Government

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

Navy Scapegoating

This morning’s military article comes to us with news that the sailor who had been accused of burning down a baby carrier has been cleared of any wrongdoing. The article actually points out two problems that have plagued the Navy for decades.

The first is that the US Navy has a long history of finding scapegoats upon whom to place blame for institutional failures. In this case, you have a ship that is poorly maintained and cluttered with junk. A sailor warns his division officer that the place is a fire hazard and is ignored. A fire is started by some unknown source. Sailors can’t put it out because they and their officers have no idea how to perform even basic damage control. Instead of blaming the command for poor training, maintenance, and housekeeping, blame the sailor who tried to warn you. The Navy saves face, and who cares about those stupid enlisted men? They are there to be destroyed for the sake of officer careers.

That is reminiscent of the Iowa explosion. In the case of the Iowa battleships, there was a flaw in the firing system. The silk making up the 50 pound bags that the gunpowder comes in were famous for leaving embers behind in the chamber of the 16 inch guns. Ramming them into the breech too quickly while those embers were still there was a recipe for explosions. They had been known to cause mishaps in those guns for decades.

However, those cannons were a huge PR point for the Navy, providing tons of photo ops and bragging rights for recruiting commercials. So when the Iowa had an explosion, instead of blaming a faulty process in a 50 year old weapons system and hurting their recruiting tool, they blamed a sailor who they alleged was a jilted gay lover.

That brings us to the second issue exposed by the above article. The Navy has had recruiting issues for decades. The smarter and nerdier recruits all want to go to the Air Force, which is seen as more technical and cerebral. A lot of the muscle-head jocks want to prove their masculinity and join the Marines. Many other kids want to be able to play with machine guns and blow shit up, so join the Army. What does the Navy have? The Navy has historically solved that problem by trying to project this image that everyone in the Navy is a fighter pilot, a SEAL, a computer technician, or an officer. You will note that no one in Navy movies except Steven Seagal is ever a cook, and even then, Seagal was a Navy SEAL cook. Assigned to a battleship. Not everyone can have those awesome jobs. In fact, most Navy jobs are tedious jobs more akin to janitorial work than to anything cool or technical. There are more people cleaning toilets and doing officers’ laundry than there are SEALS in the Navy. (There are as many Admirals as there are ships– someone has to be their orderlies.)

So the Navy convinces everyone that they can be a SEAL, or a Rescue Swimmer, or a nuclear power plant operator. The recruiters make the pitch and convince you that your job is going to be AWESOME, and will come with all sorts of promotions and large cash bonuses. What they don’t tell you, or at least gloss over, is that the washout rates are on the order of 80 percent or more for some programs. Sometimes they wash you out for nebulous reasons, like “possesses traits undesirable in this career field” because the kid got caught with a beer while under 21 years old. Starry eyed high school kids join the military to be SEALS, washout before training even starts, and find themselves cleaning toilets and chipping paint with a hammer for the next four years.

The Navy knows that those jobs suck, but they have you under contract for the next four years, so they don’t care if the sailor is happy or not. As evidenced by the statement from the Navy prosecutor:

Prosecutors said Mays was angry and vengeful about failing to become a Navy SEAL and being assigned to deck duty, prompting him to ignite cardboard boxes on July 12, 2020…Mays thought he would be jumping out of helicopters on missions with the SEALs, but instead he was chipping paint on the deck of a ship, and he hated the Navy for that, Jones said.

This is a common story. The reality of the Navy is far different from the image it portrays in the movies. The Captain of the ship doesn’t listen to some E-4 Petty Officer with grudging respect for the knowledge he possesses. The Captain is more likely to be a career ticket puncher who is desperately trying to become one of the Navy’s 265 Admirals, and will destroy that E4’s life to do so. I can’t speak for the other branches, but that is life on the big, gray boat.

By Divemedic, ago

Military and Civilians

So many on the right keep claiming that the military would never fire on American citizens if they were ordered to do so. WRSA comes up with a few examples of the military firing on American citizens. They left out an important one.

The Bonus Army.

Congress had long paid a bonus to troops who fought in times of war, to make up the difference between a soldier’s full time civilian job and his soldier’s pay. Coolidge tried to veto the bonus for the troops of World War 1, but his veto was overridden.

Under the law that was passed,  each veteran was to receive a dollar for each day of domestic service, up to a maximum of $500 (equivalent to $7,900 in 2021), and $1.25 for each day of overseas service, up to a maximum of $625 (equivalent to $9,900 in 2021). Deducted from this was $60, for the $60 they received upon discharge. Amounts of $50 or less were immediately paid. All other amounts were issued as Certificates of Service maturing in 20 years’ time, or 1945.

