Failure of Education

School Wasteland

Students don’t learn because teachers don’t teach. The reason for this is that the teachers who try to teach get screwed over and either burn out or get fired when students and parents complain that classes are too hard. So the good teachers either leave or give up and phone it in. I discovered this the hard way.

After I retired, I took a couple of years off before becoming a teacher, which I did part time for two years, and then full time for the next five years. I taught high school science classes during all of that time. For the first couple of years that I was full time, I taught advanced courses like Chemistry and Physics. The courses I taught allowed a student to take an exam after it concluded, and if they scored high enough on that exam, they would receive college credit for the course. In other words, a college level class being taught at the high school level. Students hated the fact that my course was difficult and constantly complained. Meanwhile, school administrators wanted my course to be both more rigorous and easier for students to receive an A.

During that first full time year, I was physically attacked in my classroom by a student because I took his cell phone and told him he would have to get it from the office. I wound up quitting that job and changing school districts.

The second year saw me teaching physics in my new school district. Students were constantly complaining that I was destroying their GPA because my class was too hard. They just didn’t have the math or study skills to be successful. I spent far too much of my time trying to teach things like calculating uncertainty, which isn’t that mathematically difficult.

A quiz in this class would look something like this (you will find the answers at the end of this post, for those of you geeky enough to want to solve them):

  1. A man in a tree stand 5 meters above the ground fires a rifle perfectly parallel to the ground. At the instant the 4 gram bullet leaves the muzzle of his rifle, his 125 gram watch falls off. If the bullet’s muzzle velocity is 1,000 meters per second, which will hit the ground first: the bullet or the watch? (You may ignore air resistance and the curvature of the Earth)
  2. NY Yankees outfielder Aaron Judge hits a baseball. It leaves his bat at a 22 degree angle while travelling at 40 meters per second. The outfield wall is 370 feet away. Does he score a home run? (You may ignore air resistance, the initial height of the ball when it was struck, and the height of the outfield wall.)
  3. You specify that a metal shop cut you a metal plate with the following specifications and margins of error: 32.0mm +/- 0.5mm x 30.0 mm +/- 0.5mm x 1.0 mm +/- 0.05 mm. If the density of this metal is 2700 g/cm3, what will the plate’s mass be (in grams)?(Significant figures count)

They began circulating a petition to get me fired. I caught them cheating. It was a tough year. The average grade for the class of 20 students was an 84, with 3 students getting an A, and two getting a D. The rest got B’s and C’s. When the college exams came around, four of them managed to score high enough for college credit.

So in year three, they gave me standard track Biology to be taught to the students that they euphemistically referred to as “underperforming.” This paper, written by a 15 year old who was in the 10th grade, is what I had to work with. Yes, this is a scan of an actual paper that was turned in to me, and no, he is not retarded:

At the beginning of year four, I was pulled aside by the principal and asked if I wanted to go back to teaching physics to the smart kids. It seems that the teacher that they had given that class to gave 3/4 of the class an A, but every one of them failed the college credit exam, even though the class average was a 92. I told them that the only way I would teach it was if I would not have to catch any static from administrators when students complained about their grades. The reply that I got was “We were hoping that you would agree to find a way to make your class more fun.” I declined and was sentenced to teach Biology to the dumbasses again. Hey, at least the lovable little morons weren’t trying to get me fired.

COVID hit at the end of that year. Teachers were instructed to hold class by Zoom meetings, we were required to give and grade assignments, and were told to enforce it rigorously. So I did. I would up doing quite a bit of effort and work, holding class. Only a quarter of my students did the work. At the end of the school year, the school district gave everyone at least a C. To think I could have done nothing for three months and gotten paid.

My fifth year as a full time teacher was to teach physical science. At the halfway point of the year, we were told that, due to the stress of COVID, we would have to give every student a passing grade. More than a half of my students were chronically absent. Then we were told that our students’ performance on end of the year exams would not affect their grades, but would affect our pay raises. I quit a week later and went back to health care.

