Search Results for: edju

I will admit to not being the smartest person in the world. In fact I’m pretty sure I’m not even in the top 25%. That’s okay, however, since I am smart enough to realize that. So, when something comes along that I don’t understand I can seek out those who do and learn about it. That habit led directly to me getting in touch with several renowned astrophysicists, astronomers and others and those conversations led to the many articles about science that have graced Nude Hippo over the last year. And, thanks to some of our readers, those articles have led to other posts following up on some unusual ideas. Basically, you have been allowed to share in the concept of education in action. And when I’m not writing about boobies and nude criminals, although those can be educational in their own right, I do find it kind of fun to learn something new and share it with you.

Sadly, however, many Americans never get that chance. The Fordham Institute recently published a report which claims that kids in Texas are getting such a heavily politicized view of history that they are ineligible for even the most basic college courses.

A recent report says Texas K-12 standards in history are inadequate, ineffective and “fail to meet the state’s college readiness standards,” and the report’s authors are pointing the finger at Gov. Rick Perry’s State Board of Education.

In the report, the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board and the Social Studies Faculty Collaborative say that Texas’ K-12 system is “founded upon an inadequate set of standards.” Keith Erekson, the author and history professor at the University of Texas at El Paso, analyzes in the report the entire process of Texas’ history standards — from board approval to the curriculum itself.

The report notes that the Fordham Institute gave the state’s history standards a grade of “D,” calling it a “politicized distortion of history,” that is “both unwieldy and troubling” while “offering misrepresentations at every turn.”

These misrepresentations, Erekson writes, include excluding Native Americans from the standards curriculum until recently and citing states’ rights as a cause of the Civil War when Texas did not cite it in their historical “Declaration of Causes.”

The Texas State Board of Education last May adopted its most recent social studies and history curriculum that revises its teachings of the rationale for the separation of church and state, among hundreds of other topics. The curriculum underwent a contentious monthslong revision process, and will be used in Texas for the next 10 years.

Erekson’s report comes after a separate report by the Southern Poverty Law Center in September called education about the civil rights movement in the U.S. “dismal.” Just 2 percent of the 12,000 12th graders who took the 2010 National Assessment of Educational Progress U.S. History Exam were able to correctly identify two basic points about the historic Brown v. Board of Education case to earn a score of “complete.”

The NAEP also released a report in June that showed dismal history test scores in what U.S. Secretary of Education called an impending “slow-motion train wreck”: just 9 percent of 4th graders could identify a photograph of Abraham Lincoln and state two reasons for his importance.

“People tend to think that history is only memorizing facts,” Linda Salvucci, vice chair of the National Council for History Education, told HuffPost. “More importantly, it’s a way of thinking and organizing the world.”

Texas’ failures, as well as the poor national performance, contribute to a low level of college readiness among the state’s high school students, to the extent that Erekson’s report says college readiness was almost completely ignored in Texas’ revised history standards, “Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills” — presenting history as a series of factual memorization and one-sided analysis.

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. And, sadly and obviously, George Santayana is not a part of the Texas curriculum. For all I know kids in Texas think Santayana is a guitarist who once played with Everlast, if they think about him at all.

Couple this with the recent report from the right thinking, they prefer that to right wing whack jobs, American Heritage foundation which argues that teachers are overpaid. The report was so distorted and flawed that U.S. Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, was forced to release a formal response and protest to it.

As millions of Americans search for work, and millions more scrape by to make ends meet, researchers affiliated with two Washington think tanks — the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation — have recently announced a “finding” that defies common-sense: America’s teachers are overpaid by more than 50 percent.

The new paper from Jason Richwine and Andrew Biggs fails on several levels. First, it asks the wrong question. Second, it ignores facts that conflict with its conclusions. Lastly, it insults teachers and demeans the profession.

Instead of asking whether teachers are overpaid, Richwine and Biggs should have asked what it would take to recruit and retain highly effective teachers for all students. Surveys show that many talented and committed young people are reluctant to enter teaching for the long haul because they think the profession is low-paying and not prestigious enough.

McKinsey & Co. did a study (PDF) last year comparing the U.S. to other countries and found that America’s average current teacher salaries — starting around $35,000 and topping out at an average of $65,000 — were set far too low to attract and retain top talent.

The McKinsey report found that starting teacher salaries have not kept pace with other fields. In 1970, beginning New York City lawyers earned $2,000 more than first-year teachers. Today, a starting lawyer there can earn three or four times as much as a beginning teacher.

Money is not the reason that people enter teaching. But it is a reason why some talented people avoid teaching–or quit the profession when starting a family or buying a home. Other high-performing nations recruit teachers from the top third of college graduates. That must be our goal as well, and compensation is one critical factor. To encourage more top-caliber students to choose teaching, teachers should be paid a lot more, with starting salaries more in the range of $60,000 and potential earnings of as much as $150,000.

