Response to My Critics

Conversation with My Critics

Anonymous said...

Lee, I am an avid reader of your blog, but I must offer a few criticisms (and please don't criticize my grammar):

1)You often comment on Elia's academic background. Specifically, you mention that you she doesn't have a Ph. D, but then you go on to criticize Lennard who did have one. So did you ever think that having a PhD. isn't everything? A Ph. D. is not beatification, but in the academic world, it's the terminal degree. So if somebody wants the top job for the 8th-largest community of the country's schools making $300,000 a year, that person should have at least the terminal degree and wide experience in the field, especially when the board turned down the other appropriately credentialed Ph.D. candidates from good schools with even publishing records and picked Elia despite her meager credentials.

Elia had a master's and no experience except in secondary administrative jobs at in Hillsborough County schools. As I recall, the Times did a series on the apparent graft in Elia's area connected to real- estate purchases that Elia claimed to ignorant of . So much for her competency: graft under her nose, but she didn't notice it. That lack of knowing what's going on in her own bailiwick didn't seem a recommendation for the superintendent job to me. She had done no teaching either. Also, the most qualified superintendent would probably have an Edd, since an Ed. D. is a practitioner's degree. A holder of a Ph. D. is a researcher and college professor, not someone who should run a school district. Cite your sources for this erroneous data. I have been in the academic world for most of my professional life, and suggest that you are dead wrong in these suppositions. Elia may not have a doctorate (whether it be a Ph. D. or Ed. D.), but she does have two master's degrees with certification in educational leadership, which is basically like a third master's. I suspect Lennard bought and paid for his Ph.D. I recall writing a column on his poor writing when I wrote for La Gaceta. I have never been able to get hold of his thesis via the public-information office. When Lennard got the job he was head of Vo Tech for the schools with six people under him--slim esperience. In terms of academic luster, his background is pitiful—especially the experience. All his experience was in the County school system in vo tech. He, like Elia, has a parochial background.

Here is one thesis I did lay hold of: that of Dr. Clayton Wilcox, Pinellas Superintendent. A St. Peter Times reporter shared it with me. Dr. Wilcox got his Ph. D. from the diploma mill NOVA right before the Pinellas board hired him for $240,000 a year plus a car. http://wilcoxilliteratethesis.blogspot.com/. A Pinellas school board member told me his wife wrote it.

It's interesting to note that I asked Dr. Wilcox when he appeared at Suncoast Tiger Bay when he first arrived what teachers' salaries were in the district. He had no idea. Morever, he didn't care. He is far gone in amour propre. I told him the low beginning salary of teachers and asked if he weren't concerned about the wide disparity between his and their salaries. He beamed with self-confidence and said, “You get what you pay for.”

Or, I could have added, what you are too stupid to understand is a fraud.

I sent the corrected (by me) Wilcox thesis to Nova's president and asked for his comment on whether it fulfilled the standards of a NOVA Ph. D. (This inquiry appears at the end of the thesis.) I never heard from him.

The administration there knows what it is doing. It is in the business of hustling worthless Ph. D.s for the tuition money. NOVA's ersatz Ph. D.s fill Florida's Education bureaucracy . It seems every other administrator has a NOVA Ph.D. When I get breathing space, I intend to send this pitiful Wilcox performance to the Board of Governors and ask how it can allow this disgraceful situation to go on in Florida to the state's educational reputation's detriment.

Dr. Hamilton, who just retired, I suspect bought his Ph. D. thesis too. He couldn't write himself. In my blog about two years back I did a section on his writing. The board gave him an assignment of writing up a description for new board members about board decorum. He had a year to complete the short assignment. It was embarrassing to read the product of the second-highest administrator on the administrative chain of command. The man couldn't write a literate sentence, yet he stayed on the public-education payroll for a 30-plus year career at the highest salaries in administration. That fact does not say much either for the people hiring him--the board. Right before Dr. Hamilton retired, Ms. Elia created him a boutique job paying $140,000 a year so that he could dither about whether he were ready to retire or not. The job got no advertising. A clerk told me Ms. Elia assigned it to Hamilton before the job even went on the books. The board signed off on it in blind obediance to Ms. Elia as is its wont. God forbid that one have enough concern for the taxpayers they promised to serve to ask why Elia created a boutique job for Hamilton to occupy until he got the guts to retire.

