Category: Education

Fine By Us

Education

This is interesting:

A radical activist who believes black students should only be taught by same-race teachers has received $20million from billionaires such as Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates.

Sharif El-Mekki has lobbied for a focus on anti-racism education in public schools through his prominent nonprofit and time as an adviser to Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro, as reported by The Free Press.

A former middle and high school teacher, El-Mekki lobbies through his nonprofit, the Center for Black Educator Development, CBED, which describes its mission as a ‘world where… all black students are taught by high-quality, same-race teachers’ and where ‘all teachers demonstrate high levels of expertise in anti-racist mindsets.’

CBED has over $19.5 million in assets thanks to donations from Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

And Brother Sharif looks like about what you suspect he would:

Yeah, by all means pull Black kids out of these “White” public schools and put them into all-Black institutions.

Then watch as public schools’ test scores improve and crime goes down.  What will happen in the Black schools is as predictable as the sunrise, just a lot more depressing, and will need still more support from White liberal assholes (without any improvement to show for it, of course).

Somewhere out there, Martin Luther King is spinning in his grave at 12,000rpm, while all those old Afrikaner apartheid supporters are howling with laughter.

Separate but equal, indeed. It’ll work about as well as all other initiatives that have come from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, whose sponsorship of OBED allows ol’ Sharif to pull an annual salary of nearly a quarter of a million dollars.

Race hustling has always been a way for Black “leaders” like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson to earn the big bucks, but it’s almost as good for the lesser lights, like the above.  For their followers… not so much.

Let African-Americans sink.

Excuses, Excuses

Education

A teacher talks about bizarre excuses for tardiness. Some classics include:

“The ceiling in the boys toilets collapsed due to the weight of the vapes hidden inside the ceiling tiles so they had to go to a different toilet”, and “their grandmother was meant to drop them off but went to the wrong school”, not to mention “the wait for Greggs sausage rolls made them late for school.”

Back when I were a whining schoolboy, I think in about 1970, I once made up an excuse for not having done my Math homework.  If I say so myself, it was a brilliant excuse (sadly, I cannot recall it, only that it was excellent and could have brought many to tears).

Unfortunately, the teacher was not some rookie, but an elderly man who had been teaching at St. John’s College since 1932, and was not to be fooled.  He smiled, and remarked:

“Do you know, I haven’t heard that excuse since the early 1950s.”

Howls of laughter from all the other guys in the class, and Red-Faced Kim had to acknowledge his defeat.  However, Mr. Jefferies (“Judge” was his nickname) showed some empathy by not punishing me, because of my creativity.

I always did my Math homework after that.

Yeah Well, Duh

Education

No prizes for guessing my vote on this one:

Lessons are tightly scripted to the clock to squeeze in as much learning as possible. Teachers, rather than students, move through the shiny, clean hallways from classroom to classroom during the day because it takes less time and creates less commotion. Kids change rooms for classes like physical education.

Culture-building begins immediately at the start of each year. In the first three days of school, called “culture camp,” students learn the rules of behavior, such as keeping their eyes on the teacher and a pencil at the ready, and why those rules are key to meeting the high academic standards. Then they practice these skills, like how to show respect to teachers and peers, before they open a textbook.

Of course, the Left (i.e. the Education Establishment) are going to indulge in a frenzy of pearl-clutching and fiery hair at this kind of approach, but it’s clear that their little (?) experiment on turning public schools into a Lord Of The Flies environment has failed utterly.

And of course, the very idea of returning to basic principles is contrary to “progressive” dogma, so “Doubleplusungoodness!” will be the response.

Yeah, well fuck you.  You tried, it failed (like so much of Socialism), and kids deserve better, much better than the drivel you’ve been pushing on them.

The alternative is homeschooling — a total withdrawal from the public education system.

Once again, having homeschooled all three of my own kids into respectable and responsible adulthood, there will be no prizes for guessing my preference.

