S

chool days, school days, good old Golden Rule days. Remember that? Oh, how far we have slid down the slope to craziness here in California, the state where the book pictured here is a perpetual best-seller. Today’s lesson comes from the Conta Costa county town of Concord, where the 9th grade math class was just a bit short of Golden Rule behavior:

The ninth-grade students threw things around the room. Shortly after Christmas, students told the Times, someone exploded Play-Doh in the microwave, resulting in a smoke-filled classroom that teacher Michael Huang refused to air out. In other classes Huang taught, they said, students lit trash can fires and smoked cigarettes or even marijuana. (Source)

So, come May, after Huang failed to get his classroom under control – perhaps because the kids just couldn’t understand his thick Taiwanese accent, who knows? – a fifteen-year-old student, referred to in the news articles as Allison Moore’s daughter, videotaped a raging paper ball fight and a friend anonymously sent it to the assistant principle in a plea for discipline so she might, you know, learn something in school.  Seems resonable enough. Except not here.

A friend of Moore’s anonymously sent the video to Dick Nicoll, interim superintendent of the Mt. Diablo school district. The following week, the school suspended Moore’s daughter for two days after she admitted she had taped the class without permission, a violation of the state Education Code.

Confronted with this particular bit of lunacy, the school did not admit an error and provide a lesson in maturity to its students; oh no, anything but that!

Principal Gary Swanson said he could not discuss the suspension. He disputed Moore’s claims, saying students received “appropriate consequences.” Student Services Director Margot Tobias upheld the suspension, and Moore has appealed to the assistant superintendent.

“She may have felt that her purpose was valid,” Tobias wrote about the taping, “but as a result the privacy rights of all involved were violated.”

Privacy rights?! Does the “privacy rights” of disruptive and undisciplined students now supercede any right of a good student to expect having the opportunity to learn?  Apparently not.

Sadly, this story is hardly one limited to California. Across our nation, students are taught by administrations life lessons they will carry with them for a long time: Avoid blame, cover up, avoid making hard decisions, forget morality.

3 Comments »

E

ighth grade was the grade that almost turned me into a teacher, because I had three great role models.  All were great teachers, but that’s not what drew me to them; it was the certainty with which they approached the molding of our impressionable minds.

Miss (not Ms., not back then) Karvellis could nail a kid in the back row with a perfectly aimed, dusty eraser, putting a quick end to whispering, sleeping, note-passing or whatever other disrespect was going on back there.  Mr. Hill would periodically stroll down an aisle, hands behind his back (hands he’d secretly covered with chalk dust), grab a kids head, tilt it back, reach into his mouth, and extract a wad of gum, leaving a mouth-parching deposit of chalk behind. And the third teacher – who’s name I’ve forgotten – handled boys who cheated or broke the rules quite fairly:  Write an essay or take the paddle.  We all took the paddle, and got out before the girls, whose only option was the essay.

They taught me respect for the rules, and more importantly, respect for the intelligence and guidance of adults.  Every kid smote with an eraser, trying to draw saliva back into his chalk-filled mouth, or walking bandy-legged after a smacking knew the punishment was just, the crime was real … and their behavior would change, at least for a while.

Now, thanks to idiot educators and zero tolerance, we have Savana Redding’s case being argued before the Supreme Court.  “Educators” in her small AZ town thought she might have violated the school’s zero tolerance drug policy, so:

An assistant principal, enforcing the school’s antidrug policies, suspected her of having brought prescription-strength ibuprofen pills to school. One of the pills is as strong as two Advils.

The search by two female school employees was methodical and humiliating, Ms. Redding said. After she had stripped to her underwear, “they asked me to pull out my bra and move it from side to side,” she said. “They made me open my legs and pull out my underwear.” (NYT)

How mind-numblingly stupid, first that something as strong as two Advils is considered a drug, second that any rational thought is cut short by zero tolerance, and finally, that anyone would strip-search an eighth grader – yes, an eighth grader.

How different Redding’s school experience was from mine; how different her opinions of “educators” must be.  What, exactly, did they educate her on that day?  Respect for authority? Rational thought? Acting responsibly?  How much better it would have been for her if she had encountered one adult that day with the rational cognitive power of Ninth Circuit judge Kim McLane Wardlaw who said,

“It does not require a constitutional scholar to conclude that a nude search of a 13-year-old child is an invasion of constitutional rights.  More than that, it is a violation of any known principle of human dignity.”

Amazingly, the school officials also have zero tolerance for hand-slapping, in this case, their hands being slapped by the court, which found the school to have violated the Fourth Amendment’s ban on unreasonable searches.  That sounds like a conclusion any rational person would agree with, but the school has appealed the case to the Supreme Court, which is hearing it this session.

And they’re sooo bold in standing by their decision!

Mr. Wilson (the assistant principal) declined a request for an interview and referred a reporter to the superintendent of schools, Mark R. Tregaskes. Mr. Tregaskes did not respond to a message left with his assistant.

Wilson thought he had grounds for the search because Redding had acted rambunctuosly at a school dance two months earlier, and he thought she had served alcohol at a party before the dance … two months ealier.  She says it was soda and kids that age are goofy.  Who sounds more educated to you?

The ACLU is handling Redding’s case.  In this case, I’m on their side, and hope – counter to their usual performance – they help prevent the further crumbling of our civilization, at the hand of educators who cover their zero ability with zero tolerance, and in so doing, are destroying the minds of the children we entrust to them.

1 Comment »

How You Gonna Grow The Middle Class, Joe?