Hamilton ran out $80,000 in tax-dithering money before we saw his back. He's probably got his overweight carcas parked now in a lawn chair at some suburban loau boring people to death with his past exploits as swashbucking administrator in the Hillsborough County schools.

I believe a lot of credentials fraud goes on in the school system, especially in secondary schools and community colleges. When I was still teaching at HCC, Dr. Ambrose Garner, who got dismissed for chasing secretaries around the desk (I helped the first one to get a lawyer), wrote such illiterate memos that I complained to the Tribune on the letters-to-the-editor page. I did manage to secure his thesis. It was dull but competently written. He bought it I am sure. The investigation by the ethics people took him out of the presidency at HCC; I saw him wandering around forlornly at the airport a couple of years ago. I have no idea what happened to him. He probably is president of another community college.

It is my impression that a lot of psychopaths home in on community-college presidencies and school superintendentships.

I have been in the academic world for many years and have never heard the distinction you make between Ed. Ds and Ph. Ds; the degrees are pretty much interchangeable except that a Ph. D has more weight in academia as a rule; where any degree comes comes from inside the academic world is pivotal. Outsiders don't know the difference between Yale degree or a Poducnk U degree. A degree is a degree to most people. Inside the acadmeic world, a Harvard degree, for example, has high in prestige. NOVA, I am sure, has among the lowest ratings. Ms. Elia's having three master's degrees does not replace a Ph. D. And any superintendent should know how to do basic punctuation for $300,000 a year in tax money no matter how deficient her academic background. She should sue those two master's schools for educational malpractice for letting her out with her level of punctuation deficiency.

2. I think you have unfairly graded Elia's "essay". While grammar is important, you place too much significance on it. If her essay was being grades as a school assignment I'm sure the teacher would not mark off so much just for incorrect grammar. You always drill people for grammar, yet the educational system is moving away from that. It certainly is and is turning out illiterate students by the boatloads. I got them in my freshman English classes at HCC. They couldn't write a literate sentence much less a paragraph but had made A's and B's in high school English. Employers used to complain to me that they couldn't find recent graduates who could write well enough to hire. I asked what they meant by “write.” The response: people who could write a memo who knew where to put commas and semicolons and understood rules for the apostrophe.

3. My husband spent years as a personnel director for a large international corporation. The employee interview was first verbal assessment of the person's language ability. If the prospective employee survived the face-to-face interview by talking well, he or she went into a room and wrote a page on why he or she wanted t the desire to work for that company. That was a literacy test. Teachers may not emphasize grammar and punctuation, but employers are. They don't want illiterate people representing their companies.
   

4. When I turned back my first set of papers in the classes filled with students from the Hillsborough County schools, the red marks shocked them. Many teachers, as you say, had told them that “only the thought” counted, not the grammar and punctuation. Those teachers were fooling students and ripping them off of a good education. Grammar and punctuation count in the business world and in the real world. I suspect this trend of “only the thought counts” came about because it allows teachers to skip the work of grading papers. I heard a parent at Plant High School complain that his son's teacher never graded his papers. “I want one of those old-fashioned teachers who grade his paper and put red marks on it,' he said forlornly.