ANSWERS TO THE QUIZ ARE BELOW THIS LINE

  1. Since the acceleration of gravity is the same (~9.80 m/s2) for all objects on Earth, the watch and the bullet would strike the Earth at the same time, but the bullet will be some distance away in the horizontal plane.
  2. Yes, he will score a home run because the ball will land 372 feet away.
  3. The plate will have a volume of 0.883-1.04 cm3. That will cause it to have a mass of between 2,380-2,800 grams. (three significant figures) This last problem gave them fits. They couldn’t understand how tolerances could give you an uncertain result.
By Divemedic, ago

Librarian Groomers

When I was teaching, every few years the school district had to select a new textbook. The process would include the district narrowing it down to a few likely candidates. The books which effectively covered your student benchmarks were listed, and parents would have an opportunity to look them over. So did teachers. The final textbooks were then selected with this feedback in mind.

After a book was chosen, there were of course dozens of books that were not chosen. No one ever accused the schools of censorship or book banning because they chose to have one book over another.

Not so much anymore. Now school librarians are “enraged” because schools are not allowing them to promote books that openly discuss fellatio between a 12 year old boy and a grown man, called Lawn Boy. There is also the story about two teen boys who wake up to discover they are in space before embarking on a gay love affair, or stories about how hard it is to be a teen transgender. They complain about parents not wanting their children to read about fathers raping their daughters.

This is just a way for librarians to attempt to get grooming past parents who don’t want their children educated in how to be sexual deviants. This particular story even goes on to complain that complaints about CRT are actually just “amorphous conspiracy theories” that gained traction in conservative circles last year, before going on to blame these “book bans” on deep-pocketed rightwing donors who are carrying out a campaign to ban books from school libraries, often focused on works that address race, LGBTQ issues or marginalized communities.

You will note that none of the “banned books” these librarians are fighting for are things like the Bible, Rush Limbaugh’s “The Way Things Ought to Be,” or other books from the right.

Librarians are claiming that they are “banding together” to fight “book bans.” Look- the books aren’t being banned. The parents and others who pay the taxes that fund your library and your job have decided that they don’t want to use their money to fund their children reading stories with passages in them like this one:

What if I told you I touched another guy’s dick? What if I told you I sucked it? I was ten years old, but it’s true. I put Doug Goebbels’ dick in my mouth. I was in fourth grade, it was no big deal. He sucked mine too. And you know what, it wasn’t terrible.

Citation from “Lawn Boy”

You want to publish a book like that, fine. It isn’t illegal. This isn’t a First Amendment issue. No one is restricting your speech. The First Amendment prevents the government from restricting you from speaking your mind. What it doesn’t do is require that the government fund it.

When you are a librarian in a government funded facility, you are an agent of the government. While you are acting as an agent of the government, you are not acting in your individual capacity. This is why clerks of court can’t refuse to issue a marriage license. This is why a judge can’t have a sign with the 10 commandments mounted on the front of his desk in the court room. It’s also why teachers can’t explain gay sex to children and why librarians don’t get to push children to read “how to” books on sucking dick.

I will fight against using taxpayer funds to provide that book to children, you sick fucks.

By Divemedic, ago

Constitution and Government Employment, continued

On Saturday, I posted that the government can’t fire an employee without due process. That is, a government entity has to follow certain steps before terminating the employment of their employees. Many of you disagreed, but I will share with you why I feel that this is so important:

There is a teacher I know who was terminated in violation of this law. Gerry Buell had been teaching for Lake County schools for over 22 years. He was selected as the county teacher of the year. Just a few months later, he posted on his private Facebook page that he was opposed to gay marriage.

On his personal Facebook account, outside of school time, Buell posted a reaction to New York’s passage of homosexual ‘marriage’ saying he “almost threw up.” He also referred to homosexual unions as sinful and referred to it as part of a “cesspool” of behaviors. The local media got ahold of it.

Just for the record, this is his exact comment:

I’m watching the news, eating dinner when the story about New York okaying same-sex unions came on and I almost threw up. Then they showed two guys kissing after their announcement. If they want to call it a union, go ahead. But don’t insult a man and woman’s marriage by throwing it in the same cesspool of whatever. God will not be mocked. When did this sin become acceptable?

By the way, if one doesn’t like the most recently posted opinion based on biblical principles and God’s laws, then go ahead and unfriend me. I’ll miss you like I miss my kidney stone from 1994. And I will never accept it because God will never accept it. Romans chapter one.

“It was my own personal comment on my own personal time on my own personal computer in my own personal house, exercising what I believed as a social studies teacher to be my First Amendment rights,” he said.

