Like most people, I was surprised to hear of General Petraeus’s sudden resignation on the account of an affair. Not so much that he’d had one (I don’t spend time thinking about such things), but I didn’t know that even CIA chiefs would resign due to them. I will note that some are suspicious that this had more to do with his pending testimony on Banghazi, but it’s nonetheless noteworthy that this is the explanation that was given. Anyhow, Dr. Phi – having spent time in the same room as the man – is not the least bit surprised.

Back in high school there was a coach. Coach Montgomery. We never actually saw anything occur, but the… I don’t know… familiarity with which he presented himself to the female students did not go unnoticed. Well, we partially noticed because during indoor free periods the less popular among us were having basketballs thrown at our heads while he was too busy talking to female students to notice. We didn’t like Coach M. Partially due to the fact that he wasn’t there to instill order when it was needed. But also because when he was paying attention to us, he terrified the crap out of us. He honestly struck us as a roidhead. A roidhead who would probably sleep with a female student if he had the chance.

A couple years after he graduated he was arrested. It was actually his suicide attempt that got him in the news. Our response to this was… not generous. We thought it was funny as heck. We could just imagine Big Strong Coach M scared spitless of what was an impending arrest and taking the proverbial coward’s way out. I can’t say I am remarkably proud of this response. In one sense, I am not hugely bothered by what he did. She was sixteen. A teacher (or coach) should be fired for such a thing, but I’m not sure about arrested (a subject worthy of exploration in the future) absent a degree of coercion beyond the basic power differential. A year or so after that I would be exposed to the destruction of suicide (not mine, obviously) and the funny part didn’t seem so funny anymore.

But before my better angels got a chance to catch up with me, I have to believe that I would smile all over again at having my negative confirmations of a man I disliked intensely being confirmed.

So a question for all y’all… has this ever happened to you? Wherein you’re looking at something that just doesn’t quite seem right and later it turns out that everything is unraveled in a rather public fashion?

At some point in the past, I remember seeing some interaction between a colleague of my wife and his nurse and getting a definite vibe of something. As far as I know, nothing ever came of it. It was probably nothing. Of course, if you’d asked me in all seriousness in high school, I probably would have said the same of Coach M.

John T. Tierney gives the case against AP tests:

AP courses are not, in fact, remotely equivalent to the college-level courses they are said to approximate. Before teaching in a high school, I taught for almost 25 years at the college level, and almost every one of those years my responsibilities included some equivalent of an introductory American government course. The high-school AP course didn’t begin to hold a candle to any of my college courses. My colleagues said the same was true in their subjects.

The traditional monetary argument for AP courses — that they can enable an ambitious and hardworking student to avoid a semester or even a year of college tuition through the early accumulation of credits — often no longer holds. Increasingly, students don’t receive college credit for high scores on AP courses; they simply are allowed to opt out of the introductory sequence in a major. And more and more students say that’s a bad idea, and that they’re better off taking their department’s courses.

The scourge of AP courses has spread into more and more high schools across the country, and the number of students taking these courses is growing by leaps and bounds. Studies show that increasing numbers of the students who take them are marginal at best, resulting in growing failure rates on the exams. The school where I taught essentially had an open-admissions policy for almost all its AP courses. I would say that two thirds of the students taking my class each year did not belong there. And they dragged down the course for the students who did.

The AP program imposes “substantial opportunity costs” on non-AP students in the form of what a school gives up in order to offer AP courses, which often enjoy smaller class sizes and some of the better teachers. Schools have to increase the sizes of their non-AP classes, shift strong teachers away from non-AP classes, and do away with non-AP course offerings, such as “honors” courses. These opportunity costs are real in every school, but they’re of special concern in low-income school districts.

To me, the most serious count against Advanced Placement courses is that the AP curriculum leads to rigid stultification — a kind of mindless genuflection to a prescribed plan of study that squelches creativity and free inquiry. The courses cover too much material and do so too quickly and superficially. In short, AP courses are a forced march through a preordained subject, leaving no time for a high-school teacher to take her or his students down some path of mutual interest. The AP classroom is where intellectual curiosity goes to die.

Michael Williams talks about his own experience, concurring.

I personally do not have any experience in the way of taking AP courses. As far as my school district was concerned, I was closer to “remedial” than “advanced” despite my being a top performer in most of the (non-honors) classes I took. In middle school, my math teacher inquired about putting me advanced math, but was denied on the grounds that I had been tagged a near-remedial student (I was actually making mostly A’s and the rest B’s at the time, but that wasn’t what they were looking at). Honors classes were out of reach in high school, and AP classes moreso. The colleges took a different view, and I was being recruited by a directional school specifically for their honors college. Southern Tech, where I did attend, accepted me unconditionally into its Honors College.

