Special Offers

I had an interesting conversation yesterday -- enough to break a five-month without posting streak, anyway. Before I get to that, though, let me mention that I bought a Kindle with the gifts of money I received at Christmas.

The Kindle has been good for me -- I had been not reading much, something people who knew me years ago would probably not have guessed -- and I am now reading almost nightly again. I had tried out the free software allowing you to read Kindle books on your computer when Jennifer was in the hospital for her surgeries last December, and found War of the Worlds on Amazon and a compatible copy of Little Fuzzy on Project Gutenberg. It was enough to convince me that I needed to read more again, but not that the computer was an acceptable substitute for a book.

This success with free ebooks also convinced me that I should buy the Kindle provided the first 20 books I read on it are public domain. After that, I could afford to buy books for it on a case basis if they are priced appropriately relative to their paperback versions. (You see, there is an incentive to drop the price on old, unsold paperback inventories, but not much incentive to drop the price on a file download.)

A month or two ago, Amazon came out with a way to buy a Kindle for less. (Go here and click on Kindle with Special Offers.)

This brings me around to the conversation yesterday. One co-worker, who I seldom see anymore but should make the time to find every so often, asked how Jennifer was doing, and we got onto the subject of her job.

After Jellybean was born, Jennifer was able to go from full-time to part-time teaching, something that probably wouldn't be allowed today. Her principal at the time was scrupulously fair about her schedule. In the years since, she has had frequent changes of principal, and they have been drastically changing schedules every year in an attempt to improve test scores. . . And Jennifer has been expected to do proportionately more work to maintain her half-pay.

Next year, the students will be spending 90 minutes a day on each English and math, while their other subjects are reduced to just under 40 minutes a day each. (I'm someone whose job relies written reports of conclusions backed up by calculation, and I find this rather silly. Seven or eight years ago, each subject was receiving just over 50 minutes a day. I fail to see how teaching someone to more closely follow semi-meaningful rules of communication is more important than teaching them something worth communicating about.)

In our conversation, I mentioned this to my friend, expecting him to push back a bit -- I have heard him take a position before that amounted to "teachers are trying to shirk responsibility." But he didn't. Instead, he 1) firmly fixed blame on the parents, and 2) offered a remedy.

While I find next year's schedule silly, it is only almost as silly as a few years back when study hall was made mandatory for all students because too many weren't doing their homework at home. I have been sure for years that most parents aren't playing the active role they need to play in education. (Jennifer makes Jellybean do his homework at home, and also do any incomplete school work that he brings home. I am sure she is the exception. And by the way -- because she does this, I don't have to; I don't know how successful I would be myself.)

In fixing blame on the parents, my friend pointed out that parents are under time constraints. Not that these constraints make it impossible, but they make it more difficult to spend time with their children. His solution was simple, and I'm sure will never happen -- stop spending time on entertainment media (including news) containing advertising.

His point was not simply that less time watching the television would permit more time with the children, by the way. There was a cascade of benefits that less exposure to advertising would bring. I would go into them here, but changing our culture enough to realize them would rather depend on people having more discipline than I think they do.

In my household, one of those benefits would be more time to read, I suppose. But not on a Kindle "with Special Offers."

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