"Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency."
This extraordinary statement (and what does "committed to agency discretion" mean?) in Secretary Paulson's request for bailout funds, and the subsequent results of his actions vis-a-vis the actual economy makes one wonder about the egos of these people, these giants of industry, who deem themselves fit to run our affairs.
One sees this clearly when the CEO's of "the big three" auto makers fly into Washington on private jets to beg for help cleaning up the messes they've made. Not only are they full of themselves, but they're tone deaf. Their pleas for their workers jobs are also pleas for maintaining their own exalted status.
Oh woe is us!
Thursday, November 20, 2008
Thursday, September 25, 2008
Teaching morphs into training
We're well into the Fall semester, and I'm teaching two freshmen courses (Ouch. The punishment continues unabated). The normal one seems OK, except that it's clear that no one in the room wants to learn the material. They're just there for the credentials, the stamp of "learning" required so they can continue on with their training. Engineers mostly, they are not interested in anything.
My other class, for nurses, is a strange group. They need high grades to be admitted to nursing school, but they're math averse, and technically incompetent (that doesn't mean that they can't use technology; they can use it but they just don't care how or why it works). They are taught, by me, typical problems, and then asked to solve similar problems on exams. At the end, they forget the problems, forget the concepts, forget everything, and plod on. This is a silly exercise. I pretend to teach and they pretend to learn.
What we've done is convert education into a very poor form of training, and the pre-training consists of forcing people to jump through hoops to "prove" that they can "do it", i.e., have the internal fortitude to struggle through in spite of the stupidity of it all. Perhaps the exercise is needed to "prove adulthood"? Stupidity incarnate!
My other class, for nurses, is a strange group. They need high grades to be admitted to nursing school, but they're math averse, and technically incompetent (that doesn't mean that they can't use technology; they can use it but they just don't care how or why it works). They are taught, by me, typical problems, and then asked to solve similar problems on exams. At the end, they forget the problems, forget the concepts, forget everything, and plod on. This is a silly exercise. I pretend to teach and they pretend to learn.
What we've done is convert education into a very poor form of training, and the pre-training consists of forcing people to jump through hoops to "prove" that they can "do it", i.e., have the internal fortitude to struggle through in spite of the stupidity of it all. Perhaps the exercise is needed to "prove adulthood"? Stupidity incarnate!
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