Bring on the moodiness, i mean the Santa Ana.

Well, it’s that time of year again. Time for the Santa Ana’s to blow. Pretty soon, you will hear about the Santa Ana almost every other week in the weather report. Just last week, on the first day of autumn, the Santa Ana Winds were back. As a native to Southern California, these winds are pretty much the norm. As soon as fall comes, so do the winds. You can try to describe the Santa Ana to someone who hasn’t experienced it, but it is so hard. It is such a different feeling than other winds.

The Santa Ana Winds are a downward sloping wind. Down Slope Winds are given a name wherever they occur in a region, and the Santa Ana winds occur in Southern California,

To the east of Los Angeles are the Santa Ana Mountains and the Santa Ana canyon, which the Santa Ana winds are named for. When a wind blows from the east towards the ocean, they are down slope winds coming off of the Santa Ana Mountains. These winds are hot and dry as they move downward towards the ocean.

This same article talks a little bit about how these winds are formed, and why they are so dry. I personally hate the winds because it is so hard to get around in them. It is very scary to drive in winds with gusts reaching 100mph sometimes. Now that is a very extreme case of the winds, but I know that they do get that fast. Usually the winds blow around 40mph and have to be at least 29mph to even be labeled as a Santa Ana.

If you drive up I- 15 right before the Cajon Pass near Foothill, while the Santa Ana is blowing, I guarantee you will see a truck or two overturned by the wind. I have seen it myself more times than I can count, and I rarely drive that way. There are often times trees uprooted by the wind and power lines blown over. That’s the scary thing about the Santa Ana, it is a wind that can destroy things so deeply rooted in the ground. With power lines being blown over, no wonder there are so many wildfires in Southern California at the end of the summer, early fall when the Santa Ana’s are blowing strong.

overturned truck

uprooted tree

Typically, the Southern California Wildfire season and the Santa Ana are synonymous. The two go hand in hand. The dry hot conditions of the atmosphere during these winds can cause a small wildfire to quickly spread.

fire during the wind

I do also want to mention a little bit about how the wind can affect your mood. These downward sloping winds produce a large amount of positive ions in the air, which can cause your nerves to be on end. Many have come to refer to these winds are “ill winds.”

You might be thinking these are just winds like any other wind. Not true, something different happens with a Santa Ana wind. Something happens to the air and atmosphere in a down sloping wind.

In her essay, “The Santa Ana”, Joan Didion talks about how the wind causes strange behaviors in people. She talks about how the positive ions in the air cause people to have bad moods, and other weird behaviors. I never really believed it until I did more research on the subject and found that it was true.

In a 1974 study conducted by the Swiss Meteorological Institute have shown that these ill winds cause physical problems such as headaches, dizziness, eye twitching, nausea, fatigue, saline disorders, water retention, respiratory problems, asthma, slower reaction time and host of other even more serious problems. Mental disorders caused by the increase in positive ions are nervousness, emotional unbalance, easily irritated, apathy, listlessness, insecurity, anxious and depression.

Well, what does this mean for students? If the Santa Ana is blowing strong outside, the last thing you are going to want to do it sit in a classroom. You are already going to be having problems with your allergies because of all the dust in the air. Then the positive ions are going to cause you to feel tired and irritable. The last thing you are going to want to do is sit in class and listen to lectures all day on things you couldn’t care less about. This is bad for students in southern California because the winds blow so often in the fall. We are pretty much used to it by now, and it is nice to finally be able to explain the moodiness that comes with the wind. I wish that when I was in high school I could have blamed some of my poor test scores on the wind. I feel like if more people knew that there was a scientific explanation for the lousy way they feel during the wind, people would blame the wind for a lot more things. It is science after all.



Note: Just as I was getting ready to post this, the weather report came on, and we can expect the Santa Ana will be blowing by Thursday. It is not going to last for too long, but it is going to be somewhat strong.

exit exam......fail.

In the midst of this economic crisis, there have been significant funding cuts for state programs across the board, but education has been hit extremely hard. Most Cal State and UC schools have already been hit by this with fee hikes, which, I could go on for days about. But this blog isn’t really about that. It’s more about a big waste of state money on something that could easily be eliminated, sort of.

I read this article the other day in the Sacramento Bee, which is not a paper I regularly read, I mean, I am a native Southern Californian, after all. I just happened to stumble upon it one day whilst looking through various articles online. How I found the article is beside the point. The article is about the California High School Exit Exam, and why it pretty much fails.

