Every year at the end of December, three simple joys find their way into a life that seems all too hectic and hurried.

Time slows a bit at year’s end.

Not time on the clock, but time for contemplation.

The first simple pleasure is going off the clock long enough to enjoy a little football. In that sport, time slows for a series of instant, and often slow-motion, replays.

We could use this for our everyday lives. Mistakes and great moves could be savored in minute detail.

The pageantry of football need not be wall-to-wall. For fans, end-of-season bowl games of a few teams evoking emotional attachment are enough to fill a home’s entertainment bowl.

This year, the University of Virginia’s surprise year-end trip to Atlanta for New Year’s Eve is a simple pleasure. Rooting for the Cavaliers to win chicken is peachy.

The second joy of the season is time to read. Days fly by from spring to fall with never enough time to enjoy the books and magazines that stack like cordwood bedside.

Winter offers traditional time for a farmer’s son to sit a spell. Reading offers opportunity to travel at any pace through time and across continents.

Time travel, a page at a time, enhances the peace of finding something new in something old.

Two books that rise to top stacks where reading beckons are “The Swerve: How the World Became Modern” by Stephen Greenblatt and “West by West: My Charmed, Tormented Life” by Jerry West and Jonathan Coleman.

Greenblatt’s National Book Award winner traces history through discovery of an ancient poem that changed the world.

Its beauty inspires.

Coleman’s collaboration with West traces the effects of lack of love on a child who grew up to star as a national basketball icon. His story describes West Virginia grit.

And reading of a painful childhood reminds me to be grateful for the joy of fond family memories.

The finest joy of the season is welcoming three daughters home from far-flung places.

Each young woman brings decades of warm playfulness back to a family that enjoys rousing card games with catching up on each other’s lives.

With one in the teaching business and two in the learning business, three sisters as different as parents can imagine share enduring traits.

One plans a solstice party with returning friends. Two bring home the men in their lives who play pingpong while charming those they clobber.

A house full of timeless laughter remains a great joy during a season when craziness can give way to coziness, Hoos and Hokies can both perform in cities of Southern élan and reading soothes the soul.

Speaker Tip O’Neill used to share a drink and political conversation with President Ronald Reagan even though they often found themselves on opposing sides of issues.

They were friends, as O’Neill put it, “after 6 p.m.“

Today, when a president and a speaker of the other party get together, even for a round of golf, people go nuts criticizing them for trying to do what leaders should do.

Leaders should talk with each other—both to find common ground and to better understand real differences.

But leaders cannot lead well in a poisoned atmosphere in which political and media cultures feast on finding and exacerbating any perceived difference, the pettier the better.

A culture that once valued and respected most of its leaders, just as it held most teachers in high esteem, now has lower expectations and finds leaders failing to measure up to even lower standards.

People who see bad government everywhere can easily tear down what is good about it.

Voters who want instant fixes when none can be available elect people who promise instant fixes.

Then they are disappointed when the candidates who promised the moon deliver cheese.

Candidates who promise what they cannot deliver tend to blame others for their own shortcomings and failures.

A blame game breeds bad politics. The blame is based on twisted, little “gotcha” shortcomings pushed by consultants trained to deliver emotional dissatisfaction.

Our somewhat depleted media covers short-term news better than it follows long-term problems that demand long-term solutions.

In the past year, new business plans and cooperative arrangements have started to rearrange ways consumers find comprehensive news about government.

We have to continue fixing our media by demanding better and balanced information if we are to have good chances of improving the nation’s politics.

We in Virginia have known and expected better.

And, every so often, when a politician is caught and convicted, investigative journalism more often than not exposes the criminality or chicanery.

Fact-based, objective journalism is still searching for new and successful business models.

Partnerships with new, non-profit journalistic endeavors, such as the barely year-old arrangement The Daily Progress enjoys to augment coverage with Charlottesville Tomorrow, offer hope that viable business models can add new life to thorough and fair coverage that bolsters democracy.

Good journalism and good politics go together and can restore faith in the ability of government to work.

Fair journalism tends to elevate discussion to consider common ground toward finding progress and solving problems.

Leaders in Virginia can still talk with each other, even if they remain friends only after 6 p.m.

Government is not for our entertainment. It is what founding fathers from Virginia helped develop—along with a free press—to make America work as a free republic.

Speaker Tip O’Neill used to share a drink and political conversation with President Ronald Reagan even though they often found themselves on opposing sides of issues.

