Immutable Daredevil and the (Possibly Tragically Delayed) Frank Miller Ascendency

Walking out of an afternoon showing of Wall-E last weekend, I noticed some big cardboard movie displays advertising The Spirit, a forthcoming movie based on the classic Will Eisner comic book series, to be written and directed by Frank Miller. We're clearly living in a Frank Miller heyday, and it's been a long time coming. The comics artist and writer burst into prominence in the early 1980s with a seminal run on Daredevil before creating in 1986 what remains his most famous and influential work: Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. After breaking with mainstream comics publishers over his objections to industry self-censorship, Miller spent most of the 1990s creating a gritty crime series for Dark Horse Comics called Sin City along with a personal project rooted in a childhood obsession with Spartan warriors, called 300. The latter was, of course, adapted into a phenomenally successful and profitable 2007 film of the same name, grossing close to half a billion dollars worldwide on a $60 million budget. Coming on the heels of Robert Rodriguez's successful 2005 Sin City adaptation ($158 million gross, $40 million budget), it's little wonder that Hollywood is suddenly green-lighting all things Miller. 

In some ways, it's strange that it took so long. Miller's approach to comics has always been intensely and purposefully cinematic; Sin City is pure film noir on paper and even the early Daredevil work featured moody establishing views and rigorous visual coherence. Rather than feature his heroes in exaggerated comic-bookish poses, Miller carefully planned story sequences shot by shot. I bought Daredevil #181 the day it was published, and the double-sized story of Bullseye murdering Daredevil's nemesis/ex-lover Elektra, only to be defeated by Daredevil in an epic battle that raged across the rooftops of Hell's Kitchen, still stands as one of the greatest single comic book issues ever made, and defined the Daredevil character in perpetuity.* 

Much of that material was incorporated into the 2003 Daredevil move adaptation. Yet that movie was mediocre at best, and in retrospect the reason is clear: the film-makers used Miller's stories and characters but failed to take advantage of his single greatest strength: his genius visual style. Rodriguez and 300 director Zach Snyder, by contrast, translated Miller's comics nearly shot for shot, essentially using the panels as a storyboard, and the results speak for themselves. After years toiling in the relative obscurity of comics (and several failed attempts at the movies, see Robocop 2 & 3 (actually, don't)) Miller is finally getting the resources and recognition he deserves.

And yet...it must be said: Frank Miller hasn't done anything good in years. Ten years, to be precise--the 300 mini-series was released in 1998. Looking back, it was clearly his artistic apex, and the resulting fall has been steep. His post-That Yellow Bastard efforts on Sin City were repetitive. He spent years working on a Dark Knight sequel that I frankly can't remember a panel of. And for the the last three years he's been slowly releasing new issues of All-Star Batman and Robin the Boy Wonder, pencilled by Jim Lee. It's shockingly bad. So much so that I seriously wonder whether Miller has suffered some kind of mental break/total artistic collapse; it might be the worst high-profile comic I've ever read. It's badness is all the more painful in contrast to Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely's simultaneously-released Eisner Award-winning All-Star Superman, which will probably go down as one of the ten or so greatest Superman stories ever told, and, even worse, Miller's previous re-conception of Batman's early years, the four-part 1987 Batman: Year One, illustrated by David Mazzucchelli, which in some ways has been just as influential as The Dark Knight (its traces are all over the new Christopher Nolan Batman films). 

There's still some great stuff from Miller's earlier years to tap: another Sin City adaptation is on the way, and someone really ought to make a movie out of the Martha Washington sci-fi series he did with Dave Gibbons. For all its flaws, Ronin could be terrific in the right hands. Heck, even an adaptation of Elektra: Assassin,  goofy and probably unfilmable though it is, would have been way better than the painfully inept cheap-o Jennifer Garner flick of which the less is said the better. 

But to be honest I'm worried that Miller's descent into over-stylization and self-parody, both visually and verbally, is too deep to reverse, and that he'll end up crashing and burning at the very moment when decades of influential work are finally bringing him fame and fortune.

*One of the interesting things about superhero comic books is the total lack of character development in the conventional sense. Because the iconic characters need to last forever for economic reasons, they can't ever change in any significant way. They have beginnings, but never end. As a result, the artistic challenge for the comics superhero creator is less to tell a story than define a situation, a particular combination of character circumstances and external environment within which other writers and artists can explore essential themes. 

