Random thoughts coagulate around a not-so-random natural event named Gustav.

Jim Morrison’s last song:

For some reason it popped into my head this morning.  Let’s hope the next few days are not also New Orleans’ last song…or swan song.

We delve into the Online Etymology dictionary:

swan

An Old English word from the proto-Germanic *swanaz (cf. Old Saxon swan, Old Norse svanr, Middle Dutch swane, which became the Dutch zwaan; Old High German swan became the German Schwan), probably literally “the singing bird,” from the proto-Indo-European base *swon-/*swen- “to sing, make sound” (see sound (n.1)); thus related to the Old English geswin “melody, song” and swinsian “to make melody.”

Intermission:  Geswin…Gershwin…melody song.  Louis and Ella…on the inside.

Another semester begins, to yet one more time drain the life out of multitudes of college teachers and their students.  This year begins with the periodic political campaign speech which, if it addresses education at all, displays no knowledge of life from the perspective of a college teacher.

One of the problems with being a college professor is that one is likely to be swamped with many ideas at once from time to time, which causes them not only to divide one’s time in an often futile attempt to resolve the different issues but also to consider how those issues might overlap…and why they happen to come up now, at this point in the life of a person or the history of the world.

So I’m going to carefully unwrap the twines of my reaction to the acceptance speech vis-a-vis education from another event that occurred yesterday.  More time and more thought need to go into any tirade about students who would be better served not going to college and the rest of us remodeling society so that such people could have their own form of a better life through a different vehicle than attending school not because they want to do so but because they are told to do so.  And about the amount of destruction done to educational realms when people think that the point of an education is to get a better job instead of, you know, learning something.

More time and more thought also need to go into anything written about the effects of that destruction and the destruction caused by No Child Left Behind…which has been every bit the storm Katrina was and is ongoing…on any effort to create an army of new teachers who actually have the skills and passion to teach.  The infrastructure of our education system has been neglected just as much as the infrastructure of our highways and byways…and surely for just as long, if not longer.