Yesterday evening I was talking to my oldest friend in the entire world about the general discontent and dissatisfaction we were feeling with our lives. I sit here, at twenty-five, and I wonder where my life took a wrong turn. And, basically, I know where my life took a wrong turn: Sophomore year in high school. That’s the year where the utter mediocrity of the education system broke my soul. After an illness which took me out of school for the better part of a month, I returned to discover that I could, in fact, catch up on an entire month’s worth of school work at A+ levels in two days. Two days.

Up to that point I had always faced school as a challenge. A competition which could be won. And, as a result, I was an over-achiever. Just a year earlier I had stayed up for 48 hours straight to complete an 80-page biography of Shakespeare… for an assignment which only required a 5-page research paper.

But, ultimately, the lesson I ended up carrying away from school was this: I can put off any assignment to the last minute, crank it out in a couple of hours, and expect marvelous success. I can slack off to an astonishing degree and still succeed, because I am so gosh-darn smart and my teachers love me for it.

These are piss-poor lessons to learn, and I wish I never had. Because once I became actively conscious of the charade I had been playing, the new challenge became, “Just how far can I push before anybody holds me to account?” Well, the first and easiest answer: If I miss two months worth of school, they’ll knock down my grades from their former highs (even if I’ve completed all the work). But that was just playing games with the backwards absenteeism policies of a bureaucratic school system. So now I focused on procrastination and putting the least amount of work into assignments that I could manage while still pulling down A+ grades.

The worst part is that, actively conscious of the charade as I now was, I wasn’t actively conscious of the new games I was playing. Not for awhile, any way. And I learned a very bad life lesson.

I lack discipline.

I don’t meet the goals I set for myself. I don’t achieve the things I want to achieve. I don’t have the life I want to have.

And I’ve known that for awhile now, and I still can’t fix it.

That’s the conversation I had this evening. And then I got off the phone, logged into my e-mail account, and discovered that Kris Okins had died. She was a friend and classmate when I attended the Minnesota Arts High School. We hadn’t talked since we graduated, so I didn’t know that in the years since she’d moved to Portland, Oregon. That’s where she was hit by a truck while riding her bike.

The e-mail that delivered the news to me included a news article, which read in part: “When Melissa encouraged her to get back to her career as a graphic artist, Kristine shrugged it off. She had had a taste of sitting all day in front of a computer screen, she said. Right now, she loved her life, loved her freedom and wanted to enjoy it a little while longer. She had a whole lifetime ahead of her to spend in front of that screen.”

Thus, we have a moment of personal crisis, a moment of tragedy, and a moment of synchronicity. (One might even say serendipity, since a picture of John Cusack just popped up in the background as I type this.)

The lesson I should be learning here is simple: Life is short. Live it. Don’t Waste it.

But the thing which frightens me is that, even knowing this, I still won’t have learned it. Twenty-five will become thirty, thirty will become thirty-five… and I’ll still be sitting here. Living the hollow shell of a the life I could have had.

My dreams shall be the stuff of nightmares…

The first two goals of my campaign deal with the need to create and enforce knowledge-based standards. Education is the bedrock on which the future is built, and we need to guarantee that the foundation we provide to our children is a firm one.

But our educational system should not be a lowest common denominator; it should be about giving our children the opportunity to be the best they can be.

The great fallacy of our school system as it exists today is the demand for conformity. Instead of acknowledging that different students learn different skills at different rates, our current system demands a rote progression defined by some sort of mythical average: If a student is capable of achieving more than that average, they are held back. If a student is unable to maintain the pace demanded by that average, they are dragged along in ignorance.

There needs to be opportunity for our best students; support for our worst. We can no longer endorse a system whose first interest is making sure that no one feels bad about themselves. An educational system must encourage success, or it will breed only failure.

By the same token, we must be careful: A mistake of the past has been segregating students into “smart” groups and “dumb” groups. The educational system should not be about choosing which students are going to be given a chance to succeed and which students are not: The system should give the same opportunities to all students, and those opportunities should never be taken away. A student who needs help in third grade should be given the chance to blossom in twelfth.

Implementing opportunity means allowing students to prove they are capable of more – and that requires a standard against which they can measure themselves. Implementing support means allowing students to see where they need to be – and that, too, requires a standard against which they can measure themselves.

PRINCIPLE OF OPPORTUNITY

If a five year old is capable of doing what a high school senior can do, then the five year old should be given the same educational opportunities as that high school senior. Because otherwise we’re cheating that five year old of their potential: Instead of teaching our children what they can be, we are telling them what they can’t.

Opportunity – Extracurricular Classes: Let’s offer extra classes as an extracurricular activity. Our schools are already open to support sports, theater, debate, and other after-school activity, why not take the extra ounce of effort to give those students who want to learn more the chance to learn more?

Opportunity – Independent Study: At the high school level, the challenge of setting standards which allow students to get ahead is that students will exceed the opportunities we have defined for them. But if a student is capable of outrunning our system, then the student is capable of charting their own course. Independent study programs will allow them to define their own curriculum, and post-secondary opportunities will give them additional opportunities to get ahead in their preparation for college or the professional world.