They were friends, as O’Neill put it, “after 6 p.m.“

Today, when a president and a speaker of the other party get together, even for a round of golf, people go nuts criticizing them for trying to do what leaders should do.

Leaders should talk with each other—both to find common ground and to better understand real differences.

But leaders cannot lead well in a poisoned atmosphere in which political and media cultures feast on finding and exacerbating any perceived difference, the pettier the better.

A culture that once valued and respected most of its leaders, just as it held most teachers in high esteem, now has lower expectations and finds leaders failing to measure up to even lower standards.

People who see bad government everywhere can easily tear down what is good about it.

Voters who want instant fixes when none can be available elect people who promise instant fixes.

Then they are disappointed when the candidates who promised the moon deliver cheese.

Candidates who promise what they cannot deliver tend to blame others for their own shortcomings and failures.

A blame game breeds bad politics. The blame is based on twisted, little “gotcha” shortcomings pushed by consultants trained to deliver emotional dissatisfaction.

Our somewhat depleted media covers short-term news better than it follows long-term problems that demand long-term solutions.

In the past year, new business plans and cooperative arrangements have started to rearrange ways consumers find comprehensive news about government.

We have to continue fixing our media by demanding better and balanced information if we are to have good chances of improving the nation’s politics.

We in Virginia have known and expected better.

And, every so often, when a politician is caught and convicted, investigative journalism more often than not exposes the criminality or chicanery.

Fact-based, objective journalism is still searching for new and successful business models.

Partnerships with new, non-profit journalistic endeavors, such as the barely year-old arrangement The Daily Progress enjoys to augment coverage with Charlottesville Tomorrow, offer hope that viable business models can add new life to thorough and fair coverage that bolsters democracy.

Good journalism and good politics go together and can restore faith in the ability of government to work.

Fair journalism tends to elevate discussion to consider common ground toward finding progress and solving problems.

Leaders in Virginia can still talk with each other, even if they remain friends only after 6 p.m.

Government is not for our entertainment. It is what founding fathers from Virginia helped develop—along with a free press—to make America work as a free republic.

Mary Ann Elwood had a laugh that filled a room.

The diminuitive grand dame of Charlottesville politics for 40 years was a leader who promoted others.

The daughter of an Indiana Republican industrialist, she was guided by a fierce sense of social justice.

When she died peacefully in her sleep at home on Sept. 12, her life and laugh slipped away after five decades of work as a civil rights activist, educator, lay church leader and party organizer.

It’s fair to say that Elwood, together with Mitchell Van Yahres, Grace Tinsley, Drewary Brown, Henry Mitchell and a band of civic and political activists, transformed the city into a Democratic Party enclave.

The University of Virginia played a major role in that transition, and Mary Ann and husband Bill Elwood became a town-gown power couple who knew and liked players on either side of town.

Each devoted a lifetime to pursuing racial progress and educational opportunity.

Each brought gifts of intellect and street smarts into a community in 1964 that was starkly segregated by race and class.

The Elwoods and three university presidents formed teams that very quietly tore down old racial and class barriers. Bill Elwood was a natural social healer who became an early and successful recruiter of black talent to UVA’s clasrooms.

“We came here in 1964 for him to teach English,“ she said nine years ago shortly before her husband died. “When we got here, everything was segregated and we made the decision we would not have anything to do with something that was segregated.“

They taught their two boys that not swimming was better than joining a segregated club or pool.

The couple from Northwestern University and greater Chicago went out of their way to mentor black and white children in Charlottesville.

Charlottesville’s growth as a community in which people of all races work and study together was aided immeasureably by her efforts.

“She was great at getting people together. She had a knack for that,“ said Mariflo Stephens, a writer, teacher and former reporter who met Elwood in the early 1970s.

“Everyone knew her. I was kind of intimidated by her, but by the time you got to know her you found out she was very warm,“ Stephens said.  “She was definitely a force of nature.“

Mary Ann Elwood was distressed that children were graduating from elementary school without learning to read. She saw that one-on-one tutoring taught children in her home and could work in any setting.

She organized a free kindergarten program and, later, a Book Buddies Program that linked together up to 160 volunteers a year with first graders who could use help learning to read.

“She certainly had a big impact on my life as well as a lot of people’s lives in this community,“ said Marcia Invernezzi, a professor of education at UVA’s Curry School who co-founded Book Buddies with her.

Elwood believed that success in reading by the end of first grade was invaluable in opening doors and preventing future failure.

