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Cosmic's Corner of the Space Time Continuum

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Cosmic's Corner of the Space Time Continuum

Category Archives: News and Politics

Please Don’t Be a Teacher, Son

23 Sunday Jun 2013

Posted by cosmichomicide in News and Politics

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politics

“Teaching is the only major occupation of man for which we have not yet developed tools that make an average person capable of competence and performance. In teaching we rely on the “naturals,” the ones who somehow know how to teach.” ~ Peter F. Drucker

My rising high school senior wants to be a teacher.  He loves teaching, coaching, mentoring, tutoring.  He talks about great teachers he has had and how they have influenced him.  He wants to help kids not make the mistakes he has and to discover how great books are and how much fun rugby can be.  He loved teaching classes as a camp counselor.  He wants to start a rugby team at a school that doesn’t have one.  He has all the right motivations and all the right traits.  The only schools he’s applying to are those with education programs.  He understands he’ll never get rich and he doesn’t mind.  His friends all say he’ll be terrific at it.  I believe he will be.

And I hate it for him.  Many members of my family are either current or retired teachers.  I still remember the teachers who influenced my life and instilled in me a love of learning.  I’ve spent 20 years doing technical training and I know the thrill of seeing students grasp a concept.  But I look at schools and teachers and what this country has done to education and I worry.  A lot.  He’s signing on for a lifetime of being undervalued, underpaid and underappreciated.  Will he love it?  Probably.  But what a shame that one of our most important careers to our society makes a mother wish her son would pick something else.

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9/11/2001 – Rest in Peace

11 Friday Sep 2009

Posted by cosmichomicide in News and Politics

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I was on a business trip and asleep in my hotel room in Redmond WA when the phone rang and my (now) ex-husband told me to turn on CNN.  I remember seeing the second plane strike the towers, commenting that it was an amazing simulation before I realized it was real.  Everyone was glued to computer and TV screens, one of my best friends called me after she had run from a meeting at the Pentagon when it was struck.  My hotel extended my stay without my asking (I spent a lot of time there back then), USAir had already rebooked me by the time I thought to call.  Rental cars were in short supply as people joined with strangers to drive cross country to get home.  It was one of the first topics in this blog back in August 2006.
 
We were stunned.  It was a moment of truth.
 
246 died on the four planes
2,603 in New York City
125 at the Pentagon
 
411 emergency responders died in the rescue and recovery efforts.

$2.50 – You Have To Be Kidding Me!

18 Tuesday Aug 2009

Posted by cosmichomicide in News and Politics

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money, paperless, politics

So I go online to pay my “middle of the month” bills – utilities, internet, phone, etc.  I had a very pleasant surprise earlier in the month when the gas company (love my natural gas) DROPPED my EPP (Equal Payment Plan – same amount every month) by $80.  Sweet – $960 instant and unexpected savings.  Flush with enthusiasm and windfall, I hit the local government site to pay my water, sewer and power – something I’ve been doing online since the first month the City added online billing.  Love it.  Until…. a new $2.50 “convenience fee”.
 
What effing convenience?  The fact that the City conveniently doesn’t need to hire people to stand around and wait for other people to wander in and pay a bill?  That credit cards are instant payment – no “will the check clear” worries.  That people can pay over the weekend, no receipts need printing (good for the planet too), more accurate – nothing but good news in this move.  But wait – since when do I have to *pay extra* for an already cost-cutting measure?  Don’t get me wrong, I expect to be picked apart like a pile of (taxable) guts in the desert, but good grief… a deuce and a half is just petty even for a cash starved government cow.  Not gonna do it – gonna walk down the few blocks to Public Works and pay in person.  I just have to decide if I want to use a check that will take days to clear or loose change…
 
Speaking of cows… the polar caps on Mars are receding.  Melting.  Getting smaller.  Warming even.  (This is nothing new but still one of the reasons we love NASA.)
 
Wonder if that’s the cows or the cars causing that Martian Warming…

Finding John Galt Again?

28 Saturday Feb 2009

Posted by cosmichomicide in News and Politics

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Washington, D.C., February 23, 2009–Sales of Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” have almost tripled over the first seven weeks of this year compared with sales for the same period in 2008. This continues a strong trend after bookstore sales reached an all-time annual high in 2008 of about 200,000 copies sold. –  Ayn Rand Institute for Individual Rights
 
Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand – Amazon Rank #202 in Books
 
As an Amazon seller, I can tell you that a book with a 202 rank will sell within 24 hrs of being posted, but their price drops rapidly to the famous Amazon "penny book".  The cheapest copy of Atlas Shrugged on Amazon is $9 (including shipping) so it is an exception and holding its value.  Interesting that people are finding a 50 year old philosophical and political treatise thinly disguised as fiction to be relevant again.  To be honest, most of the people who buy it either won’t read it or won’t finish it – it’s not an easy read, a quick read or a mindless read.  So, for those that won’t, a few quotes:
 
If you ask me to name the proudest distinction of Americans, I would choose- because it contains all the others- the fact that they were the people who created the phrase to make money. No other language or nation had ever used these words before; men had always thought of wealth as a static quantity- to be seized, begged, inherited, shared, looted or obtained as a favor. Americans were the first to understand that wealth has to be created.
 

