Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow...

If you're the sort of boy scout that likes to "be prepared," and you live in Maine, you may have a lot of equipment to move snow. At last count, I have three truck-driven snow plows, of which one is mounted on a very large truck, as well as two tractors with front-end loaders, and a large-ish snow blower (just for the awkward bits). I have snow shovels too, but only use them for the deck and front steps. But then it doesn't really snow!

Once a troop...

Among my many occupations (farmer, mechanic, carpenter, plumber, BnB operator, child-minder, cook, etc, &c), I also help edit an annual journal. 

This is for the Royal Air Force Mountain Rescue Association. This is an organization of ex-service-men and women from our small and very "special" force. 

(Perhaps we're too special. That thought has occasionally occurred to me.)

What this means, mostly, is that once I was, essentially, a professional mountaineer and rescuer. But I can't take much credit. Rescue is a team game. 

RAFMR personnel are, for reasons likely lost to history, collectively called "troops" or "MR troops." Our organization includes troops all the way from from the 1940s and 1950s to the very clean-cut and super-fit troops of today. I have the honour, with each year's publication, of helping them tell their stories.

I was also on civilian teams. I spent about thirty years on one SAR team or another between 1979, when I joined RAF Mountain Rescue, to 2020, when Covid hit and we were forced to close down the Unity College SAR team. 

There's also something about having lived through a decent interval with an organization like RAFMR that is asbestos-producing. (I did five and a half years of it.)

You can't harass me, yell at me, haze me, or subject me to brutal physical training and expect it to have too much of an effect. 

I've been harassed, yelled at, hazed, and brutally worked by experts.

I look forward to getting my print copy of the journal each year. I've read it before, of course, every word. I'm the main copy editor. But it's nice to see it in print. 

I just got the last set of proofs and the print copy should arrive next month.

Independence Inc.

After thirty years in American higher education as first a non traditional, or, as the Brits say, "mature" student (1989), then a student employee (1990-1999), then a faculty member (1999-2020), I was getting weary of the grind. I was particularly tired of all the different kinds of dishonesty I encountered. Students, senior administrators, and even other faculty demonstrated time and again that they had only tenuous ideas of truth. 

The student lying was tiresome and sapped my morale. If a student lies about an assignment or cheats on it, that's a pretty clear indication that they don't need to be in higher education, which, after all, is or should be to participate in the search for truth. I wanted students that wanted to be there. I was lucky to have hundreds of them over the years. But I also had hundreds of the other kind.

Senior administrators that are not scholars at heart should be banned from the face of the earth. I can count beans. My dog can count sheep, if not beans. Any idiot can run a cost analysis to determine if a class or a program is covering its costs. 

But is it worth teaching? Is it going to contribute to the well-being of humanity, to our understanding of ourselves and our precious planet? That's the real question.

(I was once laughed at by an administrator who shall remain anonymous (but whose reputation is increasing among the hoity-toity of the AGB) for reading a big book! I was carrying my current academic reading around campus with me that day, a big history book, it didn't fit in my satchel so I had to carry it, and I got laughed at. That should have been a disqualifying event right there.)

Then there are faculty who are lying to themselves about their teaching abilities and the importance of their research and so on. The professor whose students complain that the homework is confusing and they're never available to help. The wielders of red ink whose office door is always closed. The R-1 wannabes who can't wait to get their dream job in a research shop, trying desperately to get published in second- and third-tier journals while the students are lined up in tears down the corridors.

It's all a bit of a con, isn't it, until, one fine day, all of a sudden a real student asks a real question and you give a real answer. 

I was lucky to have that a lot. It was a great career. A lot of those students are in touch. One, a newly tenured professor herself, just wrote to thank me from her new home university, putting me again in mind of her and all the others whose honest questions I lived for at work.

But I always had a rich life outside of academia. I had the farm and my construction projects and my marriage and now my kid. I was looking forward to full independence if not yet able to enjoy it.

These days I run my farm, look after my kid, and tend to my rental. 

I still run across people that lie to themselves and others and behave badly. 

There are local anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers making life hell for the workers at the local coop for whose Board I'm an officer. Nothing quite like a screaming match with a deranged homeopathist to kick off your day's work of cashing out the punters and stocking the shelves. Better than caffeine. 

Then there are former students that are gun nuts, dreaming of the coming civil war, posting on FaceBook about what they plan to do when the lights go out. These are mostly the ones that took the law enforcement program but never made into the ranks. And thank heavens they didn't.

I'm an RAF Mountain Rescue veteran and spent thirty years on various civilian teams. I picked up dead people and their body parts from crashed aircraft. I lowered screaming, mortally-injured people off cliffs. I helped carry dozens of bodies off of mountains. I talked to the families and helped console them, which often simply can't be done. 

What is wrong with these people? No-one should ever dream of hurting others like this. Each hurt and each death is a family tragedy, a tornado that rips apart someone's life. It's wrong to look forward to something like this and they probably know it. It's politics we need, and better politics at that, not the wet dreams of some thirty year old loser with a mental age of ten.

And they should get over it already. The election wasn't stolen. It was won, fair and square, by the other guy. It's right wing media and the orange guy that are telling you this, to line their pockets with your money. 

Biden hasn't come for your guns. He won't. It's bad politics. He has enough to worry about with the virus pandemic and inflation and Russia.

But not very much of this trouble makes it into my dreams. I sleep a lot better. And I don't have to pretend to be nice to anyone anymore. I still am as nice as pie most of the time. That's how the world goes around. But it's a great relief not to have to deal as closely with the liars.

When I get to run my own life without these kinds of hassles, even when I'm just cleaning an Air BnB rental, life can be pretty good.

UATX

 Finally, some academic "disruption" I could get behind: They expect tuition (before financial aid) to be $30K: "The university would pare down costs by peeling away anything that did not have to do with the classroom, like administrative overhead and cushy amenities, he said." In other words, sack all the anti-intellectual business school type administrators (that are often only there to line their own pockets and burnish their own reputations), get rid of the fancy dorms and student centers and high-dollar sports, and get back to serious inquiry about science and social issues!

"We are old school. We believe human beings think and learn better when they gather in dedicated locations, where they are, to some extent, insulated from the quotidian struggle to make ends meet, and where there is no fundamental distinction between those who teach and those who learn, beyond the extent of their knowledge and wisdom."

Makes it just a bit harder to proclaim you're at the cutting edge when all you've really done is count beans, doesn't it?

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/08/us/ut-austin-free-speech.html?smid=fb-share&fbclid=IwAR0a8Bdz1r3GyzHb4_WjUQEdDpFE5Qo5gIkeesUa5YIZSy9UoManuc-_2nk 

Bankrupt fascist thugs

I'm following this federal civil trial in VA closely because I see it as a bellwether for the future of fascism in the USA. The defendants are the neo-Nazi organizers of the riot that killed Heather Heyer and maimed and injured dozens more, most of whom have so far escaped federal criminal law because the justice department was led by Trump appointees at the time. If they lose, they'll be bankrupted and in hock for a long long time, if not for life, and the deterrence effect will be salubrious. 

