Montebello E-News

 July 24, 2008  

Until the great mass of the people shall be filled with the sense of responsibility for each other's welfare, social justice can never be attained.
Helen Keller, 1880 – 1968,
was an American author, activist and lecturer.  She was the first deaf-blind person to graduate from college.  The story of how Keller's teacher, Annie Sullivan, broke through the isolation imposed by a near complete lack of language, allowing the girl to blossom as she learned to communicate, has become known worldwide through the dramatic depictions of the play “The Miracle Worker”.  What is less well known is how Keller's life developed after she completed her education. A prolific author, she was well traveled, and was outspoken in her opposition to war.  She campaigned for women's suffrage, workers' rights and socialism, as well as many other progressive causes.  

[So, we should not depend on legislation to solve the woes of the world?]  

1.   Is College Good for Our Country?

2. Social-Impact Report, Part 5

3. Announcements

4. Fun Facts about Vermont

5. The Flashback Quarterback:  Small Is Beautiful  

6. Be Aware and Share:  How Long before We All Are Doing This?

7. About Montebello E-News and “My Montebello”  

 Is College Good for Our Country?  

For a malcontent like this writer, the following hurts.  It is not enough that “No Child Left Behind” is leaving our world in a bind.  Now we read about the deficiency of higher education.  

... If “passionate and eager” can be used to describe the attitudes of the Greatest Generation and their children towards higher education, what can be said of the grandchildren? In the past twenty years, the number of college degrees handed out annually has more than doubled. So certainly they are attending college in droves. But with what attitude and to what end?  

Peter Sacks took up the question in his 1996 book, Generation X Goes to College. What Sacks found when he left journalism to become a college professor was an overarching lack of interest on the part of the students—what he identifies as a kind of disengagement. He describes a typical classroom scene:  

Scattered mostly in the back and far side rows were young males with professional sports baseball caps, often worn backwards. Completing the uniform . . . was usually a pair of baggy shorts, a team T-shirt, and an ample attitude. Slumped in their chairs, they stared at me with looks of disdain and boredom, as if to say, “Who in hell cares? Say something to amuse me.”  

According to Sacks, today’s college students have been “conditioned by an overly nurturing, hand-holding educational system not to take responsibility for their own actions.” He blames a system that has become “customer-driven.” Administrators want students to be happy so that enrollment remains high. And fearing lack of support from administrators, teachers have become reluctant to hold students to high standards. As Sacks writes, “Excellence wasn’t really the point . . . [T]he real point was whether you kept students sufficiently amused and entertained.” ... From http://www.salvomag.com/new/articles/salvo5/5segelstein.php.

If you answer the multiple-choice questions below and e-mail to lessonanswers@mymontebello.com with “Lesson answers” in the subject field, you will be credited toward a “certificate of recognition in community affairs” to be awarded in 2008 by a local nonprofit organization.  

1. What does Peter Sacks assert about college?

(a) Tuition is too high.

(b) College is “customer-driven”.  

2. What is meant by “customer-driven”?

(a) Colleges and professors lower standards to keep enrollment high.

(b) Students have a say in the curriculum which is offered them. 

 When most companies close the year, they assess their financial performance and thank their customers for sales. While we definitely succeeded on that dimension this year with over 1,000 retail locations across the United States and 300% sales growth, our far more important impact was increasing the quality of life for thousands of women and children across the globe – and we want to thank you for making that possible.  ...
Priya Haji, Co-founder and CEO
“World of Good” Social-Impact Report 2006, http://www.worldofgood.com/impact/index.shtml  

A “social-impact report”?  We have heard of “environmental-impact report”;  for example, one has to be filed with regard to the disposition of our Montebello Hills before a decision be made about the hills.  A social-impact report would talk about the probable and possible social consequences of a planned or existing activity.  

What consequences do you see from the following?  

In the previous part, we looked at the usefulness of a social-impact report with regard to the definition of marriage.  Below we look at the effect of the Internet on us and the usefulness of such a report with regard to the Internet.  

For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded. “The perfect recall of silicon memory,” Wired’s Clive Thompson has written, “can be an enormous boon to thinking.” But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it:  in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski. ...  

Anecdotes alone don’t prove much. And we still await the long-term neurological and psychological experiments that will provide a definitive picture of how Internet use affects cognition. But a recently published study of online research habits, conducted by scholars from University College London, suggests that we may well be in the midst of a sea change in the way we read and think. As part of the five-year research program, the scholars examined computer logs documenting the behavior of visitors to two popular research sites, one operated by the British Library and one by a U.K. educational consortium, that provide access to journal articles, e-books, and other sources of written information. They found that people using the sites exhibited “a form of skimming activity,” hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they’d already visited. They typically read no more than one or two pages of an article or book before they would “bounce” out to another site. Sometimes they’d save a long article, but there’s no evidence that they ever went back and actually read it. The authors of the study report: ...  

...“We are not only what we read,” says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. “We are how we read.”  Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace. When we read online, she says, we tend to become “mere decoders of information.” Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged. ...  

Nicholas Carr, July/August 2008 Atlantic Monthly, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?"

FOR EVERYONE.  Montebello library in a squeeze.  E-News  does not become involved in politics, except in ways in which the League of Women Voters would.  On Tuesday, two library staff from our main library brought to my attention the possibility of a reduction in library hours and services if the California state legislature invoked “Proposition 1A” to borrow from the library fund in order to balance the state budget.  The quickest way to tell legislators not to invoke Proposition 1A is to call.