Some characters get there right out of the box--the unchallenged big three, Superman, Spider-man and Batman, haven't changed in any truly significant manner since their very first issues. Each was perfect in its own way, and it's not a coincidence that those characters remain vital decades later (and have spawned the most successful movie franchises). Others take longer--the X-Men didn't become the X-Men we know today until Chris Claremont and John Byrne took over the book around the same time that Miller made Daredevil his own.  The Punisher was created in 1974 and was a reliably popular if second-tier anti-hero for years afterward, but there's simply no imagining any other version of the character now that Garth Ennis is finishing up his MAX run and accompanying pre- and postscripts.

And some never get there. As durable and mildly famous as she is, there's never really been a definitive run on Wonder Woman, a fact that Joss Whedon lamented when he was (unsuccessfully) trying to adapt the character for film. The iconic Avengers story turned out to be The Ultimates, which reached its heights even as the Avengers themselves were being disassembled. History suggests that it's actually really difficult to achieve that combination of compelling origin, motivation, personality, powers and milieu that all the great characters have. 

The interesting thing is that once a superhero character is truly defined, it exerts a gravitational force on all future stories that is all but insurmountable. Superman is who he is: alien, noble, decent, powerful, incorruptible, always alone. There are always new ways to explore those qualities--see All-Star Superman, it's really good--but there's no way to change them. That means that while the stories themselves can be moving and gratifying in all the ways good stories are, they rarely have any permanent significance vis a vis the characters themselves. You can, for example, read Miller's Daredevil, which wrapped up in 1984, put it down and then start reading Brian Michael Bendis' Daredevil, which began in 2001, and lose virtually nothing for having missed the hundreds of issues published in between. Bendis isn't continuing the Daredevil story; he's retelling the Miller-defined Daredevil myth. That's why there are few things more absurd than a comics fan complaining about some inconsistency in "continuity" on a major hero; the whole idea of a linear, irreversible chain of time and causality runs counter to the essential logic of the characters and the industry. It's also why the large majority of the best superhero comics published in the last decade came when writers and artists were given the chance to step away from the so-called "regular" books and re-tell the stories with total freedom, i.e. the Ultimate and All-Star lines at Marvel and DC respectively or thinly disguised facsimiles like Alan Moore's Supreme, Kurt Busiek's Astro City, etc. 

 

Shanker Seance Cont'd

Rich Kahlenberg takes to the pages of The American Prospect to apply the Shanker lens to the Sharpton / Klein vs. EPI et al "dueling manifestos" controversy, concluding:

Moving forward, Sen. Barack Obama would do well to agree in part and disagree in part with combatants on both sides of this old war -- something Shanker himself showed was possible by strongly defending the role of teacher unions in education but also challenging union orthodoxy where he believed it was bad for children. The Sharpton/Klein group is right to say schools matter and that teacher unions too often block needed efforts to get rid of bad teachers and encourage great educators to teach in high-poverty schools. Shanker forthrightly acknowledged these problems, supporting bonuses to attract good teachers to low-income schools and backing a "peer review" plan in which teachers judge one another and fire incompetents. Under such programs, more teachers are terminated than when principals evaluate teachers because every good teacher is hurt by the presence of bad teachers in a school.

What Shanker never did, however, was demonize teacher unions or say teachers alone should be held accountable. Oddly missing from the Sharpton/Klein mission statement is any call for student accountability. Why, as Shanker asked, would kids work hard to do well when told: If you fail this test, we won't punish you, but we will punish your teacher? Kids going to selective colleges have a strong incentive to do well, but for the vast majority of students who attend nonselective colleges, or go straight into the work force, doing well academically doesn't really matter that much.

"Learn from both sides" is inherently appealing but I don't think Rich really makes the case here. Where, in anything the Sharpton / Klein folks have to say, is there evidence of "demonizing" teachers unions? This nonsense certainly qualifies as such. But it's not demonizing to suggest that teachers unions support bad policies, any more than its inherently demonizing to disagree with anyone about their policy choices. There is simply no way to have a productive education policy dialogue if anyone who publicly criticizes union positions on the issues automatically gets thrown into the anti-labor camp.

