CLE for lawyers

Every state bar has a continuing education requirment for lawyers. It's a good idea to require lawyers to keep up with new developments in the law, but as Scott Greenfield of Simple Justice points out, it's not always so clearly of professional value.

In talking about a mailer for a CLE course he recently got, the asks

There's no mention of who will be the instructor, and clearly this isn't a law firm, bar association or law school, but an entity whose purpose is to selling marketing. How the heck did this group obtain authorization to provide continuing legal education? Who in their right mind would give an PR firm the power to confer CLE credits for teaching ethics to lawyers? Apparently, the State of New York did so.

That struck a cord with me because a few years back I gave a talk at an event that gave CLE credit for lawyers in Texas. I'm not a lawyer and don't have any real credentials in the field.

I was teaching Business Analysis (statistics and operations research) at a small school in East Texas and was also a graduate student in Criminal Justice. As part of a CJ course in administrative law I'd written a term paper on the applicability of federal minimum wage laws to prison labor. When a business conference came up in San Antonio and I wanted to take a trip I put together a talk on that term paper topic and submitted the paper. It was accepted in a session that was approved for CLE credit.

I just remember thinking how weird that was -- my total legal education consisted of a Business Law course I'd taken as an undergraduate (and made in C in), a Constitutional Law course I'd taken as a CJ graduate student and the Administrative Law course I'd written the paper for. Not exactly what I'd consider a serious legal education. It made me wonder how serious they were about actual continuing education for lawyers.

Two reasons Americans are just dumb

The NYT has a review of another new book by some smart person who wrote a book about the lack of interest in knowledge of many Americans. It sounds like an interesting book, but I've read enough similar books in the past that I don't know that I'm going to read this one.

I have a couple of comments about the book in a minute, but first I'll point out that the reviewer is a pretentious twit who writes sentences such as

Then there is Lee Siegel’s Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob which inveighs against the Internet for encouraging solipsism, debased discourse and arrant commercialization.

Anybody that uses big words must be smart.

But the author of The Age of American Unreason doesn't seem to write that way, at least in the quotes in the interview she doesn't talk that way.

The book seems to lay the blame for Stupid Americans at the feet of religion and our educational systems.

I tend to agree but I think that religion isn't really a root cause. I think if we had a good educational system that the kind of ignorant religious fundementalsim that we have in America could not flourish.

Our educational system, both in K-12 and college programs, has taken the position that education equals certification and that everybody has the right to be certified. We've decided that it's morally wrong to deny someone a degree.

I think we reached that spot by putting too many mushy headed pretentious twits in charge of the system. They confused correlation with causation, probably because they were so busy learning big words that they never learned fundemental concepts. Of course, now educated people don't even have to learn big words, although it helps.

People with degrees, high school degrees, college degrees, graduate degrees, made more money than those without. So the solution our politicos and educational gurus came up with to solve our social and economic problems was to make sure everybody got a degree. But in order to accomplish that they had to structure it so that no one gets an education.

I've mentioned before that I quit school when I was 14. That was legal in 1963. It required parental permission at 14, but the school system didn't really see any reason to force a 14 year old who didn't want to go to school to go. Now we do. We have laws that require it. A 14 year old who doesn't go to school ends up in the juvenile system and parents that allow it end up charged with some kind of criminal neglect. Because every body needs a high school degree. We have to mandate it.

So our middle schools and high schools become baby sitting operations rather than educational institutions. We fill them up with kids who don't want to be there, who aren't going to learn if you hit them in the head with a 2x4.

I promise you that I wouldn't have learned a damn thing in school if I'd been required to attend instead of allowed to quit at 14. But I was not stupid, it only took me a few months inside the working world of 14 year olds to discover that school might not be such a bad idea after all - that an education might not be a bad idea after all.

One of the experiences that taught me the value of an education was a craps game I got invovled in with some cowboys at a Resort Ranch in Wimberley, Texas that I worked at. These cowboys, most of whom had a 6th grade or 8th grade education simply did not have the skills to figure out simple odds on a bet about dice. I'd always been interested in puzzles and simple mathematical games, even if I didn't pay attention in school, and it game me a huge edge in that craps game (there was no house, all bets were negotiated between the players). There's a tendency for people to want to make even money bets even when the odds are highly skewed.