·        Governor Arnold Schwarznegger, 916.445.2841;

·        State Assembly Speaker Karen Bass, 916.319.2047;

·        State Senate President Pro Tem Don Perata, 916.651.4009;

·        State Senator Ron Calderon, 916.651.4030;

·        State Assembly Member Charles Calderon, 916.319.2058.  

FOR YOUTH, PARENTS, TEACHERS.  Prizes and gift cards.  Teen Summer Reading Program, June 23 – August 23, 2008, for grades 9 – 12.  Come get “Metamorphosized” and sign up for the Teen Summer Reading Program.  Keep track of the books you read and fill out a rating card.  You will get a small prize for each entry and enter a drawing for gift cards at the end of the program. … Special activities, too.  Signups start this week, 1550 West Beverly Boulevard, Montebello.  Sponsored by the Montebello Friends of the Library.  For more information, 323.722.6551.  

FOR YOUTH, PARENTS, TEACHERS.  Make Your Own T-shirt.  Your mission is to create a T-shirt that reflects your unique style.  All materials are provided FREE!  For teens in grades 6 – 12.  Saturday, July 26, 2008, at 2 p.m..  ... Montebello Regional Library, 1550, West Beverly Boulevard, Montebello.  For more information, 323.722.6551.  

FOR MONTEBELLO HIGH SCHOOL ALUMNI.  Reunions coming.  The following was received from Denise Hagopian, 323.728.2728, montebelloreunion@msn.com.  

FOR EVERYONE.  “Copper Wire Thefts Lead to Power Outage”.  About half of Whittier and a large portion of Pico Rivera were without power for several hours Monday as the result of the theft of copper wire from a Southern California Edison substation. …  Los Angeles Wave, June 19, 2008.  

FOR EVERYONE.  Legislating the obvious?  A proposed law that would help keep excess catered food from being thrown away has passed its first test in the California State Assembly. ... A 2004 study by the California Environmental Protection Agency concluded that 6 million tons of food had been discarded in state landfills, and that food was the single biggest waste source in those landfills. ...  Montebello Comet, June 19, 2008.  

What do the two announcements immediately above sadly say?  That we must wait on state legislation for solutions?  That we the people of California could not act quickly to address glaring problems?

Vermont was the first state admitted to the Union after the ratification of the Constitution. 

With a population of fewer than nine thousand people, Montpelier, Vermont, is the smallest state capital in the United States.  [How does smallness affect the way a person sees the world?]  

Montpelier, Vermont, is the only U.S. state capital without a McDonalds.  [What??]  

Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream company gives their ice cream waste to the local Vermont farmers, who use it to feed their hogs.  The hogs seem to like all of the flavors except Mint Oreo.  

U.S. President Calvin Coolidge was the only president born on the fourth of July.  He was born Plymouth, Vermont, on July 4, 1872.

Vermont’s state capitol building is one of only a few to have a gold dome.  Atop the dome is a statue of Ceres.  [Ceres is the Roman goddess of growing plants, the harvest, and of motherly love.

In a previous issue of E-News, we looked at the usefulness of a small group of friends getting together to share personal research about issues and then reach conclusions, this as a means to find the truth relatively quickly in a sea of disinformation kept churning by various media.

Small groups are useful in other ways.  An example:

"Alone in a Big Church", September 20, 1981, John Piper, http://www.desiringgod.org/ResourceLibrary/Sermons/
ByDate/1981/310_Alone_in_a_Big_Church/  

…the biblical basis for developing smaller forms of togetherness in our church is that God intends you, the saints, to do the work of the ministry as you are equipped and encouraged by the pastor-teachers. The aim of this ministry is to build up each other's faith and love. God's design is to use human support and exhortation to sustain the faith of his children and to lighten the burdens which they bear in the service of love. That kind of mutually caring ministry does not happen in big groups between casual acquaintances. Therefore, to fulfill our calling we must see the emergence of many smaller support groups among our numbers. 

However, this is not the same as a small group governing over a large group.  In other words, the logic of the above cannot be applied to justify why our city council is so small in light of a growing population.  

Brimming with lime-hued succulents and a lush collection of agaves, one shooting spiky leaves 10 feet into the air, it's a head-turning garden smack in the middle of Long Beach's asphalt jungle. But the gardener who designed it doesn't want you to know his last name, since his handiwork isn't exactly legit. It's on a traffic island he commandeered.  

"The city wasn't doing anything with it, and I had a bunch of extra plants," says Scott, as we tour the garden, cars whooshing by on both sides of Loynes Drive.  

Scott is a guerrilla gardener, a member of a burgeoning movement of green enthusiasts who plant without approval on land that's not theirs. In London, Berlin, Miami, San Francisco and Southern California, these free-range tillers are sowing a new kind of flower power. In nighttime planting parties or solo "seed bombing" runs, they aim to turn neglected public space and vacant lots into floral or food outposts.  

To learn about this newsletter, Montebello E-News, and the accompanying, growing Web site, “My Montebello”, visit www.mymontebello.com.  Also, you will find instructions and contact information for submitting announcements for publication in this newsletter, and for submitting stories to “Montebello Memories” at the Web site.