But it's worth a minute to explore again just why fascism is so evil. Let's study why the allies fought WW2 for a minute. Bear with me. I'm an academic after all. History is one of my things. And after all, the British Empire was still in being at the time, a racist and oppressive institution by definition. Stalin had just gotten away with the Ukrainian Holodomor and went on to purge his entire officer corps. And the US lynched and other wise murdered and oppressed Black and Hispanic and Native people with regularity and enforced Jim Crow. None of the allies had clean hands when it came to oppression and murder. 

But we fought German fascism. Why? Some kind of peace could probably have been made in the early 1940s. The answer is because it was evil, and that Roosevelt and Churchill knew that evil would spread eventually, coming back again to attack the allies because evil can't be trusted. 

How evil? The Hitler regime imprisoned and murdered all it's enemies, not only the millions of Jewish people and communists we usually hear about. It also killed innocent people and children just because they had birth defects or mental illness. The deaths were not easy ones either. Can you imagine a gas van full of terrified children, suffocating with the exhaust from the engine? They punished and even executed kids for reading the wrong books and distributing pamphlets. They forced women, including "Aryan" German women, to have sex with soldiers and in some cases to bear their children, sometimes multiple children. And they enslaved most of Europe, forcing the conquered people of Europe to work for them for no pay and meager food. 

If you are one of my former students and you still didn't get the message I tried to teach you, over and over over, that oppression and slavery and murder are wrong, and you're still fondling your guns, dreaming of the new civil war, having wet dreams about shooting libs, just understand that unleashing forces as evil as this means they will some day come for the people you love and even for you, just as they came for our people during WW2. Oh, yes, one last thing I couldn't say when I was employed to be your teacher: Just fucking grow up. You may not like the Dems because you're afraid of losing your sexy guns, but that's no excuse for supporting racists and calling for violence in the streets. It's not rocket science. Go out and find a decent politician who will support the second amendment without also supporting fascism and civil war.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2021/11/04/charlottesville-lawsuit-nazis-heimbach-trial/?fbclid=IwAR1HonltoZNt7FzHewJCE_I61NKRXhvW1Iovf8rNNwi1IPP5-GSOwvDksKs

Some good old pictures from the good old days (2009)

What did you do with your semester? This is a cross section of what my students were doing. These are in reverse chronological order. What these pictures have in common is that they are all "action shots" and unposed, although some of the subjects knew they were being photographed at the time and struck funny or silly poses. You can click on an image to enlarge. Narrow or widen your browser window to make captions line up with photos. "Dead-eye Dierdre," ready to shoot. Snorri, the Womerlippi Farm rental ram, ramming it up for the camera. Me, working on the decibel-linked anemometer for the Fox Islands Wind project Ervin, one of our local Amishmen, climbs his turbine. He needs to get a safety harness. Ervin concentrates on some welding Kaylee and Heather board some boarding boards SAR team students on a mock evacuationTeaching the horizontal lower using the tandem system. My favorite classroom setting Getting ready for the lowerLearning to rappel Spreading "mud" for the barn foundation: a dance choreography Tough customers: Who you lookin' at? A trenchant Unity character. Cody on the tower at our Charleston wind assessment site Et moi Worm's eye view of a Freedom turbine An Aaron in the wet

The case of the disappearing professors

At nine am on that fateful August day when the college kindly notified us (via email – the formality of old fashioned paper termination letters being apparently passé) that it would lay off all of its most uppity faculty – including Aimee and I as suspect ringleaders – all as a prelude to becoming an (almost) entirely online, virtual, and essentially stateless institution, it gave us three hours’ notice and then terminated said email accounts at noon that day. 

No courtesy mail forwarding for us! And a recent inquiry from a former student suggests that there may not even be automatic notices stating that the person emailed no longer works at the college. That alum, who also happens to be an uppity academic, was forced to resort to old fashioned snail mail. 

I can obviously test that notion, just to be sure and will. 

But if you have been trying to find us, you may have been emailing a ghost. A ghost of a college and a non-existent professor. I’m a civilian now. Again. In case you didn't know. The correct emails for the both of us are appended below. 

Mind you, they were probably wise to fire us. We would never have allowed them to become purely online, had we had any faculty power left. The power grab happened in small pieces over the preceding few years. It was a work of art in terms of coups d'état – the CIA itself could not have snuck up any better, as far as many of our shocked colleagues were concerned. 

More cynical, neither Aimee nor I were shocked. Aimee, in fact, had been predicting it for several years. I'd been making plans to pursue other ways of making a living and other interests. 

It will be interesting to see what the NECHE visiting team makes of all this in the coming months, as the time for the ten year accreditation review draws near. Word of the coup has of course, gotten out. Do the Board and the administration not understand that academics know other academics and frequently talk to one another? 

If you want to talk to us, student or visitor, here we are: womersleymick8984@gmail.com aimee.phillippi@yandex.com

Fire, fuel, compression

Someone on our local community assistance FB page couldn't start their car. I wrote this to help. 

There is a sequence of basic tests to do to repair a non-starting vehicle or any gas piston engine. You do them in order and do them thoroughly, so that you are sure you've eliminated each cause as you go. The mnemonic is "fire, fuel, compression." 

Fire means spark. You remove a spark plug from a cylinder, lay it somewhere metal on the engine where you can see it and you're sure it's grounded, crank briefly with the help of a friend if your arms are short, and hope to see a spark. If there isn't a spark, try very hard to check that it was grounded just to be sure. 

Still no? Problem is "fire." You then need to troubleshoot the ignition system. There are too many possibilities under the category of "bad ignition" to go into over FB, but with high miler cars it's often the spark plugs that are so worn that the spark gap is too large. The gap should be around 30 thousands of an inch, which is about the thickness of thin cardboard. No spark and a large gap, change the plugs. 

If there is spark, move to "fuel." The easiest test is to spray starter fluid in the intake manifold, replacing the gas experimentally. If the car fires, you know by logical elimination that it was fuel, so troubleshoot the fuel system. 

For compression you need a compression tester and the knowledge to use it, but most mechanics can tell if an engine has very bad compression in one cylinder by turning the engine over by hand with a wrench on the crankshaft pulley or by using the belt, comparing the compression resistance between cylinders. 

Don't be tempted to jump to random causes. It's necessary to use a logical troubleshooting scheme to fix the problem.

Building stuff as pedagogical strategy

I believed and believe that action is helpful to learning. This is part of the Hahnian pedagogy we practised at the old, true, Unity College. We put it into action. We built barns, solar systems, grease vehicles, wind turbines, electronic gizmos of all kinds, we fixed cars and trucks, and grew food. Why? Because it works. It overcomes the boredom and disengagement that young people feel after a decade or more of formal schooling. Don't believe me? Read the blog. It's all there, going back to 2007. Or just read this article.

Update to Hansen et al 2016

Although I'm no longer employed as a climate professional, I still monitor the climate science news and cherry-pick the latest papers. In particular, I look for progress that would or would not confirm the primary hypothesis in Hansen et al 2016, "Ice melt, sea level rise and superstorms: evidence from paleoclimate data, climate modeling, and modern observations that 2 ◦C global warming could be dangerous."

