Category: Education

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Education, Marxists

Best opening in a news article*:

This week, Matt Meyer did what many parents long to do. He dropped off his kid at school. That’s unusual in Berkeley, California, where he lives, because the schools there have been closed for a year, and the teachers’ union adamantly opposes their reopening. Parents like Mr. Meyer who can afford private schools, which are mostly open, send their kids there. His child has been there since last June. So he dropped off his child and drove off to his job.
His job is head of the Berkeley teachers’ union. His main task there is to keep the public schools closed for everyone else.

[insert “fucking hypocrite” joke here]

*so far.  “Barack Obama dies painfully” would beat it.

I’ll Take “1” For $500, Alex

Education, Marxists

Well now, isn’t this special?

A woke offensive has taken the nation’s schools by storm in the aftermath of the George Floyd fallout, but instead of the intended purpose of solving racial inequities it’s irritated parents of all persuasions.
In interviews with DailyMail.com, parents say they’ve been overwhelmed by education reformers seeking to impose anti-racist agendas on America’s schools. They describe the efforts as well-intentioned but often rushed, condescending, insulting and poorly timed, coming during a global pandemic when most families are just trying to get by.

Yeah, well, sorry folks, but this is anything but well-intentioned:  these assholes are trying to eradicate your history, your heritage and your culture.  Herewith one of the tools they’re using:

And the handy-dandy little crib sheet:

First things first:  someone needs to take this Barndoor Hissy out back and either horsewhip his sorry ass, or else apply the old Chinese Solution To Social Problems (which includes making his surviving family pay for the cartridge).

Or both.

In the meantime, let’s hear it for Whitey:

Helping Hand

Education, Homeschooling

One of the benefits of homeschooling is that parents can tailor the curriculum and teaching methods towards the individual child’s needs.  In our case, we improved Son&Heir’s reading level, for instance, by imposing a strict three-hours-per-day reading regimen — topic or authors of his own choice, of course — and inside two years he went from a three-grades-below-average level to twelfth grade level, at age 15. (His favorite authors were Daphne du Maurier and E.L. Salvatore, and by age 17 he’d read their entire works respectively — an enormous feat in the case of Salvatore, whose works are prodigious).

For #2 Son, who was high-functioning autistic, we improved his reading ability by letting him watch any TV show he wanted, as long as sub-titles were turned on.  This was prompted by the fact that being autistic, he dreaded loud noises — he’d clap his hands over his ears and become near-catatonic — which meant that he would have to turn the TV sound way down to avoid being startled by dramatic increases in the soundtrack volume, but which resulted in him not being able to follow the dialogue and plot.  The sub-titles enabled him to follow the story, and it improved his reading level by a similar degree to Son&Heir’s.  (At age 17, he was yelling at the TV adaptation of The Count of Monte Cristo  for being a travesty of the original plot;  I wasn’t even aware that he’d read the thing, but he had.)

So when I saw this, I nodded with approval:

…simply because I’d proven it to be true in my own experience as a homeschooler.

If you decide to do this, though, be aware that while comprehension and reading skills will improve, you have to work really hard on correct pronunciation, if like in #2 Son’s case you also turn down the TV volume (the spoken word teaches that, of course, so you have to be patient, thorough and non-judgmental in your constant correction).   I and the other family members still have to work on this when we talk to him, even though he’s now in his 30s.  (For those who’ve known him, you may suddenly feel very old;  sorry.)

But to improve reading skills at pretty much any age, closed captions can be your friend.

Back To School

Education, Men & Women

Ah… and when the kiddies go back to school (in the ahem  physical sense), can the teachers be restrained?  It would appear not:

A married teacher had sex with a 15-year-old boy in a field and sent him topless pictures of herself on Snapchat which were then circulated around the school, a court heard today.
Kandice Barber, 35, also allegedly told the boy she might be pregnant with his baby after sleeping with him following a sports awards evening at a secondary school in Buckinghamshire.

And it’s not just Britishland;  Oz is getting into the spirit of the thing as well:

A TEACHER allegedly romped with a 14-year-old student five times in a car after sending saucy Snapchat pics saying she was ‘waiting for him’.
Monica Young, 23, who is engaged, is alleged to have bombarded the boy with messages on Snapchat begging him to send explicit pictures to her.
The western Sydney teacher was charged with 10 offences including multiple counts of aggravated sexual intercourse of a child aged between 14-16 after being arrested on July 10.

That’s not to say that we Murkins are behind the trend, so to speak, especially in Alabama:

A teacher has been arrested and charged with allegedly having sexual relations with a student, according to the Eufaula Police Department.

And for an extra splash of badness:  she’s a Special Ed teacher.

Makes you wonder why the teachers’ unions are resisting calls to open schools, doesn’t it?

