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There were organizations before the Peace Corp, upon which the Peace Corp was modelled.  Note the "permanent" in John F. Kennedy's announcement about starting a "Peace Corp."  I was active in the international 4-H program and went abroad in the Eisenhower program "People to People" with a Future Farmers of America group. 

I went though many countries in Europe, both in western Europe and "behind" the Iron Curtain--think 1964 and "Checkpoint Charlie" times.  I met many folks who had not seen an American since WWII.  I had a wonderful moment in one area, a 5,000 hectar commune, when I found WWII Lend Lease tractors that had been bought from the British after the war.  There were up to seven folks running one tractor built in the 1930s.  Because my father owned a John Deere Dealership then, I knew you could still get spare parts for that tractor.  So an hour conversation lead to the first John Deere sale behind the Iron Curtain.

My pay off for all this was knowing how not an enemy "communists" were, an unpopular view when I came back.  I was unable to secure a Top Secret clearance because of my trip when I was in the US Army headed for Viet Nam.  That is how far ahead People to People was of the official culture.

Over the years, I have been active in the Rotary Internation exchange programs (high school and on the college level) and Portland Sister City.  So folks wanting to volunteer, there are programs right here beyond spending two years in the Peace Corp. 

And my current rants include that while the Peace Corp is still going, look what happened to Americorps budget this month!  You think PBS is in trouble, look at what the lack of Americorp will do here at home.

posted 2 years, 2 months ago
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Whoa...I was there in the 60s and 70s. "Won the war on Viet Nam?"  No, I remember Walter Chronkite as being the decider for LBJ, not the folks in the streets.  And that might have been for those who were fleeing daily to Canada to avoid the draft.    I went to Viet Nam and found it was a nationalist war, something "foreign" to all the teapot patriots who were so busy demonizing Communism.  The protests were little about the real causes for the war to end.  We were propping up a Catholic 3% of the population to run the place when 96% of them were Buddhists.   We knew so little about the history and folks that really lived there.

That sounds about the same today.  Protests are often loud and done by folks who really are not in the process over time.  Yes, sometimes it can make a difference.  But it took so long to overturn segregation, more in the Chinese manner of "a generation must die first for change."  Not taking to the streets in protest as a quick fix.  That is happening for gays and marriage now.  The young accept and the old try to pass laws against it, both yelling.  But the young will win, as death finally tips the balance.

Does protest have a place?  Of course. When a total injustice appears is a great time to yell and we have seen a few of these lately.

But protest is just one tool in the tool box.  Vote, campaign, lobby, organize, write, talk to neighbors and many other tools are available.  Yes, they take time and don't have that viseral feel of a good march yelling at the top of one's lungs.  But I have gotten more done in my life with a nudge and a push than with all the youthful protests I participated in in those years of rage and yelling.

If you need proof, look south.  Who is Governor of California?  A former protester who started working, nudging, and pushing.  Elected because of his record, not because of what he was yelling about.  And in spite of his age.

posted 2 years, 2 months ago
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Schools are "social" not socialistic.  It is where we learn to play well in the sand box.  Look how well we play in the "virtual" world of flames and sniping.  So face-to-face still has its place over a virtual school.  The conservatives of this world were the ones behind the acts that gave the 16th section of every township to education funds.  (That is at least 1/36th of what land sold for to schools.  Not shabby as a percentage.)   Conservatives pointed out that a Baby Boom was in place and some districts heard them and didn't overbuild in the 50s and 60s.  (Portland was clueless then.)  What we have had over the last 40 years is the salami game of thousands of cuts and the locals holding only the string of an old building not able to meet current demands.   So we are strapped both on construction and operational budgets. 

I thought I had a "poor" (based on the lowest bidder routine and looking at "Big City" schools) education in a very rural Oregon school in the 50s and 60s, but looking back, it was a holiday compared to today.  PE with showers, a good library, bands galore, sports with even intramural teams, and food in the cafeteria that one could be proud to serve at home.  Plus science labs to blow up things in.   Teachers active as leaders of all sorts of clubs.  Shop and auto classes.  What happened?

posted 2 years, 3 months ago
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Schools have been centralizing for decades.  Districts have huge territories in the name of economy of scale.  But if you look at the cost of transportation, the hidden elephant in school funding as one of the single largest overall system costs, one could have a very good system decentralizing for the same money.  

