BMEWS
 
Sarah Palin's presence in the lower 48 means the Arctic ice cap can finally return.

calendar   Tuesday - October 08, 2013

they ain’t got the balls

“Without helmets and pads, children are much more susceptible to getting hurt”

School Bans All Balls At Recess

Cartwheels and Tag Also Forbidden



Officials at Weber Middle School in Port Washington are worried that students are getting hurt during recess. Thus, they have instituted a ban on footballs, baseballs, lacrosse balls, or anything that might hurt someone on school grounds.

Tossing a football during recess has long seemed to be a rite of passage for kids in the school community.

“I think we need the soccer balls, the footballs and everything, so we can have some fun,” one student said.

But the students will have no such option anymore. They were just informed that during recess, football is out and Nerf ball is in. Hard soccer balls have been banned, along with baseballs and lacrosse balls, rough games of tag, or cartwheels unless supervised by a coach.

Students were not thrilled about the news.

Port Washington schools Supt. Kathleen Maloney said the change in policy is warranted due to a rash of playground injuries.

“Some of these injuries can unintentionally become very serious, so we want to make sure our children have fun, but are also protected,” Maloney said.

Without helmets and pads, children are much more susceptible to getting hurt, experts said.

...

Several districts from outside Long Island are already contacting Nassau County educators. Soon, additional schools may be jumping on the banning balls bandwagon.

The Port Washington district said the softer foam balls put students in the best situation to cut down the chance of getting injured.

I think they should just wrap your child in thick, organically grown, pesticide and peanut free cotton batting, and set them in rows in a nice quiet dim room with indirect lighting. That will make the indoctrination sessions easier too. It’s for their own good after all.

And Remember, pointing a finger, saying “pow pow!” or eating a sandwich into any vaguely L-shaped form is a Zero Tolerance Weapons Offense and will get your child suspended/expelled/psychoanalyzed and their meds increased.

Now children, everyone stand up and sing the Praise Obama song after we Pledge Allegiance To The State. And tell teacher where daddy touches you and where he keeps his guns.


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Posted by Drew458   United States  on 10/08/2013 at 11:13 AM   
Filed Under: • EducationNanny State •  
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calendar   Saturday - September 28, 2013

Glad I made step-son pack his lunches

Back when I married my wife her youngest son was a sophomore in high school. I made him pack his lunch. We’d both pack our lunches the night before. The school principal kept sending letters begging me to enroll him in the school lunch program. I wouldn’t do it. Now I know why—the school got more money for each kid enrolled.

So it is with great glee I present Yuck!

Yuck: A 4th Grader’s Short Documentary About School Lunch from Maxwell Project on Vimeo.

My fondest school lunch memories are back in the late 60s: We lived across the alley from the school, so me and the sisters would just sashay home and Mom would usually have soup and grilled cheese sandwiches for us. Boring? Nope. The soup was always different, and nobody gets tired of a good grilled cheese sandwich.


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Posted by Christopher   United States  on 09/28/2013 at 08:11 PM   
Filed Under: • EditorialsEducation •  
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calendar   Friday - September 27, 2013

In case you were wondering…

I’ve been busy running down the proper ‘authorities’ at the VA to do the paperwork for my chosen school. I nixed the IT idea. Too many of those guys are out of work. I’m enrolled in a nine-month course called Precision Machining. I’m learning how to operate metal lathes, vertical and horizontal mills, CAD-CAM (CNC) and how to harden my products.

End of my first week in school. Today (Thursday, 9/26) the teacher (Jack) took us out on the floor, lectured and demonstrated lathes and vertical mills to us, then turned us loose to familiarize ourselves with how to operate five different lathes that range from 1939 to state-of-the-art. Most of this week has been book-learning and (at least in my case) reminding us how to use a micrometer. He let us loose on the vertical mills too, but they are nothing more than glorified routers. Easy.