5. “Ask her to do so, “ I advised. “Just tell her you want her to be like one of those old-fashioned teachers who grade and mark errors on your child's paper in red.” Let me clarify. You always criticize people for grammar, when nowadays the focus is on the content and organization of the essay. A normally A+ essay should not be ripped apart just for grammar. This is news to me and would be to most conscientious teachers is my conviction. I graded papers 50 percent grammar-punctuation and 50 percent content for twenty-eight years in a way that is not the correct grading protocol according to you. Please document this claim. And tell me how, if a person blows the 50 grammar-punctuation points, can he or she make anything but an F even if the content-organization part of the grade earns the whole fifty points? Points should be taken off, but a student should not receive an F on an essay just because of grammar. (In no way am I saying that Elia's essay should be an A+; I am simply making a point). You outline the way to justify social promotions. --You seem to think that grammar, punctuation, and writing are separate entities. They combine as one entity. Writing comprises diction (words), grammar, and punctuation. One writes his her insights in an essay and uses correct grammar and punctuation. I didn't see papers festooned with grammar, punctuation, spelling errors that were A+ in content, which would be 50 points total for that part of the essay's grade. If a writer lacks knowledge of grammar and punctuation, that writer's insights are not likely to be those of a genius; the insights are on the level of the writer's grasp of grammar and punctuation: rinky dink. . If a student is not assiduous and intelligent enough to learn the basics of grammar and punctuation, he or she will not be a walking compendium of ideas that soar into the realm of the heavens. If anybody has told you that only the “thought” counts, that person has misinformed you.
   There is considerable thought behind a correctly placed comma and no thought to speak of behind a spill out of juvenalia that poses as analysis. A college entrance board or an employer looks at the quality of the product as a whole. Both cast aside illiterate papers no matter the content. Ford has already come up with the internal-combustion engine, and the company needs employees who can write literate memos that will help run the company.
   

6. I was a tough teacher. Students referred to me as “the bitch” in the lunchroom. But there was a kind of éclat for even daring to take my course. If a student passed my class even with a C, he celebrated in the lunch room with his or her fellow successes. I still run into my students here and there. Not too long ago, I was in Publix when a young man came up to me who looked slightly familiar. He looked to be in his late thirties. I had taught him English years before. He said, “Ms. De Cesare, I used to hate you when I was in your English class, but when I went to law school in Gainesville, I changed my mind. You would be surprised how many of the first-year law students have to go to remedial English classes. I didn't; as a matter of fact, my professors complimented me on my writing. I want to thank you for being a demanding teacher. It helped me succeed in my career.” I'd like to think that I am the teacher students once despised but later admired. You have to be able to take the hostility of students for upholding strong standards. But it is they who win in the end.
   
   3) You often make claims that Hillsborough County chooses an "insider" for the superintendent position. While this may true, I find nothing wrong with this practice. If the person is qualified, then why should they be denied the position? (Again, I am not referring to Elia specifically) Wouldn't it be wise to hire someone who knows what the hell is going on in the school district? As long as crony ism does not occur and the candidate it eminently qualified, then they have a right to the appointment.

7. The incestuous practice of the county's hiring only insiders dilutes the quality of the people who run the schools. This insider-crony hiring restricts the pool of talent available. A bigger talent pool means a wider swath of potential employees to choose from. The larger pools of talent for jobs offer smarter, better trained people to run the schools, a broad pool of talent to dip into. The school-board sanctioned crony inside hiring is a bad bargain for taxpayers, who want the most talent for their money; it is a bad bargain for students, who miss out on the best decision makers at the top. Crony hiring insures a tiny, mediocre pool--one in the recent case of Linda Kipley's husband-- of 2nd-rate crony talent that finds its way into jobs and stays for years and years into retirement, dragging down the level of intellectual excellence of the people who run the schools and shutting out opportunities for more talented replacement.

8. This restriction applies especially to superintendents. I read the resumes of the people Elia beat out. There were candidates with Ph. D's from respected universities with wide experience, foreign-language facility, and even a history of publishing in their field. Elia was the worst qualified of all applicants, but the board passed over the better candidates to hire the inside mediocre one, Ms. Elia. Yet because the board is parochial and because superintendent brains and talent intimidate its members, they hired insider Elia, who had politicked her way into the job, not earned it with stellar credentials. I infer the board members thought that Elia would not upset their incumbency. And get this: the board had taxpayers cough up $35,000 to cover their ass for a “nation-wide” search ad when they knew good and well whom they would vote for.

