A Weblog

The dining hall workers at Harvard have, for several decades, been receiving a pretty raw deal. Perhaps in June, when they renegotiate their contracts, things can be improved some. For those of you who aren’t as familar with the situation as you’d like to be, I’ll outline a few of the more greivous details.

• The staff gets paid only six months out of the year. Harvard would tell you they work between nine and nine and a half months each year, and, technically, Harvard would be right. However, whenever the students are on vacation, the College gives the dining hall staff a unpaid vacation. For Christmas, some hall managers force their employees to use up their personal and vacation days over the holiday. Harvard is generous enough to pay wages on Christmas Day, but not for those who work less than 20 hours a week.
• During the summer, Harvard hires out its dining services to about seven hundred contractors. Because their six-month cannot sustain equitable living the entire year, term-time workers have to find another job over the summer in order to survive. Some move cannot afford housing in the summer and must move in with family, sometimes requiring workers to relocate across state lines. Others who are bound to leases must compete with their colleagues for jobs. There is no humane reason for Harvard’s large, summer outsourcing.
• Harvard dining hall worker pay does not respect seniority. After working two years, a worker make the same wages as another who had faithfully served for thirty-five years. And while the cost of living continues to rise, Harvard dining hall workers’ wages have not. Some workers must supplement their full-time jobs at Harvard with one or more part-time jobs even during the school year.

Meetings to organize within the Local 26 and things you can do to help will be announced here in the coming days.

On my way into Town last night, I turned on my favorite NPR affiliate WBUR to hear what was going on in the world. I caught the tail end of After Welfare, a radio documentary by the American RadioWorks on the 1996 federal welfare reform legislation which ceded funding to the states and some of its subsequent effects. The piece closed with a very interesting focus on marriage. Evidently, the bill Clinton signed into law has in it some very specific wording that promotes low-income marriages. The idea runs something like this: two low incomes can provide for a child better than one. In Oklahoma, just over two million dollars pay for one of the more radical programs to result from the shift to the states. It is called the Oklahoma Marriage Initiative.

Aimed at low-income expectant parents, couples volunteer to complete a 12-hour course during which they learn, review, and discuss what it takes to stay in a long-term relationship. I believe much of their time is devoted to ever important communication techniques. It’s hard to know what if any effect OMI and others programs like it will have. And we won’t know for years, but it’s worth trying, I suppose. Studies show that as a group single mothers hold some of the most conservative family values. They believe that being a mother is one of, if not the single most important thing a woman can do. They want a traditional, nuclear family, and the majority [in the study I can't remember below] oppose abortion.

While you may not be suprised to learn that even poorer people don’t want to sabotage their own lives, many critics of the 1996 law were afraid that low income women would have more and more kids in order to up their monthly check from the state at the expense of tax-payers and their hypothetical children. Some ground-breaking research, which I can’t name off the top of my head, in which about 160 single, low-income mothers were interviewed, shows that these women didn’t get married not because they somehow lack morals and values—as others might suggest—but because they revere the institution of marriage as holy. They’re holding out for someone who can provide a stable, healthy environment for them and their kids. The only difference, it seems, between them and their middle- and upper-class counterparts is resources.

Professor Skip Gates of Harvard’s Afro-American studies department recently produced a several part PBS documentary on blacks in America. He found that many boys in impoverished areas grew up to do what their role models did: sell drugs and go to jail. But why? Because they didn’t know what else to do. Why go to school and learn things that might be useful years from now and make no money in the interim when you could sell some drugs and make a few thousand dollars in a few days? The problem of immediate gratification is ruining large portions of society. The sort of education we need here is of the utmost personal kind. It is important that children, as President Bush says, be exposed to as many possibilities as, uh, possible. If a parent tells a child that he can be whatever he wants to be when he grows up, the statement has very little empowering effect if the child can’t think of things to be.

So when I say that these women’s middle-class counterparts have more resources, I intend more than material means; I’m also talking about psychology and education.

