Macarena’s story
Macarena Hernandez, the last victim of Jayson Blair’s plagiarism, defends affirmative action in hiring, and does a damn good job of it. They were interns the same summer at the New York Times. Blair was known for schmoozing with bosses; Hernandez and the other interns focused on proving they deserved the opportunity they’d been given.
Blair’s misdeeds are not, despite what the pundits say, about race, diversity or affirmative action. His story is that of a guy who disrespected his profession, cheated his readers, deceived his editors and stole from his peers. Period. Any other way of looking at it lets Jayson Blair off the hook.
I am a product of the same program that supposedly “created” him. And I resent that his crimes will now make suspects of other journalists of color. If the New York Times were sincerely committed to diversity, Blair’s editors would have chopped off his fingers at the first sign of trouble instead of helping him polish his claws.
Hernandez also reveals more details of Blair’s utter shamelessness.
Two days before Jayson resigned, I got a call. “You’ll never guess who this is,” a friendly voice said. I assumed Jayson was calling to apologize. Instead, he asked for a copy of my story, with the explanation that his editors had questions about a quote that one of Anguiano’s daughters had translated for him. It was another lie: Had he actually interviewed Anguiano, he would have known that she spoke English.
“Jayson, I have a very hard time believing that you don’t already have a copy of my story considering that your story reads exactly like mine,” I said.
“I’ve never seen your story,” he said.
In early May, when I learned that he had resigned rather than produce receipts for a Texas trip he never took, I pictured a devastated Jayson. I prayed he wasn’t all alone. Then he started talking to the media.
I haven’t heard him express a single note of regret for what he did. Instead, he is shopping his story around shamelessly. He says he wants his tale to help others “heal.” He could, he says, write “a book full of anecdotes” about racism at the Times.
That last statement is particularly galling. It’s not that there isn’t racism in the newsrooms of America. There is. But that wasn’t what brought Jayson Blair down. And what he did has reinforced racist views, prompting some to say, “Look what happens when we let them in.”
Hernandez is right on target.
Girls rule school
From kindergarten to graduate school, it’s a girl’s world, writes U.S. News. Alpha females excel in academics and leadership. Boys dominate special education.
From his first days in school, an average boy is already developmentally two years behind the girls in reading and writing. Yet he’s often expected to learn the same things in the same way in the same amount of time. While every nerve in his body tells him to run, he has to sit still and listen for almost eight hours a day. Biologically, he needs about four recesses a day, but he’s lucky if he gets one, since some lawsuit-leery schools have banned them altogether. Hug a girl, and he could be labeled a “toucher” and swiftly suspended — a result of what some say is an increasingly anti-boy culture that pathologizes their behavior.
If he falls behind, he’s apt to be shipped off to special ed, where he’ll find that more than 70% of his classmates are also boys. Squirm, clown, or interrupt, and he is four times as likely to be diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.
Girls rule school in Canada too.
Elementary school always was designed for girls, but boys used to catch up in high school. Now they’re not making it there either. I’m not sure what the solution is, but at least educators are worrying about boys after a generation focused on the phony issue of girls’ self-esteem.
Bad poetry
Prose with random
line breaks
Doesn’t make
Poetry,
Even if it expresses
FEELINGS.
What worked for e.e. won’t work for you, kid. Sorry.
Via Pejman.
No habla English
Bilingual teachers in Massachusetts have to prove they speak English now that the state is moving to English immersion. In some districts, a significant number are not proficient in English, it turns out. That suggests that their students have been educated completely in Spanish or in broken English.
As Kim Swygert points out, a teacher who knows only Spanish is not bilingual.
Uncorrected
In a New York Daily News story on the Times’ faltering self-examination, there’s this final gem:
The Times also explained why Maureen Dowd’s column on Wednesday happened to include a comment from President Bush on the same day News columnist Zev Chafets charged she had previously shortened it to distort its meaning.
“It was Ms. Dowd’s decision” to run Bush’s comment in full, a Times spokeswoman said. “Her intention was not to distort the meaning of the quote. She had received a couple of complaints and was happy to put in the entire quote to satisfy readers who felt it was too truncated.”
Readers might have been satisfied if Dowd had admitted that she’d cut the context out of the quote the first time. Slipping in the full quote with no acknowledgement of error is a sign of the arrogance that’s eroded the Times’ reputation. Dowd may be happy. Her readers are not. And what does her editor think about Dowd’s no-correction correction? Does she have an editor?
I wrote a nationally syndicated newspaper column for 16 years, though I wasn’t a star like Dowd. Well, I sure wasn’t treated like a star. Now I’m glad. It’s hard to have your opinions appear in print every week — and get paid for it — without developing a superiority complex. I had a little voice in my head whispering: Don’t make yourself look like a fool. Don’t screw up in front of hundreds of thousands of people. If I did screw up, I was supposed to admit it in front of all those people. I’ve never heard of a reputable newspaper that worked any other way.
