The BulleTin • SaTurday, June 26, 2021 B5
EDITORIALS & OPINIONS
AN INDEPENDENT NEWSPAPER
Heidi Wright
Gerry O’Brien
Richard Coe
Publisher
Editor
Editorial Page Editor
OSU-Cascades
gets a deserved
win this session
T
his legislative session featured two big decisions about
OSU-Cascades. And it looks like the branch campus of
Oregon State University won.
One decision was on a bill,
House Bill 2888. The bill was the
legislative equivalent of picking
up an angry nest of hornets and
throwing it at the campus.
The bill would have severed the
connection between OSU-Cas-
cades and OSU. OSU-Cascades
would become its own entity —
Central Oregon University.
Students who had paid tuition
to attend a branch of OSU would
find they weren’t getting what they
thought. Faculty and staff would
suddenly be shifted to a new in-
stitution without any say in the
matter. To some students, faculty
and staff, that may have not made
a big difference. But to others it
would have. It just seemed unfair.
And then to make matters
worse, the bill aimed to slash the
potential of what degrees the cam-
pus could ever offer. It would be
barred from offering any pro-
grams over a master’s degree.
A low ceiling would be set for a
new university campus in one of
the fastest growing regions of the
state.
Why are we going on and on
about a bill that died? Because this
effort to put a check on the future
of OSU-Cascades could very well
come back.
When there is only so much
money to go around for universi-
ties and colleges, some people will
try to find ways to curb OSU-Cas-
cades. Its enrollment is growing.
Other campuses in Oregon have
struggled. It’s new. It’s where many
students want to go. It further en-
hances the draw of Central Ore-
gon for employers and families. It
creates opportunities for students
close to home in a region that was
long underserved by a university.
It creates jobs. We are going to
face fights again, though they will
likely be more subtle than the hor-
nets of HB 2888.
In fact, for OSU-Cascades, this
session seems to be turning into
something of a victory. It’s not fi-
nalized yet, but as Gary Warner
reported in Friday’s Bulletin, the
campus looks set to get $14 mil-
lion for a new building. It would
be for a student success center,
sort of a modern version of a stu-
dent union. It will be a place for
tutoring, counseling, a wellness
center, a place for students to
gather and more. It’s a necessary
part of a complete campus. Stu-
dents even voted to tax themselves
to help pay for it. They believe in
the need. They believe in the fu-
ture of the campus. It’s reassuring
that this session the Legislature
seems to, too.
Historical editorials:
‘Out for a good time’
e
Editor’s note: The following historical editorials
originally appeared in what was then called
The Bend Bulletin on Aug. 10, 1906.
T
he two boys who were “out
for a good time” and who in
having it killed a harmless
old tinker at Latham last Sunday,
are now tasting the bitterness of
their folly. The cries of the old dy-
ing man haunt them night and day,
and the awful fear of the murderer
clutches them with all its terror.
Merely youths, they now see be-
fore them a life of forced confine-
ment in the penitentiary. Whether
the court, considering their youth
and evident repentance, will im-
pose a lenient sentence remains to
be seen. It is said that dime novels
exerted a pernicious influence on
these boys. They were travelling
over the country, away from home
and parents, and were evidently
infected with the insidious desire
for a lawless life. The utter foolish-
ness of such a life is seldom seen
by many youths until they have
tried it and experienced its ulti-
mate bitterness. Better to bear the
restraining hand of a careful parent
that to suffer the pangs of a guilty
conscience and to experience the
power of law.
…
Evidently Mr. J.O. Johnson in-
tends to capture a share of that
export apple trade that the Hood
River people have been boasting
about this season. His decision
to plant 500 acres to nothing but
export apples — apples of excep-
tional keeping qualities — means
much for the future reputation for
the upper Deschutes valley as a
fruit country. Now let other settlers
follow Mr. Johnston’s example by
planting only first-class commer-
cial fruit.
Editorials reflect the views of The Bulletin’s editorial board, Publisher Heidi Wright, Editor
Gerry O’Brien and Editorial Page Editor Richard Coe. They are written by Richard Coe.