If these women believe that motherhood is the highest form of success they can acheive, it’s no wonder that most low-income babies, while perhaps not planned, are purposefully not prevented. Among other things, we need to get more and different kinds role models and mentors to work especially within low-income populations.

Even when presented with alternatives, it’s easy to believe that you’re born into your part in society, that lots are cast. In America, parents reinforce this misconception all the time. When interviewed, American mothers will list innate ability as the single most important factor in determining a person’s long-term success. Chinese and Japanese mothers, on the other hand, choose effort and persistance. As a result, American children can easily believe that those things which come easy to them are the things that are meant for them, and the stuff that’s hard isn’t. Again, pretty unsuprisingly sociologists suspect that one reason kids join gangs is a thirst for immediate gratification. Gangs will get you where you want to be fast.

And that’s why good math education is so crucial. (I could see you waiting for it, so I won’t disappoint.) Math is the sort of subject that requires lots of forethought and whose reward is delayed gratification. Of course good mathematical training won’t cure all of society’s ills, but [because this post is already long I'll keep this brief and end abruptly claiming wildly that] the psychology of mathematics couldn’t hurt.

This article from a 1993 edition of the Phi Delta Kappan somehow summarizes hundreds of pages of a digest of hundreds of research studies that wasn’t written until 1999 in only seven pages—and a drawing takes up most of the space of the first one. I agree with almost everything in it, except the bit about math movies at the end. Also, I might take issue with some of the suggestions curriculum reform. For example:

In addition, topics not previously explored in traditional curricula must be added. Changes from an agrarian society to a technical/information society demand the literate citizens be familiar with such concepts as mathematical modeling, discrete mathematics, and data analysis. An example of discrete mathematics would be the decision process whereby a street sweeper is routed through a town so that the fewest number of streets possible will end up being swept twice.

Now, sure, we ought to rethink what we teach our kids. The author is absolutely correct. The standard American math curriculum hasn’t budged much in the past century despite radical changes in American society, culture, and technology. To ignore the passage of time is stupid. But I’m not entirely sure what the author is proposing here. To me, she’s suggesting we load up our kids with graph theory and Fourier analysis. This is great if we want all our kids to go into algorithmic optimization, data compression, and signal processing. Maybe that wouldn’t such a bad thing. In my experience, Fourier analysis can be hard. But such a suggestion presupposes that everyone, everywhere will end up in the high-tech sector. Even then, my friends who do lots of computer science [most of whom actually work in finance] don’t rely on mathematics proper so much as things in computer science, and then, that they picked up in college.

Also it’s worth mentioning that we can’t just continue to add things to the curriculum and expect a change in our students’ abilities or understanding of the subject matter. Right now the curriculum is too broad and lacks substantial depth. As is, kids have to memorize lots of seemingly unrelated, mathematical facts. They’re presented in isolation and learnt in isolation. If you’re going to revamp the curriculum, fine: just don’t tack on more and more things and then look for a miracle. But moving on.

The author cites a statement by the Mathematical Sciences Education Board. Following fold, it’s reproduced for your benefit and my scrutiny in part below:

Almost no time is spent on estimation, probability, interest, histograms, spread sheets or real problem-solving, things which will be commonplace in most of these young people’s later lives.

I agree. We pay little attention to any of those things; it’s a shame, too. Probablility and statistics are perhaps the most important “real-life” mathematics we could be teaching. I’ve always found it funny that calculus has dominated as the capstone math course at many high schools. College freshmen use it as a measure of their peers mathematical prowess. You’re especially frightening if you took a multivariable calculus or linear algebra class. Statistics isn’t as nearly frightening. Too bad, because if it were, maybe more people’d offer and take it. I routinely run into Ivy-league educated people who don’t know “correlation is not causation.” I’m a bit worried and confused by their inclusion of “real problem-solving.” I don’t know what it means, but I can guess.

