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Interesting Reads for 15 Aug 2014

America Is Not For Black People – “The United States of America is not for black people. We know this, and then we put it out of our minds, and then something happens to remind us. Saturday, in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson, Mo., something like that happened: An unarmed 18-year-old black man was executed by police in broad daylight.” Deadspin

Who rules America? – “The analysts found that when controlling for the power of economic elites and organized interest groups, the influence of ordinary Americans registers at a “non-significant, near-zero level.” The analysts further discovered that rich individuals and business-dominated interest groups dominate the policymaking process. The mass-based interest groups had minimal influence compared to the business-based interest groups.” The Hill

Making the Case for Teaching Students to Debate – Education Week – “Research supports this development. It has been demonstrated already that debaters in high school show improved academic performance and fewer disciplinary and behavioral problems than non-debaters. Student debaters also have a much higher likelihood of attending and graduating from college than their non-debater peer groups. But research also tells us that middle school is a period of considerable brain growth with the shift from concrete to abstract processing and growing capabilities in problem solving, planning, and critical thinking. Debate can support and enhance brain development as an activity requiring and honing these skills.” Education Week

Ecological Intervention: Prospects and Limits – “This essay seeks to extend the already controversial debate about humanitarian intervention by exploring the morality, legality, and legitimacy of ecological intervention and its corollary, ecological defense. If the legacy of the Holocaust was acceptance of a new category of “crimes against humanity” and an emerging norm of humanitarian intervention, then should the willful or reckless perpetration of mass extinctions and massive ecosystem destruction be regarded as “crimes against nature” or “ecocide” such as to ground a new norm of ecological intervention or ecological defense?” Carnegie Council

The Civil Rights Movement Is Going in Reverse in Alabama | New Republic – “But the implications of this go far beyond partisanship. Because of increasingly racially polarized voting patterns in the South, party has become a stand-in for race. As University of California at Irvine law professor Rick Hasen recently wrote in the Harvard Law Review, “The realignment of the parties in the South following the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s has created a reality in which today most African American voters are Democrats and most white conservative voters are Republicans.” “ New Republic

Toward a Conservative Policy on Climate Change – – “Because conservatives, for the most part, are less concerned about climate change than environmentalists are, it may seem that workable solutions are more likely to come from the left. That assumption is incorrect. If politicians and policy analysts on the right were to look more carefully at the problem, they would realize that conservatism offers much more tenable approaches — and they might just be able to stop running from the issue.” The New Atlantis

August 15, 2014/by dpogreba

Summer Reading

Student Blogs

As you approach the end of summer, don’t forget to complete your summer reading assignments for AP Literature (seniors) and AP Language (juniors).

There are copies of the books available at the Helena High Office—and you still have time to get it done.

August 15, 2014/by dpogreba

Interesting Reads for Aug 08, 2014

Daily Wisdom

Some interesting reads you might enjoy this week.

Machine Grading and Moral Learning – The New Atlantis – “Responding to and evaluating students’ written work does more than just describe students, or distinguish them. Grading is also pedagogical: it corrects and informs, rewards and reinforces someone’s understanding of the world. Because it has the potential to change a student, grading is a moral hazard. Grading well requires knowing what human beings are for and educating them accordingly; how and why one grades is a confession of one’s beliefs about the ultimate destiny of man. A professor is an architect of the intellectual life, making castles of minds and cathedrals of culture — or slums and factories, as the case may be.” The New Atlantis

Yuppie Prohibition League Denounces Pot Legalization | Rolling Stone – “No, actually, by making it legal, we’re deciding that letting people get high is a lesser evil compared to a person’s life being derailed forever by a pointless and intrinsically hypocritical marijuana arrest. But Brooks/Brown/Scarborough wouldn’t know anything about that, apparently.” Rolling Stone

Virtualsity, by Michael Barron – “What music can we expect to hear from these new digital instruments? If a generation of people who grew up listening to plugged-in instruments and guitar solos have moved onto the computer, what happens when a generation of musicians who have learned to sample and manipulate automated audio clips are given the tools for expressive digital instrumentation? A new musical genre, perhaps, or new variations on the familiar. It’s a chicken-and-egg question, but it may take only one virtualoso to hatch the answer.” Harper’s

Obama’s “Limited” Mission in Iraq – The New Yorker – “There can be no doubt about Obama’s intentions. Even with ruthless fighters from the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) overrunning large parts of northern Iraq, the President has clearly demonstrated in recent weeks that he is deeply reluctant to use U.S. firepower in an effort to halt their advance. Spurning calls from the Iraqi government, and from the Kurds, to shore up American forces and carpet bomb the militants, he instead dispatched a few hundred military advisers to Iraq, saying that they’d assess the situation and report back. (George Packer has written about the people fleeing ISIS, and Dexter Filkins has urged American military support.)” The New Yorker

The War Photo No One Would Publish – The Atlantic – The Iraqi soldier died attempting to pull himself up over the dashboard of his truck. The flames engulfed his vehicle and incinerated his body, turning him to dusty ash and blackened bone. In a photograph taken soon afterward, the soldier’s hand reaches out of the shattered windshield, which frames his face and chest. The colors and textures of his hand and shoulders look like those of the scorched and rusted metal around him. Fire has destroyed most of his features, leaving behind a skeletal face, fixed in a final rictus. He stares without eyes. On February 28, 1991, Kenneth Jarecke stood in front of the charred man, parked amid the carbonized bodies of his fellow soldiers, and photographed him. The Atlantic

August 12, 2014/by dpogreba

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