When I got to Southern Tech, they had me take a placement course. This wasn’t for college credit, but was for bypassing the sequence as Tierney mentions. I scored into the highest English and Math courses, though it turned out not to matter: The Honors College required that I start at the bottom floor in English and the College of Industrial Technology required that I take specifically designed “technical math” courses, which were not appreciably different than the sophomore and junior high school classes I did take. I could see why I otherwise would have tested out of them.

I am, on the whole, glad that I did not take AP classes. It may not have done me any good for math and my Honors English classes were awesome. The only ones I would have wanted to test out of are those that I might not have (namely, science) and ones I would have (Social Studies, English) are ones I was glad to take at the collegiate level.

Tierney points to what I consider to be some solid reasons why AP classes have gone off-track, as far as that goes. On the other hand, some of the same arguments can be used against tracking (Honors/Standard/Remedial/etc) and I am a fan of those. The bit about intellectual curiosity comes is interesting because my impression from my friends – many of whom took honors classes – were that it was much more freewheeling than the classes I was taking. Without thinking about it, I would have guessed AP classes would have been the same. But if the class itself is geared towards preparing for a specific test, I suppose that makes sense. It does seem a little bit odd to me that the best teachers would be teaching these classes, though. I’d have thought that teaching to a test is something that they would avoid (and, along those lines, that non-AP honors classes were considered better because the framework was not as rigid).

Marc Ambinder thinks that the era of affirmative action may be coming to an end.

[Justice Anthony Kennedy] endorses the idea that affirmative action can be used to achieve a diverse student body, so long as race is considered as one part among many others, and so long as applicants are considered individually. It is hard to imagine him not finding fault with the racially conscious 15 percent admissions process. For Kennedy, race-conscious policies are permissible (barely) if (and only if) diversity cannot be achieved any other way. Plainly, the University of Texas has found a way to achieve some measure of diversity without affirmative action before it takes race into account.

Perhaps Kennedy will try to salvage affirmative action, but it is hard to see the court’s conservatives allowing him to do so. They have their chance to end it, not mend it. Though John Roberts has said (and told Congress during his confirmation hearings) that he values precedent and wants the court’s decisions to be incremental rather than sweeping, it will be hard to resist the temptation to sweep away racial preferences.

It seems to me that he actually put his finger on why affirmative action won’t be banned wholesale. If Kennedy wants to preserve affirmative action, but can’t justify it in Texas, he can merely write an opinion stating that affirmative action is not permissible where the aims are being met by other means. That would abolish affirmative action in Texas, while continuing to allow sympathetic jurisdictions an opportunity to keep with the policy. To universalize from Texas’ experience, Kennedy must be judicially confident that any state could achieve the manner of diversity through a Top 10% policy like Texas has. This may be true, but it’s far from certain for a whole host of reasons.

It seems to me that Kennedy remains relatively sympathetic to affirmative action. If I’m wrong on that, then maybe it is dead in the water. But if I’m right, he can either uphold it in Texas (by declaring that the existing racial diversity is insufficient) or uphold it everywhere else (with the above argument).

{Comment with care.}

I turned in a pretty lackluster day today substitute teaching. The class itself wasn’t the issue. They weren’t perfect – what second grade class has perfection – but on the whole they were better than expected as students of the school in question and given a gender imbalance (2/3 boy) that always makes me nervous.

But I was exhausted. I have been for several days now. I’ve been getting less than six hours of sleep a night for almost a week not. My days over the last couple have included some exhausting chores (driving a lot of miles in uncomfortable conditions). It was hard to keep moving around the room (and second grade demands it). I had a lot of difficulty retaining any sort of focus.

On the drive home, I was reminded of the things that my wife, and doctors like her, are expected to do on a lot less cumulative rest than I’ve had.

It’s a rather good thing that she is taking the maternity leave she is in light of the newborn coming our way later this month. I hear newborns sometimes cut down on quality rest.

Southern Tech, like many schools, is considering a smoking ban on campus. I was thinking as much as a decade ago that this might be the natural extension of the bans in bars and restaurants. Of course, to voice this back then was to be building up strawmen and making slippery slope fallacies and all that jazz. To be honest, I wasn’t even sure back then. I mean, a bar or a restaurant is one thing, but an entire campus of hundreds of of acres? When office campuses started going entirely smoke free, I stopped feeling that I was perhaps paranoid.

