PDK & Marketing for the Core

One of the features of Common Core has always been the ability to market materials on a national scale. A national set of standards should help edubizes get away from having to marker fifty different sets of materials, but it only partially solves the problem of millions of individual teachers who think they have the professional expertise to think and choose for themselves.

We've already covered the creation of EdReports, a site intended to be a Consumer Reports style recommender of education materials. But here comes a puff piece in the Phi Delta Kappan that read likes the advertising insert in a glossy magazine.

"Support the Common Core with the Right Instructional Materials" authors Rachel Leifer and Denis Udall both have nifty education pedigrees. Leifer did stint with TFA in DC ("where more than 80 percent of her students advanced at least 1.5 years in academic skills annually")and is now a program officer for the Helmsley Foundation. Udall graduated from Harvard's Graduate School of Education and went on to found a charter school; these days he works for the Hewlett Foundation. So, big fans and supporters of public education.

Leifer and Udall open with an anecdote about a school in New York that used EngageNY materials and -- whoosh!-- for the first time in years "test data show that nearly every student at Ripley is making substantial learning gains." Or at least test data show that students are generating better test data. But it wouldn't be another day in Reformsterland if we didn't blithely assume that test scores = learning. The conclusion Leifer and Udall reach in this introductory anecdote is that having the right materials makes all the difference!

So advertising point one-- you need good materials.

Point number two-- the good materials are essential, but they are scarce.

Well, damn. If only there were some expert organization that could direct me to the Right Stuff!

CCSS supporters "realized early that they would need to prod the marketplace to respond to the standards." So "working with educators," the Student Achievement Partners (the non-profit profiteering group founded by CCSS writers David Coleman, Susan Pimentel and Jason Zimba) decided they would whip something up.

Instructional Materials Evaluation Tool (IMET) is a product of SAP. It is

a set of rubrics designed to support educators and administrators tasked with developing, evaluating, or buying full-year or multi-year curricula. The rubrics distill the standards into non-negotiable criteria for alignment with tangible metrics.

Doesn't that sound grand and technical and like the kind of thing you'd need experts for-- real smart experts and not just classroom teachers? And so we consider the process of suggesting that classroom teachers are not knowledgeable enough to select classroom materials. I know that's not a new idea, but the CCSS marketing plan requires it.

Educators Evaluating Quality Instructional Products (EQuIP) is from our good friends at Achieve.

This rubric evaluates a lesson or unit on four dimensions: alignment to the depth of the standards, key shifts required by the standards, instructional supports, and assessments. Scores for each dimension classify materials as exemplar, exemplar if improved, revision needed, or not ready.

Achieve has trained a boatload of teachers to use this (because, again, the poor dears certainly couldn't have mastered it on their own) and has a cadre of fifty evaluators ready to give materials a look-see and the stamp of approval (or not).

It's about here, in a small-print paragraph, that Leifer and Udall note that both of these groups being advertised here get grant money from Helmsley and Hewlett.

The author's cite two benefits of using the rubrics. First, they will create "smart demand." In other words, these rubrics are a way for the rubric designers to coach the market, to encourage the market to want what the rubric designers think the market should want. Second, the rubrics will make everyone who uses them more familiar with the Core. Presumably not in the "Now that I understand what the Core is, I do not support it" manner documented in recent polls.

Two shining lights

Leifer and Udall go on to discuss two states that have had super-duper success with this sort of thing: Louisiana (where Leifer worked for a while) and New York.

For Louisiana, they talked to John White as well as touting the use of materials from some of the same folks who helped write EngageNY's lesson plan straightjackets. At any rate, they claim that LA reviewed textbooks so rigorously that only one each for math and ELA made the grade. White is proud of judging publishers transparently. The article does not in any way address that giant regulatory clusterfinagle that is currently LA education.

In New York, we just go ahead and declare EngageNY a success, based on anecdotes from a couple of administrators. This alleged success is due to three factors:

         1) Using the EQuIP rubric real hard
         2) Training many educators
         3) Facilitating adaptions instead of requiring scripts

Because EngageNY is just famous for its lack of scripting and its enormous freedom for teachers. Which, given what I've been hearing for the last year or more, will come as real news to some folks.

The Five Main Steps

So what does it take to come up with great materials? Five steps, it turns out.

