Champion Teachers misteaching grammar

Inspired by the New York Times article a few weeks ago, I started reading Doug Lemov's Teach like a Champion in spite of a title so bad I can hardly bear to repeat it here. I very much like the idea of a teaching book that focuses on the mechanics of teaching, rather than on higher-order ideas that so often can become muddled or meaningless in practice.

Completely incidental to the points the text is making (which are content-neutral), I've already found two examples of "good" grammar teaching that are rather distressing to me.

In the first, the answer is right but the definition wrong, in the second, only the definition, which is wrong, is given.

1. Definition of a Subject

The task is to identify the subject and the sentence is: "My mother was not happy." The student (A) in the example guesses "happy." The teacher asks for clarification from another student (B) and gets the definition that "The subject is what the sentence is about." The teacher says this is correct and then asks student A what the subject is again. Student A replies "mother." End example.

This is an example of the rule "No opt out," where students always are forced to give the right answer, even if they at first get the answer wrong. You might think that the teacher above was just going easy on student B to move the lesson along, but the next section of the book, "Right is right," is about how important it is not to pretend students are right when they're not, so I think we can safely assume that Lemov thinks this answer is right.

If you're wondering why the definition is wrong, it's easiest to just give some counterxamples:

1. It is raining. Grammatical subject: "it." Subject according to above definition: rain.
2. "It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife." Grammatical subject: "it." Subject according to the above definition: marriage.

2. Definition of a Noun.

The task is simply to define a noun. Lemov gives the example of a student who says "A person, place or thing." The champion teacher does not accept this answer but prompts a more thorough response, until given "A person, place, thing or idea."

The importance of the idea clause here is telling, because it is the vagueness of the concept "idea" that has let so many educated people believe this definition for so long. It is, after all, entirely obvious that not all nouns are people, places or things. However,if you consider that things like "liberty," "truth," and "proof" are ideas, conceptual entities if you will, then it seems like this definition might just do.

The trouble is many nouns are clearly actions. In fact, we have suffixes that let you turn verbs into nouns, thus creating newly minted nouns out of any action we please. Here are a few very simple cases of nouns that are not people, places, things or ideas:

"Destruction" as in "The hurricane resulted in devastating, wide-spread destruction."
"Liberty" as in "I am not at liberty to say."

How would I define "noun," you may ask. I teach students the following simple procedure for identifying a noun. It is not perfect, but it is close, and it doesn't include any out and out lies: "If for a given word X you can say "the X" but not "very X", then X is a noun." Every native speaker can apply my rule perfectly every time.

Two experiences with customer service, a world apart

Since we've gotten two new gizmos here over the past month (dell mini + kindle2), I've had a few chances to enjoy giant-corporate phone support. At times past I've felt like all companies end up being equally frustrating, but my recent experiences leave me feeling otherwise. Here's a look at two very different experiences -- Amazon and Dell.

Dell:

I had various issues with my dell laptop's ubuntu installation out of the box. First, the weekend I got it, the Dell software repositories were down for a few hours, so no kind of update or installation would work at all (I had no way of knowing at the time that this was a temporary problem). Next, a number of things weren't working too well -- the machine had crashed several times (more than any linux machine I've ever used before), ssh was not working (so I couldn't copy all my working files from my other machine over our network), and I had found a reproducible bug that crashed the dell launcher every time I changed the background. Finally, I had questions about whether and how to update the machine from 8.04 (what it came with) to 8.10 (what is current); the standard ubuntu procedures didn't seem to be supported, but it seemed like it would be worth trying an update to see if it fixed some of the issues I was experiencing.

I went to Dell's website to see what I could see. I found a phone number and a chat support link. I called the phone line and opened up the chat support, figuring I'd learn which was faster. The chat took about 10 minutes to connect me with a service representative. I had to type in the service code from the back of the computer, etc., before I could describe my problem to them. When they learned the issue I had was with their ubuntu set up, they informed me I had to call a phone number (a different number than the one listed in my docs on the machine and on the website). At this point, I hung up the phone (I was on hold all this time) and called the new phone number. I was on hold on the order of 45 minutes before being connected to a service representative, to whom I had to read various serial numbers off of my laptop etc. When she learned that I needed support with their ubuntu installation, she told me I needed to talk to their ubuntu experts who were only available from 10-5 (it was 9:50 at this time -- I'd been trying to get support for over an hour at this point).