Great teachers stand at the summit of one of the hardest, most challenging, and most consequential professions for our children and the country’s future economic prosperity. They deserve our respect and should be well-remunerated. Nevertheless, through tortured analysis, and in some instances a disregard of their own data, the authors of this new study reach a predictably contrary conclusion.

Traditionally, economists have analyzed teacher pay the same way they analyze pay in other professions–they have compared the pay of teachers to workers with similar education and work experience. Like many before them, Richwine and Biggs found that teachers did indeed receive lower pay than similarly educated workers — almost 20 percent lower.

I agree that educational credentials are not the best measures of teacher effectiveness — but the researchers go on to assert that teachers should not be compared to workers with similar educational credentials because teachers do not score as well on the Armed Forces Qualifications Test. Setting aside the fact that the AFQT does not measure teacher effectiveness, it is insulting and demeaning to argue that teachers are not smart enough to receive market compensation comparable to their peers based on the results of a test that most of them took as teenagers.

The researchers also ignored a chart in their own paper showing that teachers have similar overall benefit packages to private employees. Unhappy with those findings, they then exaggerated the value of teacher compensation by comparing the retirement benefits of the small minority of teachers who stay in the classroom for 30 years, rather than comparing the pension benefits for the typical teacher to their peers in other professions.

Finally, they appeared to create out of thin air an 8.6 percent “job security” salary premium for teachers — despite the fact that hundreds of thousands of education jobs were lost in the recession and teachers continue to face layoffs.

By the end of this decade, more than half of America’s 3.2 million teachers are expected to retire. That demographic shift presents a stiff challenge and a special opportunity. States, districts, and schools have a once-in-a-lifetime chance to modernize the teaching profession and expand the talent pool. But doing so will require dramatic change in the way we recruit, train, support, evaluate, and compensate teachers.

I agree with Richwine and Biggs on one point. If teachers are to be recognized and compensated as professionals, states and school districts must shift away from a blue-collar assembly line model of compensation–and do more to reward effectiveness and performance in the classroom. A performance-based compensation model will enable great teachers to earn more, justify higher salaries, and raise the stature of the profession.

Americans need and deserve an honest, open debate about the teaching profession, framed by evidence, not ideologically-tilted studies like this one. The debate in Washington today should be about how to judiciously invest in education. How can we best modernize schools with crumbling infrastructure so they can teach 21st century skills? How can we keep teachers in classrooms, instead of on unemployment lines? And yes–even when budgets are tight–how can we make teaching a more attractive career and elevate the profession?

The answer to these questions cannot be to cut teacher pay and put tens of thousands of teachers out of work. Even in a time of fiscal austerity, education is more than just an expense. It’s an investment in the future.

I’ll allow Maureen Downey to chime in. She’s a teacher.

Are you sick of highly paid teachers?

Teachers’ hefty salaries are driving up taxes, and they only work 9 or10 months a year! It’s time we put things in perspective and pay them for what they do – babysit!

We can get that for less than minimum wage.

That’s right. Let’s give them $3.00 an hour and only the hours they worked; not any of that silly planning time, or any time they spend before or after school. That would be $19.50 a day (7:45 to 3:00 PM with 45 min. off for lunch and plan– that equals 6 1/2 hours).

Each parent should pay $19.50 a day for these teachers to baby-sit their children. Now how many students do they teach in a day…maybe 30? So that’s $19.50 x 30 = $585.00 a day.

However, remember they only work 180 days a year!!! I am not going to pay them for any vacations.

LET’S SEE…

That’s $585 X 180= $105,300 per year. (Hold on! My calculator needs new batteries).

What about those special education teachers and the ones with Master’s degrees? Well, we could pay them minimum wage ($7.75), and just to be fair, round it off to $8.00 an hour. That would be $8 X 6 1/2 hours X 30 children X 180 days = $280,800 per year.

Wait a minute — there’s something wrong here! There sure is!

The average teacher’s salary (nation wide) is $50,000. $50,000/180 days = $277.77/per day/30 students = $9.25/6.5 hours = $1.42 per hour per student–a very inexpensive baby-sitter and they even EDUCATE your kids!) WHAT A DEAL!!!!

Make a teacher smile; repost this to show appreciation for all educators.

That’s a simplistic view of things, I will admit, but it does have its math right and it makes an honest point. As things are right now, dollar for dollar, teaching is not a good career choice. Do you really want your kids being taught by the least capable people available?

And what kind of world are we looking at if that is the path we choose? Let’s take a quick trip to Florida – where else? – to find out.

If you think your parents are embarrassing, just wait til you hear what this Florida mother allegedly did in front of her daughter.

Winter Haven police arrested Marsia Emanuel on Thursday after she allegedly hailed a school bus and beat the driver in front of her teenage daughter and other students around 6 a.m., The Ledger reports.

The driver, Marilyn Richmond, recognized Emanuel as a student’s mom, pulled over and opened the door. For reasons that are unclear, according to The Ledger’s dispatch, Emanuel boarded and refused to leave the bus.

