When I was a precocious five year old (that was how my parents described me, anyway) my late father, then the founding Chairman of Bradley University’s Electrical Engineering department, used to take me to lunch with the other professors.

He’d stand me in the booth at Hunt’s Restaurant in Peoria, Illinois and have me recite the Pythagorean Theorem for them.

“The area of the square built upon the hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal to the sum of the areas of the squares upon the remaining sides.”

Now, I’m pretty sure that he and the rest of the engineering professors just wanted to hear me use the word “hypotenuse” in a sentence, but you can imagine how betrayed I felt a few years later in Mr. Evans’ fifth grade math class when I learned that the theorem posited by Pythagoras was really expressed as a2+b2=c2, where C is the longest leg of a right triangle.

So why am I telling you this?

Had I not been the son of an Electrical Engineer who was a college professor, I would have learned the Pythagorean Theorem, including the correct use of the word “hypotenuse,” IN THE FIFTH GRADE!

That wasn’t a special boarding school for precocious children.  It was a public school in Peoria, Illinois within sight of the GI Bill house on Orlando Drive where my mother still lives.

Somehow, I doubt they still teach the Pythagorean Theorem in the fifth grade.

And I can almost guarantee that in Nevada, they don’t.

It is a symptom of the dumbing down of the public school system.  In Nevada, we have lost in short order both the state’s School Superintendent and the Superintendent of the largest district because of, among other things, the enmity of the teachers’ union.

And why such enmity?

Well, the union and its acolytes really don’t want to have results measured in any meaningful way.  And these guys were all about accountability.  Worse, the measurements were extremely embarrassing for the teachers, the administrators, the school boards, and the liberal politicians.

A friend of mine says we ought to print the results of the state’s proficiency tests on the sports pages like box scores.  Why?  “We know those who watch the sports box scores can read and understand numbers.  Putting education performance data there might wake up some people and get them really pissed-and they should be pissed,” said my friend.

That makes him at least twice as smart as the head of the Teachers’ Union, who used to be the head of the Nevada branch of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Now Gary Peck, during his ACLU tenure, was a fair guy. He wasn’t one of the New York-style liberals who thought that free speech only applied to liberals.  So, I thought that when he took his current position as the head of the teachers’ union, he might show the same fairness.

It appears, however, that when it comes to the union, orthodoxy among the leadership is universal.  Peck last week objected to a proposal from the now former state superintendent to pay the top 2000 teachers in the state $200,000 a year, telling the Las Vegas Review Journal that “this kind of skewed investment, giving substantially more to a very small cadre of people, is not the answer.”

Peck said that if the raises were not “across the board,” it would diminish the efforts of the other 18,000 teachers in the state.

Really?

Well, among the other things my late father did in his career was to bring what was then “educational” television to Illinois.  And I remember being there when he was selling the idea of having very skilled and experienced teachers in subjects like math and science available in every classroom.

The then-nascent teachers’ union (this was in the mid 1960s) hated it.

Because the truth is that for most unions, it’s not about doing the job well; it’s about making ever more money regardless of how well you do the job.  And the teachers’ union is not an exception. In fact, they lead the parade.

Now in fairness, it is the liberals who empowered these guys in the first place who decided that our school systems needed to function as social engineers in loco parentis (look it up if you don’t understand it), leaving many teachers to do the basic jobs that parents should be doing.  So I don’t totally blame many otherwise good people, who face a classroom of challenges that their degree in education didn’t prepare them for, wanting combat pay.

But, that said, nobody is forcing you to teach.  There is no sin in doing something else.

And, frankly, we’ve tried just about everything else except incentives to get test scores from abysmal to acceptable.  We even tried lowering the bar so low that you would have to crawl under it. That doesn’t work, either.

Why shouldn’t teachers compete for big money like the rest of the world?

Given what we already spend on public education, why should most of the well-educated kids come from homeschooling, where parents actually do their jobs?

The truth is that exceptional kids can excel even in the worst Clark or Washoe County schools.

But what about everybody else?

Why not incentivize the teachers to be exceptional? Before the really good ones quit in disgust and get a $200,000-a-year job at Apple making iPhones that teach the dummies graduating from Nevada schools to send short text messages spelled correctly?

Photo credit: Zol87 (Creative Commons)

When my late father (a card carrying member of America’s greatest generation) came home from World War II, there was a new industry being born.

Television was just waiting for the resources that were being taken up by the war effort to spread its wings.

Imagine, radio with pictures!  It must have really been amazing at the time.

I was born about four months before the end of the Korean war, and I have no memory of living in a house without a television (although I do remember that the first television I watched was a Magnavox console model with a radio and a phonograph built in.  Black and white, of course.)

Today, I carry not one but two little television sets in my pocket, almost at all times.

Oh, I’m sure that most people don’t think of their iPhones or their Android smartphones as TV sets, but they are.

The other night, Louisville won the NCAA tournament in a great game over Michigan.  The game was on CBS.  And also on my little pocket TV sets masquerading as iPhones.

Had I happened to be in rural Nevada, within reach of a cellular tower, I could have watched that game just as I watched it on Channel 2 on my big screen in my living room near Reno.

This sort of cross platform video brings with it two problems that need to be sorted out; and, as usual, it is competitors lobbying the government to stop progress which is standing in the way.

Let’s start with that cell tower.  And AT&T. (They’re the good guys in this story.)

Now AT&T is the company that brought you the Bell System.  And when the government decided that its network had grown too big, it ordered the company split up.