As for the "student accountability" issue, I'll confess to never having really understood what we're missing. Students get grades, and if they don't pass, they don't graduate, which in this day and age is a catastrophic consequence and certainly a sufficient incentive to learn. Of course, it's well known that social promotion is rampant in many schools, which is why some states have decided to only award 12th grade diplomas to students who can pass a 9th or 10th grade (note: not a 12th grade) test. But as a rule, people on the teachers union side of the issues are opposed to such policies. Their positions tend to be less about balance via accountability for everybody and more about accountability for nobody.

Moreover, to say that "for the vast majority of students who attend nonselective colleges, or go straight into the work force, doing well academically doesn't really matter that much" is really, strikingly wrong. Students who go to nonselective colleges still have to take college placement tests, and the majority of them fail those tests, at which point they're assigned to non-credit-bearing remedial classes, paying thousands of dollars out of pocket (increasingly funded by student loans) to re-take courses they were told they passed in high school but really didn't. Remedial college students are far less likely to graduate than their peers. As for those who go into the workforce, is Rich really saying that there's little or no relationship between academic achievement and the ability to do well in a career? If so, why are we even debating the issues, that's a profundly anti-education argument more than anything else. I don't think Al Shanker would approve.

Fox, Meet Henhouse

Depending on who you talk to, Congress is either on the verge of finally passing the long-delayed new version of the federal Higher Education Act, any day now, really, or time has run out and it's all going to get pushed off into 2009 and beyond. Either way, it's worth pointing out that, based on the language currently being considered, Congress is on the verge of doing something very smart and then immediately undermining that smart thing by doing something that's very, um, not smart.

Here's the smart thing: the new law would require colleges and universities to report graduation rates "disaggregated by gender, by each major racial and ethnic subgroup, by recipients of a Federal Pell Grant, by recipients of a [federal student loan], and by recipients of neither a Federal Pell Grant nor a [federal student loan."

This is a commensense and extremely important provision. The federal government spends many billion dollars per year on aid programs for financially needy students, and state governments spend billions more. A whole host of programs, research areas, and controversies exist surrounding the issue of college access for low-income undergraduates. Yet there is shockingly little data about what happens to those students once they get to college. We collect graduation rates for basketball and football players, but not for students receiving financial aid. This clearly needs to change.

Unfortunately, the bill proceeds to add this qualifier: "if the number of students in such subgroup or with such status is sufficient to yield statistically reliable information and reporting will not yield personally identifiable information about an individual student. If such number is not sufficient for such purposes, then the institution shall note that the institution enrolled too few of such students to so disclose or report with confidence."

This seems reasonable, no? It wouldn't make sense to calculate a graduation rate for, say, one student. But here's the problem: the bill as written would allow individual institutions to determine the threshold for "statistically reliable." This is a terrible, terrible idea. It is the road to madness, because inevitably different institutions will choose to interpret the provisions in different, self-serving ways. This is a certainty. Congress made the same mistake when it wrote No Child Left Behind and allowed states to determine which statistical tests to apply in deciding how to hold schools accountable for student performance. Some decided to use a p < .05 test of statistical significance; others chose p < .01. Some decided that five students was the minimum number for reporting results; others decided it was 100 students. Worse, many states change their statistical standards every year.

It's highly likely that at most institutions, students on financial aid graduate at a lower rate than the student body as a whole. This can be embarrassing, further giving colleges reasons to use the most expansive exclusion rules imaginable. And since there are thousands of higher education institutions out there, the U.S. Department of Education won't even be able to do what it does with states under NCLB, which is require them to make their statistical standards public and submit them for approval.

If those goes through as written, here's what will happen: after a number of years, the data will finally be released to the public. Researchers will quickly notice that many institutions with signficant numbers of students on financial aid aren't reporting results as required. When asked, the institutions will say they applied a statistical test, but won't say what the test was. Then the colleges that did report results will argue that, due to the inter-institutional variance in reliability standards, it's unreasonable to compare Pell grant graduation rates at one institution to another, which of course is pretty much the whole point of having them in the first place.

There's a better way, which is the way graduation rates are currently reported: institutions submit all their data, confidentially, to the National Center for Education Statistics, and then NCES applies a uniform statistical standard to all institutions. That's the way it already works with the race and gender disaggregation, and it works perfectly well: small n sizes aren't reported and qualifiers are attached to rates that are statistically less reliable. If this new language goes through the whole thing will end in tears and we'll have to wait another ten years to find out which institutions are doing a good job helping low-income students earn degrees.

