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Saint Forum-Blogger© Pioneer100© Member  Polymath
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Modern Education Where has education been and where is it going? That's the question on the minds of not just the parents and the students, but the teachers and administrators these days. Never in the history of the United States has education taken such a front stage postition, and rightly so. The entire future of our country rests on the decisions being made by this generation. Let's face it, the U.S. is feeling the pressure from up and coming countries like China and India. Want to kow why the price of gas is going up? Because 300,000 Chinese people just bought cars and learned to drive. Try calling the servicing company for your major appliance. Pick one, any one, stove, refridgerator, washing machine...when you call you will be answered by someone in India. The statistics are pretty startling. America is losing ground. We are still the hyperpower of the planet, but staying that way is going to take some serious work, and yesterday was not soon enough to start. A little history is in order here. We all know that the Little One Room Schoolhouse model was widely used before the turn of the century. It worked well for small pioneer communities who had very few children, and widely spaced age groups. In addition, before the industrial revolution, a eighth grade education was pretty much sufficient for the running of most farms and ranches. The emphasis was on "deportment" and "manners" as well as history and language. Math took a secondary position because, other than some accounting, what need was there for math in an agrarian community? The teacher was almost literally a dictator (but not necessarily a tyrant) in the classroom, and rightly so. Before school boards and administrations, decisions had to be made immediately and discipline was often difficult to maintain with a group of students that spent much of their free time in the fields and forests. Then came the Industrial Revolution. America changed from a rural farming country to an industrial juggernaut almost overnight. With the mass migration from the farms to the cities, the schools found that their role was changing. Now people needed technical skills and math. Since the vast majority of the population could be expected to work in a factory setting, schools adopted the same troutines and procedures as a factory. Blow the whistle, go to work. Ring the bell go to school. Stand in line to get your paycheck or stand in line to go to class, school was a training ground for the factories. That model is still used today, even though times have changed. Then came World War II and Korea. After the war, the tired veterans came back to America sick at heart of the killing and death that they had seen. They wanted nothing more than to settle down, raise children, and quietly forget about the horror. Unfortunately, they became indulgent and lax parents. They wanted their children to be sheltered from the terrible things in the world, and in doing so, forgot that the lessons of reality are some of the most important. As their children grew, they met with their test, Vietnam. Without the fortitude and resolve of their parents, they were ill-equipped to fight. Worse yet, they did not have the advantage of a clearly righteous idealogical position. Add to that a war run by politicians, not generals, and Vietnam turned into a Hell of misdirection, misunderstanding, and misguided efforts. Disillusioned, the Baby Boomers tuned in, turned on, and dropped out. As they grew and became parents, their disillusionment with life, society, and history caused them to shelter their children even more. Thus started the "I'm OK, You're OK" movement of the sixties and seventies. This is where I come into the picture. When I was attending school in the early 1970's the wave of "feel good" education had not quite reached my little hometown of Havre, Montana. They were still firmly enshrouded in the factory model of education. In our little school, in the sixth grade. There were a few things that would absolutely astound modern parents and eductors: 1. Special Education children were all severely retarded...and there were only six of them. All other children were expected to do the best they could in regular education classes operating on the theory that they would have to make a living for themselves someday and codling them would make that process harder for them, not easier. The idea that they might be on welfare never entered into the picture. 2. If you flunked a grade, or possibly even enough classes, you would be held back. More than once. As a matter of fact, you could be held back many times until you got it right. There was always some big, six foot gorilla with a mustache in the six grade and all of us were scared to be him. "Yeah, that's Big Mike, he got held back in the sixth grade three time! *snicker*" 3. Teachers were respected and feared. They had your future in their hands and everyone knew it. The Good Lord help you if they called for a parent / teacher conference. Rules were clear and strictly enforced. A trip to the Principal's office was considered a near-death experience, and every knew about it by the end of the day. 4. Violence was tolerated and even encouraged. Every kid carried a knife, but no one would ever use one in a fight since that was considered "Cowardly and against the unspoken rules of manly Warfare." To break these rules meant risking being an