Naughty teacher?

New York is all aflutter at the fact that former sex worker Melissa Petro revealed her shocking past on-line just after receiving tenure.

This little bit of excitement suggests a panoply of possible responses, here are some:

1) I thought New York was a rough-and-tumble bastion of secularism, not rural Alabama. Though I suppose this kerfuffle is of a piece with the resistance to the "mosque" near the World Trade Center site. Both are narrow-minded and illiberal.

2) New York has many thousands of teachers. Based on published estimates, probably two percent or so of the female teachers have had sex for money at some point. One could round this up on the grounds that New York is not rural Alabama, or round it down on the grounds that college graduates are less likely to have sex for money (do we know this?) but in any case Melissa Petro has dozens, if not hundreds of compatriots in the NY public school teaching corps. Has NYC gone to hell as a result? Are students setting up brothels during recess? Maybe this is not really a very big deal after all.

3) Sex work is legal in most developed countries. Maybe it should be here too?

4) Maybe the real issue is Melissa's highlighting of the lack of any rational justification for tenure for primary and secondary teachers. More broadly, if you have a system with tenure, Melissa's timing is clearly the optimal one. In academia, in my experience people who have gamed the tenure system by successfully concealing their type prior to tenure stop doing research immediately after getting tenure. Why wouldn't they?

5) In what sense is it worse for children to have a former sex worker as a teacher compared to, say, a teacher union organizer? I had a math teacher in junior high who broke her arm [sic] banging it on the car of a substitute teacher hired during a strike. Did she provide a good example to her students? Certainly she did not provide a good example of the life of the mind and the value of resolving disputes non-violently. Melissa, in contrast, provides a fine example of not paying attention to stupid laws and also of honesty.

Hide and seek at hotels

Hotels without pretensions helpfully attach the blow drier to the wall right by the sink. It is easy to find and easy to use. Hurrah for hotels without pretensions.

Hotels with pretensions of greatness, though, find the sight of a naked blow drier, right there on the wall by the sink, off-putting, like Victorian ladies who covered naked table legs lest their male guests come unglued by the sight. Or, perhaps but rather implausibly, they imagine that their guests have such a reaction.

So, these hotels put the blow drier in a cloth bag and hide it somewhere. Less ambitious hotels hide it in the bathroom, so that it takes only a minute or two to find, though you still have to unwind the cord and all the rest (and you have to do it every single day, because the cleaning people always put it away again, even after you signal that you do not care by leaving it out).

More artistic hotels will perhaps hide the blow drier in a desk drawer, or in a small cupboard within the big, ugly, wooden box in which they have hidden the attractive, modern TV. A couple of hotels I have been to have even hidden the blow drier at the front desk, so that one has to go down in an elevator and wait in line with the people checking out while offering them your wet, wild hair to gaze upon.

I do not understand why posh places, or places that pretend to be posh, do this. Blow driers are not that ugly. Posh hotels don't put their toilets in cloth bags and hide them, and they usually are ugly. Their lamps are often pretty ugly too and they, too, escape the cloth bag treatment. Presumably the guests at posh hotels have higher values of time, too high, one might think, to want to play hide-and-seek with the blow drier.

A mystery to be solved by some clever applied theorist.

Strange feeling

The Fox News crew is going after Steven Colbert for his Congressional testimony, linked to a couple of days ago by Greg Mankiw. As I watched - I only do this in hotels - they played a tape of Nancy Pelosi defending Colbert. I think this means I agree with Nancy Pelosi on something, which is pretty scary.

To me, though, the truly scary part of the Colbert testimony video is the near complete humorlessness of everyone else in the room. They can't laugh because Colbert is being honest. Congressional hearings are not about information gathering. They are about theater. But no one is supposed to say so.

So, I am with Mankiw and Pelosi on this one: advantage Colbert.

Addendum: A link to some conservative criticism of Colbert.

On boring economists

John Stewart defends, sorta, boring economists, except for Larry Summers, but then he is not very boring.

The first comment is pretty good too.

Via: Economist Mom

On cleaning the house

The Guardian (!) publishes some old-school cleaning advice that seems like it should have ended up in the Daily Telegraph.

My favorite bit:

There's no such thing as a cleaning cheat You can hide mess and disguise stains, but something is either clean or it isn't. If you have people coming and the place isn't clean, just tidy up the clutter and focus on the ambience – candles, flowers and low lighting all work wonders. Make time to get yourself ready, too.

The bit I did not know:

Towels go hard because washing powder and fabric softeners leave mineral deposits in the fibres, which are then baked in as the towels dry. To ensure you have soft towels at all times, wash in laundry liquid rather than powder, and take out of the dryer or off the line before they're bone dry. Soaking hard towels in a solution of water and white vinegar (145ml vinegar: 4.5 litres of water) will bring them back to life.

For readers not familiar with the solar system of British newspapers, a piece on housecleaning that really belonged in the Guardian would recommend cleaning not as exercise, as in this piece, but as a nice way to overcome class biases and bond with the workers (before going out for Thai food and the theater).

On academic political science

Stephen Hayward writes what is in part a very standard sort of piece making fun of the lower tail of paper names from academic conferences. That's all good fun but not very deep and not very original.

The other part of Hayward's piece laments the attempts of political scientists to actually act like scientists, by developing theories and testing them against empirical data. This, he argues, makes them irrelevant, which apparently means that it reduces their chances of showing up on a Sunday morning spin show, or on the sale table at an airport book store, and thus gaining the attention of beltway insiders of the more intellectual sort.

My problem with Hayward's plea is that he seems to confuse political science departments with schools and departments of public policy. They have different names because, within the academic division of labor, they do different things. I would have thought, indeed, that it is also in part the task of institutions such as Hayward's employer, the American Enterprise Institute, to translate academic output into formats that beltway types can digest and use. Such translation is a very useful activity, just not one that is necessarily the best use of time for most academic political scientists.

Asking for "political insights" - does that mean things like "senator so-and-so's mistress is ready to go public for $200K"? - from political science is a bit like asking for tips on how to economize at the grocery story from academic economics. It misses the point.

Movie: Cairo Time

I saw this on Wednesday night after a pretty brutal day (to the extent that any day a professor has can be described as brutal) and really, really enjoyed it. It is a lush, quiet, sensual, beautiful piece. I particularly enjoyed the understatement and that the characters developed by show rather than by tell. It also illustrates how a movie can be very sensual without any actual sex or nudity. This is in my top five for the year.

On the other hand, my wonderful wife did not like it very much; she found it slow going and did not find the central relationship as compelling as I did. The NYT review provides a midpoint between the two of us.