They want our kids to pretend that they’re the CEO of a juice company, and they need to figure out whether to make more cranberry juice or more grape juice according to a number of contraints. Maybe they’ll do the linear programming themselves, or maybe they’ll plug it into a computer. In any case, these sorts of highly contextualized, so-called real world problems are, in researched fact, a bad, bad, bad idea. Not only do they not interest most children—most children are not, nor do they dream of being the CEO of a juice company—these sorts of problems actually hinder transfer of abstract principles and problem solving structures to other types of problems and disciplines. What does go, however, are abstract relationships.

With a little practice and a lot of thought, it’s not hard to come up with motivating questions that live soley within the realm of mathematics. There’s no need to introduce confusing and distracting details from the physical world.

But, if you must, I could see the addition of more mathematics into the school day. What if we had two math classes, but disguised one of them as “real-world problem solving”? Then we wouldn’t have to compromise learning how to think through problems in an abstracted way that promotes the formation and understanding of relationships, and we’d have a venue for an integrated approach science, math, and technology with applications that is so hot nowadays.

Anyway, I’m meeting with the author sometime next week to talk about these sorts of issues in person. I’ll let you know how it goes.

After reading my first post about the effects of the New Capitalism on education, Liz kindly sent me this article on the changing conception of career with regard to teaching from the Phi Delta Kappan. As I had mentioned before, onece upon a time, people choose a job for life. Indeed this is the case with the retiring class of teachers today, but those who are replacing them fall into three categories: the lifers, the explorers, and the capstoners. The first group wants to stay in teaching for a long time; the second sees teaching as a springboard to other things, but are still serious about education while they’re there; and the third have already done other things, are probably late along in life, and want to retire into teaching. In 2001 it was projected that we’d need about 2.1 million more teachers than we already had by 2010. I’m not sure what the numbers are now, but I’d find it hard to believe that many qualified, elementary and secondary school educators just walked onto the scene. So it’s important that we invite and make use of all three types of people. The trick, then, is how to keep them once we’ve got them, and how to make them into good teachers.

For a moment, let’s pretend that the new lifers, the teachers who decided in third grade that what he wanted to do was teach, went to a teaching school, has full certification, and loves and wants to teach forever are the standard. [Of course I take great issue with the way math teachers are trained; but for now, I'll hold those gripes aside.] The explorers aren’t sure they want to teach long-term, but they know they want to teach for a few years. These are the folks programs like Teach for America and the Massachusetts $20,000 signing bonus for new teachers—article on its limitations here—are after. I’m a bit weary of this lot. Most of them don’t stick around; many know that they’re going on to graduate and med school after a few years. They don’t have the time, experience, or training to be good teachers. And while they are usually very serious about their work, the reality of the situation is a bit bleak. After two years of working for Teach for America, volunteers bring raise their students on average from the 14th percentile the 17th. That’s not an awful lot. Even if we pick our teachers from an newly graduated, Ivy-league educated pool, studies have shown that merely being an expert in your field doesn’t make you an expert teacher in your field. [This is shocking, I know.] That’s why pedagogical training is so important. Knowing the facts is one thing; knowing how to teach those facts is another.

Likewise, the majority of capstoners lack any formal instruction in teaching. What’s worse, they often can’t afford the time or money to enter into a certification program. If we’re going to keep either of these groups around for the long haul, and to attract more into the lifers’ group, we need to train and support our fledgeling teachers. As I’ve said before, less than one percent of school budgets go to professional development nationally. Even then, programs like Programs in Professional Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education focus on upper-level administration, not on entry-level teachers. Of course, there aren’t that many places to spend money on training. Many advanced courses—graduate level classes in history, science, math, etc.—are taught during the day and require full-time attention. And these classes are not designed with teachers in mind: they’re for the serious academic, and so, don’t pay much attention to the difficulties presented by the specific subject content. [This body of knowledge is called content pedagogical knowledge; you can't teach chemistry the same way you teach art history. The fields are not the same, so your approach to them shouldn't be the same.] here just isn’t an infrastructure to support our educators.