outcast in your community. Each boy was expected to know how to defend themselves. Bullies usually had a short run. Girls did not EVER fight for any reason, since that was unfeminine. Although there was nothing wrong with having your boyfriend fight the boyfriend of a girl you hated. Then came the late seventies and the eighties. I guess I first noticed the change when one day, after I had been watching too many "Bruce Lee" movies, I kicked open a windowless door in the gym, only to have it bash the vice principal in the face on the other side. he pulled me along to the Principal's office to get some "swats" admonishing some kids who were outside the "smoking area" on the way. I expected swats, but when I got there and was waiting dejectedly for my well-deserved punishment for my thoughtless and even dangerous behavior, I suddenly found myself holding a piece of paper that said, "Detention." This was a new concept to me. No punishment other than sitting in a room reading? I loved to read! It was like I had done nithing at all. The "Touchy Feely" movement had begun. I graduated two years after that. Two years filled with keg parties, drunken driving (it wasn't a crime in New Mexico in those days), late nights and sex. True to my early education, I still pulled down "B"s and "A"s without much effort. I went away to college, went into the Air Force, then the corporate sector and didn't come back to education until the mid-ninties. After my father died, I came back to my little home town, went back to college for the third time and got an education degree. I'll never forget my first week of class. I guess I still had some of the old ideas about education. I had a kid in my class who was a skater. I identified with him because I was a skater myself, from the "Lords of Dogtown" school of the seventies. he never did anything in my class no matter how hard I tried. Finally, I sat down with him and told him point blank, "If you don't do this work you're going to flunk my class and possibly get held back in the seventh grade." I was astonished and speechless by what he told me then, "No I won't, Mr. Ives. I can flunk this class and every other class and they'll still pass me to the next grade." And he was right. Social promotion was in full swing, the special education classes were packed, the population was medicated, and you'd better not post any kind of grades, not even an "honor roll" becaue that might damage someone's ego and lead to a lawsuit. Over the next decade and a half, things have changed again. I wasn't the only one to recognize and be incensed by the state to which education had deteriorated. The pendulum swung back and , as is usual in a backlash, it had gone ever further the other way. It was time for new models and new ideas. One of the first ideas to come along was testing. But that's tomorrow's topic! Last edited on 12:28 am by Saint  A^2 + B^2 = C^2 |
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Saint Forum-Blogger© Pioneer100© Member Polymath
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I wanted to address the new things that are going on in education, but that will have towait for another day. Instead I need to talk about gun control, and you'll see why. Gun Control I’m not much of a hunter. I guess I just can’t get around looking into another mammal’s eyes and then killing it. I think the Air Force realized this and that’s why they made me and instructor pilot instead of what I wanted to be, a nuclear bomber pilot. But don’t get me wrong. I can be as violent as the next man. My last fight fifteen years ago (with my best friend, over a girl, of course) left our white-carpeted apartment splattered with blood and both of us with stitches. I’m a fisherman and I have no problem bashing a fish’s head on a rock and frying him up with cornmeal over a campfire. I grew up in the wilderness of Montana and was an avid backpacker in my youth, so I also understand the love of living off the land so I think I might even understand why some people like guns and hunting. I used to own guns. I had a Marlin Model 60 (.22 with a 16 shot barrel feed), a Ruger 10/22, and a 9mm Luger. I mostly liked to go out and hunt beer cans with my friends. Like all teens, I loved the feeling of power firing a gun gave me. Then came a day when I was 17 years old. The age well-known for stupidity and irresponsible behavior. My friends and I had been drinking all day. That was our first mistake. In those days the drinking age in New Mexico was old enough to see over the dashboard, operate the pedals, know the name of a beer at the drive up window and have cash that was green. Like all western children, we had taken hunter’s safety when we were 12 and had pretty much grown up with a gun in our hands. Of course, when you are seventeen, twelve is a million years ago. So we all got our .22s and headed out to Chokecherry canyon, a desolate badlands-type landscape. We strolled along, drinking and talking, but not seeing anything worth shooting other than some old, rusted out and abandoned cars. So we decided to split up. That was our second mistake. The third mistake was to circle in opposite directions. As my best friend and I trudged to the top of a steep hill, our heads popped over the crest. At that second, a bullet zinged off the top of the hill, throwing dirt on our faces and whizzing right past my ear close enough to ruffle my hair. We hit the dirt, then crawled to the brink and looked over. We were surprised to see our other friends in a ravine on the other side, laughing