Mary Ann Elwood’s passion for politics led her to organize people to vote. She succeeded in uniting black voters and white liberals and moderates into a highly organized majority in city elections.

“She had real friends, not just allies,“ said friend Virginia Germino. With a raucous sense of humor and righteous anger at racial injustice, “She brought people together,“ Germino said.

But with her background she was also a good fit as the first female president and CEO of the Charlottesville Regional Chamber of Commerce, said current chamber president Tim Hulbert.

“She was a superstar,“ Hulbert said. “She and Bill were superstars.“

She was admired by former UVA President John T. Casteen III, who praised “her capacity to criticize in ways that enlightened rather than antagonized, and to express affection and respect in words that also corrected and taught.  She and Bill addressed the world as it was, imagined a world that acknowledged its past but also built new futures.  Mary Ann lived her life with elegant honesty.  Few do that.  But she did, and because of that the parts of the world that she touched are better places.“

Charlottesville found inspiration in her leadership, and sense of justice, and is a more integrated community thanks to her.

Competitive elections in November sharpen the candidates and the issues.

Real races give voters, who are the consumers of all that discussion and advertising known as campaigning, choices they desire and deserve.

But in Virginia, genuine competition in November elections is going the way of the dodo bird and the $1 cup of coffee, at least for most voters.

Partisan warming has pushed the competition into the June to August summer months. That is when political parties nominate candidates with far smaller turnouts and far more ideologically and rigidly partisan litmus tests.

As long as political parties draw legislative districts to give one party or the other overwhelming advantages, the climate change in politics will mean fewer hot races in November and more seats that only change hands when parties nominate candidates.

Although partisan warming is definitely and entirely man-made, there is no scientific consensus yet formed as to exactly how destructive it will be to the environment of democracy.

The push of hot races from November to the summer freezes seats into partisan place in the fall.

The nomination season in Virginia this August will occur as Republicans and Democrats court the relatively few true believers on the right and the left.

Those candidates who pass partisan muster when the few vote in August stand to inherit safer seats in the fall.

Competition is failing most places in the fall.

Democrats in the Virginia Senate hold 22 of the chamber’s 40 seats and so far are not even contesting 15 seats held by Republicans.

Using their narrow 22-18 majority, Democrats this spring stuffed Republican voters into as many of those 15 GOP districts as they could to maximize Democratic potential in adjacent districts.

That leaves only something like seven or eight tough and ridiculously expensive truly competitive Novembers Senate elections.

Almost 30 of the 40 senators could sleep-walk to victory.

Five Senate Democrats are still unchallenged by Republicans. Twenty of the state’s 40 districts—half of the entire state—have no races.

So much for competition. If one district typically has more than 60 percent of its vote going to the other party, parties figure why bother with a November election?

The House of Delegates, which political observers agree is nearly certain to remain solidly Republican, is hardly a bastion of competition, either.

In the House, 40 Republican-held seats are unchallenged by Democrats and 25 seats held by Democrats are not contested by Republicans thus far.

When 65 of 100 seats have no two-party competition, the voters in two-thirds of Virginia are cheated out of a choice.

Blame partisan redistricting as a root cause of this dearth of democratic choice as districts are party-packed for easier partisan control.

Congressional redistricting in Virginia is no better. Eleven congressmen consented this spring to a House of Delegates plan that packs Republican voters into eight GOP districts and more Democrats into three Democratic-held districts, giving incumbents incredible advantages. That plan has not passed.

The House and Senate in Virginia’s General Assembly cannot agree on a plan, so the courts may have to step in and draw lines.

Perhaps judges can add competition back into the November elections.

Until redistricting is made less partisan, it will be the rare district indeed that will offer competitive two-party choice in November.

Fort Monroe in Hampton offers one of the finest, and least known, examples of how Virginia shaped the end of slavery.

Virginia’s original sin of enslaving Africans started 392 years ago in Hampton and started unraveling 150 years ago in May of 1861 when three African-American slaves, who were considered property under American law, were kept as contraband in the very same place at Fort Monroe.

The first three slaves showed up by boat as runaways at Fort Monroe hours after Virginia broke from the Union.

“I believe this is the greatest unknown story of the Civil War,“ said Doug Domenech, Virginia’s secretary of natural resources.

Domenech, who said Fort Monroe will make a fine historical park some day, tells the story of the general’s groundbreaking bureaucratic and legalistic decision, which helped guide Presidend Lincoln’s hand and policy toward an Emancipation Proclamation within two years.

