Winner of Teaching's "Nobel Prize" says "Don't become a public school teacher"

I agree. American public schools should be shuttered. I support compulsory private education until age 16.

Huffington Post

"Nancie Atwell, who over the weekend won a $1 million award for her accomplishments in education, has been a teacher for more than four decades -- but she said she would not advise her students to go down the same career path.

After Atwell was awarded the first Global Teacher Prize from the Varkey Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to improving education for underprivileged students, she told The Associated Press that she feels "validated every day just by the experiences I have with children in the classroom."

However, in a subsequent interview with CNN, she said that she would not advise kids to become teachers.

"Honestly, right now, I encourage them to look in the private sector," she said during an appearance on "New Day." "Public school teachers are so constrained right now by the Common Core Standards and the tests that are developed to monitor what teachers are doing with them. It's a movement that's turned teachers into technicians, not reflective practitioners."

"If you're a creative, smart young person," she continued, "I don't think this is the time to go into teaching.""

Henry Cotton and Bayard Holmes -- schizophrenia as an infection

Bayard Holmes, who killed his schizophrenic son by trying to wash his intestines. Seriously. 

www.smithsonianmag.com

"Pasteur’s famous experiments in the 1860s—including his swan-necked flasks, which demonstrated that microorganisms didn’t spontaneously generate in broth—convinced much of the scientific establishment that his germ theory of disease was correct. Pasteur was so successful, in fact, that he kicked off a craze for discovering the infectious agents behind all sorts of ailments. This zeal, though, caused some scientists to search for the microbial culprits behind conditions we now know have a more complex genesis—such as schizophrenia and other psychiatric illnesses.

Two such investigators—Bayard Holmes and Henry Cotton—firmly believed that the atypical behaviors and trouble with distinguishing reality that are characteristic of schizophrenia were caused by some kind of toxin. They hypothesized that the body itself produced this toxin and that it poisoned the brain.

Holmes and Cotton independently tried to cure schizophrenia by cutting out the organs they thought were responsible for the illness. Holmes focused on intestines; Cotton also removed "teeth, tonsils, gall bladders, cervices, colons, thyroids and other body parts," according to the Journal of Medical Biography."

Have we reached "peak CBT"?

"We don’t really know our own minds, and we often have powerful motives for keeping things that way. We see life through the lens of our earliest relationships, though we usually don’t realise it; we want contradictory things; and change is slow and hard. Our conscious minds are tiny iceberg-tips on the dark ocean of the unconscious." I'm sorry, but what part of that do you think Freud was "wrong" about?

The Guardian

"CBT [Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy] embodies a very specific view of painful emotions: that they’re primarily something to be eliminated, or failing that, made tolerable. A condition such as depression, then, is a bit like a cancerous tumour: sure, it might be useful to figure out where it came from – but it’s far more important to get rid of it. CBT doesn’t exactly claim that happiness is easy, but it does imply that it’s relatively simple: your distress is caused by your irrational beliefs, and it’s within your power to seize hold of those beliefs and change them.

CBT embodies a specific view of painful emotions: that they’re primarily something to be eliminated, or made tolerable

Psychoanalysts contend that things are much more complicated. For one thing, psychological pain needs first not to be eliminated, but understood. From this perspective, depression is less like a tumour and more like a stabbing pain in your abdomen: it’s telling you something, and you need to find out what. (No responsible GP would just pump you with painkillers and send you home.) And happiness – if such a thing is even achievable – is a much murkier matter. We don’t really know our own minds, and we often have powerful motives for keeping things that way. We see life through the lens of our earliest relationships, though we usually don’t realise it; we want contradictory things; and change is slow and hard. Our conscious minds are tiny iceberg-tips on the dark ocean of the unconscious – and you can’t truly explore that ocean by means of CBT’s simple, standardised, science-tested steps.

This viewpoint has much romantic appeal. But the analysts’ arguments fell on deaf ears so long as experiment after experiment seemed to confirm the superiority of CBT – which helps explain the shocked response to a study, published last May, that seemed to show CBT getting less and less effective, as a treatment for depression, over time.

Psychoanalysts contend that for one thing, psychological pain needs first not to be eliminated, but understood

Examining scores of earlier experimental trials, two researchers from Norway concluded that its effect size – a technical measure of its usefulness – had fallen by half since 1977. (In the unlikely event that this trend were to persist, it could be entirely useless in a few decades.) Had CBT somehow benefited from a kind of placebo effect all along, effective only so long as people believed it was a miracle cure?

That puzzle was still being digested when researchers at London’s Tavistock clinic published results in October from the first rigorous NHS study of long-term psychoanalysis as a treatment for chronic depression. For the most severely depressed, it concluded, 18 months of analysis worked far better – and with much longer-lasting effects – than “treatment as usual” on the NHS, which included some CBT. Two years after the various treatments ended, 44% of analysis patients no longer met the criteria for major depression, compared to one-tenth of the others.

...

In 2004, a meta-analysis concluded that short-term psychoanalytic approaches were at least as good as other routes for many ailments, leaving recipients better off than 92% of all patients prior to therapy. In 2006, a study tracking approximately 1,400 people suffering from depression, anxiety and related conditions ruled in favour of short-term psychodynamic therapy, too. And a 2008 study into borderline personality disorder concluded that only 13% of psychodynamic patients still had the diagnosis five years after the end of treatment, compared with 87% of the others."

The Target -- Ivor Gurney (1919)

The poet was gassed in September 1917. He spent the rest of his life in psychiatric care.