At 10, I did try calling the number I'd been given again, but when I heard tones and a computerized voice saying "you're being forwarded", I got suspicious I'd been moved out of the ubuntu support area anyway, and gave up entirely.

Amazon:

Katharine's new kindle developed a dead pixel (or rather, a dead line -- a whole one-pixel-wide vertical line of white) some time a few weeks ago. When you're reading, you barely notice it, but it's the kind of thing that's worth getting repaired while it's under warranty.

Today I decided to get around to calling support. I googled "amazon kindle support" and the first web page I found informed me that I could call, or I could sign in with my amazon account and have them call me, in which case they'd have all of my information ready. That sounded better to me, so I signed in under Katharine's account (to which the kindle is registered). I chose "hardware defect" from a dropdown menu of potential problems, chose "now" from a menu of times at which I'd liked to be called, entered my phone number, and clicked "Call me".

A window popped up telling me the phone was ringing and sure enough my phone rang. A computer voice told me I'd be waiting for 1 minute. In a few seconds I got a human. He confirmed that I really was Katharine by asking for my name and address (okay, I'm not Katharine, but I know enough to fake it). He talked me through how to hard reboot the kindle. I was pretty sure this wouldn't do anything, and sure enough it didn't. He confirmed that this sounded like a hardware issue and said a replacement kindle would be in the mail today and would most likely arrive by Monday. He said an email would go out to Katharine with tracking information, information on sending the defective kindle back, and directions on registering the new kindle to her account.

The whole process was done in just under 9 minutes (my phone has a timer, so I know).

Conclusions:

In both cases, I was calling tech support for a new product (Dell has just released the Mini-12 with ubuntu, within the past few months; the Kindle2 is under a month old), so in both cases the support training etc. must be relatively fresh. But the design, polish, and programming behind these two systems was worlds apart.

In Dell's case, they seemed determined to disappoint at every step. Their advertised 24/7 support does not apply for software issues. Add to that a slew of technical problems in their ubuntu setup and you have a lot of frustrated ubuntu users. But when you try to access them through their phone and chat support, you get bounced around on the phone with no indication of where you are, how long you'll be there, or how close you are to getting help.

Amazon doesn't offer 24/7 support either, but when you go to their website, it's very clear what they do offer (the hours are right there). They also make it easy for you to save them time and money by having them call you after you've logged in, which gives them all of your account information and so on and prevents you from having to read awkward serial numbers in on the phone. The minute I got on the phone, Amazon gave me an estimate of how long I'd be waiting, so I knew whether I should settle into some other task while on hold or not. When I got a hold of a representative, the representative already knew everything about me, so all I had to do was confirm my address (I didn't need to spell anything out since he surely had the info in front of him on a computer screen).

Dell obviously understands that phone support is frustrating -- they've added chat support which is surely cheaper for them to implement and less annoying for many customers. But they haven't linked any of this to your account information (which would bypass all of the serial code reading), and they haven't linked their website directly to their phone system.

I realize Amazon had a lot of advantages in this comparison -- a hardware problem is easier to diagnose and support than a software problem; they also obviously had more call center people on hand when I called. That said, a lot of this is simply a question of design. Even with the same resources, I'd imagine if Amazon had designed Dell's system, my experience would have gone something like this:

1. I go the Dell website, log in under my account, and then say I need support.
2. I answer a few quick questions (drop-down menus) that determine that I have a software problem and I have the Dell-supplied Ubuntu 8.04 operating system.
3. I come to a screen that tells me that Ubuntu support is available from 10-5. I can either call a phone number listed there, or enter my phone number to have Dell call me at a specified time between 10 and 5. I click "call me at 10"
4. At 10:00 I get a call with an estimated wait time. Presumably even with the same staff, my wait time will be substantially less now that my call has been directed correctly, since their phone support people aren't being tied up redirecting misdirected customers, having people read out serial numbers, and so on.

Surprisingly, the redesign would actually improve my experience by replacing two human-to-human interactions that I had with computer interactions: first, instead of chatting with a person, I could have used a dropdown menu to tell them the nature of my problem; second, instead of waiting on hold to find out when software phone support was open, the web page could have told me. I know humans are normally nicer to talk to than computers, but when all you want is to give some basic information, a well designed form is much better than a human you have to wait to talk to.

