Why Teachers Should Eat Twinkies, and Begin Building Their Defense

Now that using my cellular phone in the car is illegal unless I succumb to the bluetooth brain tumor implant that allows me to drive and talk legally, I must find creative ways to curb the boredom caused by my commute.

Today, on my way to work, I counted exactly 651 For Rent and For Sale signs. On the reverse commute home, there were 667. This is approximately my credit rating, I think. To be honest, I'm not quite sure what my credit rating is. To be honest, I'm not sure I even know what a credit rating is, in the concrete noun sense. In other words, I wouldn't know a credit rating if it slapped me in the face.

I know how a credit rating is used: in order to judge the content of your character. In fact, I know by heart the credit rating of at least 24 out of 53 of my facebook friends. I know this because they have told me their credit ratings, reporting proudly 750s and 800s. (This information was unsolicited, and in one case listed as a status).

Now, after receiving gmails and facebooks from upstream-swimming friends my age in other parts of the country who are buying homes, the margins of my computer screen now assault me at every opportunity, telling me that I'm entitled to know my credit score online from a variety of reliable sources. The assumption behind this target marketing must be that I'm in a keeping-up-with-the-Joneses relationship with my Facebook friends because I have congratulated them on their successes via these free services. However, the marketers are using a flawed assumption.

Instead of mimicking my friends, I embrace that they are often stronger swimmers than I. In addition to swimming upstream, they have the ability to thrive in both fresh and salt water. They are strong, adaptable, capable, FICA people, and I acknowledge that I can't compete with them. On a scale of 300 to 850, they are 800s to my 652. While I'd like to dismiss this measurement completely, I also have to acknowledge that in many cases, their FICA scores, while indeed meaningless, often parallel their virtue. I'd give them 800s too. They are virtuous, voting Democrats, who buy a series of Yoga classes, recycle, believe in public education (outside of LAUSD), and wear Che Guevara T-shirts. They are working very hard. They wake up early in the morning. They are on time.

It's easier for strangers to get my credit rating and purchase history than it is for them to access my academic transcripts, the latter of which are protected under the Buckley Amendment to the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act. An unofficial credit rating is free. An official academic transcript is $10 ($20 for rush orders), and available only to the student. This is true unless the student is "foreign," or a "suspected terrorist," in which case The Patriot Act trumps The Buckley Amendment.

California, as reported in the Sacramento Bee, is in danger of having its credit rating reduced from an A to an A-, blurring the boundary between credit and GPA, just when I was about to understand it, and further confounding my sense of "official" vs. "unofficial."

I'm ashamed to admit that ratings, in general, are too abstract for me. I am the type of eccentric who cashes her paycheck, and asks for it in one dollar bills. I like to touch the edges of objects, and have a hard time believing in something's officially exists unless there is a combination of logical and empirical evidence.

As an experiment last semester, my students were asked to cash three consecutive paychecks, and then compare how they spent their cash with how they spent three directly-deposited, consecutive, virtual paychecks. In every case, students held onto their cash more firmly than they held onto the abstract money spent on their debit cards.

At the Apple Store last February, I bought myself the requisite bluetooth device (which doesn't work). I tried to pay in cash, and six sales associates didn't know how to "process cash." They all used handheld, credit card scanning machines, and only the manager of the store had "Till Priviledges."

California is considering paying its workers in official IOUs, like they did in 1992, while under the leadership of Republican Governor Pete Wilson. Governor Schwarzenegger doesn't believe in excessive spending, excluding recall elections that cost an estimated 30-35 million. According to The San Francisco Chronicle, "the IOUs will look like regular state checks except they will be printed on darker green paper and bear the issue and maturity dates and the word 'registered.'"

A strange aside, did you know the former president and CEO of eBay, Republican Meg Whitman, is running for governor in 2010? Tangentially, Ronald Reagan believed that the only pure, objective way to be a civil servant was if you didn't need the salary. It kept you disinterested.