Hostilities ensued. Emanuel yelled in what seemed to be a foreign language, according to TV station WTSP. The incomprehensible ranting was followed by Emanuel allegedly battering Richmond on the shoulder and arm.

Emanuel fled and police traced her retreat to her home where there was another outburst of yelling, again from the mouth of the accused misbehaving mom. Police claim Emanuel, 37, dropped her underpants in front of them too, reports said.

Eventually subdued, police charged her with burglary of an occupied vehicle, battery of a public education worker, disturbing the peace and indecent exposure, according to the Polk County Sheriff’s Department.

The unruly behavior was apparently contagious that day. The investigative work of Winter Haven’s finest was hindered on board the parked school bus by a 15-year-old boy who interfered with cops’ efforts to canvass passengers for statements about the strange early morning incident. The student was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct, resisting arrest and disrupting school, according to The Ledger.

The remaining pupils boarded an emergency replacement bus about 90 minutes later and were transported to high school.

Let’s break down both crimes, shall we? The lovely Ms. Emanuel was so upset at something that normal language evaded her so she made up a new one on the spot, beat up a bus driver for no reason and then dropped trow in front of a group of armed cops to prove …… something that I doubt even she understood. Follow that up with the epitome of modern education in action with the 15 year old boy deciding that conducting some sort of poll while the bus is filled with police is a good way to exercise his First Amendment rights.

Just FYI, he was wrong.

There’s a time and a place for everything and that wasn’t either.

I hope he learned that at least. I’m guessing he already knew who to call for bail money.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnStAMHpT8A&w=480&h=360]

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I know, as do you, that there are people out there who believe some odd things. Quite a few of them represent red states in the U.S. Congress. Others have talk shows on Fox. But the one thing most of us try to ignore is how those people got to where they’re at. In the case of our delusional congresspeople they were elected by a majority of constituents in their part of the country. In the case of the talk show hosts they are there because there are enough people who buy the crap they sell. Which means that there are people walking among us who have little to no grasp of what reality entails. They breathe the same air we do, see the same sun we do, and have access to the same information we do and they just choose to ignore or deny it all. It’s like the Taliban but without the subtlety.

Mark Morford at the San Francisco Chronicle has put together a compendium of really depressing stats.

Six percent of Americans believe in unicorns. Thirty-six percent believe in UFOs. A whopping 24 percent believe dinosaurs and man hung out together. Eighteen percent still believe the sun revolves around the Earth. Nearly 30 percent believe cloud computing involves… actual clouds. A shockingly sad 18 percent, to this very day, believe the president is a Muslim. Aren’t they cute? And Floridian?

Do you believe in angels? Forty-five percent of Americans do. In fact, roughly 48 percent – Republicans and Democrats alike – believe in some form of creationism. A hilariously large percent of terrified right-wingers are convinced Obama is soon going to take away all their guns, so when the Newtown shooting happened and 20 young children were massacred due to America’s fetish for, obsession with and addiction to firearms, violence and fear, they bought more bullets. Because obviously.

In sum and all averaged out, it’s safe to say about 37 percent of Americans are just are not very bright. Or rather, quite shockingly dumb. Perhaps beyond reach. Perhaps beyond hope or redemption. Perhaps beyond caring about anything they have to say in the public sphere ever again. Sorry, Kansas.

Did you frown at that last paragraph? Was it a terribly elitist and unkind thing to say? Sort of. Probably. But I’m not sure it matters, because none of those people are reading this column right now, or any column for that matter, because reading anything even remotely complex or analytical is something only 42 percent of the population enjoy doing on a regular basis, which is why most TV shows, all reality shows, many major media blogs and all of Fox News is scripted for a 5th-grade education/attention span. OMG LOL kittens! 19 babies having a worse day than you. WTF is up with Justin Timberlake’s hair?!?

It is this bizarre, circular, catch-22 kind of question, asked almost exclusively by intellectual liberals because intellectual conservatives don’t actually exist, given how higher education leads to more developed critical thinking (you already know the vast majority of university professors and scientists identify as Democrat/progressive, right?) which leads straight to a more nimble, open-minded perspective. In short: The smarter you are, the less rigid/more liberal you become.

Until you get old. Or rich. And scared. And you forget. And you clamp down, seize up, fossilize. And the GOP grabs you like a mold.

Oh right! The question: How to reach the not-very-bright hordes, when they simply refuse to be reached by logic, fact, or modern mode? How to communicate obvious and vital truths (conservation, global warming, public health, sexuality, basic nutrition, religion as parable/myth, the general awfulness of Mumford & Sons) the lack of understanding of which keep the country straggling and embarrassing, the laughingstock of the civilized world?

And who are these people, exactly? And are they all really in Kentucky and Florida and Mississippi? Are they all in the Tea Party? Is failing education to blame? A dumbed-down media? Reality TV? In the wealthiest and most egomaniacal superpower in the world, why is the chasm so wide?