So AT&T reinvented itself as AT&T Wireless.  The same company that once built a network on which you could dial Peoria, Illinois from Brooklyn by yourself and talk to your kids like they were in the next room became the company that put that phone in your pocket allowed you make that call from almost anywhere.

But there would be more.  This thing called the internet came along, and it was only natural that one of the big players should be the company that developed the telephone network and got too big doing it.  After all, networks are networks, right?

So AT&T started combining a new network with pocket telephones; and over a long period of time, we got to where we could watch the Final Four on an iPhone from one of their cell towers in the middle of nowhere.

There are only two problems with that.

The first is that some lesser competitors want to tie AT&T’s hands in places like rural Nevada by forcing them to keep the old telephone network intact, thus stopping them from building more wireless systems until the little guys can catch up.  How stupid is that?  Stop a company that wants to invest in rural Nevada from investing until it’s too late.

And the second problem is that the television stations and the networks that own the programs don’t want any new competition, so they want to pretend that an iPhone or an iPad getting its signal from a cell tower somehow isn’t the same as a TV set getting its signal from a tower in Reno.

Last week at the National Association of Broadcasters convention, Fox said that if the courts didn’t stop a start-up in New York called Aaero from broadcasting TV stations to iPhone over the air, they would convert Fox to a pay channel and simply get rid of their affiliates.

I need to remind you that these were the guys who decided that three networks were not enough and started a fourth one.  And that CNN wasn’t enough, so they started Fox News.

Something tells me they protest way too much.

Two things about progress.

One is that even if you throw your body across the railroad tracks, it won’t stop the train.

And the second is that the government can’t stop it either. Not for very long, anyway.

But that doesn’t mean they won’t try.  In Nevada, T-Mobile and Sprint would like to use technical provisions in an outdated law to slow down AT&T or stop them from building out a network that only stands to benefit rural Nevada.  And, interestingly enough, most of the other phone companies and internet providers big and small—including Verizon—have sided with AT&T.  It is, in 2013, a reasonable question to ask why the state should regulate this stuff at all.

At the national level, the legacy broadcast networks want the definition of a radio or TV set to be whatever they say it is at any given time to suit their purposes.

The truth is that it’s time for them to come into the 21st century, the same way that the newspaper industry is going to have to.

Using the legislative process to try and slow down or stop progress is not only bad public policy but make the taxpayers losers every time.

If you don’t believe it, here’s an interesting fact.

Cellular telephones were actually invented in the 60s by Bell Labs.  They weren’t rolled out until the late 80s because the FCC spent that long trying to determine who the winners and the losers were going to be.

Think about that the next time some legislator starts telling you how you need to be protected from private companies with new ideas.

Photo Credit: Mobile Cell Phone Review (Creative Commons)

Sigh.

Once a sportswriter, always a sportswriter, I guess.

I just saw that Rutgers University fired its head basketball coach after three seasons, ostensibly because of some practice videos, aired on ESPN, that showed him pushing some of his players and calling them homosexuals. Perhaps in stronger language than that. (There were subtitles.)

Now, far be it for me to condone a basketball coach cussing out players in a practice at a Big East school, where just about every player is selected for his ability to maybe play in the NBA. But if every coach in major college sports were selected on his skills as a diplomat, the final four would be very dull indeed.  Ask one Robert Knight.

A more telling reason for Mike Rice’s firing may well be his last three years’ record of 44-51.

Some years ago, Oral Roberts University had just come to national basketball prominence.  It was 1973, and two guys who have provided me over the years with endless hours of both friendship and entertainment could not have been happier.  Both Oral Roberts and former head coach Ken Trickey are no longer with us; but back then, President Roberts told Trick publicly how much he loved him.

Trick answered with a question:

Would you still love me if I was eight and 20?

“We’d love you,” said the man the University is named for.  “But we’d miss you.”

In the case of Rutgers, they don’t even have to love Rice. Insult the gay community, and you’re fired.  Even if the real reason is probably 44-51.

Explain that to me.  I hate to go all Bill O’Reilly on us, but we can have the Federal Government use our money to pay for putting a crucifix in urine and call it art.  The ACLU can file and win endless lawsuits telling Christians they can’t post a cross on public land. But let a basketball coach call someone a fairy, and even Chris Christie gets into the act as the Governor of New Jersey.  Who knew fatso was so sensitive.

I’ll bet that if Coach Rice called a player a “bible thumper” or a “mackerel snapper,” nobody would have said a word.

Let me be clear here.  I’m all for civility in basketball coaches.  But no basketball player was hurt in the making of those videos.  They were all there voluntarily, and they all stayed there.  You know, getting a quality college education while auditioning for the NBA. That’s why they are called student-athletes.

I’d be willing to give pretty good odds that if Rice were 85-10 over the last three years, he’d still be there, too.  If they had even played their way into an invitation to the big dance this year, he’d still be head coach.

There are two things at work here.

First is institutional hypocrisy at Rutgers. And second is the willingness of people who should know better to cower in the face of political correctness.

When I was growing up, “gay” meant happy, a “fairy” was a mythical creature that gave you money when you lost a tooth, and a “fag” was a cigarette.

Now, they actually have a commercial scolding kids who use the phrase “that’s so gay”.

What’s next?  A rewrite of the late George Carlin’s seven words you can’t say on television?

I didn’t start out to make sport of what we now call the Gay, Lesbian, Bi-sexual, and Transgender community (my original target was Rutgers.) But you know what? If the shoe fits. . .

Photo credit: Dave Schumaker (Creative Commons)