I seem to be a bit ahead of most of these youngsters—there’s only one guy who might be older than me, the rest are far too young… He’s also the only other guy who took machine shop in high school, which he says he doesn’t remember. High school he doesn’t remember, much less shop! Funny how we both gravitated to the oldest lathes… you know, the ones that were entirely manually-operated. No hydraulics, no partial computer read-outs. Just like all the stuff I worked with in the Navy.

Anyway, seems my woodworking hobby is going to help me. Setting up a Shopsmith is very similar to setting these machines up. The difference? I don’t have to deal with tolerances of +- .005IN in wood. That’s five thousandths of an inch… about the thickness of a hair.

Monday we will actually start working on the lathes. First project? We must grind our own lathe cutting tools before we can do anything else!

The machinist jobs are looking up here in my area. All those machinists who flooded the market when GM and Delphi went under are retiring. Jobs really look good if I’m willing to relocate south.


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Posted by Christopher   United States  on 09/27/2013 at 01:19 AM   
Filed Under: • EducationPersonal •  
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calendar   Tuesday - September 17, 2013

Shot Down In Flames

You Make ONE Little Mistake ...

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image via Insty A new high school level textbook designed to prepare students for the Advanced Placement exam, may be chock full of revisionist leftist slant. I don’t know; I haven’t read the thing. But it does contain at least this one major error, restating the Second Amendment in the classic, classically WRONG, far Left manner. Even though that view was never supported by most citizens, and was shot down by SCOTUS a couple years back. I think people are getting damned fed up with the indoctrination, and they’re pushing back. Finally.

At Amazon the tome is getting savaged, garnering hundreds and hundreds of negative reactions. Good. I wonder how many it will take before they pull this POS off their digital shelves?

This text is designed for a one-semester or one-year United States history course for students preparing to take the AP U.S. History Exam. Teachers can assign the book as the course textbook or as a supplement to a college-level textbook. U.S. History: Preparing for the Advanced Placement Examination presents the history of the United States from pre-Columbian times to the Obama administration. It follows the curriculum put out by the College Board for this course of study. Thirty chapters, each covering a different time period. Each chapter begins with an historical quote. Then each chapter narration is divided into sections and subsections by three levels of heads. Each chapter then has an “Historical Perspectives” (historiography) essay on some topic related to the chapter. This is followed by a list of key names, events, and terms from the chapter. Each chapter ends with a set of multiple-choice questions, a set of essay questions, and a set of questions related to a group of documents. In some chapters, this last set of questions is called a Document-Based Question (DBQ). Five of the text’s chapters have a special feature on how to write DBQs. The instruction is sequential, from one feature to the next. Students can gain additional experience by completing the Practice Exam at the back of the book.

Yadda, yadda, yah ... want to bet the entire thing is nothing but Black Armband History? Oooh, dem eviil Dead White Men done come over and mess up everything! ‘Merika all wrong, all bad, da big lie, and worse!

Burn it.

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Oh Hella Yeah



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Posted by Drew458   United States  on 09/17/2013 at 09:45 AM   
Filed Under: • Big BrotherEducationGuns and Gun Control •  
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calendar   Sunday - September 15, 2013

Planning in advance for future population engineering

Reader comments in the Mail say it all for me.
I thought it might have been an early April 1st joke. But no.  Someone was very serious about this.
Just shows ya what our world has come to. And hey btw ... you can not know for certain that one day, at the rate this island takes in immigrants, that Wales won’t have maybe half those languages spoken in this place, and the white population will no longer be 96%.  What a gloomy thought that is.

Wales you should be aware, is a place of awesome beauty.  And at the moment at least, there are places like this that are sooooooo white, makes one want to be there.  But not in winter.  It’s always nice in photos, and I’ve been there but only briefly so of course the magic remains.  I understand however that it isn’t highly prosperous, lots of hill farming, sheep, but I didn’t see any.  I recall acres of wild flowers and very hilly.


School form offers choice of 80 languages including Igbo and Tagalog in an area that is 96 per cent white

Conwy council has been accused of trying to ‘micro-manage’ its residents

One parent describes the form as ‘a baffling lesson in geography’

But the council says it trimmed the list from one containing 300 languages

By Liz Hull

When it comes to finding out the first language of children being raised in North Wales, most would assume that English and Welsh were the two obvious choices.

