June 30, 2014

You've got to commit the resources. And yes, it costs money.

I'm the lead teacher in a large urban high school inclusion classroom for five out of six periods a day. I have regular students, special education students, emotionally disturbed students, blind students, deaf students, English Language Learners, students in wheelchairs, you name it.

We average 30 students per period. I have an inclusion teacher, who is a special ed teacher with a Master's degree IN special ed, I have a teacher who signs for deaf students, I have another special ed teacher with a Master's specialization in emotionally disturbed students, all of whom are in the classroom whenever their particular special population has a member present.

On demand, we have assistant principals, campus police, the department heads of ELL, Special Ed, and Social Studies. It's the first non-boring job I've ever had. In 10 years, we have had exactly one classroom disturbance, and that was a regular student breaking up with her boyfriend, resulting in her shoving a desk around.

So does it cost money to have 3 master's level teachers in a room plus an interpreter? Yep, and the results are worth it. The senior class overall has a nearly 30 per cent failure rate, but our rate in our inclusion part of the world was less than 15 per cent, and in every case, was caused by poor attendance.

Maslow was absolutely right - if kids don't feel safe and supported, nothing good can happen. Sounds like St Paul is trying it on the cheap. Don't know how big the school is, but 6 total new staff don't seem like much. Best of luck to them, but they really need to commit to doing what is actually needed.

June 7, 2014

I've been teaching for 19 years at a large urban high school here in west Texas, and I have

never met any teacher with an attitude as you have described.

Standardized testing defines what will be taught and nothing else, because district money, administrative pay, teacher pay, facilities money, all revolve around those sacred results.

Now this is all strange, since no longitudinal study has ever followed a group of students from birth to death to find out what contributed most to happiness in their lives, and that's the only reason for living - happiness.

Students still come to the USA from all over the world to attend school here, because the simple fact is, we have success here - the world's largest economy, extremely high standard of living, especially for a large, high population country of heterogeneous makeup.

Without teachers, there is no education. And everyone teaches, by example and by word, all the time. This is why your type of post is quite distressing - it's similar to someone telling a child that the police are all corrupt, that all members of the government are out to get them, that people of different races and religions are evil. The fact is, it's simply not true, and while any profession has less-desirable elements in it, they don't last long without outside factors - relative, friend, huge scarcity in the field, or something else.

300 students a year, 6 hours in the classroom each day, hundreds of hours of preparation, worry, define, refine, include, reteach, retest, be observed, do observing, all culminate once a year for those who teach seniors, like I do, in graduation at 8:30 tonight, when hundreds of students will become graduates, and it will be my privilege to see them in my neighborhood, as I do and have for the last two decades, as they share their success, family photos, job woes and triumphs, temporary setbacks and major disasters in life with me. It's my absolute privilege and joy - not one of them has ever been unkind to me, nor ignored me in the real world in all these years.

Beats banking, graphics arts, baby pictures, insurance sales, truck tire sales, newspaper writing, construction, oilfield work all hollow, and is a far more demanding and difficult job with real consequences than any other those other jobs I held previously.

May 10, 2014

Well, Adam Smith felt that corporations were inevitably a bad way to do business:

The trade of a joint stock company is always managed by a court of directors. This court, indeed, is frequently subject, in many respects, to the control of a general court of proprietors. But the greater part of those proprietors seldom pretend to understand anything of the business of the company, and when the spirit of faction happens not to prevail among them, give themselves no trouble about it, but receive contentedly such half-yearly or yearly dividend as the directors think proper to make to them. This total exemption from trouble and from risk, beyond a limited sum, encourages many people to become adventurers in joint stock companies, who would, upon no account, hazard their fortunes in any private copartnery. Such companies, therefore, commonly draw to themselves much greater stocks than any private copartnery can boast of. The trading stock of the South Sea Company, at one time, amounted to upwards of thirty-three millions eight hundred thousand pounds. The divided capital of the Bank of England amounts, at present, to ten millions seven hundred and eighty thousand pounds. The directors of such companies, however, being the managers rather of other people's money than of their own, it cannot well be expected that they should watch over it with the same anxious vigilance with which the partners in a private copartnery frequently watch over their own. Like the stewards of a rich man, they are apt to consider attention to small matters as not for their master's honour, and very easily give themselves a dispensation from having it. Negligence and profusion, therefore, must always prevail, more or less, in the management of the affairs of such a company. It is upon this account that joint stock companies for foreign trade have seldom been able to maintain the competition against private adventurers. They have, accordingly, very seldom succeeded without an exclusive privilege, and frequently have not succeeded with one. Without an exclusive privilege they have commonly mismanaged the trade. With an exclusive privilege they have both mismanaged and confined it.

Book V, I, iii, 1 The Wealth of Nations

Emphases added.