Prior to the rebellion launched at Fort Sumpter in Charleston Harbor earlier that spring of 1861, the United States Army had no legal right to keep slaves safe, protected and unreturned.

But a canny and creative Army general at Fort Monroe turned American property rights against a Confederate colonel and slave owner who quickly sought the return of his runaway chattel.

Major Gen. Benjamin Franklin Butler was asked by an emmisary of the Confederate colonel to return the slaves. He refused.

Butler was about to make policy that had not yet been made or approved in Washington.

When the three slaves rowed across the James River and up to his fort in a stolen boat, Butler faced a decision as a commander without clear guidance on such a matter from Washington.
 
This was a day after Virginia had ratified secession from the Union and the three slaves—Frank Baker, Shepard Mallory and James Townsend—belonged to a colonel who had compelled them to dig an artillary emplacement across the harbor from Fort Monroe,  according to a story in the April 3, 2011, edition of the New York Times, “How Slavery Really Ended in America.“

Baker, Mallory and Townsend arrived at the fort under cover of darkness, sought asylum and brought with them useful intelligence about the gun emplacements being set up to attack Union forces under Butler’s command.

Butler, who happened to be a lawyer and Massachusetts legislator in civilian life, decided to decalre the three men contraband of war since they were engaged in construction of a gun battery and were claimed as property by Confederate Col. Charles Mallory.

Although noninterferance with slavery was federal law and Lincoln’s early war policy, the case of the three fugitive slaves who had been digging a gun emplacement to shell his fort gave Butler a set of facts that allowed him to change policy toward slaves seeking freedom.

The general decided to keep the slaves under his care as contraband of war. The convenient and canny definition of contraband—and not freed slaves—stuck and the word spread across the country.

Within days, more contraband started to walk up to Butler’s fort. A village of hard-working and semi-freed slaves showed up to live at Fort Monroe and the term “contrabands” was born to describe them in their legal limbo.

Soon a flood of contrabands started crossing Union lines elsewhere across the South to become valued allies and protected souls.

The contraband label gave cover to Lincoln’s government before it was politically ready to declare abolitiion of slavery. It was a creative half step that later became a carefully crafted full step.

Fort Monroe on a spit of land in Hampton is likely to become an excellent and historic park, Domenech said, noting that it is the place slaves first set foot in Virginia in 1619 and where slavery started ending as slaves set foot in 1861 to become contraband and later finally free.

National park status would be fitting for the fort where Gen. Butler started writing America’s end to slavery. 

The event will begin at 6 p.m. in the Washington Room of CNU’s David Student Union.

All Sorensen alumni and the public are invited to the event on Thursday, May 26, which is free and kicks off with a reception sponsored by State Farm from 6 to 6:30 p.m.

Why aren’t more women in elective office today?

One reason might be that not enough have been asked to run.

Studies show that men generally do not wait to be asked by friends, colleagues or parties to throw their hat in the ring. Even if they don’t wear hats, men just announce for an office and go for it.

Women, whether they wear hats or not, more often wait to be asked.

What is clear in Virginia right now is that this year, as usual, many more men are seeking state legislative positions than are women. 

Across the nation, 23 out of every 100 state legislators are women.

In Virginia, the numbers are a bit lower. Only 19 of 100 members of the House of Delegates are women and just eight women serve in the 40-member Virginia Senate. Two of them are retiring this year.

Of the first 116 candidates to announce for the House thus far, fewer than 20 percent are women. In the State Senate contests on the ballot, 18 percent of the first 61 candidates to announce are women.

Politics can be a cantankerous business. Maybe it would be a little less so if more women joined the boys.

We live in a nation that believes in doing great things together when we can agree on what those great things are. Settling the West, defeating Hitler and freeing captive nations, going to the moon, attaching cell phones to every other ear and identifying ourselves by the T shirts or tattoos we wear all are things, great or small, we Americans have accomplished together.

There is much to find common cause to do. Finding and defeating Osama Bin Laden was one of those things. Improving public education and getting government spending under control would be others that could gain bipartisan agreement. Some things are better done and more easily accomplished if two parties get together and work out their differences.

Electing more women to office may be a key to achieving that type of consensus. Women are drastically underrepresented in state and federal office, which hurts our politics because women tend to be better consensus seekers than men and much less prone to the combative effects of excessive testosterone. (Although a few women in politics behave as testosterone pill poppers, the vast majority do not.)

