My Journey into Pink Floyd

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At the time that Pink Floyd was getting a lot of attention I was living outside the US, and somehow I missed the entire phenomenon.  Then, early in the Eighties a friend played "Is there anybody out there?" for me, and I sat up and listened.

I think my main problem is that I don't listen to pop music (or Rock) on the radio.  When my daughter was old enough to listen to music, I began to pay attention to the songs she liked: The Cranberries, They Might Be Giants, Ani Di Franco, the Dave Matthews Band, Red Hot Chili Peppers, and so on.  But other than that, the only music I listened to on radio was classical music!  Yeah, I know: stupid.

I forgot all about Pink Floyd for a long time.  Somehow, Pink Floyd fans were not in my immediate circle, or at least if they were, they never said anything to remind me of the fact.  So by an amazing set of circumstances, Pink Floyd just passed me by.

Last week, my daughter's band Minstrel's Ghost (a band that is more than a decade in existence, but is now undergoing a rapid transition of its membership, and possibly on the brink of disbanding) was invited to play in an evening of Pink Floyd covers, and once again I was reminded that I liked their music.

Before I go any further, here's a video of their Last Reunion concert from 2005 (an important year for lots of things):

featuring three really awesome songs, maybe four, including Wish you were here.

Looking at the audience, you get the impression that Pink Floyd fans were . . . really nice, ordinary people.  They were clearly delighted to be at that concert, but were otherwise regular folks, hardly the sort of maniacs you would see at any other sort of rock concert.

For the benefit of anyone like me, unfamiliar with the Pink Floyd group and its (or their) music, and who, like me, need names on which to hang their concepts, the central members are Roger Waters, a founding member, who ended up playing bass, though he appears to be an all-round instrumentalist, and one of their main vocalists, the owner of a very expressive, cadaverous baritone, a little like David Bowie, but a lot more hoarse; and David Gilmour, the principal guitarist, and also a vocalist, with a wide vocal range centered around a tenor, but able to sing falsetto very high, as evidenced in the first song in the above concert.

I'll add more if I find anything to add!

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The Weird Arguments I Get Into These Days

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I just came off a heated exchange with someone I don't even know, about whether the Washington leadership should stop "obsessing about STEM."  (Apparently Steve Jobs, Mark Zukerman and Jeff Bezos all agree that what makes America the economic leader of the free world is the breadth of our education system.  While some countries such as France and ??? were specializing their students relatively early into narrow technical fields of expertise, the USA chose to provide its citizens with a broad education, which made Americans more flexible in their ability to solve problems.)

Of course, I approached this question from a political point of view: it's all very well to train our youth with a Liberal Arts education, with Art, Music, History, Literature, Social Sciences, Mathematics, and some Physics, Biology and Chemistry as well, but when it comes to seeking employment, in desperate times, hiring is based on a sort of bottom line: can you handle the technology?  If you have a major in a STEM field (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) you're presumed to be competent in technological problem-solving.

Of course, the course of the Economy is strongly influenced by the Steve Jobses of the world.  The leadership, the innovators must have a broad education that equips them for creative solutions to problems.  But, in contrast, at the lower level --and most levels are lower-level-- the problems are technical.  In other words, the majority of workers need a technical education.  So, with the education system we have, every student has to gamble on whether he or she is going to be some of the innovators --a low percentage bet-- or a worker --a much higher-percentage bet.

Well, as it happens, most of my friends are Liberal Arts people: History, Library Science, Foreign Languages, Music, Theater.  Of course my defense of STEM fields was seen as a direct attack on their disciplines, because people in these fields are under siege all the time, and are expected to defend their choice of field constantly, and to battle for majors, who submit to the parental and governmental pressure to move into STEM fields.  The minute I expressed the opinion that a STEM education might be a better bet for a student today, I was perceived as siding with The Enemy.  But no one finds it more welcome to have a student who loves, say, music, to go into a music major, than I would.  Such a person would be a disaster in a mathematics major.  Well, not a total disaster, but not as much of a success as in a music major.  The world would be a better place if only those who really enjoy mathematics took it up as a major.  There are always minors.  You could always minor in anything you like!