R

ecent news reports tell us that Joe Biden’s big job in the Obama administration will be to increase the size of his much-loved middle class.  Just one question, Joe:

How much are you going to do that by lifting the poor up to the middle class, and  how much are you going to do it by taxing the wealthy down to it?

Just wondering …

Peanut Nutty

R

ecently a school bus in an unnamed U.S. school district has hastily evacuated, then fully decontaminated. Why? Sarin gas? Smallpox pores? No, a peanut was seen on the floor. What hope do we have that our children will get a sensible education if education is in the hands of people who evacuate and decontaminate school buses because of a peanut?

As I usually do when confronted with a story I like, I turn to Stats Blog, where I found another example:

At this time of year many municipal elementary schools in the United States, including the one attended by my children, raise money by selling wrapping paper and candy. This year parents in our school were told that they could no longer pick up their purchases from their children’s classrooms. Instead they had to pick up their orders from a loading dock at specified times, to avoid a danger to the children.

The danger? Some of the orders contained sealed tins of festive nuts. Out of an overabundance of caution the school decided not to allow any of the items on the premises.

Sealed containers!  In the hands of adults!  What are they afraid of, that a child with a peanut allergy and utterly no self-control will beat a teacher paralyzed by fear of physically restraining a child, rip the tin open, and commit suicide by nut?

“This allergy is just nuts,” by Nicholas A. Christakis, professor of medical sociology, Harvard Medical School, in the latest issue of the British Medical Journal, which is excerpted above.  Christakis goes on to say:

About 3.3 million Americans are allergic to nuts, and even more – 6.9 million – are allergic to seafood. However, all told, serious allergic reactions to foods cause just 2,000 hospitalisations a year (out of more than 30 million hospitalisations nationwide). And only 150 people (children and adults) die each year from all food allergies combined.

That’s about the same as the number of people in the U.S. killed by lightening each year. Should we ban thunderstorms? Continue Reading »

1 Comment »

The SacBee’s Capitol Alert ran this little squib last night; I almost missed it in all the debate stuff:

The California Teachers Association reported donating $1 million to oppose Proposition 8, the gay marriage ban, on Tuesday.

Can someone please explain to me the correlation between education and breaking the age-old, sacred, voter-supported definition of marriage in the name of homosexual activism? Anyone? Anyone?

CTA is mum about it on its Web site, but there is this posted in its media section:

CTA Urges Voters to Support Candidates Who Make Public Schools a Priority

Before voting find out how candidates stand on education issues
October 16, 2008

With Election Day around the corner – Monday is the last day to register to vote and voting by mail has already started – CTA has launched a statewide radio ad campaign urging voters to find out where candidates stand on education issues and then vote for candidates who make public education a priority and will fight for our students and schools.

“From the White House, to the state Legislature, to your local school board, the candidates you choose can help improve California public schools or set them behind,” says David A. Sanchez, president of the 340,000-member California Teachers Association, in the spot. “Find out where candidates stand on making public education a priority.”

What the heck, Sanchez?  Are we supposed to find out where they stand on gay marriage too?  Is that important to education?  After all, you’re spending your members money – money that is supposed to be spent to support efforts to pour an endless stream of money into the black hole that is public education in California improved public education – to defeat the will of the people of California and force gay marriage on us after we voted overwhelmingly against it.  So gay marriage must be good for education, right?  How is that, exactly?

What does CTA giving $1 million to No on 8 teach school children about civics, Sanchez?  It seems to me there is only lesson to be gained is this:  If you don’t like the will of the people, then screw the will of the people.  Is that what the CTA wants to teach kids today?  Is that what CTA has come to stand for?

Sanchez?  Sanchez?

No Comments yet »

Unhappy PC Birthday

E

verything I have to unlearn, I learned in kindergarten – that’s how Incredible Daughter #1 responded to this story, from BBC:

An eight-year-old boy has sparked an unlikely outcry in Sweden after failing to invite two of his classmates to his birthday party.

The boy’s school says he has violated the children’s rights and has complained to the Swedish Parliament.

The school, in Lund, southern Sweden, argues that if invitations are handed out on school premises then it must ensure there is no discrimination.

Violated rights? What right? The right to be an utter jerk and suffer no consequences? For a school to propose that this is discrimination is to tell kids that the most important life lesson is to expect to get everything without investing anything.

One of the boys who didn’t get an invitation didn’t invite the perp of this horrific social crime to his own birthday party. The other boy simply didn’t get along with birthday boy. No matter! Life is happy! We’re all equal! Kumbayah!

Remember: The Dems think Europe is the cat’s meow and won’t be satified until they’ve morphed American independence and frontier spirit into a clone of Sweden. And Obama’s friend, radical educator William Ayres, is at forefront of the effort to use the schools to accomplish that goal.

A China You Haven’t Seen

S

piegel has a photo gallery posted along with its story Lives Under Chinese Communist, Caught on Film that you ought to take a look at. Here are the two that moved me the most.

First, let’s look at a photo typical of what we see out of China today, symbolic of its emergence on the global economics playing field.

Relaxing on the hood of his new Mercedes is Li Xiaohua who was previously a Red Guard who was forced to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution. His rebirth as a successful capitalist is symbolic of the new China. But we shouldn’t forget that the old China still exists, as shown in this photo of barge-pullers on the upper Yangtse River:

Why are these men naked? Because they own so few clothes that they don’t want to wear them out doing this hard labor.

China has a long way to go, despite the happy face the Beijingoists try to slap on the mess they rule. Continue Reading »

No Comments yet »