I have found new levels of respect for those that choose to educate children for a living, not through observing them, although I have seen some fabulous ones. I have learned respect by taking our twins out of school. We have three older boys, and they stayed in the school system, the oldest has graduated, the second is a senior this year, and the third is a sophomore this year.
Our girls are twins and for the last year we have home-schooled them. We took them out part way through their 5th grade year, and we are learning from the challenges presented by this choice. I do not regret our choice, and I would not change it. One of our girls was falling behind partially do to bullying that that particular teacher and principle either could not, or would not stop, and the other twin was feeling a need to protect her sister through fights. The situation required more personal attention than the teacher could give, and so we took the task on ourselves.
Well, back to my point, despite the fact that I feel that we did right for our situation, I have discovered repeatedly the difficulties that can be encountered in keeping kids interested in the education that they get. I think that those who choose the path of the educator are to be commended.
I have stopped wanting things for birthdays. I think that I was still a teenager the last time I had something that made me wiggly inside. Since that time I have felt that if I really wanted something that I should prioritize it, and get it when I had saved up for it. I am 42 now, and quite arguably, I have made it hard on people to get things for me for years. I am always saying, “It is enough to have those I care about near me.” I find myself suddenly gripped with a new situation, someone has made something that is all the better if you don’t get it for yourself.
I don;t actually think that I know anyone who could foot the bill for this, that doesn’t have higher priorities, but the promise of it being so good makes me unwilling to get it for myself. I will undoubtedly have this bookmarked on my browser for years to come, if only so I can feed the dream, but for the first time in a long time… I know what I want for my birthday. 🙂
I live below the poverty line. I live so far below the poverty line that if I were single that I would still qualify for some assistance. Even were I not physically disabled. Having said that, I am physically disabled and I am married. I’m not just married, but am the father of 5. I was not always disabled, but perhaps if I had more foresight I would have seen it coming; either way, it is here. My wife cannot work outside the home, for reasons that I will not discuss, but is a writer and working on novels. We pay token rent to a loved one for use of their home, and they are good to have us. I don’t say any of this for pity, I am just trying to paint an accurate picture. The point is that by the world’s standards, I am poor.
I choose to look at it another way. My life is full of friends and family. My wife helps care for me, when I am unable to take care of something myself. I have 3 boys 15, 16, and 19. and twin girls who are turning 11 next month. My 19 yr old is turning into a good man, and is soon leaving to serve a religious mission for 2 years, not because he needs to, but because he truly believes that that is a way for him to serve others and God. My 16 yr old is autistic, but is one of the most kind hearted people that you could hope to meet. He recently was asked, and went to preference dance with a cute gal, life is giving back to his kind heart. My 15 yr old is… well ADHD, but 15… so, a teenager. Still, he listens to his parents, sort of… ok he’s an adventure, but he has a great sense of humor. The girls, though twins, are not identical, and most definitely possessed of hugely different personalities, yet they are each others best friend, and always have the other one’s back. We have a place to live, and friends that like to come over to visit and play games. There are many wants that we don’t have, but we have what we need, and I can’t help but smile at the many blessings we receive.
Basically, we are not poor, we are fabulously wealthy, but it is a wealth that no accountant can manipulate on a ledger, no government can tax, and no thief would be able to fence. I am in simple terms rich beyond words.
Well to be more specific, I am the Sgt. At Arms for Post #912 of the American Legion in Washington, Utah.
We had a meeting tonight that was incredibly good. We are a young Post, having been only extant for a year and a half. We had a wonderful group of hula dancers come and perform for us. We had the forming of our Auxiliary post, and we had a nice potluck dinner. All of those elements were wonderful, but as I sat directing my kids in the cleanup afterwards, I had an opportunity to sit and observe the people as they interacted with each other.
I observed family, not just my wife and kids (who were there among them), but all of the people that we had there. We had veterans of multiple wars, and conflicts. We had their wives, or in one case husband, we had my children (we are among the youngest in the group, and still have kids at home), there were a couple of industrious young men who are going to Boys State this year and their folks, and the hula dancers (some with husbands- as roadies). The thing is, we interacted, not as associates, but in the familiar way of family. It was a beautiful sight, and moved me. I found the realization that as I looked out on this crowd that I cared for these people.
I know that some will see this as silliness on my part, but I am part of them. Just as I am part of my family, and my Faith, I am part of these people, and together we are strong. It turns out that we are legion.
Much has been made over the last decades of the view among the liberal and literati that a woman intelligent enough to have a career is wasted as a mother and homemaker, and I have a certain amount of empathy for the women with keen, active minds who have ‘settled down’ to raise children. But… I have a different view of the issue.