So, once again, one of the major contradictions in our society needlessly polarizes a discussion.  Education should not be a gamble; an education should equip a youth to function in a variety of fields and occupations.  If the nation needs more STEM capable citizens, then all students must be STEM competent.  One does not need to be a technology major to be competent technologically.  All students should be required to learn considerable mathematics, computer science, physics and chemistry, just as today STEM majors are nevertheless required to learn History, Foreign Languages, Art or Music, and English composition, whether they like it or not.  The holiday is over: we need an education far more enriched in STEM subjects for everybody.  This makes a lot more sense than to encourage more students to take up STEM majors.

Unfortunately, students will find STEM subjects harder to achieve a modest standard in; there is a great deal of deferred gratification.  So I might alienate more of my friends with this great idea of mine than I had up until now.

Competition for majors in college
Competition is, I suppose, a wonderful thing, for some people.  But it appears that the Competition switch must either be off, or on; the typical citizen grows up in an environment where the Competition Switch is turned on very early.  This means some really funny things going on in a small college.  When high-school kids visit a college, while they and their parents are still trying to decide which college to go to, they are sent around into various classrooms, in which representatives from each major give them a spiel about their subject.  (I have been the Math representative in years gone by.)  Now, instead of singing the praises of the school as a whole, these representatives (going on autopilot) sing the praises of their subject.

I takes a new professor some time --and a fair amount of courage-- to learn to present a given subject as simply a part of an entire suite of subjects that will fill the needs of this peculiar audience.  When I started out (and for various reasons it was several years before I was fielded as a representative to these innocent young future students, and their suspicious parents) I tended to sing the praises of mathematics, but focused more on how our major was different from a mathematics major at a competing school.  But, generally speaking, throughout the academic year, college professors spend a lot of time and energy marketing their major to a captive audience of undecided undergraduates.  Even on Facebook, we find ourselves lauding the benefits of the subject we teach, even when fully cognizant of how other subjects fit into a total education.  Faculty in certain areas are particularly defensive.

One reason for this is that allocation of additional faculty members is based on numbers.  This is an innovation brought in by professional college administrators.  It does make sense, because every department tries to make a case for additional faculty.  Sometimes it is necessary, because some disciplines are so vast that no one is able to teach courses in all the sub-fields.  For instance, in mathematics we have (1) Algebra --not just 8th grade algebra, but abstract algebra, such as Group Theory, Galois Theory, and so on; (2) Analysis: calculus, integration, approximation; (3) Topology: continuity, shapes, manifolds; (4) Linear Algebra: matrices, vectors, solving linear equations; (5) Geometry: preparation for high school teaching, hyperbolic geometry, projective geometry, etc; (6) Statistics (7) Applied mathematics: differential equations, numerical analysis; (8) Computer Science.  This is often a separate department, but often a small college cannot afford that. (9) Mathematics Education.

Obviously, a small school cannot hire 9 different sets of professors, one for each of these areas of specialization, nor can they hire 9 individuals to staff these needs.  So when someone is hired who can teach several of these areas, that's pure gold.  But in some departments, faculty simply refuse to teach courses in some areas, and insist on hiring someone to take care of it.

In other departments, faculty prefer not to teach lower-level courses, and petition to hire faculty specifically to teach underclassmen.  This is unfair by the new hires, who're doomed to teach lower-level courses for many years, until a senior professor retires, or drops dead.

In yet other departments, mostly those that are very popular, more faculty are needed simply to divide up the majors as advisees.  Each student has to have an advisor in that major, but Business is such a popular major (unfortunately of very little utility value for a prospective employer, but don't quote me) that we even conscript faculty in other departments, and even the administration, to advise business majors.  So a department often petitions for an additional faculty hire on the grounds of having a lot of majors.  Unfortunately, often the members of the committees that approve the hiring of new positions are staffed by Business faculty (and those in their circle--after all, hiring has to do with money, and who better to decide how to spend money than Business and Economics and Accounting professors?) so that they're particularly sympathetic to the "Lots of majors" argument.  In the final analysis, that's the only argument that can be supported with numbers.