There is no easy answer, but there is a great deal of irony. It is a wicked conundrum that you and I can debate the definition of elitism, whether or not it’s fair to criticize those who believe that, say, gay marriage means kids will be indoctrinated into homosexuality, or that evolution is still a theory, or that Jesus literally flew up out of a cave and into the sky, when the discussion itself is, by nature, elitist, exclusionary, requiring fluid, abstract thinking the very people we’re discussing simply do not possess, and therefore cannot participate in.

TLC used to stand for “The Learning Channel.” Thanks to deregulation it is now the home of shows called “Sister Wives” and “90 Day Fiancé.”

So much for edjumakayshun.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that every channel should be like PBS. But it would be nice if people tried to raise the bar a little.

And, as to real education I remind you that the majority of textbooks are manufactured in Texas where they, recently, did try and get creationism and evolution both listed as valid scientific theories. Of course in Louisiana they do actually teach them side by side without any hint of irony.

And let us not forget this gem reported by Susan Guyet from Reuters.

Up to 150 students at a Missouri high school that ordered “Slaughterhouse-Five” pulled from its library shelves can get a free copy of the novel, courtesy of the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library, library officials said on Thursday.

The offer for students at Republic High School comes on the heels of the Republic School Board’s decision to remove Vonnegut’s novel and Sarah Ockler’s “Twenty Boy Summer” from the curriculum and the school library shelves.

“All of these students will be eligible to vote and some may be protecting our country through military service in the next year or two,” Julia Whitehead, the executive director of the Vonnegut library in Indianapolis, said in a statement.

“It is shocking and unfortunate that those young adults and citizens would not be considered mature enough to handle the important topics raised by Kurt Vonnegut, a decorated war veteran. Everyone can learn something from his book.”

Slaughterhouse-Five, considered Vonnegut’s most influential and popular work, is a satirical novel centered around the bombing of the German city of Dresden during World War Two.

The Republic School District took the move at its April 18 meeting following a complaint lodged by local resident Wesley Scroggins in the spring of 2010.

In his complaint, the Missouri State University associate business professor called on district officials to stop using textbooks and other materials “that create false conceptions of American history and government or that teach principles contrary to Biblical morality and truth.”

Neither Scroggins nor Republic School Superintendent Vern Minor were immediately available for comment.

Whitehead said she was talking with the American Civil Liberties Union in Missouri and Indiana to support the First Amendment rights of the students at Republic High School.

The offer of a free book to any Republic high school student who requests one is a way for the fledgling 7-month-old library, located in Vonnegut’s hometown, to show support, she said.

Yes, Wesley Scroggins is a moron and Vern Minor is a wimp. This is exactly when the school superintendent should use this as a teaching moment and explain what the First Amendment is and what it really protects.

It allows Mr. Scroggins to continue being a moron but it allows us the freedom to disagree with him.

Although, I can see why an enlightened gentleman such as Mr. Scroggins might have had a problem with the book.

Americans, like human beings everywhere, believe many things that are obviously untrue… Their most destructive untruth is that it is very easy for any American to make money. They will not acknowledge how in fact hard money is to come by, and, therefore, those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves. This inward blame has been a treasure for the rich and powerful, who have had to do less for their poor, publicly and privately, than any other ruling class since, say, Napoleonic times.

Many novelties have come from America. The most startling of these, a thing without precedent is a mass of undignified poor. They do not love one another because they do not love themselves.
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

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Man, what a great week to be a complete whack job. I don’t care if you’re left wing, right wing or the whole flipping bird, if you’re a paranoid lunatic this week has been manna from heaven for you. It’s had everything; bombs, Muslims, manure, cops, police states, the NRA, Facebook and our beloved Kenyan President allegedly espousing socialist values. And most of the stuff was completely meaningless. The guy on the roof in Boston? Probably a Dish Network repairman who happened to be in the area. The number of turban wearing terrorists seen racing from the scene in West Texas is still zero. That is also the same number of guns confiscated by the Obama administration. Which, surprisingly, is also the same number of times that the CIA has hacked intro my Facebook account. But none of that matters. What matters is what YOU think, not what FACTS are.

Let’s start over on the left wing. Many pro-Bama blogs are reveling in the fact that the state of Texas hasn’t inspected the exploding manure plant since 1995. That is wrong. The plant was inspected in 2006. And it was found to be unsafe. And it was fined. But, because they paid the fine, they were never inspected again. Yeah, Texas rolls like that. The nice people at Think Progress have a succinct take on it all.

It’s impossible to know at this point whether unsafe workplace conditions were a direct cause of this disaster, but we do know that it was cited for failing to obtain or qualify for a permit in 2006 after a complaint of a strong ammonia smell, a smell that was reported to be “very bad last night.” The plant hasn’t been inspected in the past five years, and in fact only six Texas fertilizer plants were inspected in that time. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) is chronically understaffed, which means that a given plant like West Fertilizer can only expect to get a state inspection once every 67 years on average.

Texas is a great state for companies. Not so much so for people. Of course Texas is the state where children who meet the state’s academic requirements in High School are ineligible for state college.