1) Build on previous efforts and existing resources. By which they mean, use the techniques that have already worked for places like Louisiana and New York.

2) Make sure educators are involved and trained. The training is important because, remember, teachers are not sufficiently knowledgeable or professional to select their own classroom materials without first being properly indoctrinated trained.

3) Have non-negotiables. In the dating world, these are called dealbreakers. In this case, it means don't try to make your own revisions to the rubrics-- if the rubric says no go, then listen tot it. Remember, teachers and principals and curriculum directors-- you are not professionals and these sorts of decisions are beyond your ability to make unaided.

4) Provide detailed feedback. To textbook companies, that is. It's your job to help them make the sale.

5) Enable teachers to supplement and adapt material on their own. By which they apparently mean to allow teachers to go to "online libraries of vetted materials" (EQuIP and SAP both have them), not actually write or adapt materials themselves. Good lord, they're only classroom teachers-- how could they possibly do that?


It's a pretty little advertising insert and really, what better message to send out to the members of a society of professional educators that they can relax, because education is in the hands of people more capable than professional educators.

7 Reasons To Send $$ To Teachout/Wu NY Campaign

Why contribute to a New York gubernatorial campaign when you don't live in New York?

Zephyr Teachout is challenging Andrew Cuomo for the Democrat position on the ballot. While a victory is unlikely, it's not impossible. And you, dear reader, are probably not even a New York resident. Here's why you should support Zephyr Teachout and Tim Wu anyway.

Send a message to the Democratic Party

The Democratic party has taken to defining their traditional constituencies as "those people whose interests we don't have to represent because they will vote for us even if we punch them directly in the nose."

"Vote for us," Democrats tell teachers. "We're the ones who like teachers." And then they punch teachers in the nose, and trash education. The Democratic party of New York is so sure they don't have to reach out to Democratic voters that Cuomo has barely pretended to be a Democrat at all. If being a Democrat were a crime, I'm not sure Cuomo could be convicted.

Bottom line-- people will take you for granted just as much as you let them. The Democratic Party needs to stop taking education voters and labor voters and not-actually-rich-guy voters for granted.

The race has national implications

See above. New York is not the only place where Democrats have decided they can turn their back on education. The Obama administration has been as anti-public education as any Bush ever dreamed of being. And since Cuomo has his eye on the White House, lessons from this governor's race are also lessons about 2016. If the lesson of this race is that being a pro-corporate, anti-public ed tool will cost you at the polls, that's a lesson that will affect any Democrat running in 2016.

Teachout doesn't have to win

It would be great if she did. And she still could. But she doesn't have to. Cuomo is supposed to be invincible, untouchable. This supposed to be a walk in the park.

This is like one of those stories in which somebody is pretending to be a god. To bring him down, you don't have to outright kill him-- you just have to make him bleed. He's already showing strain and a hint of flop sweat.

There's another race, here

Quick-- name Cuomo's running mate! Yeah, I can't, either. Tim Wu, on the other hand, is the father of net neutrality. There are two races here, and since only about twelve people in New York pay attention to the Lt. Governor race, mobilizing voters could let Wu walk off with that office, thereby handcuffing Cuomo to his own opposition.

This is what rich people do

Looking across the country and picking out people who stand for your own values is a rich person's game. Thanks to the Supremes, we don't even know how many gazillions of dollars have been spread around the country into various races, but based on what we can see, we know it's not peanuts. Rich individuals like the Koch brothers, advocacy groups like StudentsFirst-- this is what they do. Swoop in, bankroll a guy who Sees Things Your Way, and hope it helps.

So here's a chance to live like a rich person and support candidates in races you won't even vote in. Maybe your contribution will be more Grey Poupon than beluga caviar, but you can still feel fancy.

Teachout/Wu stand for the right stuff

Teachout is Not a Politician in all the best ways. She's not ignorant or naive, but savvy and knowledgeable, and she gets it. This is not a protest campaign or a stunt campaign-- this is a campaign of substance and thought. For public education fans, she sees what is going wrong with public ed in this country, but she sees it in the context of larger issues.

People are out of power now, not just in their politics where they feel that their voices don't matter, but in their workplace and in the marketplace. I want to revive the old American belief -- exemplified by Jefferson (who wanted an anti-monopoly clause in the Constitution), Teddy Roosevelt and FDR -- that concentrated private power threatens democratic institutions.