It's a bit cynical to accuse a department of canvassing for majors for the sole purpose of supporting an application for a new professor, but I suspect that many faculty go on autopilot on this matter, and do not consciously realize that, at the back of their minds, that's what they're doing.  They probably say to themselves: we need a new faculty anyway, and we'll look pretty silly unless we have lots of majors ... Better get out there and beat the bushes.  Oh, what a tangled web we weave.

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Transgender: The Asymmetry of Public Restroom Usage

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After many years, here is an issue in which the relationship between the sexes is not symmetric: Transgender individuals using toilets.

In a Ladies' restroom, all the relevant activity takes place in seclusion (at least in any restroom I've had the privilege of inspecting). If a male, or former male, or person of indeterminate sex were to venture there, there would be nothing of interest visible. If the "intruder" were to appear to be male, it would almost invariably (in 2016) cause a degree of consternation, for no objective reason, except cultural ones. A male could use the facilities with no trouble, and the other occupants might be left wondering whether the time they spend repairing their make-up at the mirror was being observed by unlicensed guys wearing skirts, figuratively speaking.

In a Gentlemen's restroom, only half the relevant activity takes place in seclusion; there are special installations that guys use for passing water, with great satisfaction (because these are not usually present in private homes). Nobody is supposed to be looking at their neighbors, but one occasionally gets a glimpse of anatomical equipment if it varies more than a couple of standard deviations from the mean, despite all attempts to pay no attention. If a female (anatomical, or gender identity-wise) were to stray inside such a restroom to actually use the facilities, assuming she wanted proceed with the greatest privacy, she could easily use the booths, and no one would be any the wiser, unless she was aggressively female, in which case she ought not to be there. It would probably cause a degree of embarrassment (2016), and more annoyance than horror. Men, too, preen at the mirror, but they're not too sensitive about been caught at it.  On the other hand, if the "intruder" were to be so brash as to want to try the urinals, without being equipped to do so, then there would be an uproar.

Guys in a Boys’ Restroom, trying to pee:	Not a problem
Guys in a Girls’ Restroom, trying to pee:	Not much of a problem
Guys in a Boys’ Restroom, trying to poop:	Not a problem
Guys in a Girls’ Restroom, trying to poop:	Not much of a problem, really.
Girls in a Boys’ Restroom, trying to pee:	Not much of a problem, unless they want to use the Urinals, or they're dressed like a girl.
Girls in a Girls’ Restroom, trying to pee:	Not a problem
Girls in a Boys’ Restroom, trying to poop:	Not much of a problem
Girls in a Girl’s Restroom, trying to poop:	Not a problem.

The ones who would be most suspicious of Transgender people using a particular restroom would be males, of a person who has female anatomy.  Guys probably would not care about this sort of thing, unless the person was dressed as a female, and used the Men's Room.  Note that the North Carolina law forces this to take place.  It encourages harassment of a former male at the hands of fellow-males.

The men in North Carolina seem to be making their case based on matters of principle.  But the majority of those responding to this law on social media seem to be women.  The problem seems to be that it is easy for a former boy, who now identifies as a girl, to remain undetected in the Girls' Room, which makes the users of the Girls' Room uneasy.  While, practically, the girls are hardly ever exposed inside the Girls' Room (and what do I know; guys have heretofore not been allowed there) they are simply queasy about the mere possibility that one of their fellow-occupants might just be a (former) boy.  And, you know what?  I don't think this is crazy at all; if I were a girl, I might be queasy, too.

Some (progressive) women take the view that, hey, you can't see nothing in the Girls' Room, so what's the diff?  And the guys don't care anyway (by and large), so it's all a plot to make Trans kids uncomfortable.  No, it's not, and I think Obama is wrong to disregard the sensibilities of those who are uncomfortable having people of the wrong sex share the restroom with them.  It is sad that progressives, who typically tend to be people of great sensitivity, are blind to the sensibilities of those on the other side of this question.

