s tried killing himself three times,” adding that it was because “he has two parents and they’re both females.”

“He’s a foster kid. His alternatives in life were having no parents or foster care parents who are gay,” Samsel tells students. “How do you think I’m going to feel if he commits suicide? Awful.”

In another video, Samsel is recorded telling students, “make babies. Who likes making babies? That feels good, doesn’t it? Procreate … You haven’t masturbated? Don’t answer that question….God already knows.”

He seems to have been harassing one student in particular.

At one point, Samsel tells the student, “You’re about ready to anger me and get the wrath of God. Do you believe me when I tell you that God has been speaking to me?” He then pushes him, and the student runs to the other side of the classroom.

“You should run and scream.”

In another video, he tells students, “Class, you have permission to kick him in the balls.”

Parents told The Star that Samsel “put hands on the student” and allegedly kneed him in the crotch. In a video apparently taken immediately after the incident, the student is shown on the ground. Samsel is standing over him and says, “did it hurt?”

He then asks him why he is about to start crying, pats him on the shoulder and apologizes, and then says he can “go to the nurse, she can check it for you.”

Samsel addresses another student and says, “do you want to check his nuts for him, please?”

Now he’s out, and he’s claiming that he meant to do that. He was “sending a message”.

In a Snapchat post shared with The Star, Samsel wrote that “it was all planned.”

“Every little bit of it. That’s right. The kids and I planned ALL this to SEND A MESSAGE about art, mental health, teenage suicide, how we treat our educators and one another. To who? Parents. And grandparents. And all of Wellsville,” he posted.

He wrote that he gave one particular student “hope.”

“I went to jail for battery. Does that really make me a criminal? Time will tell.”

He said that the incident happened during fifth period, and that the classes before that hour went as planned, and he shared the same lesson in each one. He said what happened was “exactly what God planned. The kids were in on it. Not all of them. But most.”

I have no idea what message he was sending. I do know that kicking your students in the crotch does make you a criminal, and I don’t believe for a moment that he was implementing a god’s plan. He was just an incompetent jerk who ought not to be allowed anywhere near a school. Or a statehouse.

Videos here. His classroom seems to have been nothing but self-indulgent chaos and Christian abuse. At least he has “apologized”. Sort of.

Wise explainer

LeVar Burton is something special — he is beyond being a science communicator, and is more of a knowledge communicator, which is something we desperately need. Science is beautiful, but so are history and literature and philosophy and art and all human endeavors that make the world a better place.

So he appeared on The View, and Megan McCain, of course, thought she’d challenge him with the Dr Seuss “ban” (it wasn’t) and that deplorable cancel culture, and he gently and succinctly shot her down.

In terms of cancel culture, I think it’s misnamed — that’s a misnomer. I think we have a consequence culture and that consequences are finally encompassing everybody in the society, whereas they haven’t been, ever, in this country.

I think there are good signs in the culture, and I think it has everything to do with a new awareness on people who were simply unaware of the real nature of life in this country for people who have been othered since this nation began.

Nice. Listen to LeVar, everyone.

Inconstant weather

Well, it’s 32°C in Morris today, with extremely low humidity and the potential for strong winds. I think that means the spiders will be stirring, so I’ve got to abandon grading for an hour or two to wander the streets looking for my little friends. I better do it now, since for all I know it’s going to snow later this week. That’s my excuse for evading my responsibilities, anyway.

’Tis the gift to be simple, ’tis the gift to be free ’Tis the gift to come down where we ought to be

I’m working on the final exam for my introductory biology course which is laced with Darwinism, but also with the philosophy of science, and early on I’d introduced them to Occam’s Razor. I’d tried to explain to them then that while it’s a useful operational tool in designing appropriate experiments, it’s almost never true that the simplest answer is the correct answer, at least not in biology. And then I stumbled across this article on Simplicity in the Philosophy of Science by Simon Fitzpatrick that summed up that same point nicely.

It should be noted, however, that not all scientists agree that simplicity should be regarded as a legitimate criterion for theory choice. The eminent biologist Francis Crick once complained, “[w]hile Occam’s razor is a useful tool in physics, it can be a very dangerous implement in biology. It is thus very rash to use simplicity and elegance as a guide in biological research” (Crick, 1988, p138). Similarly, here are a group of earth scientists writing in Science:

Many scientists accept and apply [Ockham’s Razor] in their work, even though it is an entirely metaphysical assumption. There is scant empirical evidence that the world is actually simple or that simple accounts are more likely than complex ones to be true. Our commitment to simplicity is largely an inheritance of 17th-century theology. (Oreskes et al, 1994, endnote 25)

Oooh, I’ll have to make a note of that for the next time I argue with an Intelligent Design creationist who thinks complexity is a hallmark of design.