A final note: I have no idea how good the Dell techs are at troubleshooting and supporting you over the phone, because I never got to one. Now that I know it takes upwards of an hour to contact them, I'm highly unlikely to call their support again.

Luckily, google has a plethora of information about all things linux, so I was able to learn a few key things that Dell support likely wouldn't have known anyway, such as how to fix ssh on their install (which is broken by a broken wireless setup by default), how to activate ubuntu repositories properly for the low power intel architecture dell shipped with, and why upgrading to 8.10 won't work yet (even though a Dell salesperson told me she was pretty sure it would).

Do real people actually use Windows Server?

Tonight I got one of many tech e-mails I get at school. In this case, the issue was related to a printer being down -- actually, a number of printers. If enough printers fail, it's a high priority issue, because it means teachers and students walking long distances to get print outs, and that's a lot of lost time at school (students may be thankful for the exercise and chance to socialize, but that's not really what we're aiming for).

Anyway, I decided it would be worthwhile to go into the server remotely and see what I could about the condition of the printers, so I could prioritize how important it was to get to fixing these printers soon. But the server is a Windows 2003 server. Our standard way of accessing it is over VNC or RDP, both of which can be really slow in the wrong conditions.

I've been waiting a good 30 seconds to get a response to each click remotely, which makes my "quick check" not so quick. This raises the question: why on God's green earth am I "clicking" anything?

There are lots of reasons why it doesn't make sense for a server to run a GUI. Among them is this: it's incredibly inefficient to transmit a picture of a whole desktop, and mouse events, etc., just to find out some basic information. If this thing were simply a *nix commandline, a 1200 baud modem would have sufficed to complete my inquiry in a few minutes. As it is, I'm giving up after a half hour (for what it's worth, I've been doing other things while I wait for responses from RDP). Do real people use this crap?

More and more I've been missing the commandline as I have to do admin work. I know that clicking is (theoretically) faster than typing commands, but between the ease of doing things remotely (I've spent hours programming on a remote system in emacs without noticing any difference from working locally) and the scriptability inherent in the commandline, I'm finding it hard to believe that people who administer machines for a living could ever do without a decent shell as their base of operations.

(Note: I know windows has a command prompt, but it's a pale shadow of bash, and as far as I know out of the box Windows Server does not have an ssh server enabled)

Sysadmins are not programmers

In my new life as a technology liason/sometimes sysadmin, I've had occasion to watch a Windows Systems Administrator at work, and to marvel at the ways in which the mind of such a person is not the same as the mind of a programmer. This is, to me, rather shocking: after all, the great thing about computers is that they're programmable, right? So someone who spends their lives working with computers... well, you'd expect them to know how to automate things.

I've always assumed that being a computer type means that you follow a very simple axiom: never repeat manually what could be done by a program for you.

In other words, automate the automatable, whenever possible, and, when it's not possible, whine like hell.

It turns out that our SysAdmin consultant does not think this way. Or perhaps it's simply that his definition of "possible" is extremely limited. At any rate, as a result of his ignorance in this matter, I've been reading up on scripting, trying to get myself the requisite literacy in Windows programming that, staggeringly, the Windows expert lacks. In this case, I have a very simple, very tedious task to do:

1. Collect a list of student users from our online student information database.
2. Create Active Directory accounts for those students that don't already have accounts.
3. Delete Active Directory student accounts for students not on our list.

This is the kind of task that any lover of computers should refuse to believe must be done by hand. (Note that I also had to create google-based e-mail accounts for these people — that was a no-brainer because google is not designed by idiots (there's a defined csv file and all I have to do is massage the data into that format and upload it).)

Lo and behold, after much fruitless searching, I have at long last found instructions for creating Active Directory accounts from information in a spreadsheet (or, if they were more sane, a csv file) (hopefully that link will help future googlers).

As I began to read those instructions, though, I was struck by the following strange prose, which so confused me, and so revealed the weirdness of the category of "System Administrator", that I had to stop reading and write this blog post. Here goes:

System administrators, or so we are often told, are the last of the rugged individualists. System administrators don't use mice and dropdown lists; they type their commands at the command line. System administrators don't bother with graphical user interfaces; they like their data displayed in the command window. System administrators don't pull up to the drive-through window at a fast-food restaurant, they actually get out of the car and... well, okay, even rugged individualists have to draw the line somewhere. The point is, you can run a script by starting it from the command prompt and passing it a bunch of command-line arguments; in addition, you can output data to the command window or to a text file. What more could you possibly need?

