Government

I am done

This article blames the school system because a high school student had a 0.13 grade point average and failed nearly every class he took. The student in question was absent 272 times in four years. He failed his classes for four years, and the first time the kid’s mother knew anything was during the final semester of his senior year? Yeah, mother of the year right there.

I have 133 students this year. Of those, more than half of them (68) are currently failing my course. Six of those students have a perfect zero for the current marking period, due to the fact that they have not turned in a single one of the fifteen assignments that has been assigned to them. In fact, more than half of my students have received at least 6 zeros. The mean grade for my students is a 48 percent.

Absenteeism is over the top. I have students who have been absent more than not. One of my students has only been in class six times so far this year. I have over a dozen students that I have not seen nor heard from since before Christmas.

There is nothing that I as a teacher can do. I teach, but the student has to show up and actually make an effort. I am tired of caring more about my students’ success than they or their parents.

In fact, I have had enough. I am done. I am putting in my two weeks’ notice tomorrow. Since spring break is coming up, my last day as a teacher will be next Friday. This morning, I was offered a job supervising techs at a nearby hospital. I accepted.

Back to the medical business.

By Divemedic, ago

Get woke, go broke

The University of Texas has had a long tradition of playing the school alma mater, “The Eyes of Texas,” at the end of each football game. Traditionally, the football team stands in the middle of the field and sings the song with all of the fans, alumni, and boosters.

Until this year.

This year, students and athletes decided that the song, with ties to Confederate General Robert E. Lee, was racist. Many students and athletes were organizing protests and circulating a petition to have the song banned. It all culminated in the team leaving the field and refusing to sing the song.

The backlash from the boosters and alumni was overwhelming. Hundreds of alumni and donors blasted off emails to the university president, demanding that the school stand up to “cancel culture” and firmly get behind the song — or else donors were going to walk away.

The press is roasting the benefactors, calling them the “worst” and claiming that they are racists.

The school, athletes, and students are free to change the traditions of the school. The donors and benefactors of the school are just as free to withhold donations and endowments. Remember when you lectured us and told us how Facebook and Twitter could do whatever they want? It cuts both ways.

Don’t like it? You can always go ahead and start your own school. Or continue to run the existing one without much of your funding. Isn’t that what you told the right when they complained about FB and Twitter?

By Divemedic, ago

Socialism hurts everyone

Boston schools have eliminated educational courses that are designed for advanced students because not enough black students are admitted to the program. This is the basic flaw with socialism- it seeks to achieve equality of outcome instead of equality of opportunity.

The students who are seeking to enter the program took a standardized test in the third grade, earned a high score, and won an open spot via lottery. Even with that, the rate of black students that entered the program was far below that of white and Asian students.

Many studies have shown that black students do poorly on standardized tests and on intelligence tests. As a result, researchers have concluded that the tests have racial, cultural, and socio-economic bias built in. There is no evidence of this claimed bias, aside from the results. The conclusions of these researchers ignore an obvious, alternative conclusion: that some races and cultures are less intelligent or place less value upon education, which results in the disparate scores.

My guess is that this is not because blacks are inherently inferior or less intelligent than whites, but that the black culture itself places little value on intelligence or on education. There is research that even supports this. When black or mixed-race children are raised in white rather than black homes, their pre-adolescent test scores rise dramatically. These adoptees’ scores seem to fall in adolescence, but this could easily be because their social and cultural environment places them into social circles with other black teenagers.

The whole point of desegregating the schools was to place black students into classrooms with white students, with the belief that black test scores have not risen. Instead, the white/black gap has shrunk, mostly through white students losing ground as they began to adopt the “hip hop” culture.

No matter what the cause, eliminating the advanced classes in order to put the advanced students in with the underperforming students will create equal results, but that only means results will be equally poor.

There you have the essence of socialism: as long as everyone has the same outcome, it doesn’t matter how poor that outcome is. Welcome to education in a socialist environment.

By Divemedic, ago

Why do I need to know this?

