A student letter to his teacher – during this “quarantined” period of our lives.
and now and then…
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Author Archives: Jeffrey
Five Reasons COVID-19 is the Best Thing to Happen to Public Education
“Free at last! Free at last! Thank God-Almighty that we’re Free at Last!” ~ Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
As the world scrambles to curtail COVID-19 with social distancing, millions of parents are facing the prospect of involuntarily homeschooling their children for the foreseeable future.
As of Monday, 45 states have ordered all schools to be closed. At least 54.8 million school students are now home. Though initial school closures have ranged from a few days to a month, many speculate it could be a lot longer before schools reopen, if they do at all for the rest of the academic year.
While it is disruptive to the economy, as well as public school children and parents, a whole lot of good will come out of school closings — beyond the obvious benefit of slowing the spread of the disease.
Here is what parents and the public as a whole should take away from the school closings. Continue reading
Allsup: Stories for Children in Times of Trouble
Storytelling Help for Parents in the Era of COVID-19 and Sharing the ongoing story: The Secret Prince
You’ve stocked up on essentials: hand sanitizer and toilet paper, and you’ve got a cupboard with non-perishable food including enough pasta to feed your neighborhood. But your neighbors won’t be visiting anytime soon.
If you have children, here’s one more thing to add to your list of essentials in this era of solitude: stories, especially stories that you create yourself to help your kids cope with unexpected changes in their daily lives.
The Secret Prince is an ongoing story meant to support the inner journey of children in this time of solitude. You will find the first five chapters below. My goal is to add a new chapter each Monday, Wednesday and Friday. I hope your child(rens) aged four through twelve, find The Secret Prince helps to normalize staying home for many days.
The story shows a child whose independent spirit helps him deal with being stuck inside for weeks. This story has no mention of disease; it’s about a boy who has to stay inside due to flooding. It’s not an explanation for why we are practicing social distancing. By now your child already knows why their daily routines are different. The question now for most children is not so much why as how to re-imagine their daily lives. Continue reading
Should Children Be Taught How To Grow Food As Part Of Their Schooling?
Our children live in a fast-paced society, and their life has become much easier than the one we were used to.
I know countless applications that can do their tasks and assignments instead of them, and they can type just a few words on their computers and find everything they need, without having to jog their memory or use their knowledge.
Yet, many fear that in this way, we are raising slouches, irresponsible future adults, and a burden to our society. There is no doubt that new inventions have provided more comfort than we ever dreamed of living in. Continue reading
Parents Need to End the Stigma Surrounding Trade School
My son wants to attend vocational school in high school and I am all for it. (Twenty20 @Amandafisher)
I’m going to be completely transparent: When I attended high school in the ‘90s, if you were a student who took vocational classes, everyone thought it meant you couldn’t cut it in regular school. Continue reading
The Great Webster’s Dictionary Conspiracy
Noah Porter was the editor of the 1864 Webster’s Dictionary. Curiously, he graduated from Yale in 1931 as a member of the infamous Order of the Skull and Bones. After graduation he was a Congregational minister (1836-1846) until becoming a professor of moral philosophy and metaphysics at Yale. He rose to be Yale president in 1871-a post he held until 1886. Porter died in 1891 at age 75 in New Haven, Conn.
In most cases, a dictionary is merely a compendium of word usage. We can expect words like table, chair, glass, tree and beaver-words devoid of political implications-to be defined in keeping with their common usage. However, Joel Rorie, a self-taught lexicographer, has uncovered what can only be described as a dictionary conspiracy. Continue reading
Bill Gates Tacitly Admits His Common Core Experiment Was A Failure
It looks like this is as close to an apology or admission of failure as we’re going to get, folks. Sorry about that $4 trillion and mangled years of education for American K-12 kids and teachers.
Bill Gates (Sebastian Derungs)
Bill and Melinda Gates run the world’s richest nonprofit, with assets at $40 billion and annual giving around $4 billion. They have helped pioneer a mega-giving strategy called “advocacy philanthropy,” which aims to use private donations to shift how governments structure their activities and use taxpayer dollars.
Since 2009, the Gates Foundation’s primary U.S. activity has focused on establishing and implementing Common Core, a set of centrally mandated curriculum rules and tests for what children are to learn in each K-12 grade, with the results linked to school and teacher ratings and punitive measures for low performers. Continue reading
6 Sanity-Saving Tips for Newly Homeschooling Work-At-Home Parents
Photo via Pixabay
Welcome, everyone! Every day is a grand adventure these days, and if you have children, you’ve been forced into the amazing world of homeschooling because America’s schools are closed due to the Chinese COVID-19 pandemic. First, don’t panic. I’m a veteran homeschooling mom, even though I sent my kids to private school a couple of years ago. I have six years of homeschooling and working from home under my belt. Even still, I felt the same twinge of the panic I know you are feeling when I found out we were going to do it again. But don’t worry. Everything is going to be okay. You can do this and still get your work done and I’m going to help you with these very helpful tips. Continue reading
Homeschooling for Beginners
There are a lot of children home from school now, and many parents who have essentially begun homeschooling. Here is a brief guide for how to do it. Continue reading
No need to panic, parents, over homeschooling
Hundreds of schools across the United States have shuttered their doors during the outbreak of the coronavirus, and now parents have suddenly been thrust into a new role that their friends and neighbors have been accustomed to for some time: homeschooling.
