Sign seen in a front yard

“Educators that sealcoat.”

I see why they’re moonlighting. But then, maybe educators really aren’t human.

The Obama Lesson

I’m not as pumped about this as conservatives are.  The initial lesson plan was pretty creepy, but the speech seems harmless enough, though Huebert on LRC pointed out that “where you sit, 250 years ago” is very bad history. Rusty was looking for “Listen to your parents”, found it, and was satisfied.

Again, with the exception of LRC, nobody is even coming close to the core principles here. Public schools were originally set up as engines of indoctrination, initially to make Irish Catholics into good Protestants. The religious Right would still like them to indoctrinate; they just want control over the content. Mathew D. Staver, founder of Liberty Counsel and dean of Liberty University School of Law, claims that the speech is illegal, citing 20 U.S.C. § 3403. But where was he during No Child Left Behind, which is also an attempt at Federal control of curriculum? And unlike the Democrats in 1991, congressional Republicans have been pussies on this issue; all the heat has come from the grassroots.

To the extent that this leads parents to talk about the history of presidential power and of the history of government schools, this could be a good thing. But most of the parents who are aware enough to do so have already pulled their kids out of the system.

NE prep school commits suicide

…at least I wouldn’t send my kid there. They’ve gotten rid of their library books. And, apparently, their reference desk, which is being replaced by a $50K coffee shop.

Tracy and other administrators said the books took up too much space and that there was nowhere else on campus to stock them.

They’re taking up space already allotted to them. You want newer books? Weed the old ones then. I do it every year, and it hurts like hell, but if nobody has cracked the thing in a decade, it either belongs in off-campus storage or outta here entirely.

It’s doubtful if the students will miss them:

Tia Alliy, a 16-year-old junior, said she visits the library nearly every day, but only once looked for a book in the stacks. She’s not alone. School officials said when they checked library records one day last spring only 48 books had been checked out, and 30 of those were children’s books.

These are the people who are going on to Harvard and Yale. These are the leaders of the future. Be very afraid.

Baptist kid suspended from school for going to prom

(AP) — NEW YORKss – An Ohio teenager suspended by his Christian school for attending another high school’s prom says he was caught off guard by his principal’s decision to discipline him.

Tyler Frost says in an interview with the CBS “Early Show” on Tuesday that officials at Heritage Christian School in Findlay took drastic, unnecessary measures.

The fundamentalist Baptist school Ohio forbids dancing, rock music and hand-holding. School officials had warned Frost he would be suspended and prohibited from attending graduation if he went to the dance.

Frost says he doesn’t feel any less Christian for attending the weekend dance.

And of course, he isn’t. But since when is being Christian a matter of “feeling”?
He signed on to certain rules when he chose that school. He was clearly told what the consequences would be for violating them, and he did it anyway. He’s doubtless familiar with the story of the first time that deal went down, and how “My girlfriend really wanted me to” wasn’t going to cut it as an excuse. Now, I’d agree with Frost that it’s a silly rule. But then, I was raised a beer-guzzling Lutheran, and seem to be a Scotch-sippin’ Anglican; I’m definitely NOT a Baptist. Frost probably really isn’t either, and once he leaves Mom ‘n Dad’s, he can figure that out for himself. Until then, suck it up, dude, and quit trying to take your case to the world’s court of public opinion, because that’s not where you settle a dispute between believers, and all you will do is make yourself and your religion look bad.

So does anyone give a shit?

Rusty volunteered to take our granddaughter Sara from Mom’s to Dad’s, via McDonalds, and asked me if I wanted to come along. I hadn’t seen her without her braces; hadn’t seen much of her at all, really, since she became 13 and too cool. So we got fed (No more Asian salad!! So I do the fish deal, on a feast day…does that count against the meat I eat on Friday?)  and I was trying to make small talk:
“Doing anything musical?”
“Just chorus.”
“Singing anything interesting?”
“No.” [pause]. “We ‘re singing [List of 2nd rate pop tunes].”
“Wow, you’re right, you aren’t singing anything interesting. Are you reading Harlequin romances in English Lit?”
It takes her a minute to understand what I’m asking. “No”
“Then why do they teach that material in chorus?”
“History is worse. Mr. X never teaches anything; he just has us copy timelines and notes. And he has the answers on the board during the tests.”