and hollering. Embarrassed and frightened, my friend and I stood up and yelled to them, “You almost killed us, you idiots!” (Actually, we used much more colorful language.) This was replied to by a torrent of catcalls and dispersions concerning the character and quality of our family line, with hints as towards the lack of courage in our ancestors. Being a teenager, naturally my friend and I were jealous of honor and quick in quarrel. We yelled back, “Oh yeah? Let’s see how you like it!” We raised our rifles and waited for a second while our friends scrambled behind a rather large boulder with a steep dirt hill behind it. Once they were safely under cover, we opened fire with both guns, stitching the dirt all around the boulder while our friends screamed in fear. After we stopped, barrels smoking, we laughed hilariously as they crawled out from behind the boulder cursing us loudly. They yelled, “You idiots! We shot at you on accident, but you shot at us on purpose.” We took that as our cue to return the insinuations as to their DNA and family tree. After that, things began to get really crazy. We were shooting and running everywhere. Naturally, we were just shooting to frighten and calls of “If you kill me, my mother will kill you!” were tossed back and forth. I remember at one point, I was hiding behind a tree that was four sizes too small to hide me, while I listened to bullets hitting the other side with sharp “Whack Whack” noises. As I peered around the tree, I saw my friend running from cover to another, better position. So I took aim at his heels and gave him the “Dance, stranger!” treatment. Unfortunately, at that point one of the bullets ricocheted off a rock and ran up his forearm, not breaking the skin, but leaving a arrow-straight burn trail. We decided that we’d had enough fun for that afternoon, but the day wasn’t over. Late that night we had still been drinking, since that was our hobby in high school in the seventies. We were driving out in the hills looking for a keg since they went on pretty much continually all weekend long. We saw a truck coming the other direction, loaded with guys our age, so we flagged them down to ask if they had any info. I not quite sure who started what after that. I have a feeling that it was my best friend who was known for a big mouth and a quick temper. But at any rate, within minutes the seven of them and the five of us were engaged in a full blown, knock-down, drag-out street brawl. I was up against a guy my size, but he no stomach for it by the look on his face. A couple of quick punches to the nose and a kick to the stomach sent him packing. I turned around to see how my friends were fairing. In the dim light, it was hard to tell who was who, but I recognized my best friend’s brother, a hulking Navajo kid, stalking after another quickly retreating kid twenty yards down the road. He seemed oblivious to another kid on his back pummeling his head and shoulders. I glanced to my right and saw my best friend had taken a hit. He was on the ground, in a fetal position and didn’t seem to be breathing. As I watched, the kid who was fighting him drew back his foot and gave my friend a brutal, vicious kick to the face. My friend’s head snapped back to a terrifying, unnatural angle. He lay motionless. I was convinced that his neck had been broken. In my intoxicated state, a thought swam into my mind, insistent. “They killed my friend. Now I have to kill them.” I felt very calm. This was one of the two times in my life where I thought I was a little insane. I walked over to the car, opened the trunk and pulled out the Marlin. I turned and walked straight to the guy who had killed my friend and drew up the rifle to eye-level. At three yards, with a semi-automatic, there was no way I could miss. Terrified, He threw up his arms a screamed, “Don’t shoot, man!” I felt my finger tightening on the trigger. At the last second, I heard a small voice in my head, “Don’t kill him.” Call it sanity, conscience, God, or just sobriety, I pulled off a little to the left and fired. At the sound of the shot, everyone stopped fighting. The boy stood there for a second, watching me looking down the barrel at him, then took off running for his truck followed closely by his friends. As they desperately tried to start the truck, I walked around the truck blasting headlights, tailgate, mirrors, everything except the tires. (I guess I wanted them to leave.) Finally they drove off at a pretty incredible rate and I dropped the gun to my side. I turned, sick at heart, not wanting to see my best friend lying in the dirt. “What would I tell his mother?” I thought. Imagine my shock and amazement as my friend got up, rubbing his neck and dusting himself off! I heard him say, “Sheesh! I thought you were going to kill those guys!” So I had almost gunned down seven men in cold blood…for nothing. The next day, I decided that I was not responsible enough or intelligent enough to own a weapon. I wanted nothing to do with guns again. It seemed to me that situations like that could all too easily be repeated in the future. So a friend of mine who was kind of stupid told me he would buy all the guns from me. He came over that day with the cash, because, shaken as I was, right now wasn’t soon enough to get rid of them. I debated selling them to him, because he was known to be a complete idiot. But what the Hell, if he did something stupid, that wasn’t my fault, was it? (So I thought in those days.) I gave him the Ruger first, but I took out the clip before I gave