Pushing Back

Anarchist thugs, BaconLettuceMayo, Education, Good Stuff

Here’s a happy ending:

A Los Angeles English teacher was forced to flee her home after receiving numerous death threats for wearing an ‘I Can’t Breathe’ T-shirt during one of her virtual class sessions.
The teacher at El Camino Real High School in Woodland Hills, California wore the shirt in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement and included instruction about racial injustice in her teaching, which the school allowed.
But a parent upset with her class allegedly shared a photo of the teacher on social media along with her e-mail address and invitations to harass her.
The photo was later shared by Elijah Schaffer, the podcast host of YouTube’s ‘Slightly Offens*ve’, on his Twitter account, which led the teacher to receive hundreds of emails and threats.

Meanwhile, oh boo-hoo-hoo:

‘I can’t afford to go to a hotel and I can’t go home. My daughter’s a ninth-grader starting at this school. We can’t stay in our home,’ the teacher said to CBS Los Angeles.

Not so much fun when the Alinsky Rules are used against you, huh?

The last word comes from one of the good guys:

Scott Blodgett is one of the parents upset with the teacher’s curriculum that covers the civil unrest unfolding across the country.
‘I just want my daughter to go to English class and learn about English,’ Blodgett said.

Yup.  Stick it to them, good and hard.  And this happened in Califuckingfornia.

Unnecessary Deadlines

Education

I have never understood why people give themselves deadlines on activities which require no deadlines:  “I have to get my hair cut this week” or “I need to do the laundry today” and “I must finish my book before Saturday” and so on.  Other than an attempt to impose some kind of self-discipline over chronic procrastination, all this does is add a layer of stress into one’s life — all the more so because it’s both needless and self-imposed.  An ex-boss of mine put it in perspective, speaking purely of business matters and not of obvious crisis situations:  “There is no decision can’t be improved by waiting till the next day.”

Over at Insty’s place, Mark Tapscott posted a long letter from a friend who is grappling with the fact that his kids — and the kids of many of his upper-middle-class neighbors — will not be attending public school anytime soon, thanks to the teachers unions’ unnecessary obsession with the health risks of their members being exposed to the germ-laden petri dish that is the average school.  (It’s definitely worth going over there and reading it.)  Leaving aside the obvious retort that other workers (in supermarkets etc.) seem to have had few problems in this regard, I want to focus instead on one aspect of this hapless parent’s dilemma.  Here’s the part that got me thinking:

“And, for the families who either cannot leave a job or are not interested in what has been proposed by the public school systems, they are either spending tens of thousands of dollars per year on private education or are now for the first time acquainting themselves with homeschooling options. I will also add that in many cases, private schools are full and homeschooling curriculum options are sold out leaving families with no idea what they will do in a few weeks.”

Somebody needs to sit this harried man down and explain one of the most beneficial aspects of homeschooling:  there are no deadlines.  The “few weeks” he’s talking about is an artificial construct:  schools say that the new semester must begin on September 7, therefore that’s when education should begin.  Of course, that’s utter nonsense if you’re not chained to the public (or any) school system:  your kid can take up classes on September 7, or October 15 (or tomorrow, for that matter) — because given the glacial speed of public education, the kid will catch up with, and overtake, his former classmates in a matter of weeks.  (Remember that the entire middle- and high school mathematics curriculum — all five years of classroom instruction — can be learned by an average student in just over six months, when delivered at their own pace at home.)

I remember the mother of my son fretting about his slowness in getting toilet-trained, and telling her:  “I promise you that by the time he’s fifteen he’ll be using the toilet just like everybody else.”  And from an educational perspective, whether a kid starts learning in August or September is irrelevant to their future progress.

Everyone seems to want to set deadlines on education:  must complete high school by age 18, then go straight to college and finish the undergrad degree in four years, or else “they’ll be left behind” — as though that matters, when of course it doesn’t.

Unsaid in all this, of course, is that if education is truly unshackled from the education establishment, there’s nothing to stop a kid from finishing their undergrad degree by age 18, either, if the kid is smart enough and motivated enough — because just as homeschooled kids of high-school age typically finish twelfth grade earlier than their classroom-educated contemporaries, the appearance of online university-level classes (delivered either by streaming or by DVD) means that the homeschooled college student could finish their degree in two years and not the more common four.

The only thing that holds parents back from homeschooling is their own sense of inferiority — that somehow, even college-trained adults can’t teach their kids mathematics (the discipline which frightens parents the most).  Let me assure you all right now:  with the proper course materials, anyone can teach their kids anything.

And best of all, there’s no need to feel pressure to do it by any specified date — hell, you can even learn the stuff with your kids as you go along, and how bad can that be?