And thus goes education in the hometown of President McKinley. I can excuse incompetence; I can’t excuse not caring. This is the sort of thing that gives educators a bad name. There are effective and ineffective ways of teaching, so pedagogy courses aren’t a complete waste of time. But when nobody seems interested in applying what they’ve learned, one is tempted to conclude that it’s just another organized-labor trick to restrict access to the trade.

Afterwards, we check out Severstal (the Mill Formerly Known as WCI, where Rusty used to work). Not a sign of life in the place, except for a few cars around the blast furnace. Hank Rearden probably isn’t in there.

Earlier, after church, I’d stopped at City View, the foreclosed mall. Out at the end were several uncompleted buildings, and then a blocked off road to nowhere, going up a hill. One of the abandoned stores was becoming a dollar store. That’s better than at Randall Park, where there’s a flea market, and “Church ‘n the mall” in the old Lerner’s.

There are bits of hope though, always. A solid 4 story brick building in Warren, which Rusty had had fantasies of renovating, has been bought and is being renovated. Steelyard Commons in downtown Cleveland seems to be doing fine. I was there after church at the Wal-mart, to buy a new coffeepot and some vise-grips (to be stamped with my initials so my wife won’t disappear them). They’re downhill from the barrio, so they stock certain sorts of prepackaged meat for the Hispanic trade (tripe etc.) . I bought 4 lbs of beef heart at $.86/lb, which will make a dandy stew tomorrow.

“What made Oświęcim famous has made a loser out of me.”

British kids think crematoria have something to do with “cold ones”:

A survey of around 1,000 secondary school pupils aged 11 to 16 found 10% of youngsters were unsure what Auschwitz was. Almost 10% of those polled thought the camp was a country bordering Germany and 2% thought it was a brand of beer. A further 2% wrongly identified Auschwitz as a religious festival, while a worrying 1% thought it was a type of bread. The poll found that six out of 10 youngsters did not know what the Final Solution was, with a fifth believing it was the name given to the peace talks which ended World War II. Despite the Holocaust being specified on the National Curriculum, only 37% of those polled knew that more than six million Jews were killed during Hitler’s dictatorship.

Well, so much for government schools. It also should be noted that the folks in Britain (at least the ones who aren’t Moslems) are the same stock who became our redneck hillbillies… only the hillbillies had the gumption and initiative to leave their country. Now, what I want to know is: what do German kids know about the Holocaust?

And in related matters, Papa Ratzi has written a letter about the lifting of the SSPX excommunications and the Williamson issue, and noted that the Vatican really needs to pay more attention to the Internet.

Word police and Oxford children’s dictionaries

Via Breda, news that Oxford University Press has changed their children’s dictionaries in some alarming ways.

I’m actually of two minds of this. If a word is part of most people’s experience, you don’t have to explain it. What child doesn’t know what a blog is, or voicemail? But if Britain is truly multi-culti and post-Christian, then the church words become even more important, because they aren’t part of everyday experience for many youth, and they are such a part of the literary heritage. Is “fortnight” in there? (Made famous by Robinson Crusoe…and as a child I never understood what a “Popish prayer book” was…maybe “pop-ish”, like a missalette.)

As for the “country words”, plants and animals are hard to define. You can figure out by context that a buttercup is a flower, but if you’ve never seen one, it’s hard to get the picture. It’s a lack of nature literacy we’re discussing here, not one of words. Likewise, with all due respect to Breda’s sacred food, you know bacon, or you don’t. Is “fetayer” in there, or “kibbeh”? Just checking.

In short, this is more a symptom than a cause of Britain going downhill.