I shot him, and it had to be
One of us 'Twas him or me.
'Couldn't be helped' and none can blame
Me, for you would do the same

My mother, she can't sleep for fear
Of what might be a-happening here
To me. Perhaps it might be best
To die, and set her fears at rest

For worst is worst, and worry's done.
Perhaps he was the only son. . .
Yet God keeps still, and does not say
A word of guidance anyway.

Well, if they get me, first I'll find
That boy, and tell him all my mind,
And see who felt the bullet worst,
And ask his pardon, if I durst.

All's a tangle. Here's my job.
A man might rave, or shout, or sob;
And God He takes no sort of heed.
This is a bloody mess indeed.

Satin Doll -- Duke Ellington & His Orchestra, ft. Ella Fitzgerald (1949)

Cigarette holder which wigs me

over my shoulder, he digs me
Out cattin' my satin doll
Baby, shall we go out steppin', careful, amigo, you're flippin'
Speaks Latin, my satin doll

He's nobody's fool and I'm playing it cool as can be
I'll give it a whirl but I ain't for no boy catching me, swich-e-rooney
Telephone numbers well you know, I'm doing my rumbas with uno
And that'n my satin doll

Telephone numbers well you know,

I'm doing my rumbas with uno
And that'n my satin doll, and that'n my satin doll
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
And that'n my satin doll, what a doll?
He is my satin doll
I had the craziest dream

Songwriters
ELLINGTON, DUKE

Cultural entropy -- whatever is happening, it can't be good

This photo was taken 20 years ago. Any one of these people could walk down the street today wearing the same clothes and hairstyles and no one would bat an eye. Imagine people in 1990 saying that about a group photo taken in 1970. Or people in 1970 saying that about a group photo taken in 1950.

WSJ

"Is some sort of cultural entropy homogenizing us?

As novelist Douglas Coupland has pointed out, ordinary people in photographs from 1993 are indistinguishable from people in photographs now. Can you name another 20-year period in modern American history when this is true? 1900-20? 1920-40? 1970-90? His analysis: There's not much geist left in the zeit.

Things don't make a difference. I think the last novel to have must-read impact on American culture was "The World According to Garp" in 1978, 35 years ago.

Now I go to New York and look at a work of art in Chelsea and say: "Oh, that's one of those." (Dripping, elephant dung, monochrome, squalor, scribbling.)

Facebook enshrines banality. "Am I the only one who hates her kids' birthday parties?" "Go outside RIGHT NOW and look at the moon."

The media have lost authority and audience—people want to know less about the world around them.

... 

Or: We've lost our sense of possibility. Incomes decline, pensions vanish, love dwindles into hooking up, we're not having enough babies to replace ourselves.

No arc, no through-line, no destiny. As the British tommies sang in the trenches of World War I, to the tune of "Auld Lang Syne," "We're here because we're here because we're here because we're here."

I don't know what's going on. I doubt that anyone does. Is our democracy turning into a power vacuum? What will fill it?

...

What a strange time it is to be alive in America. It can't stay this way, can it? Or can it?"

Hunter Thompson's nasty suicide

You shoot yourself with your son, daughter-in-law, and six-year old grandson in the next room? With a gun that you had your son clean for you the night before? You're an a-hole.

The American Scholar

A shy, sensitive boy, Juan [Thompson, son of writer Hunter Thompson] lived in terror of his father’s unpredictable rages. As Hunter’s marriage to his first wife, Sandy, foundered, Juan would listen to torrid screaming matches between his parents and wake up in the morning to find his mother picking up broken bits of furniture. As a prepubescent boy, helpless in the face of Hunter’s verbal assaults, Juan hated his father “deeply and completely,” so much that he “would have destroyed him if I could have, for my sake and for my mother’s.”

But wait, you’re protesting. I thought you said this book was an expression of love and connection. Amazingly, it is. Juan’s terror and hatred of his father eventually gave way, after decades of estrangement, to forgiveness and reconciliation. To be sure, their relationship was rarely easy, but Juan treasured moments with his father during his later years. Among other things, these included the ritualistic maintenance of Hunter’s collection of firearms. On each visit to Owl Farm (the name of the ranch in Woody Creek), Hunter would select weapons for Juan to clean and then present for his father’s inspection. 

In February 2005, Juan, his wife, and their six-year-old son visited Owl Farm for the weekend. Hunter handed him a .45 semiautomatic pistol. “It was no big deal, just another gun that needed cleaning,” Juan writes. The next morning, as Juan’s wife and son played 20 Questions in the living room, Juan “heard a weird cry and a crack,” which he initially thought was the sound of a book falling on the floor. It wasn’t; it was Hunter shooting himself in the head with the same .45 Juan had cleaned the night before.

One could reasonably interpret this scenario as Hunter’s final act of paternal aggression. But Juan doesn’t see it that way. [But Juan is wrong.] Hunter simply wanted to go out on his own terms. After all, his father “was tapped out,” Juan says. Since his glory days in the ’60s and early ’70s, Hunter’s output had consisted mostly of correspondence, or hackwork, or pieced-together anthologies of his earlier writings. Which means he spent the final 30 years of his life not as the productive writer he’d once been but as the Hunter S. Thompson caricature he’d created—a burden that, along with massive amounts of alcohol and cocaine, sapped his writerly powers.

Moreover, Juan believes that his father’s decision to kill himself during what otherwise would have been a pleasant weekend with his family was a cockeyed act of love—and, though Juan doesn’t explicitly say this, there’s an implication that Hunter’s giving him the job of (unwittingly) preparing the suicide implement was intended to deepen the father-son bond. Some readers may naturally resist this conclusion."