(Trying to) follow the money

Public and private funding is pouring into Teach for America as the highly regarded organization expands the number of recent college graduates that it places in some of the nation's toughest-to-staff classrooms. The organization plans to quadruple its operating budget from $40 million to $160 million between 2005 and 2010 as in doubles, to some 8,400, the number of its"corps members" working in disadvanted urban and rural public schools.

But the Office of Inspector General at the US Department of Education has charged TFA with failing to account for half of the $6 million the organization received in federal discretionary grants between 2003 and 2005. The IG's office scrutinized a sample of the federal funds and concluded in a report released last month that "TFA did not fully comply with applicable laws and regulations..." The organization "could not provide adequate supporting documentation [for half of its expenditures] because it lacked sound fiscal accountability controls," the IG's office wrote, adding that, "On several occassions, we requested additional documentation from TFA's Vice President of Accounting and Controls, but she never provided us with adequate supporting documentation or an explanation of the expenditures."

TFA told the IG's office that it has since implemented a new accounting system and updated its fiscal policies and procedures.

The Baby Borrowers: Try Before You Buy

The Baby Borrowers is not about teenage couples trying to raise kids. It's about teenage couples, period.

The examples of bad parenting are shocking, but I tend to think they're mostly indicative of the constraints of the situation. In one instance, Daton and Morgan's "son" soils his diaper at the home of another teen couple. Morgan tries to get him to walk to the bathroom, but she's giggling and he doesn't want to walk, so she ends up dragging him. Nevermind that a child with a soiled diaper is being drug across the floor of someone else's house, because, really, neither the house nor the child belongs to anyone in the room. No one's really responsible at all, making the whole exercise at times painful and always riveting, but more importantly, it's just entertainment.

Mostly we see how, at any given time, one member of the couple is struggling with the burdens of parenthood. How the other member of the couple reacts means all the difference. When Austin refuses to stay home with the kids, preferring to leave Kelly at home while he works, Kelly pouts. Then, when Austin takes a shower, Kelly leaves the house to commiserate next door. No one is left watching the twin two-year olds that were supposed to be in their care.

Sasha and Jordan provide the best example of a functioning couple. Although they face much more difficulty with two-year-old Luke this week, they each step up when the other fails. Sasha teaches Jordan how to comfort young Luke when he's crying, and later, when Luke rebels against Sasha too, Jordan is there to bring her back and calm her down. The episode ends badly for even these two though, as we see Sasha preparing to pack and leave. The announcer leaves us hanging.

Besides the primary lesson of waiting to have children until a suitable, cooperative partner has been found, the show deserves credit for one other thing: it does a really good job of making crying sound like the worst noise on earth. That audible reminder is powerful, and the only true birth control evident in the show. Next week that deterrent is gone as the couples take over pre-teens.

If You Were John McCain's Education Advisor...

After much breathless anticipation, John McCain will finally be addressing education in a formal campaign appearance a week from now at the NAACP. Let's imagine you were given free rein to write that speech. Assuming the senator would give the remarks as delivered, and, as speechwriter, you would not be bound to the letter of what he's said in the past (not that he's said that much about education). What would you say? What could you say?

For all the edublogosphere's patter about the education ideas of the two major candidates, McCain's opponent is the one in the best position. Read this excerpt from the AP article announcing McCain's coming address for proof:

Unlike Democratic candidate Barack Obama, McCain is not calling for increasing the roughly $23 billion the federal government now spends to implement the law. Much of that goes toward educating poor children.

Keegan said McCain would reallocate how the money is spent. For example, more would go toward merit-pay programs for teachers. School districts are increasingly experimenting with programs like that, in part because of a Bush administration program that helps pay for the initiatives.

The national teachers' unions oppose linking student test scores to teacher pay. Obama supports the idea when teachers help negotiate and craft the merit-pay plans.

These are absolutely perfect paragraphs for Obama. In the first graf, McCain doesn't want to increase spending for "educating poor children." Instead, he'll take that money and reallocate it for merit pay for teachers. Obama supports that too, but only if the merit pay plans are structured with teacher buy-in. Obama comes off as reasonable and measured, while McCain comes across as the guy down the street grumbling about his taxes.

McCain is left in a pretty tough position. Education is not his passion, and it shows with how little he's put into the issue. His choices at this point are:

• supporting the strong accountability provisions of No Child Left Behind. That's defensible but not politically popular.
  