I am against the ban, to what I am sure is nobody’s surprise. So is the Student Association. I find it difficult to believe that on a campus that is nearly 500 acres in size that you cannot find places to accommodate smokers. I feel oddly dispassionate about it, though. It will likely happen at some point, it will likely be ignored. Potential compromises may be passed along the way, but even workable compromises will be deemed insufficient.

In the case of Sotech, there are rumors that it is not entirely the school’s choice and that cancer institutes are threatening to stop giving grants to schools that don’t have smoking bans. Which, if it comes down to losing significant amounts of research dollars, I guess I understand.

Rather than objecting on an ideological level, it’s mostly the sense of loss that nags at me. Not the loss of our freedoms, but that being able to smoke on campus provided extraordinarily good social opportunities for me as an undergraduate. The bans around doorways actually just made it better because it got us all clumped together. No smoking on campus and I never meet Dharla (I mention her, but there were others). This is no thing for a lot of people, who instead of going out to smoke might go to the commons area and meet people there. Me being me, I’d probably have stayed in the dorm and not met anybody. At least, my pre-smoking college experience bears that speculation out.

That’s not exactly a defense of smoking in any logical manner. Which is to say, if there weren’t other issues at stake, my introversion would not be justification for inconveniencing other people. And though I have my objections to a lot of the smoking bans, I can’t at all say that it is an altogether bad thing for smokers to make smoking inconvenient. So it’s not a rational reaction. But dang, man, one of my college experiences is about to be consigned to a period piece.

A little bit back I commented on teacher sex with students and suggested that, in the case of inverse genders the man would not get off as lightly as many of the women. Well, here is a counterexample:

A former North Texas high school teacher was convicted Friday and sentenced to five years in prison for having sex with five 18-year-old students at her home.

The Tarrant County jury decided on the sentence for Brittni Nicole Colleps, 28, of Arlington after nearly three hours of deliberation. It took jurors less than an hour to find her guilty earlier in the day of 16 counts of having an inappropriate relationship between a student and teacher. The second-degree felony is punishable by two to 20 years in prison per count.

The former Kennedale High School English teacher had sex with the students at her home over two months in 2011, authorities said.

Colleps is married and has three children. She turned herself in after a cellphone video of one encounter that involved multiple students emerged. That video was shown a trial.

Which I guess just goes to show, we might take women having sex more lightly than men, or maybe not, but definitely not freaky sex. Probably best not to have five partners, but if you do, not all at once. Eighteen or no.

I absolutely loved this quote:

No sketch of Harold Berman can be complete without a reference to an epigram in which he summarized children’s natural grasp of natural law: A child says, ‘It’s my toy.’ That’s property law,” he said. “A child says, ‘You promised me.’ That’s contract law. A child says, ‘He hit me first.’ That’s criminal law. A child says, ‘Daddy said I could.’ That’s constitutional law.”

At some point I will have to post on a kid I had who used the concepts of arguing for gay marriage so that he may talk to his friend that he was not supposed to be talking to. It was brilliant. I told the kid he should go to law school. But I didn’t let him talk to his friend.

When I was in middle school, one of the things we had to do for physical education was “dance.” Like, partnered dancing. To do this, obviously, you needed partners.

The way that the coaches had it set up was that they lined up all of the guys on one side of the gymnasium, and all of the girls at the other, and you picked your partner. Guys or girls would walk across the gym and ask someone to be their dance partner. By rule, if asked, you cannot decline.

I’m not entirely sure what the purpose behind this ritual was. Maybe there was a confidence-building aspect to it. “Hey, I asked a girl, and she said ‘yes’! (never mind that she had to)” Maybe it was just a way that partners could partner off by their own volition and that allowing people to decline would be fraught with hazard (because junior high kids don’t know rejection)? Maybe it was a way in which nobody could be blamed for saying yes.

I remember that when I learned of this, my thought was that I hated it. I didn’t care if they had to say yes because, if they didn’t want you to be their partner, you’d find out about it. As conspicuously as possible. I had visions of the girl I was dancing with trashing me relentlessly just to make sure everybody knew she was only doing it because she had to. That was the way things worked. You made dang sure that even if you were partnered with someone, if you didn’t want to be associated with them, you made sure that everyone knew it. It worked this way with school assignments. With dancing? That times ten.

So I sure as heck wasn’t going to ask anyone. And it was doubtful that anyone would ask me. So I’d end up in the randomly assigned group. This, too, lent itself to conspicuous disassociation, but at least then you could both claim that it’s not what you wanted. That was how it worked with school assignments. If they rolled their eyes loudly, I would do my part to make sure that everyone knew this was an assigned partnership. I didn’t want to be associated with someone that didn’t want to be associated with me. Which meant asking nobody.