Funny, when one reads Ivan Doig for other western writers, one finds wonderful stories of one room, one teacher schools.  They taught all levels and did what "modern" school philosphy is aiming for in facilitating learning.   Parents have been calling for "local" education for years.  Maybe it is time to rethink that transportation fleet cost.  And putting that money back into classrooms, not up some tail pipe in smoke. 

posted 2 years, 3 months ago
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One can not have a discussion on homeless populations without that nasty topic of mental illness.  Given foreclosures and jobs, it is short step to not having the meds to be anything but homeless.   These folks tend to stay where they know the area and that hits many suburban folks.  Some stay away from the city centers for the same reason others fled to the suburbs...crime, crowding and all the busy life of a city.  I still can't get that story out of my mind of the homeless vet in Forest Park that taught his 12 year old well as she lived with him years ago.  We failed him and his child, but some folks came forward when his plight was known and kept his privacy intact.

In terms of the program theme of surburban homelessness, add to that towns that once were vigorous with jobs but that are now trending to becoming rentals for Section 8 and poor folks.  Look at the changes in Gresham and Willamina, just for two towns with population trends that are disturbing.  Where we push the poor is part of the homeless picture, as the ones that don't make the move often end up on the street. 

It is cyclic.  When I first came to NE Portland in the 70s, I knew where the last of the madam houses were, the communes and other life style folks that loved the nice houses and low rents.  Now look at the place!  Million dollar homes! 

I miss the County Farm concept.  While Edgewood wasn't quite like this, decentralized places where folks could go and work for growing food they could eat, as well as school children, prisoners, and others in exchange for a safe place to live sounds utopic.   There does need to be places social services meet the problem directly and where folks can be processed into paths that work. 

posted 2 years, 4 months ago
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The point here is how to get student qualified to get IN to MIT or Reed or OIT or OSU or the local Community College through education, not which is best on a narrow ledge of knowledge...but then I educated my daughters, one of  which did go to MIT and both whom are now well employed electrical engineers, who both know how to organic farm and raise a self sufficient household.  They got their liberal arts through the IB program at Lincoln, a school they both transfered to from east Portland.  And they self studied, as well as were early adapters of technology, as they were on computers as pre schoolers in my publishing office.  MIT and Reed are famous for certain styles of education--not being the best place for the average student.  So lets raise the tide for all and get students learning and let the alums argue elsewhere...

The only thing I asked of them on computers is that they be touch typists in speed and accuracy.  One of my daughters now has to "type" in her mind to spell words, as she self admits that perhaps she got a little ahead of how to spell in her learning. 

Bill Gates votes for Khan, if memory serves.  But Khan is for those with a good base that can handle knowledge, so we are back to how to build that base.

Unfortunately, Reed suffers from a long period in which they believed in the Teddy Roosevelt school of teaching--tossing folks in the deep end of a pool and telling them to learn to swim.  They had a lot of drop outs.  So we know that experiece is not the best for all, although there are many very successful Reed graduates.  So we need tools for everyone.

posted 2 years, 4 months ago
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The great stories generated with the new teaching tools is easy to explain--students who did not excel with the existing model finally found something that they could use in the eye-hand-ear combination that stimuates learning.  That functionis different in all of us.  So the danger to holding up one form over others is that we forget that there is no one right answer, one fits all solution in eductation of the mind.

I've taught at colleges, in the Army, and pre-school.  Plus corrected the public school problems that popped up with my own children.  My experience tells me to find what interests the learner and run with it.  And then go on to the next learner and do the same puzzle solving in the context of what I'm suppose to be teaching.  I got low end students to As and Bs and loved it.  High end students like variety and certainty, so they are a little easer to teach.  The key is to find the ah-ha's and expand them to all.  The third grade is a great place to do this.  It gets tougher as you go up in school level, as there is more bad baggage being drug along from past frustrations in learning.

What I'm laughing about in this context of using tech devices in that it sure looks like "vocational" teaching to me.  Kids don't like passive, sit and listen.  They need some hands on.  But we got lost after Sputnik (sorry younger folks...go look it up)  in pushing advanced lecture over real learning over rolling over rocks and explaining what we have discovered.  Or building a boat and seeing it go down a stream.  Then talk about displacement and all the science involved.  Then jumping to "Where could we go if we built a large enough boat?"