Selling firewood

The text for our sermon rant today will be Farm and Dairy, November 20, p. C5 (this bit seems not to be online): “Ohio firewood laws…Non-packaged firewood must be sold by the cord or by fractions of a cord…if sold in bulk, firewood must be purchased by the weight in tons measurements. This must be weighed on a certified scale. It is illegal to sell firewood by any other unit of measurement such as a rick, rack, face cord or truckload. If a consumer believes that a seller did not comply with these rules and regulations, the person should immediately contact the seller. If non-packaged firewood is purchased, the seller must present the consumer with a delivery ticket or sales invoice that includes contact information and the terms and conditions of the sale.”

Suck me blue! My neighborhood is so full of criminals, I might as well live in Cleveland. Look at all the shootings over firewood deals gone bad!

Now, I realize those big city slickster politicians think that we carbon-emitting, bitter gun-and-religion-clinging hillbillies are in deathly danger of being screwed over by our equally BGARCH neighbors, (I believe the technical term for this is “projection”) and that we need protecting because we’re obviously too stupid to buy firewood without being taken to the cleaners or the woodshed or something. And that our BGARCH locally-underfunded schools full of BGARCH teachers didn’t teach us anything (possibly true for those under 40) and didn’t have the good sense to not teach anything really important on the first day of deer season.

But I do believe that most of us learned in elementary school about cubic measurements. And those of us who buy wood know what a cord is (It’s one of those esoteric measurements like on the famous Salina, Kansas 8th-grade graduation exam, from 1895, where if you don’t know how many pounds are in a bushel of wheat, you’ll flunk). Armed with those two facts, we can evaluate any wood deal, as I’m sure you know. But for the sake of any of our young’uns who were too strung out on meth that day to pick this up in school, let’s consider the facts.

A cord of wood is a stack 4′ by 4′ by 8′. To get cubic feet, you multiply length x width x height, and come up with 128 cubic feet. If the going rate for a cord is $150, the cost per cu.ft is$1.17.

The easiest measure to figure is a face cord. That’s a pile 8′ long and 4′high, but the depth dimension is unspecified. Usually it will be 16″, but the pieces could be cut 12″ or anywhere in between. Thus, at our $150 reference rate, it should cost no more than $50. If the pieces are all different sizes, you’ll want the cheapest price you can haggle, because it’s hard to tell just what’s in it, and because the guy was slovenly about cutting it up. This is easy enough to the seller to redefine as “1/3 cord”, “1/4 cord “or whatever, to keep the government off his back.

Ricks n’ racks are WYSIWYG. It’s ” a stack of wood”. If the stack is 6′ by 3.5′ by 10 inches, that’s 17.5 cubic feet and you should get it for $20.

Truckloads are harder, because the pieces aren’t nicely stacked and there’ll be a lot of dead space. But most people figure that if it’s mounded up nicely, that compensates, and they can figure truck bed surface (generally 4 x 8 ) times depth (what, 2.5 ft)?

No, here’s the part of this that cracks me up:”If a consumer believes that a seller did not comply with these rules and regulations, the person should immediately contact the seller.” This assumes that we actually care if the seller is complying. And weren’t we IN contact with the seller when we noticed he wasn’t compliant? I suspect this a roundabout way of saying, “If you didn’t like the deal, take it up with the seller, because if you drop a dime on him, your BGARCH neighbors will stop talking to you, but if you kick his ass, he probably had it coming.”

Speck, meet log

Last week, for example, the [NYC Conflicts of Interest] board ruled that City Council members would not violate the charter if they were to vote to extend or abolish the term limits now scheduled to remove them from office.

But when a high school librarian gives away copies of his daughter’s manga Macbeth, it’s good for a $500 fine. And he couldn’t even afford a lawyer because, well, he hadn’t yet created a JK Rowling-like commercial empire for his daughter out of his librarian’s office.

Equality

If a female teacher were to marry a man, would it be considered a “teachable moment” to cart 18 1st graders to the wedding, during school hours? Why or why not?

“How many days in school are they going to remember?” asked parent Mark Lipsett. “This is a day they’ll definitely remember.”

Isn’t school about remembering things other than “days”? It’s almost (but not quite) enough to make one long for the time when female teachers were forced to resign upon marriage…which was not that long ago.