Unfortunately, rummaging around in philosophy articles is not a good way to come up with testable questions for a first year biology course, and I still don’t have a good idea on this topic for the exam. I suppose I could just put that quote on a page and ask them to explain why Crick and Oreskes would say such things, but for the sake of my sanity, I’m avoiding asking for long essays from freshman students. I’m sure my students could handle it, but then I’d have to read 50 such essays, and I don’t think I could.

Where is my crocoduck tie?

I own a crocoduck tie, somewhere. I was actually gifted this tie by Richard Dawkins himself, many years ago, and I thought I’d wear it as a talisman this afternoon, but now I can’t find it. I haven’t been at any events that warrant a tie for many years now, and honestly this past year I’ve barely left the house. Maybe if I went to church more, I’d have an excuse?

Anyway, the reason I was looking for it is that I’m supposed to have a livestream on youtube with Kevin Logan and Kristi Winters about science as a social construct, which it is, prompted by this other YouTuber going by the name of King Crocoduck, who claims to have something he calls a “naturalist nuke” that demolishes all those SJWs who don’t recognize the omnipotence of True Science. I guess it’s happening around 3:00, my time — it’s all very informal, since I don’t have a link yet. In which case I guess it’s just as well I’m not putting on a suit and tie for it.

A virtual meeting of arachnologists

If you are interested in spiders, the American Arachnology Society meeting is open for registration. The meeting is 24 June to 1 July, is only $20, and you don’t need to be a professional arachnologist with a PhD to attend (yay, my imposter syndrome is appeased!). I’m also interested in this new addition to the conference:

This year, we aim to connect attendees with artists, artisans, entrepreneurs and vendors who make arachnid-inspired pieces via a “Featured Artists” page on the conference website. For a small fee ($5-10) artists can have an image of their work and a link to their digital store or website included on this page. Are you interested in having your art/products featured at the conference?

I have no art/products, but maybe you do, and I want to see them!

It’s all old neckless white guys with buzzcuts harassing kids, in my mind

Ken the Hen is exactly right: LEAVE THEM ALONE.

I remember genital inspections — only we called that junior high PE class. I hated it. Being an insecure and introverted adolescent and being told to strip and take a public shower was bad enough, but it was made worse by the swaggering asshole, Mr Earl, who ‘taught’ PE and would stroll through the locker room making comments about everyone’s bodies. He was definitely in the category of “really mean people”, and was probably also a white supremacist — he certainly raved on and on about the Vietnam War — and I’m sure he’d be a TERF, since, although there were very few openly trans folk in my community then, he was dazzlingly homophobic.

OK, maybe that’s my conspiracy theory. The worst people in the world are brutal PE coaches from the 1970s, and now they’re all running the country and sitting in the Missouri legislature passing hate crimes as laws.

Where are our conspiracy theories?

I’m feeling left out. I just encountered yet another story of a shadowy cabal conspiring to destroy humanity by promoting transgenderism, and it got me wondering why we don’t have our own silly conspiracy theories.

While prominent Jewish transgender activists like Jazz Jennings and Jennifer Pritzker, and Jewish-themed shows like Transparent, serve as one face of this imagined conspiracy, white nationalists believe the real power is wielded behind the scenes by Jewish billionaires, talent managers, media and entertainment executives, journalists, and advocacy groups like the Anti-Defamation League. They think this shadow network is working patiently to normalize transgender acceptance in popular culture; as another Occidental Observer writer put it, “the stunningly disproportionate Jewish involvement in the ‘transgender rights’ movement reveals it as yet another form of Jewish ethnic warfare.”

This Jewish activism, they are convinced, is laser-focused on attacking white, Western society at its most vulnerable and sacrosanct point: the sexuality of children.

As Henrik Palmgren, leader of the white nationalist multimedia company Red Ice said in 2015, the Jewish parents of Jazz Jennings, by supporting their young daughter to become a trailblazing advocate for trans empowerment and acceptance, were enacting “one of the most disturbing agendas the Zionist elite have ever created.” This attempt at “normalizing the abnormal,” Palmgren wrote, “will sacrifice the physical and mental health of numerous children for decades to come.”

I mean, look at that! Why? Who gets together in meetings and schemes to cripple children? What loon would think that the “most vulnerable point” of Western society is allowing a tiny minority of young people to define their own sexuality? It’s not an effective strategy, and I also can’t believe that any subgroup that acquires “real power” would be interested in destroying the culture they are succeeding in. If anything, history tells us that the powerful tend to work to maintain the status quo.

That got me wondering, though, if I believe in any conspiracies. I don’t know; I think billionaires are the most horrible, disruptive force in society, but I don’t think they’re intentionally working together to nefarious ends — they’re just selfish people who are exploiting the system independently. Republicans are doing great evils, but again, it’s not a plot. It’s just ignorant people mired in fallacious dogma. Creationists are just pathetic. There’s no one on the other side I’d consider an evil mastermind, the other side seems to be full of bumbling, incompetent human beings, just like my side.

That’s a problem, maybe. It would all be so much easier if we could identify a distinguishable group to demonize, but instead, they is us.