Oh, The Hardship

Education

Must our children suffer any more?  Yes, according to the headmaster of this school in Britishland:

A [school principal] has insisted that a 12-hour school day will give pupils ‘buckets full of endorphins’ – as the 7am to 7pm scheme comes into effect today.

Children at All Saints Catholic College in the affluent neighbourhood of Notting Hill, west London, will partake in a whole host of activities instead of spending the time at home on their devices when classes finish at 3.15pm.

This includes homework time and activity clubs from dodgeball, basketball, art, drama and cookery classes in a bid to break the cycle of smartphone ‘addiction’.

The controversial decision to introduce a 12-hour school day comes after the principal found ‘shocking’ things on confiscated mobile phones, including pupils blackmailing strangers and catfishing one another.

[He said:] ‘It’s pretty clear across the sector this is a real issue in terms of the vacuum that phones fill for children when they go home. There’s a crisis in attendance and if we look at the last 10 years or so there’s a depletion in services that are available to children after school. He said the school will ensure homework is done within that time, while also making sure that children take part in activities so they go home ‘with a bucket full of endorphins’.

Not to mention that the little shits should be too exhausted to get up to mischief.

Not that this is anything new, of course.  Allow me to present a typical day in the life of a schoolboy at my old school, St. John’s College, back in the day:

6.40am:  Rising bell
7.02am:  Roll call
7.10am:  Breakfast
7.35am:  School prep (make beds, get books together for class, etc.)
8.00am:  Morning Chapel
8.25am:  Classes begin
1.25pm:  Lunch
2.10pm:  Reading and study (classrooms or dorm rooms)
2.50pm:  Sports (compulsory; cricket, swimming, athletics, tennis, squash in summer;  rugby or field hockey in winter)
4.15pm:  Roll call
4.20pm:  Free time, unless taken up by extra duties: sports, choir practice, punishment (detention, hard labor etc.)
Day scholars could leave for home after roll call or after extra duties.  For boarders:
6.30pm:  Dinner
7.10pm:  First Prep (homework), in classrooms, with a 10-minute break at 8pm
8.10pm:  Second Prep, until 9.15pm
Lights out:  9.45pm

If the daytime classroom hours seem to be less than in U.S. schools, remember the two hours’ prep each night, and allow me also to point out that Saturday mornings were the same as weekday mornings, and pupils were only free after lunch — “free”, that is, unless the school sports teams were engaged in matches against other area schools, and attendance was compulsory (roll call again!) at First Team matches.

Boarders stayed in school on Saturday nights, which were taken up with “club” activities such as Bridge, Drama, Chess, Debate, History, Photography, Geography, Literature, Film, Pioneer (nature/history studies) and so on.  Membership of at least three clubs was compulsory. Then Sundays:

8.30am:  Rising bell
8.55am:  Roll call
9.00am:  Sunday Chapel & Communion
10.00am:  Boarders were excused to leave, with parents only
6.30pm:  Roll call
6.35pm:  Dinner
7.00pm:  Evensong & Sermon, until 7.45pm
8.30pm:  Lights out
…and the whole thing would start again the next day.

So when I read about “12-hour days”, I just giggle.

We were so exhausted (endorphins? pah) that we seldom had time to get up to mischief.  Officially, that was the theory, anyway.  The reality, especially for thugs like the Four Muscadels, was a little different.

And we didn’t even have phones.  Wouldn’t have mattered if we did, because the school would have banned and confiscated them.

Just like our Brit headmaster has.  In that, at least, we have something in common.

Teacher, Teacher

Education

Via Insty, I see that another teacher at the same school has been canned for her side gig:

A second teacher at a small Missouri high school has landed in hot water for supplementing her income by peddling porn on OnlyFans — after a student slipped a note under her classroom door that they “knew her secret,” according to a report.

Megan Gaither, 31, an English teacher and varsity cheerleading coach at St. Clair High School, told the Post-Dispatch that she was put on leave Friday after her X-rated moonlighting job was revealed.