So I did return to school and did finish high school and went to college and got a degree and went to graduate school and got graduate degrees. But I'm not sure any of that would have happened if they'd have tried to make me stay in school when I was 14.

Everybody suffers when you fill up the schools with people who don't want to learn.

I have more I want to say about out educational systems, about college admissions, and degree programs, and graduate programs, but this post has gotten long enough so I'll stop for now.

Motivating kids to learn math

Every once in a while I look at what search terms people are using that ends up at this site. The title of this post is one of the recent ones, motivating kids to learn math. I didn't show up on the first page for that term so I'm not sure which post got that hit.

But motivating kids to learn math is a topic I do have a little to say about.

For parents, the way to help motivate your kids to learn math is to play games with them and encourage them to read stories like "The Gold Bug".

My parents tought me and my younger sister to play Pinocle as soon as she was old enough to count meld (she was about 5 and I was 8).

For a kid the realization that math can help them solve interesting puzzles and help learn to improve their performance in playing games is a huge motivation. It certianly worked for me.

The crime of having a sex life

This news story is accompanied by a short news clip of two people having sex in an office. The action's all blurred over but it appears they were both fully clothed.

It's news because the man is an elementary school principle and the woman is a school teacher. That and whoever videotaped them send a DVD of it to parents of students in the school.

That's just awful, they all seem to think. They just can't allow their kids to go to a school were actual adults with actual sex lives work. The teachers involved have resigned.

No one seems to be asking who the hell made the tape and distributed it to strangers? They don't seem to care. They don't mind having that kind of person in their community. Just get rid of the adults with normal sex lives.

Motivating kids to learn

Kids don't always react the same to as each other to various attempts to motivate them. Paul Phillips says

I was too often told I was smart, and I never gained a taste for applying effort outside my areas of natural ability. I was always way too interested in getting the perfect grade as opposed to learning anything.

My reaction to being told I was smart as a kid was almost the opposite. I rejected grades, and just focused my education on topics I picked, not topics picked by my teachers. My target grade was a B or C, I'd pretty much stop and do something else once I knew I'd done enough to ensure a passing grade. In a 10th grade science final exam, where I was going to be allowed to leave when I finished the exam, I knew I needed a 56 on the final to make a C in the class. It was multiple choice, 100 questions. I left 44 answers blank and turned it in. It was just my way of showing disdain for adult approval.

To me, as a child, the educational system was just a rigid system that had been designed for the benefit of someone else, certainly not based on any interest in my education. When I was in the 6th grade we took some kind of standardized test at the beginning of the year. The two highest scores at each elementary school in Austin, Texas where then invited to a special summer program for smart kids on the University of Texas campus.

I didn't make great grades, but I read things that interested me, newspapers, adult novels, etc. I always scored well on standardized tests, and scored highest in the 6 grade class of my elementary school. So, even though I made B's and C's instead of A's I got an invitation to that summer program. The school principal tried to talk me into refusing the invitation so she could send a more deserving student (the 3rd place student who made all A's.). She actually used that term -- "more deserving".

That just steeled me. Do something to make the school principal look good? I don't think so. I insisted on going to that program.

The the true stupidity of formal education systems hit me right in the face. They had two tracks -- literature/history and math/science. You had to pick one. I wanted math/history. No, can't do that.

It was a morning program, 8:30 to 12:00. Math (or literature) was from 8:30 to 10, followed by a 30 minute break. Then in an entirely different building, different teacher, science (or history) from 10:30 to 12.

Math and History were taught in large lecture halls with plenty of seating.

There was no reason whatsoever, none, to not allow me to take math and history. They just didn't think it was appropriate to mix humanities and science. Had to pick one.

Screw them. After the first day me and a new friend who had the same interests as me went to math then cut science, going to the museum that first day. On later days we just hung around the beatniks on the UT drag (this was about 1961 or so), or sometimes went to the history lecture. They didn't call roll. We found we could just do what we wanted. That was a cool summer. The math lectures were on number theory and very interesting, the history was American History, post 1860 and was sometimes interesting.

But I discovered cutting classes was easy. By the ninth grade I was cutting so many boring classes I got expelled.

I went back, graduated from high school, and college, and grad school, even taught college blah, blah, blah

But that summer was probably the most interesting and informative educational experience I've ever had. That's when I learned that you don't have to listen to any of them.