• promoting red-meat conservative education priorities like vouchers and school prayer. He did that with moderate success in 2000, but that seems a little tired this time around.
  
• passively ignoring it, answering questions when pressed but offering no real substance on his own volition, and letting Lisa Graham Keegan do all his education bidding.
  

He's clearly chosen a small helping of each of the first two and a massive portion of the last one. It's only July, but it's amazing how out-maneuvered he's been on this issue. I'll be shocked if next week's speech changes that.

Testing the Limits

Measuring Up, Harvard professor Daniel Koretz's new book on educational testing, is making the rounds in the education policy and blogging worlds. My review, the latest installment in Education Sector's "What We're Reading" series, is now live on the ES Web site.

What Does It Mean to Be A Good University?

Most of the first twelve years of my life were spent in Storrs, where my father was a professor of computer science and electrical engineering at the University of Connecticut.  So I've always had a soft spot for UConn, rooting for their great men's and women's basketball teams and generally trying to keep an eye on how things are going. Thus, I read with interest this article in the Times about how things have apparently improved.  I don't normally do this -- in fact, I don't think I ever have before -- but for reasons that I hope will become clear I'm going to reprint most of it here and comment in italics along the way. I'm searching for three words--can you guess what they are?

Shedding the ‘Safe’ Label

By MORGAN McGINLEY
Storrs

MICHAEL J. HOGAN arrived at the University of Connecticut last September as its 14th president knowing he was inheriting a school vastly improved from a decade ago. Once a “safety school” with deteriorating facilities, the university now boasts rising test scores among entering freshmen and spruced-up academic facilities, thanks to a nearly $2 billion taxpayer-funded construction investment.

UConn is "vastly improved, we are told. Evidence: higher scoring students are enrolled, and the buildings are nicer. 

Dr. Hogan’s predecessor, Philip E. Austin, oversaw the largest expansion in the school’s history when the governor and state legislators committed to improving the state university system. After 10 years at the helm, Dr. Austin stepped down in 2007, saying it was time for someone else to lead.

The university’s 33-member search committee selected Dr. Hogan as its unanimous choice after a nationwide search. Now that Connecticut has been transformed into a modern campus with sparkling new buildings and programs that attract more of Connecticut’s best students, who once fled the state for higher education, university officials said they wanted Dr. Hogan to take the university up another level.

Why are the higher-scoring students enrolling? Because the buildings are nicer. 

“A decade ago, the university did not have the campus to support a great academic program,” said Dr. John W. Rowe, president of the university’s board of trustees. “The university has gone from being a safety school to much more selective. But we have a long way to go to be in the ranks of leading universities such as Michigan, California and North Carolina.”

Nice buildings are really important, although they could be nicer still, which would attract even higher-scoring students.  

Dr. Hogan came from the University of Iowa, where he was executive vice president and provost. He was inaugurated in April, and as he looks toward his second academic year here, he must contend with the implications of a state budget deficit and a looming recession. He also inherits a $315 million endowment, smaller than those of many other public universities.

Dr. Hogan knows that if he is to make the school among the nation’s best universities, he must improve several areas, but most important is its financial health.

“We’re the only public university among the top 25 that does not have a $1 billion endowment fund,” Dr. Hogan said. “We need to work our way into that club.”

To that end, the university also will soon announce a $450 million fund-raising drive, he said.

Nice buildings are expensive, and the legislature is unreliable. Therefore priority one is to raise a bunch of money, some of which will be spent on more nice buildings, and some of which will be stashed in the bank, because the more money in the bank the better the university looks. 

U.S. News & World Report rates Connecticut the best public university in New England, and has Connecticut, Purdue University and Iowa tied for 24th in the nation. Dr. Hogan said that a major goal is to break into the magazine’s list of top 20 public universities.

“We’re supremely good among public universities and we’re on a track to get better,” Dr. Hogan said.

Raising a bunch of money has the added benefit of increasing the university's U.S. News ranking, which is a "major goal." Nonetheless, UConn is "supremely good." Supremely!

Dr. Hogan, 63, said he will work to raise academic standards, especially in the graduate schools. A handful already receive high marks in national rankings, like the Neag School of Education, ranked 12th among public universities and 21st among all universities by U.S. News & World Report, and the dental school, which consistently places its graduates in top-flight residencies. But many more are far down in the pack. A strategic plan for academic success, a chief focus of Dr. Hogan’s, is due in September. He is optimistic.

