Posted: Friday, September 1, 2006 12:00 am
ROSE (roz) n. One of the most beautiful of all flowers, a symbol of fragrance and loveliness. Often given as a sign of appreciation.
RASPBERRY (raz'ber'e) n. A sharp, scornful comment, criticism or rebuke; a derisive, splatting noise, often called the Bronx cheer.
We hereby deliver:
• ROSES to excellence in education, embodied in the local educators and education advocates honored Tuesday with the Golden Apple and Stellar Service Awards.
Honored this year were Wanda Arp, a Title 1 assistant at Garfield Elementary School; Mary Lynn Roush, who teaches fourth-graders at Mountain View Elementary School; Sandy Fong, who teaches special education students at Linus Pauling Middle School and Therese Patterson, a math teacher at Corvallis High School.
Anne Schuster, newly appointed to the Corvallis School Board, was honored with the Stellar Service Award and received a star statuette and a certificate. Schuster has been a volunteer at the district for 12 years.
The awards, presented through the Corvallis Public Schools Foundation, are endowed by Corvallis philanthropist Mario D. Pastega. In addition to a handsome golden apple and a star, the award-winners received a homemade loaf of Pastega's date-bread.
The winners bring enthusiasm and energy to their work, and it is contagious. In addition to roses, we offer the winners our thanks.
• RASPBERRIES to low-wattage, cynical thinking by Washington's state Liquor and Control Board, which has banned sale of 29 brands of low-cost, high-alcohol wine within a six-square-mile designated "alcohol impact area" that includes Capitol Hill and the University District.
No stranger to the many problems associated with drinking in our own College Hill district, we can sympathize with efforts to curb obnoxious, drunken behavior and its impact on locals. But this idea sounds like something that hitchhiked onto a long strange trip with a bottle of Night Train.
With more than 3,000 types of other liquors available, the less brand-loyal homeless alcoholics should have no trouble finding a substitute. For those for whom nothing but Olde English 800 or Colt 45 (two of the banned liquor brands) will do, there's always the option of moving along. After all, that is the time-honored approach to the problems associated with chronic alcoholism.
Was the Washington Liquor Board just tired of hearing complaints from that particular group of residents in the targeted neighborhoods? Because we're betting that they'll soon be hearing more from neighbors in areas not affected by the ban.
• ROSE-BERRIES to the nation's high school graduates of 2006 for a mixed bag of SAT score results.
The roses go to Oregon's class of 2006 for achieving the second-highest scores in the nation (behind Washington) on the new longer, tougher and more varied SAT college entrance exam. It included a tough essay component for the first time, designed to assess college-bound students' writing level.
However, the overall SAT score on the revised SAT resulted in an average 7-point drop in scores - the largest in 31 years. That prompted us to wonder just what it is that
Oregon's doing right - or everyone else is doing wrong.
Boys - now identified as having serious
academic problems at every grade level - scored lower than girls on reading and math
The College Board, the architects of the SAT, down-played the drop, saying it was due to the fact that fewer students took the test a second time. (Perhaps that had something to do with the fact that it took students an extra
45 minutes to finish a test that was three hours long to begin with.)
We will be interested to see how SAT scores change when Oregon implements tougher high school graduation standards.
• ROSES to the National Science Foundation, for granting $24 million to enable
researchers to focus on what is happening in Oregon and Washington estuaries.
Oregon State University, working with Oregon Health and Science University and the University of Washington, will become the first
science and technology center to focus on the coastal margins and the "river-to-ocean" ecosystems along the Columbia River and the Pacific Ocean.
We're hardly surprised. OSU's researchers and scientists are involved in everything from documenting the oceans crisis to identifying and monitoring the biological "dead zone" off our coast, to studying the unique ecosystem around undersea volcanos, resurrecting dormant sardine fisheries off the northern coast and finding new ways to market oysters.
From marine biologists and oceanographers to wave energy technologists and those seeking to resurrect fisheries along the coast, OSU has been making waves - sometimes literally - considering OSU's engineering team involved in "the nation's only university research program funded from federal resources in ocean wave energy extraction."
Given its growing expertise in the field, the place we know as OSU also stands for
Ocean Sciences University.