Good Natured Bitterness

With apologies to Ayn and Ali, it struck me that i really am no-longer good natured - and it has to do with greed. I don't consider my self greedy but i do believe that i am introverted enough to understand the minimum things that i need to have for me to function well in our current environment. We all need food, shelter and the like, but in the physical mental sphere, there are things that we need to keep us happy enough to be fully productive and when our priorities shift, we generally feel off-keel.

Working in natural resources, i feel that i have an over-abundant playground to find the draws to my passion that keep me in a sphere where i can interact with people and exchange knowledge value. Since my umbilical cord is my computer - periodic upgrades are like moving from CD to DVD or analog to digital television - eventually the cost comes down and we all go - but the people into it need to keep leading edge, trying and doing new things.

In working with schools, and the grubbermint and a non-profit suck em dry business, we put together a system, redile, that worked for people that freely chose to follow me on the path not generally taken. My appreciation of Frost allowed me to turn to create in a new area, but i kept being drawn to protecting (and compromising) the values i was trying to build in order to keep things going and make it work for the target - the youth that i had committed to at the beginning of the time period. Consensus - while it may be viable for governance - when applied outside a meetingplace turns into handcuffs. People can not work by consensus.

My target was to have an effective program to meet my son in 9th grade - woulda, shoulda, kouda - he is in 9th grade and i am debating whether to even bother to stay here. The path of bringing in people to develop consensus constantly eroded the values we produced. The first Bug Zone worked well - because of the novelty, we had fairly unconstrained ability to seek knowledge that only our group guides really had. I became a teenager again - but with responsibilities to the adult world. I needed to learn about resources first hand - so i essentially rolled up sleeves, dove in and developed essentially another doctorate (which i need to write up as a book - target spring) in applied resource chemistry.

The first mistake was allowing the schools to insist on one size fits all. When students can self-select based on interest, there was a desire to do the things necessary to learn the depth of the topic. When we moved into classrooms - we got sucked into the miasma of ill will from two groups - the kids who couldn't keep up and the administrators - who saw us as dog and pony because that was what they had always had.

Meanwhile - the director of the non-profit left and the new director refused to honor any agreements with me personally. I came in way undervalue as a personal service initially, on the condition that my fund-raising raise my pay, but no money followed any of the grants once my salary was established - even a salary increase written into one of the grants. The organization wouldn't spend on materials - i was using my personal computer at the office during the whole time period. It was my resolve to do it, because i committed to the kids (and highly interested in what i was learning) that i was attempting to draw. I couldn't lie to them and work a viable program. So i self funded. My mentor self-funded the larger operation. And we got every kid that was with us the first year of the program through high-school.

The agencies didn't really want junior scientists - their scientists feared for their jobs and kept them by shrouding their work in mystery and for the most part - finding data to produce that fit the political interest of the agency agenda. They want to talk about what they do in an hour - show and tell - our current one size fits all teaching style. Bosses saw our sharp high-school students as intern workers - replacement for temporary help that slowly replaced permanents. The temporaries knew this - they wouldn't take the conduit positions in redile because they would be outsourcing their work to students. Smart high school kids become summer replacement for temporaries and more competition when they reach college. But what do these agency scientists really do? Most shuffle papers and do so little real science, we would be embarrassed. And people don't have the expertise to deal in their assigned areas, so they defer to the so-called experts. Formosa ghosts.

So now, i am no longer disposed toward good will. I greedily seek resources to squirrel away because i have to live. I doubled up a new laptop as a X-mas present - because, i have to justify keeping up to speed to get information to work. But i am not being paid to work, because i couldn't allow the system to be hijacked again when i wasn't even able to make ends meet for the effort. Government run education can blackball anybody that doesn't teach to the tests, by defunding any efforts through the backdoor. When you are doing the work on the ground - you don't have time or effort to chase the money.

I agreed to chase the money to do the program, and we were successful - but i didn't spent any time watching who got the money and i lost my good nature, because the people i trusted to take care of me couldn't. Now i have to take care of myself - from way behind the eightball of where i would have been if i had been putting in the same effort to create dog and pony shows for pretend education. And i have to find people i can trust - because the current show has left me doubting.

I tried one last show with depth salinity - but the students don't have the resolve and the self-selection process was marginalized - they need bribes to continue and a better future job or college scholarship is a non-viable bribe here for rural american kids. I feel my loss of idealism is representative of their generation, yet the kids that we touched through ONRRI that honestly put effort into their work in the program all came out as winners - and for that i came howdt a winner as i move on to rebuild and tackle the great monster that hides knowledge for profit. When we slay that monster, perhaps i'll develop my good-nature again.