On Best of the Web, alert reader Brad Westmoreland “dowdifies” a Dowd column:
“The president was . . . found . . . to do the right thing . . . all of the time. . . . Bush . . . is . . . ideal.”
That’s a direct quote.
How the baseball team crumbles
The new minor-league baseball team in Montgomery, Alabama has chosen a name. Not The Bad Jokes. But close. Via Au Currant, who’s just moved, and Uncle Bob, who had a scoop but didn’t know it.
More school, less education
Instead of perpetual remedial education, why not teach ‘em right the first time. Chester Finn riffs on the possibilities on Education Gadfly:
American education is so expensive in large measure because we pay for it twice. We send kids to high school to pick up the knowledge and skills they ought to have learned in elementary school. We send them to college to acquire a decent secondary education. And if we really need someone with a “higher” education, we’re apt to look for people with postgraduate degrees.
How incredibly more efficient and economical it would be to get it right the first time — to expect people to have a proper elementary education by the conclusion of eighth grade, a serious secondary education by the end of 12th, and a bona fide college education by the time they collect their sheepskins.
In such a world — dream on, you say — fewer people would feel compelled to attend college because fewer employers would require college degrees, knowing that a high school diploma signified a full measure of knowledge, skills, and work habits. And if fewer people went to college, education wouldn’t cost society as much, even though everyone would wind up knowing as much as (or more than) they do today. Better still, the savings might be used to improve teaching, invest in new technologies, make pre-school universal, and other education desiderata that we can’t today afford because so many billions are needed for each level of the system to backfill what the previous level ought to have done.
Look at all the high school students who can’t get a 60 percent on a multiple-choice graduation exam measuring — at most — 10th grade skills. They haven’t learned high school skills, but they all seem to want to go to college.
Motivate me
Parents, don’t trust your children’s education to the schools — even to good, suburban schools. That’s one of the key messages in John Ogbu’s book, Black American Students in an Affluent Suburb. In FrontPage Magazine, Peter Wood looks at Ogbu’s study of black students’ lackluster school performance in Shaker Heights, Ohio. Educated black parents wanted their children to do well, but didn’t supervise homework or participate in school events, the Berkeley anthropologist found. Middle-class black students said they don’t work hard in school. Wood writes:
The student who complained that the school failed to “motivate me” speaks volumes in those two words. No school, no person, no “role model,” no society can assume the responsibility to “motivate me.” . . . Teachers cannot supply motivation for the resolutely unmotivated, or even for those empty vessels that have shifted the responsibility to others. “Motivate me” is the command of someone who has already abandoned the essential educational project. A community or a culture that fosters that kind of expectation has put itself in opposition to educational achievement.
Black parents “did not perceive themselves as active agents in the education process,” Ogbu writes. They assumed teachers would pour knowledge into their children.
The Black parents simultaneously uphold an attitude that educational achievement is important and a contradictory attitude that the locus of responsibility for academic achievement lies outside the students and the family. When this learned helplessness begins to erode their children’s commitment to the hard effort need to succeed in high school, both the black parents and their children reach for the well-trod rationalizations that it is somebody else’s fault: the teachers that don’t “care,” the White community that denies real opportunities, or the society that oppresses Black culture.
Middle-class black parents are fighting a culture that tells their children that black identity is rooted in defiance, flash and isolation from the white mainstream. Parents must create a family culture that relentlessly preaches the old motto we used to mock in my youth: work, study, get ahead.
Who Would Jesus Do?
Jesus was gay, along with at least three of his disciples, says a University of Queensland PhD with a yen for astrology. Tim Blair has the juicy details, including a link to the “gay planet” which figures in Jesus’ astrological chart and the story of the Alpini attack on the nude barbecue. Jayson Blair couldn’t make this stuff up.
Worse verse
Jayson Blair was supposed to be a talented writer gone astray. But perhaps his only talent was for sucking up. Jim Treacher links to Smoking Gun, which found Blair’s college poetry posted on a web site.
Blair plagiarized lines from himself. He should have stolen from someone who could write.
In one poem, which includes a dictionary definition of “kaleidoscope” and “brown,” Blair appears to confuse love with bunions:
One look into those burnt sienna eyes
Quickly forgetting all the others’ lies
Trying my best to glance at my feet
Running away from their radiant heat
I thought this poem was daring, till I realized that he meant “waist” rather than “waste.”
Can’t escape thoughts of how I love the curves on your body
From your waste to your eyes
Her flesh craddling against mine
Thoughts of your skin . . .
In Heathery, the green sparkle in his love’s burnt sienna eyes “illicits a smile.” In some contexts, that would be a clever play on words; here it’s just subliterate. You do have to feel for the poet, however. His heart has been burnt, amputated, splintered, exploded and “worn on my vest,” where inevitably it’s going to bleed all over the cards held “close to my chest.” Messy.
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