This ain't Hell, but you can see it from here

Category: Schools

  • Waiting for Superman

    So, Netflix put the documentary “Waiting for Superman” on it’s wireless list, so that’s what I’m watching this afternoon. It’s about the “education””system” in this country. If you can watch this documentary and not walk away hating the government, unions and liberalism in general, you’re a brainless moron.

    This is how liberalism promises to make everything in the country “better”. Somehow throwing money at problems is doing something beneficial. When I graduated from high school, I CLEPed out of my first year of college without studying a lick – just based on what I learned in high school. But now, New York liberalism has made the education system “better”. Twenty years later when I went to the State University of New York to finish my education, I didn’t learn a thing I hadn’t learned in high school.

    Most of the freshman class was enrolled in remedial classes for reading and writing and math…in college, they were learning to read. New York used to have the best education system in the country…until liberalism made it “better”. They leveled the playing field nationally with Jimmy Carter’s Department of Education, so the leveling leveled New York State’s system down. And since we’ve placed such a high valueon colelge education, the public education system can teach more important shit like putting condoms on bananas and let the colleges take up the slack….when the public schools used to teach a college level education, now they teach up to a grade school level and stop.

    And throwing money at the problem isn’t going to help that illiterate high school senior headed for college next Fall. or that high school senior who will start looking for a job in June.

  • Professor calls care packages shameful.

    So just like a similar case that happened Saint Xavier University a few years ago. Professor Michael Avery sent the email in response to a campus wide email asking support for care packages. According to the people over at “Above the Law”, he said the following below.

    I think it is shameful that it is perceived as legitimate to solicit in an academic institution for support for men and women who have gone overseas to kill other human beings. I understand that there is a residual sympathy for service members, perhaps engendered by support for troops in World War II, or perhaps from when there was a draft and people with few resources to resist were involuntarily sent to battle. That sympathy is not particularly rational in today’s world, however.

    The United States may well be the most war prone country in the history of civilization. We have been at war two years out of three since the Cold War ended. We have 700 overseas military bases. What other country has any? In the last ten years we have squandered hundreds of billions of dollars in unnecessary foreign invasions. Those are dollars that could have been used for people who are losing their homes due to the economic collapse, for education, to repair our infrastructure, or for any of a thousand better purposes than making war. And of course those hundreds of billions of dollars have gone for death and destruction.

    Perhaps some of my colleagues will consider this to be an inappropriate political statement. But of course the solicitation email was a political statement, although cast as support for student activities. The politics of that solicitation are that war is legitimate, perhaps inevitable, and that patriotic Americans should get behind our troops.

    We need to be more mindful of what message we are sending as a school. Since Sept. 11 we have had perhaps the largest flag in New England hanging in our atrium. This is not a politically neutral act. Excessive patriotic zeal is a hallmark of national security states. It permits, indeed encourages, excesses in the name of national security, as we saw during the Bush administration, and which continue during the Obama administration.

    Why do we continue to have this oversized flag in our lobby? Why are we sending support to the military instead of Americans who are losing their homes, malnourished, unable to get necessary medical care, and suffering from other consequences of poverty? As a university community, we should debate these questions, not remain on automatic pilot in support of the war agenda.

    The author over at “Above the Law” does a good job at destroying Avery’s email. So head on over there for his full reply. Also 96.9 Boston Talks is asking for feedback on this email. They can be reached at this link.

  • Good kids out there

    This article on Rivals High tells a story of a kid in Minnesota, Josh Ripley, who carried an injured opponent a half a mile back to the beginning of the Applejack Invite and then ran the complete 2 mile race.

     

    “I didn’t think about my race, I knew I needed to stop and help him,” Ripley said in the school district release. “It was something I would expect my other teammates to do. I’m nothing special; I was just in the right place at the right time.”

    The story just made me think about the kinds of men and women who choose to serve in the military when we’ve got troops on at least two fronts, and they’re virtually guaranteed action.  People who make sacrifices like Josh did, just because it’s right.   He’d make a nice hospital corpsman, don’t you think?

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    Nice job, Josh.  I am sure your parents are very proud of you.

     

     

  • Picking your fights

    Adirondack Patriot sent a link to The Blaze about armless and legless 16-year-old Julia Sullivan who wants to join her school’s cheerleading squad and she’s been rejected three years running. I certainly sympathize with her plight and her desire to be a normal teenage high school student, but she and her parents have sent the ACLU after the school.

    “We would agree that there are some activities such as football where the ability to run and tackle are fundamental to the sport,” Kevin Schneider, the family’s attorney, told the World-Herald. “Making reasonable accommodations and modifications for cheerleading are not fundamental in that same way.”

    What? And jumping around, dancing, twirling and catching your team mates aren’t fundamental to cheer leading? What “reasonable accommodations” should be made? Cyborg arms and legs? I’m sure other girls have been rejected by the team because they couldn’t dance or perform acrobatics well enough to be on the squad, right? That’s pretty standard. The “reasonable accommodations” they want is complete ignorance of the fact that Julia’s not even remotely qualified to be on the squad – anymore than I would be even in my prime.

    Not everything is worth litigation, and the ACLU is doing this just to attract the money that sticking up for the handicapped would garner.

    I know there’s at least ONE cheerleader out there who has a comment. You know who you are.