However, I think N.C. law is wrong in the way they have addressed the situation.  Forcing a kid to use the restroom on their birth certificate is harsh.  If it is a (former) boy, either anatomically, or in gender identification, she will be subject to the notorious viciousness of young guys.  If it is a former girl, it is an imposition on the other girls, who will see him as an intruder.  If this is the intention of the N.C. state House, it is heartless and cruel.  If it is a feeble attempt to solve the problem practically, it is ineffective.

Private unisex restrooms are certainly one possible answer, which has only a minor disadvantage in terms of social dynamics: one wonders whether a child using this single-user restroom will be subject to some sort of humiliating psychological pressure.  Remember that School is where you learn to deal with your fellow-students, and it is a delicate business when there are no complications.  With complicated gender issues are part of the mix, it can be a very delicate business.

Someday, we might find ourselves in a Utopia in which all the kids are perfectly fine doing their physical education completely in the nude.  But one suspects that, in such an environment, gender identity might not be a major issue.

Another Blogger focuses on another aspect of this issue: restrooms and perverts.  Despite the anger of victims of rape and perversion, these incidents are blessedly few.  But it does not mean that we shouldn't guard against them, and educate kids to address and respond to a potential incidence of perversion or rape.  The legislation under discussion is both paranoid and ineffective, as that article points out.

In Illinois, it appears that a group of girls have been encouraged to push back against the school's decision to retreat from offering a private changing room for a student who was born with a gender ambiguity (and is still in incomplete transition to female), and allow the transitioning girl to change in a curtained-off area in the girls' locker room.  The girls pointed out that while the privacy needs of the transgender girl have been addressed, the needs of the other girls have not been.  They still regard the transitioning girl as male, because (as far as the girls know) she is still anatomically male.

This is an openly conservative site; there is at least one line that says "Arrest Obama", and there is a strong possibility that those who posted the blog describing the confrontation between the girls and the school and the Department of Education (which was clearly not hostile) are, at least philosophically, hostile to the Federal Government.  But, before progressive women rush to line up to dismiss the objections of the girls as foolishness, I want to say that this is not intrinsically a political issue.  What the girls in this neighborhood of Illinois find uncomfortable, young women in Maine might find laughably irrelevant.  It is amazing how quickly people in one locality dismiss the discomfort in another for a particular situation.  Just because people who live inside the Arctic Circle can run about naked in zero degree weather doesn't mean that people who live in Florida should jolly well learn to do the same.  Someday, as I said before, we might be OK just changing out on the playing field, but that day is not here yet.  The world is divided between those who think separate locker rooms for girls and boys are a luxury, and those who think that they hardly go far enough.  I can't be the only one who hates to get naked in front of other guys.  But in front of other ordinary guys and transgender guys: that is pushing my fortitude to its limits.

I do think it is appropriate for the Federal Government to blackmail local school districts into extending privileges.  But not into extending privileges to transgender children at the cost of the discomfort of the other children, if there is any possibility at all of accommodating them.  We all know that, in the not-too-distant past, whites were uncomfortable riding the same public transport with blacks.  This was discomfort that we stopped tolerating a long time ago, because we began to recognize that we were all of the same species.  Are we at the same point as far as accepting the needs of transgender individuals?  In the case of the Illinois girls, it appears that forcing the transgender Girl to change in a private room was hurtful to her, because it singled her out.  It seems suspicious to me that the Girl (or her spokespersons) considered it less objectionable for her to change in public, with the other girls.  Girls are notoriously unhappy about changing into gym clothes even with other girls.  But this Girl was still anatomically male.  I can see only one reasonable way out of this: every student must change in a private room.  It is convenient to conflate the security of a locker room, with the privacy of a changing booth, but sometimes progress is inconvenient.  If we would like to allow this gender-transitioning girl to consider herself a girl already, we can tolerate the awkwardness of an array of twenty or so changing booths on the edge of a playing field, or on the perimeter of the gym, so that every kid can change in privacy.  This Spartan tradition of all the girls changing in the same locker room simply has to go, and the same for boys.

