THE WOEFUL STATUS OF AMERICAN EDUCATION

PART ONE

                         

My second career was elementary and high school teaching and elementary and high school principal.   As such, ‘I have made my bones,’ and from intimate knowledge have earned the right to evaluate the system.

                                                                                            

Politicians drone on about the deplorable state of American education and people like President Bush 41 ask the question “Is our children learning?”  

The answer is NO! At least they are not graduating with knowledge and understanding of the world we live in and a factual chain of math and scientific cause and effect; and most of all they lack the ability to apply logic and reason.

There are numerous causes for the inability of our schools to effectively educate our children to a twenty-first century adequacy.   The major problem is that our system is the product of politicians and radical (mostly religious) groups with special agendas.

The ‘whipping boy’ for this failure is always the teachers. 

As an educator, no longer serving at the pleasure of an elected school board let me give a view from inside a system designed for failure.  

Let’s first look at teachers.   Most teachers are better educated than you local bank president.   All have Bachelor Degrees and many have Masters and Doctorates.   All have passed strenuous certification tests and are required to continue their education in order to recertify at specific intervals. 

Teaching was historically a female occupation, and as such was never looked on as a ‘legitimate’ profession.    That mind set has carried over to today where teaching is still not considered as professional, but instead viewed as advanced child care.    Teachers are not paid salaries accurately reflecting their level of education and are not given the respect received by other professions with lesser requirements and less responsibilities. 

Part of this image is the fault of teachers.  How often have I heard teachers state that they teach because they love children.   What bull shit!   You might love lions and tigers but that doesn’t qualify you as an animal trainer.   Teachers should demand professional respect.   They should state that they teach because they have developed a unique ability to impart information and because they have special training and background on certain subject matter.   They should support their unions that constantly try to elevate teaching to a respected profession. 

Teachers constantly have an uphill battle.   They preside over classrooms that are overcrowded; they deal with unnecessary discipline problems from unruly students - some that are potentially dangerous; they lack support from principals who serve at the pleasure of parent and special interest school boards; they are required to teach curriculum that is scattered and loosely connected.  

Most teachers are good teachers.  There are some special teachers that can go beyond and are able to encourage logic and critical thinking skills (this of course is not valued in the south.)  There are, in fact, very few ‘bad’ teachers.   Most ineffective teachers become dissatisfied with teaching and move on to other (and often more lucrative) fields.   There are, however, struggling teachers in impossible situations.     They are basically good teachers, who lack support from their administration, and eventually burn out.   Realizing the futility of their situation they develop a survival attitude.  They are products of a system that can not succeed.  

As a retired school principal I can tell you with authority that the teacher’s main goal is the success of their students.   Our teachers morn the fact that their students are matriculating with an incomplete education.  They hate the fact that they have to teach to testing standards.  They know that if given the authority and autonomy to set their curriculum to the special demographics of their students they would be able to effectively improve understanding and knowledge retention.   They are, however, hobbled by outside influences of non-educators and a bureaucracy and a public that is not teacher friendly.   

The teachers are not the problem with the education inadequacy – they are the solution. 

The Ol’Buzzard

                                                                                                  

MY LIFE

the Ol'Buzzard

Bike Run with United Bikers of Maine

The wife and I haven't gotten much riding in this year because of the rain.   Earlier this month we went on a two hundred mile run with The United Bikers of Maine - Franklin County.   The weather was bright and cool; perfect for a bike run.  Our route took us through the western Maine mountains and over the height of land overlooking the Rangeley Lakes, finally ending at the Moose Alley in Rangeley.

A little bit of sore biker ass when we got home, but a great ride.

A spider: seeing more and more of these with old folks.

Black one in the middle: my bike.   Pretty lady with the white hair: my wife.

Great looking Honda

If I could have one more bike - this would be it: Honda Valkyrie.