The women I have covered in Virginia politics over more than 30 years tended to be at least as smart and savvy as the men and generally better at finding ways to meld interests. They do not run around and spike the football.

Many people still cannot quite accept women in leadership positions. As I was riding the train back from New York City to Charlottesville this week, I noticed a blatant example of that. The iconic photo of President Obama silently watching a video feed with 15 top aides at the White House during the Bin Laden operation two Sunday nights ago was doctored in a reprint in a New York Hasidic newspaper, Der Zeitung.

The images of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and U.S. Director of Anti-Terrorism Audrey Tomason were digitally erased from the group, according to the New York Post, which reprinted the doctored photo and reported that the Jerusalem Post said the offending paper “didn’t want to show women in authority positions.“

Women are not only generally better at building consensus, they genuinely care about solving economic and social issues that affect families.

They comprise more than 50 percent of the American electorate and less than a quarter of the legislative teams, including Congress.

No woman I can think of in Virginia politics is remembered for scandal, which is hardly true of the men even though Virginia can boast it has far fewer scandals among its public officials than most other states.

Lingering sexual stereotypes are unfair to woman and yet very real in politics and, to some extent, in the media.

As the media increasingly treat politics as entertainment, or as a game or sport, women are judged and questioned about what they wear or how they do their hair.

Clearly the most outrageous hair in the business of politics is Donald Trump’s, so let’s restrict the coverage and commentary on political hair.  By the way, not even Trump should not be judged by his hair.

States from Maryland to Florida and beyond are studying how to base teacher pay in part on the test scores of students.

This is an idea worth looking into and probably worth rejecting as unfair to teachers, students and the learning process.

Americans have a long history of misusing standardized tests, including IQ tests, and should be careful about using these as a measure to determine teacher pay.

The tests have some value in measuring student performance, especially if they show sequential progress for individual students, but scores for pupils can be unfair, inaccurate measures of teacher performance.

Today’s standardized tests are not as pernicious as previous instruments of intelligence and achievement measurement, but their use in the hands of school officials making budget decisions ought to scare teachers whose value in the classroom should never be measured through the lens of sleepy, lazy, dopey, sneezy, bashful or uninspired test-takers.

Testing in American schools already limits and defines how teachers spend their classroom and after-school time.

Adding the burden of having test scores help define teacher pay could lead to the upside-down logic of rewarding bad teachers who are teaching to tests while limiting pay of those teaching the disadvantaged. Good teachers might flock to schools in which test scores are shown to improve and away from challenged classrooms, resulting in a poorer incentive to help those who most need the biggest boost.

The history of tying test scores to teacher pay, as is now being suggested in several states, including Maryland, is spotty and its value unproven. For generations, the standard tools of sorting students, especially IQ testing and tracking, have left minority students, particularly black students, mired in lower tracks.

My interest in the idea is sparked by an excellent course I am taking at the University of Virginia’s Curry School of Education, the History of American Education.

In one of our readings, one critic of tying student scores to teacher pay, Diane Ravitch, said the idea discounts credentials and experience in favor of judging teachers by their students’ scores despite studies by economists that demostrate “that this particular measure of effectiveness is highly unstable.

Ravitch, a former assistant secretary of education under the first President Bush, also said American educators in the first half of the 20th Century widely believed that immigrant children “lacked the intellect for academic studies.“

Alfie Kohn, another education critic, said the more educators “allow themselves to be turned into accountants, the more trivial their teaching becomes and the more their assessments miss.“ He notes that norm-referenced tests, including the Iowa and Comprehensive Tests of Basic Skills, were designed “so that only about half the test-takers will respond correctly to most items. The main objective of these tests is to rank, not to rate; to spread out the scores, not to gauge the quality of a given student or school.“

Kohn argues that over use of testing can hurt students as “the more that students are led to focus on how well they’re doing, the less engaged they tend to become with what they’re doing.“

Politicians are going ahead with such plans, which poll as popular. In Florida under a new statute signed into law March 24 teachers are now going to receive pay increases based on student test scores. The law sets up an evaluation system that will rely heavily on student test score data to judge teacher quality.

There is much to be wary of in the entire history of turning children into data. Testing has been touted for steering gifted and talented students into math and science in greater numbers, yet our national ranking in these subjects declined during the past 50 years as rhetoric about educational excellence soared much higher than academic attainments.

We owe it to our teachers and our children not to base teacher pay on a social science of widely extrapolated test uses whose acceptance by educators and the public may be here today and gone tomorrow.