They can’t read very well, but they hate carbon emissions

Schools constantly complain about the pressure to meet actual academic standards, but they somehow always find time to beat the children over the heads with social or political issues — and always from the point of view of the Lefter side of the political spectrum:

Third-grade teacher Debbie Robles made her acting debut before a packed auditorium of youngsters at Rancho Elementary School in Novato. She bombed.

Playing the villain in a school assembly Wednesday aimed at educating the students about global warming, Robles – dressed in a witch’s black attire and prancing around the auditorium as “Queen Carbon” – drew the biggest response from more than 500 students who attended two “Curb Your Carbon” assemblies.

“My own daughter Hannah asked me, ‘Do you have to be my mother today?'” Robles said.

Teachers, parents and volunteers helped organize the assemblies and participated in the skits to help raise awareness about global warming and what people can do about it – exchanging traditional light bulbs for compact fluorescent bulbs, for example.

School officials distributed more than 500 CFLs last week.

On Friday, Rancho students will be given bilingual “Cancel-a-Car” coupon books filled with ways they can fight global warming.

Once the coupons are returned to school, teachers will track what conservation efforts are made and the date. Teachers will help monitor the progress. As the carbon reduction increases, images of cars will be crossed out on a giant poster kept at school.

Another Novato school, Lu Sutton, joined the program last month, bringing to eight the number of Marin schools that have introduced the program that began earlier this year at Bacich Elementary and Kent Middle schools in Kentfield.

The program is being financed by a $200,00 donation from the Earth Day Every Day Fund of the Marin Community Foundation. Three nonprofits, the Marin Conservation Corps, Strategic Energy Innovations and Cool the Earth are implementing the program and hope to introduce it to 25 Marin schools by the end of the year.

Even if I accepted the urgency of this whole Climate Change shtick, which you know I don’t, I would still find irksome the time wasting in which the schools routinely engage, pursuing any agenda other than the Three Rs. How about if they put a temporary stop to all the preaching and go back to the good old-fashioned teaching, with an emphasis on reading, writing and arithmetic.

Of course, after spending hours perusing the appalling document that our local school board prepared — with the help of teachers — to establish teaching goals for the next few years, I’m slowly coming to the conclusion that schools spend a lot of time not teaching because of the teacher’s and administrator’s own educational deficits, deficits that don’t appear so much in math, but that reveal themselves in reading and writing. At our local schools, the faculty are very well-intentioned and committed to their jobs, and they manage to churn out high test scores by sticking closely to the prepared curriculum but, with some sterling exceptions (and my kids are lucky enough to have those exceptions this year), they are an ill-informed crew.

UPDATE:  Thanks to Ophi for helping me find what was manifestly a late night typo.  Making typos, however, is distinguishable from obscure or semi-illiterate writing, filled with cant, jargon and buzzwords, and impossible sentence construction, all aimed at concealing meaning (or the lack of meaning).