When a nuisance gator is caught, they always say that it was relocated. The truth is that they are killed. The trappers are not actually employees of the state. They are contracted to serve a certain area, and their pay is that they can legally sell the meat and hide any nuisance gator they catch. If the relocate the animal, then they have just given away their fee.
Uncategorized
Teacher pay
Another popular legend is that the average teacher makes $48K a year in Florida. It amazes me that there are so many gun owners who claim that the press lies, but then take this pile of garbage as gospel. Let me show you why this is wrong:
Here is Lake county’s teacher payscale. Note that a teacher needs 18 years on the job in order to get to $48k. I doubt that the average teacher has been teaching for 18 years. The same story is in Polk county, where a teacher needs 15 years on the job to hit $48K.
I initially thought that this $48K number was caused by the counties down south making more. However, looking at the page, they claim that the average pay for Lake and Polk counties are $44,600 and $45,200, respectively. Classroom teachers don’t come close to that.
Uncategorized
Teacher workdays
One of the things that I hear all of the time about being a teacher, is how nice it must be to get summers off. Then the conversation usually drifts into how teacher pay is so great, because we get paid a full year’s pay, and how summer is basically a paid vacation. Let’s take a look at that:
Teachers are contracted to work 196 days per year. In addition, we are also required to be at school for events outside of the 196 days of the contract. Events like graduation, open house, and even to staff the different extracurricular events like sports, grad bash, prom, and school dances.
During those summer breaks, teachers are required to do things. One of them is training to comply with Federal and state law. For example, I have to attend 120 hours of training on educating students who do not speak English as a primary language. Last year, it was 60 hours on special needs students, and another 24 hours on school security. On top of that, many schools have training requirements of their own. My wife (who works at a different school) has a reading list of books that each teacher must read during the summer. For example, last year’s book was “Find a way.”
It can be difficult to add up the hours, because teachers are salary, and each school and teacher has different requirements. Here in Florida, every teacher has a contract of what they must do, and this contract lays out the minimum. My wife and I are high school teachers, so I am going to use that as an example.
To begin, each teacher is contracted to work an 8 hour day for 196 days a year. That covers the 6 classes per day that we are with students, plus the planning period. That comes to 1568 hours.
We are also required to provide course materials like power points, worksheets, and tests. You either create them or pay for them out of your own pocket. I also have to grade student papers. I have 140 students a year, so any time there is an assignment, those papers take time to grade. My school requires that I have my students complete a minimum of 3 graded assignments a week. Some classes are harder to grade papers than others. Essays and complicated physics problems take longer to grade than a multiple choice quiz, for example. A new teacher spends about 4 hours each of the 180 workdays where we have students on this. More experienced teachers can do it in about 2 hours. There goes another 360 hours or so.
In addition, we are required to attend 5 events each year. Those events include prom, sporting events, etc. On top of that, you have to attend the awards banquet for your students. There are two of them (9th & 10th grade, and another for 11th & 12th). There is also graduation, baccalaureate, and others. In all, these events add up to another 40 hours or so.
Last year, every teacher in the state had to attend a 120 hour class on sensitivity to illegal alien students. That was in addition to our regular in service training. Same goes for the 60 hour special needs training we did this year, and the Guardian training that will be required, if they ever establish that. If you want summers off, then you have to find a way to take those classes at night or on weekends during the school year. These trainings usually come to another 100 hours or so,on average.
Total it up: 1568 + 360+ 40+ 100. That is about 2068 hours. That pretty much equals the 2080 hours that you work in a 40 hour a week job.
Uncategorized
Too much
I donate to pro gun causes. The NRA, Second Amendment Foundation, and I even used to give money to Florida Carry. About two months ago, I gave a modest donation to the Firearms Policy Foundation, I can’t even remember how much and I am too lazy to go look it up. I know it was between $100 and $250.
Ever since, I have been getting an email EVERY. SINGLE. DAY. asking for more money. I am about three emails away from putting them in the SPAM filter.
This is the kind of behavior that makes me believe that progun organizations are in favor of gun control because it increases profitability.
Uncategorized
Free ride
Florida state law says that any student who moved to the US from a non-English speaking country is “sheltered” for the first two years. A sheltered student may not fail any class in a public school, solely because of their lack of proficiency in English. The county where I teach takes that one step further: teachers of any student who is sheltered MUST award that student a ‘C’ regardless of any other circumstance. Any teacher who refuses not only gets fired, but loses their state teaching license for being an anti-immigrant racist.
I have a student in one of my classes who was living in Connecticut and was not going to be able to graduate. The reason for this, is that he is lazy and misses a lot of school. To remedy this, he and his family moved to him Puerto Rico and he stayed with family for a few months. He then came to Florida, and gets a C in every class, as well as a pretty much automatic diploma. He was in my class for 70 school days, but was absent for 24 of those days. He completed exactly one assignment and failed every test and quiz. I had to add 42 percentage points to the 28 percent that he “earned” in order to get him to that C.
Uncategorized
Nothing to see here, pt 2
So there are more reasons why the Colorado school shooting has seen so little outcry from the press. Not only were the shooters trannies and Democrats, but the father of the elder shooter is an illegal immigrant who has been arrested for weapons offenses, and has previously been deported twice.
Not only that, but a parent at the school warned the school in January that the pair were planning on a school shooting. The school hired an attorney in February and were planning legal action against the parent who warned the school.
Uncategorized
Police as security
The theme parks in the Orlando area use police officers as security guards. They wear their department issued uniform, carry a department issued firearm and radio, and are paid by the department that they work for. The theme park then pays their department for the service. Depending on the situation, they are considered to be security guards or police.
If they want to search you but don’t have a warrant or probable cause, they are security guards. If they ask you a question and you lie, they are then cops and you have broken the law. If you resist them in any way, they are cops. They get to have things however it works out best for them. As this great grandmother found out, when Disney security searched her bags as a part of a security check and she was arrested for having CBD oil. The charges were later dropped, but this illustrates the problem I have with cops as security. They can search you, and you have no constitutional protections. But let them find something illegal, and they instantly can use the fruits of what would otherwise be an unconstitutional search and arrest you.
Uncategorized
Nothing to see here
Wonder why yesterday’s school shooting in Colorado was swept from the news cycle so quickly? Two hours after the story broke, the national media had already returned to talking about the 2020 election.
The two shooters were a tranny and an 18 year old gay man who is a registered Democrat. They used a handgun. The shooters didn’t match the media’s agenda of making guns owners look like racist white Republican males who are using “assault weapons” to butcher kids and minorities.
Uncategorized
FBI show
My wife loves watching shows like “FBI.” The agents on the show infuriate me, but my wife tells me that I need to stop analyzing and just watch. I disagree. People watch this stuff and it changes attitudes. Let me give an example:
They were investigating some threat or another, and walked into a grocery store where their suspect had bought a drop phone. They asked the shop owner for his sales records. He refused. Then they asked for the video from his surveillance cameras. He told them he would turn it over if they had a warrant. The agents immediately replied by claiming they had seen rats the size of badgers in his store, and would turn him into the health department if he didn’t comply.
Later in the show, they made statements that only people who are guilty or who have something to hide need a lawyer, therefore if you ask for a lawyer, you must be guilty.
I was incensed. The shop owner who was being extorted for his video certainly needed a lawyer. The FBI agents in that show were acting like the mafia or like secret police in a third world dictatorship. People who know nothing about enforcement, the law, or their rights see stuff like this and it colors their attitudes and beliefs. The CSI effect is real, the government knows it, and they manipulate it to their advantage.