So parents were stunned when pupils were sent home from school with a form asking them to tick the dialect that applied to them from a list of more than 80.

Remarkably, the local authority in Conwy, where 96 per cent of the population is white, says it trimmed the list from one supplied by the Welsh Government, which contained around 300 different languages and races.

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Medieval: Conwy Castle, built by Edward I in the 13th century, sits imposingly on the Conwy Estuary.

The baffling list still included obscure languages spoken by races in far-flung corners of the world, including Igbo, a dialect spoken by people native to south-eastern Nigeria, and Tagalog, which is spoken by just a quarter of Filipinos.

Other languages listed on the form were Kannada, the mother tongue of people living in the Indian state of Kannartaka, and Wolof, the dialect of the Wolof people living in Senegal, Gambia and Mauritius.

It was accompanied by an equally confusing form asking parents to detail their child’s ethnicity, which included seven categories for travellers and gypsies alone, plus around 85 other nationalities and races.

The ‘data collection’ documents were issued by schools in Conwy County Borough Council this week as children returned after the summer holidays.

The area has a predominantly white British population, with less than four per cent coming from an Asian, black or other ethnic background.

The council says the information is needed to help schools ‘provide a better education service’.

But one parent said yesterday: ‘This form was a baffling lesson in geography.

‘It’s another example of councils trying to micro-manage and know everything about the people who live in their communities.

‘While everyone understands the importance of giving every child a good education, this seems completely over the top.

‘This part of North Wales is predominantly white British, but some council bureaucrat, in their bid to be politically correct and not offend anyone of a particular race or ethnicity, has spent time putting this endless list of obscure languages together.

source for more


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Posted by peiper   United Kingdom  on 09/15/2013 at 05:00 AM   
Filed Under: • EducationIllegal-Aliens and Immigration •  
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calendar   Tuesday - September 10, 2013

a few italians reject multi-culture and diversity crap to protect their kids and culture

Caught this one by accident cos the wife saw it and told me. Take a look.

Apparently this multi culture and diversity crap doesn’t play too well with some Italians.

Can’t say as I blame the parents.


Italians removing children from racially mixed schools


Classroom aversion to immigrants may reflect tensions in politics and society in general

MICHAEL DAY

Italy’s racial tensions are now manifesting themselves in the country’s schools, with evidence that Italian parents are removing their children from classrooms that they consider contain too many immigrants.

In perhaps the most clear cut case so far, in the village of Corti, near the northern city of Bergamo, all seven Italian children have been withdrawn from a first-year elementary school class where they were outnumbered by non-Italian pupils. The remaining 14 children are mainly Africans (mostly Moroccans) with some Albanians and Romanians.

Marinella Ducoli Bertoni, 57, the school’s head teacher, said:  “Until July, the parents assured me that they were going to send their children to the school. Then one by one the families changed their minds. I’ve returned to school and I found that they’re all gone.”

It started with “little things, such as the fear of not being able to celebrate Christmas. It was a feeling of uncertainty that spread slowly and changed the minds even of those who’d had their other children with us for five years,” she told La Repubblica newspaper.

“I don’t think you can talk of racism,” she said. “In all these years there’s never been a problem with the holidays of different religions. The Arab families never complained if we spoke about Christmas; they understood that at school it’s a cultural thing, not a religious one.”

The area around Bergamo is a stronghold of Lega Nord, the populist, anti-immigrant party that has led the racist abuse hurled at Italy’s first black minister, Cecile Kyenge.

But schools in other parts of the country, from Milan to Palermo, have experienced similar incidents. In Rome in 2009, a mother withdrew her sons from the Carlo Pisacane elementary school because she said there were too many foreign children.

And in July this year in Reggio Emilia, a group of Italian parents wrote to the mayor complaining that over two thirds of the pupils there were non-Italian.

The previous Berlusconi government introduced guidelines in January 2010 that said the proportion of foreign students per school should not exceed 30 per cent, a level that appears to have been exceeded in some cases.

