We always hear or read about the horrible trial lawyers. In fact, last week in the Houston Chronicle we saw another op-ed by the chairman of Texans for Lawsuit Reform.
Barbara Ann Radnofsky, 2006 TX Dem nominee for U.S. Senate, wrote a responseto the article that has been published in the Sunday edition of the Houston Chronicle. Barbara Ann is a Houston attorney who has been listed in "Best Lawyers in America" for each of the past 15 years.
Anna Quindlen wrote a piece in the current issue of Newsweek about Connie Heermann, a teacher at Perry Meridian High School (9 miles south of Indianapolis). She was suspended for a year and a half without pay for not following the school board guidance to retrieve the book The Freedom Writers Diary from students. (They even made a movie from the book.) She had passed them out after waiting three months for approval from the board. She had a local business pay for the books and collected approval slips from the parents of 149 out of 150 students plus favorable signals (or so she thought) from the principal of the school before distributing the book.
My wife sent this on to me. She's an elementary art teacher working in a low-income, primarily Hispanic school district. In spite of the wonderful experience she has of helping children she also gets to experience the full scourge of the move to discredit and emasculate our public school systems that is occurring today in the name of greater accountability and standardized testing.
I like Obama as our candidate and believe that he will be a good President. The alternative is too terrible to think about. However, there have been some stances that Obama has taken that has caused consternation from the DK crowd. I am afraid his support for merit pay for teachers is another one of those issues.
Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama on Saturday thanked the National Education Association for its endorsement but also made it clear that he continues to support merit pay for teachers.
Education has always been an important issue with me, and I think merit pay is something that needs to be explored in depth before it is implemented on a national scale. I freely admit that I am a skeptic and do not support merit pay, but am willing to listen to arguments for it.
This sort of story, currently running on CNN's website - an experienced and seemingly enlightened teacher being punished by a bunch of prudish, power hungry, yokels - never fails to make me both angry and queasy. It calls to mind other such censorious and irrational cases as the Scopes trial, the burning of Beatles albums by Southern evangelicals in the 60s, and the attempts to keep certain reading materials out of the hands of young people; in fact, that is what this is. I get outraged by seeing idiot mobs getting away with such abuses of power.
Part of the reason for dumbing down in our culture has to do with power being placed in the hands of such entities as the Perry Township School Board, as expressed by Jon Baily, its pasty faced, censorship-legitimizing attorney, and of other such unenlghtened boards across the country. My sympatheties here are absolutely with Connie Heermann and her students. She is clearly a woman of character and integrity, and this school probably doesn't deserve her. I hope that her union will continue to fight for her.
Disjointed ramblings, and two, TWO stories in one!
James Cady Robinson
October 22, 1942 - February 23, 2008
English & Latin Teacher, Madison Sr. High, San Diego, CA
Bon Vivant, goad, irritant, class clown, harlequin, word whore, & one of the smartest men I knew.
JR Superstar... Gauzy sun drenched days and autumn hued sunsets of summers in San Diego in the late '70s, when all things were possible, the beach called your name, and no one could conceive of growing older. Pablo Cruise and Peter Frampton on the radio, and boys... Suntanned, long haired, surfer boys... The memories are often better than the reality one lived at the time, but some things, some people, always ring true. You are the only teacher at Madison who stands out clearly in those memories.
Fractals: A New Lens on the Natural World
A Conference for 6-12 Science Teachers
My talk was not on fractals but was entitled: TEACHING SCIENCE THAT MATTERS: REFRAMING THE QUESTION IN SCIENCE, and can be viewed from my webpage.
I was dealing with issues that may reflect back on the way science is being taught. The three examples I was using for them were
Global warming and climate change
Evolution vs. creation ("Intelligent" Design)
Determining when something is "alive"
I thought some of you might be interested in what Complexity Science has to say about these issues and their relationship to "standard" science. Look below the break if this is of interest to you. I'll suggest that there is relevance to this election in what I had to say
I am reading a great book that if you've not read I highly suggest by Jeff Walker called
"The Ayn Rand Cult"
It does not debate the views of Rand per se, as many other works do, however it does argue, and I would say successfully so, that Objectivism is a cult.
It discusses the history of Objectivism from the earliest years to the present day. However this is not the focus of the diary. I only bring this up as it's a great read and the point of this diary came about from a point in the book.
In the book the author points out that for some how certainone is of a belief dwarfs the importanceof its truth or falsity.
Today I thought I was actually going to have a day where something wouldn't piss me off. Well the FISA thing ended that notion, but also something else I read in the news.
There was always something slightly insane about No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the ambitious education law often described as the Bush Administration's signature domestic achievement.
That is the opening sentence of a piece in the current issue of Time. Written by Claudia Wallis, the piece is entitled as it this diary, and it is very much worth your going to this link and taking the time to read it. It is especially interesting as we now have on record a key insider in the Bush Department of Education acknowledging the arguments of critics that for some in the Department
No Child Left Behind was nothing more than a cynical plan to destroy American faith in public education and open the way to vouchers and school choice.
It is a piece that has been widely discussed on some of the educational lists in which I participate, and I thought it might be worthwhile for me to examine it and offer some commentary here.
I was a high school math teacher for 4 years, now I'm working on my masters since I want to teach at university. These are my thoughts on how to fix schools. Frankly, I think "fixing" schools is a far less mystifying task than some people make it out to be. Many of the solutions we've tried have been based on gimmicks. Why do kids in poor neighborhoods get all of the gimmicky solutions? In thinking about this question I thought about my excellent public school education in a wealthy suburb and tried to apply the things that worked about my high school to the city school. How would you fix schools in your area? Or do you have great public schools?
I hope Obama can use his political momentum to address the growing need to defend grade school teachers against physical and mental abuse from students. I make this request because the level of indiscipline and lack of proper home-training has grown beyond the borders of being civilized. All the pressures and pain of our children’s education is put on the backs of our teachers and in exchange, they only get a check and a certificate without any form of protection.
We have a lot going on today in North Carolina as you all know. You can feel the excitement in the air. We aren't accustomed to our primary being so important to those outside our state and getting the attention here in North Carolina that we've been getting. Now let me say first of all that I'm pleased that I don't have an opponent in today's primary so I can relax a bit. However, I can't help thinking as I watch what is happening that it isn't nearly as important what happens today as is what happens tomorrow.
As I watch what is happening here on the ground...
From a survey conducted by The Union of Concerned Scientists, it was reported on April 22,2008 that, "more than half of the Environmental Protection Agency [EPA]scientists who responded to the survey said they had witnessed political interference in scientific decisions". Further, Francesca Grifo, director of the group’s scientific integrity programs indicated that Scientists are being pressured by outside interests...".[Ref.: article by Christopher Lee, The Washington Post].
Its not that such attacks on Science by members of our current White House Administration are of news to Street Prophets readers, but rather to bring to attention that political mischief by various States politicians of the same bent seems to be flourishing also specifically in regard to evolutionary theory.
Read about it below the fold:
This is not a full-fledged diary but a primer on one I'll be writing as I compile all the facts on this topic. However, this one's burning in me and it's worth getting some light shown on it right now.