April 20, 2014

Hmm, time for Jerry Clower to update "Words We Don't Need"

Like penitence, because we are no longer sorry for anything (Lookin' at YOU, Wall Street!)
Or foist, because now anything goes (Hey, General Mills, hitting "like" means no mediation for faulty products?)
Or foreseen (As in, no one could have foreseen, right, Condi?)
Or gallant (Good lord, who wants to even TRY it now?)
Or rigmarole (I mean, the advertising industry has to make a LIVING, right?)

Yeah, all pretty useless in our current culture. But MUST have

Twerking (Just look it up and you'll immediately feel worse.)
Gawjus (Yes, that OLD word "gorgeous" is just too cumbersome, isn't it?)
Flipers (Diapers worn by a flight crew when they have no access to a bathroom, but don't worry, they fly well even when stinking)
Selfie (Why YES, it IS all about ME!)

Well, gotta bounce! SAT is all that and a bag of chips, right? I don't know why I'm bugg'n, cause a little clownin never made anyone go postal! (Gratuitous 90's flashback)

March 30, 2014

Who said they should be gender exclusive? They clearly are, since

with literally millions of people of all genders in the work and government-place, you'd expect a rather random result, and yet, you have tiny numbers of women in both areas. Bizarrely, we task women with raising the children, and so many of these ideas come from maternal caregivers who are contributing to their own oppression, much like Uncle Toms of old.

Nothing random about it - the good old boys protect their own at all times and at all costs.

I don't believe in military conscription, nor war, nor a military. I don't believe in going around the world killing strangers for the benefit of the money machine, so no draft, no wars, and no military for me, please.

See what you did with the kindergarten teachers? I did. You must feel that male teachers are pedophiles and should not be around children of that age. Please don't say you didn't say that - you did, so now you will have to own it.

That blurt is just another confirmation of the anti-woman, pro-rape society we swim in. Ask a fish how he likes the rain. Won't know what you're talking about, because they're wet all the time. Same here.

March 30, 2014

No value.

We don't even process the rape kits. How's that for value?

We've had our first black President of the US, but no woman yet.

There are 81 women in the House of Representatives and 20 women in the Senate, or about 19%, even though women are 50%+ of the population.

Women in equivalent occupations make about 77% of the wages that men make in those same occupations, holding constant time on job, education, and other qualifications.

Women currently hold 4.4 percent of Fortune 500 CEO roles.

So no, we don't value women, and there were no happy darkies singing the praises of Ol' Massa before the Civil War, either, although it gave great comfort to the oppressors to think so. Still does.

March 30, 2014

Here's a starting point:

1. Process every rape kit already taken and being ignored by the millions and prosecute every one of the offenders, and register each convict as a sex offender for life.

2. Assign in-school punishment to every male student who walks down the hallways with his hands over a girl's breasts, his crotch pressed into her body, his arm firmly around her neck. This is a major problem in the large urban school I teach in, and I call out each and every offender between classes. Unfortunately, it's not considered a punishable offense, so I try to make it a teachable moment.

3. Teach women that unwelcome contact is rape, period, and teach them to take action - to loudly object at the moment, to file charges, to get help from bystanders, to in every way signal that this bad behavior will not be tolerated, and to get away from these offenders as soon as possible and permanently.

Now there's a start.

March 30, 2014

Doesn't mean it's not, does it?

Truth is, millions of rape kits of evidence are never processed, because the society we live in places no value on women. We might find the men who actually committed those rapes if we processed those kits, and good lord, some of them might be influential community members or people with money!

So, we give them a pass without even looking to see if a crime has been committed.

That is a rape culture, where rape is invisible and undiscussable. Yes, the one we live in.

March 12, 2014

Not at all familiar with the seizure of assets from US citizens of Japanese descent, are you?

http://www.fear.org/RMillerJ-A.html

Yes, we took it, stole it, sold it, redistributed it to white US citizens who had not taken such good care of their property, and if the Japanese-Americans complained, they were threatened with prison. Since they were already in concentration camps, that threat sounded credible to them.

And we most certainly never compensated Native Americans for everything we simply took at gunpoint from them, either.

So why so squeamish about seizing assets from corporations, who are not even flesh and blood, have no feelings, and suffer no physical nor mental privations?

THIS is what being an American is all about!

March 10, 2014

http://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?f=W&n=PET&s=EMM_EPMR_PTE_NUS_DPG

The price of gas inauguration week 2000 as Bush comes in: $1.269
The price of gas inauguration week 2008 as Bush goes out: $3.068

I had to find this link because of all the stupid Republicans who think gas was $1.50 when Obama took office, and now it's $3.259, when it started at $3.068 and is NOW, 6 years later, $3.292

Yes, now that food, energy and rent have been removed from the cost of living index, it seems the only things left are meth and huffing fluids. The argument for removing those other things? "Too volatile."

Sigh