9. The Hillsborough Board has not hired an outside superintendent since 1967. Because of that, the school system has been stuck with parochial intellectual pygmies such as vo-tech Lennard who make poor leaders. Lennard as superintendent was head of torturing Doug Erwin for revealing crime in the schools instead of giving this whistleblower his thanks and a medal. How smart was that? And he expressed disappointed amazement when a jury found for Erwin and against him and the crooked school administration. What kind of intelligence does that reaction suggest? The school system has not benefited from picking low-talent people as superintendents. Any status the Hillsborough County schools retains goes to the efforts of the teachers, whom envious, mediocre administrators thwart as much as they can. Despite this oppostion, however, the teachers carry on and do their jobs with the students to the teachers' glory and the students' salvation, and this fact is known by those who are not too dumb to see reality.

10. 
    Elia is not only poorly credentialed, she is a poor leader. In making decisions, she consults only her own limited knowledge. While in her previous job as administrator before the board chose her as superintendent, she overbuilt classrooms that she upset a school neighborhood to redistrict after she became superintendent to cover up her error. I was present the night the parents filled the board room to beg and plead for reconsideration with weeping tots clinging to mothers' skirts. You should have witnessed the tears of the parents who came to the mike and Ms. Elia's froideur in listening to their pleas. I am talking presence of the director of Buchenwald.
    

11. 
    

12. With teachers, Ms. Elia is a bully who imposed an extra class on teachers to solve her budget problem so that they don't have planning time or time for leading student clubs; she didn't alert teachers or give them any say-so in the move; she downloaded a grade-inflation scheme that gave her more “performance” money
    in her salary but which offended the teachers' professionalism and deprived students of the rigorous training that would have gotten them into good universities; she most recently purchased a pricey gim-crack commercial educanto-ago-go program named The Spring that had done poorly in other venues without consulting the teachers who have to implement it in the classroom. The allure of this program for Ms. Elia I infer was that it provided her a chance to add more "performance" money to her salary, not that it replaced in effectiveness the books that it appears will be dumped at great cost to make way for the ersatz Chatty Cathy Spring program.
    

13. The board said nothing as is its wont. I tell teachers that the board is the villain in my book. It does not lead. It follows Ms. Elia and uses its position for the social éclat of gadding about town pretending to be patrons of education. Again, this Spring program gives Elia the chance to get more bonus money. Ms. Elia is shameless when it comes to upping her salary at the expense of the students and teachers. Her greed is repulsive. Even the recent Tribune editorial implied that. I wish one of those outsiders with the dream credentials had got the job instead of The Spring Elia.

14. And cronyism right now and for years into the past is rampant in the school system. The board allows it despite its false devotion to equal-employment opportunity. How did a bus driver become head of transportation? No advertising of the job is how. Only after the meltdown of that department and the board's hiring a $350,000 consultant to come in and give two simple pieces of advice—get routing software and locate buses in more convenient locations—did the situation improve. The problem with hiring unequipped, low-talent, minimal intellect buddies to do jobs is that the taxpayers have to pay for pricey consultants to come in and use flash-card remediation to teach the buddies to do their jobs.

15. The board is the ultimate authority, so unless people vote out the collaborators with Ms. Elia and vote in some independent board members who look out for citizens, teachers, and students, the situation won't change. Teachers thought for a long time that the board was their saviors. I said, “Grow up. The board is the villain. They allow Ms. Elia to do all these things that disadvantage teachers, students, and the schools. Without their acquiescence, Ms. Elia could never do things that so harm teachers and students. Her bloated salary despite her mediocre credentials and frenetic performance comes courtesy of the board. The board is responsible for the status of the schools. Its members are ultimate boss. So failure goes to them.

