As many of you know, I don’t have a twitter page, but Denise, social goddess that she is, made one for our book, The Simpsons in the Classroom–you can follow us under Simpsonology. It is through this apparently fabulous entity that we got in contact with some of the heavy hitters at THE SIMPSONS: David Silverman, animator & director; Josh Weinstein, producer & show runner & writer; and Chris Ledesma, music editor. The latter invited us to see a recording of the music for the show if we were ever in LA. This year’s MLA happened to be in LA, so down we went last weekend.

Walking on to the Fox lot, we were nervous. As Denise had explained to our friend Kathy, our excitement was extraordinary because the circumstances were. How many people have loved one thing and been obsessed with one thing, since 1987? How many people then teach it and write about it? How do you expect people to react when they get to meet their obsession after over twenty years? (I think we held ourselves together very well, all things considered.)

Getting our passes from the guard seemed surreal; I think we were both expecting to be turned away, like it was all some sort of mistake, but the passes were given and we set off down a fake street that they use on BONES and HOW I MET YOUR MOTHER toward the FUTURAMA trailer to meet up with Josh. Josh used to work on THE SIMPSONS, but now is on FUTURAMA, which Comedy Central will hopefully renew (it’s been really good lately–check it out!). The two nice people in reception were expecting us, and Josh was summoned.

We started with a tour of the Futurama building–his office, the revision room, etc. Josh offered us some Matt Groening doodles that were on post-its in the revision room. Apparently, Groening can’t sit down without doodling something and we now have our own proof of that.

Then Josh took us on a brief tour of relevant parts of the lot. The recording stages in one building are named after three famous Hollywood women–Jane Russell, Marilyn Monroe, and Marge Simpson. We couldn’t access Marge’s studio because they were doing some dubbing for BONES. “You mean Angel from BUFFY might be in there?” quipped Denise.

The old SIMPSONS‘s building itself looked like a motel–it was small and two stories and all of the rooms were accessible by the outside. When you look straight on to it, you see a fountain with koi (and netting to unsuccessfully keep feral cats out) and bathrooms. Groening’s office is behind a nondescript door to the right of the bathroom doors.

Along the way, we met Ian Maxtone-Graham (who wrote, among other things, “24 Minutes” and who is very tall), Rob LaZebnik (“Homer vs. Dignity”), and Michael Nobori (“To Surveil with Love”). Due to Denise’s description of my love for Weird Al Yankovic, Mr. Nobori has probably banned me from the lot from now on.

Josh then took us for coffee at Moe’s Bar on the lot. We talked about working with his old writing partner, his brief stint on SIT DOWN, SHUT UP, Groening, and the behind the scenes stories of some episodes.

By this time, it was 11; we’d been there for an hour. Josh had to hand us over to Chris, which is where I’ll continue with the next post.

(Relevant pictures are being uploaded to Facebook; I can’t get them to post here . . .)

Diane Ravitch, former assistant secretary of education under George W. Bush, has come out with a new book explaining that the Bush education agenda was flawed.

Of course, this is one in a long line of such books. Cheney seems to be the only one who thinks everything went just fine.

I read an excerpt the book in a recent American Educator. I was shocked (shocked!) to discover that apparently, making tests the only test for whether education is working is a bad idea. It leads to people teaching only to the test, to cheating, and to students knowing how to fill in bubbles while their little minds are unfilled. It leads to an incomplete understanding of whether a teacher is successful or not.

And under George Bush’s plan, it leads to rich schools getting richer and poor schools getting poorer, as schools are punished for low scores. It leads to putting all of the blame on our low-paid and ill-respected educators when the scores don’t turn out right. It leads to a perpetuation of class stereotypes–rich people are just better and smarter and poor people deserve to be poor because they’re lazy and stupid–if they all take one test, surely we can see that (never mind that they are starting off on a teeter-totter rather than a level playing field due to the money coming from property taxes rather than fair allocation).