The report notes that the Fordham Institute gave the state’s history standards a grade of “D,” calling it a “politicized distortion of history,” that is “both unwieldy and troubling” while “offering misrepresentations at every turn.”

These misrepresentations, Erekson writes, include excluding Native Americans from the standards curriculum until recently and citing states’ rights as a cause of the Civil War when Texas did not cite it in their historical “Declaration of Causes.”

That’s actually the good news when it comes to education in Texas.

On the NRA front things seem to be circling the drain. Their current president avoided military service due to failing a psyche evaluation and the dude who set the tone they live by these days killed an illegal immigrant in Texas (which turns out to be legal down there).

But, despite those auspicious facts, one of their biggest sources or personal revenue just pulled the plug and ran away. Adolphus Busch IV, of Budweiser fame, has taken his rifles and gone home.

Adolphus Busch IV, heir to the Busch family brewing fortune, resigned his lifetime membership in the National Rifle Association on Thursday, writing in a letter to NRA President David Keene, “I fail to see how the NRA can disregard the overwhelming will of its members who see background checks as reasonable.”

The resignation, first reported by KSDK, came a day after the Senate rejected a series of amendments to a gun control bill, including a bipartisan deal to expand background checks for gun sales. The NRA had vigorously opposed all those measures.

“The NRA I see today has undermined the values upon which it was established,” wrote Busch. “Your current strategic focus clearly places priority on the needs of gun and ammunition manufacturers while disregarding the opinions of your 4 million individual members.”

I should note that Busch joined the NRA before they were overrun by nutjobs. He’s just a guy who likes to hunt. Speaking as someone who has hunted and enjoyed it and who was taught gun safety at a young age, I can empathize with him. But, since he is white, rich and republican, his word means much more in the circles of the NRA than mine ever will. Hopefully someone will listen.

Since we’re leaning to the right now, let’s tilt all the way over.

As anyone who has not been in a coma knows, the police captured Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev, the alleged Boston Marathon bomber, just a day after killing his brother in a wild shoot out (coming soon to a theater near you). He had hid in a boat which is, quite possibly, the worst get-away vehicle known to man when you are surrounded by concrete. Let him be a lesson to remind you that we all live with the decisions we make.

Okay, so he’s caught. His family is Chechan. Mine is Irish. Neither fact matters. He is Muslim. So is my next door neighbor. It doesn’t matter. He worshiped his older brother. So does almost every little brother. It doesn’t matter. The older brother got dissed after winning the Gold Gloves. That is cause for a well written letter to the editor, not an excuse for blowing up innocent civilians.

Simply put what we do know is almost meaningless, beyond the fact that they caught the right guy. Well, almost all of what we know is meaningless. News Busters is going to be keeping a close eye on the media to see if they report the important fact that Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev may have voted for Obama.

Several posts on what several news organizations have confirmed as the Twitter profile of accused Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev indicate that that the 19-year-old Chechnyan immigrant was a supporter of Barack Obama in the 2012 presidential election.

If that is indeed the case, it does not mean that Obama has any sort of connection with or responsibility for the bombing suspect or his brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev. It does, however, completely reverse the fantasy that many American liberals were openly hoping for: that the bombing suspects might be revealed as Timothy McVeigh 2.0, someone whose very name they could use to smear and deride anyone who stands against their belief system. In other words, one of those “dog whistles” we keep hearing so much about.

Now that information has emerged which not only indicates the suspected bombers were not radical conservatives but that one of them appears to be a supporter of President Obama, how widely will it be spread in the endless series of reports trying to report as many details about the two suspects?

Several news agencies have tracked down a Twitter account which is believed to belong to Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the younger of the two brothers whom the FBI has identified as the people responsible for a pressure cooker bomb which killed three people and injured nearly 150.

Well, it was good of him to note that our president is not suspected of being involved in an act of terror. For the record Timothy McVeigh was a big fan of Bush the elder. I don’t remember that nugget coming up at his trial.

Do you know why?

IT DIDN’T FREAKING MATTER!!!!!!

Whatever drove the Tsarnaev brothers to do what they did is almost meaningless. There is no rationalization that justifies killing innocent people outside of a war zone. And even with that exception things get murky.

Nevertheless, I’m glad they caught him. If only to ensure that he is not part of a larger plot or a member of some organization that means to do us harm. Something which I doubt at this point.

BTW, big UPS to NBC for noting that using white terrorists is easier in America than using Arabs. I’m sure no one will take advantage of that. I mean, seriously, thank God there are no white people in the world who wish us ill otherwise that could prove horribly prophetic.

Oy freaking vey.

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First off, I have good news for the male readers of this blog. A new study has just been released that shows, definitively, that men who don’t do housework get more sex than those who do. So when you hear a neighbor brag that her hubby helps clean the kitchen or whatever, remind yourself that he may as well be sleeping on the couch for all the good it does him. Nope, the message is clear, go do your manly stuff and then park your butt on the couch and wait your turn. Heck, if you get it right she should even bring you a sammich and a cold beer. Basically it all comes down to role playing, just not like the kind they do in Fifty Shades of Gray. Although if she’s willing to toss in a little of that too don’t turn it down.