For a long time it was assumed that the problem lay in attracting new teachers. But in light of the New Capitalism, we see that the real problem is retaining new teachers. We can keep them longer if we give them better facilities, higher wages—these tactics work and are employed just about everywhere—but something we have systematically denied to teachers, something we’d expect in any other field, is the a chance to grow professionally. Before the New Capitalism workers climbed up and down the ladder. In education, the analogue is weak if present at all. We have long expected a classroom teacher to stay in the classroom, to teach the same material year after year, in approximately the same way—repeating the cycle mechanically each fall. It’s no wonder technology zealots believe they can automate the learning process, sending our kids to computers. Society has long held his opinion.

Of course, professional development has the added bonus of continually raising the abilities and therefore qualities of our teachers’ instruction to their students.

Yesterday, the Associated Press published an article explaining “a growing national debate over whether the nation’s newest education experiment is — unexpectedly — encouraging school segregation.”

Because of the penalties listed in the No Child Left Behind Act, schools who “underperform” lose funding. If you’re a public school administrator, and your school’s doing just fine, what are you going to say to a poor, stereotypically troubled and troubling child who wants admission? No way. It only makes sense, right? If you take him, his tests scores could jeopardize your already delicate budget. And that kid who just immigrated and can’t yet speak English and so will almost certainly fail the mandatory state assessment — well, she’s out, too.

It’s economically advantageous to segregate against poor students under the law. So, now we see school doing just that. But to say it’s unexpected, as the AP says, is simply just wrong.

The same sort of argument came up when there was a big push for vouchers for charter schools. It’s true, test scores generally rise when public schools have to compete with charter schools. However, it’s a zero-sum game. For every student who jumps ships from a public to a charter school [or the other way around], that students state allocation leaves with him. Some say this puts the onus on schools to be the best they can so that they don’t lose students. But that’s a fairly unreasonable expectation unless you provide sufficient funds.

Imagine a doctor denying a patient treatment, “Oh, no. No medicine for you, not until you get better.” That would teach America never to get sick again. Sure, we ought to have standards, but this is ridiculous.

Charter schools were bad, but they weren’t everywhere. They were only a local evil, plaguing, for the most part, cities and large metropolitan areas where there are enough students and therefore government subsidy. My small hometown of 10,000 residents can only furnish enough kids to graduate less than sixty each year — not nearly enough for the economics to provide us with a charter school. Our partner school, the one with which we share football, hockey, and my senior year, cross-country teams, is even smaller. [To be fair, each class starts with about 120, but after you figure in attrition to private and vocational institutions, drop-outs, and death (there are less than a handful in the last category), it's suprising if there are more than 50 students left in good standing by senior year.]

No Child Left Behind is worse: it’s national. No one can escape it. [Even if a state tried to, they'd forfeit almost all federal support. So while it's not compulsory to comply in theory, it is in practice. Isn't that tantamount to extortion?] The flow of well-to-do, advantaged populations to well-to-do, advantaged schools will continue, as it always has. But now, schools are going to be [and this article says they are] on even more careful watch to keep the disadvantaged out.

What we need to do, you see, is get rid of the many millions of dollars it costs to develop, administer, assess, and analyse large tests like the MCAS [which, despite the lone open-ended math essay question still ask SAT-type, multiple choice which do not prove a kid understands anything other than how to take a test; the AP sucks less, but still an awful lot. They let me take a TI-89 calculator which can do symbolic manipulations to the exam in high school.]. Instead, we need to invest it in the teachers. Less than 1% of school budgets nation-wide are dedicated to professional development. I can’t wait to be a comfortable, gentleman academic.

I wrote this with the intent of sending it to the Boston Globe, but since time marches on and I’m not the most time-sensitive individual, I pass it off to you to read here. Notice how my professional writing is still vaguely colloquial:

In his opinion piece, “Kids take back seat to gay agenda” (Boston Globe, 15 March 2006), columnist Jeff Jacoby argues that gay activists have pursued their cause, “the normalization of homosexual adoption,” to the detriment of children. He defends the Catholic church’s right to discriminate against homosexual couples. He claims that millions of Americans believe the parents in a family must be of both sexes, and further comments, this is “neither a radical view nor an intolerant one.” Since Catholic Charities can no longer place children with anyone, Jacoby concludes that gay activists and colluding media and state government officials have propelled gay equality forward while relegating children to the back, much like a few rotten apples spoiling the whole bunch. Jacoby is wrong in two different ways.

