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Education Reform Made Easy

I recently received proof that my five year old grade inflation adjuster based on Generally Accepted Academic Practices (GAAP) is still deadly accurate. A friend who teaches at a prestigious college discovered a student had plagiarized most of a paper that was the primary work assignment of the course. My friend acted in accordance with school policy, calling in the honor committee, etc. To make a long story short, the student was given the low grade in the class for the semester, a “B”.

This restored my faith in the comprehensive education reform plan I spend nearly two afternoons preparing back in 2006. After all, since my grade inflation adjuster has proven 100% accurate, the rest of the plan should be equally effective. I even included a few bones for the dogs in the plan to make it palatable, like my universal answer key for standardized tests.

The beauty of a universal answer key is that it is guaranteed to work as long as both the students and the graders apply it properly. I shared my universal answer key in a YouTube video a couple years ago, and it’s drawn over 8,000 views, so I like to think I’m doing my part in showing the way to a better America. Speaking of directions, I’m equally proud of the improvement I suggested Congress mandate for all online maps to help young people orient themselves:

I believe the reason my education reform plan didn’t see widespread adoption was due to the overwhelming scope, which far exceeded the viewable area of the standard computer monitor. Internet browsers automatically resize PDF files to fit in a single screen, so education experts who downloaded my plan ended up seeing something unreadable like the image below:

But I recently realized that with the widespread adoption of iPads, Kindle Fires and smartphones, even people with PhDs in education have become adept at setting the PDF size to 100% and then panning the image on small screens. So I wanted to state for the record that my comprehensive plan for education reform, starting with the first grade, is still available for royalty free adoption by all educational institutions that hold out hope for a brighter future. The plan addresses behavioral problems, truancy, career guidance, nutrition, medication dosages and gifted programs. The PDF download is available at:

http://www.fonerbooks.com/student.pdf

I want to draw special attention to my physician approved unique approach for reducing the need for student medication in public schools. In a time of sharp budget cuts for education, the tens of billions of dollars in annual savings would provide welcome funds for constructing new football stadiums. After all, it’s time we got our priorities straight on football, and let’s get those teachers legitimate prescriptions so they don’t have to go to Florida and overpay at pill mills.

For those who may be wondering, I do offer a course in remedial flowchart reading for the Yes/No challenged. The next session will be held in Las Vegas as soon as my contact at the GSA can fit me into her budget.

May 15th, 2012 | Category: Uncategorized | 2 comments

Automated Kindle Book Reviews On YouTube

I thought this was pretty funny. An Amazon Associate has automated video book reviews on Kindle eBooks on YouTube. There are over 5,000 reviews posted already. The automated reviews consist of a book cover, while a text-to-speech application with a pleasant voice reads the Amazon book description. It’s particularly amusing in the case of my classics List, because about halfway through, it turns into a rapid laundry list of author names.

I don’t know if automated reviews violate any YouTube guidelines or if reusing the Amazon descriptions violates Amazon copyrights, but it seems to be a harmless enough endeavor. They really should have figured out how to put the link to Amazon in the video description, rather than making people retype the alphabet soup URL, which I can’t imagine many people doing.

May 8th, 2012 | Category: Amazon, eBooks | Leave a comment

The Cafe Writing Culture

I scribbled out a twenty sentence plot for my first novel in a cafe almost twenty years ago, a cafe that doubled as a bookstore. The books are long gone and I stopped going to that cafe every night to read Hebrew back in the late 90′s. Now that I’m returning to writing fiction, I thought I’d try a new cafe. So last week I went to a cafe every afternoon for an hour or two, drank Japanese green tea, and started roughing out an alternative reality.

But I couldn’t help noticing a few things about how cafe writing culture has change in Northampton, MA. It’s an upscale college town where half of the people I meet are employed as writers and the other half are critics, you know the sort of place. The first thing that jumped out at me was that I’m a member of the 1%, at least at the new cafe I chose. I don’t mean I’m wealthier than the other patrons, I’m older than 99% of them. I’m also scruffier, which doesn’t say much about my evolution as a person.

The next thing I noticed is that laptops are still the replacement for the books and newspapers of the days that when the current crop of patrons were in diapers. I expected to see people reading on their iPads or playing with their phones. After all, the town has its own Apple store, plus a college bookstore that sells Apple products. Instead, it was two or four laptops to the table, always matching the number of people and often matching the number of chairs. I sincerely hope none of them were out on a date.

And they were typing. Well, in some cases they were typing and reading, but without looking over anybody’s shoulder, it seemed they all had a great deal they wanted to put into writing. Maybe they are all keyword writers working for spammy SEO blogs and phony content sites. I didn’t ask, but I didn’t see much contemplation going on.

There was a young lady sitting on the other end of my couch who was knitting up a storm, but that was just one day out of the five. I probably saw one couple having a conversation each day, and once I saw a girl reading a newspaper, but everybody else was all laptop all the time. And the funny thing is that the cafe has intentionally removed all of the power outlets from the walls. I’m surprised it’s not a building code violation but maybe there’s an exception for cafes.

I brought a notebook myself, the old fashioned paper kind. I’m waiting for somebody to come up and ask, “Hey, what are you doing with that weird stick, gramps? How do you make the black lines come out of it like that? And didn’t your mother ever tell you not to write in books?”

And I wonder if any of them were blogging about the relic on the couch who was gazing out the windows and writing cryptic notes in a composition notebook. Look who thinks he’s a writer.

May 7th, 2012 | Category: Writing | 7 comments
 
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