Come join us watch Diane Ravitch on the Daily Show on Thursday!

Diane Ravitch, the country’s foremost defender of evidence-based rather than faith-based education reform, will be a guest on the Daily Show starring Jon Stewart, this Thursday. This is a great breakthrough and reverses a long media black-out of opposing points of view on education issues.

Please join Diane, other parent activists and me for a viewing party starting at 9:30 PM at the Benjamin Hotel to celebrate and watch the show together, in a fundraiser for Parents Across America, a new national group committed to putting the parent voice back in public education:

When: Thursday, March 3, at 9:30 PM -11:30 PM

Where: Club Room, Affinia Hotel, 155 E. 50 St. (off 3rd Ave.) NOTE: change of venue!

Tickets are $50; $25 for students/teachers; contributions are tax-deductible.

To order tickets, and for more info, please click here:

http://www.nycharities.org/events/EventLevels.aspx?ETID=3295

Also, check out Jon Stewart last night on the Daily Show – defending hard-working and underpaid teachers who are being called “greedy,” while too many of our elected officials and commentators seem to be defending the obscene bonuses of bankers instead. During the segment, Jon reveals his mother was a teacher.

He ends by satirically proposing that our kids be outsourced to China to be taught overseas. Actually this is no joke: Rick Hess and other edu-entrepreneurs are advocating that teaching be done online, and outsourced to places like Singapore. Come join us Thursday, and watch Diane eviscerate such hare-brained ideas to undermine our public schools.

The Daily Show - Crisis in Dairyland - Odor in the Capitol Building
Tags: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

Let's Be Human Together

Being part of history in the making is a powerful thing. It can make you feel like you are--finally--part of something real. And of course you are. The trick is recognizing what you are part of, and responding as a human being.

Remember our dear friend Pinocchio? He was created by a nice guy (Geppeto) who was lonely, insecure, and sought love-- so he made himself a son. Except that in reality, his "son" was a puppet. He wouldn't become a real boy until he developed a conscience, recognized the power of (and reason for) his strings, and in doing so became part of the world. And Gepetto, despite hoping that his puppet would complete him, remained isolated until Pinocchio became a true boy.

Pinocchio's road to developing a conscience was tough. At first, he just tried to act like he had a conscience. "I've got no strings, to hold me down, to make me fret, or make me frown...there are no strings on me...I want the world to know, nothing ever worries me..."

He enjoyed the help of his friend Jiminy Cricket who tried to remind him that he needed to get a conscience. But time and again, he'd fail to make the right decision, and inevitably forfeit his ability to control his own fate. In an effort to teach him morality, the Blue Fairy came and made Pinocchio's nose grow and grow, until it eventually fell off. She told him "A boy who won't be good might as well be made of wood."

But the story sticks with the puppet, and he get a second, third, even fourth chance to figure out the difference between right and wrong. Gepetto can't teach him--after all, his moral conscience is clearly underdeveloped or he wouldn't have been so self-indulgent as to try and create another person simply to satisfy his own desires.

Eventually, as we know, Pinocchio figures it out. Dreams don't come true when you wish on a star, or try to take a self-serving shortcut: they only come true when you can tell right from wrong.

In today's world, morality is not at all abstract. It is the difference between selfishness and selflessness. Behaving in a moral fashion may hurt in the short-term, but in the long run it's the only way to avoid being exploited, to maintain a community, and to be truly human.

Be brave. Be truthful. Be unselfish.

It's the Wisconsin Idea.

A NEW DIET STAPLE TREND? by P.B.Lecron

Panais sold at outdoor marketplace.

Exactly one month ago I predicted that parsnips or panais, one of those forgotten winter root vegetables the French classify as a légume oublié from yesteryear, would mount in popularity and find its way to supermarket shelves here. See my earlier blogpost: Parnsips, the Next Big Thing. Despite that it was my own prediction,  I was still surprised to notice it for the first time yesterday in a grocery store--and in a hard-discount supermarché at that. Cultivated on a small scale by local producers, panais has usually been only available at public markets. That was fast!

But this was only one sighting in one store. As any right-thinking French skeptic would say, "Une hirondelle ne fait pas le printemps." The arrival of one swallow doesn't mean it's springtime; one shouldn't draw conclusions hastily from an isolated fact.

Hirondelle de fenêtre in the Loire; photo attribution: Fryderyk.

Vocabulary
legume: vegetable
oublié: forgotten
supermarché: supermarket
hirondelle: swallow
















©2011 P.B. Lecron