The truth is, there are lots of times you don't need anything else. On the other hand, sometimes—just sometimes, mind you—system administrators look at applications like Microsoft® Excel and think about how nice it would be to harness some of the capabilities Excel for their own use. Consider, for example, the need to create a bunch of new user accounts in Microsoft® Active Directory®. Could you do that by passing command-line parameters to a script? Sure, if you don't mind typing in command strings similar to this:

cscript new_user.vbs /cn="Myer Ken" /sAMAccountName="kenmyer" /givenName="Ken" /SN="Myer"

Okay, maybe that's not such a good idea. But couldn't you read in all the information from a text file? You bet you could. Of course, the text file would have to look something like this:

"CN","sAMAccountName","givenName","SN"
"Myer Ken","kenmyer","Ken","Myer"
"Jones TiAnna","TiAnnajones","TiAnna","Jones"
"Smith Ben","Bensmith","Ben","Smith"

That works, too, but good luck getting your HR department to supply you with a text file that looks like that. Can you use these techniques? If you want to. But think about how easy it would be for your HR department (or whoever) to type all this information in Excel; in fact, there's a good chance that's what they already do. Yes, Excel is a graphical utility, and, yes, you're a rugged individualist, but just this once, wouldn't it be nice to be able to take an Excel spreadsheet, run a script against it, and then use the information gleaned from the spreadsheet to create a whole bunch of user accounts, all in one fell swoop?

Okay, sure, not for you. But maybe you have a friend who isn't as rugged an individualist as you are. If so, tell your friend that he or she is in luck. This month we're going to tell you—um, we're going to tell them how to use a script to read data directly from an Excel spreadsheet, and then use that data to create a bunch of new user accounts in Active Directory. And then next month we'll show them how to go the opposite route: How to grab data out of Active Directory (or some other location) and display it in a nicely-formatted spreadsheet. And listen: If you decide to try these scripts, we promise not to tell your fellow system administrators. Promise

Ok, let's look at the crazy assumptions in the above:

1. The point of the commandline is that you can do things with lots of parameters, which shows you're knowledgable.
   Actually, the point is that you can chain various commands together, and save useful combinations thereof in scripts. No one prefers typing long chains of obscure switches to pressing a few buttons; it's just that there's no way to program button-presses, so programmers prefer the commandline. It appears that sysadmins (as imagined by the above prose) try to imitate programmers by typing everything into a commandline, but don't actually understand it).
2. A CSV text file is scary
   WTF? Is there any decent programming language that doesn't have simple libraries for handling CSV files?
3. An Excel file is different from a csv file
   Again, WTF? Is there any person sufficiently computer literate to be reading this document who couldn't turn a given excel file into a csv file easily (Save As...)? And is there any HR department that could be trusted to get column headers etc. exactly right so you could run a script using their Excel file? Or is it actually true that all the crap excel adds to data to make the HR department happy (like formatting, for example) just gets in the way of the programmer, which is why you'd convert to CSV in the first place. I assume in this example we'll massage it into a predetermined format of Excel file instead, but if that's the case, there's really no difference between the Excel solution and the CSV solution.
4. Rugged individualists wouldn't run scripts against spreadsheets
   Huh? I frankly can't imagine how any thinking person (and I assume these straw-man rugged individualists would style themselves thinking people) could possibly consider creating users doing anything other than running a script against something like a spreadsheet (assuming, that is, that one is copying a list of users from elsewhere, such as HR).

Of course the ultimate WTF is that this functionality isn't built into AD at a more basic level.
Anyway, I'll be reading the rest of the article soon. The odd thing about the article is that it seems to posit a commandline-using sysadmin in opposition to someone with a modicum of programming knowledge. And that, I must say, is very strange.

Pronunciation snobbery and Beijing

The other day the radio, I heard an NPR reporter doing explicitly something that has always implicitly bothered me about NPR reporters. She was talking with their China correspondent and asked him how to pronounce "Beijing". He explained that it's actually (in Chinese) pronounced [beʤɪŋ] (with a "j" as in "juice") and not [bejʒɪŋ] (with a "j" as the "s" in "vision" or "treasure"). An article I found here at cnn.com goes so far as to make this hyperbolic claim:

Television networks should be setting a higher standard of pronunciation and fulfilling their role of informing and educating the viewing public," he said. "Mispronunciations are misinformation. The casual attitude of the networks towards this matter is, at best, negligent and, at worst, bordering on disrespect for China and the Chinese."