“If you saw Atlas, the giant who holds the world on his shoulders, if you saw that he stood, blood running down his chest, his knees buckling, his arms trembling but still trying to hold the world aloft with the last of his strength, and the greater his effort the heavier the world bore down on his shoulders—what would you tell him to do?”
" To Shrug."

Honest people are never touchy about the matter of being trusted. 

Conjugate? Isn’t That Something You Learn In Health Class?

08 Friday Sep 2006

Posted by cosmichomicide in News and Politics

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One week into school and I’ve heard from Cosmic Jr’s teacher twice.  Yesterday, after a week of the boy swearing he had no homework (over and over – I was giving him a chance to ‘fess up), she called to inform me that he had not turned in anything.  Sooooo… we pick him up from school, bring him home, chew him out and sit him down for the homework march of death.  Which nearly killed Mom.  Cosmic Jr. is wailing that it’s all boring.
 
We start with science, since the boy wanted to start with reading.  [insert evil parental cackle]  For an hour we drop balls of goo and measure their bounce height, stretch them and measure their stretchability and imprint them with paperclips.  All in all, not a bad series of experiments – until Mr. Cosmic said something about the scientific method.  And Cosmic Jr. looked clueless.  Er…?
 
Moving to math, I discover that the "essential skill" being studied is using shortcuts to figure out divisibility.  In the fifth grade?  WTH were they doing for the first four?  Even numbers is a valid topic for 10 year olds?  What are the 8 year olds doing?  Counting to 10?  The "challenge" question (not required, of course) was to find a number over 100 that is divisible by 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 9, and 10.  Gosh, let’s see.  Ends in 0 and we can mark off 2, 5, and 10.  Throw in a 4 next and we can mark off 4.  Make it 540 and we’re done.  Gosh, a whole 8 seconds or so of challenge.  What happened to trains traveling towards each other from Chicago and Pittsburgh?  *grits teeth*
 
Spelling – surely spelling will be a challenge?  I peek at the assignment.  "Choose 5 words with suffixes, use them in sentences and write the definitions."  CHOOSE?  CHOOSE?  OK, once I lower my blood pressure, I decide that we can make this worthwhile by building in some grammar skills, so we start with the suffix -ly and I’m gonna cover adjectives and adverbs.  "Cosmic Jr., what type of word is lone?"  He stares blankly.  I ask what the definition of a noun and a verb is (realize this is a kid who has read and reread all the Harry Potter’s and loves to read) – he looks blank.  I scrap spelling for the time being and ask when they are going to diagram sentences.  Apparently no one diagrams sentences anymore.  "Stream of consciousness with personal spelling encourages creativity" and "spelling lists are ineffective".  No wonder resumes are utterly incoherent – no one knows if their participles are dangling or their modifiers are misplaced and they couldn’t conjugate a verb (much less spell conjugate) if their lives depended on it.  I think it is time to revive Schoolhouse Rock, dammit.
 
Reading.  I know we’ll be fine with reading, right?  Until I see that his language arts book is the state EOG study guide.  Since when are study guides textbooks?  Why are we teaching the tests instead of the skills?  Why have two parents I know been turned down in their request to advance their advanced students a grade?  Easy, if you have to keep the slow kids with their class (wouldn’t want them left behind to actually learn the material), we have to keep the fast kids back to balance the test scores so the schools look like they are "successful". 
 
Can we bring back nuns and eraser throwing harridans who believe that when kids leave their class they should *know* the material – not only the test answers, but the why behind them?  Can we graduate kids that can read and write and spell and do long division and balance an equation?  And no, I’m not blaming teachers – every one I’ve ever talked to firmly believed in teaching the key skills (you know, like phonics) and every one was mired in the "required curriculum" to "prepare students for the EOG tests".  In other words, 5 years of elementary school are basically geared towards teaching a test so the school looks good.
 
As someone who teaches skills for a living, I can tell you that someone who passes a certification exam will lose the job to someone who actually has the ability to do the job – every single day of the week and twice on Sunday.
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