See, we’ve barely started and already you’ve learned something.

In that vein Florida’s Gov. Rick Scott, realizing that the state is rapidly becoming an intellectual cesspool is asking the legislature to spend an additional $1.2 Billion on education. Included in his request is a $2,500 per year raise for every teacher. Before you get all impressed, that would still leave teachers in bottom fifth of pay nationally and the school system barely on par for a per student spending average. In other words, they have to raise the bar just to get to the bottom. Oh well, it’s a start.

Yesterday I wrote about the ten year old girl, her ounce of cocaine and how she won a science fair. Some of you were upset that I wasn’t upset. The fact is I feel for the kid. She has to make do with what she’s got and in Florida, as evidenced by the above paragraph, she ain’t got much.

Among the many issues the Florida education system has is that it is nigh on impossible to fire a teacher. So you have the lowest paid, least qualified, people being given absolute authority over your child’s future and there is nothing you can do about it. This problem came to the fore again in the strange case of Paula Prudente.

Long-time teacher Paula Prudente appears to have lost her four year battle to keep her job with the Palm Beach school district.

A state court last month recommended she be fired for misusing district technology to harass and threaten fellow employees. The emails, described as “rambling, sometimes-incoherent,” complained of mistreatment and told employees how to perform their jobs.

On Wednesday, school board members said they’d move to fire Prudente, 57, at the next board meeting.

But Prudente denied the accusations, calling them retaliations for reporting unethical hiring practices and health violations at schools. “My emails were complaints and grievances,” she said, adding that she’s filed multiple lawsuits and grievances against the district.

Prudente, last assigned to Spanish River High School, has been employed with the district since 1978. Her problems began in 2008, when she was accused of sending negative emails to her co-workers about a presidential candidate. In 2009-10, she was again accused of sending co-workers inappropriate and harassing emails.

Both cases were settled out of court, with a 10-day suspension.

But in 2011, the district alleged Prudente had returned to her email attacks. They said she sent numerous hostile and confusing emails to staff and left one employee a three-minute threatening voicemail.

“You are going to have to cease and desist your cafeteria style of … law and agreements cause … you are very wrongful in your misrepresentations … you are very deceitful …” Prudente said.

Other confusing emails were sent to school board members, the area superintendent and district employees who handled her benefits, despite warnings that school email accounts could not be used to bully co-workers.

Administrative law judge Robert Meale wrote that in emails addressed to one of her principals at the time, Prudente “launched into a bewildering set of vitriolic directives, awkward references to herself in the third person, and head-turning claims…”

One thing I learned as I wandered through the limited public documents on this mess is that Ms. Prudente is not a fan of President Obama. I also learned that everyone, but her, is an idiot. It is never made clear what awards she has won, just that has won three of them.

In semi-related news, another teacher, Dean Liptak, is in trouble because his physics test borders on the hyper-violent and seems to advocate killing babies.

I should note that he is also a well respected teacher in Florida. In case you’re wondering how far things have to go down there.

The fate of Florida science teacher Dean Liptak is unclear as parents express concern over violent test questions that involve propelling students and driving over babies.

According to WTSP, the Fivay High School teacher in Hudson, Fla., assigned test questions like:

“A 50 kg student has a momentum of 500 kg m/s as the teacher launches him toward the wall, what is the velocity of the student heading toward the wall?”

“A northbound car with a velocity of 100 m/s ran over a baby with a momentum of 800 kg m/s, what is the mass of the car?”

Parents tell WTSP that the test questions are “violent” and “inappropriate.” School officials have not disclosed the teacher’s status at the school.

Liptak has been teaching in Pasco County Schools for several years and recently moved to Fivay from Ridgewood High School. His students at Ridgewood had positive reviews of his teaching on RateMyTeachers.com. One student calls him the “best teacher in the world.”

A similar incident in Washington, D.C. last march led to a teacher’s termination. Parents were outraged after the educator sent third graders home with morbid math problems that referenced cannibals, baking people in ovens and a child whose brain had become infested with fire ants.

And just two months prior, Norcross, Ga. elementary school parents were upset when math problems that used examples of slave beatings were used in class. The teacher who assigned the problems eventually resigned.

The science test in Florida comes at a volatile time for the school, as the Fivay community continues to remember their late classmate Jessica Laney, who committed suicide last month.

Ah yes, higher math only works if you kill and eat someone. I must have been out the day that lesson was delivered.

But the worst case scenario came to light this week when James Tracy, a professor at Florida Atlantic University, began teaching his students that the Sandy Hook massacre was all staged and no one really died. CNN’s Anderson Cooper took him, and Florida’s education system, to task.

Florida once had a howling wolfpack of higher education reporters competing for scoops about small-time shenanigans. These days, the education beat is pretty much on life support. And in the absence of swift and sure journalism justice, the shenanigans are morphing into national scandals.