Gaither said she joined the subscription-based site in May to help pay back more than $125,000 in student loans. Her total pay last year, including a coaching stipend, was about $47,500, the paper reported.

Her colleague Brianna Coppage, a former freshman and sophomore English teacher at the school, recently resigned to devote all her time to porn after she was placed on leave when it was revealed she was running an OnlyFans page with her husband.

It’s only fans fair to see what all the fuss is about:

I know:  cue the “They didn’t look like that back in the day when I was using a quill to write on papyrus!”  wails.

My question is of a different nature.  How the hell did she expect to pay back $125,000 in student loans on a teacher’s salary anyway?  (Corollary:  what kind of non-medical / legal degree ends up costing well over a hundred grand?)

Look, I’m no prude, but I am a realist.  The appearance of subscriber sites like OnlyFans has given women a non-academic economic opportunity.  Low up-front cost (a camera, access to a streaming outlet) and away we go.

Granted, one needs to have a fairly relaxed set of morals and (perhaps) a willing partner (or two, if we’re going to get really adventurous).  But given the apparent lack of modesty and morality among young women today, that doesn’t seem to be much of a problem.

And being even more realistic, an OnlyFans gig is a million times safer than other prostitution options, which involve walking the streets and being at risk from all those Green River Killer wannabes, not to mention the chances of being abducted and sold to some Arab in a Gulf state.

At least we have equal opportunity here, among women anyway.  Unlike a “straight” movie career, looks aren’t that important because, let’s face it, there are no limits to male depravity — okay, male tastes — in this kind of thing.  Even someone who looks like Hillary Clinton will find a willing (and paying) audience in the “GILF” world.

Sorry about that, but you get my point.  Even the most hardened, tattooed and pierced chick is going to be guaranteed an audience that is not confined to still pics on hotbikerbabes.com;  in fact, that seems to be a positive advantage.

Anyway, before this post turns into a treatise, I deplore the fact that people who are supposedly “educating” our kids academically are in fact giving them another kind of education altogether.  Witness the fact that somehow, the little sneaks in the above article seemed to have had no problem in not only finding and identifying Teacher Dearest on OnlyFans — a whole ‘nother topic all by itself:  what the fuck were teenage boys doing on OnlyFans?  where did they get the money?  where were their parents? — but these boys were apparently going to blackmail the hapless teachers (which has happened before).

For all the opprobrium heaped on the religious schools of yore (I know, lust-filled Catholic priests and nuns with rulers blah blah blah), I can’t help thinking that Napoleon had a point:  let the Church educate children until age 12, and then toss the little shits out into the world to earn a living, was his dictum,  Certainly, cossetting them in schools until age 24 (which is what we have today) doesn’t seem to be working that well for them either.

It’s a little sad to think that the kids in the above pic are going to end up with untold thousands in tuition debt, and only the girl on the end is going to have the OnlyFans option to pay it off.

On the other hand, maybe that’s all they deserve.

Double Win

Education, Marxists, Unions

Here’s a win-win situation: 

The Fresno Teachers Association (FTA) is demanding that the Fresno Unified School district set aside parking for homeless families, as a part of their larger list of demands – such as free laundry services – as the union prepares to go on strike.

Yes;  nothing says “We Care About The Children!” more than putting a squatters’ camp right on school property.

Fortunately, the school district is showing just a little common sense:

The district has previously stated that it does not plan to bow to the union’s demand, with the district’s chief communications officer saying that, “We do not plan to open our parking lots,” since “education, not housing,” is the school district’s area of expertise.

The union has other demands:  money for “security”, an end to Global Warming, banning tooth decay and some other equally-important stuff, but nemmind.

Here’s the win:  the longer this bunch of malcontent Marxists can stay out of the classroom, the better-off the kids will be.

And here’s the other win:  the longer the school district plays hardball, the sooner the striking schoolteachers will have to join the ranks of the homeless they seem to care so much about.

Of course, there’s another way to deal with these striking teachers:

…but no doubt someone’s going to have a problem with this.