If you don't ordinarily contribute to political campaigns because it's all political crap and the candidates are all bought and paid for by Big Money anyway, here's a chance to support the kind of politician you wish were running. Here's your chance to say to The Machine, "This is the kind of thing I want to see."


Politics are a free market of sorts. Much of the market is driven by advertising and entrenched power, but the consumer always has the power to demand certain choices, and we exercise that power by standing up for those choices when they appear.

Celebrate Labor Day

I live in Pennsylvania, but I have contributed to the Teachout/Wu campaign, and I will do it again. I will not contribute much, but every reader of this blog chipped in ten or fifteen bucks, it would add up to some real money. Teachout has a real chance to make a real difference, but she is up against fully entrenched and well-financed power. There's just nine days left till the primary, and lots of phone calling, flier distributing, sign posting, and general campaigning to do.

So what better way to celebrate Labor Day than by supporting someone who is trying to put the voice of regular citizens back into the political conversation.

Click on this link, contribute some money. Do it in the next 24 hours. Step up and help out.

Why Aren't More Women in Tech? Here's One Thought...

If you need a reminder just how bad misogynistic behavior can be in our current culture, there is news this week to remind you.

Anita Sarkeesian is someone you should know. Her vlog series "Tropes vs. Women" has over the last few years dissected and explained the sexism of the video gaming world. Her videos are thoughtful and scholarly. Situated on the website Feminist Frequency, they provide an intelligent, considered look at how the tropes and traditions of video games reinforce some of the worst sexist attitudes of the culture. Sarkeesian's presentations are calm, clear, and non-ranty; were it not for the subject matter, you could easily imagine her videos running on PBS.

So, of course, she has received constant threats. The level of harassment is stunning, a degree of ugliness that makes you want to just powerwash your computer after you look at it. Beyond the standard fare of trolling (known in the meat world as Being an Asshole) Sarkeesian has been the threatened with violence, rape and death. Trolls created a video game "Beat Up Anita Sarkeesian" and sent her screen shots of herself being assaulted. All this, I'll remind you, because she is a woman daring to point out sexism in video games. Video games.

Sarkeesian has put up with this since Day One, but last week, things took a turn for the even worse when someone let her know that they had tracked down her home address, as well as the names and address of her parents, and threatened to kill them all. Sarkeesian called the police and moved out of her home.

When discussing the shortage of women in the tech industry, it's standard to observe that the frat boy atmosphere can make them feel unwelcome. Frankly, saying that the tech industry makes women feel unwelcome is like saying being mugged makes people feel uncomfortable. We have example after example-- the launching of the app "titstare," the tinder lawsuit, the endless tales of Comic Con misbehavior. And every example of tech world sexism and harassment comes with its own second helping of "How dare you call us sexist, you ugly woman who probably can't get laid."

The culture in general and teachers in particular have got to update our image of what sexism looks like. The classic sexist stereotype (macho, strutting, physically powerful and confident) is being replaced by a new harasser-- the smart guy using his techy device to blast his ideas and images out into the world, never having to even look his victim in the face, and demanding that no women enter his domain without submitting to him.

It doesn't have to be that way. My son-in-law works in the tech industry, and he and my daughter make a fine feminist couple. But somehow we've raised a whole host of young men who think that it's okay to threaten women with rape and death.

I've taught Kate Chopin's The Awakening for years, and it always sparks some important and revealing conversations among my students. But lately I'm feeling that a discussion of the subtle and powerful ways in which society can pressure women into certain roles hardly prepares us for a world in which women who dare to call out little boys for their misogyny can expect relentless threats of death and rape-- how the hell did we end up with that world?? I should have done it before now, but this year we'll be upping our game when it comes to talking about gender in American lit.

One thing's for sure-- in that world, providing women with access to STEM education is only a tiny part of the solution. We like to think of ourselves as far more advanced than countries where women are threatened, harassed and assaulted for trying to get an education. I wish we were separated from that kind of thinking by a far larger gulf than we apparently are.

NEA Gets It Wrong Again

I would probably not pick at NEA so much, were it not that I am paying them enough money each year to buy myself a nice toy, support a local food pantry, or get a bit ahead on paying off my kids' college loans. But never have I forked over so much money for the privilege of belonging to an organization that annots me so much.