Ms Kyenge, the minister for integration, this morning called for children to remain integrated at school to avoid the creation of ghettos.

“It’s wrong to refuse to stay with foreign students,” she said. “It’s not easy to judge, but the school cannot give up its role as place for integration.

The Congolese-born minister of has enraged racists by quietly but insistently pressing ahead with her equality agenda.

She wants legislation that will automatically grant citizenship to the children of legal immigrants who are born in Italy – as already occurs in many other western countries.

But the plans have angered extremists in Lega Nord, and activists in neo-fascist parties.

Ms Kyenge, obviously a foreign and possibly african name, wants legislation that will automatically grant citizenship to the children of legal immigrants who are born in Italy – as already occurs in many other western countries.  Yeah. And we know how that ends.  What with their birth rate and all.  Italy is a small country. They need another Duce to eject these folks.

source


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Posted by peiper   United Kingdom  on 09/10/2013 at 05:03 AM   
Filed Under: • EducationRacism and race relations •  
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calendar   Friday - August 23, 2013

Obama: Let’s Turn All Our Colleges Into NPUs

Obama’s Push For College Reform:

PUNISH the colleges who “discriminate” by admitting students from lower middle class families or better

1) And you thought our education system was dumbed down already? Cracka, you ain’t seen nuthin’ yet!
2) Am I the only person in America sick to death of this arrogant asswipe and his never ending theme of PUNISHMENT for those who don’t do as he says?

President Barack Obama’s college reform plan, released by the White House on Thursday, would encourage colleges to discriminate against applicants who come from families with total incomes of $60,000 or more by awarding colleges higher federal ratings and increased federal aid for admitting a higher “percentage” of students who receive federal Pell Grants, which the Department of Education says are for “low-income” students.

A college that based its admissions policies solely on the merit of the individual applicant--and did not consider the applicant’s family income or eligibility for a Pell Grant in deciding whether to offer the applicant a place at the school--could be penalized under the Obama plan with less federal aid for itself and for its students if its merit-only admissions policy resulted in a student body with a lower percentage of Pell Grant recipients than other schools.

The Obama plan also would reward colleges for having higher overall graduation “rates” and for graduating a higher “number” of students on Pell Grants--which could provide colleges with an incentive to lower the academic standards for earning a diploma.

White people, if you have kids in decent colleges, your kids have already seen how their university is wall to wall Black kids in the summer, taking remedial classes left and right. And they’ve also seen how the Freshman class is amazingly diverse. Until around Halloween, or whenever drop-add day is. By finals week of the Fall semester, things are looking fairly pinkish-yellow, and nearly all the diversity is gone come Spring semester. This happens at every good university every year. It hits every Freshman class, most Sophomore classes, and sometimes even in the Fall semester of Junior year for those colorful folks who transfer in from community college. Here in the Fall, gone before Spring. Even with extensive free tutoring services. And by Senior year, their class is half the size it was, and it’s almost nothing but White kids, Asian kids, and some Indian kids. Because all the PUSH programs on earth can’t make a silk purse from a sow’s ear, and while they can get tons of minorities into college, almost none of them manage to get through to the end. Heck, even from historically Black colleges their dropout rate is >50%.

So Obango is gonna change that. By lowering standards right into the mud. Deeper. Watch, and in a few years you’ll see nearly illiterate students with college degrees. And none of them will be able to read cursive, much less know a thing that even a Liberal Arts degree teaches (ie, don’t touch the fries the moment they come out of the fryer, you’ll get burned). So let’s take it down half a dozen notches. Because Racism. And Class Warfare.

It’s not like Pell Grant students come from even moderate income middle class homes these days. No, most of them are at or below the bottom of the middle class barrel. Well below.

If a family of three included a father and a mother, who both worked 40 hours a week for the minimum federal wage of $7.25 an hour, and an 18 year old son going off to college who did not work a single hour the entire year, the total annual income of that family would be $30,160. That would them slightly above the income level of three-quarters of Federal Pell Grant recipients.