I didn’t expect many people to cross the gym. I figured most people would do what I was going to do. We shuffled our collective feet for what seemed like half an hour but was maybe a couple minutes. Then, finally, #14 (a jock) crossed the threshold and asked a hyperpopular girl. She looked relieved. I recall her having a boyfriend of higher stature than #14, but I guess she thought that he would do and was much better than the alternatives (like, me).

Come to think of it, it was the ultimate opportunity for the worst reject to put a cog in the works of the way that things were supposed to work. The nerdier, the more power you had. It was a transient power, because you wouldn’t get anything more than a dance partner, but it was something. Only if you were willing to do what I was not.

After he broke the ice, more people started moving. Almost entirely from the boy’s side. This was my worst nightmare. The more people who boycotted the ritual, the more safety there was. At the rate things were going, I was going to be among a small group without the gumption to pick a parner. The only upside is that I would get coupled with a fellow reject who would have little room to loudly roll her eyes. Oh, but who was I kidding? She’d roll them anyway.

Then, out of nowhere, came Ashley. If the class photo is still expandable, I’m pretty sure the Ashley is the girl next to #30. Ashley and I had conversed very lightly before, of the “Can I borrow your pencil?” variety, but that was about it. She was leagues and leagues above me. She was… actually kind of attractive. It was, in retrospect, quite amazing that she hadn’t been picked yet. Then there she was, picking me. She didn’t “ask” like she was supposed to, instead opting for “let’s go”, but who the flip cared.

It was all kind of chaotic, so I don’t know who I might have been partnered with otherwise. But having avoided the lottery, I was on cloud nine. That she was attractive was nice, but not as important as that she wanted to be there. Well, that may have been an overstatement: she wanted to be there more than all of the other available options. Well, that may have been an overstatement: she felt a warm enough pity for me that she picked me rather than let me twist in the wind.

She was also a great partner. By which I mean, she was patient with me. She never rolled her eyes. We did okay together. It was a good thing, too, because my class critics/bullies didn’t relent. A few people, perhaps assuming that we were an assigned pair, made fun of the asymmetry of our partnership. “Oooh, look, Will is dancing with a real live girl!” and more than once she would say “Because I asked him.” (Standing up for me! In a fashion.) One of the more persistent critics was actually #27, who was dancing with #30, both of whom would later become friends (and #27 my guardian protector). Boy I hated him then, though.

I really don’t know why she did it. Very few guys would have rolled their eyes at being picked by her. If any. She wasn’t a 10 by our school’s standards, but she was a solid 8. Maybe minus one for her general dress.

I always felt an immense appreciation for what she did that day. I consider it a grand favor on her part, though looking back at it almost 20 years later she surely had her reasons. I just can’t imagine what reason it might have been. She went into it with a positive attitude and made what could have been a very long six-week term one of the highlight of my days.

One of the odd things about this picture are all of the people who aren’t there. The class was cut by roughly a third in between the 7th and 8th grade. The end-result being that a lot of people I have a lot of memories with aren’t in the 8th grade picture.

Another of the odd things are people who bring up visceral reactions, but that’s all I remember. I singled out #3 below and thought about singling out more, but they are too numerous. Not all of them are negative. Some of them I can immediately remember their name and that’s it. I don’t even know how I remember their name. Often it’s just “LIKE!” or “DON’T LIKE!” without much recollection of why.

Below is a list of recollections of various people. It’s far from inclusive, but I had to draw the line somewhere and chose 25 (though there are two #9’s and I should have combined #1 and #2). Assuming I remember this time, I will be fuzzing this picture up in a week or so. The row descriptions are inexact, but include both the cheerleader and faculty rows. I will neither confirm nor deny guesses as to which person in the photograph I am.

#1 (Third down, center-right): Stabbed a bully in the eye with a pencil

#2 (Middle row, off to the right): Was stabbed in the eye with a pencil by the Bullyslayer (he survived).

#3 (Third down, center-left): I hate this girl with a passion. Seeing her face makes me think “HATE! HATE! HATE!”… I cannot remember why.

#4 (Top-right): The Weatherby Twins

#5 (Bottom-left): At least two guys I know had a crush on her. Pre-cheerleader.

#6: The principal. She was an unremarkable principle, except that she followed a completely inept principal. The district loved her, though. She was promoted to a high school, then sub-intendant, then super-intendant, and how has a friggin’ school named after her. It’s the weirdest thing.

#7: Gave me my first F, changed my life.

#8: Got me grounded for three-and-a-half weeks. She was just out of school and quite attractive.