Don’t make Minnesota Avenue a mall
BY CHAD BUELOW
I
am writing in opposition to the
proposal to convert a portion of
Minnesota Avenue in downtown
Bend into a pedestrian-only corridor.
This proposal marks the opening
of another front in the unrelenting
“war on parking” being waged by our
newly elected City Council. Propo-
nents claim that this proposal covers
only one block, but don’t kid yourself
— if this block becomes pedestrian
only, it’s only a matter of time until
vehicles are barred from all of down-
town, which would be a terrible mis-
take.
While there are many pressing is-
sues facing Bend these days, the state
of downtown is not one of them.
Downtown is thriving. Pedestrian
malls, on the other hand, have a his-
tory of failure dating back decades.
Advocates of pedestrian promenades
tempt us with visions of warm sum-
mer nights outside, but they con-
veniently ignore the reality of what
downtown would look like the rest of
the time.
One of downtown’s strengths is
that it is “activated” all week. While
our beloved breweries and restau-
rants draw tourists and locals alike on
weekends, downtown is also bustling
on weekdays with residents patron-
izing other “daily needs” businesses:
the untrendy banks, barbershops and
bookstores that visitors on the Ale
Trail walk right past. Most of these
residents drive, so eliminating parking
will make them less likely to patron-
ize businesses downtown. Businesses
will shutter and be replaced by either
“for rent” signs or retailers catering to
tourists.
To compound things, Bend is a city
with a homelessness crisis in a state
GUEST COLUMN
that now bars cit-
ies from preventing
camping on pub-
lic property. What
could possibly go
wrong? The answers
are there for anyone
Buelow
willing to look.
Before relocat-
ing to Bend from California, I lived
in Santa Monica and Venice Beach
— both of which offer cautionary les-
sons. At best, a pedestrian only down-
town Bend would resemble Santa
Monica’s Third Street Promenade: a
soulless outdoor mall avoided by lo-
cals and filled with tourists stepping
around (and over) street performers
and panhandlers to patronize chain
retailers and restaurants. The worst-
case scenario is something resembling
the human tragedy unfolding daily
on the Venice Boardwalk — and I’d
encourage anyone who thinks that
couldn’t happen in Bend to think
about the homeless camp that was on
Emerson Avenue.
So why are we even considering this?
This proposal seems to be driven by a
few downtown businesses that would
benefit from a pedestrian promenade
— primarily those expecting to be
gifted private outdoor dining space on
public property now used for parking,
which would constitute a gross mis-
use of a public resource. If Bos Taurus
needs more space to sell $155 steaks, it
should relocate or open a second loca-
tion like any other business.
As a Democrat, I’m surprised that
progressive politicians would even
consider giving away a public asset to
private businesses, but this isn’t the
first time local elected officials have
taken disappointing positions re-
garding parking. Our new councilors
are working to deliver a massive gift
to developers by waiving minimum
parking requirements in new develop-
ments. The previous council allowed
Old Bend residents to privatize public
street parking. The current council
is allowing private downtown busi-
nesses (including one of the nation’s
largest craft breweries) to convert
public parking spaces into exclusive
seating areas. The common thread
seems to be that councilors won’t let
progressive principles interfere with
their “war on parking.”
It seems that our new councilors,
shielded from constituents in their
Zoom meeting echo chamber, have
misinterpreted the “blue wave” that
carried them into office as a mandate
to make driving as difficult as pos-
sible. They are being eagerly abetted
by an unelected city parking services
manager who opposes parking, as
evidenced by his derisive characteri-
zation of those who value parking as
being stuck in driving culture (as if
any other culture were available to the
majority of Bend residents).
Perhaps they need to be reminded
that while Bend voters are anti-
Donald Trump, we also overwhelm-
ingly approved the transportation
bond last year — which suggests that
Bend residents have no problem with
the “driving culture” that rookie coun-
cilors and unelected bureaucrats are
working to eliminate.
The Minnesota Avenue proposal
is a flawed solution to a nonexistent
problem that will ruin our gem of a
downtown. Bend residents should op-
pose it.
e
Chad Buelow lives in Bend.
