View 681 Saturday, July 2, 2011 – 1
I’ve been catching up all day. I’ve been working on fiction, including getting some older books ready for Kindle publication, but also on the new novella with Niven and Barnes. This takes place in the Legacy of Heorot world, and is set in the time between that first book and Beowulf’s Children. (The Kindle version of Beowulf’s Children is in preparation.) We are calling this a novella but it will be about 50,000 words, which was a novel when I got into this racket.
There’s a ton of stuff to write about, but it’s late.
Thought experiment: in most cities now the average expenditure per child in school is $10,000. Now High Schools may have different requirements, but in my time, grade school was 2 grades to the room, about 20-25 students to the grade, and a teacher with a 2 year Normal school degree. Imagine now that we take a four-year degreed teacher, give her 25 students, and $200,000. She is free to do with the money as she sees fit, but for every student who doesn’t get a passing grade (we’ll quibble about how we go about determining that another time) she gets docked $8,000, and for every student who gets outstanding grades she gets a $10,000 bonus. Again we can quibble about how all this is determined, but assume it’s meaningful and real, not just a way to stroke the unions. She’s free to teach anywhere she wants; we can be sure that capitalism will take care of offering classrooms for rent with desks and chalkboards and all the expected accoutrements. She can hire assistants as she likes. She can buy or rent computers, and Internet connections. In other words, she is free to try what she likes and keep the profits, so long as the kids learn, and she can go for the bonuses.
Do you think this would be an improvement over what we are doing now?
It’s late. Good night.
