Cushy Car Physical Education

January 7th, 2013 | Posted by jclifford in Environment - (3 Comments)

Automobiles bracket my day as a father. In the morning, I walk my son to middle school.  It’s not a difficult distance to walk, though the sidewalks are covered with the filthy chunks of ice and snow that have been blasted off the streets so that people riding in cars can have a smooth, fast ride.

Now, in the afternoon, I have walked back to my son’s school, to accompany him back home by foot as we talk about his day. As I stand outside the entrance to the school, waiting for him to emerge from his afterschool activity, I see other parents arrive for the same purpose, but I never get to talk with them.  They pull up in the parking lot in their cars, and never get out. They sit there, removing, with their engines idling, putting out great clouds of mist and smoke.

In my village, almost none of the students live more than two miles from the school, an easily walkable distance for a middle school child who is used to getting a little exercise… and the children who leave in the first wave certainly get exercise. They’re the middle school basketball team, and they run to their family cars now that their practice is done, so that their parents can give them a comfy ride all the way home.

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Armed Guards in School? Fact Check: Kids are Safer in School than out of School

December 21st, 2012 | Posted by Jim Cook in Homeland Insecurity | Questions - (7 Comments)

In the Bangor Daily News of December 20 2012, Daniel Patterson of Presque Isle Maine writes that armed guards should be posted in all public schools:

"We need armed guards where masses of people, especially children, gather because crazed gunmen target masses of people. I know we might not like the image of soldiers at our schools and malls, but I’d rather see that than lifeless bodies of children."

The next day, National Rifle Association Vice President Wayne LaPierre called a national press conference at which he also called for armed guards to posted in all public schools:

"The budget of our local police departments are strained and resources are limited, but their dedication and courage are second to none and they can be deployed right now.

I call on Congress today to act immediately, to appropriate whatever is necessary to put armed police officers in every school — and to do it now, to make sure that blanket of safety is in place when our children return to school in January.

Before Congress reconvenes, before we engage in any lengthy debate over legislation, regulation or anything else, as soon as our kids return to school after the holiday break, we need to have every single school in America immediately deploy a protection program proven to work — and by that I mean armed security."

Do guards armed with guns belong at schools? The answer to that question might be “yes” if schools are especially dangerous places. If on the other hand schools are not especially dangerous places, then there is clearly no safety or budgetary reason to put armed guards in schools.

It’s time for a fact check: are schools in the United States dangerous places for kids to be? Are they more dangerous for kids than they used to be? Is being in school more dangerous for kids than being out of school?

Existing data from the National Center for Education Statistics and a new report released just yesterday by the the Bureau of Justice Statistics address these questions succinctly and definitively.

NCES’ most recent data on the number of homicides in school and out of school, combined with Census Bureau data on the number of school-aged children in the United States, allow us to chart the rate of homicide in the United States in school and out of school:

Homicide Rate for Youth Aged 5-18 from 1992-2009

The youth homicide rate in schools is negligible at the national level, consistently less than 1 in 10,000,000 people. If you’re going to worry about children being killed, worry about the still-small but much-bigger youth homicide rate outside of school, which is far, far higher. Schools are safe places for children. Schools are havens from murder — and they have been getting safer, not more dangerous, over time.

What about other serious violent crimes, like rapes, robberies and aggravated assaults? The National Crime Victimization Survey asks people aged 12 and older about the crimes like these that they’ve suffered in school and out of school. A report by Janet Lauritsen and Nicole White of the University of Missouri, released on December 20, 2012 by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, includes data on the rape, robbery and aggravated assault rate in school and out of school:

Serious Violent Crime Rate per 1,000 Youth aged 12-17 from 1994-2010

As with homicide, the rate of these serious violent crimes is quite low in school, higher outside of school than inside school, and decreasing over time.

Schools are safe. The call to stuff the schools with armed guards is not based in reality.

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Sharing a Holiday Tradition of Krampus at Elementary School

December 20th, 2012 | Posted by Jim Cook in Irregular Ideas | Outside the USA | Religion - (0 Comments)

This year, my daughter’s third-grade class was asked to bring in parents to share family holiday traditions. One of the things my extended family has enjoyed doing over the past four years is singing this “Here Comes Krampus” song when we get together between the solstice and the new year. And so with posterboard in hand I told the third grade class about Krampus, the Alpine trickster spirit who accompanies punishes naughty children by swatting them with birch switches, putting them in his sack and tossing them in a cold stream.

A Christmas Krampus

We started out with the familiar. I asked the children if they thought Santa Claus was a good guy or a bad guy — the unanimous, enthusiastic answer was “good guy.” Then we sang “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” and looked at the lyrics; there’s a kind of creepy side to this Santa involving surveillance and punishment. And that was the point at which I brought in Krampus, who in Europe accompanies St. Nicholas and doles out punishment. To convince the children that I wasn’t making it up, and to talk about Krampus in terms of tradition, I showed them this video of Krampus and accompanying Buttnmandl dressed in straw from Berchtesgaden, Germany:

Krampus and the Buttnmandl are part of a larger mumming tradition that is older than the St. Nick story and that stretches more broadly from the British Isles to Bulgaria. Dimo Dimov connects Krampus to mummery. At the summer solstice and the winter solstice, mummers mark the change from darkness to light, from chill to warm. Dimov writes, “The special marks of the mummers are huge bells, wooden and leather animal, demon and spirit masks, natural materials and clothes like wool, wood, cones, moss and roots. Spreading fright and blessings is the main theme of those creatures, who are an important part of the rural landscape.”