Opportunity – Support for Gifted Students: At the elementary level, the challenge of setting standards which allow students to get ahead is supporting those students who are gifted in certain areas. In some cases, students will be best served by skipping grades. In other cases, special study groups will allow those with an aptitude for math or science or art to push themselves to whatever level of excellence is right for them.

PRINCIPLE OF SUPPORT

If a sixth grader has not yet learned the things a sixth grader needs to learn, then the sixth grader is not yet ready for the seventh grade. Indeed, promoting them to the seventh grade would be a punishment, because we would only be forcing them into failure.

Support – Kindergarten Plus: There is a great disparity between the students who enter kindergarten for the first time. If we can win this one, big battle – and even the playing field before students enter the first grade – then all our other battles become easier. Many disadvantaged students will be able to benefit for Kindergarten Plus – a summer program which would extend kindergarten education for those who need it.

Support – Summer Self Study: At higher levels, district-supported self study programs will allow students to catch up – or move ahead – through home study.

Support – After School Study: Opportunities will be made available for after school study, to give additional help to those students who need and want it.

Knowledge, not process.

Teachers, not bureaucrats.

Education, not socialization.

My first goal in running for the Minneapolis School Board is to establish comprehensive, knowledge-based, grade-by-grade minimum standards that students must meet in order to advance.

The reason this is necessary leads to my second goal: Guaranteeing that our children are given a firm foundation for success.

In the big picture, this means guaranteeing that when a student graduates from a Minneapolis high school they have been given the tools necessary for success in life – that they have been given a foundation on which the rest of their life can be built.

But for that goal to be a reality, the first building blocks of that foundation must be laid down in the first year of school. Any architect can tell you that if the first layer of bricks isn’t laid properly, then the building will fail – but that’s a lesson we seem to have forgotten, and which the Minneapolis Public School system will need to relearn before the deep, structural flaws in our educational process can be corrected.

Starting in Kindergarten. It should not come as any sort of surprise to learn that students enter kindergarten with a wide range of capability. Some students enter kindergarten already able to read, write, and perform simple arithmetic. Others enter kindergarten without even knowing which way to hold a book. Armed with this knowledge, it shouldn’t take much for us to realize that these students will not perform at comparable levels in the first year at school. Nor is there anything we can do about that.

But what we can do is acknowledge that the problem exists, and take the most logical course to resolve it. If we set a standard of what a kindergarten student should know before entering the first grade, and then hold students to that standard, we level the playing field.

Does this mean that some students will be held back at the end of kindergarten? Yes. And, in fact, that is the purpose of the standard.

This is what I’m talking about when I say we need to form a foundation: By ensuring that the student does not leave kindergarten until they are armed with the knowledge that kindergarten is meant to impart, we have given that student the foundation they require to succeed in first grade.

The alternative is what we do now: Promote the student to first grade, even though they lack the skills needed to succeed there. Doing so, of course, condemns the student to failure again. Not only are we permanently degrading the educational experience of that student, but we are degrading the educational experience of the other students in the class.

Now, extend the principle. Standards are set not just for kindergarten, but for every grade level thereafter. Instead of playing a hopeless game of catch-up, we get on top of the problem from the very beginning by making sure that a student has been given the foundation to succeed at the tasks they are given.

Assessing the Student. At the city-level we can enforce the formation of this foundation by assessing the students according to a set of knowledge-based standards. The term “test” is not a good fit to what I envision: I cannot perform an objective test to determine whether or not a student is “capable of discussing the Civil War in a comprehensive fashion” – the bulk of education is not something that can be tested in a standardized fashion.

But I can test a knowledge-based standard in order to perform an assessment: If the student cannot tell me that Abraham Lincoln was the President; that the Dred Scott decision was passed by the Supreme Court; and that the North won the war, then I do know that the student can’t discuss the Civil War.

The danger in such a system is that students will simply learn by rote: They won’t learn how to discuss the Civil War – they’ll learn a collection of trivia (who was President, who made the Dred Scott decision, who won the war). So where’s the other half of the assessment come into play?

The teachers. Because they’re the only ones who can make an informed, case-by-case judgment. The assessment provided by the standards will enforce a minimum, and the judgment of our teachers will provide the rest.

Knowledge, not process.

Teachers, not bureaucrats.

Education, not socialization.

NOTE ABOUT SPOILERS

Although billed repeatedly as a novel on its front and back covers, Digital Knight is, in fact, a collection of previously unpublished short stories which – as far as I can tell – have only been lightly touched up (if at all) to form the “novel”. I’m going to spoil significant chunks of the first short story (although not its plot), because – otherwise – it would be impossible to discuss this book in any meaningful way. The rest of the book is left blissfully mysterious.

END NOTE ABOUT SPOILERS

Neither the exceptionally poor cover art nor the somewhat cliched back cover blurb drew my attention to Digital Knight. Not even the effusive cover quote praise from Eric Flint would have made me pass over the eight bucks Baen was asking for it.