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Want kids to learn math? Be honest that it’s hard and takes time
BY JORDAN ELLENBERG
Special to The Washington Post
A
school year unlike any other
is coming to a close, but one
thing remains the same: We’re
still tussling, in the same old ways,
over how math should be taught.
More data science, less stuffy trigo-
nometry? Students placed in separate
classrooms by test scores or doing
differentiated work in the same class-
room? These questions are vexed, but
I’ve got one suggestion for how we
can improve. We can tell students that
math is very, very hard.
It’s the truth. The techniques of al-
gebra, geometry and calculus were
hard to create, and they’re hard to
learn. But saying so forthrightly
doesn’t come naturally to a lot of
teachers — or to commenters on ed-
ucation. “Math Is Not Hard: A Sim-
ple Method That Is Changing The
World,”reads a headline in HuffPost,
extolling an approach that aims to
help ease kids into the subject. I em-
braced rhetoric like this when I was
an apprentice college instructor. I
was constantly telling students, at the
outset of a computation, “Now this is
pretty simple” — encouraging them,
or so I thought. My mentor, the mas-
ter teacher Robin Gottlieb, now a
professor at Harvard, set me straight.
When we say a lesson is “easy” or
“simple,” and it manifestly isn’t, we are
telling students that the difficulty isn’t
with the mathematics, it’s with them.
And they will believe us. They won’t
think, “I’ve been lied to,” they’ll think,
“I’m dumb and I should quit.”
This applies to parents, too. I’ve
been teaching math for two decades,
and I still find myself telling my kids
that a math concept they’re struggling
with is “not that hard.” That’s not en-
couragement — that’s evidence of my
frustration with watching them strug-
gle, and it’s not part of teaching.
One big problem is that math
teachers mastered the concepts so
long ago, we’ve forgotten their diffi-
culty.
A fellow mathematician once told
me that high school calculus was as
easy as following a recipe. And that’s
exactly right, in one sense: Following
a recipe is easy once you know how to
cook. But recipes require tacit knowl-
edge and substantial experience that
novices just don’t have. How much
salt is a dash? What’s a rolling boil?
You learn to cook by cooking, in the
presence of someone who knows how,
and at first you flail; you make plenty
of mistakes; you get results that are
right in some ways but very wrong
in others; and the outcome of all that
work is that you become another per-
son who thinks cooking is easy.
This isn’t just true of calculus,
which most nonmathematicians ac-
cept is supposed to be hard. It goes
for supposedly easier things, too, like
fractions, a third-grade Common
Core standard. When we first pres-
ent fractions to children, we’re asking
them to make a huge conceptual leap.
For their whole life until that mo-
ment, the definition of a number was
something that answers the question
“how many?” A fraction is a totally
different thing, not so much a number
as an amount. And yet you are sup-
posed to be able to add and subtract
them, just as you can “regular num-
bers.”
The popular economics blogger
Noah Smith, a fervent advocate of
math education, recently tweeted,
“We don’t really start teaching math
til junior high.” Not true! Even the
concept of expressing a number as a
string of digits is a deep, hard-won
idea that takes time to grasp, a con-
cept we shouldn’t treat as trivial just
because it’s old hat in MMXXI.
The idea that math is supposed to
be easy gets in the way of the most
effective learning tool students have:
asking questions. If math is easy, you
should just get it. And so students are
afraid to ask questions in class, be-
cause they’re afraid of looking stupid.
The situation is even worse for stu-
dents who by reason of gender or race
or accent or household income have a
justifiable fear that their classmates —
or worse, their teacher — will jump to
precisely that conclusion. If we were
honest about how difficult and deep
mathematics is — at every level —
this would be less of a problem; we
could move toward a classroom where
asking a question meant not “look-
ing stupid” but “looking like someone
who came here to learn something.”
I get it: “Math is hard” can be dis-
couraging. But “Math is easy” is just
false, which is even worse. We can be
truthful without being demoralizing.
We can tell our students: Math is hard
— and you can do it.
e
Jordan Ellenberg is a math professor at the
University of Wisconsin.