Some day in the future, our descendants might not have genitals at all, or even hang them up on the peg, or surrender them at the door.  But various degrees of prudishness is a common human trait, and we cannot legislate it away.

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Yet another writer describes why Trump leads the Republican Party

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Perhaps this gentleman has read the same pieces that I reported on last week, but now George Packer has written a post for the New Yorker Magazine on the topic: How Donald Trump appeals to the White Working Class.

The article is very easy to read, and a lot shorter than the similar piece on Stir Journal.

Here is the gist of the article; I might deviate a bit from the points of the author if I have a slightly different view of matters.

Off the Beaten Track
Sara Palin and Trump are walking the road between Reality TV and Politics, one going one way, the other going the other.  They both appeal to middle-aged, white Americans, who have been made furious by "globalization, low-wage immigrant labor, and free trade."  They are minimally pious, anti-government, and (inexplicably) pro-business.  Trump is also using "White Identity Rhetoric," which is a clever way of saying that he appeals to poor white voters who feel marginalized by National Politics, insinuating that their economically disadvantaged status is caused specifically by their race, and that Trump will work specifically to help this demographic, as signaled by his professed hostility towards immigrant labor.

Traditional Republicans
The mainstream of the Republican Party only had Ted Cruz to represent them.  They were not happy with the Tea Party rhetoric that some of the candidates had adopted, and are not happy with the contentious stupidity of Trump's rhetoric either.  (More importantly, the conservatives in the GOP did not like Cruz either, because he was too extremely Right.)  Trump loves the non-logic of those he perceives to be his supporters; in fact he goes out of his way to make arguments that make absolutely no sense, but depend on superficial verbal cleverness which is either his natural style of speech, or has been adopted specifically to appeal to an audience that is tired of hearing the logic of upliftment of the racial minorities, as if it were synonymous with the upliftment of the economically disadvantaged.  Mainstream Conservatives, even if many of them are not religious, like to maintain the appearance of being believers.  They argue against abortion and gay marriage from a traditional Christian viewpoint, though they could not care less about the religious objections.  (Some conservatives undoubtedly do, but I'm sure they're in the minority.)  This makes the GOP deeply unhappy with Trump.

How Democrats feel about the White Working Class
The Democrats (the author says), have had an uncomfortable relationship with (members of) the White American working class.  They support them in principle, but when the educated Democrat supporters of Bernie Sanders (for instance) actually encounter working-class whites, "the feeling [of empathy with them] can vanish ... [because these working-class folk] often arrive with disturbing beliefs and powerful resentments—[and] might not sound or look like people urban progressives want to know."  In short, a Democrat encountering someone who looks and sounds like the Trump supporters we see on TV, but might not actually be a Trump supporter, will be acutely uncomfortable, because though the Democrat agenda is intended to address the needs of the working class, no matter of what race the individual might be, the encounter is going to be uncomfortable to the one who is supposedly bringing the good news.  Trump does a better job of speaking to this demographic, because often their views are repugnant to those of us brought up on a diet of Political Correctness and Equality of Women, and such things which some guys find objectionable, bless them.

To put a more serious complexion on this situation, the writer reports that according to a certain study, in recent decades working-class white Americans have been dying at increasing rates.   The cause, says one author of the study, is mainly alcohol, suicide, and death due to opioids.  The study concludes that it is an epidemic of despair; the psychology of the poor white population has gone far beyond being of merely academic interest.  Indeed, there is certainly an epidemic of narcotic abuse within the white population of all economic levels, which is signaled by a new interest in providing social services for addiction.  Traditional Conservatives would view addressing the mental-health (and chemical health!) of drug-users as important simply as a means of preventing the scourge from spreading to their own families, and for preserving the health of the workforce.  Liberals (and other Democrats) must view the task of addressing the needs of poor whites as something that has not been done up until now, and must be taken care of on moral grounds.  But it is a difficult job, because the target audience is a highly illogical, prejudiced one with actually very conservative social views, which must be battled all the way.