First, Jacoby ignores the other, very valuable and very laudable work done through Catholic Charities outside of adoption. In addition to adoption, Catholic Charities offers over thirty services, among which include child care, mentoring programs, substance abuse counseling, and homeless shelters and transitional housing. Each year the United Way awards Catholic Charities with a grant, most recently for $1.2 million. Had the State issued a waiver to the anti-discrimination law, it would have put all programs run through Catholic Charities, not just the adoption services, at risk. Most funders, including the United Way and the state government, refuse to grant financial assistance to organizations that discriminate. Many of the budgets of these programs are already sensitive to even slight fluctuations in current funding; if Catholic Charities were allowed to ban homosexual adoptions, the resulting decreased financial backing would ensure a curtailment effecting several other vulnerable populations throughout the city who were not directly involved. In essence, the State’s ruling saved many more charitable programs. Furthermore, it is worthwhile to remember that the Church chose to close the adoption services, not Catholic Charities, and not the State.

Second, the view Jacoby claims to be “neither radical nor intolerant” has no founding in contemporary research, and is, therefore, not only intolerant against gay couples but is also harmful to children. According to the National Adoption Information Clearinghouse, between 6 and 14 million children were living with a gay or lesbian parent as of 1990. The dozens of studies to investigate the psychology of children of LGBT parents have been motivated primarily by family law, and thus directly address the effects on children of having gay versus straight parents. Evidence shows pretty convincingly that children are not harmed in any way merely by having homosexual parents. In fact, it shows quite the opposite. According to one study by Hoeffer published in the American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, daughters of lesbians, on average, have higher self-esteem than those of straight women; their sons are more caring and less aggressive. Additionally, children of homosexual parents are no more likely than the general population to be homosexual themselves. In light of these statistics, we have no choice but to deny Jacoby’s interpretation of the views of “millions of Americans” and call his opinion what it is: unreasoned, unjustified, and harmful to children.

It seems that every time I go to church choir [this is once a week, on Thursdays], I end up talking to the choir director, who moonlights as the director of the music program for one the local school districts, about all that I find wrong in the world. Usuaully it’s secondary education that upsets me most — especially when there’s an educator nearby.

No Child Left Behind [PDF here] (NCLB) has already upset, as you might remember, because it very blindly replaced all the social, emotional, and physical and health education out of the Jump Start legislation organized by some very well-meaning and pretty smart people in the 1950s with a single word: literacy. This law is was just a clever political move. Give the public something they can hold onto, repeat quickly, and give it a name that sounds pleasant. I won’t rant about the artificial metrics the law forces on schools, or how these exams cannot be compared from state to state, and why the underlying principle of it is “Oh, yeah, you’re sick, huh? Well, you can’t have any medicine until you’re better.” Much like the abortion bill in South Dakota, NCLB lacks any foresight and doesn’t consider the consequences. But instead of being four pages, it’s 670.

And if you look on page 559, you will find the heading for SEC. 9528. Armed Forces Recruiter Access to Students and Student Recruiting Information. There you will find tucked away very neatly a most disturbing consequence of this bill. Looks like someone was planning ahead after all:

“[E]ach local educational agency receiving assistance under this Act
shall provide, on a request made by military recruiters or an institution of higher education, access to secondary school students names, addresses, and telephone listings.”

This sort of thing happens all the time at colleges and universities. And sure, that almost makes sense. After all, kids there have gone through most of the developmental processes that deem them a functioning, thinking adult. Remember last summer when I almost took a commission in the navy to train nuclear engineers for subs and carriers? Well, while it’s hard to defend the military’s right to know my name and number, it’s almost undensible to do the same with sixth graders. And don’t think that because you’re at a private or religious school you’re not effected. There’s a good chance you are. I’d suggest that parents read subsection (c) and check with their kids’ schools.