This is the paper that turned my professional life upside down. It took me three weeks to read it carefully, annotate it, and follow up on the primary literature cited therein. It's a very dense eighty-some pages. But I had a feeling then and still do that I was witnessing the emergence of the best prediction for the fate of the earth, and its consequences, all in real time, and that nearly everything I had done as an environmental activist, scholar, and teacher would become moot as a result.

Seems like the kind of thing you would want to keep track of. Especially if you have a six year old daughter.

In the years after Hansen and his colleagues published this tome, I tried to teach it. I was responsible for general education classes that included a climate change module, as well as a senior-level climate science class that taught the general science and the basics of climate modeling. It seemed my responsibility to give them this paper. But I failed badly in the attempt to teach it. 

It's just too complex a proposition. 

Not "if a then b," which is what most undergraduates can handle in terms of logic problem, essentially linear cause and effect, but "if a and b and c, then d might happen and e will perhaps ensue and then f is a distinct possibility if we cross threshold g and reach set point h, and hypothetical feedbacks i, j and k set in, and we have evidence of varying quality for a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i, j, and k, and if we get to f then a total catastrophe will drown all major cities within seventy years and set off storms that can flatten Florida, but you have to be an expert to understand the evidence and by the way, even you, the professor, is probably too stupid to understand any of this."

I have to admit I took a certain morbid and masochistic satisfaction trying to teach it. I could spend a lifetime just learning to teach this one paper. But this is what science is about for me: struggling with logic and reason and consequences.

Anyway. Updates, right? They have been fairly scarce and not written for the lay person.

Dr. Hansen has finally published an informal update of sorts here. It is intended to be a foreword to a book, but looks to me more like an attempt to put forming thoughts about updating H2016 on paper.

As such, I would expect it to either disappear or appear later in some other format. But for now it's very interesting. I plan to follow up on the literature as soon as I can get a draft copy of Chapter 48 of his new book, which is where he says to go next.

Here's a thought..

If all you really could think of to do with your life was to put into practice some educational idea you'd cooked up for your PhD, and you had absolutely nothing better to do with that life (like for instance saving the planet), then the right way to go about it would be to start an institution dedicated to that purpose.

That would have saved an awful lot of grief on the part of the people that loved the institution you crapped on and climbed all over and finally dropped in the toilet to get your dream accomplished, wouldn't it?

(I submitted this to CHE last year for their essay section, was turned down. Publishing it here, now.) 

Why I Won’t Teach Online (Again).

 

By

 

Mick Womersley

 

In March our small college, like most others, sent students home and told the faculty to finish out the semester online. And so the faculty taught online. We managed. Most of us. A small minority went under for a while and those students suffered, and, as students do, complained to administrators. But most of us managed the transition, even if not in style. I did it, and didn’t mind it at all, except that I missed my students. I set up a whiteboard, movie camera, and tripod in my spare room to facilitate the operation. I held online help sessions and did a lot of one-on-one coaching. I made movies and annotated slideshows of the material. I wrote lengthy “how-tos” on using the statistical package, or making the right graph in Excel. I enjoyed seeing my students on video chat and in presentations. It was good to know they were for the most part safe and well, if not exactly thriving. I didn’t complain. I just did it. It’s just what good educators do. As far as I know, I didn’t get a single complaint. But lack of complaint does not indicate success in teaching.

            A quick perusal of the time statistics for student engagement from our learning management system illustrates the problem. In a three credit-hour sophomore economics class, required for a major, with five weeks left in the semester, the hardest working students studied the online teaching materials provided for just less than thirty hours. The ones that flunked but still attempted the final exam put in less than three. The average was around twelve. Out of twenty-eight students a couple just dropped out of sight and didn’t even attempt the final. Who knows what was going on in their lives? Whatever it was took priority over making progress to their degrees. And my other sections produced similar results. Most students just didn’t try as hard as they would have if I’d been there to chivy them, if the social aspect of going to class had been there for them, if the routine had been there for them. If it had been face-to-face.

The Carnegie credit-hour system suggests that students need several hours of study outside of class for each “contact hour” in class. The same students in face-to-face learning would have spent fifteen hours in class to finish out the last five weeks of the semester, and been asked to do another thirty or more hours of reading and studying outside of class. Even the best students studied for only half the time they should have. Like most faculty around the country, I don’t get full compliance with Carnegie standards for homework, but students typically report taking many hours to prepare for my exams. I coach the students who have difficulty studying on their own, often putting in hours of back-to-back meetings for this purpose, hoping to make up for years of neglect. In all this, I have to act on the assumption that a kind of rough justice prevails, and look forward to the reflection section on the institutional assessment form where I get to try to decide if I’ve succeeded. I look for “Mick made me think”, or “I thought economics was boring but he made it interesting.” 

But my students, most of whom normally report learning success in economics, wouldn’t learn online. Why not? That seems to be an awfully good question for educators right about now. The Covid crisis forced some of us online. But others went online long before. And they too report success. But is this an apples-to-apples comparison? Are they even the same kind of students? Do they have the same needs? Will society, who is paying or subsidizing their education through Stafford Loans and Pell Grants and other aid, get what it wants out of the bargain?

Like many other schools, ours is making plans to offer more online classes in the fall, opening up some of our formal distance education classes to the students in the conventional face-to-face unit. Previously the two were administratively separate, operating under different calendars with different faculty and students. But our administrators have come up with a “hybrid” model that permits the experiment. They didn’t ask too many of the face-to-face faculty whether or not we thought it a good idea. Perhaps they assumed we wouldn’t like it much. I for one don’t like it at all. I can put up with it in an emergency, but I don’t want it to become a norm. I don’t want to drift unthinkingly into a society that does all its higher education online. I want us to keep face-to-face education wherever we practically can. 

Experience seems to show that these particular students don’t seem to want to learn online. Our administrators like to say that online is “more accessible” and tout success stories from the distance education program – a single mother here, a veteran there, to prove it. But these are not apples-to-apples comparisons. They say that it is cheaper, which is true. Our college charges roughly two thirds of the price for online courses than for face-to-face. Administrators want to save a buck. Who can blame them for that? They are generally judged on budget dollars, not educational success. Online faculty are typically less established, more worried about their jobs, less likely to ask hard questions of harried administrators, less likely to belong to a union, or to make an accreditation board complaint. It’s an easy drift, solves a lot of problems. But it’s not a valid comparison. You are providing a different kind of education, tailored for a different kind of student. And we really need to interrogate the facts here. Does online education work for all students? 

So who are these students of mine that won’t learn online? Ours are mostly first-year, first time students matriculating at age eighteen, direct from high school. A few are older veterans under the Post-9/11 GI Bill. A minority have studied elsewhere but typically not succeeded and hope to do better with us because we promise more help and more experiential programming. Their average household income reported is essentially the same as the nation. But when you get to know them, you realize soon enough that they are almost all from middle-class and working-class families, and a significant proportion are the first in their immediate family to go to college. We are a very white, northern state, and so few of our students have diverse backgrounds, but those who do, often seem to come from better-off families. That makes sense too. If you come from an oppressed minority, it’s hard enough to send your kid to a local college, never mind one that’s out-of-state.

