My Ever Changing List of Biases

I'm very into making lists of late.

Subject to Change Biases

On human nature:

1. Teenagers lie. Little kids lie. Grownups lie. All lies feed on desperation and fear.
2. Fear is a terrible motivator. So are grades.
3. Punitive measures lead to stagnation. Risk taking requires an acceptance and embrace of failure, not a public shaming. Innovation only results when repeated failure is allowed as a path from which to learn and improve.
4. Procrastination sucks your life away, minute by minute.
5. Pets restore our souls by making us focus on compassion and caring for another.
6. Our priorities as a nation are clearly warped when we financially reward celebrities and athletes with vast, enormous sums of money but can't increase the minimum wage to keep up with decades of inflation.
7. Sport stadiums should be paid for by the people who use them, [not the government at any level]; community centers, parks, bike trails, libraries, and swimming pools should be paid for by everyone. (I stole this from Doug Johnson.)
8. It's never really about you.
9. Cell phones are evil and will lead to our downfall. It's already started, BTW.

About education:

1. A teacher's job is to educate the whole person, regardless of subject area. Our primary goal in providing education is to make better human beings, not to raise test scores.
2. To that end, our nation and our educational systems are suffering from dire lacks of loyalty, respect, and compassion, at all levels.
3. The best and brightest are never going to go into or stay in education so long as teachers do not have professional autonomy and are themselves, treated like students requiring intensive supervision who must always ask for permission.
4. Creativity, empathy, and humor are as important to success as reading, writing and numeracy.
5. All citizens should pay for public education through taxes. All schools should be funded equally. I do not want to live in a nation of idiots. Look at what's happened to Congress.
6. All kids should be treated the way we ourselves would want to be treated. If you wouldn't subject your own child to "it", no one else's should be.
7. On data, evidence and statistics: math never lies, except when it does, through omission or manipulation. As Einstein once said, "Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts."
8. Standardized test are more about discrediting public schools and teachers in service of making huge privatized corporate profit than improving education.