  • LA schools; Homework is racist

    ROS and Eleven-Bravo sent us a link to the LA Times which makes the case for reducing homework in LA schools because it’s keeping students back, somehow from something;

    For while the days of actual Jim Crow laws in California may be gone, Latino and African-American school children are profoundly segregated and at a serious disadvantage.

    Imagine how segregated they’re going to feel when they get culled out of the herd of employable people because they think they can bitch and get a lesser work load out in the real world (not to be confused with the MTV show).

    From LAWeekly Blogs;

    Based on the theory that homework is more likely to be completed by kids with a secure home life and involved parents — aka, the white middle class — LAUSD is forcing teachers to cap homework at 10 percent of a student’s grade, beginning next month.

    “The policy is intended to account for the myriad urban problems facing the district’s mostly low-income, minority population,” writes the Los Angeles Times today.

    Yeah, less education is the answer to the myriad urban problems.

    Alvaro Ramirez, a junior at the Santee Education Complex, doesn’t have his own room and his mother baby-sits young children at night. “They’re always there and they’re always loud,” he said, explaining his challenges with homework.

    Not at all like a workplace, huh? It’s funny, but many educators have discovered that every time they make demands on a student, the student at least meets those new challenges…and students who aren’t challenged also meet those expectations.

    And they wonder why the world thinks Americans are unemployable.

  • Another failing grade for US education

    StrikeFO sends us a link to a Wall Street Journal article that excoriates the US education system is regards to the teaching of history and current events;

    Only 20% of U.S. fourth-graders and 17% of eighth-graders who took the 2010 history exam were “proficient” or “advanced,” unchanged since the test was last administered in 2006. Proficient means students have a solid understanding of the material.

    The news was even more dire in high school, where 12% of 12th-graders were proficient, unchanged since 2006. More than half of all seniors posted scores at the lowest achievement level, “below basic.” While the nation’s fourth- and eighth-graders have seen a slight uptick in scores since the exam was first administered in 1994, 12th-graders haven’t.

    So we lose generation after generation of students to ignorance in what used to be the world class education system. StrikeFO makes the valid point that maybe if teachers spent less time introducing their students to people like Matthis and more time actually teaching relevant material, our students would be a bit brighter. It’s not just Matthis, it’s putting condoms on bananas in class and all of the socialization that occurs in the classroom as opposed to actual teaching.

    We have a cash-hungry university system that accommodates students who can’t read nor write by providing “remedial” instruction which is a green light for public school teachers to steal from the taxpayers by providing a less-than-adequate basic education.

    As taxpayers pour cash into a broken education system, illiterate and moronic students are churned out the other end…most completely unemployable in the modern world. I attended college 20 years after I graduated from high school and I learned nothing in college that i hadn’t already learned in high school. But because of education inflation, I needed that diploma for employers. A sad statement on the state of our system at this point in our history.

    ADDED: Old Trooper adds a link about Minnesota schools who are failing their students in droves;

    Minnesota Department of Education figures, released Wednesday to the Star Tribune, show that 4,872 seniors have yet to pass either or both of tests; that amounts to about 8 percent of all seniors tested.

    This is the second year that passing both tests has been a state graduation requirement, and the figures are similar to those from last year. A final count for the Class of 2010, issued in January, found that 7 percent of seniors — 4,794 — had not passed either or both tests, even after additional chances to take them were offered beyond the school year.

    ADDED AGAIN: Yet another link from Old Trooper to prove my point that schools need to do more teaching and less socialization BS:

    A middle school in Massachusetts is under fire for requiring children to complete a graphic sex survey — without parental knowledge or consent — that included questions about sexual partners and oral sex.

  • Matthis still in your schools

    I know there must be some Philadelphia tax payers in this crowd that are upset that a phony Afghanistan veteran and admitted rapist is lying to your kids in the schools that you fund.

    He still claims he is an Afghanistan veteran. In this video, he claims he “trained up” for his six days at the Bagram Baskin Robbins. He tells the kids that soldiers are trained to shoot civilians.

    He spews out statistics about 1 in 3 women being sexually assaulted while they’re in the military. 1 in 5 men are sexually assaulted during their terms. He gets those figures from a study that sent out hundreds of thousands of surveys and got only few thousand surveys back. One third of the women and 20% of the men who responded claimed to have been sexually assaulted. Not a very scientific survey.

    According to Matthis, 1 in 4 homeless people in NYC are veterans and veterans are the largest demographic among the homeless. More accurately, more homeless claim to be veterans than they claim to be from any other demographic. Most of the homeless veterans I’ve talked to wouldn’t know an M16 from an E-tool.

    And you’re all drug-adled sociopaths teetering on the edge of suicide like him.

    The School District of Philadelphia
    440 N. Broad Street
    Philadelphia PA 19130
    215-400-4000

  • Zombie: How a Teachers’ Rally Made Me Anti-Education

    Our buddy Zombie sends us a link to the latest post at Pajama Media. You can probably see why Zombie’s mind was changed about education by this picture taken at a “State of Emergency” School Funding Protest in LA last month in which teachers indoctrinated their students with propaganda from the Party for Socialism and Liberation;

    From PSL’s “About” page;

    Revolutionary Marxism requires a revolutionary party to flourish and develop. Marxism is not an abstract doctrine but rather a guide to action. It must be constantly tested by action and in debate.

    Sweet, huh? It’s no wonder the schools are churning out utter morons.