And while there might be a whole horde of diamonds in that rough, if you can even read between the lines a tiny bit, you know what he’s pushing for. Kick out the rich, kick out the smart, and fill up the schools with dummies from da hood. Turn colleges into NPUs. Negro Processing Units. Let’s make a college degree even worth less than it is now.

Speaking at the University of Buffalo, President Barack Obama today unveiled an ambitious new plan for the federal government to create a national rating system that will define what a good college is and financially reward or punish colleges depending on how they rank in the government’s system.
...
Thus, Obama’s proposed system of rating colleges, because it would give a college a higher rating for “enrolling and graduating students who are on Pell Grants,” would give a college an incentive for admitting, maintaining and graduating students whose families keep their income low, but not for admitting, maintaining, and graduating students whose families do not maintain a federally certified “low-income” status.

“Our ratings have to be carefully designed to increase not decrease the opportunities for higher education for students who face economic or other disadvantages,” said Obama.

Obama made these remarks today at a high school in Syracuse NY, after visiting SUNY Buffalo yesterday, the 2nd or 3rd most academically demanding school in the State University of New York system. Then it was down to talk at my alma mater, SUNY Binghamton. A state school more academically selective than most of the Ivy Leagues, but costs the same as community college, which makes it right up at the very top for value. But it’s still a brutally hard school (if you take a challenging major) and what I said earlier about evaporating diversity is true there. Saw it myself, year after year.


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Posted by Drew458   United States  on 08/23/2013 at 03:28 PM   
Filed Under: • Education •  
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calendar   Wednesday - August 21, 2013

SCHOOLS, UNIONS, YOUR KIDS AND THE FUTURE

For American readers who wouldn’t be familiar with it or him, UNITE is a union and is led by a fellow referred to as, “Red Len” and for good reason.
How about having a bust of Lenin on your desk?  Think that might be a clue? Ok, so now ya know if you didn’t before and are new.

Now I can understand any organization that wants to enroll more members.  Natural thing to do.
But til today I had not heard of a drive by a union to bring certain kinds of literature (call it what it is, propaganda) into the schools. 
I am not referring to pamphlets or info explaining why unions exist.  No, no.  This is taking things to a new and different level.
Take a look and see for yourself, see what you think.  For myself I must tell you, anything to do with unions is close and personal.  I had an experience once I won’t ever forget, and while even before that I didn’t care much for them, after the event, my hate grew beyond all way to express it.  Well on second thought I suppose I could have expressed it, but I’d be writing this from prison had I really expressed my true self at that time and place.  Was always sorry I didn’t do something but I was young and with not much experience.  A really frustrating thing is knowing other people know what you are saying and do not doubt you, but themselves are powerless for many reasons that have nothing to do with you, to do anything about it. 

So anyway .... I despise the bastards.  And that’s putting it pretty mildly.

Organize and learn how to protest.  Become ‘activists.’ And oh yes, make sure that business people are seen as evil exploiters of the masses.

The video Unite didn’t want you to see: Union produces film to ‘brainwash’ children with lessons in ‘strategies for public protest’

Pupils would learn how to make placards and fight plans for privatisation

Videos encourage children to defy school rules and question teachers

Unite has joined forces with teaching unions to get material into schools

Children are asked how to push the protest further in free online videos

Unite and production company do not want video published on this website

By TIM SHIPMAN and ANDREW LEVY

The Unite union has launched a campaign to teach children how to carry out militant protests.

Pupils could be given lessons through watching videos on how to make placards, oppose local businesses and fight plans for privatisation.

Videos have even been produced which encourage children to defy school rules.

But, despite the videos being freely available online, the production company that helped create them does not want their name published and Unite have refused to grant permission for it to be shown on the Mail Online.

(Which the Mail Online has done anyway and you may see the video at the link below)

The Mail Online has contacted both Unite and the production company to comment on why they do not want the video published here and are awaiting their response.

Unite – run by left-wing firebrand Len McCluskey – has joined forces with the main teaching unions the NUT, NAS/UWT and the Association of Teachers and Lecturers to get the material into schools.