(I suspect that Trump supporters shown on TV are far from being typical.  They are selected to be interesting viewing, and not to be representative.  It is very likely that the majority of Trump supporters are pretty much like our own friends who are impatient with Crybaby Progressives.)

My Take
Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders are splitting the Democratic Party into the idealists, and the cynical pragmatics.  After Carter, the Democrats reinvented themselves under the Clintons as business-friendly (for the sake of the Nation).  I don't know the inside story of how they managed to gain control of the party; they probably assured them that they (the Clintons) had powerful business support, and that therefore the financial backing to win the White House.  That was the time when we had Enron and all those crazy Wall Street bandits, and half the time the Republicans wanted to put the Clintons in jail, while the rest of the time, they wished they could be bigger Wall Street bandits themselves.  The Clinton years were all about a bunch of adulterers trying to convict Bill Clinton of sexual depravity.  The fact that US citizens were better off in Clinton's presidency than they have ever been since then was of no import: they wanted a highly moral guy as President.

But the fact remained that the Clintons played a lot of financial games in their day, which made them the darlings of the big Banks and Insurance companies, and this makes it very hard to trust Hillary Clinton in her bid for President, because being beholden to the Banks, she might be as dangerous in the White House as Cheney was.  Make no mistake: I would trust Hillary Clinton a lot further than the Bush-Cheney team.  A lot further.  But there is still a little niggling doubt.

With Bernie Sanders (and with Donald Trump, for completely different reasons) one feels anxious about how well he would actually perform in the White House.  With Trump, I'm not going to rack my brains trying to see how he could succeed.  With Bernie Sanders, we shall need not only to win the White House, but win the Congress with Bernie supporters, and there would have to be a credible team behind him, who will help to put together legislation that will bring about a significant part of the political and social changes that he has been talking about, in such a way that it does not end with a huge fiasco with calls for impeachment, and martial law, and a new constitution, and yadda yadda, and repeals of the legislation within a year or two.  Obamacare survives, because, ultimately, the Insurance Industry is happy with it.  But Big Business will not be happy with the majority of legislation that Bernie has planned.  That's good for us, as long as the legislation stands.

[Added still later:

George Blow, an op-ed columnist for the New York Times, summarizes many of my feelings about Trump, and the sector of US society that gets inspiration from him, and presumably will win Trump the nomination of the GOP for the presidency in 2016.

I am embarrassed to be delighted at every criticism he hurls at this demographic, but in some ways his characterization of this sliver of our society is somewhat more compassionate, because he indicates the curve of the legislation that took resources away from middle-class white men, and spread it to other sectors of society that was in need.  Most of all, he delineates why Social Security, in its earliest form, left out large sectors of the population who sorely needed it, and (if I understand him correctly) how, when these inequities were corrected, it left middle class white men with less, in order that other sectors of society could catch up with them. This is the nature of a zero-sum game: if I win a little more, you win a little less.
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[Added later:

I believe that Hillary Clinton could be a good President for the USA, probably one of the best.  But my problem with her is that she frequently does not say what she really believes, and says what seems expedient at the time.  The hearts of the Clintons are probably in the right place, but ... she still has to earn my trust.  A good number of Democrats will vote for Hillary without a second thought, but I'm not that comfortable with her.]

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Teachers: Because Parents Can't Do It All

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A few days ago, it was National Teachers Day, and all the schmaltzy "I Love Teachers" stuff got trotted out.  I'm all for adulation of teachers, but we've got to keep the sentimentality out of it.  You know?  It's great to know and admire teachers, but sentimentality really doesn't get you very far.