Last week, CNN’s Anderson Cooper was keepin’ ’em honest at Florida Atlantic University (FAU). Steam poured out of the silver haired anchor’s nostrils as he channeled the righteous indignation of millions regarding FAU’s James Tracy, a tenured professor of media history who thinks that maybe the Sandy Hook massacre was staged by “crisis actors” and maybe all those first graders aren’t really dead.

“I describe myself as a scholar and public intellectual,” Tracy told Sun-Sentinel reporter Mike Clary as the story was beginning to gather steam. Campus colleagues with higher standards of scholarship and lower quotients of narcissism describe him as Dick Tracy, the comic book detective who solves fictional crimes.

FAU President Mary Jane Saunders took to the CNN airwaves to assure Cooper’s global audience that Tracy “does not speak for the university.”

Maybe not, President Saunders, but his heartless, tone-deaf, self-aggrandizing pouring of salt into the gaping wounds of a Connecticut community still deeply in mourning has dealt yet another blow to the credibility of higher education in Florida.

The embarrassments have been piling up. Two top administrators at Edison State College allowed students to kiss off core classes required for legitimate degrees in three separate majors. Florida A & M is in danger of losing its accreditation. Politician and professor Mike Haridopolos’ $152,000 payday for a “book” resulted in a document as intellectually challenging as My Weekly Reader.

Add to those Florida State University’s selling its soul to the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation for $1.5 million to finance a “faculty” position. Of course, the right-wing foundation would name the teacher. And the Koch pledge is so paltry it would barely cover the cost of golden parachutes for any failed or disgraced FSU administrators.

James “Dick” Tracy is not the only accident looking for a place to happen in Florida higher education, and he did not grant himself tenure, either. Florida’s students and taxpayers deserve better than what they’re getting from a system increasingly run by people with Ph.D.s from the University of Educated Fools.

And there, kids, is the problem in a nutshell. Florida allows private financing for schools with no strings attached. If you’ve got enough money, as the Koch brothers do, you too can teach kids that Jesus rode a dinosaur while partying with Thomas Jefferson. And no one can stop you.

However, just as the University of Texas will no longer accept graduates of the Texas High School system unless they pass an entrance exam, so too is the rest of the world putting limits on how much they will tolerate lunacy and ignorance being passed off as knowledge.

Let’s face it, facts are facts and logic is logic. They are the bricks and mortar that all children need to build a future. If you want to wear a tinfoil hat and wait for Armageddon, be my guest. Just don’t take our kids with you.

MATER SUSPIRIA VISION – Seduction of the Armageddon Witches {2011} from Diego Barrera on Vimeo.

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG (FOX! Sports) every Friday around 9:10 AM.
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This site has long proposed that it would benefit everyone if people made educated choices. I know it sounds like a simple idea but its implementation has been woefully lacking. The current presidential election is a shining example of this phenomena. I don’t care if you vote Republicrat or Demican, but please do so based on the facts. For the record I can assure you that Governor Romney is not now, nor has he ever been, a unicorn. I can further assure you that President Obama is not now, nor has he veer been, a Muslim. That’s not to say that a Muslim unicorn wouldn’t make a fine candidate in the future. Even so, both claims can still be found, and clung to, on the web.

Before we get to the main thrust of today’s blog, I’d like to share a little political advice my grandmother gave me long ago.

“It is the politician’s job to make you like him. Ignore him and look at the people who support him directly. They will let you know what kind of person he is.”

Of course, when my granny was young there were almost no female politicians so I’d hope you’d cut her some P.C. slack on this one.

Even so, it’s good advice.

That simple amount of research can save you years of anguish. In many other cases the same principle holds true as well. For example, if you’re a nurse, knowing that injecting a patient with coffee instead of blood might be a bad idea is knowledge worth having. It’s a pity that no one told Rejane Moreira Telles that.

A student nurse in Brazil has been charged with involuntary manslaughter after allegedly injecting a patient with coffee, rather than a blood drip.

Rejane Moreira Telles, 23, had been working at a Rio de Janeiro clinic for only three days
when the incident occurred, the New York Daily News reports.

“Anyone can get confused,” Telles told TV Globo, pointing out that the blood drip and a feed drip filled with a coffee and milk mixture were right next to each other. She also noted that she had not received training in this particular procedure.

The patient, 80-year-old Palmerina Pires Ribeiro, died last week, hours after the mix-up, according tot he Daily Mail.

Nutritional specialist Dr. Armando Carreir told the network that Ribeiro’s death “would have been as if [she] was suffocating.”

Two nurses and other student at the clinic have also been indicted for manslaughter.

A similar incident occurred in Rio de Janeiro in late September, when a nursing technician allegedly injected a patient with soup.

For the record, soup really is good food. It’s just a lousy blood substitute. See? Knowledge is power

Here’s some more advice; if you rob a bank don’t go back and tell them you were shortchanged.

Going back to a bank you just ripped off to claim you’d been shortchanged isn’t likely to end well.

