Bookworm Room

No, my post title does not mean I’ve gone off my rocker and started supporting Kevin Jennings in his role as Safe Schools Czar.  Thanks to Terresa Monroe’s hard work, I’ve known for months exactly what kind of person Kevin Jennings, the “Safe School Czar” is.  He’s a career gay man who is devoted to [...]

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When I was a very little girl, back in the hard drinking 1960s, an expression I frequently heard was that someone or something needed a bit of “the hair of the dog that bit you.”  I used to think that actually meant people would consume dog hair to cure their ills.  It was only later [...]

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The UC regents voted for a steep increase in tuition.   Some have pointed to the unedifying spectacle of whining middle class students taking to the streets to protest the tuition increase, since they prefer to have California’s working class, most of whom will not attend the school, bear the financial burden.  Although I agree in [...]

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I remain absolutely convinced that Obama, the boy genius of the left, is a product of affirmative action who is hiding his academic record because it is dismal.  If it weren’t dismal, he’d be showing it off.  Frankly, though, after thirty years of affirmative action, we expected nothing more from our academic institutions.  That’s a [...]

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Yesterday, I noted two sterling examples of physical bravery in the battlefield.  I’d like, today, to pay homage to moral bravery in the face of both verbal and physical attacks.  Despite withering fire from her school and the community, and despite threat physical confrontations, knife threats and property attacks, conservative student Kristen Campbell has stood [...]

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Horrible story of what happens when political correctness and fear of a violent minority group culminate in a school that saw the administration look the other way for fear of offending those violent minority sensibilities. This, by the way, is how that paralyzing political correctness, a sensiblity that saps courage and morality, begins.

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We used to view ourselves as a shining City on the Hill, a nation that hadn’t always done right but that, more than any other nation, had changed the world’s concept of liberty — and that in the last century had saved more people from tyranny than any other nation in the history of human [...]

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The conservative internet is appropriately riled by a video of New Jersey public school children singing a song to the Obama: Lyrics ======== Mmm, mmm, mm! Barack Hussein Obama He said that all must lend a hand [?] To make this country strong again Mmm, mmm, mm! Barack Hussein Obama He said we must be [...]

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I pretty much have no words for how much I hated UC Berkeley.  And I see from Steve Crowder’s visit there that little has changed:

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I gave the post the above title because, in England, even a woman who is a convicted sexual predator gets to keep up her relationship with the victim: A public school music teacher was today jailed for lesbian sex with a 15-year-old pupil – but was given an astonishing green light to continue the ‘affair’ [...]

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I am not at all pleased that Obama is going to descend upon an impressionable and captive audience on September 8.  While I don’t expect him to do much more than mouth “lame” platitudes about education and service (meaning, of course, service to liberal causes not, God forbid, military service), I’m offended on principle to [...]

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My children, despite having one liberal parent and one conservative one, have come down firmly and absolutely on the side of conservatism.  They loath Obama.  Thank God, too, because Obama is going to use the power of the federal government to speak directly to America’s children, bypassing their parents as gatekeepers and intermediaries.  It’s not [...]

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One of my main bases for hostility to teacher’s unions is that increasingly have nothing to do with their original goal, which was ensuring a living wage and decent working conditions for teachers.  (Not that they were always that effective at serving their original union mandate.  My father was a teacher and he did belong [...]

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When the San Francisco School Board voted to do away with the district’s JROTC program, program supporters (unsurprisingly, perhaps because of the military elements of JROTC) fought back.  And they won!

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Unlike many people, I was not shocked to learn that the LA Unified School District is paying teachers not to teach, although the $10 million price tag strikes me as just a tad unreasonable.  In the early 1970s, one of my teachers was a scary guy (not to mention a bad teacher).  Because of his [...]

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Our school system is dealing with a very fluid situation, as information about the swine flu changes from minute to minute.  My sense, currently, is that it’s real, it’s out there, it’s spreading fast (as if it was November, not April) and, in the U.S., it’s not a very serious threat as compared to any [...]

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My son came home from public school the other day complaining that one of his teachers used a history lesson as an opportunity to launch into a short speech about how Obama was going to bring peace to the world.  (Which is true, if you accept that, as Charles Krauthammar points out, Obama is going [...]

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Despite the fact that it is a voluntary organization, that the costs to the school system are minimal, and that the kids who join it do well in school and are exemplary citizens, San Francisco’s hostility to the JROTC knows no bounds, and the school system has done its best to destroy the organization.  One [...]

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I would love to see the recession cut America’s top universities, which have become intellectually polluted institutions that have nothing to do with education.  Heather MacDonald — in a larger article about how Yale, even as it tightens its belt panders more deeply to the LGBT community — sums up perfectly the expensive grievance culture [...]

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The article only interviewed Muslim parents, but it’s clear Christians were involved as well.  These were the parents in England who pulled their young children out of school rather than have the children be subject to a month long GLBT indoctrination, er, education sessions — and who are now being threatened with government sanctions. Let [...]

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We often complain here about the futility of arguing with someone who gets information and opinion only from the liberal media.  Thomas Sowell attacks the same problem from the perspective of a parent trying to get through to a child whose entire education has been spent in the liberal school system.  Rather than trying to [...]

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I’m sorry, but when a law professor writes this kind of prima facie garbage, you have to wonder about an administration that keeps him on board.  Without even delving into actual facts, let me just fisk the relevant parts of Bisharat’s article regarding Israel and war crimes to reveal logical inconsistencies and outright gibberish: Israel’s [...]

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The Times writes about a trend with which I’ve long been familiar:  student participation in parent-teacher conferences.  The article leads with a school district that has benefitted from this trend, since more people show up for the conference than have in the past.  The article also points to parents who like it that their child [...]

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As we were driving back to the ‘burbs from an outing in San Francisco today, we saw a rare sight:  an older lady nattily attired in furs.  Standing near her was a young woman, screaming into the lady’s face.  The children were mesmerized.  First, they’d never seen furs and, second, the spectacle of a public [...]

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Is this a recommendation for Obama’s education advisor? Darling-Hammond, a teacher-friendly educator, has been tapped by President-elect Barack Obama to head his transition team on education policy. I thought education was supposed to benefit the children. I’m feeling a little sour on the subject right now because I went to the elementary school science fair [...]

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