I could review the arguments that were used for and against women’s suffrage, but even then most of the arguments for and against were cast in emotive context and lacked the logic to hold up. So I’ll just note that there were arguments that were held as valid that ‘women weren’t smart enough to make political decisions’ which we know to have been false.
I will note that much of the literature of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, particularly the pulp fiction rags…
Often we face problems that we as individuals can’t solve. When enough of us share the same problems, then politicians that offer sympathy, or even better, solutions arise to run for office on these issues. Politician after politician gets into office telling us that they share our feelings and vowing to do something about the issue. Often there are complications but they do, for the most part, try to keep their promises. Sometimes that isn’t so good.Einstein shared this thought;
No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.
Unfortunately not every problem that we can think of, as a matter of fact, not many at all, should be solved by government. We have discovered that most of the problems that we face in our modern world stem not from the actions of people, but from the actions of organizations, companies, and governments. Still we ask them to solve it. We need to send people to govern who not only have compassion for our plights, but actually will study and find solutions, even if they are not the ones we agree with. We keep sending the same types of people, who keep responding to the popular problems into office. It just may be that this kind of thinking, despite our other worries, may be the real problem.
In 1979 Pink Floyd recorded a rock opera called The Wall. This was a rather iconic piece and gave Pink Floyd a rather well known single called “Another Brick in the Wall”. Roger Waters, who was the bass player, wrote this song and it resonated with those that felt that school was too rigid and unaccommodating. Being in school at that time and experiencing the iron rule that my teachers wielded against the kids, I understood this song very well.
Allot has changed in education since I was in 3rd grade, several of my own kids inherited my dyslexia, ADHD, or both; and where no attempt was made to diagnose my conditions, and find ways to help me learn, my kids have seen programs that improved their experience, and accelerated their ability to learn. I thought that this was the new trend, and whether Pink Floyd’s protest had any affect in these events or not, it was clear that things were going in the right direction.
A downhill turn started recently though, one that has called back those words of long ago. It started a few years back with “No Child Left Behind”. I am certain that it was implemented, as all programs are, with the best intentions It caused several problems however; notably it tied teacher salary, advancement, and status to the number of students that could meet national standards. It started to take a turn against teaching the kids to learn, and started teaching them how to pass the next test. Don’t get me wrong about all of this, there have always been teachers who were outstanding, and there always will be, despite the system in place, but a bad system makes it harder to survive the spaces between the good teachers.
No Child Left Behind also made it so that the question of whether you would graduate, and in some sense the question of whether you would go to college was suddenly “Of Course!” This sounds pretty good until you realize a couple of things; first is that not all of these students were actually ready, the high school standards had been lowered to improve graduation numbers, and secondly; it leveled the assumption that you were a nobody unless you got a college degree.
So everybody off to college, right? Well the colleges had to lower their standards a bit, at least for the associate level of degree, after all if all of these people wanted to go into debt to give themselves self worth, then who were administrators to argue. A little note here, in a quiz given to high school graduates, and those with associate degrees recently, both groups of students scored almost exactly the same in all categories. It seems that all that money was well spent (sarcasm for those in public school at this time).
You would think that this was bad enough, we had college graduates, because almost all were, flipping whoppers at Burger King for minimum wage, and trying to get on with life/ pay off the loans at the same time. Life was suddenly hard, you had to work to keep you job, and more so if you wanted a promotion or raise, and the boss wasn’t required to make sure you succeeded.
This brings us to the current time and a new program, also on that devilishly paved road of good intentions, has reared it’s head. It is called Common Core. The people pushing it say it is “not a curriculum, it is merely a set of testing standards”, I have decided that with some exceptions, that this is true, however the testing standards ask questions that cannot be answered unless a certain curriculum was taught, clever huh? I have tried long and hard to get a copy of Common Core to look at, I inform them that I am a parent that wants to be involved with my children’s education. I have been told everything from a simple no, to an explanation that my cooperation is appreciated and that they will gladly tell me when they need my opinion. I might have paraphrased that last for the sake of brevity. The long and the short is that they will not let me even look at it. I have managed to get access to some educational materials that are “in compliance with Common Core”, and I found a section on Thomas Jefferson, I was glad to see that it was there until I read it and saw the questions. There were questions that asked the student how a man could have any moral authority to write the Declaration of Independence, when he owned slaves. Great philosophical question, but one chat an elementary or even secondary educated child has no hope of answering, and so they are left thinking that the separation of the U.S. from foreign powers had anything to do with the liberty of slaves, well deserved or no.
Many parents are now looking for alternatives to public school, as a matter of fact an ever increasing number, they are looking to private schools, charter schools, or home schooling. I am home schooling my twin 10yr olds. My wife and I started for other reasons, but this has made us question whether or not to send them back when the current reasons are past.