He was 100% correct, but that didn’t matter to the Lake County school system. Some parents filed a complaint with the school superintendent. Shortly afterwards, he was suspended. Two days after being suspended, he was fired for “violating his professional ethics.”

“We took the allegations seriously,” said Chris Patton, a communication officer with Lake County Schools. “All teachers are bound by a code of special ethics (and) this is a code ethics violation investigation.”

According to the school system, what Buell wrote on his private account was disturbing. They claimed that they were especially concerned that gay students at the school might be frightened or intimidated walking into his classroom. Patton also disputed the notion that Buell’s Facebook account is private.

“He has more than 700 friends,” Patton said. “How private is that – really? Social media can be troubling if you don’t respect it and know that just because you think you are in a private realm – it’s not private.”

So, according to the Lake County, Florida school system, whether or not a government employee has the right to free speech depends on how many people are listening.

Patton said the school system has an obligation to take the comments seriously. He said Buell will not be allowed back in the classroom “until we do all the interviews and do a thorough job of looking at everything – past or previous writings.”

To accomplish that, he said people have been sending the school system screenshots of Buell’s Facebook page.

“Just because you think it’s private, other people are viewing it,” Patton said, noting that the teacher’s Facebook page also contained numerous Bible passages.

Buell hired a lawyer, who sent a notice of intent to file suit for terminating him in violation of his First and Fifth Amendment rights. The school caved in. If government employees were “at will,” that never would have worked.

I want you to ask yourselves- just who in government service needs to have their Constitutional rights protected? In these days of school boards shutting down discussion and declaring that parents are terrorists, do you think that leftist teachers have any fear of being fired? Or do you think it is conservative teachers?

I myself was fired from that same exact school. In October of 2016, we were told to discuss the gay and lesbian lifestyle* and its benefits in the classroom. Click on the link to see the actual handout we were given. I refused. Less than a month later, I was attacked in my classroom by a violent student.

I had worked for that school for exactly one week less than a year, so I was still on “probation.” I could be fired for any reason. I was placed on paid leave. Two months later, the school system told me that, if I resigned, they would not pursue any other actions and would simply tell future employers that I had resigned. The union wanted me to fight. I didn’t think the job was worth fighting for, so I quit.

A month later, the school system tried to have my teaching license revoked by pressing formal charges with the state. Had they been successful, my medical license would also have been revoked. They accused me of attacking the student and even tried insinuating that I was a pervert that was attracted to the teenaged girls in my class.

I wound up spending several thousand dollars on a lawyer, got a hearing, and won my case. Throughout the process, the school hid evidence, manufactured evidence, and played every dirty trick they could. My attorney was livid. After the administrative hearing was over, he wrote a letter to the director of Florida’s DOE, telling them that he had never seen the kind of outrageous behavior from a school system before.

Be careful what you wish for. Remove constitutional protection from government jobs, and the left will be free to eliminate the conservative minority.

* Note that I mentioned this in 2016. This grooming thing has been going on since before Trump was elected. Note also that the CRT stuff has been brewing since at least 2020. I mean to say that both grooming and CRT have been in our schools for at least a decade, perhaps longer.

If it weren’t for the constitutional protections that government employees have, the only voices our children would be hearing are the ones grooming them for the left. It’s important.

By Divemedic, ago

You Need a Lesson

Parents are waking up to what is going on in their children’s schools. Teachers are teaching ethnic and gender studies courses, but schools are refusing to release any details to the point where parents are having to sue the school district to find out what is being taught.

Parents are rightfully upset. So how do school boards across the country respond? By calling parents terrorists and telling them that they “need to be taught a lesson” in professionalism. Had I been at that meeting, I would likely have been escorted out by police after I stood up and told her that elected officials need to be taught a lesson about who they are actually working for and what part of my anatomy that dictatorial harpy could place her oral labia.

By Divemedic, ago

Making Math Racist

A few days ago, I posted about Florida refusing to buy certain math textbooks because they contained CRT and SEL propaganda, and the state is trying to keep political topics out of elementary school. No groomers allowed, to put it bluntly.

Now the state has finally given some examples and reasons for why they rejected some textbooks. Take a look:

It’s subtle, but they are grooming the kids in their care, so that they grow up to be good little communists.