Five videos teach ‘strategies for public protest’ and ‘how organised protest is an effective way of ensuring change takes place’.

The videos show a group of cartoon teenagers protesting against a fictitious company’s plans to ‘take over’ the town of Tethergo – an anagram for ‘together’ – and its ‘big plans to privatise the entire area’.

The children are shown campaigning to save a closure-threatened community centre from laughing businessmen. 

When they fail, lesson plans prepared by Unite urge teachers to think about how they might make protests more threatening.

Children are asked to think of ‘five things you could do to push the protest further.’

They are then urged to make their own placards and ‘consider emotive language used to write letters of complaint’.

Unite also recommends that ‘teachers may wish to create a display of finished protest placards’.

Incredibly, the union also wants children to undermine the authority of their head teachers.

Staff following Unite’s guidance should ask pupils to ‘Think of anything that is unfair in your school. Does anyone make the rules to suit themselves?’

One of the videos asks teachers to read out a quotation from Martin Niemoller – a German pastor who risked his life opposing Hitler.

Niemoller is famous for his poem which starts: ‘First they came for the Communists and I did not speak out because I was not a Communist’ and includes the line, ‘Then they came for the trade unionists.’

Last night head teachers and Tory MPs described Unite’s plans as ‘reprehensible.’

Nigel Adams MP said: ‘This propaganda is almost North Korean. It might be acceptable in the schools of Pyongyang, but not in Britain.

‘These cack-handed attempts to pedal trade union ideology in schools would be funny if it wasn’t so dangerous.’

Mike Griffiths, head of Northampton School for Boys, said: ‘If anyone even remotely suggested it where I work they would get short shrift. The notion of encouraging children to undermine teachers is reprehensible.’

Peter Kent, head of Lawrence Sheriff School, a boys grammar school in Rugby, said he would only consider allowing the subject in lessons if it was balanced.

‘If it was part of a lesson about history and the teacher wanted to explore how people used public protest I can see a legitimate angle,’ he said.

‘But they would have to make sure it covered both sides of the argument with respect for authority figures.’

Christian May, spokesman for the Institute of Directors, denounced the negative depiction of businessmen.

SEE EVERYTHING THERE IS TO SEE HERE


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Posted by peiper   United Kingdom  on 08/21/2013 at 09:40 AM   
Filed Under: • EducationUKUnions-Labor •  
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calendar   Monday - August 05, 2013

just how important iz speling in the 21st centory? gramer to.

There are a large number of bees, hard to tell what variety as they are near the top of house, and getting under one of the tiles next to my bedroom window.

That is not the subject of this missive and I only share it in passing.  Just another annoyance to tend to.

I am prompted at the moment to post this brief excerpt because Wardmom made a comment which reminded me of something I read yesterday.

Rush Limbaugh points out that the Left/Liberals/Progressives/Communists/Socialists/Fascists always start with changing the language - dumb it down, ‘nudge’ the meaning a bit, cutesy it up - to make the ignorant sheeple even more ignorant.  Posted by wardmama4


Lessons in spelling ‘have no place in 21st century schools’

Schools should stop providing lessons in spelling and grammar because children can correct linguistic errors on their mobile phones, according to a leading academic.

Sugata Mitra, professor of educational technology at Newcastle University, said good spelling and grammar was necessary “maybe a hundred years ago” but “not right now”.

UNEDITED VERSION HERE, TELEGRAPH

You might be interested to learn that the professor has won a $1,000,000 US education prize to develop a generation of ‘cloud schools’.

To be fair, you might want to read the entire article and catch the prof.’s comment in response to critics.


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Posted by peiper   United Kingdom  on 08/05/2013 at 11:04 AM   
Filed Under: • Education •  
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calendar   Tuesday - July 30, 2013

I Give Up. Now Even Math Is Racist

New book for teachers: mathematics is racist, so don’t teach it and then kids will naturally want to be Socialists. I kid you not.

1 + 1 = I am a victim of an oppressive society.
2 x 2 = Gibs me ma free stuff foevah.

Link 1:
Textbook title: Rethinking Mathematics: Teaching Social Justice By The Numbers.

