The 2011 Thing We Won't Forget Award

The first award bestowed by iBlogAmerica

I took it all pretty seriously this year. I found I couldn't even finish most of my ideas because I couldn't stop trying to be The Best Blogger You've Ever Read. Sigh. Waste of time, really.

It's all retrospectives in December. Why? Because everyone wants to know what we're supposed to remember from 2011. Well, in order to do our civic duty, we here at iBlogAmerica offer: The 2011 Thing We Won't Forget Award.

Let's get to it. What were the best fashion disasters? Dancers for Dancing Amongst the Stars? Viral Videos? It's been a huge year, to be sure. But mostly for weather, politics, and business.

WEATHER

These are a few of my favorite things, of course. We got an East Coast earthquake, a NYC hurricane, and three solid blizzards (including one on Halloween). Pretty awesome-- if problematic (because while natural events are awesome, people's lives get ruined. Like in Joplin. No smiles about that-- or about flooding in Vermont or New Jersey. Awesome weather events often are terrible ones-- and that's problematic. And an earthquake isn't weather, technically.)

POLITICS

Osama dead, gay marriage in NY, the Occupy movement, and the GOP presidential carnival are all huge events from this year. Union busting and tenure ending in education (as we predicted in this blog)-- that'll be big in the years to come, for sure.  The ten year anniversary of 9/11 will stick with us, for sure. The embarrassing US Congress will be hard to forget.  The Arab Spring, of course, the death of Qaddafi (or Gaddafi or Xaddafi or whever), the Russian winter. Kim Jong Il died. That's big in North Korea. The Axis of Evil had a terrible year! And who can forget the End of Days by Harold Camping. Oh, right: probably most of us. But I'm still excited for the Mayans in 2012!

MUSIC

But for art, my other other favorite thing, it was a pretty lousy year. Think about music. Gaga? Perry? Tyler the Creator? Beyonce? Kanye and Jay, Lil' Wayne or Wiz? Not much there. I liked Gaga's drag at the Grammy's (or was it American Music Awards). “Born This Way,” even though it's a naked ripoff of Madonna, is an awesome tag for our time. I'm glad Gaga did it. The biggest music story of 2011 may have been that Amy Winehouse died-- but she was so quickly replaced by the much-less-dangerous-to-herself-and-everyone-else-Adele that no one seemed to notice much after a month went by. The point is: there were few truly huge ideas or styles that will likely survive to next year.

MOVIES

Movies? Um. Harry Potter? Dragon Tattoo? The Tree of Life? Hugo? Melancholia? The Artist? Moneyball? Midnight In Paris? Shame or Guilt or whatever. Gosh, I don't know. Where's the unforgettable stuff? Dragon Tattoo seems like it might affect female stereotype model in Hollywood.  That would be cool.  As for the piece you can't imagine missing? I guess I missed it.

THEATRE

Broadway had Warhorse. That's pretty amazing. Big puppets, like in Avenue Q, but without the irony. Certainly an analogue standout in a year of such digital-tech development. Sleep No More has got to be the most successful installation/theatre piece of many years (all time).  I think it has more to do with shooter-perspective video games than anything else-- but that's a whole other blog.  I guess that I should mention Spider Man and Book of Mormon-- but it's hard to see how either will move theatre very far forward.

TV

I hear that there are tons of awesome shows this year. I don't really watch them-- but I should. Mad Men? American Family? Boardwalk Empire? 30 Rock? I've seen a few episodes but certainly not enough. They're all supposed to be amazing.  Memorable?  Well, Tina Fey is the most important female writer in entertainment.  That's not a small thing.

BOOKS

I read The Submission, by Amy Waldman. You should read it. It's an awesome portrait of race, religion, and politics of our time. I am so glad to have read it in the shadow of the constantly growing World Trade Center. Keep growing, building!

TECH

Siri is big. We will all be talking differently forever. Mark my words (add echo effect here). You wait until the 4 and 5 year olds of today are 14 or 15. They will not talk like robots or anything, but they will be deeply changed by the voice interfacing which is sure to be the greatest thing that Steve Jobs is leaving us all. No, he didn't invent it-- he just made its hardware platform a global phenomenon about 8 years before his company made it standard on the iPhone 4S. Yup, we'll be changed by that one.

