In 2006, while a graduate student at Antioch University Seattle, there was an Open Space event where I tried to promote the idea of "replacing classrooms with diagnostic portfolios." A school is trying to teach specific things, so they should teach those things until point by point the students prove they know those things, and thus should abandon the classroom structure all together. Now, 10 years later, upper level admin are going rogue at MIT to do something very similar: http://www.chronicle.com/article/MIT-Dean-Takes-Leave-to-Start/235121?cid=trend_right_a
Think of swimming lessons. They have groups of student at different levels, and when a student has mastered the level they are on, they move on to the next level, not before, and not after. Because if you don't teach swimming this way people drown.
A friend of mine tried to put her 14 year old son in her more talented-when-it-comes-to-swimming 11 year old son's swimming level, because she just figured the 14 year old could handle it. He ended puking up water in the pool gutter from his constant barely not drowning he was doing instead of swimming, and back in the more novice swimming class. He lost his tolerance for swimming lessons all together, and now he and his brothers are doing parkour classes instead.
As students are plummeted forward through classes on a rigid time line they don't have time to develop, least bit maintain, demonstrable skill. They find challenging material overwhelming, and often abandon the subject all together.
Taking the subject of mathematics for example, it is impossibly demanding for a teacher to be expected to get every single student to learn every single thing over the course of the school year. The result is a loss of interest in mathematics from students, bad over all test scores for the school, and not enough well prepared students for the future workforce.
What if instead we taught Math like we do swimming lessons. Instead of dividing students into classes and years, divide them into weeks-long levels, with one teacher per level, and the students stay in that level until they are competent at that level. This does not require a development in curriculum, because we already have Khan Academy. Just as the rogue MIT administration has determined that lectures and classrooms are extremely outdated in the face of things like Wikipedia, Youtube and other internet resources, it's time to stop torturing students instead of teaching them:
Let me summarize the point for you clearly: If you make this about Trump's personality, (which is easy to do because his neon physical appearance, lifestyle, and criminality is so very larger-than-life,) you will make him much stronger politically. Remember when Hillary was content to let Trump hang himself with his own rope by letting him just keep talking? How well did that work for her?
Making this about Trump's villainy is handing the narrative right on over to him. Consider just for a moment the power of name recognition. Trump's name is out there now in an irrevocable way. He now has the most name recognition of any president in history. The best.
If he is what is in the mind of the voters, the voters will vote for him. All of this constant onslaught of attacking his moral character because of his amoral cabinet choices (military leaders, known racists and scam artists) plays into Trump's strategy, which is to simply keep the narrative all about him.
Obama's personality was over the top. First black president, played basket ball, attended Black Church. Smarmy-annoying-lawyer Chicago-Politician attitude. Impeccable political strategy. There was a lot to like there for metrosexuals, but what most lefties didn't realize, is there was even MORE there to HATE for ammosexuals!
McCain and Romney lost to Obama in very significant ways, because they got in what I call Obama's "personality vortex." The more corrupt, wall street, silver-spooned, drug using, pandering, Joker-like they made him out to be - the more they turned Obama into a super villain - the more Obama's victory was assured. "Bad press is better than no press" means that if your opponent isn't currently making headlines and you create a headline for him by attacking him, you have just done your opponent a huge favor.
Look at Ronald Reagan's personality vortex. It was so powerful that after his eight years he even got George H. W. Bush elected, far more potent than Obama's vortex. Even more perilously for the people of the USA, Bill Clinton's sax-playing personality vortex was so strong that he got reelected even as he passed overtly racist policies, pumping up the prison industrial complex, dismantling the public safety net, and sending jobs out of our country with NAFTA.
Now we are caught in Trump's personality vortex. It is exponentially stronger than even Reagan's was, and the progressives are not only going to lose 2020, but at this rate they will lose 2024 as well. Instead I strongly recommend the following strategies:
Talk about POLICIES, not about PEOPLE (unless they are your people, but then you must focus on policies all the more to compensate.) In the face of a Trump personality vortex, you must show why your IDEAS are better than their ideas, because in so far as this is about individual virtue, the bigger personality will win regardless of how virtuous they aren't.
Have policies that matter! Propping up Obamacare as it fails to contain health care costs was a fatal error for Hillary. Even though Medicare For All (espoused by Sanders) was seen as less politically viable - it is that very controversy that would have focused more attention on Hillary. More importantly, Medicare For All had it's own personality vortex as a policy that would have attracted votes. In today's era of mechanization and radical loss of jobs, the left should be all about Basic Income right now, but instead they flounder while Elon Musk is left to proselyte the idea on his own. Now that the Electoral College has proved to fail to protect us against demagogues, how is it that progressives aren't turning this slave-era form of voter suppression into a major political issue?