Why might online learning not work with these students? Let’s start with the force field. No-one tells you about this when you start teaching. The average developed world teenager comes with a supernatural force-field around them that inhibits communication from any person older than them. Learning to identify and penetrate this force field at will, on a regular basis, is an a priori requirement to be successful in teaching liberal arts classes. There are many techniques to draw upon: the Socratic question, the slightly controversial remark, the humorous aside, the outgoing body language, the tone of your voice, the ways and means of teaching effectively when all your students wish to be elsewhere, doing other things. You have to make them want to be there. Will they want to be online?

Ask them to read aloud. When they matriculate, and even by the time they make it to my second-year economics courses, our average student reads very slowly, like a robot, unable to put in emphasis of dialect or emotion. I would guess many of yours do too.

Ask them to write. Most cannot complete a paragraph of simple error-free sentences. After the “writing-across-the-curriculum” drive a few years ago, which I took to heart, I coach their writing one-on-one each semester. I get results, but it takes time and effort and individual attention.

Ask them to think, especially about the Good Society and what it should be. This often comes hardest. Young minds are more open than old ones, for sure, but not as much as you’d hope. A significant minority have unadjusted racist and/or other narrow-minded attitudes, probably inherited from their families and the communities they come from. We do our level best to counter this with programming in the residence halls and liberal studies classes from the first semester, but it doesn’t always work, or work right away. 

There are exceptions to this taxonomy of failed education, of course. I get some students who are easy to teach, gliding through my classes, loving each new thought. If you’re one of my students and reading this, and have gotten thus far already, you’re almost certainly in this category. I thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for making my daily task easier and more enjoyable. But if you’re one of these students, you know too that you were in the minority in my classes.

Bottom-line, many if not most of our students do not present ready to study college-level material. I’m sure many of yours don’t either, if you don’t teach at a more exclusive place, and do have students from ordinary American backgrounds, from ordinary American high schools. 

Let’s take these in the order I listed them. If you ask a student who reads at an eighth-grade level to study online, they need to read all their course material online. If it is to be expounded on or explained, that may happen through annotated slides – more reading – and if they are lucky, some video. If they want to ask a question, they may need to type it, and then read the answer. If they are lucky, there will be face-to-face office hours or help sessions via streaming video chat in which they can ask that question. You can add all the concierges – how I dislike that hotel-industry word in the education context – and learning specialists you want. The very fact that they read at such a low reading-grade level means it will take them several hours more to get through the material than a student who is properly prepared for college. In face-to-face programming I’ll discover this, and, usually during a writing or some other coaching session, get them to read their own work out loud, and help them improve. I encourage them to read more, explain that reading is the key to knowledge, adaptability, promotion. Sometimes I even hit home. 

Let’s try writing. If you study for an online degree, most of your grade is going to be for written submissions to exams, quizzes, essays and so on. I expect that there’s also a lot of multiple-choice, auto-graded stuff, but even that needs to be read. If you can’t yet write at a high school level, you’re at a disadvantage. The very few students I see who can diagram a sentence went to private school. Most of my students can’t even read their own sentences out loud without stumbling over their clumsy phraseology. If they have to write out paragraph-length or essay-length answers, they have to be coached, or I have to be capable of inferring from their work that they actually understand the economic theory they are asked to apply. It’s a kind of divination. The cure, the only thing that can make it objective is to bring the student in for coaching. You can improve their writing and understanding of economics at the same time. And, after all, that’s what the punters and the government are paying for.

Last but by no means least, let’s address the critical thinking. This is supposed to be the greatest outcome of a liberal arts degree, students who can think critically, to remake and renew society and make it better in each new generation. That’s why we subsidize higher education. That’s what a government of the people by the people needs to get out of this bargain. 

So, what's the cure for systemic prejudice? How do you change a mind that believes it's made up already, and doesn't wish to change at all? That's been on my mind for years, but especially recently. The only thing I've ever found that worked, even imperfectly, was face-to-face, in-person Socratic classroom or similar informal discussion hosted by a skilled teacher and mentor who has the stage presence and moral authority to guide discussion and testimony, even that which is hard to hear, helping students experience what other people have to say and being guided intellectually and emotionally to put themselves in their shoes. Where have I experienced anything like this? In high school, when I had some very good teachers; in some (not all) Christian churches, and at meetings of other religions; but most frequently in liberal arts classes and related college activities with my students and faculty and teaching staff colleagues for the thirty-two years I've been involved in American education. If you want to live in a better world, you need to change minds. 

A lot of people simply don't change their minds when presented with new, better ideas. But that's what good educators do. We change minds. It's not easy. I wish it was, but it isn't. And it only works some of the time. But what kind of a world would we live in if it had never worked at all, ever, for all of history? We'd all be at each other's throats, sitting on each other's necks, one against one, group against group, clan against clan, nation against nation, for all history, whenever we got the chance. I tell my northeastern students, many of whom are Franco-American, that when the Klan first organized here in the 1920s it was to get rid of them! And now they hang Confederate flags on their dorm room walls! Think about that! This is our fault, the high school and college teachers’, for not educating them better. They need to know that prejudice is wrong because it’s irrational, from the font of all unreason: hatred. They need to be told that they are as dependent on a reasoned society as anyone, if not more so. Mine are not from wealthy homes. They can’t avoid struggle. Just because you think you're in the privileged group now doesn't mean it was always that way, nor will it always be that way. Better start treating people the way you'd like to be treated. And be willing to change your mind. 

So we need to support mind-changing education, which for some students will always need to be face-to-face education, because the system has already failed them, failed to provide them with the skills to learn online. Online school has a place, but probably not for those students who are already underprepared, for students at risk. They need face-to-face instruction, face-to-face encouragement, face-to-face learning, with educators committed to reason and to education. It's our only hope. 

I for one cannot reconcile teaching these particular students online with my professional conscience. It’s not enough. It will fail them. They would be better waiting a semester or two if need be, or learning in person using social distancing, than being isolated online. This would actually work. It would teach them, they would learn, For the most part society has already failed them, and the move online just exacerbates the problem. 

 

 

You don't say...

Tell me again how cheap online courses are the future of higher education and will beat out the competition and diversify the student body (while UMaine invests in free hands-on in person courses specifically to better retain students from demographics that traditionally don't retain well).

https://bangordailynews.com/2021/06/17/news/bangor/new-umaine-program-aims-to-boost-student-retention-through-hands-on-learning/?mc_cid=3aa32a311a&mc_eid=23d95a4618

PBS Newshour article on Unity College controversey

They didn't capture the essence of the debate nearly enough. 

I would have done more to highlight the clash between experiential versus remote pedagogy and between the communitarian principles of the old Unity College versus the self-aggrandizing, individualistic capitalism of Our Dear Leader, the self-appointed "savior" of higher education.

And they minimized the angst, shock, and loss of the community. 

But it made prime time, which is something.