16. 
    

17. Ms. Elia just insisted on hiring an administrator's husband who did not have even a college degree against 18 competitors, several of whom were qualified and one highly so. The board said nothing. Either its members are too unconcerned or too gutless to intervene, even though they have Equal Employment Opportunity Employer stamped on everything not nailed down. The board's excuse for not intervening is that it makes the policies and that Ms. Elia carries them out. But she doesn't. She spurns the board's policies, and it doesn't fire her as it should. If the board does not have the guts to rebuke Ms. Elia, it should have the guts to fire her when she messes up as she constantly does.

18. 
    

19. I talked to Mr. Valdez, the personnel administrator. He is a courtly man with lovely manners who has the ROSSAC lying protocol down to an art. He justified with a flow of practiced rhetoric the hiring of the insider's husband despite its being a cronyism hire of a man who was poorly qualified in comparison to his competition. Mr. Valdez demonstrated seamless mastery of allegiance to the ROSSAC party line that emanates from Ms. Elia's office and held firmly to the validity of counting as the best person for the job a man without the credential of even a college degree against eighteen others many of whom had a college degree as well as the accounting major that the job description required. This was a shameless hire that demonstrated crony hiring at its worst. As long as we have a weak board that does not do the job voters expect its members to do, the administration will run the schools for the benefit of the administrators, not for the students or teachers or community.
    
    4) Why must you criticize everyone in ROSSAC? While I agree that many of them are "crooks", I have never heard you speak well of any administrator from ROSSAC. Are you saying that there is not a single person in ROSSAC that gets your stamp of approval? I find it hard to believe that the eighth largest schools district in the nation fails to have a single competent employee in its administration. I write satire, so one sees a lot of satire's devices in my writing. Deliberate exaggeration is one tool of satire.
    

20. I can't say there are no good people working in ROSSAC. I just have not encountered them. And to keep their jobs, they must be obedient cogs in a crooked system. Not one person came forward to protest the crucifixion of Mr. Irvin, although I heard when I first started attending board meetings a couple of years ago what a good man he was--especially from the teachers-- and how hard he worked for the schools.

21. It's despicable to see a decent man like Mr. Erwin abused and not to speak up. It reminds me of the murder of six milllion Jews by the Nazis. People did not protest. Against all tenets of morality, they stood silent and cooperated. They stood silent as the Storm Troopers loaded all Jews, including children, onto cattle cars bound for Auschwitz and the gas ovens. We are stunned when we hear this fact. I am stunned that ROSSAC employees stand by as Ms. Elia and her palace guard trump up a case against any dissident and target the person for firing. The teachers as a group are terrified to speak out because Ms. Elia instructs Ms. Kipley to cook up a case against them for termination if they do. The board pretends that it does not know what is going on. This lying board stance is just sicko in my book. The taxpayers should know about it.

22. My observation strongly suggests that ROSSAC functionaries are all intimidated into never deviating from Ms. Elia's dictums at the cost of their jobs—either that or they are in agreement with the crooked policies of Ms. Elia and her upper-level palace guard. The latter I find hard to believe. I believe this servility to the boss to be an old policy that goes back beyond Elia's tenancy. But she counted on continuing it. After reading the Erwin files, I decided that ROSSAC acted out an imperial model of governing. Tyranny and coercion are its lynch pin. Everybody lined up behind Lennard, Hamilton, and Black to ostracize and torture Mr. Erwin for outing crime in the schools. Think of that. Whatever happened to the concept of “law and order” in this vile ritual? Do good citizens tolerate such outrage against justice?