I say all that because I'm about to bitch about something that, on its face, is a trivial complaint. And yet, it seems completely symptomatic of NEA's problems as an organization.

President-elect Lily Eskelsen Garcia used to have a blog; a nice personal site where she infrequently posted. But hey-- she was actually using the internet, which seems to be a technological leap that the NEA leadership is largely unwilling to make. When it comes to technology, this is not your father's NEA-- it's your grandfather's. The NEA continues to closely resemble the GOP of the last two national elections-- they know that the young people are out there playing with their twitters and using those interwebs, but they can't seem to think of anything to do with the technology except either lock it up tight or use it to make cyber-versions of print magazines and glossy brochures.

So LEG's blog was a nice touch, threatening to bring the NEA up to at least a decade ago. But now the blog is gone.

The title is still in place ("Lily's Blackboard") but the website has been replaced with a slick, glossy, cold, corporate website resplendent with press releases and articles. Logos and links mark it clearly as part of the family of bloodless NEA websites. Her old posts have been warehoused in a special category, a section of the website set apart, I guess, for when LEG might actually write something herself. Wowee.

The NEA corporate communication guys seem to have realized on some level that LEG's personal touch is part of her appeal, so they not only kept her original title, but they put it in one of those cute fonts that's supposed to look handwritten.

But one of NEA's problems continues to be a culture at the top levels that comes across as detached, disconnected, aloof, cold, corporate, and far away from the world of classrooms. I'm always left with the impression that my union leaders are far more comfortable talking to an Arne Duncan or a Bill Gates than to an actual real live teacher.

So when you elect a new president whose signature strength is an ability to communicate personally and powerfully with people, it seems kind of dopey to surround her with a bunch of virtual handlers and whisk her off to the boardroom so that the executive assistants can start communicating through press releases.

She has too many important things to do? Bullshit. What does the president of NEA have to do that's more important than communicate with her members? And if you know what you're doing, maintaining a blog or twitter account or social media presence does not take dozens of hours a week.

The bottom line appears to be that the NEA simply doesn't know how to make social media work. Their GPS network, an attempt at running a bulletin board system to discuss and share education materials and topics is still a slick, glossy ghost town. And while I was initially excited that LEG had a twitter account, NEA seems to have no idea what to do with it beyond PR blurbs.

Look, folks. Age is not an excuse. I'm fifty-seven years old. My first lessons in computer programming involve BASIC and punch cards. And yet I seem to have figured out some basics here and there. And here's the most basic thing to get about social media-- it is a way to communicate with people, not to manage them. Lily's New Blackboard is a bummer, because it replaces something that could have been personal and effective with one more piece of shiny impersonal plastic. Wrong again, NEA.

First Loser in NY Anti-Tenure Lawsuit

In the end, there can be only one.

Even though it's all about the kids, according to the NY Post only one group gets to stand center stage for the big New York Tenure Takedown Lawsuit.

Previously the Campbell Brown nameplate case was going to have to share the big Caring for Kids spotlight with Mona Davids (of New York Parents Union), but Davids is now saying, none too cheerfully, that her law firm has dropped the case. Davids charges that the firm was chased off by "bullying" tactics by Brown and her camp, but Davids also announced that her lawsuit will continue. So this fight to be the Big Name in New York anti-tenure lawsuits is not over yet.

According to "multiple sources" the firm Gibson Dunn actually pulled out because they have education clients who didn't take kindly to Davids working with the firm. Brown's lawsuit is, of course, is being handled by several big-name lawyers and PR flacks with close ties to the Obama administration, who don't much care if they bother any people in the education world or not.

Students Matter, the Vergara-sponsoring advocacy group composed primarily of David Welch and his giant pile of money, has also withdrawn from Davids' suit.

No news yet about a press conference in which Campbell and Davids stand together and announce that since they are only concerned about what's best for the children and not who gets to be Really Important, they're putting aside all their competition for the best position in front of the camera.

UPDATE: Eclectablog has a more detailed account and timeline of how Brown et al squashed these pretenders to the thrown and competitors for the spotlight like bugs.

TNTP's Teacher Pay Proposal Is Dopey

I picked the title because I didn't want to make you wade through this whole post just to get to my bottom line. That's one thing I learned from reading the TNTP report "Shortchanged: The Hidden Cost of Lockstep Teacher Pay" The other thing I learned is that you can't be afraid to recycle the same old shinola with a spiffy new spin. I can promise you that you probably won't find a thing in this post that I haven't said before. But I can be just as relentless as TNTP. So let's crack open this report and see what creamy nougat is inside.