it to him. He played with the rifle for a while. Then he said, “Give me the clip.” I replied, “No.” Naturally he asked, “Why not?” I told him, “Because you’ll do something stupid with it.” I was kind of blunt and tactless in those days. Of course, I was actually the one being stupid for considering selling it to him in the first place, but teenagers don’t think that way. He kept begging and pleading, though, and I finally gave in telling him, “This clip is loaded, you can look at it, but don’t put it in the gun.” So fast that, to this day, I still can hardly believe it, he rammed the clip into the gun, pulled back the bolt and released it. Since his finger was on the trigger, the gun went off immediately. Luckily, the Good Lord watches over fools and children. The gun was pointed at the ground. Unfortunately, the bullet ricocheted off the hardwood floor and passed through the wall into the next apartment. The family wasn’t home, but I’m pretty sure that their cat lost one of his nine lives. So what’s my point? It’s this: gun safety has come a long way. We have trigger locks, gun safes, and ammo cases. But how can you design a gun that is “stupidity-proof?” Like alcohol, you can pass all the laws you want, but anyone who wants a gun will get their hands on one if they are available. Anyone: criminals, citizens, and children. You can say that everyone should have training, but I had it and I completely forgot it in the passion of the moment. Worse yet, there will always be intense, emotional situations in people’s lives. Guns have a terrible tendency to make those temporary situations worse. I’m writing this blog today, not because I wanted to expand on the gun thread, but because I got the word that yesterday that my favorite cousin tried to commit suicide. He is in the hospital with a shattered jaw. Amazingly, the bullet went out his mouth. His face is disfigured, but he didn’t lose any teeth and I know that the doctors can work miracles with plastic surgery these days. He has been diagnosed as manic-depressive, so now he will get help and medication and perhaps lead a normal life. He wanted to kill himself because of terrible financial problems, something I can relate to intimately. There was once a time when I felt the same way. I had lost everything, was homeless, alone, and just out of jail. What saved me was my faith, (I believe suicides go to Hell) and the fact that I didn’t have a gun that night. The next day I felt better. You will argue that my cousin could still have found a way to kill himself without a gun, but he didn’t. He used a gun. Guns always seem to be everyone’s favorite instant solution to a temporary problem. I haven’t owned a gun since that day. My wife doesn’t like them and I have granddaughters now, so I won’t be buying a gun anytime soon. I’ve lived an adventurous and dangerous life and gotten along fine without them. I’ve faced down vicious gangsters and crazed, delusional Vietnam veterans. I’ve had live rounds put in my mailbox from the local gangs as a message for throwing their soldiers out of school. I’ve had bullets whistle by my head when I was out cutting firewood. I’ve had strangers shoot at me from across lakes. But I’ve been fine, I’ve never needed a gun, and it looks like I never will. It’s a personal choice, and I won’t deny others their right to own a gun, but I just can’t buy that a gun is a “necessity” of life. That just hasn’t been my experience. It just seems to me that guns cause more problems for people than they solve. Last edited on 11:12 pm by Saint A^2 + B^2 = C^2 |
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Saint Forum-Blogger© Pioneer100© Member Polymath
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On Love Of course sex is a big part of love, especially for the young and the young at heart. But I'm not going to focus on that today, instead I'm going to talk about the emotion itself. The emotion that is behind the sex, the emotion that is still there even in ninety year olds when sex has become difficult if not impossible. Most people have had passionate love affairs in their youth, and most marriages start out the same way, but after a time, things begin to change. (The smart thing to do is of course to keep the romance alive in a marriage and try different things to keep your physical love llife fresh.) True love, however, will not diminish with time. As a couple matures and changes, love itself changes. There is a comfort in a long love, a feeling of peace and companionship. True lovers should be friends as well as mates, sharing activities, music, movies, and life itself. It takes maturity to keep love alive, but with work, it can blossom into a thing that towers over the fleeting feeling of passion. perhaps one of the greatest tragedies of the 20t century was a wndering from the path of lifelong commitment to true and lasting love. Many of the young people I work with say to me, "I'm looking for the perfect mate." The problem with that, of course, is the no one is perfect...including yourself. How many marriages have failed because each partner was unwilling to forgive foibles or overlook annoying habits? When the disappointment of reality in a marriage comes along, some people begin to search for another, some while they are still married, others after a divorce. But what's really needed is the perserverance to see things through. To talk and work things out. To understand and forgive faults and realize that you, yourself have them too. That's the recipe for a lasting and fulfilling love.