My favorite part of this section comes last. Connecticut has consistently been a thorn in the Secretary of Education’s side. Last last summer, the state sued because the Secretary refused to grant a waiver for annual testing made mandatory by NCLB. Connecticut has had state-wide testing long before Bush came around. They had done such unreasonable things as wait until ESL students learn some English before forcing them to take the test, which, by the way, is conducted in English. The Department of Education didn’t like that and so denied them the waiver, requiring the state to spend millions just to develop the test in what would be over 150 languages. Throw in costs to administer and grade the things, and we’re talking several times what it costs to run an entire, medium-sized school district. I haven’t heard anything since last Connecticut’s case since last summer. I’d be curious to know if anyone else knows what’s happened since.

Anyway, I’m thinking about marching down to my old high school to ask if they’ve passed out a form for parents to easily refuse consent. Tonight’s after-choir conversation almost got me riled up enough to start an after-school math tutoring program there voluntarily. But then again, I might get for the city of Cambridge to do exactly the same thing. I’ll wait until after I receive an email.

In response to yesterday’s post, I received an email asking if it meant that I “loved abortions.” I responded privately but there’s no reason not to respond publically. What I wrote had almost nothing to do with abortions. This may come as a suprise, especially when you consider the fact that the word appears eleven times. No friends, I not about to betray my opinions and hop on either of the anti-life and anti-choice bandwagons. What I wrote was an attack, though it was never explicitly stated, against the popular culture of immediate gratification.

This bill represented the easy-fix mantra that tends to destroy. Good things, I’m told, come to those who wait. I believe good things come to those who plan. If the writers of the bill want to ban abortions, fine, but think about the consequences first. I made no appeal to the sanctity of life, nor to a women’s right to choose, none of that. All I ask is that when you do something, anything, that has consequences, plan for them.

The representatives did not provide for the new babies. There was no mention of increased funds for medicare, increased low-income housing [the sad reality is that the poorer you are, the more likely this bill will effect you], increased money for education, for food stamps. The law doesn’t make any economic considerations, and neither is there accompanying legislation that does. That’s what I’m against. And it doesn’t matter if you’re for or against abortion, no one can be against responsible law-making.

The short-sightedness of the bill is what upsets me most, not its content. And that’s why I ask you to write a letter to the sponsors who moved the bill asking them to think about the consequences of what they’ve done. There’s a good chance they haven’t already done so. By next Monday I’ll post the letter I’ve sent to each of them so that the lazier among you have little excuse not to follow my lead.

South Dakota recently signed into law [it's not long, only a four-page read] legislation that puts all but a complete ban on abortion. It allows for it only in the most extreme cases which endanger the life of the woman and it denies action to women even in cases involving incest and rape. Coppertosteel first brought this to my attention, but you can also read about it at one of the many internet news sources here. Now, I’m not going to tell you based on some moral, anti- or pro-religious, or women’s rights argument that this is, perhaps, one of the dumbest things I’ve ever read — and recently I read this book — don’t let the high customer rating fool you; if the emotionally exploitive nature of this book really compels you, I suggest that instead of reading it, you volunteer at some local non-profit.

According to the figures I found at the CDC and the Alan Guttmacher Institute, the US abortion ratio in 2000 was about 25%. This statistic measures the number of legal abortions per live births. It is a composite figures that states voluntarily report to the centers [at least for the CDC]; some states choose not to report, some are very accurate, and, of course, some fall in between. The take home is this: the abortion ratio under-reports. Now, South Dakota has pretty much asked the Supreme Court to reconsider Roe v. Wade. And this legislation mentions scientific advancement since the Court last made its ruling. If the US banned abortions outright, which for the crude approximations I’m about to make should suffice, the abortion ratio tells us that about 1 million more babies would be born, and remember that number is low. We as a country pick up about 4 million babies each year any way. And here’s the kicker. We don’t have enough money to support them already.