Rest stop

Height of land. great view

This was called a poker run.  Twelve dollars a rider.
 Five stops, at each stop you draw a card
At the destination the best hand wins 50% of pot.
Other half goes to Christmas baskets for needy in the county.

Final destination.  Chow down.
Everyone splits up
 and then seventy miles back to the house.  

The Ol'Buzzard

A MIND FUCK

This morning I woke up and it was raining so I went back to sleep.  

About nine-o-clock I went down stairs and made a cup of tea and tried to read a few pages from a book, but ended up putting the book down and taking a nap in the chair.  My wife and cat finally roused me with a cup of tea and an English muffing with peanut butter and banana, which I ate, drank and then went back to my nap. 

I usually call a day like this (rain on our metal roof) a Cat Day: a day where I plan to do nothing but read, eat, drink a little wine and lounge.   Either my wife or I have the authority to declare a Cat Day and the rule is that the other must immediately agree (which is never a problem.) 

Today I have carried it beyond a Cat Day and ventured into the strange realm of a Slug Day:   I have yet to declare this a legitimate level of existence, but I am experimenting with it at this moment.   The image comes to me of the big caterpillar in Alice In Wonderland (OK, he’s not a slug – but close enough.)

Back upstairs laying in bed and listening to the rain drumming on the roof I began to think about fuck.   Not the act of fuck (which if I can talk my wife into agreement this afternoon could culminate in an altered state, like a psychedelic experience of SLUG reality); but, I have been thinking about the word FUCK. 

With out a doubt the word FUCK must be the most versatile word in the English language.

Fuck it, Give a fuck, Go fuck your self, Fucking moron, Fucktard, Fuck you, Fuck me, Fuck me silly with a handy billy, Fucking-A, Fuck a duck, Fucking Jesus, Fucking easy, Fucking cunt, Fucking bastard, Fucking great, You don’t know fuck all, Fucking retard, Mind fuck, Fuck that, Fuck this, Fuck them, Fucking douchebag, Mother fucker, Bug fucker, We’re Fucked, I’m fucked, (Or as Yellow Dog Granny says:) We’re all fucked, and the list goes on…

What a remarkable word that allows so many shades of expression: Let’s fuck, You wanna fuck?, I can’t fucking contain myself, You don’t fucking like it? - Don’t fuck with me. Awh  Fuck, You could go fucking crazy thinking about this. 

Have a fucking great day.

The Ol’Buzzard

ANCESTRY TRACKING

I have a cousin in Virginia that I correspond with.  She has become interested in family history and begun tracing her ancestors.   Being a nihilist (and a know-it-all) I wrote to her of the futility and inherent false results of such effort. 

To begin with ancestors multiply at an exponential rate.   In non-mathematical language you have two parents, four grand parents, eight great grand parents, sixteen great great grand parents: then thirty-two, sixty-four, one hundred and twenty eight…..etc.   Your kind ship dilutes by one half with each succeeding generation you trace back to. (Never end a sentence with a preposition – fuck the rules.)   Ten generations back you are equally kin to two thousand and forty-eight ancestors; and if you carry it back to twenty generations – over two million. 

At what point does the gene pool so diluted that you are realistically no longer kin?  

Probably, most people try to track their paternal name.   This also is an inexact effort.   This day and age, with birth control, women have fewer children and are freer to have sex without consequences.   Now, it has been my experience that married women are more likely to be receptive to a one night (one week, one month) dalliance with no commitment than single women.   After being married for a few years, and having your husband with his back to you in bed let out a fart, you might say the bloom has left the roses.   Women like to feel they are still sexually attractive and an exciting tryst with one of the husband’s friends is probably more common in marriage than admitted. 

A few generations back (pre-birth control) pregnancies that occurred from such unions were easily covered up by the wife telling her husband, “Look dear, he has your nose.”   And, when a child stood out from the rest of the brood she could say, “He looks like my side of the family.”

This is the point of Chaos theory: there are chance variables in every situation that can change the results. 