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Saint Forum-Blogger© Pioneer100© Member Polymath
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Some people satuarated by the hype over the Harry Potter books have reacted as expected with a backlash condeming Harry and his stalwart friends. Seeing only the relentless hype and missing the greater process taking place, they decry the books as overrated and underwritten. I have to vehemently disagree. You see, the whole point of the thing is that they are books. Children are reading again. For over a decade others teachers and I saw the steady decline in reading skills until the average high school student was reading at a second grade level. I kid you not. Besides the obvious fact that life becomes infinitely more difficult when you cannot assimilate new skills or look up old ones because you are illiterate, there's also the terrible loss of history and culture. Old classics like "Treasure Island" and "Moby Dick" fell into disrepair next to copies of "Little House on the Prarie" and "Papillon." Each book containing not just powerful life lessons, but insights into the very nature of mankind. Eventually, like the law of nature states, "If you don't use it, you lose it." That thing which was lost was imagination. I asked a class during this period, "Just see this concept in your head." They replied, quite seriously, "We can't. We don't have an imagination." i thought about that statement and realized that it was true. Everything they saw or heard had been pre-imagined for them. their TV shows, their music, their movies. their minds did not have to imagine what it looked like or sounded like, they could see it and hear it and so that sense atrophied. Then came "Harry Potter." Just as "Star Wars" touched the imaginations of a previous cohort, Harry came at just the right time to influence an entire generation of young minds to read and expand and their horizons. To think about what is possible in life and to stretch out to meet it instead of sitting apathetically in front of the television being force-fed their ideas without any conscious thought at all. And that is mankind's greatest gift. Imagination. Without it we are a stagnant species, slowly decaying and dying in our cubicles. With it we are superhuman, reaching out and growing to new ideas and new concepts of what is possible. When we have imagination, we can dream, and when we dream, we can achieve. That's the gift that J.K. Rowling has given to this newest of generations. And it's about damn time.
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Saint Forum-Blogger© Pioneer100© Member Polymath
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On the Front Lines of the War for Education: Many of the people in the mainstream of the US are not aware that they schools that they grew up in are not the places they were. The young people of today barely resemble the generations of the past. They have been changed by inffluences that have only cropped up in our society recently. Influences such as the internet and internet porn. Hyperviolent entertainment and high technology. They are a generation that has grown up always at war, both inside and outside. Nor are the problems that teachers deal with on a daily basis the same as they were in the past. I work at an Alternative High School. It can best be described as an "Educational MASH Unit" for educational trauma cases. It is staffed with teachers that are expereinced veterans and specialize in the toughest kind of educational trench warfare. The kids who attend our school are good people, but have had rough lives indicative of the times. Here is an example. Yesterday in class, a nice young girl, who is one of my students, asked permission of me to check herself out of school to go to a doctor's appointment. Since she is 18, as long as she checks herself out, so that we know she is off campus in case of an emergency, she is allowed to do that. Just a few minutes later, my administrator came to my classroom and asked if this young girl had told me she was leaving. I replied that she had and that I had reminded her to check herself out formally with the office. He informed me that he had seen her texting someone in the parking lot, then had gotten into a car with an older man who was not a student at our school and had driven away without checking herself out. He told me that he would be suspending her for the rest f the week and that I should immediately send her to the office if I saw her on campus that afternoon. (Naturally, we were concerned for her welfare.) About an hour after lunch, the little girl came to my classroom and sat down with a tear in her eye. She started out slowly mumbling, "I want to apologize to you." Feeling a bit sorry for her, I asked, "Why are you apologizing to me? Because you knew I might be worried about you? You do understand why we need you to check out with us before leaving campus, right?" The little girl sniffed a bit, then looked up teary eyed, "Yes, I understand, its just that I was molested when I was a little girl and the man who did it is out of prison now and is back seeing my Mom again." Now this little girl is the very personification of "emo" a kind of kid that could be described as "wounded emotionally." They are characterized by all black clothes similar to the "Goths," lots of facial piercings, and a tendency to lean to either seriously