#9: Pink had an FBI agent for an ex-husband. Aqua had a former NFL linebacker. These are great ways to win points with middle-school boys.

#10: The infamous counseller who informed my parents that their son was not college material. (She did this while the counseller of my elementary school).

#11: My remedial reading teacher. She called my parents in for a conference. Scared me half-to-death. It turned out the meeting was to ask why I had been put in remedial reading and if it would be okay if I just played at the computer lab across the way since I was obviously so bored.

#12: Ex-marine who fixed shop class.

#13 (Fourth row up, near-center): The inexplicable wallflower.

#14 (Top row, right): This kid was a good example of the upside of athletics. He was a brute until he had coaches to tell him not to be.

#15 (Top row, left): He was a friend I don’t talk about much. His parents were deaf, but he wasn’t. He also appeared to have different ethnic routes than they. That suggested adoption, though the story was otherwise. In any event, he was the only good friend I had who had trouble in school for reasons other than lack-of-effort.

#16 (Fourth row up, far right): Clementine!

#17 (Third row up, mid-left): Nice girl, smart girl, cute girl. My friend dated her (a few years after this picture was taken) on this basis. It was a nightmare within weeks. A future post, I think.

#18 (Middle row, mid-left): I still feel guilty for how I treated this guy, theoretically a friend. He’s one of only a couple I’d like to go back and apologize to. The other guy I treated rotten deserved it.

#19 (Fourth down, center-right): The only kid my parents ever forbade me from hanging out with.

#20 (Third or fourth row up, near-left): A nerd’s nerd who somehow “made it” in high school. It was like his father needed to die for him to be comfortable with himself and therefore make friends.

#21 (Fourth row from bottom, mid-left): Moved to Deseret and joined an atypical religious sect.

#22 (Center): A friend with this sister… she was not remarkably attractive (indeed, I wasn’t positive when I first met her that she was a she instead of a non-masculine he, though to be fair she was 12), but man did I fall for her and hard when our families took a trip together.

#23 (Middle row, far-left): Did okay for himself.

#24 (Third row up, far right): Pregnant the following year.

#25 (Fourth row up, center-left): Lived a couple houses down. We were never friends, but I did get along with his older brother and had a special relationship with his younger sister. He had some behavioral issues, though I hear he turned himself around.

Sarah Kliff says that maybe medical school debt isn’t the problem behind the absence of primary care docs. She cites a couple of reasons:

1. A program for medical student loan reimbursement had absolutely no applications.
2. Those with the largest student loans tend to actually go into primary care, rather than avoid it.

It might be overstated as a reason, but there are other factors going into what she’s taking about that should be addressed. Clancy took a pass on Arapaho’s student loan reimbursement program. It had nothing to do with being unworried about student loan debts. Rather, it was based on (a) the bureaucratic difficulty of signing up and (b) committing to the job for six years. She signed a three year contract, and there will be a financial penalty when she leaves early, so San Mateo’s more generous program might have been something we’d have signed on with when we didn’t sign on with Arapaho’s. But specific programs that offer reimbursement often do so precisely because they are among the most uncomfortable jobs. the jobs that someone is least likely to want to commit to. And the repayment is often backloaded. And you’re making payments in the meantime anyway and interest is accumulating. And the jobs will often pay less than you could make elsewhere, with the student loan reimbursement failing to account for the difference.

As far as the second thing goes, well, there it’s more complicated as well. My wife graduated in the top third of her class and didn’t have to go into primary care. But a lot of doctors who end up going into primary care do so with little choice. I suspect that these people are also those with the most amount of student debt. They couldn’t get into a state flagship (as my wife did) and end up going to an expensive (non-elite) private college. I don’t know this to be the case, but I think it’s a factor.

To me, the really pernicious effect that student loan debt actually doesn’t have all that much to do with the dearth of doctors willing to go into primary care, however. Rather, it has more to do with the medical culture itself. The desire to make as much money as early as possible in order to get out from under. This makes high-paying jobs that, on the face of it, are questionable. There were jobs that paid significantly more than the job Clancy took. She took a pass, but the ability to pay off student loans in a year is tempting nonetheless. And while you might tell yourself that it’s temporary, I think that once you’re making that sort of money, it’s hard to go back. It sets the pace for contributing to The McAllen Problem.

So what’s the solution? I’m not sure. Relieving student loan debt for doctors who want to go into primary care may help, but since such programs are often so back-loaded, I’m not sure how much of an effect they would really have. Since they’re not something you can really count on, I think a lot of docs would end up taking the enterprising course anyway.

Not that I wouldn’t mind someone stepping in and taking care of that for us.