Link 2

Link 3

Two main themes emerge from the pages of “Rethinking Mathematics.”

The first is that the U.S. is a hopelessly racist country that routinely oppresses “people of color.”

This message is conveyed through lessons and essays about racial profiling, environmental racism, unfair mortgage lending practices of Big Banks, the “overabundance of liquor stores” in minority communities, and slave-owning U.S. presidents.

The book’s other major theme is that capitalism’s unequal distribution of wealth is the root cause of the world’s suffering.

if students are taught that the constitutional principles of private property ownership and free market capitalism are merely tools white people use to oppress “people of color,” they’ll eventually demand a socialist form of government.

Political Correctness + Socialist Mass Media = Death of America

Common Core = Commie Core

... or as they say, “you do the math”.


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Posted by Drew458   United States  on 07/30/2013 at 11:25 AM   
Filed Under: • Democrats-Liberals-Moonbat LeftistsEducationPolitically Correct B.S. •  
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calendar   Wednesday - April 24, 2013

When Diversities Clash

Them vs. Them

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A long read, but a real eye opening thought provoker. 7 page essay, with 10 pages of comments. The public school system in East Ramapo NY is failing. On the one side, poor Hispanics and Blacks, and a large (legal and illegal) immigrant population. On the other side, a poor and highly inclusive community of Hasidic Jews. Caught in the fiscal crossfire: the public school budget and the children who attend the public schools that have been stripped so much that the kids can’t sign up for enough classes to graduate High School.

It’s a helluva read, and will probably take you an hour if you hit all the comments. Right here.

And the comments are at least as good as the article; the whole county is wound up about it, but good, and in no uncertain terms. One small example from hundreds:

The strategy—to use politics to starve a place of resources so that one ethnic group will leave, abandoning it to another—is so strange that the only contemporary example that scholars offer took place in Zimbabwe, where the Mugabe regime seized the land of the last remaining white farmers. Some of the public-school parents have come to see the situation in East Ramapo through a lens similar to this.


I grew up in another part of this county. The Hasidim have always been there, in a very small gated world of their own making. But lately it seems their population is exploding. The Blacks and Hispanics and the South of the Border immigrants have always been there too, but in far lesser numbers in the past. With White Flight, now it seems that the buffer zone between them is eroding. As is the tax base. Uh oh.

Oh, and if the political might of this one little enclave seems a bit familiar, look back in history just a few years to the last days of the Clinton presidency and Hillary’s first win as a carpetbagging Senator. Hey, they were ripping off tax dollars earmarked for education then too, and boy did they cut a deal!

You might find the article a bit broken. The author starts out saying one thing, then shifts gears and turns the corner to try and say something completely different. I think a better written piece, or a follow-up, would have a much stronger perspective from the Black/Hispanic side of the issue, besides the short tales of a Haitian immigrant or two.

h/t to my brother for the link


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Posted by Drew458   United States  on 04/24/2013 at 12:31 PM   
Filed Under: • EducationRacism and race relationsReligion •  
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calendar   Saturday - April 06, 2013

Always With His Nose In Some Book

In reaction to something I read over at Gates of Vienna the other week, I went out and found a second hand copy of Joan Peters’ 1984 work From Time Immemorial which researches the roots, history, and propaganda behind the Arab-Israeli conflict. I’ve only read the first chapter so far, but it looks like the book could have been titled Don’t Buy Into The Meme. Except that nobody knew what a meme was back in 1984. But after only a dozen pages, I’m hooked, even if once all the facts are laid out, and all the histories lined up, and all the foots are properly noted, that the gist is exactly that of the somewhat fictionalized story told in Uris’ The Haj. That’s Ok. This one looks like a real scholarly work, but so far it is quite readable. Bravo. I gather that Noam Chomsky intensely hated the book, and did his best to torpedo it even before publication. The hateful little shite. I count that as a near-perfect review.

Used books online are the greatest thing. I think I got this one for $4.99 plus shipping, and it was rated in Very Good condition. It was a gift to someone from Congressman Robert Roe (D-NJ), signed and all, and is in mint shape. It doesn’t even smell like an old book. Not musty at all.