Point attacks AWAY from the opponent. It's NOT Trump's racist cabinet picks when the whole GOP stands by, holds their nose and nods - that is the entire GOP failing to protest Trump's appointing of racists and charlatans while militarizing our government. That isn't Trump, it's the whole GOP. Make them OWN that. More importantly, as with Medicare For All, it isn't just the GOP to blame, it is all of us: our country is out of touch with the fact it would be better for businesses (because of international competition with government subsidized health care for their employees) and individuals (who's insurance premiums are clearly raising faster than their taxes would have from a single payer system) alike to to have a single payer system.
Seize the Change brand, and hold on to it for dear life. Hillary's status-quo strategy was ill conceived from the beginning. Manufacturing jobs and fly-over states are so compromised that it will be a very long time before protecting the status quo will be a viable political strategy. How did the DEMOCRATS become the pro-war, pro-insurance, pro-corporate-oligarchy, defending status-quo party? That happened when the DNC thought conservatism would be a good way for a progressive party to win 2016. Wrong.
By death gripping the change brand, generalizing blame and focusing on policies that matter, it is far easier to draw attention to the more progressive candidate, steering clear of Trump's personality vortex, and by attrition making him seem like an old boring idea from the past, along with the GOP and their anti-people agenda. Don't let conservatives scapegoat Trump so they don't have to own their own garbage. Don't let progressives use Trump as an excuse for their own political ineptitude and lack of conviction. Every time you see some post or article demonizing Trump, remind them of the fact they are erring, drop something along these lines in the comments:
Though I certainly wouldn't ever vote for a Pyramid Scheme Pharaoh like Trump...
... I'm not convinced Hillary's nuclear winter would have been all that much better than Trump's global warming. When it comes to who won between two candidates who weren't Marco Rubio or Bernie Sanders (thanks to Hillary,) I am fairly neutral.
However, on the night of the 2016 election I asked friends "why isn't anyone talking about election fraud, considering the difference between 538 and the actual outcome of the election? This is strange considering that the FBI and Russians hackers have already messed with our politics this election." Trump aggressively protested the recounts with his usual bluster, and then some, with wild eyed comments about how he would have won the popular vote if it wasn't for supposedly "MILLIONS" of fraudulent votes. Does He Protest Too Much? Could it be that:
Russian hackers found a way to tamper with our election in ways not already discovered?
Trump doesn't want the focus on voter suppression to be associated with the electoral college?
The one case of voter fraud in 2016 was in favor of Trump, does he know of more cases?
Trump had non-Russian help electronically altering the vote results as the W had in 2000?
Since Trump was elected, he settled a fraud case for Trump University (not to be confused with ACN or Trump Network) for $25,000,000. What you have to realize is far more so than any previous President-elect, Trump is capable of extraordinary large-scale fraudulent schemes, and that this in fact is at the core of his business dealings that have given him fame. Not only did he disastrously have notorious MLM Pharaoh Michelle Van Etten speak at the GOP Convention this year...
... he has appointed none other than the Queen of the ultimate Pyramid Scheme, AMWAY, Betsy DeVos, to lead the US Department of Education (yikes, so much for effective business education.) Beyond that the most prominent Ponzi scheme in recent memory was the Bernie Maddoff's, and Trump's selected Treasury Secretary, Stephen Mnuchin, made over $3,000,000 off of that same scam. (Does that really sound like a good "treasury secretary" to you?)
When Ross Perot was the king of 3rd Parties, I was all about Ross. When Ralph Nader was the dominant 3rd Party candidate, I was all about Ralph. However this election both the Libertarian and Green Party candidates:
Did not dominate the majority of 3rd party voters.
Were both incredibly flaky, adding baggage that did not represent the interests of their parties (such as for example Jill Steins apparent aversion to use of Wifi and Screens in K-12.)
However Democrats are notoriously squeamish about street fighting over election quality, and this is exactly what cost Al Gore the election in 2000. I thought Hillary would at least stand up for herself which would have been consistent with her public image, but she apparently couldn't call in to concede quickly enough even though the election numbers didn't seem to make sense. Was she somehow conspiring with Trump on some secret agenda?
Crazy as she may be, at least Jill Stein actually believes in doing the right thing. When:
the president elect is a known con-man, and
he proceeds to promote other scammers just as far and wide as he possibly can, and
the election results were at odds with the most reliable polling analysis available (538), and
there had already been election manipulation by Russians AND
election manipulation by the FBI...
...an election recount is certainly in order. More important than any political agenda is the quality of the democracy our republic is built upon. We need to know exactly how much election manipulation there was, and exactly how it was done, in order to preserve the USA as a legitimate institution:
