The Atlantic is one of those magazine I never read. To find one good article, I need to wade through 100 of them whose quality, content and or morality frankly disgust me. That being said, I receive links for great articles in The Atlantic from two or three different people on a semi-regular basis. If you follow this link, you will see I think highly enough of the good articles that I write about them on this blog. Whenever I start thinking they are on the right track an article like this one titled Student’s Broken Moral Compass show up and I resolve never to read them again on my own, but wait until someone with a stronger stomach than mine wades through the dreck to find the diamonds.
The thing that put me into a state of high dudgeon about this article was the proprietary aire of the piece–like it is actually OK for failed government schools and the education union thugs to assign the teaching of ethics of other people’s children to themselves. Or that an author for a hard left moderate1 rag like The Atlantic can write about it like it is a foregone conclusion that that needs to be done. There is definitely a problem with all this, but it should be obvious that it begins with parents and a culture willing to assign the young and innocent to mediocrity and frequent failure, both morally and academically, at the hands of these progressive drones.
I know, I know, I have not yet made the caveat that there are great teachers in the system like this one. I make that caveat now (for my own safety).
1. Kelly tells me “it is moderate with a left bent tempered by many right-leaning writers,” but I do not think I am willing to say many or moderate. I might go along with “a few writers who are right-leaning on a few issues.” The article described in this post was definitely hard left with a totalitarian bent.
Lorena spent the whole day cleaning and cooking. She had the time of her life. It is counterintuitive to me how those first two sentences hang together. Part of it had to do with the fact that she bought him a new mop. Looking back at that last sentence, I concede that, still, none of this makes a whole lot of sense to me. Lorena picked up Christian after school, just like the old days at NCSU and they went down to Target to buy “stuff.” Both of them had a ball. I am losing hope that I will figure out all the joy associated with these events. On the other hand, I hung around in the apartment all day, did nothing and felt really good about it for the first tie in years.
Late last night, Christian sent Lorena a Snapchat that reminded me my mind is not as able as it used to be, In some ways, I think that is a good thing–there are lots of good things I can still learn without hurting my brain. He was genuinely excited about it and, having seen this before, I know he will actually read the thing and to the bulk of the exercises. What a great thing. It inspires me to dive back into a learning project or two. In that regard, I found a new Predictive Analytics tool this weekend called 
Lorena just came back from Seattle. She was up there for about five days to help Kelly because she has time for nothing but studying. In her PhD program she has to do two formal papers in addition to her dissertation. They are full-blown research projects with experiments and formal write-ups good enough they are often published in scholarly journals. Since first year students generally have never done such formal research, they have to learn everything from scratch. That was certainly true for Kelly. Kelly’s presentation of her first year paper takes place the second week of February and she is working every waking hour on the paper, her TA responsibilities, research for her advisor and the classes she has to take.