What did make me pick it up was the fact that Ryk E. Spoor had written it. For those of you who don’t already know, Ryk posts regularly around Usenet under the handle Sea Wasp. As the friendly Wasp, I’ve been acquainted with Ryk for almost exactly a decade now – during which time he’s distinguished himself as a person of singular creativity, insight, and intellect.

So, if Spoor had written it, I wanted to read it. Once a copy put in an appearance at my local bookshop, I snatched it up and stuck it on my reading list. Which brings us here.

As noted above, Digital Knight is more a short story collection than a novel. It contains a cycle of short stories, all focusing on the character of Jason Wood: A private investigator who finds himself plunged into a world of urban fantasy.

Reading this book is fascinating, because you can see Spoor growing as a writer right before you eyes. The earlier short stories are plagued with a lot of problems: The plotting is awkward and contrived, and its strength is further sapped by the fact that Spoor seems to be making an attempt at stylizing his prose by adopting the hard-edged, slightly ironic feel of a PI novel. Unfortunately, he doesn’t quite get there and the result is jarring and off-putting.

Worst of all, the early dialogue can be actively painful. People just don’t talk the way Spoor has them talking. The thing I noticed most was that his characters weren’t using contractions, but this was really just the tip of the iceberg: A lot of factors combined to make the dialogue jarring and unbelievable.

But, like I said, as you read further you see the book improve dramatically before your eyes:

The dialogue begins to flow naturally, and the characters develop rich, distinct voices. The stiff, uncomfortable prose resolves itself into a unique, effective voice – still rough around the edges, perhaps, but clean and entertaining nonetheless. And once Spoor finds his rhythm, he starts playing some powerful beats: There are bits that I found myself reading out loud, and I only do that when the wordsmithing becomes remarkable.

Meanwhile, the plotting is shedding its awkwardness step-by-step, until you eventually find yourself compulsively turning page after page, drawn inexorably along by Spoor’s action and world-building.

In short, the book is well worth pushing through its weak start: The early stories have some diamonds in the rough to offer you, and the book starts to really pay off with “Photo Finish” (which starts around page 90). Shortly thereafter Spoor throws a twist at you which makes you realize that he’s just been toying with you all along, and then he follows it up with a revelatory punch that will send you reeling. You can practically hear the starter pistol going off as the novel starts racing.

There are a lot of treasures hidden away in the nooks of this book, but one thing which is delightful right from the beginning is what I’m going to call, for lack of a better term, the “genre-awareness” of the characters. When Jason Wood runs into vampires he has his moment of disbelief… but then he realizes he’s acting just like the characters he makes fun of in the horror movies and gets down to the business of using his collected knowledge of horror and fantasy to his advantage. Not everything he tries works – because, of course, myth isn’t the same thing as reality – but that just sells it: Wood is a skeptic in an unskeptical world. But he’s not Dana Scully dense: Once he’s seen the evidence of something being true, he accepts it as truth and moves on.

In grading this book I am left in something of a quandary: I would rate the early material at roughly a C+ (average-to-mediocre material with the occasional reward). For the later material – and greater bulk of the novel – however, I would probably give an A- (highly rewarding with only the occasional, minor flaw). In a completely non-linear fashion, I’m going to average that out to a B+ (notable, fun, and well worth your time).

GRADE: B+

Ryk E. Spoor
Published: 2003
Publisher: Baen Books
Cover Price: $7.99
ISBN: 0-7434-7161-X

If Memory were the first Bujold book you ever picked up, you wouldn’t have any problems reading it.

I expect there are quite a few people who would disagree with me on that one. And I’ll admit that it’s hard for me to judge how a newcomer would come to this book: The first time I came to it, I was reading the entirety of the Vorkosigan series in published order – so I was distanced from the newcomer’s perspective then, and I certainly haven’t regained my objectivity by re-reading the book multiple times.

But, looking at it as objectively as possible, I do think this is a book which is accessible to the first time reader. And, more importantly, its effective for the first time reader. Perhaps not as effective as it would be for a long-time reader, but that’s simply a natural consequence of the strengths to be found in series fiction.

All that being said: I wouldn’t recommend this book to the first time reader. If you’re approaching Bujold for the first time, this is my advice:

(A) Start with Shards of Honor, Bujold’s first book. If you find that you enjoy this light, romantic adventure – despite its minor flaws – then keep reading in publication order until you finish the series.

(B) If you don’t enjoy Shards of Honor, then you should know that Bujold improves dramatically over the course of her career. Skip ahead to Barrayar (it’s conveniently contained in the same omnibus).

(C) If Barrayar doesn’t, at the very least, make you interested in the series, then it probably isn’t going to work for you. You might want to try Bujold’s fantasy.

(D) If Barrayar does work for you, then I suggest going to back to read The Warrior’s Apprentice, Brothers in Arms and Borders of Infinity. Then go to Mirror Dance and read in publication order from there until the end of the series. After that, you may feel compelled to go back and pick up the stuff you haven’t read yet.

Have fun.