This is my answer to SiGraybeard:

There are many challenges to being a teacher in a failing high school. One of those challenges is the students have parents who are largely high school dropouts and drug addicts. They didn’t become that way because they value education. Kids emulate the behavior they see at home. Countering years of a parent who is ignorant and telling the child, “You don’t need to know that. You will never need to know how to use any of that stuff they make you learn. I graduated 20 years ago, and still haven’t used any of it,” is nearly impossible.

One of the things that I do is present the students with a digital photo album. It’s a photo story of my life. My time in the military. My time as a firefighter. A paramedic. A master SCUBA diver. I show them pictures of my travels. I show them how great life can be, and how different it can be from what they know. Then I tell them that the key to living an interesting life is education. That doesn’t mean college, necessarily. It could be a trade. Then I try to tie my lessons into a skill.

Kids, did you know that a bullet begins to fall from the acceleration of gravity as soon as it leaves the barrel of a gun? If a sniper shoots a bullet perfectly horizontal, and his watch falls off at the same time, the bullet and the watch will hit the ground at the same time. Then I prove it.

If four firefighters are on the fourth floor of a building, and there is 200 feet of firehose between the truck and their position, you have to add pressure to the water to account for friction and elevation. This is how you calculate just how much pressure you need to add in order to get them enough water to put out the fire.

Efficiency is important. Chemical reactions have efficiency. Some reactions are not perfect. Let’s say we are making drugs like in “Breaking Bad.” Let’s say that we know that our reaction is 90% efficient. (Pointing to kid in front row) Is John stealing from us, or are we losing product to inefficiency? If he is stealing, we need to whack him. Let’s do the math and see if John lives or not. (students all laugh) So we start by calculating…

I use examples to make the class fun, interesting, and relevant. Math isn’t racist, but a poor teacher can make it boring. Even these tactics fail more than half the time. The kids don’t care, their parents don’t care, and so the kids don’t even come to school more than half the time.

So many people fall back on the race card. It isn’t that my kid is absent and refusing to cooperate with the lessons. That would be an indictment of my parenting. It isn’t that my kid is becoming a gang member. A drug user. My daughter isn’t going to wind up as a stripper. No, all of this is the teacher’s fault. Not mine. Not my child’s. The teacher MUST be racist. Blaming racism is the same fundamental logic as 1930s Germans blaming the Jews- “It can’t be MY fault. It must be someone else’s fault.” The people need a scapegoat for their own failures.

By Divemedic, ago

Intrusive

My sister just got a letter in the mail from the US Census Bureau, claiming that she had to take the “American Community Survey.” The letter gives her 48 hours to take the survey by mail, online, or by calling some woman for a phone interview. The claimed penalty for refusing to answer is $5,000. There is an even larger penalty for lying.

The questionnaire is 28 pages long, and asks questions like how much you make, what your rent payment is, and what time you leave the house to go to work.

The Census bureau claims that they will keep your answers confidential. Uh, the CIA couldn’t even keep the identity of their spies confidential.

Fuck that. No one has been prosecuted for refusing to answer since 1970. Look, I will answer to tell you how many people live in my house, as the Constitution requires, but that is it. If there is a penalty for lying, that must mean that you are comparing my answers to some database somewhere. That tells me two things:

  • You already have the answers.
  • You plan on using the answers to incriminate me, which is a violation of one of those Amendments you keep ignoring.

So, no. I will take my chances with you ignoring me. Or maybe I can get an attorney. I don’t know if you can rely on the courts any longer, and I am sure that the ACLU isn’t interested.

By Divemedic, ago

Home of the free no more

This is going to be commonplace for many of us over the next several years as we are forced to come to grips with the fact that this is no longer the “home of the free and the land of the brave.” We can stomp our feet and deny it, we can try to act as though we don’t accept it, but it is not going to change the reality that the great American experiment that was launched just over 230 years ago is finally producing empirical results. The conclusion: People are capable of sustaining individual liberty only for as long as they can be constrained by a system of law that suppresses and contains their true nature.

Hobbes was right.

By Divemedic, ago