hard rock like Rammstein, or the harder punk rock. They tend to be quiet in class, introspective, and loners. Also, they gravitate towards darker japanese Anime. This little girl fit the profile to a tee, and I thought that she was a very pretty and petite little girl, despite the metal hanging from her lips and nose. To say that I was taken aback by this was an understatement. I immediately inquired about her safety, "Is he molesting you again?" She replied, "No, he just comes over to see my Mom." "And that makes you nervous? It brings back the bad memories, is that it? "Yes." "Have you talked to you Mom and told her how you feel?" I asked that, despite knowing that it would be a pretty dense or self-absorbed parent that wouldn't know her little girl would be affected by the return of the man who molested her. "No I haven't told her. She loves him and I kind of don't want to upset her." "So you are sacrificing for her?" I was actually thinking that it was the mother who was sacrificing her child, but I refrained from saying that. "Yes." "Who was the young man you took off with?" I asked to make sure that it was not the pedophile. "Oh, he's a good friend that I can talk to when I need to get things off my chest." "So did something happen today that made you feel that you needed to deal with it right away?" "Yes, my mother is thinking of moving in with him. You see, he went away for a long time to prison for what he did. He admitted it and everything. Now he's out and they are watching him and he is supervised, but he still comes over." She replied. Two thoughts here, "Does the Probation Department know about his visits and has he registered with them since he got out?" I had connection with the JPO's office as all teachers do and I determined to find out. Immediately I caught the implications, and I reassured her, "Don't worry that is illegal. Convicted sex offenders are not permitted to live with families that have children. Are you worried that you won't have a place to live? If you can't keep him from coming over, you're 18, can you move in with someone else?" She looked up and replied, "Well actually, she is going to let me have the apartment when she moves out." Relieved, I let out a sigh and said, "Well, that's great! The problem will solve itself. Do you have a job that will pay the bills? You might need to find yourself a roommate with prices as they are." "Oh, I have a very good job and make enough for that, so it's no problem, I'm just worried about my little brother and my Mom is beginning to really yell and me and be mean to me. She says she's disappointed in me." Again, I came to a full stop. "Little...brother? 'Yeah, he's going to move with my Mom." I couldn't begin to understand how a parent could be disappointed in a little girl who was so self-assured and capable that she not only had a good income at 18, but was mentally ready for independence. I get kids every day telling me they don;t plan to move out of their parent's home until they are 30 years old or until their parents die, whichever comes first. But now I began to see the light. The poor little thing had the worst dilemma I could imagine. "So let me get this straight. You want your Mom to move out so that you don't have to face the man who molested you daily, but you're afraid that your little brother may suffer just like you did, all while your Mom is blaming you for the fact that she can't move in with him because of you. You have the choice of moving in with a child molester, or saving yourself and abandoning your mother and little brother. Am I close?" "Yes. That's it." Right about here, you have to put yourself in my place and ask yourself what you would say to this poor, victimized little girl. She literally had no good choices and was backed into a corner. I asked one more question that would determine my involvement in the process. "OK...I want you to understand that I'm only a teacher, I'm not a counselor or a psychologist, I don't have the ability to give you the kind of advice you need and I'm going to set up an appointment for you to meet with one of those if you don;t mind. That said, here is the advice I can give you: this is a tough time for you, but it won't go on like this forever. Remember that. Lots of times, teenagers think that things will always be the way they are now, but that's not true, life changes all the time. Secondly, Time heals all wounds. It will take time, but as the years pass, this will become easier to deal with and eventually you'll move on to your own life with your own family and your own career and this will be a distant memory. I'm not saying that you'll forget what happened, just that the pain will lessen over time. And lastly, remember this above all, you are a good person. there is nothing wrong with you. No matter what anyone says, you have done nothing wrong. You will have a wonderful life despite all this and you will be fine. Does that make you feel any better?" "yes, and thanks, it does make me feel better." "If you don't mind, I'm going to inquire a bit about his status t make sure that you and your little brother are protected." "That's OK. Thanks, I have to go now, class is starting. "Try to have a good day, OK?" "OK." This is the life of the Modern Teacher. Part teacher, part psychologist, part parent, part confidant, part doctor, part therapist, all human.
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