On the Value of Kotter, et al.

• One of the mysteries of life is the variety of international readers of this blog.  Not long ago, Indonesians made up a sizable chunk of my readership; currently I'm having an influx of South Africans.  Is it something I said?
• I may have mentioned a while back that I have a thing about teaching, possibly because I believe in education (yes, I'm one of those) and because I mostly was dealt excellent teachers (a few crummy ones, too, whose names are mercifully forgotten) and because I was smart, which is not to say that I liked school, but that is another story altogether.  Because my communication skills are non-existent (what works for me is writing and polishing sentences, which is very difficult in real space and time unless both parties have iPads), I bailed on an educational career, but that doesn't mean that meta doesn't interest me.  Anyway.  Lance Mannion has a thought or two on teachers (his son is graduating from high school) that resonated:

  Every era has its own peculiar insanities. One of ours is a sudden vituperative disrespect for teachers bordering on out and out hatred. All over the country there are concerted efforts to put teachers back in their place as mere employees, and temp workers at that, grateful for whatever pittance the local school board deigns to pay them. Several cohorts of teacher-bashers are behind this, for different but overlapping reasons. […] But they really don’t value talent.
  
  They don’t appear to even know what it is.
  
  What they value is productivity.
  
  That’s another way of saying they value making a maximum amount money at a minimal cost.
  
  Teachers are anything but “productive” in that way.
  
  And it’s clear that these reformers think teachers aren’t productive because they are lazy, not intelligent, without talent, and not incentivized to work harder and become productive by money---that is, by the fear of not having it, not by the real prospect of earning more of it. […]

• 100 years ago, the precipitating event for World War I happened (I thought I'd linked to an article seen in the Smithsonian magazine, but apparently not.  Damn).