Introduction

Money is really important. Followed by an abstract of what's to come.

Why lockstep pay doesn't work

Because it doesn't include any punishments for being bad or rewards for being good. And by rewards, we mean money. Because why else would anybody want to do a good job, except to get more money?

From here the nameless authors conclude that school districts are wasting buskets of money paying for crappy teachers.

Low Entry-Level Salaries Keep People from Considering Teaching

Pay attention, because here TNTP starts to show their hand. We should offer more money to starting teachers so they will choose teaching. Part of the problem-- we're paying too much money to high-step teachers. We should move that money down to the bottom of the scale. Though they also offer a chart showing that teacher salaries rise too slowly compared to other fields.

Great teachers feel pressure to leave classroom while lousy ones feel pressure to stay

Okay-- the great teachers will be downtrodden and discouraged because they don't get recognition and more money that the craptastic guy next door, while Mr. Craptastic will stick around forever for the paycheck. So...let me think this through. The great teacher is not motivated by the paycheck, and that's why he needs a bigger one? The guy who doesn't like his job feels highly motivated to keep showing up for the job that he hates?

It doesn't exactly scan, but maybe if we threw in some dubious statistics.

The amount of taxpayer money that goes toward rewarding poor teaching is staggering. Last year, schools in the U.S. spent a conservative estimate of $250 million giving pay increases to teachers identified by their districts as ineffective.

"Estimate" is a generous word to use here for this mostly made-up number. Or this:

This goes a long way toward explaining why 75 percent of low-performing teachers remain at the same school from one year to the next, and half say they plan to remain a teacher for at least another decade.

Well, this one has a source, anyway. A previous paper by TNTP. They finish with their real point, which is that it is annoying as hell that good teachers and bad teachers might be paid the same.

The Best Teachers Aren't Recognized for Leading the Classrooms Where They Are Needed 
Most

The assertion here is that people in different settings working with different populations are paid the same amount. The truth of which depends an awful lot on your location. But then, the value of your pay varies with location, too. I don't make huge dollars compared to folks teaching in, say, Pittsburgh, but I live in a nice 10 room house with a finished basement and two baths, residential neighborhood, large yard which butts up against a river that I paid a five-figure price for. I'm not sure they have any point here except that it's hard to compare apples and anteaters.

What's the return on a Master's Degree?

Teachers have a financial incentive to pursue advanced degrees. Some advanced degrees are not awesome, yet teachers still get paid more for having them. TNTP thinks those raises should not happen.

A Roadmap for Building Smarter Compensation Systems

This is a three-step process. More pay for beginners. Offer raises for strong performance (and nothing else). Give incentives for working in tough areas. Let's take a closer look at each, shall we?

Competitive Early Career Salaries

One cute idea-- sign-on bonuses that you have to be vested to get. Otherwise, they want high starting, and a scale that goes up quickly, within, say, the first five years. Six figures in six years is their idea. They do get one thing wrong in asserting that in most districts it takes a whole career to get to the top. Unions figured out that problem ages ago and compacted schedules. For instance, in my district you get to the top of the pay scale in about thirteen years.

I can tell you the problem with that. People at the top of the scale sometimes get testy about having fairly stagnant wages while young folks are getting big raises. Of course, you have to stick around for over a decade for that to matter. Hmmmm....

Merit Based Raises

Nameless Author carefully avoids the M word, but that's what they want-- raises based on performance, with little or no increase for longevity. Their proposal does not include the exact wording of a pitch where schools say, "Come work for us, and you may or may not get a raise, based on measures that we haven't perfected and which you can't affect."

Incentives for High Needs Schools

Do that. But don't give money to bad teachers. Just the good ones. Since high needs schools will always have low test scores, proving that the teachers there are ineffective, you will never have to give anyone a raise, ever. Score!!

Is Performance Based Pay Affordable?

Now, eighteen pages in, we get to the heart of the matter. I've argued over and over that merit pay will never work because in education, you cannot grow the pie-- you can only slice it thinner and thinner. Here's the TNTP answer

It does, however, require that school systems make a fundamental choice: Do they want to pay for years of service, advanced degrees and everything else they are currently buying with teacher salaries? Or do they want to pay for great teaching? Doing both is not an affordable option.