By 1932, many veterans had been out of work because of the depression, so about 17,000 of them camped out in two Hoovervilles that were located in Washington, DC. They went there with their families, hoping to be paid the bonus that they were owed in 1932 instead of 1945. The two groups numbered as many as 50,000 men, women, and children.

 The camps were tightly controlled and well cared for by the veterans, who laid out streets, built sanitation facilities, set up an internal police force and held daily parades. A vibrant community arose, including churches in tents, kitchens, a library, and even their own post office.

They were told that the only way that they would be paid what they were already owed was to accept work in the Civilian Conservation Corps at Fort Hunt, Virginia.

Some accepted that and went to work, others did not. The veterans thought that by sitting there and refusing to leave, the government would eventually have to relent and pay them what they were owed. Instead, they were given an ultimatum: leave by May 22, or else.

Hoover ordered police to go in and clear them out on July 28, 1932. When some of the veterans refused to leave, one policeman drew his service revolver and shot two of them, both of whom were killed. General Douglas MacArthur then rolled in that afternoon with 1,000 armed troops of the 12th Infantry and 3rd Cavalry regiments, 800 policemen, and six tanks, all supported by machine guns.

Patton, who was in charge of the 3rd Cavalry, had this to say:

“If you must fire do a good job — a few casualties become martyrs, a large number an object lesson. . . . When a mob starts to move keep it on the run. . . . Use a bayonet to encourage its retreat. If they are running, a few good wounds in the buttocks will encourage them. If they resist, they must be killed.”

The infantry charge was made with fixed bayonets and suppported by the use of Adamsite (an arsenic based vomiting agent). Hoover ordered the assault stopped once the veterans had retreated across the river, but MacArthur chose to ignore the president and ordered a new attack, claiming that the Bonus March was an attempt to overthrow the US government. A veteran’s wife miscarried. When one 12-week-old infant died of respiratory complications caused by the chemical warfare attack, a government investigation reported he died of enteritis. In the end, a total of three civilians were killed, more than 1,000 were injured (some by gas, including an 8 year old boy left blind for life) and 2 police officers received injuries.

The negative publicity of the attack on its own veterans was believed to be one of the major factors in Hoover losing the 1932 election to FDR.

Not only were MacArthur and his troops willing to fire on and use chemical warfare agents against veterans and their families, in many cases the veterans who were being fired upon had served in the same units as the soldiers who were attacking them with bayonets. In the end, none of the veterans received a single cent of what they were owed, not in 1932, not in 1945, not ever.

Don’t make the mistake of believing for one single second that the military today would hesitate to kill you, if so ordered.

By Divemedic, ago

Concentration Camps

It has long been said that wealthy, elitist Democrats don’t care about illegal immigration because they don’t have illegal immigrants in their neighborhoods. Ron Desantis has proven that old saying to be correct by shipping some illegals to Martha’s Vineyard.

FDR put inconvenient non-whites into military guarded camps. Now the left has found another group of non-white people to put into camps. Less than 36 hours after arriving in Martha’s Vineyard, which declared itself to be a sanctuary location, the immigrants that arrived there were shipped off to a concentration camp to be guarded by 125 National Guard troops activated for that express purpose.

It isn’t that liberals don’t understand hypocrisy or cognitive dissonance, as Miguel argues. They fully understand it. The leftists have simply decided that they don’t have to follow the rules that they have set for others.

In the meantime, everyone on the left who supports this needs to be called a racist who supports putting Hispanics into concentration camps.

By Divemedic, ago

Meanwhile, in Martha’s Vineyard

Residents of Martha’s Vineyard, which declared itself to be a sanctuary for illegal immigrants, are freaking out because Florida Governor shipped 50 illegals to their island. It wasn’t so long ago that residents there were posting shit like this:

Wait, they were just virtue signaling? Who knew?

Meanwhile, all of the residents of Martha’s Vineyard are like:

The best part of it was the liberal who said that: “Martha’s Vineyard is just a bunch of rich people. It’s weird that you all think you’re sticking it to the libs. Millionaires ranting about illegal immigrants aren’t liberals.”

My reply? “Don’t the Obamas own a house in Martha’s Vineyard?”

It’s easy to be a “sanctuary city” when there is no one there who needs sanctuary. When you are one of the states being overrun by illegals, it’s no longer academic. 50 illegals? There are millions of them in New Mexico, Arizona, Florida, and Texas.