That’s what police say led to an arrest Monday in upstate New York.

Syracuse police say 28-year-old Arthur Bundrage, of East Syracuse, went into a bank at about 9 a.m. and demanded $20,000. Authorities say a teller initially refused, but relented and gave him some money, even though he never showed a weapon or made a threat.

Investigators say Bundrage left but returned when he found he hadn’t been given $20,000. Officers say they found him at the bank’s locked front door, trying to get back in.

Bundrage is in jail awaiting arraignment Tuesday on a charge of fourth-degree grand larceny. Police say he doesn’t yet have a lawyer.

But these are examples of individual stupidity. Let’s take a look at group stupidity. And we are talking on an epic scale here. The Arizona legislature wants to force the Grand Canyon to secede from the United States and become their personal property.

No, I am not drunk.

When voters in Arizona go to the polls next month, they will be asked to decide a landownership tug of war: Should the Grand Canyon belong to all Americans, or just the residents of Arizona?

A controversial ballot measure backed by Republicans in the state legislature is seeking sovereign control over millions of acres of federal land in the state, including the Grand Canyon.

Proposition 120 would amend the state’s constitution to declare Arizona’s sovereignty and jurisdiction over the “air, water, public lands, minerals, wildlife and other natural resources within the state’s boundaries.”

The measure is the latest salvo in the so-called “sagebrush revolt” by Republicans in the West aiming to take back control of major swaths of land owned by various federal agencies, much of it by the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management.

State Senator Sylvia Allen, one of the Republican backers of the measure, argues that federal retention of the land hurts the economy of the Western states and leaves them struggling to fund public education, nurture their economies, and manage their forests and natural resources.

“We do not have the ability in rural Arizona to provide jobs for our citizens due to the fact that the federal government controls all the land,” Allen told Reuters. “It leaves us at a great disadvantage. We’re not able to bring in industry and provide for the jobs that we need,” she added.

The exact area of public land targeted by the measure – which excludes American Indian reservations and federal installations such as arsenals – was not immediately clear on the Arizona Secretary of State’s website.

The Sierra Club pegged the area at between 39,000 and 46,700 square miles (101,000 and 121,000 square km) – or 34 percent to 41 percent of the entire state.

BATTLE OVER LAND

The ballot measure is just the latest move in a decades-old federal-state skirmish over control of a wide range of natural resources in Western states, often pitting mining, drilling and logging companies against those seeking to protect the environment.

The efforts have had mixed success. In May, Arizona’s Republican Governor Jan Brewer vetoed a state bill calling on Washington to relinquish the title to 48,000 square miles (124,000 square km), arguing that it created uncertainty for existing leaseholders on federal lands in difficult economic times.

But similar legislation was signed into law by Governor Gary Herbert in neighbouring Utah in March, despite warnings from state attorneys that it was likely unconstitutional and would trigger a costly and ultimately futile legal battle.

Opponents of the latest drive to assert Arizona’s ownership say that, if successful, the initiative could undermine protections provided by federal environmental laws such as the Clean Air Act, Endangered Species Act, and Clean Water Act, and would saddle Arizona with lands for which it would be unable to care.

“They can’t even fund and ensure that their (state) parks are protected, so how they would take on an additional 25 to 30 million acres of land is a big question mark,” Sandy Bahr, director of the Sierra Club Grand Canyon Chapter, told Reuters.

No polls have given a sense of whether Prop 120 will prosper during the November 6 election. But Bahr cautioned that, should it pass, it would inevitably trigger fresh litigation for Arizona, which recently fought a legal battle over its tough 2010 crackdown on illegal immigrants all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

“This one is just blatantly unconstitutional,” Bahr said of Prop 120. “Does Arizona really need another lawsuit?”

Problem #1; (click this to see a map) The Grand Canyon is also in Nevada.

Nevadans are fun loving people but they might be a bit miffed at seeing a 20th of their state taken away from them.

Problem #2; see the excuse above: “We’re not able to bring in industry and provide for the jobs that we need.”

So, to solve that problem they would have to pave over the Grand Canyon. Or use it as a dump. Either way my guess is that people who rely on the Colorado River (whcih flows thorugh it) and Lake Mead (which is entirely in the canyon) for water might be just a touch miffed.

Given the fact that the Southwest is in a state of perpetual drought in even the best of times I could easily see this leading to armed conflict.

Problem #3; Arizona doesn’t even come close to having the resources to poperply manage the thing.

In fact, the state already has millions of acres of unused land. The fact that they have, thus far, used that land to build publicly funded baseball parks and money losing strip malls is not the fault of the federal government.

Nor is it the fault of the Grand Canyon.

Not that I wish to impugn the intelligence of the average Arizonan – well, I guess I do, actually, now that I think about it – I would like to remind them of this bon mot from H.L. Mencken, “People deserve the government they get, and they deserve to get it good and hard.”

Nyle “Let The Beat Build” from Last Pictures

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG (FOX! Sports) every Friday around 9:10 AM.