23. Lennard wanted surface harmony; he didn't care that there was crime inside the schools that cost the taxpayers money just so the public didn't know about it. He wanted the curtain of spin to hide everything. His goal was to keep his job, its power, and its money. Those were Davis's and Hamilton's goals as well in my opinion. And Ms. Bricklemeyer and Tom Gonzalez went along with the skulduggery too. The court files show that Lamb, Kurdell, and Olson knew what was going on and looked the other way. They did nothing to intervene and help Mr. Erwin save the schools. If you doubt me, go to the public-relations office and request the files for the Erwin court case. Work your way though the depositions, the three big notebooks of narrative, the two big boxes of court files. It will take you a long time to read them; but you will come away with your eyes open to the administrative mode of ROSSAC. It is the same now as it was then in my judgment. There has been no change.
    

24. To summarize: My impression is that all of ROSSAC's people lie to corroborate the party line that comes from Ms. Elia. If they don't, they lose their jobs. It's as simple as that.

25. The first experience I had with Ms. Elia involved her and Ms. Kipley's cooking up a firing offense against a friend of mine who protested Rhonda Storms's shutting gays out of full participation in the country library. My friend Bart Birdsall protested from his home email to the county library director, Joe Stines. Elia's chum Pat Bean sent the emails to Elia for action against this gay protester who dared to challenge the county's mistreatment of gays. Bean apparently wanted Ms. Elia to terrify Bart about his losing his job for using his First-Amendment rights with emails from his home to shut him up. Bart had not done what they accused him of, but Elia engaged the technology department of our old friend Davis, one of Erwin's torturers, in a fishing expedition that snagged Bart on the charge of using the school emails for personal business because he had posted on the media bulletin board an announcement of the gay speak-out against Storms's taking library privileges away from gays. Attorney Gonzalez joined in on the kill. He is a labor lawyer always eager to kick little people. I think he has an absolute relish in doing so. He and the technology department trapped Bart in an oblique technical error. It was all they could dredge up, but they used it to terrify him although they didn't suggest firing him—just hinting around the possibility to scare the be-Jesus out of him was their sadistic maneuver. Bart went to therapy from the psychological effects of the experience. That was the aim of Ms. Elia et al. Immobilize the opposition by terrorizing it. Sadistic fascism is what I call this despicable maneuver.

26. 
    

27. You should hear the teachers stories' of the sadism of Ms. Kipley in punishing them. She told one teacher that she could not tell anyone what her punishment was in Professional Standards. How's that for free speech? The teachers are terrified of Ms. Elia's referring them to Professional Standards, run by Linda Kipley, the husband, who has no college degree at all, having been just hired over better-qualified candidates. This is a wicked system that gives such power to the superintendent and her sadistic myrmidons. I infer that the reason Ms. Elia ordered Mr. Valdes to hire Kipley's husband instead of a qualified candidate was that Ms. Elia owes Kipley so much and that Kipley knows so much on Elia that Elia can't afford to thwart her. Contrary to legend, there is little honor among such thieves.
    

28. When you have read the ROSSAC Erwin files, then let me ask you the same question about good people in ROSSAC. I am publishing quite a bit of the files on my blog. They will give people enough information copied from the court file to make a judgment on how moral and trustworthy the ROSSAC people are under the administration of a dictator superintendent whom the board does not reign in but lets run the schools for her benefit and that of her cronies.
    
    5) A few times you have criticized the holders of doctoral degrees, often citing that their dissertations were rubbish and whatnot. Have you actually read these papers? Examine Dr. Wilcox's thesis at the above URL. Show it to any person in an upper university job and ask for an opinion. How do you know they were not scholarly? Because I am a scholar and know scholarship when I see it. I also know claptrap when I see it. Read Dr. Wilcox's dissertation and see what piffle he got accepted as scholarship at NOVA. Tell me why the NOVA president didn't answer my query and defend Wilcox's thesis. He knew it was a half-assed attempt to write a thesis if he knew anything about dissertations, and the reputable academic world would have laughed it to shame. And do you doubt that an institutions such as NOVA, which granted this degree, would have approved the dissertation even thought were substandard? I absolutely do. There are educational diploma mills all over. Look on the Internet. NOVA is in the twilight zone of acceptability. But nobody in the legitimate academic world thinks it is a serious academic institution. The NOVA president knows it's not. He does not answer my inquiry for those reasons.
    