Why we need teachers
You can do your own research, but deep in the dawn of history, or actually, a few thousand years ago--I suspect it was around the dawn of agriculture--when it was realized that kids could learn more while they were still young, and the amount of non-food-related information began to burst into bloom, the idea was born that you could assign an adult to teach the little blighters a little something extra, and pay him / her with food, and Bingo!  You had a few young people who could take up some of the more complicated professions with a lot less trouble.  And you also had them out from underfoot when the adults were busy.

Lots of higher mammals are like that: even elephants have a prolonged youth, during which they grow intellectually a great deal, whereas something like a rabbit is probably ready to breed within seconds after it is born.  I don't know all there is to know about animals; dammit, Jim, I'm a professor, not a ... well, anyway.

Adulation
In lots of primitive societies, ignorant adults tend to assess the worth of each other based on their own --presumably primitive-- values, such as how much wealth they had, or how good a fighter someone is, or how many women they had raped, or other good stuff like that.  (I'm not trying to save your feelings; this is the real primitive world.  If the potty fits, poop in it.)  It became quickly clear that, A. Teachers did not fit into this value structure.  Also, B. kids who had been to school were generally more successful in life.  Putting two and two together, haha, Gloopy arrived at the conclusion: we should respect Teachy despite the fact that he/she doesn't own a lot of goats, and isn't much good in a fight.

In the US, too, until recently, an education did give one an edge in personal success, and teachers were --generally-- regarded with a degree of respect.  But somehow, primitive values crept in.

Primitive Values
Business began to gain the upper hand in US culture in the sixties, and was helped along in the eighties by affluent politicians, who saw that their own personal financial success depended on the success of the Stock Market.  It is always a mistake to give undeserved respect to something like the Stock Market, because it is subject to interference by unpredictable things.

Many things conspired to make teachers unpopular among people of limited mental acuity.
First of all, the value placed on grades.  Living in the insanely competitive society that we do, it was natural that parents began to feel that the grades Junior got was a reflection on them.  Of course, this is partly true: more successful kids get more educational support from their parents.  Some parents know algebra, others do not.  So the parents of poorly-performing kids began to dislike their teacher, especially if the teacher were so politically inept as to point the finger of blame on the parents concerned.
Secondly, the employment situation got intermittently tight, so that business could get sniffy about whom they hired.  Colleges and universities, too, knew that --while it was always a good policy to admit rich kids, regardless of what their scores were-- kids with high scores were always more likely to do them proud.  This made teachers decidedly unpopular with at least half the parent population.
Thirdly, teachers generally oppose militarism, because they developed an attachment to the kids they had been teaching, and the last thing you want is to see one of your students go off to Vietnam and get killed.  It is difficult to trace this particular source of teacher unpopularity, but I have a hunch that it exists.
Fourthly, the rich idiots who control Congress (and more importantly, the various State houses of representatives) resent the taxes that keep the schools running, and want teachers accountable for even the few miserable tax dollars that they do spend.  This epidemic spreads quickly throughout politics: teachers must be held accountable.

Many other factors make teachers unpopular.  Kids do not like school; unlike in the days of Socrates, it is no longer a privilege to go to school; the law requires it.  This means that young people completely unsuited to the demands of school are forced to submit to education.

I'm not sure when this sentimental approach towards appreciating teachers began, but, embarrassing though it is, I suspect it originated with teachers themselves.  In the vacuum left by absentee parents, teachers had to take on aspects of the education of a child that is more appropriately handled by parents.  "Respect your teachers" is most definitely one of them.  In any case, some of the memes we're getting are just pathetically irrelevant.  The one at right is a case in point.  (Perhaps it was dreamed up by folk from the Far East, who are horrified at the lack of respect for teachers they find here.)  Like many things, the attitude towards teachers must be culturally appropriate for the society: reverence for teachers quickly deteriorates into sentimentality.  Do we really want to describe teachers as consuming themselves for their students?

A teacher must love his or her subject.
A teacher must like young people.
A teacher must have a lot of energy and patience.
A teacher must be able to deal with adults.

Apart from these things, a teacher must be a moderately intelligent human being.  Consuming themselves should not enter into the equation.