I still don't believe they will get away with it in the very long run. The fond memories of the old place run too deeply to be successfully buried, while outside forces like accreditation regimes and competition are too stochastic to be successfully predicted. 

The board must be aware by now that they have critics who have something meaningful to say, something thoughtful and just and deserving of a hearing, about the robbery that has taken place. The Fuhrer tried to paint his critics as behind-the-times ne'er-do-wells, but the fact that the national press is listening to said critics must be disquieting to his bosses, the board. They would probably prefer the quiet life to the place they find themselves, in the churning whirlwind of a Zeitgeist moment for higher education. 

You can sweep all these kinds of awarenesses under the carpet, but only for so long. They tend to nibble at your soul in the wee hours.

Perish the thought! But it doesn't and won't. It will always be there, until the Right Thing gets done, and the correct state of things is restored.

One guy, in search of satisfaction for his own lame ego, chose to ride the tiger. But it's exhausting and it makes you angry, sad, and paranoid. The low grade underlying stress will never end. There will always be another destabilizing crisis just around the corner. Something will eventually give. 

This year's ten-year accreditation review will be one more such stressor. 

And the visiting team is now, thanks to PBS, on full notice about the controversy they are walking into.

Enjoy.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/record-enrollment-at-maine-college-offering-diverse-learning-options-post-pandemic?fbclid=IwAR0H4D5gP5MXgs0jyBBdsMn0GYqarqtny_GISyLuZni0wMFInsnznGHsM5w

The Real Work*

There's a lot of self-serving and specious bloviation originating from the gang of sharp characters that stole our college.

The notion, now that they have hi-jacked the college's good name and accreditation profile to deliver race-to-the-bottom online education, is that this is somehow better.

In particularly, they argue, mostly to potential students and their parents, but also to the governing board, that the college is now more accessible, with more students and more diverse students and that this is better.

Well, no. It's not. And it never will be.

What it is, is different, and it can't easily be compared in order to determine "better" or "worse." Apples to oranges. And it's obviously more commonplace and far less unique, a counterfactual to the nonsense emanating from the corner office, because, well, competition. 

How many online higher education programs will be needed once the Biden administration gets done with its plans to increase Pell Grant, zero out community college tuition, reform the student loan program for four-year schools, add several new avenues for student loan forgiveness, and execute a smart "about turn" on the Title IV "neg reg" that would otherwise have allowed Unity College Online to shop around for an easier accreditor, one that might more easily forgive its many transgressions?

This is a fairly elementary exercise in critical thinking, so much so that I can't believe that someone on the Board hasn't thought it. Probably several have thought it, but haven't said anything. The human being is a frail social animal. Peer pressure is real. Lots of people are not brave enough to actually carry out the responsibilities they sign up for. I expect most of them by now have sat through hours of self-aggrandizing air-time from the administration, Zoomed and PowerPointed to sleepy distraction, caffeinated but dozy, drifting off from time to time, on and on and on, blah, blah, blah, all to justify the abandonment of the mission, the campus, the faculty, the community, the students. 

Some skepticism must have been aroused. But not enough, apparently.

So we'll just have to do their job for them.

Critical Thinking 101. Description, then analysis. First description. Interrogate facts. Put them under a hot light and knock them around a bit. They're just facts. They can't hurt, right?

So, what exactly was the old college in attempted comparison to which the new one is so much "better."

It was lots of things, but most essentially the students. Earlier generations of the Board of Trustees knew this. Many had been such students themselves. I expect right now, anyone with fond memories of the old Quaker Hill is persona non-grata. 

That's a problem in itself, isn't it?

Unity College had a reputation for turning out self-reliant, plucky, feisty, and useful people that could get the job done. Ask any employer why they hired our kids. So how did this happen?

It came in the mix.

And it was a mix. 

(A disclaimer: The order in which our student categories appear is not hierarchical. Or indeed in any kind of structured order. This is just a list in the order in which I thought of it.)

First up, the Golden Girls and Boys. The old college, in any given intake of two-hundred or so mostly eighteen-year old "first-year, first time" college students, served a handful, only twenty or thirty, of gifted and talented environmental studies and environmental science students for whom we had to compete with their respective state flagship and second tier state colleges. Not with Harvard or Yale, for sure. They were gifted but not super-academic. And they didn't have the money or connections to get into the Ivy League. They mostly came from low- to middle-income families. They signed up for the more academic majors, EES, EPLS, SEM, SBE. Or they were the best students in the applied sciences. Even CLE, PFR, and Captive would attract one or two. The best CLE and PFR students were typically "Dudley do-right" Boy Scouts, and leaders of my SAR team. They are park rangers and game wardens now, having been the ones that won the particular game of "Survivor" that is entry to uniformed conservation employment. They are the ones that actually learned the very basic math behind the UTM coordinate system, or that took protection of civil rights to heart. The anti-Chauvins. 

The best Captivers were already mini-zookeepers, with their own menageries, often illegal ensconced in their dorm room. 

They were all truly great students who truly wanted to help save the planet and for the most part are doing so right now in their new careers.

They made my former professorial life wonderful. I mean that. It was full of wonder -- at them. These were the students I lived for. And they are no small legacy. 

After over thirty years in American higher education I'm now allowed to say this: Most professors live for their best learners, less so their middling ones, and certainly not their worst.

I have no fears for the earth, or even for my small daughter's future on it. You see, it wasn't just me doing this work. I had lots of help all over the country and the world. These students, and thousands or even hundreds of thousands like them that were trained up by the environmental movement in global higher education over the last few decades, they will sort it. I have faith in their integrity and capability.

You know who you are. Thank you for returning the faith we placed in you.

My daughter's life and happiness will be in your hands when Aimee and I are gone. But I expect she'll join you in the Real Work.

Next up, the Crusties. A very small minority, one or two of each class at the most, were returning students or older first-timers or veterans on the Post-911 GI bill. These were also great students, but came with more baggage. But they were often very rewarding in return. Having been around life's block a bit, they were happy to have some help in understanding how to go around again, only using a bit more reason this time. 

I could relate. I was twenty-eight when I began college, after seven years in the military and five and a half in military rescue.

Thank you, for all the hard talk and well-earned respect on both sides. Here's a salute from one veteran and non-traditional students to another.

Then the Great Mass, the lumpen proletariat, were b-minus and academically-disengaged students with outdoor or animal-interest lifestyles for whom college was always going to be a chore, who mostly hoped quite desperately to get into outdoor jobs like game warden or wildlife technician or zookeeper just so they could survive lifetime employment somehow. 

Unity offered them a way to survive college, get a degree, and get a shot at one of our trademark outdoor jobs. These students paid our bills. But they were work to teach. They often simply didn't want to learn, especially if it was economics or math or hard science or social studies. They were happy to identify mammals or fish, or go out in the woods on just about any excuse. But take them out of their outdoor identity, out of their comfort zone, and they would try to punish you in return. 

I tried to love them. I still do. I used humor, particularly my grumpy ex-British serviceman's humor, with a slight snark, but no small empathy for their predicament. 

It's hard, truly hard, isn't it, to want to get paid to go hunting or to pet fuzzy animals. That's the only thing you want out of life. That and a toke or a beer or a big truck and a hot boyfriend or girlfriend or all of these. I can empathize. 