Approximately 64,000 schools have been closed in 33 states, affecting about 32 million students, Education Week reported in a March 16 story. Continue reading
Robert M. T. Hunter, Secretary of State for the Confederacy
On his way down to Montgomery to assume his new role as Secretary of State for the Confederacy in May 1861, Robert Hunter took the opportunity to speak to the crowds at the various train stops; Atlanta was one of them. The Co-Editor of the Southern Confederacy, J. Henly Smith was there to record his comments:
“Our cause, our institutions, our hopes, and our destinies are one. I rejoice to be able today to proclaim to you the union of the South for the sake of the South, and not only for the sake of the South, but for the sake and in the name of liberty – the last refuge of man oppressed, and the hope of the world. I am thoroughly convinced, that, independent of the negro question, we have not left the North any too soon. Compare their Government and its workings, and their institutions with ours! Their ancient safeguards are being trampled underfoot by those now in power; and is done, too, at the behest of their own people. On the other hand, show me a programme or a form of government, which promises more for mankind, or offers greater future security and happiness to the people than the Constitution of the Confederate States! We have everything to hope for and encourage us, in upholding it.
Continue reading
The Difference One Racist Made: Margaret Sanger’s World
“On the other hand, the mass of ignorant Negroes still breed carelessly and disastrously, so that the increase among Negroes, even more than the increase among whites, is from that part of the population least intelligent and fit, and least able to rear their children properly.” ~ W.E.B. DuBois, Professor of Sociology, Atlanta University. “Black Folk and Birth Control.” [Margaret Sanger’s] Birth Control Review, Volume XXII, Number 8 (New Series, May 1938, the “Negro Number”), page 90.
The Early Years
Margaret Sanger was born in 1879 in New York, one of 11 children born into an impoverished family. Her mother was Catholic, her father an atheist. Her mother had several miscarriages and died at an early age. Though the cause of death was listed as tuberculosis, Margaret always attributed her early death to the fact that her mother was weak from bearing so many children. This deep-seated disdain for large families would encompass her life and contribute to a belief that women should limit – or be limited – in the number of children they have. Continue reading
Teachers are walking away from their careers in Alabama because of unruly students
Mobile, Ala. (WPMI) – It can be tough to be a teacher.
According to a study released last year by the Economic Policy Institute nearly 14% of America’s teachers are either leaving their school or leaving teaching altogether, and school systems are having a hard time replacing them.
Often, it’s because of the pay, but a growing lack of respect for the profession is also to blame.
WPMI spoke with one Alabama teacher who called it quits after just two months on the job.
Two months.
That’s how long this former Mobile County public school teacher lasted in the classroom and he says his departure had everything to do with a lack of student discipline and support. Continue reading
Sometimes We Meet Someone Who Changes Our Lives Forever
As she stood in front of her 5th grade class on the very first day of school,
she told the children an untruth.
Happy Birthday, Miss Jones ~ Norman Rockwell
Like most teachers, she looked at her students and said that she loved them all the same. However, that was impossible, because there in the front row, slumped in his seat, was a little boy named Teddy Stoddard.
Mrs. Thompson had watched Teddy the year before and noticed that he did not play well with the other children, that his clothes were messy and that he constantly needed a bath. In addition, Teddy could be unpleasant. Continue reading
‘1776’: Prominent black conservatives counter NYT’s flawed ‘1619 Project’ with message of unity
‘We do this in the spirit of 1776, the date of America’s true founding’
A group of prominent conservative black scholars, pastors and activists has unveiled an alternative to the New York Times’ controversial and highly criticized “1619 Project” with a history initiative of their own dubbed “1776.”
“I’m here for two reasons, I believe in America and I believe in black people,” said Glenn Loury, a professor of economics at Brown University, one of many to speak at a news conference at the National Press Club on Friday to announce the effort.
Loury said the authors behind the 1619 Project “don’t believe in black people.” Continue reading
Remember the Alamo… Correctly
To us Texans, the Alamo is a symbol of how we value freedom and liberty. William Travis, Davy Crockett, Jim Bowie and the other Alamo defenders were heroes because they valued the liberty of their countrymen and land above their own lives.
A famous legend about the Alamo entered Texan folklore a few weeks after the notorious siege. Around April of 1836, Santa Anna was fed up with resistance from freedom fighters. To stomp out this lingering flame, he sent a message to his troops in San Antonio, ordering them to burn the mission to the ground. But when his soldiers approached the Alamo, they met a ghastly surprise. Continue reading
State Compares Alamo Cenotaph to Confederate Monuments
The ghosts of old battles still haunt the Alamo.
An underdog Indian tribe has joined the progeny of warriors in court to fight George P. Bush for the shrine of Texas liberty. The city’s controversial Alamo redesign plan, a mixed bag of ideas that includes moving the cenotaph off the grounds, has been slowed by an unlikely coalition of Native Americans and preservationists held together by a common ancestry of war. Both groups argue that the mission grounds are a graveyard, protected by state law, with the cenotaph acting as a headstone. United in court, they face Mayor Ron Nirenberg, General Land Office Commissioner George P. Bush and the increasingly foreign management of the embattled mission.
For descendants of the Alamo fighters like preservationist Lee Spencer White, the battle is personal. Continue reading