This is absurd of course. No one is recommending we actually try to reproduce the Chinese pronunciation of "Beijing", in which nearly every sound would be foreign to us (I believe it begins with an unvoiced non-aspirated bilabial -- not a voiced bilabial like we use) and in which we'd have to make sure we got the tones right. In no way does not speaking Chinese border on disrespect for the Chinese.

This is a more widespread phenomenon. I see it when the NPR folks try to spanishify their pronunciations of Latin American countries, (saying "chee - lay" instead of "chilly" for "Chile", for example). Have they forgotten that they're speaking English? It also reminds me of a habit of a certain acquaintance-who-will-go-unnamed who always strikes me as terribly pretentious in pronouncing all foreign words with faux-correctness, taking care to avoid flapping the "t" in words like "risotto", for example.

It strikes me that the NPR version of this has something to do with not wanting to offend people, or with the belief that Americans generally are woefully, shamefully ignorant. But isn't it obvious that all over the world people speak a handful of languages at best, and frequently just one or two (as we do), and that when they refer to other people's words, they follow the sound patterns of their own languages? I of course can pronounce Spanish place names just fine when I speak Spanish, but I find it awkward to try to pronounce them in Spanish when I'm speaking English -- that's why we warp pronunciations to fit our own sound patterns in the first place.

All of this rant is premised on my assumption the Beijing is always pronounced [bejʒɪŋ]. That does the beg question of whether I'm wrong and [bejʒɪŋ] and [beʤɪŋ] have existed as variants for some time. Is that the case? Has anyone ever heard the [beʤɪŋ] pronunciation used commonly? Is it common in Britain or other English-speaking countries? (note: pronunciations by Chinese speakers and hyper-self-conscious broadcasters don't count as common use).

Grrr... I hate closed source software

So in my new life as a tech administrator, I've gotten to play with OS X server and client machines. It turns out that OSX includes more or less the equivalent of Norton Ghost for free — that's a good thing. Our school hadn't configured or used this functionality in the past — that's a bad thing. Enter me to save the day!

Anyway, long story short, our previous tech guy had upgraded our server to 10.5 in order to fix some now-forgotten-about bug (grrr #1: paying to get upgrades that are really bugfixes). So, long story short, after a long time today setting up an image and setting up the server to use it, I had a problem: for some reason Mac's System Image program wasn't seeing my source disk as a valid image. I couldn't figure out what was going on for the longest time, until finally on Mac's website I discovered it: with the 10.5 version of the System Image program, you can only create images of System 10.5 and later. Our client machines all have 10.4.x on them.

Grrrr.

It's funny what you end up taking for granted in the open source world I'd been living in. Here are the things that would normally be unimaginable:
#1. That I can't update without making a big expenditure (and in this case, it would not just be one new client license but many)
#2. That I can't downgrade if an updated piece of software isn't any good (i.e. I can't get or run the 10.4 System Image program on my 10.5 server).

To solve this, I'll have to downgrade everything to the 10.4 server and hope that whatever bug bugged our last tech guy won't affect our new environment.

It's also quite puzzling to me that the System Image software cares about what kind of volume it's installing. I'd think with the base infrastructure in place, you'd be able to distribute images of any kind -- Window, Linux, Mac, what have you. I can understand that their might be some value-added stuff the System Image software can do that's specific to the OS, but it seems strange that they couldn't support at least a base functionality for any old system disk.

Lazy web programmers (or are they just stupid?)

I'm setting up some online auto-billing to save the pain-in-the-ass of stamps and checks here... this always gives me a chance to see some fine web programming on display. Here's an error message I just got that, unfortunately, is not at all uncommon:

Please enter 10 digits, leaving out characters such as "-" or "/".

My first response is: you lazy piece-of-crap programmer, how hard is it to strip out the character.

But then I realized something — the programmer isn't exactly lazy, they're stupid, because they took the time to write the code that generates the error message, but didn't take the time to just do what the user wants.