But before you can even get a shot at the game warden exam or get that internship at the zoo, you have to pass economics? Do algebra? Learn climate change? Write a grammatically correct sentence?

I felt their pain. I still do. Poor kittens.

So, when so challenged, which was daily, I gave as good as I got. I did my job, taught them econ or climate or math or grammar, the hard way, often one on one, until they hated me more, until they gave up and realized there was only one way out, the honest work they didn't want to do in the first place at the beginning of the semester, and I took their money quite honestly, having earned it very well, with the sweat of my furrowed brow, and paid my bills and made my way, got married, bought a house, made a farm, had a kid. About half to two-thirds or more of these types became decent human beings of whom I am proud. 

And, I should say in their defense, an awful lot of these folks were interested in Hahnian Rescue Service and were on my SAR team or the fire department or ambulance.

Thank you, all the same. I still have hope that you'll see, one day, that climate change is real, that economics and politics are important, that your life won't get better until you decide to put your shoulder to the wheel of civilization like a real person and give it a push. But in the meantime, you helped keep me honest and straightforward and grumpy, and let me pay my way and raise our kid. So thanks for that. And the house and farm and kid, the light of my life. You made all that possible.

And keep up the good work. Even if you're still a climate denier, Rescue Service is important. We have that in common, still. 

Even if you still can't and won't learn how to parse the math in geographical coordinates. Honestly, how can you want to be a game warden and be unwilling to learn this? Really, dude? How do you think the computer search mapping system works? Magic?

And the Board? What, you didn't know that Kurt Hahn's principles included Rescue Service? What the fuck did you think I was doing, playing soldiers? Or Expeditions? Or Projects? Look it up, for chrissakes. Do your job.

Where's your Unity Fire Department, your Unity Ambulance, your SAR team now? Online?

Then the Specials. At the very bottom, academically-speaking, but often high in our esteem, were a category of students who had grave learning disabilities for whom very little worked except one-on-one attention. We teachers and academic staff poured our hearts and souls into some of these, and the more deserving cases kept us up nights with worry. We loved them all, but most of all we loved the ones who fought to overcome their difficulties.

I wonder how easy it is for them now, to get the attention they need from that overworked online adjunct.

Back to the mix. The Thugs: Some students, a small minority, became dishonest. They would lie, cheat and steal just to get out of an assignment and go hike or fish or hunt. Some, generally the same ones, were unpleasant and derisive. 

As Interim Provost for a couple years, I had to deal with these types in disciplinary cases. I once had to intervene with a huge hulk of a con law student who tried to bully a seventy-year old English Comp adjunct with a blue rinse into giving him a better grade for an assignment he'd "borrowed" from a friend. She ran out of the classroom in tears. I wanted to fire him, but the president intervened. But this was perhaps the worst of it. The thugs were few and far between. And I'm proud of everything we attempted to deter their behavior and teach them better ways. But you couldn't pay me enough to ever go back to this part of the job. I'm glad to be done with them.

So no thanks to you. Can't win 'em all. I hope you stay out of trouble and don't hurt anyone. But since I already saw you hurt people, with words or otherwise, I can't be sure of that. I tried to teach you otherwise. 

But hurters are going to hurt until they find a way to change. And real education is a contact sport, despite what the proponents of distance learning have to say about it. Really deep personal change doesn't come easily, or online. It comes from personal contact, social encounters with people of different viewpoints whose feed you can't power down just because it makes you uncomfortable.

I have the scars, mental and otherwise, to prove it.

Actually, it was Tim Peabody, former Colonel of the Maine Wardens Service and Unity College professor, who taught me this. 

Abusers keep abusing. they can't stop. Thugs keep thugging along.

Finally, the Weird Ones. And they won't be mad at me for calling them that. They wore their weirdness on their sleeves, a badge of honor. I am weird too, in some ways, so I could relate. 

But across the above board, there were an awful lot of kids for whom the college was simply a refuge to grow up and explore. Gay, lesbian and transgendered kids found a safe home there, as did a good few disabled kinds, although the able-bodied mainstream moved on as fast as ever in their outdoor lifestyles, sometimes including, sometimes not. A lot of teachable moments were developed helping the conforming and able to be tolerant and including of the nonconforming or disabled.

I could tell stories for hours about working with all these kinds of students.

The best way to teach all these, but especially the Great Mass, was experientially. We employed Kurt Hahn's expeditionary learning principles throughout the college in one form or another. The present establishment is wholly ignorant of this theory, a sad remark on their lack of professionalism. They thought we were the unprofessional ones because we wanted to teach experientially, which is of course sometimes expensive. I got very tired of being nickel-and-dimed by so-called professional administrators, mostly pointy-headed sycophants and yes-men and -women, who thought that classroom materials were optional expenses. In the end I just bought my own, to the tune of thousands of dollars. 

That shiny kit in the sustainability lab? I paid for much of that. 

But this was key to engagement. And we were the experts. I've been using Kurt Hahn's principles in education since 1980. Other UC faculty had even longer pedigrees in experiential environmental education. If you want evidence, just read through my blog, and look at all the projects we did together. 

This expertise was, of course threatening, and so to remove the threat the pointy-heads disavowed the theory, in most cases before they even bothered to examine it. On their meteoric rise up the academic career ladder, this was information they didn't want or need.

But it works. It's tested scientifically. Sometimes, as in the lumpen cases above, it's the only thing that works at all! The promise of experiential education in recruitment meant we could make a class. Using experiential education helped us deliver on that promise to help make the students into decent and useful people. Without it, all the pointy-heads and sycophants would have been out of a job.

So I'm proud of all the educating we did at the old Unity. It was a good way to spend twenty years of my life. I'm proud of every grumpy vet that graduated, proud of every game warden I taught to read maps or to think about civil rights, every mixed-up queer kid that cried in my office but eventually found a safe place to be and sort it out, every trans kid that found a place to change into their new life, every disabled kid that loves the woods, every one of you that tried to learn.

The bright kids, older students, and veterans were a particular joy to teach. I count it as one of the great honors of my life that the Student Veterans' Association chapter chose me to be their advisor. 

But by and large most, a very large majority of all the types of student we had made progress. They learned. They changed. Often they learned and changed a lot. There was a lot of value added.

So back to analysis. Critical Thinking 101. One plus one is two. Two plus two is four. A and B. OK?

A. More isn't better. Deeper is. You'll not save the planet with shallow change.

B. We were diverse. 

Got it? (Boy, that was hard!) 

Let's do B first: Diversity. We had kids from trailer parks and kids from mac-mansions, kids with rusty jalopies and kids with BMWs and Mercs, grumpy old vets with PTSD would sit next to radical lesbians and somehow, mostly, get on with them and even become friends in a grudging but real kind of way. The great majority of our students were the first in their families to go to college. We had black, brown, Asian, gay, and trans kids, and a heck of a lot of white kids who could barely afford to do college. Not enough kids of color, for sure, but they all came and learned and somehow found an on-ramp to a life working for the environment. We made an inclusive community of all these folks. 