    Lastly...I may be wrong on this one, but since when did Dr. Lamb write a thesis for USF? He obtained his B.S. from UT, his M.Ed. from UF, and his Ed. D. from Syracuse. You are educating me. I thought he got his terminal degree from USF. I will see if I can get his Syracuse dissertation from him. Write him yourself and ask to read it. You are a citizen entitled to this information. It will be interesting what he says to you.

2:36 AM

Anonymous said...

And his daughter is a district administrator. He has been on the board a long time. I hope this is not nepotism. But I wouldn't count on his not having influenced her hiring.

The Gulf in the Sound of Literacy

Speaker 1

• The laws governing inheritance are quite unknown; no one can say why the same peculiarity in different individuals of the same species, and in individuals of different species, is sometimes inherited and sometimes not so; why the child sometimes reverts in certain characters to its grandfather or grandmother or other much more remote ancestor, why a peculiarity is often transmitted from one sex to both sexes, or to one sex alone, more commonly but not exclusively to the like sex.

Speaker 2

Overheard on the bus:

• “Lordy, hon, I am just pure disgusted. I done everything I can to to he'p him, and I's been stopped by his stubbornness.

Speaker 3

I scream “could have done!” at the TV as I walk by my husband's watching a football game at half-time when the news person interviews one of the stars of the game:

Speaker 3

Sportscaster: “And how did your team bring off this upset?”

Speaker 3

• Large football player speaking into the camera: “Well, we knows we had to execute as good as we did in Houston, and if we executed like we done already done in Houston, we could of did the same thing on this here field in New York.”

Which one sounds like an educated person—1, 2, or 3? Which one do you infer knows grammar and punctuation rules and which does not?

Whose speech would you like you yourself to be able to use?

If we say that the football player has made millions of dollars playing the game, will that matter when his daughter brings home educated friends from college on a holiday and her father speaks this way at the dinner table as her eyes fall on her plate?

Which of the speakers would you like to have as a performance model for your own children?

The first speaker is Charles Darwin, whom I am reading now. The quote comes from his Descent of the Species. Do you think that Darwin's ability to express himself both in conversation and in writing had something to do with his writing the most influential book in science in the last two hundred years? Do you think he could have written this book and others if he did not know grammar and punctuation down cold?

Football Player

We are all somewhere in the aural literacy scale between the football player I quote from his half-time comments to the press and Charles Darwin's lecture on the descent of the species.

Darwin had an Oxford education, which means an education in reading the classics in Greek and Latin. The change to including science in the college curriculum came from Germany, and Oxford and Cambridge resisted this change at first. Even intellectuals can be dummies on occasion.

Darwin did not want to read only the classics, so on his own he read natural history. He had a professor friend at Oxford who also dabbled in natural history. It was he who referred Darwin to Captain Fitz Roy of the Beagle to be the naturalist on Captain Rex Roy's Beagle in its circumlocution of the globe for British science. On this trip, Darwin's genius catalyzed his realization of evolution and natural selection on the Galapagos Islands.

From that insight, he wrote: The Origin of Species. Clerics all jumped on him for being sacrilegious, but he had his defenders in the intellectual world. He went on to write a follow-up book that pissed the preachers off even more: The Ascent of Man. Today, the whole world pays tribute to Darwin as the progenitor of science in this area and has forgotten the preachers for the most part.