Here's some pythonic pseudo-code to illustrate:

To do it the right way

inputstring = get_idno_from_webform()
inputstring = inputstring.replace('-','').replace('/','')

To do it the wrong way...

inputstring = get_idno_from_webform()
def confirm_idno ()
    inputstring = get_string_from_webform()
    try:
        assert(inputstring.isalphanum())
    except:
        show_obnoxious_error_message()
        confirm_idno()
    else:
        do_the_right_thing()

Grrr... makes you wonder -- who hires these people and how much do they make?

(Note: I realize that even in the ideal code you'd need an error message for cases where the user typed something totally invalid, so maybe they're just lazy after all. Still, the error code that handles things like a user typing "!)(*@!$#KJ" should pretty much never run, whereas the code that handles dashes (which are printed on the bill as part of the number) is really much more important and will be called for more often than not.)

D.A.R.E. Update

Today K was accosted by the same D.A.R.E. identity-card selling people in Arlington center that I wrote about a few weeks ago. In her case, they told her that next year ID cards would be required for children and cost a mere $65, making their price ($40) much more reasonable. They also helpfully suggested that if she didn't have cash she could give them a credit card number! So, it looks like this is an out and out scam and I should take back anything I implied about D.A.R.E. itself.

Except that the scam is based on an actual D.A.R.E. fundraiser, which, on second look, I was able to find on their website here. The description of the actual fundraiser is quite perplexing. Here are some choice quotes...

As part of the Child Safety I.D. Program representatives will offer D.A.R.E. Medical Emergency ID all-FREE of charge. During these events products including D.A.R.E. t-shirts, ID cards, DNA kits, safety videos and other child-oriented products, will be displayed and available for purchase...
...
This campaign is a great way to introduce and remind children about safety information. If children are made familiar with these techniques through reminders and role-playing with parents, they are less likely to find themselves in dangerous situations. We hope that no child or family ever has to use the emergency/medical D.A.R.E. ID card.

The above really doesn't get any better if you read the full context -- it's incoherent, at least to me. What, for example, is the referent of "these techniques"? In what sense are DNA kits child-oriented products? I still have no idea why I would be motivated to get this card, whether for free or (in the case of our local scam-artists) for $40 (although if they got my credit card number, I'm guessing it would come to much more than that...)

D.A.R.E., fear-mongering, and a question about identity fear

So when I was in high school, it was a cliche to make fun of D.A.R.E. as a fear-mongering, ineffective program. I don't actually remember if I ever went through the D.A.R.E. program, so I can't comment on whether it was or was not effective or fear-mongering as a high school program, but I had an experience today where I was accosted by a D.A.R.E. representative on the street in my role as parent (I was with Grace), and I learned that our local D.A.R.E. folks were involved in a whole new kind of fear-mongering: working off of the fear of medical emergencies (and, oddly, identity theft).

What the D.A.R.E. representative tried to sell me on was not (as I would have guessed) donating to D.A.R.E. Instead, she wanted to sell me, for a mere forty dollars, an identity card for Grace that would include medical information about her and give permission to treat her in case of emergency. She showed me a sample card and explained that it was an "official" something-or-other. She then reassured me that the card wouldn't have Grace's full name on it, so if it fell into the wrong hands, I wouldn't have to worry.

This raised a number of questions for me. Some of them rhetorical, some genuine (actually, maybe they're all both rhetorical and genuine):

1. If a child were to show up in an emergency with a treatable, life-threatening condition and no guardian present, would they deny treatment? I somehow feel like they wouldn't (it's also hard for me to imagine just how Grace could end up in such a scenario, but I understand that in order to get into the proper D.A.R.E. mind-set I am to imagine the worst of all scenarios in the worst of all worlds...)
2. Is there in fact a subset of plastic-like-identity cards that are "official"? What makes them so?
3. Why would I be afraid of someone finding out my daughter's name? Aren't names public information? Is there anything scary that can happen to her with her name known that couldn't happen to her with her name unknown? (I've heard the name worry come up in a web context. A number of students have told me they're allowed to have facebooks/myspaces/etc., so long as they don't use their full name, or their last name, or what have you. I presume that the fear behind this is that someone will see their picture, decide to stalk them, and then, knowing their name, be able to track down their home address, etc. Are there other things about names that I should be afraid of that I don't know?)
4. Why is D.A.R.E. selling medical-alert-ish identity cards? (Note: I couldn't find anything about this on their website, nor could I find the cards -- is it possible the D.A.R.E. table in Arlington center was actually entirely a scam? seems unlikely...)
   

If anyone knows the answer to these questions, I'd be interested to hear them.