I have found a new resonance with Pink Floyd, and something that saw ripen on the vine is now starting to rot. I pray that those in positions of power within our school systems will have their eyes opened and find a way to reverse the rot that is going on before we just make our kids into blockheads.
It all started with a Big Bang, or did it? We have a big problem, we don’t exist. Nothing exists, or at least that is one possibility. I’m not being very clear. Let’s try this a different way. Either an infinite universe existed before the Big Bang, which quantum physicists will tell you makes such an unusual event an almost certainty. Or the universe sprang from the Big Bang itself. The first possibility would still not explain the origin of the universe, and so it is generally ignored. The second possibility is more measurable, but has problems of its own. Is the universe now infinite, having sprung from the cataclysm?
If the universe is infinite then that gives us problems. If an infinite universe sprang from a measurable and finite event then we can start by throwing math out the window. We also know that the amount of thing that can be understood to travel infinite distance in an instant can be counted on exactly zero fingers. If we were to ask Einstein what would happen to a universe that expanded from nothing to infinite in exactly no time whatsoever, he would give a long winded explanation about the warping of space time that would cause that infinity to travel backwards in time infinity, (see first possibility) this causes a causality loop… Are we having fun yet? What’s more this possibility trashes the conservation of energy concept as the energy of the Big Bang disperses through the universe, sending us to the inevitable and ironically named “heat death” scenario.
Much of this is fixed by a closed, finite universe, or it would be if the universe weren’t still expanding. We measure whether things are getting farther apart or coming closer with Doppler effects on the light that we see from distant stars (that’s the simple version of it). We have looked deep into the sky with telescopes that see light, heat, x-rays, radio frequencies, ultraviolet, and infrared… and I’m possibly leaving out one or two things. We have figured out roughly where the Big Bang happened, and where the walls of our expanding reality are. We have even figured out the mass and energy in the universe (very big numbers, that can only be truly described by other very big numbers). The take out from all of this being that we didn’t have enough mass to account for the gravity that objects were exhibiting on each other
Well science to the rescue, or math more precisely, as a bunch of mathematics PHDs decided to call themselves scientists, and we all believed them. We weren’t sure what they were doing for a living either so maybe they were the same thing. The point is, all we had to do was add more mass, never mind that this bollixed observation, that pesky scientific method was getting in the way anyhow. They called it Dark Matter, rather convenient. All we had to do is pretend that the universe was mostly made up of stuff we couldn’t see, and the mass and rotation of the universe worked. Thee cheers for math, er science, whatever.
This turned out to have its own problems however, with that much mass, the energy in the universe was not enough. “I canna’ give em’ any more Cap’n.” By all rights we should be in the middle of being sucked down into a singularity the size of a… well a singularity, not to put to fine a point on it.. Not to worry though, those clever guys with the blackboards, slide-rules, and graphing calculators came up with a solution just in time to save us from the ultimate needy relationship. They added energy! Dark Energy, there’s a theme happening here. Now most of reality was made up of stuff that was, well, made up. The math worked though so at least the universe worked when written on a ledger…
To kick this all in the the proverbial knackers is the idea, after all of this, to say that this isn’t really a theory, more of a proven fact. I love science, when do we get to start doing it again?
I don’t normally make a big deal out of it, but my second oldest boy is autistic. He is a blessing and a joy to me, my wife and all of his brothers and sisters. Having said that, he is a scapegoat. He is an easy mark. If he is accused of wrongdoing in the wrong way, then his response is always the same, “NO I DIDN’T”. For my wife and I, we know that this means that he was accused in a non-productive fashion. Outsiders, even extended family think this means he is a liar. His siblings have in days now past used this to make him look guilty even when innocent. We have been able to stop this approach with the occasional exception of the 10yr old twins.
One might assume this would put an end to it, but his cousins still do it, and his aunts and uncles have taken to accusing him without even evidence of wrongdoing. He is brilliant, he is very artistic, and has deep thoughts that confound those that really listen to him. He has an active imagination, and the rare ability to suck others into his storytelling. Despite all of that, he is treated as though he is incapable at best or a misanthropic miscreant at worst. He is constantly underestimated,
No two autistic people are exactly the same, and even if you think you know autism, don’t buy into the trap of treating them in any other way than that in which they individually have earned. Don’t underestimate them, they have surprises hidden inside that are only able to come out under certain circumstances, and those change from person to person. Most of all take the time to really understand them, my son when approached correctly will quickly respond with, “Oh I’m sorry.”, if he has done wrong. If you learn their language then you will know what they are really saying.
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