Grooming kids to become little communists. That is why these books were rejected. I took the Implicit Association Test, and it is garbage. It asks questions like “Are those that you are sexually attracted to mostly of a similar skin tone?” and “Do you think that certain skin tones have an advantage over others in making money?”

Garbage. This isn’t math, and it isn’t science. It’s propaganda.

By Divemedic, ago

From the Group that Believes in Science

The same group of people that keeps lecturing us on how science allows boys to be girls, masks can stop a virus, and other claims to own the science world, comes a complete lack of understanding of physics and math.

Four years ago, I wrote about the scam of creating fuel for free by using a machine to make hydrocarbons out of the carbon dioxide in the air. For many reasons, not the least of which is the First Law of Thermodynamics, this system is a scam.

Then a year ago, I told you how that same company announced that they can take carbon dioxide from the air, liquefy it, and pump it into the ground, thereby saving us all from global climate change. Again, those pesky laws of physics.

Now they are building these things. They do not, and cannot, work to reduce atmospheric CO2. Even using so called “green energy” sources.

Science. It’s a thing.

By Divemedic, ago

Pull the Other Leg

Florida has a bill winding its way through the Legislature that would prohibit schools and teachers from discussing LGTBQ matters with children in kindergarten through third grade. Students in eleven different Seminole county schools decided to “spontaneously” walk out of class in protest. With no prompting from the school district. Right.

So you are telling me that 12 year old kids care so much about teachers being able to talk to five year old children about homosexuality that they monitor the state legislature for pending laws and then organize a mass protest with no input whatsoever from teachers or staff?

While we have nearly half of our students unable to read at their grade level, there are teachers who are fighting to be allowed to discuss sexual intercourse with five through nine year old children. Maybe they should be concentrating on teaching their students what they are supposed to be teaching them, instead of trying to have sex with kids.

By Divemedic, ago

Ivy Prestige

There are eight Ivy league colleges in the United States: Harvard, Yale, Columbia, UPenn, Brown, Cornell, Dartmouth, and Princeton. All have this reputation of being the best colleges that the country has to offer. Being accepted to one of them is an indication of excellence. Is pride in that accomplishment justified?

Only a five students have been accepted by all eight of them.

What do all of these students have in common? (Other than being accepted by all eight Ivy League schools, of course.) They have a lot in common:

  • They are all black.
  • They are all immigrants. 3 are from Nigeria, 1 from Guyana, 1 from Ghana
  • All five of them went to high school within 35 miles of Manhattan.

Admittedly, they have high grades and test scores. However, lots of students have that. So then explain to me how David Hogg qualified for Harvard with his SAT scores, which were low enough to place him in the 5th percentile.

Keep in mind that Harvard accepts less than 6 percent of applicants. The other schools in the Ivy league do the same. They have been sued for discrimination in the past.

William Fitzsimmons, the 30-year dean of admissions, who oversees the screening process of about 40,000 applicants and narrows them down to 2,000 acceptance letters that are handed out each year, testified that African-Americans, Native Americans, and Hispanic high schoolers with mid-range SAT scores out of a possible 1600 combined math and verbal, are sent recruitment letters with a score as low as 1100, whereas Asian-Americans need to score at least 250 points higher – 1350 for women and 1380 for men.

Tell me that being accepted to those prestigious schools is about your ability and accomplishments, and not about meeting the woke checkboxes. The admissions departments at these schools claim that this isn’t discrimination, because they are attempting to “break the cycle of the discrimination of the past.” Fighting discrimination by discriminating against people is like fucking to preserve virginity.

Harvard isn’t the only one. Yale was also sued by the justice department under President Trump for discriminating against qualified white and Asian students.

Meanwhile, 49 percent of the students at Harvard have straight A’s.

I don’t understand how a University that admits students based on race, then gives them straight A’s can possibly be an elite school that carries any sort of prestige.

By Divemedic, ago

Even Hawaii

Even in leftist Hawaii, families are opting out of the public school system in large numbers. The left doesn’t care how many people they piss off.

This reminds me of my confusion from the weeks leading up to the 2020 election. I couldn’t understand why the Biden campaign wasn’t running the race. It never occurred to me that the race was over because they had taken a shortcut.

The left doesn’t care who they piss off, because they know that they have already won.

By Divemedic, ago