Comments on: Found it on Facebook: A list of items and images that will be banned in American public schools

By: jj

jj — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 18:23:21 +0000

My father was, until I was about 20 (at which time he was 68) not on the spot a great deal, but when he was it occasionally made for some interesting times. He originally intended to be an engineer, and toward that end he put himself through Cooper Union. (He also put one younger brother, uncle Marty, through Columbia; and another, uncle Bobby, through Fordham – in the 1920s, when college was a minority kind of deal and not at all “necessary” for everyone.) He never did become an engineer, right before graduation one of his favorite professors looked at him and said, in essence, “what the hell are you doing? Engineers are a dime a dozen, and right now even with teaching and my work on the side you’re less than half my age and you’re making five times what I make.” He finished because he was so close to the degree, but never gave it another thought in his life. But – he was a pretty good mathematician. In line with JKB’s comment about parents occasionally correcting teachers, I remember a day when I was in the fifth grade and he showed up at school to pick me up. It was the end of the day and my teacher was doing some elementary (I assume, 5th grade), equations on the blackboard, and she wasn’t doing real well. She got herself tangled up, stood back perplexed, and Dad offered to assist. So he knocked the equation down to steps, (as far as he was concerned the whole thing was nothing more than a step), broke out the reasoning, did about five more of them, and then “which leads to…” and in about ten minutes the entire blackboard was covered with numbers. (Engineers in those days did it in their heads or on a piece of paper, remember: no calculators.) Other people wandered in, and it was probably another hour before we headed home, during which time he addressed the individual difficulties of most of the faculty in algebra, geometry, etc. There were probably seventeen teachers sitting at those dopey little desks, most of them I didn’t know at all, from the high school, and he just took ‘em through it.

He was nice about it, too. Said not a word on the subject to me, but later on that evening I did overhear one, “Jesus, they’re teaching and they don’t know anything!” remark to Mom. Didn’t say it to the kid, (me), didn’t once undermine them, but I think he was unimpressed.

By the time I was 13 I was away being a New England preppie, and that’s a small enough world that there were always people who knew people who knew somebody who knew somebody else, and they sort of knew that a certain amount of what they were addressing as history was first-hand experience in his life. They asked me to relay invitations to him to come and speak a couple of times – he did twice, I believe – but only in very general terms. Specifically he knew more about what really happened than they ever would, but he was very good at keeping things to himself. And maybe one of the reasons the prep schools are better than the public schools is because most of the teachers with whom I dealt never had a problem saying they didn’t know when they didn’t know.

A different age in other ways, too. In the student/family handbook my mother preserved so I still have, there’s a section on bringing guns to school. It was perfectly fine. You had to let them know you brought one, and you couldn’t keep it in your room. It had to be locked up in a room the school set aside for that purpose, but you had pretty free access to it, and if you wanted to go out into the woods and shoot on any weekend afternoon, no problem. (You could pretty much only shoot on weekends, because weekday afternoons you were busy being an athlete.) There was of course a rifle team, (pss’t: there still is at most of those schools, OMG, don’t tell anybody!) and a very nice range in the gym, hidden away down in the basement. Amazingly enough, I can’t recall we ever killed anybody.

I’m getting old. I can remember when even 13 year-olds could be successfully treated as adults.

By: 11B40

11B40 — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 16:53:34 +0000

Greetings:

I’ve long been a subscriber to the theory that if a child has his fingers he has his gun. However, my expertise in this area requires me to question the “Hand” illustration above.
The cognescenti in this regard recommend using the pointer and middle fingers to simulate the barrel and an elevated thumb but still bent thumb to simulate the hammer.
Admittedly, these are minute, perhaps nano, changes but in these days of more and more semi-automatic pistols, a single finger kind of short changes the weapons “slide” and thus verisimilitude suffers and some poor student who perhaps is doing nothing more than pointing out to his fellow where illicit drugs, proper contraception, or even an abortion may be obtained, might end up confusing the rulers of his academy to such a degree that a fright might be suffered.
I would hate for one of our respected but still underpaid educators to be trapped in such an ambiguous but threatening situation, with no doubt serious and long lasting professional repercussions, just because some derelict people-hating gun-lover was too busy to take the time to instruct a child on how to properly terrorize society and traumatize his fellows.
Perfection in the little things is still perfection.

By: Ymarsakar

Ymarsakar — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 15:52:59 +0000

The authority of the teachers don’t exist. That would be the authority of unions, bureaucrats, politicians, and various other hanger ons. Such rests the real money and power. Teachers merely pay for the upkeep of such using their enforced union dues. Much as the serfs and slaves of the land paid for the luxuries of their lord. Authority rests not with the workers.

By: Spartacus

Spartacus — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 06:25:31 +0000

You know, SADIE, it’s always good to pick up a new metaphor, analogy, or intellectual framework on which to hang slices of the world so as to get a better look at them from various angles. And I will never think of the teaching of history quite the same ever again.

Thank you.

(“You’re going to marry Princess Lucky whether you want to or not! She has great… history curricula!”)

By: SADIE

SADIE — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 03:42:19 +0000

Public school textbooks represent a compromise between what various powerful groups want kids to be told. The lies are rarely overt. Usually they consist either of omissions or of over-emphasizing certain topics at the expense of others. The view of history we got in elementary school was a crude hagiography, with at least one representative of each powerful group.

Pretty much like a push-up bra and face make-up.

Only this missing from the FB poster are NO LEFT or RIGHT TURN signs.

By: JKB

JKB — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 20:28:24 +0000

They forgot the letter "F". Plus, we know they've already banned the carpenter's square, the grease gun, the T-square, and other assorted tools of the "trades" and the blue collar worker. I was just reading Paul Graham's Lies We Tell Kids from 2008. These teachers and administrators are just speeding up the realization of kids that teachers are not omniscient or even rational. They undermine their authority with every panicked response, and undermine their hope to make "guns bad" one of the lies that stick Here is what Graham has to say about lies told to kids by adults to maintain authority: My parents were pretty good about admitting when they didn't know things, but I must have been told a lot of lies of this type by teachers, because I rarely heard a teacher say "I don't know" till I got to college. I remember because it was so surprising to hear someone say that in front of a class. The first hint I had that teachers weren't omniscient came in sixth grade, after my father contradicted something I'd learned in school. When I protested that the teacher had said the opposite, my father replied that the guy had no idea what he was talking about—that he was just an elementary school teacher, after all. Just a teacher? The phrase seemed almost grammatically ill-formed. Didn't teachers know everything about the subjects they taught? And if not, why were they the ones teaching us? The sad fact is, US public school teachers don't generally understand the stuff they're teaching very well. The following section on the lies told by "education" is also very interesting Public school textbooks represent a compromise between what various powerful groups want kids to be told. The lies are rarely overt. Usually they consist either of omissions or of over-emphasizing certain topics at the expense of others. The view of history we got in elementary school was a crude hagiography, with at least one representative of each powerful group.