I particularly knew all about the students who could only afford beater cars because I was the one that helped keep them on the road!

It was in the rubbing together of this community, where all the corners got scuffed, in Hahnian Expeditions, Projects, and Rescue Service, that the Real Work happened. The classroom time was just a backdrop. 

The real work requires real people who are willing to get real.

The new carpet-bagging administrators, the pointy-heads, didn't care much for this weird and wonderful community because, in their offices and meetings, on their phones, and in their shiny cars, they weren't part of it. And they couldn't analyze it on a cost basis to make it somehow more efficient. It was all a kind of mystery to them. They lacked a faculty to evaluate it, or even, in the worst cases, to even know it existed. So, they were often quite disparaging or discouraging of our efforts to make this community, and especially our requests for travel, tools, equipment, lab time, facilities, and, most of all, real leadership. It was all somehow too messy, too weird, too eccentric, too non-mainstream, too environmental, and, above all, too different for them. 

Eccentricity is not commonly encountered among those who wish to climb the ladder. A kind of bland inoffensiveness is required. Dress the dress, walk the walk, talk the talk. Bore the bore. Worry about the planet? Hope for social change? That's not my problem. I'm on my way up.

Until it is. Until what is needed is a different outlook, a willingness to commit, a new idea, something different...

A few memes: January 6th. Derek Chauvin. Climate change. The biodiversity crisis. On and on. 

I tend to think that convention and peer pressure and superficiality is pleasing to these kinds of people while the essential disorder that comes along with a teachable moment is not. 

They certainly didn't have the kids in and out of their offices all day with their worries and cares. No poverty-stricken or gay or trans kid was ever going to ask them how to grow up without dying. 

Yes, that's right, you bullshitting morons on the Board. It's life or death for weird kids. Haven't you heard about youth suicide? 

There were two youth suicides among the Unity College community under the recent administration? Did you know that? Was that ever the subject of a PowerPoint? How many do you think my colleagues and I helped avert, with our "unprofessional" empathy?

On dozens of occasions I had these kids in my office crying their eyes out and complaining of the treatment they were getting from the corner office that looks out on Quaker Hill. Every time a student stuck their head above the parapet and tried by themselves or in a group to make the college more sustainable, more progressive, more inclusive, they met with approbation from that corner.

That is perhaps the worst indictment of all. That when the students tried to actually live the mission, they were discouraged, or even, in the worst cases, formally disciplined.

Back to A. Depth is as important or more so than width. And real education is a contact sport. 

The students didn't always go along with our living learning Hahnian utopia, of course. But it was a safe place for a lot of people to learn.

So the notion that the current college is somehow better in comparison with the old because there are A) more students and B) more diverse students is simply not true. The new college is different. But not better. The old college was good, even very good: at teaching, at being a safe place to grow up in, at being a very diverse community. At using experiential learning. At being a real living-learning community. At training leaders to save the planet.

It was not just good, but unique.

The new college may have attracted larger numbers of quite diverse students to take a few credits each, all working in their very limited spare time from work or family, without experiential learning, without immersion, without having to rub up against their peers except in chat rooms that can easily be ignored or minimized without grade penalty, all taught by badly-paid, poorly qualified adjuncts working only over the computer and nary a project or field trip. 

But this isn't better. It's shallow. And I would guess that far fewer actual credit hours are taken per year by each student. Because the old community-based program went deeper and grew more change in individuals, there may even have been more education getting brewed up compared to the inches-deep mild mix they serve today.

And in teaching these larger numbers with so shallow a system, I'm afraid, the new college will have to compete with every other online program that does much the same.

Just because it has more faces of color doesn't make it more diverse, if those faces are more conforming, less challenging of authority, less likely to save the planet (even if just by sheer ornery-ness), less likely to fulfill the mission.

Less likely to save the planet.

And so, without that community, without really that mission, the college is no longer unique either. 

And the old campus, where all these lessons began in a safe beautiful place in the Maine woods with a view of the mountains, is now empty and sad and disused, when it should be getting cleaned and priced up and made ready for a new intake

So, tell me again how this is better.

Note: The title of this essay, "The Real Work," is a phrase coined by environmental poet Gary Snyder to describe the personal growth needed to successfully connect to the natural environment. 

By extension, it is the Work we need to do to save the planet. It encapsulates the mission of the old Unity College and my own continuing vocation.

Rise Again #2

 

The Mary Ellen Carter

She went down last October in a pouring driving rain.
The skipper, he’d been drinking and the Mate, he felt no pain.
Too close to Three Mile Rock, and she was dealt her mortal blow,
And the Mary Ellen Carter settled low.

There were just us five aboard her when she finally was awash.
We’d worked like hell to save her, all heedless of the cost.
And the groan she gave as she went down, it caused us to proclaim
That the Mary Ellen Carter would rise again.

Well, the owners wrote her off; not a nickel would they spend.
“She gave twenty years of service, boys, then met her sorry end.
But insurance paid the loss to us, so let her rest below.”
Then they laughed at us and said we had to go.

But we talked of her all winter, some days around the clock,
She’s worth a quarter million, afloat and at the dock.
And with every jar that hit the bar, we swore we would remain
And make the Mary Ellen Carter rise again.

Rise again, rise again, that her name not be lost

To the knowledge of men.
Those who loved her best and were with her till the end
Will make the Mary Ellen Carter rise again.

All spring, now, we’ve been with her on a barge lent by a friend.
Three dives a day in hard hat suit and twice I’ve had the bends.
Thank God it’s only sixty feet and the currents here are slow
Or I’d never have the strength to go below.

But we’ve patched her rents, stopped her vents, dogged hatch and porthole down.
Put cables to her, ‘fore and aft and girded her around.
Tomorrow, noon, we hit the air and then take up the strain.
And make the Mary Ellen Carter Rise Again.

For we couldn’t leave her there, you see, to crumble into scale.
She’d saved our lives so many times, living through the gale
And the laughing, drunken rats who left her to a sorry grave
They won’t be laughing in another day. . .

And you, to whom adversity has dealt the final blow
With smiling bastards lying to you everywhere you go
Turn to, and put out all your strength of arm and heart and brain
And like the Mary Ellen Carter, rise again.

Rise again, rise again – though your heart it be broken
And life about to end
No matter what you’ve lost, be it a home, a love, a friend.
Like the Mary Ellen Carter, rise again.