However, school boards with religious conservatives on them, many of whom have run for board office simply to force Darwin out of the curriculum, are still trying to banish scientific truth from the classrooms and teach instead religious myhth of how the world and its inhabitants began. This method is called “intelligent design.” I had a friend at HCC who has written a classic in that field reviewed by the NYT. He did not favor women's rights but would help me proselytize out of friendship. He helped me succeed in my “bust parity” campaign to get women's busts in all the libraries, where male busts reigned supreme heretofore. The enemies of women's rights laughed, but not when I was accompanied by Bill, the intelligent-design buff, who is 6' 4”.

It seems to me that some of the dumbest people in a community run for school boards, where we need the smartest people. Ms. Faliero, who had an on-site adulterous affair that she initiated with Mr. Mark Hart, who used to head the public-information office, is a firm opponent of sex education in the schools. Figure that one out. I exposed her when the board made her board chair after Ms. Elia had Mr. Valdez fire Mr. Hart for fear of the knowledge of the activity's becoming public. The administration feared that knowledge would enrage the public if it learned about it. I believe it would have done.

The administration and board didn't mind the adultery's going on in school sites –just the public's knowing about it. Mr. Valdez in our hall interview at the last board meeting insists that Mr. Hart got due process. I hope he did. I wish he had stood Mr. Valdez and Ms. Elia down and had insisted that it was not fair that he be punished while Ms. Faleiro become board chair. I would have sung like a canary to the press myself. I would have picketed board meetings. I think if Mr. Hart had taken that route that he would still be on the job. Now he can't help his divorced wife support his two young children, both of whom have suffered terribly from Ms. Faliero's initiating an affair with their father to amuse herself, because he can't get a job.

After the divorce, the Harts' children suffer from the break-up of their home. Their father told me that the little boy had been a whiz in school, but his grades fell drastically after the divorce; the little girl's previous illness exacerbated. Faliero flew out to see Hart one time in Santa Fe when he relocated there after his divorce; she missed school-board work to do so. She dumped the broken-hearted, foolish man when she returned home to a new love interest is my impression.

How do I know these data? Marc Hart came back to Tampa to complete his divorce, called me to come to the beach and tell me about his situation, came, and showed me his divorce deposition confirming the affair and told me t other details. Ms. Faliero is now board chair and managed to have me kicked out of the board room in retaliation for my outing her; but I requested that the ACLU came to tutor the board attorney on the First Amendment, so I am back in the board room after Tom Gonzalez gave La Faliero a lesson on the freedom of the First Amendment. Then he rebuked me for calling her "Pole Girl." It's amazing how these floozies have the power to cloud men's minds--not that Gonzalez's is a first-class mind, to be sure.

The lesson from this pas de deux is that one should be flexible

One of you asked me not to criticize your grammar and punctuation. Now why would you do that when both minimize the importance of grammar-and punctuation literacy? I believe it's because you may secretly acknowledge that grammar and punctuation do matter just as verbal literacy matters when you speak.

You ladies don't have serious problems in that area as evidenced in these writing samples, not that it would not be beneficial for both to review your grammar primer. Tell me if you change your mind, and I will get out the red pen.

The problem I have with your short essays is the part that you think should count almost to the exclusion of grammar and punctuation: your sentiments—your insights—are not perceptive. The first person doesn't understand that the statements she makes go athwart the best practices of education and that whoever told her that grammar and punctuation don't count in today's world should have set off warning bells for as intelligent woman as she appears to be. The second of my critics also shows limited sophistication about kinds of writing. A savvy reader with intelligent ideas should be able to differentiate straight writing from satire. This piece of writing to you two is straight prose. Go to the piece a few entries ago on "The Great Interrogation Spectacle" for my satiric style. That's another genre of writing altogether. People with education can spot the difference between the two kinds of writing. They learned about the difference in their English classes. Or they may, as I have done, come from a family of dinner-table wits who produced a satire or two every night while dining. My father could make a post laugh.

My readers mostly send me encouraging notes, especially those in the school system who know what's going on in the ROSSAC bunker. It was interesting to get some input from my critics and defenders of Ms. Elia. I don't think she has many. Thanks for taking the time. lee