Liberals:

By Divemedic, ago

Show Your Work

A few days ago, I promised that I would post more about crime and race to support my contention that blacks are largely unsuited to following the law in a civilized society.

As I said yesterday, science is about following the evidence, wherever it leads. Sometimes the place that the evidence takes us to is inconvenient or flies in the face of our beliefs. The three most reliable evidence of race and crime to my knowledge are the National Crime Victimization Survey, the U.S. Justice Department Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that are based on that survey, and somewhat less reliably, the FBI’s Universal Crime Report (UCR). The NCVS surveys a large group of people about their experiences with crime victimization, so it is not based on what is reported to the police and what the police do with it. The Uniform Crime Reports is based on data from police departments, and is thus generally a less reliable measure of actual crime.

Let’s take a look at these sources and see where that evidence leads us:

We will begin by taking a look at the data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ Race and Ethnicity of Violent Crime Offenders and Arrestees, 2018, with regard to rape/sexual assault, robbery, aggravated assault, and simple assault, crimes that are referred to as “Nonfatal Violent Crime.”

When you look at this, you would think that Whites account for more violent crime than other races, until you account for the fact that whites are 60% of the US population, and blacks are only 13% of the population. I have posted numerous times about the statistical likelihood of blacks committing murder and homicide. In fact, the evidence is overwhelming and pervasive to the point that I could not find a single reputable source making a claim otherwise.

This poses the question if people of color live in more violent communities or if the local brand of justice is inherently selective. Experts have long been debating this matter.    

  • Around 2.5% of the US black male population was in prison by the end of 2016. 
  • 2,417 per 100,000 US black male residents were incarcerated by the end of 2016. 
  • There were 467,000 sentenced black male prisoners and 20,400 black female prisoners in the US in 2016. These figures exclude blacks with Hispanic origins and those with sentences that are one year or less. 
  • In 2015, 59% of black prisoners sentenced to more than a year in prison were detained for a violent crime.  
  • 18-19-year-old black males are 11.8 times more likely to be incarcerated than white males belonging to the same age group. 
  • Black males 65 years and above are 4.4 times more likely to be incarcerated than white males belonging to the same age group. 
  • In 2016, 34% of black inmates were doing time for public order offenses. 
  • While blacks and Hispanics comprise about 32% of the US population, they accounted for 56% of the US prison population in 2015. 
  • Blacks are five times more likely to be incarcerated than whites. 
  • If blacks and Hispanics share the same incarceration rate of whites, the prison population will decrease by 40%. 
  • As of 2001, one in three black males born in the said year would likely face a prison sentence in his lifetime. 
  • As of 2016, 48.3% of prisoners serving life and virtual life sentences are black. 

Even the left acknowledges that blacks are arrested and convicted of crimes at far higher rates than are whites. They attribute this to a criminal justice system that is racially prejudicial by claiming that whites and blacks commit crimes at the same rate, but blacks are being arrested and convicted at much higher rates than are whites. I reject that for one simple reason: That isn’t what the evidence shows.

In order for this claim to be true, cities that have higher white populations and are otherwise of similar in population density would have similar crime rates to those with higher black populations. That isn’t the case. In fact, the 6 largest cities in the US with the highest murders per capita so far in 2022 are New Orleans, Baltimore, Birmingham, St. Louis, Milwaukee, and Cleveland. All cities with a high percentage of their population being black.

This is why 28% of the residents of the USA are responsible for 53% of the homicides, with the 10 largest cities in the US having 20% of the homicides. Those ten cities are: New York with 333 killings, Chicago 415, Detroit 332, Philadelphia 246, Los Angeles 578, New Orleans 150, Baltimore 234, St Louis 159, Washington DC 104, and Indianapolis 135 means that of the approximately 14,000 murders in the US in 2014, nearly 2700 of them- about 20%- occur in just those ten cities.

In short, it’s been reliable data in this nation for decades: majority black neighborhoods are crime ridden enclaves. If blacks and whites were committing crimes at the same rate, then black and white cities would have similar crime rates. That is demonstrably not the case, therefore black and white crime rates are NOT the same.

Anyone with evidence to the contrary, please provide it. I am however, going to ask that you provide more than “Nuh, uh. You are wrong you racist.” I have shown my work. You show yours.

If a person cares about this country and the people in it, you must care about ALL of the people in it, even the minority groups like blacks. If you want to improve the nation and its people, then you have to first admit where the problems are. If you are going to do something to fix the black crime problem (and there IS one) then you have to do more than simply say that blacks aren’t committing crimes at a higher rate than all other demographics and claim that it’s just whites are being racist. That isn’t going to fly.

By Divemedic, ago