Who could have suspected?

Dave Morris's Frankenstein app, via The Guardian.

Mr. Bill Gates in the Washington Post!!!

Efforts are being made to define effective teaching and give teachers the support they need to be as effective as possible. But as states and districts rush to implement new teacher development and evaluation systems, there is a risk they’ll use hastily contrived, unproven measures. One glaring example is the rush to develop new assessments in grades and subjects not currently covered by state tests. Some states and districts are talking about developing tests for all subjects, including choir and gym, just so they have something to measure.

In one Midwestern state, for example, a 166-page Physical Education Evaluation Instrument holds teachers accountable for ensuring that students meet state-defined targets for physical education, such as consistently demonstrating “correct skipping technique with a smooth and effortless rhythm” and “strike consistently a ball with a paddle to a target area with accuracy and good technique.” I’m not making this up!

This is one reason there is a backlash against standardized tests — in particular, using student test scores as the primary basis for making decisions about firing, promoting and compensating teachers. I’m all for accountability, but I understand teachers’ concerns and frustrations.

Well, I have to say this makes me feel a lot better, about humanity in general and about Barack Obama in particular. Neither Obama nor Gates is a vile union-hating blood-sucking thug with a secret plan to turn America's public-school children into soulless factory robots. Au contraire! If their ideas about educational reform (not to be confused with rephorm) could be implemented, it might well be an on-the-whole okay thing.

But will somebody kindly tell me how the blessed fuck such smart guys have managed to be so blindingly stupid? Will you please explain to me how they have gotten themselves associated with plans that are clearly designed to turn America's public-school children into soulless factory robots? Can you give me one good reason why they should be working with fools, liars, and incompetents like Arne Duncan, Michelle Rhee, and Thomas P. Friedman (better known as Thomas L. Friedman, the Schnurrbart des Ewig-Daseins), while ignoring Diane Ravitch as a Dirty Fucking Hippy? Just asking.

From Charfade at DeviantArt.

In other news, Dr. Victor Frankenstein published an op-ed piece in the Geneva Villager:

Horace-Bénédict de Saussure may be the best mountain climber in town, but you'd hardly guess that from watching him tooling his way up Mont Blanc: he seems totally distracted, stopping every two or three minutes to examine a bug or a striation in the rock. If you were scouting for mountain climbers, he'd be your last choice, alongside Ferdinand the Bull. But you'd be making a mistake.

Just as today's sports coaches have recognized that supreme athletic ability is a highly complex phenomenon and developed whole batteries of tests to help them identify promising young talents, so have biologists in nearby Germany come to understand the complexity of life itself—pretty deft segue, huh?—, and learned how to take a Raggedy Ann or Andy of scavenged corpse parts and literally reanimate it through the miracle of electromagnetism, turning it into a living, breathing Creature, capable of reason, passion, and reverence for its Creator (that would be yours truly).

But you can't just turn such a thing on and then duck out the lab window and take off for Geneva, marry your fiancée, and forget the whole thing. A Creature is a big responsibility, capable of great goodness and great harm. You have to take care of it in a holistic way, feeding and clothing it, showing it affection, cultivating its strength and grace as well as its intellect, artistic sensibilities, and emotions. You have to—Aargh, I hear its fiendish footsteps! Tell Elisabeth I may be late for dinner!