Thanks for asking
1. I love living here, rock climbing is scarce but we the pacific.
2. My career has been as a boat Captain which I loved but teaching is an absolute riot. The kids are fantastic and I do my best to challenge the young minds.
3. Sadly I'm paid from taxation but over my lifetime I will end up being taxed more than I will be paid from taxes. Yes I did the math.

Have fun!

Do you like teaching in Hawaii?

Over 100 miles round trip for me, so I'll have to miss it.

Looks pretty interesting, I can catch the 440 America, have time for a beer and hot dog then hit the 8:00 for this.

My state, Hawaii is part of the common core push, and it has been since I've been teaching so it's always been part of education for me. I'm going because I'd like to learn the cons.

I teach social studies if it's my job to have them read primary sources then guys like Locke, or Hayek, or Bastiat have authored some pretty interesting material. If it's analyze a graph then look at social security, there's one data point stating fewer seniors in poverty but nine other graphs can show it's not sustainable.

We start the common core testing this upcoming school year, called SBAC for 11th graders.
Dang I'm happy teaching mostly seniors. At least the AP exams while standardized can allow the students to get college credit. And AP courses seem to be exempt from common core.

So tomorrow night it is, a double feature for me.

One the surface, common core sounds good. The trouble is, once you think it through, many will understand why it will be the worst thing that has happened to education since the founding of this great country.

The opposition to the Common Core standards crystallizes a big part of what I understood the two Ayn Rand books I've read as condemning. It seems to me like politicians get elected by exploiting the differences in people urban vs. rural, pot smoking vs. gun owning, non-religious vs religious, etc. News outlets do this, similar to how I am happy in my paid writing to write about something that will bring lots of comments and hits. No one is evil in this; it's just something that works to get votes and hits. Many voters get their info passing by a TV a the deli, and histrionics gets their attention.

Some part of the population pays close attention to it and becomes convinced we're in a pitched battle for survival against an ideology. They look for anything to condemn the outgroup. **Taking it to an absurd level that sounds like a joke, they read boring school worksheets that are loosely associated with an education initiative associated with someone seen as part of the outgroup, in an attempt to discredit them.** Instead of taking charge of their kids' education, they use the standard as a political prop to make a scene over. I'd like to think a Gail Wynand is behind it, seeing just how absurdly he can get people to act to reassure himself he does indeed run things; but I think this is an organic phenomenon that crops up out of industries that live for attention, media and politicians. Its sounds absurd b/c we're talking about some education initiative, but it makes sense to the people who buy into it b/c the outgroup is supposedly out to destroy civilization. In desperation we turn off reason and look for in-group shibboleths, probably a behavior that had a selective advantage in packs and tribes.

I see this behavior more often in leftwing people than rightwing only b/c I happen to know more of them. I also know a lot of tech libertarians who think there's a technology answer to everything; I'm probably one of them. Anyway, if people spend much time listening to Amy Goodman or Glenn Beck, they often start seeing the world as a desperate ideological struggle.

The opposition is either group politics taken to a laughable extreme, something that I will realize 20 years from now was actually right and I was a fool, or something in the middle.

I SOOOO want to go to this, but the timing is not good... ugh

We Will Not Conform is showing in my town at the same theater that does Atlas Shrugged and D'Souza's America movies.