AND THE AWARD GOES TO...

2011's biggest contribution to world history: the Too Big To Fail Movement in Business. Politically, no one is too big to fail. Look at all the toppled world leaders, Republican presidential candidates, and Anthony Wiener-- but don't look too long.

In Business, being Too Big To Fail is the winning strategy. It spawned the Occupy Movement, remains an albatross around Obama's neck, and and will likely lead to all kinds of political and class conflict in 2012. Go BP! JP Morgan! Bank of America! Congratulations to you all.

The idea “Too Big To Fail:” iBlogAmerica's winner of the 2011 Thing We Won't Forget Award.

Let me know if I forgot anything.

Thanks for the attention, gentle readers. We here at iBlogAmerica (me) wish all of you (you) a happy, prosperous, and risk-filled new year. Go get 'em in 2012, marshmallow.

Wrong Story, Wisconsin

School's got 99 problems and money ain't one.

I'm not old enough to remember a time when the media referred to groups of teachers acting as “political demonstrators.” As a public school teacher, it's a bit unsettling-- but, I can't help but feel a bit of apathy about it. If you've seen a hundred protests, you've seen them all.

In fact, I suspect the whole “protest movement” looks a bit passe to people under the age of 50. On TV, I've seen marches for everything: civil rights, women's rights, gay rights, black men's rights, white men's rights, Puerto Ricans' rights, gun rights, Glenn Beck's rights, Howard Stern's rights, potheads' rights, and recently, moderates' rights (thanks, Jon Stewart).

I've also seen marches against everything: gun control, abortion, gay marriage, Bush, Obama, the war(s), oil companies, liberal media, Fox News, taxes, the government, and, sadly, dead soldiers (thanks, Fred Phelps). Protest marches don't seem to mean, well, anything. Protest marches often look fun, like a cool party or something, or scary, like a group of wackos, but they don't seem effective.

Protest marches just seem to highlight divisions. And, in this case, they are keeping us from focusing.

The Wrong Problem Problem

As the palpable tensions in public education bubble to the surface in the midwest, the whole country is finding that old arthritis of education woes more difficult to ignore. It's foolish to try and blame anyone, of course, but absolutely unsurprising battle lines are being drawn. The easiest narrative for both politicians and the media (our time's most powerful storytellers) is that the tension grows out of a clear rift in our country-- between those who support smaller government and those who support bigger government.

This story of big government versus small, of left versus right, will only keep distracting us from the cancerous problems of education. I'm not saying that we don't have a money problem. We do. But it is NOT the big problem. And it has to stop driving our discourse about improving education.

Here's what we keep talking about:

1.People want lower taxes

2.American students are getting whooped by students in other countries

3.Teachers' pensions are out of step with other professions

4.There are too many bad teachers

5.Teachers have “short” work days and have summers off, holidays, etc.

The budget constraints are making it more difficult to ignore the big problems. Look, when your mom gets an aggressive form of cancer, you don't say “what's the most cost-effective way we can save her?” Sure, you have to talk about money in that situation, but it's not the ONLY or BIGGEST concern.

Raising taxes, lowering taxes, abolishing unions-- none of these “corrections” address improving education. Sure, we can try and save money. But when do we start talking about better education?

Here's what we SHOULD be talking about:

1.Attracting and keeping great teachers-- and making them the most important element in our schools

2.Evaluating students to test skills and critical thinking, not regurgitation

3.Rebuilding our school infrastructure so that it serves the primacy of learning (not student containment)

4.Resisting the colossal error of making education a “customer service” industry

As long as the battle is between politicians and union members, we're going to have the same, tired arguments with the same, feckless results.

Education is the mother f#$%ing future of the country! When can we get serious about fixing it?

For some of my ideas about fixing education, read my fun-to-read (and smartly handled) four part series “Scapegoats and Saviors.” And I barely swear at all in these articles.

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