Good teaching will always be in fashion.  Tools come and go.

posted 2 years, 4 months ago
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I first saw Oregon's reaction to "racial" issues in Medford in 1962, when the weather station at the airport brought in a black man and crosses were burnt on his lawn.  I then saw a lot of change and anger in folks through my college years, finally seeing some feeling for folks with the march for Martin Luther King after his death.  I went to Viet Nam, and was friends with folks in the "Boonies" where most white folks didn't go.  I came back to OSU, built and ended up teaching "Minority Entrepreneurship" at the Business school, while setting up a black controlled business in Portland.  I then became the first victim of reverse discrimination in teaching minority issues, as I was replaced by another white guy who had taken his wife's Hispanic name.

On Martin Luther King Day, I sputter a bit, as I was exposed to a lot of dialog and feel it is the discussion between Malcom X and Martin Luther King that is more important than making one of them a "saint" and forgetting the other.  As the Chinese say, "It takes some deaths for progress."  Those with engrained "...so carefully taught" biases must leave us and we must hope that each generation has fewer so taught folks.

posted 2 years, 4 months ago
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The "whole" in this topic is cluttered by missing definitions.  Portland once had a wonderful accidental laboratory to showing what pornogrpahy really was.  It was a business just off the Morrision Bridge, long torn down now, where the front part was a snack and drink place you could grab something to take to the office and a second part, beyond a knee wall with a gate, that had "magazines" of naked people doing all sorts of things.  It was not the magazines that were porno.  It was the looking at the observers of the magazines.  You'd see no smiles, no "how the devil did they get someone to look like that?" comments, no laughter....just stares of objectification.  I took a lot of folks in to observe.  Universally, it was judged a "creapy" excercise.  It wasn't the printed matter--although, yes, some might be have been deemed porno, but this was back in "Playboy" days--but the attitude of the viewer that was clearly active pornography.  No discussion after this lab observation ever brought about a sound proposal we could take on to a law maker, as who is the judge of the act here when interaction is the problem, not just the printed image?  The saw "I know pornography when I see it" was plain in that accidental lab of a magazine shop.  But how does one define it outside or in the privacy of one's home?

Yes, we can define some children images as pornography.  Some folks will say some of these images are common in advertisements and some movies.  So we know how touchy that line can be. 

So the Court here is probably right here.  Viewing isn't indication of the breaking of the law, but active downloading is.  And some downloading of other adult themes sure should cancel any single accidental viewing of "child pornography" by other outside observers.   A lot of "accidental" viewings might be part of a circumstantial case that would need further evidence for serious conviction.  At best, one has a moving target in this topic. 

posted 2 years, 4 months ago
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This is a long term Legislature proplem.  Look how they killed the successful Vet Home Loan Program years ago and after its death was forced to pay back $27 million of so it swept away.  It is a shell game of robbing cash piles over stepping up and funding a program.

posted 2 years, 4 months ago
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We used to have, and may still have some, regional cooperationon low number studies.  Becoming an animal vet once was a program you could go to another state and get "in state" tuition.  But once the number of students for specifics get high enough for schools in both states, this disappeared in some areas.

posted 2 years, 4 months ago
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I grew up in the shadow of Oregon's closing of the one room school houses.   I saw High Schools crammed with vets taking welding and continuing education classes.  It is my opinion that Oregon's support of schools slowed hugely when community colleges took all that activity out of High Schools.  While not a vote for taking away community colleges, I would encourage a higher use of high schools for community education of folks that live nearby.  That gets more folks voting for "their"local school.  Stakeholder is an important factor in education.  And geography is a huge cost in education.

I have taught at OSU and Marylhurst, so I have some perspective of the "system" in Oregon.  I wished then and now that we had more 503c (non-profit) representing a specific industry associated with schools.  Like where are the folks wanting products through Oceanography, as just one example?  You can't get classes in how to make a business plan at the School of Oceanography because it is a grant/research profit center.   It would be self interest for the citizens of the State to have such associations and it is a way to get professors extra money to be very good at the full spectrum from pure research to applied research to applied job generating business ventures.  No, colleges are for the pure purpose of advancing knowledge, not advancing the area specific research that could work and put to work folks here.  While Michigan got off the tracks with its ties with the Auto Industry, there has to be a happy medium of private and public in schools that would make Legislators happy to support becuase they see the future flows helping raise the whole of the State.