Rise Again

The Resurrection of Marshall Wharf Brewing Co - The Maine Mag: In April 2019 Kathleen Dunckel and Dan Waldron were heartbroken. The owners of Marshall Wharf Brewing Company, David and Sarah Carlson, had announced they were closing the brewery and adjacent Three Tides bar and restaurant. After years of battling rising … Continue reading →

Tilting at Windmills, and other Texan bloodsports

A large amount of nonsense being talked by opponents of green power because of the Texas outages. Solar PV works quite well even in Maine's winter because PV cells like winter weather. There's less internal electrical resistance when it's cool, and the snow we have on the ground most of the winter reflects light up to the array. Ours is deliberately tilted to shed the snow quickly. It's been running flat-out since the sun hit it square on about 9.30am. Wind turbines are similarly at full blast today in Maine because of the strong polar wind we have, and because we employ anti-icing systems that Texas chose not to pay for. Here's the power produced by the solar array on our barn the last week. You can see that some power was produced on even the snowstorm days, while the array was at peak output for four of the seven days. Each kilowatt hour saves us 18¢. The array cost $3,500 after the federal tax rebate, although it was cheaper because we did much of the work ourselves, with the help of some students that wanted work experience (they were paid!), and the local solar PV company who helped with the paperwork. It's made 80 KWh in the last week, so that would be $14 in power for the week, or about $60/month. I don't know of any other investment that will safely give you $60/month for only $3,500 upfront. Nothing legal, that's for sure. And it will make even more in summer, zeroing out our bill entirely some months. CMP fought us tooth and nail on this installation, and we had to take them to the PUC. But it's been worth every penny. My only regret is that it needs no attention, so I don't get to tinker with it! It's totally boring how reliable it is. But I do have a 1975 VW bus for that. And It's quite toasty in our house today running on solar PV and wood stove heat. I feel sorry for all the Texans without power, but let's put the blame where it belongs, with their pay-to-play politicians and their cheap-assed power companies.

Green Keynesianism

This was my Climate CoLab submission from 2014. It still ranks high in the Google search for the term Green Keynesianism, so it gets read, even though it was essentially dismissed by the Climate CoLab team. Considering the first step is now Biden administration policy, it may be worth keeping it in a safer, separate spot than the CoLab records, so I posted it to Google.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1fNSpBSTiYz76kH0HGdwtbvrf4tyPPX3c/view?usp=sharing

Later, I cleaned it up for publication in Ecological Economics journal. It was initially accepted, then turned down again. I can see why. It argues that ecological economics thinking is not influential and unlikely to become so.

(But that doesn't mean to say it isn't true, or useful, thinking.)

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1oPA_2gUHHbJLhcRiWrYNq6UcHLMxyP65/view?usp=sharing

High angle rescue training

I found a bunch of old You Tube videos I'd forgotten about and so I'm reposting some. This one is from 2009. This was before RfR gained, essentially, a monopoly on high angle rescue certification in the US. Here I demonstrate a two-person lower system for Royal Air Force Mountain rescue which I still believe is superior for both simplicity and for training newbies.

The real work

 We really did do lots of experiential learning in my old job. Here's the evidence.

Knitting for a storm

I was able to set up my old Singer "chunky" knitting machine in a different space where it can stay set up for a while, which meant I could do more knitting. Edana (age 6) has been helping. We now have a "line" of bobble hats made with Womerlippi Farm yarn. Edana likes to set up the needle bed and make bobbles. This is a good activity for the dead of winter.

Are RECs any good?

Adapted from a letter to a former student who asked whether RECs were any good.

Dear Susie:

You wanted advice on whether or not to purchase “green” electricity through one of the several companies allowed to sell it to you via your Versant delivery system. The specific example was Ambit.

These companies use “deregulated” electricity markets. Basically, deregulation meant that local electricity companies like Bangor Hydro (as Versant used to be known) has to disaggregate their electricity sales business from their electricity delivery business. They were now required by government to “deliver” electricity from other producers when previously they both produced and delivered their own electricity  This is a “free market" way of regulating "natural monopoly".

What this means is that Bangor Hydro no longer exclusively sells electricity from the many hydro dams it used to own on the Penobscot and other rivers. Good for salmon and alewives, bad for the atmosphere if that electricity is replaced by electricity from coal or gas. They now must sell you electricity from any producer on the national grid who wants to sell it to you.

The problem is the physics. You may remember from class that electricity finds the shortest path to ground. If you short out a 110V circuit with your finger, and don’t have proper PPE footwear, you’ll BE that shortest path, and get a “belt”. Usually this doesn’t kill you, unless you’re ready to drop dead anyway. But you’d notice.

So super clean wind turbine electricity produced in Minnesota and run into the grid there will find its way to ground through the nearest fridge or baseboard to the turbine. It’s not physically possible, unless every intervening draw is switched off along the transmission and distribution lines, for that electricity to arrive at your home in Maine.

So to account for this and allow for a “free” or freer market in power, we create a “free market” fiction. We let the wind power company feed that electricity into the grid in MN and get the two cents or so per kWh than MN is willing to pay for ordinary electricity  

But imagine that a “green” electricity customer in Maine is willing to buy that KWh for 18 cents, just over what Versant charges for Standard Offer.

The MN wind power company can sell the actual electricity to the MN grid for two cents and sell the green “attributes” of that power as a Renewable Energy Credit or REC to Ambit for say 5 cents. They get 7 cents instead of two so they’re happy. Accounting is used to make sure they don’t sell the attributes twice.

This is a bit like when you “sponsor” the education of a child in a developing country through a non-profit. You get pictures monthly of “your” kid. Except that the money you pay doesn’t go directly to your kid. It goes to the non-profit, who takes a cut to pay overhead, and then to an in-country umbrella corporation, possibly also a non-profit, who takes a cut, and then to the school. Sometimes bribes have to be paid. If you just found yourself some deserving kid somewhere and sent her a ten dollar USPS money order each month, you could cut out the middlemen and the whole business would be better for it. But that’s too much work for the average punter.

Back to the REC business. Ambit turns around and sells the seven cent kWh to Lilliana for 18 cents. Ambit pays Versant eight cents per kWH to "deliver” that power to Susie  Ambit is happy because they made three cents net revenue (18 minus 8 minus 7 cents equals three). And they did nothing very much too earn that money,. They just acted as a broker.

Susie is happy because she thinks she is buying green power instead of stinky old Versant power.

Only Versant is unhappy because they can’t sell Susie their standard offer of eight cents for the power and 8 cents for power delivery. They get eight instead of sixteen cents. But screw them. Filthy old power company.

But think again: If you look at Versants standard offer disclosure label, it actually isn’t so bad. A bit of coal and a bit of nukes, for sure, and some gas. But it’s over 20% renewable. (And would be more so if the grid hadn’t been deregulated in the first place, causing Versant to dismantle all those dams because they were no longer competitive with cheap fracked gas.)

Susie, in frustration, emails her grumpy old professor. He says it’s all very close to being a con. It’s sometimes better to spend the two cents differential between Versant Standard offer and Ambit on something that simply saves energy directly. So, if the power bill is $100/month, 2/18ths of $100 is $11.11. 

This is too much work for most punters. Just like the kid.

But eleven bucks isn’t nothing. That would be enough to switch out the five most heavily used light bulbs in the house for new LEDs in just the first month. Or pay via credit for a new fridge that uses 100w/hour instead of 500w/h. It might even buy a small share in a local solar cooperative, among the many getting set up locally. These have the advantage of being capital investments and so bring in more savings (AKA income. Savings is the same as income in the long run).

Moral of the tale? It’s perhaps better not to buy the REC if other better local options are available. But if you don’t have the brain-space to find out about these options, buy the REC. just research the company that sells it to you.

Best,

Grumpy old Mick