Between the CDC and the AGI, it looks like single or unmarried women comprise close to 60% of those who have abortions [Curious stat: umarried women are 6 times more likely to have an abortion than married women], half of them are under 25, and 20% of them are under 19. I couldn’t easily find demographics on education or economic status, but from a lecture I went to at the Kennedy School in the fall, I can qualitatively tell you that the younger, less educated, and poorer a women is, the more likely she will not give up her baby to adoption. And the older, more educated, wealthier a women is the less likely she will even have a kid. The lecture did not mention abortion, but I’m willing to guess that whatever the numbers are we’re going to have to pour lots more money into the welfare state.

As it is, we have trouble taking care of our kids. There’s just not enough money to go around. The public education system is saturated. Abortions are highest [surprise] in the most populous states. The top three by incidence are New York, Florida, and Texas and rank second, third, and forth by population. South Dakota happens to be in the bottom four of both lists. [They reported just under 900 abortions of the 1 million reported in 1999.] These highly populated states will have to bear the brunt of the baby boom this law would incur. Just as a matter of resources, don’t change anything just yet. We can barely maintain status quo. As a potential educator, I’m terrified. I don’t know where we’d get more teachers, let alone qualified teachers. My pessimist leanings suggest we start building more prisons and raising funds. Once our schools fail these kids, tax payers will have to shell out about $22,650 per inmate if things stay the same according to the Bureau of Justice. The same report says that annually the prison system is a $38 billon industry. We need so many more teachers and jobs. [That same K-School lecture said we needed more highly skilled labor and turned to immigrants as a potential solution since our kids are too expensive to teach and because the success rate is so low. It's getting harder and harder to out-compete India and Korea, for example.]

If you have the time, please write a letter to Representatives Hunt, Brunner, Deadrick, Dykstra, Gillespie, Glenski, Haverly, Heineman, Howie, Hunhoff, Jensen, Jerke, Klaudt, Koistinen, Kraus, Krebs, Lange, McCoy, Michels, Miles, Nelson, Novstrup, Pederson (Gordon), Rausch, Rhoden, Tornow, Turbiville, Van Etten, Weems, Wick, and Willadsen and Senators Bartling, Abdallah, Earley, Kelly, Kloucek, Koskan, McNenny, Moore, Napoli, and Schoenbeck, who introduced the bill. South Dakota has set up a handy webpage with a form to email each of them directly!

And while you’re at it, send a few letters to your own representative asking them to consider the economic impact of the law. No one wants to spend more money.

Last night I went with the Sophomores back to H-block to take in my high school’s annual cabaret. Things have changed drastically since I was in school. From what I remember, kids sang showtunes and performed magic acts. But now all that has been replaced.

The types of acts can be broken down, first, by gender. The boys were assembled almost exclusively in heavy rock and punk bands, lasting more time and generating more noise than I could physically handle. Some of the musicians were quite talented. But almost everything that was played was too loud and too long. There was a duet which sang a selection from Phantom of the Opera; the boy was, however, in several of the bands, as well. In fact, there were only about eight boys in the entire show. They mixed and matched and reconfigured to form ten different bands, though. By the end of the night, my ears were humming. It may been my severe cold, but my ears are still rining.

The girls could be divided into two groups: trashy dance troupes and vocalists. Those who sang were good. No one in the audience paid them much respect — because they didn’t strip is my guess. The dancers, I use the term euphemistically, disgusted me. I cannot begin to explain my outrage when six fifteen year old girls took off their shirts [to expose tang-top underneath] while gyrating and riding each other [quite literally] to suggestive R&B in front of their parents, colleagues, and friends. In spite of my sore throat, I could not help but scream, “Stop!” in the middle of their routine. It came from deep within my aching soul.

One of the girls father was sitting in front of me, bobbing and dancing along, ostensibly proud of his daughter. I turned to Mark, who was sitting next to me, and loudly exclaimed in the name of all that is decent on this earth, that the parents of each of those girls ought to be ashamed of themselves, that concerning the hyper-sexualization of children there can be no other opinion, that this was one of the most distasteful and dispicable things I have ever seen. And the crowd loved them.

Who knew that when they asked me if I wanted to go to a cabaret, they meant it?