“I know another name for him,” said one of the children, raising her hand. “He’s the devil, isn’t he?” I replied, “Well, he has horns like the devil, doesn’t he? But not everything that has horns is a devil.” The more subtle answer I didn’t give is that Europe has been a religious battleground between Christianity and older pagan traditions. What better way to push away mythic competition than to take pre-existing figures and brand then as “devils?” Indeed, as this web page from Salzburg notes, the Krampus tradition was banned outright by the Catholic Church during the Inquisition. But the tradition has survived in Europe and is spreading again beyond its original borders.

Full credit to my daughter’s teacher, who not only tolerated but welcomed sharing a tradition about this “devil” in her classroom. We ended by singing the chorus of the Krampus song: “Here comes Krampus, here comes Krampus, ja, ja, ja, ja, ja!”

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School Shootings are Less Likely than Asteroid Hits. No, You Don’t Have to Scare Your Kids.

December 17th, 2012 | Posted by Jim Cook in Homeland Insecurity | Media - (3 Comments)

When I picked up the Bangor Daily News this morning, I read columnist Sarah Smiley insisting that she “had to tell” her children about last week’s school shooting incident in Newtown, Connecticut. Adults absolutely have the right to feel the way they want to feel about the shootings in Connecticut. But do we “have” to tell our kids? “Have” to make them cry? “Have” to make them scared and change the way they see the world? No, we don’t, because our children are not at a significant risk.

Look at the statistics, the actual numbers describing how incredibly rare violent school deaths are. See this table from the National Center for Education Statistics for context. Since the statistics started to be tracked in 1992, there has not been a single year in which the number violent school deaths have risen to even 40 for the whole nation.

Number of Homicides at School, 1992-2010

The death of 40, 30, 20, 10 or 2 children is indisputably sad. But in-school violent deaths are very, very rare. Compare those numbers to the number of children killed outside of school:

Number of Homicides In and Out of School, 1992-2010

Consider how many school-aged children there are in the USA — about 53.9 million in 2009-2010, according to the Census Bureau. Now do the math. In the most recent year with available data, 2009-2010, 17 children died of school violence in the USA. That’s about 3 deaths for every 10 million children: a 0.00003% probability for any one child. Let’s imagine that the 20 slain children in Newtown are unusual, bringing the typical 20 or so violent school deaths of children per year to 40 for 2012. That would raise the share to about 7 deaths for every 10 million children: a 0.00007% probability for any one child.

U.S. Homicides In and Out of School, Compared to the U.S. School-Age Population, 1992-2010

There is no reason to make a child cry in fear over an event that has a 0.00003% to 0.00007% probability of happening to them. Disagree? Then you’d better warn your kids about asteroid 2012 VE77, which according to NASA scientists has a 0.0009% probability of smacking into the Earth between 2033 and 2035. Let’s be realistic — you are not going to weep in bed and then go tell your kids about the asteroid and make them cry. So why should you weep in bed and then go tell your kids about another risk that is even more remote?

You have the right to feel the way you want to feel. You have the right to scare your children if you feel like scaring them. But no, there is no reasonable sense in which you “have to” scare them in order to be a responsible parent. It’s unfortunate that Smiley suggests otherwise.

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Southerners, Take Heart: A Pitiful Snow Day in Maine

January 19th, 2011 | Posted by Jim Cook in State and Local - (2 Comments)

If you live in the South, you know the sport that your Northern friends make of you: when you tell them you’ve had a snow day for a mere two inches of snow, they laugh in your face, call you a poor dear, and explain how many feet of snow they’ve had so far in the season.

Well, let me give you a little something to volley back their way. Yesterday, the small-town school district where I live in central Maine sent home kids from school early… for flurries. By the end of the day it had snowed perhaps half an inch. This morning, the superintendent of schools in the same central Maine school district delayed the start of school by an hour because of roads… that were as clear as the sky.

The Yankees don’t like to share these details with outsiders, but yes, silly snow days happen here too.

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Simple Gifts: Lesson Learned?

December 22nd, 2010 | Posted by Jim Cook in Humor and Fun - (1 Comments)

As the father of a first grader, I am the recipient of many pieces of carefully crafted schoolwork. Last night a sheet of paper came home with these lyrics printed on one side:

‘Tis the gift to be simple, ’tis the gift to be free,
‘Tis the gift to come down where we ought to be,
And when we find ourselves in the place just right,
‘Twill be in the valley of love and delight.
When true simplicity is gained,
To bow and to bend we shan’t be ashamed,
To turn, turn will be our delight,
Till by turning, turning we come round right.

And this picture drawn on the other side:

RRAA: Did this monster come round right?

That’s an overturned car to the left of the monster’s foot, and a tree to the right. Maybe the monster found itself in a place just right.

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They’re Tracking Your Kids in Texas… Are You Next?

October 12th, 2010 | Posted by Jim Cook in Homeland Insecurity | State and Local - (9 Comments)

Houston area school districts have implanted RFID chips into kids’ ID tags and installed gear around schools and buses to constantly keep track of children’s location.

Get ‘em used to it while they’re young and they won’t think twice about it when they’re grown. Where will implanted chip RFID tracking be found next?

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Interactive Cartoon: Paul LePage Quotes on Creationism in Public Schools

September 27th, 2010 | Posted by Jim Cook in Election 2010 | Media | Politics | Religion | Republicans | State and Local - (4 Comments)


This interactive political cartoon was created using Scratch.

Is Paul LePage a Creationist? Does LePage support the insertion of Creationism into Maine’s public schools? Click on the image of Maine GOP gubernatorial candidate Paul LePage in the applet you see above to read his various statements on the subject this year.

Click on this link to embed this political cartoon on your own website, to find out more about how this interactive political cartoon was made, and to find out how you can make your own creations, within some reasonable limits.

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