But paying those six-figure salaries year after year to 100% of your teaching staff is not an option either. So they are correct-- you can have this model, or you can have longevity. Their model works as long as you keep churning and turning over your staff. That's been the argument for the first eighteen pages-- TNTP doesn't want to look at career earnings, but just the first five or six years, because not only do they not care if you stick around longer, but they need you to get the heck out so that they can repurpose your salary to pay for two newbies.

And that is how we use the argument of better teacher pay to drive the McDonaldization of education. As long as we can churn and burn, this model is sustainable. But it cannot sustain a school full of lifers who all make top dollar all the time.

Examples

The paper goes on to offer some studies of school districts that have done some version of what they propose. What can I say, except that the first example is Newark. Newark. Followed by Bridgeport's Academy school. Followed by Louisiana, Tennessee, Indiana and Florida as examples of state-led salary reform. If you had somehow still been taking them seriously up until this point, you may now get off that train.

They also have ideas about how to implement this smart compensation program, finishing with the motto "Give great teaching the compensation it deserves." And that certainly sings with ambiguity, doesn't it.

It's the same old bad ideas constructed to model the charter/TFA model of schools as dispensers of speedy education product, staffed by temps who are just passing through and cashing in on their way. It's a dark and dopey vision of education, no matter how many pretty graphics you stick on the page.

Spell Check & Educrats

A few days ago I tried composing a post on my tablet. I like the equipment; it's new and shiny and it lets me get things done while sitting on the couch with my wife instead of hunched over my desk.

But for whatever reason (no doubt a setting that I haven't located and changed yet) it is an aggressive fixer of my spelling. And my battles with the spell checker remind me of the role that technocrats have tried to play in education.

Spell check seems like such a helpful idea in theory. Whether you mistype or mis-spell, the power of the computer will correct you, help you get things right. Except that instead of helping you get things right, it helps you write things that the programmer judges as right. And here we hit trouble.

Granted, the only thing worse than my spelling is my typing. I have a cadre of loyal readers who regularly direct my attention to mistakes I've typed. The process there is that they send me a message about what they've spotted, I check it, and if need be, I fix it.

This is different than the process of spell-checking, in which the computer program substitutes its judgment for my own without asking. In the case of my tablet, it is so insistent that even when I think I have overruled it, I find out later that it simply changed things back. It's not trying to be oppressive. I have no doubt that the software writers felt that they were offering a helpful feature, that this overruling of my judgment was for my own good. But it does not need to know me, meet me, even make an attempt to understand what I'm trying to say. The content of my writing doesn't matter; I will be assimilated.

Technocrats dream this dream a great deal. They dream of an elegant system, a perfectly produced piece of software that will make human judgment (so messy, so flawed) unnecessary. So Google tries to finish my words for me even as they work on a car that will drive for me.

It's a weird warping of time. It feels as if the software overrides my judgment right now, but of course the decisions that created that moment were made by programmers a while ago, long before they would even know who would be using their program. They could never have known that I like to bend and twist words, make new illegitimate ones. They could never have known that I think one of life's great little moments is when somebody puts together a sentence that has never been spoken or written before.

It also makes subtle value judgments. Most spell checkers assume that people either never would or never should use words like shit, and never, ever drop the F bomb. So spell checkers are also politeness checkers.

You can see all of these drives in the technocrat approach to education reform. The dream is a system so smooth and uniform that it can be implemented anywhere and, more importantly, the people who are actually pressing the buttons don't ever use their personal judgment because the system renders their judgment unnecessary. Teachers and students should be able to just boot things up and step back and wait for their prompt. Their individual qualities and preferences shouldn't matter. When the system and the people clash, the system is keyed to simply override the humans. Human judgment as exercised by humans, after all, is messy and sloppy and unpredictable; it reacts to too much, is steered too much by its senses and surroundings. On the other hand, human judgment enshrined in the form of software is solid and unchanging and smooth and unaware of anything except its own directives.

When live humans and software collide, technocrats blame the humans for not getting in harmony with the system. I can tolerate that in my word processing, but not in my school. Or to speak in programmer terms, human chaos and responsiveness to the world, the tendency to change and grow and change some more in relationship with the richness of the world and other humans-- these are not bugs. They are features. They are the whole point.