Friday, January 21, 2011

Fight the socialists with Spam

I posted a couple of strongly worded articles Monday night (actually early Tuesday morning, Jan 18.)

Willful ignorance and fear about public education PART 1: The Common Core

Willful ignorance and fear about public education PART 2: Senator Buttars' constitutional amendment to give the legislature control over curriculum


Much of what I said was prompted by what I see as purposely misleading comments about public education at the Eagle Forum Convention last week. Some of those involved were also people who have accused Alpine District and BYU of pushing a socialist agenda, including Oak Norton.

Oak Norton very civilly responded to my post in the comments Tuesday morning (in part 2) and a couple other commenters supported his views that morning as well.

My blog email address is listed in the sidebar and I have infrequent communications with other bloggers/commenters. I don't use the address much, so I also don't get much spam.

I mention this because at 11:37 am, Tuesday, Jan 18, I received a confirmation of my blog email address' new registration on a gay dating website. This was closely followed by a registration confirmation for a website selling some sort of "make money at home" products. When I discovered this Tuesday evening, I opened the spam file and found I had already received over a dozen other offers. At least 2 of them mentioned my new registrations for their services or free offers.

Spam happens, and I always get more spam when I post more often. So for comparison, Gmail filtered 13 spam messages into my spam file from Dec. 21, 2010 through Jan. 17, 2011, with two blog posts during that time. From 11:30 on Jan. 18 through now, about 2 1/2 days and 4 blog posts later (counting the two posts early on the 18th), Gmail has filtered 46 messages into my spam file, including many thanking me for my registration, plus 5 additional messages from the gay dating site and the money at home site that got through the filter.

Let me be clear, I don't think Oak Norton had anything to do with this or that he would. But checking my website statistics, he must have forwarded my post to some friends, mailing list, etc. because I got a bunch of visits--many from northern Utah County--just to the second post all that morning and through the day after his posting.

So I guess my point is to ask the one person on the mailing list who hated my ignorant and/or socialist comments, can you see the irony in your retaliation against the supposed immoral, humanist agenda?

And the site traffic leads me to a further point that I think too many of the Eagle Forum/ASD conspiracy crowd are too reliant on their echo chamber sources of information. (e.g. Eagle Forum, Edwatch, Republican Party, etc.) The Common Core standards were specifically accused of being a further push of the humanist agenda at the Eagle Forum Convention, but less than 1/4 of the site traffic to the Part 2 website where I debated with Oak also looked at the Part 1 post about the Common Core. Hearing and thinking about opposing points of view is critical to teaching students and good thinking in general.

1 comment:

Oak said...

Actually, no I didn't send a link to my mailing list. I can honestly say I had nothing to do with that. Spam is the worst and I get plenty of it on my various sites as well. I wouldn't wish it on anyone. :)

I also want to thank you for the tone of your last reply to me as well as noting that I responded civilly. I appreciate that. I have been swamped the last few days and want to respond back but I've been unable to so far. Hopefully I can soon.

I would like to just note that although I am concerned about how strongly BYU's McKay School of Education and ASD are tied to John Goodlad's organizations, I have never said there was a conspiracy in our state to push a socialist agenda. What I have said is that everything Goodlad does is to push his agenda. Charlotte Iserbyt (author of The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America) calls Goodlad the nations "premier change agent" in pushing us toward socialism in the education system. Has Goodlad succeeded? I argue he has. Many districts have adopted constructivist math programs which he pushes. In ASD the damage to tens of thousands of children is largely irreparable as they have gone into college without knowing the basics of math. We have a remedial math department at UVU instead of just courses. About t70% of incoming students at UVU and SLCC require pre-college level math to bring them up to college readiness. It's really tragic.

Oak