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2016: Gender Reassignment, and the Transgender Phenomenon

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Since the question of how to deal with the needs of transgender citizens in our midst is becoming a major policy issue, I think we ordinary folks should take a look at the entire phenomenon.  Psychologists, obviously, have been looking at it for decades, but I tend to be just a little doubtful about their thoughts on anything; the psychologists who have affected public policy have been as often wrong as they have been right.  The entire pain management industry, though helpful to some people, indirectly contribute to the heavy use of narcotics across the country.  That might be considered an entirely medical subject, but I think psychologists have had their hands in it.

Gender is a complex thing.  It is both something that characterizes how an individual sees him- or herself, but almost, even more, how an individual wants society to see him or her.  I’m willing to bet that the attitude of anyone withing the group of people who are sensitive to the question of their gender identity, and to the gender identities of those whom they are interested in relating to, could change depending on the cultural environment of the moment.

Fifty years ago, gender stereotypes were so oppressively strong that only the bravest and most determined people even considered what was called back then a “sex change”.  In some present-day cultures, it is usual for males to take on aggressively masculine personas, and (possibly in response) for females to take on —what other sub-cultures may consider—  excessively feminine personas.  In such a social and cultural environment, life would be difficult for an individual who finds it unpleasant to fit into either the ultra-feminine or the ultra-masculine role that is considered appropriate.  On the other hand in those times, for some people the desire to change gender could be almost desperately strong, because so much is at stake.

Western society is gradually evolving into one in which extreme roles are not expected.  But, of course, because of the great cultural tolerance in American Society (though significantly less than that of certain European societies), there are innumerable cultural pockets in every population center, where the norms are different.  So one could easily find in a big city such as New York, Los Angeles or San Francisco, where gender roles are subtle and nuanced, certain neighborhoods in which a male is expected to be excessively masculine as a matter of course.

So, I am beginning to think that a child’s decision to stop being a boy and become a girl, or stop being a girl and become a boy, could be strongly influenced by the microculture in which it finds itself.  Some boys just love to wear dresses.  But what if that boy were in a local culture where dresses do not exist?  Dresses, after all, are an artifact of the culture; a way the culture chooses to express itself at a given moment.  There is very little intrinsically feminine in a dress; most of it is by association and usage.  If a boy in an entirely pants-wearing culture were to suddenly become enamored of dresses upon seeing one in a catalog, for instance, that would be interesting.  One wonders whether gender reassignment would be warranted in such cases, where in my opinion the child is much too young to make a decision of such great import.

More interestingly, because of the gradual drift of gender roles towards a more neutral middle-ground, and because of the tendency of fashions for young people to become more unisex, a trend we can expect to see increasing, it might not be something a young person actually needs, to be surgically altered.  These phenomena of unisex fashions and androgynous presentation of self are more often seen in big cities, and (interestingly enough) among more middle-class populations, whereas less-affluent sectors of society seem to favor the more strongly differentiated gender roles.  A couple of decades from now, we could hope to see a decline in gender-reassignment surgery, simply because it would gradually become easier, some day in the future, for anyone to express him- or herself comfortably at any point in the spectrum of gender identity without gender re-assignment.  We must hope that gender roles of any sort become possible without surgical intervention.  But by then, people might be more interested in becoming whales, or sharks, or something more interesting!  To my conservative eyes, it seems a better choice for an individual to work within the gender he or she has been born with, and use any avenues of costume or other means to create an environment in which he or she can interact in the way he or she desires with the companions he or she desires, than to go the route of surgery.  We hear from those who are happy with their gender transformation, but we ought to hear from those whose gender transformation paths have not been smooth.  Just as things such as surgical body enhancement have been a nightmare for some, so one cannot doubt that desire and attitude alone cannot guarantee success for everyone wanting to change gender surgically.  There have to be a significant number of failures out there which we have not learned about.  But my main thrust is that it may not be long before gender becomes more of a matter of attitude, behavior and choice than a matter of anatomy.

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