My view would be for partnerships at schools to be both the high standard of research and applied projects.  That is hard to do when your deans are purely research folks and publish or perish still exists as a path to success. 

(On that note, the fact that no PhD program I know of outside of education has a class within its normal course of instruction on how to teach effectively, a whole other can of worms.)

posted 2 years, 4 months ago
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Seasonality was our "animal" history.  Most people do the same job season in and season out.  What changes for them is recreation.  Most folks don't have bad weather, dark day recreation.  So a seasonal disorder is logical to observe.  When we stood in one place for a couple generations, folks got used to the local seasons or died off, hail Darwin.  But now, we mix it up all over the world and forget we drag our adaptive genes to places they have never been, so welcome seasonal depression, which can happen to perfectly happy people. 

posted 2 years, 5 months ago
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I retired to a farm to get away from the winter blues.  And I changed the holidays. 

First, I look forward to Solstice in December and do it by the traditional bone fires, literally piling up things I can do without and need to be burned.  (On a farm, this is easy.)  And I have a nice bonfire on Solstice.  Sometimes with family and friends showing up, thinking it is a good idea and they bring something to toss on the fire.  Then I celebrate Christmas in Christmas--which is December 25th through January 5th, not the commercial stuff that ends with December 24th.  (Start singing "A partridge in a pear tree.." here.)  You want folks to be happy with you?  Show up with a gift when they don't expect it.  And be there for a discussion or talk about things in the past, now that they are over the stress of getting ready for "Christmas."  Guess what, shopping is cheaper when you do this and you pick up hints at what people really want because they didn't get it during the commerical wave.  Sharing gifts of foods, like a smoked bird or pickled bantam eggs from my farm, are great gifts.

Chickens help.  If you want more eggs, chickens need 14 hours of light.  Not hot light, as 40 watts will do the average coop.  But you have an outside place with animals and more light to go when it is dark.  'Beats a SAD light in the bathroom.  (Although I'm not knocking the SAD light...upping the wattage in the bathroom is a good winter trick.  But a chicken that coos at you is something a SAD light doesn't provide.)

So the advice?  Figure out how to live well and bring smiles to others means less figuring out what to do about your seasonal sadness.  But if it is too tough, get help.

Happy Solstice all...

posted 2 years, 5 months ago
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There are scablands, or swirls where water flows made scablands, in the Portland area.  Metro aquired some of the Tonquin Scablands in their property prgram.  You can go visit them.  My favorite flood movement is up on Canemah Bluffs, a very significant site near Oregon City past the falls to the south.  You see house sized chucks of basault moved slightly.  While naturally beautiful, standing in front of one of those licorice fern covered monsters and figuring out how much force caused it to move the foot or so it did from its place of formation is a humbling activity.

posted 2 years, 6 months ago
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In a land that just split and a lava flow started (that wedding cake form of the Gorge) geology was a fast process here in many forms.  Good grief, the battle between St. Helens and Mazama--which formed Crate Lake--is in the Klamath living stories.

posted 2 years, 6 months ago
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Greenest?  Not when you look at salmon, soil replentishment and other "costs" of dams.  I'm not saying take out the dams, but we should recognize social costs of the hydro system.  Out here on the farm, we are looking at winter low head hydro, when there is huge flow plus summer solar as a greener solution to power needs. 

posted 2 years, 6 months ago
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Do realize, when driving up NE33rd Avenue's hill just before Fremont and that the whole ridge of gravel and small rock is the same scale we see when a wave goes back to the ocean and leaves ripples at our feet.  That's what 400 feet of water column rushing by does!  The ridge is the boundary between the backwater trapped in the Willamette Valley Basis and the water rushing towards the ocean. 

posted 2 years, 6 months ago
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In terms of unique geological history, the floods give that to the Willamette Valley.  I'd love a land use law to protect the deep soils dropped from the floods, simply that no can build on top soil, as it is too valueable.  It has to be removed from the site and removed to a place it will be farmed.  Since some soils in the Valley are 20+ feet deep, that would make building houses on such soils an interesting project.  That way, the geological value of Valley would always be there to feed us.  Houses on some of the deepest soils on earth is just wrong.

posted 2 years, 6 months ago
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And remind us all that the Holocausts still happen again and again and we do little...

posted 2 years, 6 months ago
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