There is no way of knowing at what point in your track you will run into an ancestor “born on the other side of the bed.”     At that point, though the name continues, the blood tie (as small as it is likely to be) has been derailed. 

This day and age the above scenario may sound unlikely, but in earlier time this was not uncommon.  

As per my earlier post:  I was raised by my grandmother, who I thought was my mother.   One of my sisters was actually my mother and my other sisters and brothers were my uncles and aunts.   When my grandmother took me she didn’t like the name on my birth certificate so she changed it.   She also didn’t like my birth date so she changed that to a war memorial holiday (probably so she could remember it.)   I grew up as an alias.  I never found out about this until I was nineteen and tried to obtain a birth certificate to join the Navy and discovered I did not exist.  

Generations ago I am sure that many parents raised children of their daughters under similar circumstances, giving them their sir name.  Besides me, I know of two more just in my family (Of course you realize I am of the south.)   At any rate this makes following a paternal name speculative at best.  

For myself, I don’t count my heritage any further than my birth.   I know where I am from: the Mississippi Delta.

IMPORTANT DISCOVERY

It has been a long time since I posted.   It just seems that during the summer there is too much to do - too many obligations so computer time is put off to the never never.

My wife and I make a motor cycle run each month with The United Bikers of Maine and we try to take off  by ourselves once a week (for some distance eatery) on the bike. 

We monitor a local lake twice a month for water quality and invasive plants.   We try to work out at the gym at least twice a week and we bowl with a league once a week.  On top of that there is grass to mow, a flower bed and raised vegetable patch to tend, bird feeders to fill, a to-do list of summer maintenance chores that I make each spring (and rarely finish,) and at present there is a cord of fire wood, cut and split, sitting by the side of the house that I need to move into my wood shed one wheelbarrow load at a time.

And then there are books to read: so many books so little time.

Any way that’s my excuse and I am sticking to it. 

But I have recently come across something so startling that I feel I must post.

You probably don’t remember but when I started this blog my main goal was to define the meaning of life.  

To that point, I have just come across some revealing scientific information (at least as valid as Republican truisms) on the actual meaning of life and the theory of everything.  

The largest computer in the universe (according to the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy) has determined the theory of everything is the number 42.

Physicist speak of the beginning of creation as the Big Bang, a time when an indescribably dense point in nothingness explodes, throwing out matter which creates an expanding universe.  

I suppose we could describe the end of creation as the Big Suck.  This would be a time when all matter returns in upon itself, forming a gigantic black hole and finally shrinking again to some miniscule point in nothingness.   

I hate to tell you but the time of the Big Suck is really not far away. As a matter of fact, I have come to believe it is at the end my foreseeable future.  You see, this is the way it works:  It’s like Schrodinger’s cat - When I die the world is gone – Sorry, but there is nothing left.   If I can’t see you, you don’t exist.   My death is the Big Suck.  As my reality shrinks like a heavy star into a cognitive black hole from which nothing returns, so goes creation.  The world and the universe are snuffed.  Time and space converge into nothing. 

Now knowing the meaning of everything is the number 42 it seems to verify my original assumption (posted in many of my post.)

“do the hokey pokey and you turn yourself around”

Count it – forty-two characters: I was right. 

the Ol'Buzzard

or like Yellow Dog Granny says: we're all fucked

A SALUTE TO TENNESSEE

I recently read an article about the increase in snake handling religious cults in Tennessee.    In a second article a Tennessee TV weatherman was shot with a crossbow by his room mate.   Add to this some of the weird laws coming out of the Tennessee Legislature and it leaves me wondering. 

SO TO SALUTE ALL THE RELIGIOUS BACKWARDS WING NUTS THAT SEEM TO PERMEATE THE TENNESSEE POPULATION:

I shouldn't throw stones, being from Kentucky some of this is in my background.

But I'm just saying...

the Ol'Buzzard