Gerard Bracey says in his article:

“High school exit examinations don't work, and in some cases, they backfire. States don't gather information on the effects of the test because the political risk is too great. Imagine voters' outrage if a study found that a state had spent hundreds of millions on a test that did no good. “

I pretty much agree with him on that one. Being one of the first classes in California to actually have to pass the test in order to graduate, I thought it was kind of a joke. Nobody that I knew took the test even remotely serious, because let’s face it, we all probably could have passed the test in like 6th grade. Now that is somewhat of an exaggeration, they say that the English language arts section tests you at a tenth grade level, while the math section tests you at an eighth grade level. But really, if we were being tested at such low grade levels anyways, what is the reason for kids not passing?

Bracey mentions a study done at Stanford University about the effects of the CAHSEE no students. Their research found that students who placed in the bottom 25% of the test as tenth graders were more likely to drop out of high school. Now of course there were more findings, which are definitely interesting and should be looked into, if you’re interested.

But what this means to me is basically, the kids who couldn’t pass and dropped out/ couldn’t graduate are the same kids who would have probably dropped out regardless of whether or not they took the test. There really is no reason for anybody who deserves a high school diploma to not pass the test- and what it comes down to it whether or not the kid actually wants to graduate. I don’t think anybody goes into high school just with the intent to drop out, but there are certainly those who take their education a little more seriously than others.

Here is something else I found interesting

"Another group of researchers at the University of Minnesota tried to determine if state high school exit examinations made the diploma more meaningful to employers. The answer was a resounding "No." It didn't matter if the exit exam was relatively easy or tough. The Minnesota team concluded, "These examinations must be seen as a colossal waste of education and human resources, harmful to those whose educational attainments are curtailed by failing them and of little use to those who pass them."

Now, why on earth are we wasting money on this test when the benefits are almost nonexistent? If passing the test gives no added benefit to the student, and the students who don’t pass probably wouldn’t have graduated anyways, why do we continue to waste these students time, and frankly, our money that we desperately need right now. I think there is a much better use for those millions of dollars that are being spent each year on the CAHSEE. Hey, maybe those Cal State kids and UC kids could stop bitching about their fee hikes? Just an idea.

This is not about education..

Well, I know that my blog claims to be about education and policy, and this post is clearly not about that. However, I felt it necessary to begin with a post about public intellectuals and how they are revered. Stephan Mack makes some interesting points in his article, “The ‘Decline’ of Public Intellectuals?”

So, is there any way of conceptualizing something called the public intellectual that is consistent with democratic values? Of course there is, but it needs to begin with a shift from “categories and class” to “function.” That is, our notions of the public intellectual need to focus less on who or what a public intellectual is—and by extension, the qualifications for getting and keeping the title. Instead, we need to be more concerned with the work public intellectuals must do, irrespective of who happens to be doing it.

Now, I am in no way claiming to be any kind of expert on the things I am going to be writing about, and I would like to emphasize that in no way am I trying to present myself as a public intellectual. Most people coined as public intellectuals are surrounded by controversy. They are the kind of people we love to hate, and I think to an extent, their work is driven by that. If the Fox news network was to give me a late night talk show, I think that I would be just as big of a jackass as some of their current hosts ,*cough* Bill O’ Reilly *cough*- it’s good for the ratings. Now, whether or not you agree with O’ Reilly’s work and opinions, there is no doubt that he is an authoritative public intellectual.

His schooling credentials alone give him credit enough to pretty much say whatever he wants, however he wants. He has a Bachelor’s degree in History from Marist College, a Master's in Broadcast Journalism from Boston University and another Master's Degree in Public Administration from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. In addition to just his schooling, he has vast experience in journalism, print and broadcast, publishing weekly columns, and of course his late night cable TV talk show (on Fox), “The O’ Reilly Factor.” It is these qualifications that show us how he was able to get the title, and I think that maybe it his attitude and his work that allow him to keep his title.

Two recent books exploring Lenin’s deportation of intellectuals from Bolshevik Russia raise an ironic question about the supposed impotence of public intellectuals in America, that special class of academics and philosophically oriented writers who go outside their own disciplines to comment on social and political issues.

Do I even need to say why O’ Reilly fits into this category? I think not. He seems to fall a little out of this definition though, because he is more of a full time public intellectual. His show, “The O’ Reilly Factor,” is pretty much his commentary on politics and current news. His weekly columns also fall into this same category. However, he earned this status as almost a permanent public intellectual, because he spent many years as a news caster and journalism. O’ Reilly is a very controversial figure on the air today. There are even websites dedicated to how he sucks, (oreilly-sucks.com), but even if you think he is a complete idiot, you can’t really argue the fact that he has earned his title of “public intellectual”.