Wow. Who would have thought that No Child Left Behind would have left children behind? Well, any of us who opposed it from the beginning. Ravitch basically says that everyone in the administration was well meaning, that these were honest mistakes. I will buy that they were well meaning. And some of these mistakes might have been innocent. I mean, all of the consequences were totally forseeable, but not everyone is smart enough to actually think things through. I would guess that some people were fine with letting certain children fall behind–because it defended the class and power status quo, because it might have ultimately led to the dissolution of public education, etc.

Ravitch is good when talking about what went wrong; she is less effective in talking through what needs to be fixed.

Here’s what needs to happen. 1. The ideologues need to look at the reality and to see that this policy is flawed. People on both the right and the left need to make sure that Obama doesn’t keep this policy in place.

2. We need to level the damn playing field–all children have a right to equal education. We will all be stronger if we are all literate.

3. We need to think about the mental infrastructure of this nation. If I want a nation of smart, educated, critical thinkers, which I do, I need to be as supportive of mental infrastructure as I am of the other kinds. Our current economic crisis has meant that banks and car companies and airlines have gotten bailouts, even when those companies have been spending and making money willy-nilly. We have invested a lot of stimulus money in public works–even while the schools in my district (including the university for which I work) are struggling, we have tons of crews working on the roads downtown and the down the street.

Why don’t we consider our schools too big to fail? Wouldn’t giving stimulus money to educators to create smaller class sizes be a good idea that would pay off a thousand times? How many teachers could we hire for what one bank CEO makes? How many decent textbooks could we buy, so that each child has access to one (one of my friends knows a teacher who has 25 books total for six classes of 35 students)?

America is all about investment. Why aren’t we investing in our children? Why aren’t we investing in ourselves?

In the September 09 edition of Wired, Clive Thompson has a short article in which he basically cites and agrees with Andrea Lunsford (a writing teacher at Stanford) that our students are more literate in the age of facebook and texting–they actually write (even if it’s just tweets) when they aren’t required to by a teacher.

The argument further says that the students understand the idea of audience more because of the “life writing” they do.

I find the argument intriguing, but I have one quick bone to pick. “As for those texting shortforms and smileys defiling serious academic writing? Another myth. When Lunsford examined the work of first-year students, she didn’t find a single example of texting speak in an academic paper.”

Well, I’ve seen it. I’ve actually returned a paper to a student and asked him to spot the error in line four. Even when looking for it, he couldn’t see the “you” is not spelled “u” error because he was so used to texting. While texting speak in academic writing isn’t rampant, it happens.

I’m upset that we would declare something a myth because one teacher didn’t find an example of it from the papers she collected at Stanford. This is a hasty generalization–the sample size is too small and is perhaps not representative of the college population.

Just saying.

The article is here: http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/17-09/st_thompson

Michael Savage was on Talk of the Nation today because he has apparently been banned from entering the U.K. because of his hate speech. He was offended, of course, and kept talking about the first amendment, which does not apply to the U.K. He also mentioned the Magna Carta, but not in a way that indicated he had read the document.

Talk of the Nation is a call in show, so they took a call from a man who pointed out that if you replace “Christian” or “Jew” in place of “Muslim” when Savage talks, he might not be on the air.

Savage interrupted him and said he wouldn’t stay on the show if he had to listen to people calling from insane asylums in their pajamas. He ended up hanging up on the show.

Yes–our defender of free speech, who makes sure he has all the freedom to speak and all the freedom to not let anyone else do so in his earshot.

The other news: had meeting with the boss about my future (meaning will I be invited to be more permanent in three years). The good news: some of the highest student ratings in the department. The bad news: I thought my “file” was cumulative, meaning that whatever I added each year was added. I had been trying not to submit the same stuff again and again, but apparently that’s what I need to do for the next three years.

Not a problem, of course. I just feel silly.

What we’ve learned today:  students appreciate me, I’m not skilled at selling myself, Dan Savage is so much cooler than Michael Savage (that’s not even Michael’s real name, by the way).