I also picked up a copy of Terry Pratchett’s latest, Dodger, his version of the tale of that Artful character from literary history. It’s set in 19th Century London, not Diskworld, although the two have an awful lot in common so far, even toshers. Good reading and fun, which you would expect for an award winning novel from an award winning author. Although why, or even how, a book has a video trailer is beyond my ken. And sadly, I don’t think there will be a Nac Mac Feegle anywhere in the story.



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Posted by Drew458   United States  on 04/06/2013 at 02:16 PM   
Filed Under: • Education •  
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calendar   Thursday - March 21, 2013

Oh Noes, Spare Der Po Widdle Feeewings!

School Honor Roll Canceled Because Some Students Didn’t Make The Grade

In Ipswich, the anti- Lake Woebegone, none of the children are above average



filed under: Leftists Gone Wild!


A Massachusetts principal has been criticized for canceling his school’s Honors Night, saying it could be ‘devastating’ to the students who worked hard, but fell short of the grades.

MyFoxBoston.com reports that David Fabrizio, principal of Ipswich Middle School, notified parents last week of his plan to eliminate the event.

“The Honors Night, which can be a great sense of pride for the recipients’ families, can also be devastating to a child who has worked extremely hard in a difficult class but who, despite growth, has not been able to maintain a high grade-point average,” Fabrizio penned in his first letter to parents, the station reported.

Fabrizio also said he decided to make the change because academic success can be influenced by the amount of support a student receives at home and not all students receive the same level of emotional and academic support at home.

Academic success influenced by the amount of support at home? Who is this talking, Obama? “You see that A student? She didn’t earn those grades herself. Oh no. Her parents, family, neighbors, and local government had a part in it too!”

Buncha crap, all of it. Oh how tewwible, the other loser kids might have their pwecious self esteem bwuised a widdle bit! Oh noes! So screw over the few who actually bothered to hit the books. Gosh, this sounds a bit like the standard philosophy of gun control, doesn’t it?

But I will give the Ipswich school system a little credit: at least they had an honors ceremony in the past. Trying to peer back through the mists of time, I’m pretty certain that my school - especially my middle school - had no such thing. No ceremony, no gold stars, no bumper stickers. Not even a mimeographed list thumb-tacked to the bulletin board. Your grades were your business, and your parent’s. Possibly the computer printed report cards came with a little H in column 17 or something. We didn’t “graduate” from middle school or even elementary school either. You graduated from high school, and that was it.

I recall that my high school had a National Honor Society chapter, and that I purposely did not join it because at 16-17 I was trying desperately to fit in, and NHS was pure Dork Squad, where the foreign kids and the band kids went. Social kiss of death. And our report cards there were all in letter grades, so it amazed me how they selected the Valedictorian. Heck, a whole bunch of kids had solid 4.0 I think, and we all got the “tougher” Regents diploma ... not that the high school had honors night or even a posted list of “H” students either.

PS - Ipswich must have replaced their school with some kind of Einstein Challenge network. IIRC, just opening the books once a week or so was enough to garner a C+ in my school system; doing that and turning in most of the homework assignments got you a “B”. B+ if you stayed awake in class and asked or answered a question or two a week. It’s not like getting A grades was all that hard. Matter of fact, it was damn easy. So easy that I never ever learned how to study until I was a junior in college. And my town had a nationally recognized award winning school system. Although it’s possible that came about after my time there. Beats me; all I know is I took every single Regents level class they offered other than foreign languages. We didn’t have AP classes in those days.


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Posted by Drew458   United States  on 03/21/2013 at 02:30 PM   
Filed Under: • Democrats-Liberals-Moonbat LeftistsEducation •  
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calendar   Friday - March 15, 2013

Today’s musical selection…

… is Bohemian Rhapsody in Blue. Thought we needed to hear some classical music!


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Posted by Christopher   United States  on 03/15/2013 at 06:36 PM   
Filed Under: • EducationMusic •  
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