“The quality of the applicant pool gets better every single year, and it’s more diverse,” he said.

"Academic standards" and "academic success" are defined exclusively in terms of U.S. News rankings and the number of high-scoring students, which one attracts by raising a lot of money and spending it on nice buildings, which all works together strategically in that high rankings are mostly a function of how many high-scoring students you attract and how much money you raise. 

The average SAT score for incoming freshmen rose to about 1200 from 1192, more than 150 high school valedictorians and salutatorians are enrolling and 20 percent of the freshman class will be minority students, a fact Dr. Hogan points to with pride. The proportion of freshman minority students has increased more than 100 percent since 1995.

The state’s investment in new buildings at Storrs and branches statewide, as well as the excitement generated by its nationally ranked basketball and football teams, drew more applicants this year to the university, officials said, so they decided to expand the entering class by 250 to a total of 3,400.

Spending the money on the nice buildings--and really, I think we get the point about that--is complimented by spending money on successful basketball and football teams, which draws more applicants from which more high-scoring students can be drawn. Diversity, defined in terms of the percent of minority student who enroll as freshmen, is also a plus. 

Now we skip a few grafs...

Ryan McHardy, 25, the president of the student government, praised Dr. Hogan for his strong interest in improving academics and campus life for students. Mr. McHardy said Dr. Hogan has toured the campus with student leaders at night to discuss safety and other aspects of student activity.

Dr. Hogan, who specializes in American diplomatic history, holds a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Northern Iowa and master’s and Ph.D. degrees in history from the University of Iowa.

He held several positions at Ohio State University before going to University of Iowa, where he worked on university fund-raising efforts, student recruitment and programs to boost academic and research quality.

Dr. David J. Skorton, president of Cornell University, was president of the University of Iowa when he hired Dr. Hogan as executive vice president and provost in 2006.

“The main criterion for the faculty was someone who was a scholar and appreciated the role of faculty in higher education. He had a national reputation as an outstanding scholar,” Mr. Skorton said. “He is a humanist. He’s a historian. Many universities have a heavy emphasis on bioscience, life sciences. Mike was as good with those faculties as he was with the liberal arts faculties. It’s hard to do, and Mike did it well.”

Dr. Hogan is committed to increasing the minority faculty, which is 11 percent. He plans a dedicated fund so that the school can offer larger salaries when competing for minority scholars.

He also wants to increase the size of the faculty, now at about 1,400, by 125 positions. He believes the university could double its research grants, which currently are $190 million. The University of Connecticut Health Center’s plan for a large new hospital has caused a furor among major hospitals in the Hartford region, which fear competition. Dr. Hogan seeks a collaboration so that the school and other medical facilities benefit mutually. He said doing otherwise would duplicate resources and risk the loss of large science grants.

Research grants and economic development also make the university look good, while taking some of the money you raise (the part not spent on nice buildings, presumably) and giving it to the faculty keeps everyone happy. Dr. Hogan's been around the track a few times so he understands how this works. 

So, what are the missing words? Anyone? 

Teaching

Learning

Graduation

They don't appear anywhere in the piece. And there's a reason for that: Teaching, learning and graduation don't matter in higher education when it comes to defining university success. Cut out this article, fold it up and put it in your wallet (or bookmark it or save it on your Kindle or whatever the appropriate 2008 action is). Everything you need to know about why colleges and universities do what they do, and don't do what they don't do, is there. UConn is being perfectly rational here, and everything Dr. Hogan is doing makes sense, given the rules of the game as it's currently played. It doesn't matter how well you teach. It doesn't matter how much your students learn, or how likely they are of graduating. What matters is how much money you have and how many "good" students you convince to enroll. Everything else is gravy. And until we do something to change that, until the essential questions about quality are different when the presidential search committee fans out and the New York Times comes calling, college students won't learn as much as they need to learn, too many won't graduate, and college will cost more than it should. 

Say What You Will

Envious of Eduwonk's extreme makeover, we at the Quick & the Ed have decided to stay ahead of at least only one step behind the curve by adding comments to the blog. Standard rules apply: we'll delete anything that annoys me is libelous or patently offensive, otherwise let us know what you think. If nobody comments, we'll assume that means the pristine logic of the posts makes any further commentary redundant and any criticism impossible.