Posted on 04/13/2008 11:24:45 AM PDT by wagglebee
I remember in the seventh grade Bobby C was shooting spitwads in Mr. Isler’s class. Mr. Isler grabbed Bobby by the shirt collar and literally kicked him to the door. He took him down to the principal’s office and whipped him so hard Bobby cussed and ran out. We didn’t see him for two or three days. I thought it was great. (This would have been around 1963/64)
You don’t sound too far from my age.
I’m a product of Brooklyn, NY public education. I was in 5th grade during the OJ trials, and I wanted him guilty, even at the age of 10.
Like you I really hope schools are reformed very badly, or they’re all scraped altogether. Lincoln High School has turned into a fortress. Metal detectors at the front and auditorium entrances; no cellular phones or music players allowed in. I can’t remember if there were 5 teachers that I liked.
I would have been D E A D, period, no discussion.
You two are only a few years younger than me. I left public schools in 1993 during the 6th grade, but not over academics. I wouldn’t think of sending anyone there now.
Ah I am 21 years old(22 this June) and can recall the OJ stuff.
I lived in Owings Mills, Maryland at the time in an apartment with my father and mother as we were preparing to move to Severna Park where my High School was. Suddenly some young kid knocked on our door and told us to watch the TV because it was about OJ Simpson. We turned the TV on and I can still remember the helicopter and all of the trees as the big arrest was made. I don’t remember much after that except that it was rather historic.
I also remember that my father used to call me orange juice or juice juice and that was on all of the protestor’s signs outside of the courthouse when the trial went on. I never had a big opinion on him as I was too busy playing Adventure Island III to bother or care.
I’m a product of Randallstown/Severna Park education and now Gainesville/Palm Beach Gardens education as I moved to Florida for college. I never really made many friends after 9/11 as I got more and more serious. It might’ve been my activated Neo-Conservatism or something but my educational career with friends was mostly over by then.
I used to be an advocate of public schooling, perhaps because I was in there. The funny thing is that we probably could’ve afforded private schooling and my parents would’ve been great home-schoolers(in fact I got homeschooled by my mom in the 9th Grade on Concepts of Algebra since the teacher was very bad. I learned more from my mom than the teacher). The public school route, however, was easy, convenient and might’ve also been because my father was on the pathway to being a reformed Democrat(he became a Republican in 2002 but I still don’t think that he understands how politics work, I think most people don’t understand how it works myself).
Yes, there has to be a reformation of the public school system or a total demolition. IMO, business and jobs are a lot more useful than an education laid out by people you won’t care about in a few years so I suggested business centers. They would be more useful, and they could also have the PC stuff involved also(diversity training)
Severna Park High School was not really a fortress but I remember in a Middle School I went to where a kid was expelled for carrying a knife into school. I also remember a few bomb threats. And I remember Columbine, the wanna-bes and the day I had to miss(I think) because somebody posted somewhere that they were going to kill a few kids.
That is funny about the cell phones and music players. So, no cell phones even on vibrate? I can possibly understand music players, they are sort of like how my school banned students from wearing hats. I would like to hear all about your experiences at Lincoln High School and why no reformer has made it safe for kids to go around without metal detectors. I suggest that all kids in these bankrupt schools to watch movies like Lean On Me which are close to finding out about how a school can be transformed.
I also must laugh because Blackboard Jungle warned us all about it, and it was fictional. Nowadays every single movie about a school reformer(I love movies) is based on a true story especially with rebellious and out of control kids. It is almost like they are trying to set up a blueprint for the reformers. I also find it ironic that you went to school, in Brooklyn. I knew somebody who went to school around there and it wasn’t the most pleasant of experiences.
A big reformer who wrote a book called The Underground History of American Education has helped me give myself a plan or solution to what is going on right now. That guy, I forget his name, used to be a public school teacher in Manhattan.
Ah, bad teachers. BAD teachers. I’ve had a few. The Concepts of Algebra teacher was horrible. She assigned us lots of pages of homework, a lot of attitude(she was a black woman who wore an Integrate This T-shirt and I don’t think that it had to do with Mathematics), and very hard problems to do. My mother, who taught me all the way through to pass the class, said that that teacher(Mrs. Roberson) stunted my growth in the Math department. She even, on the final review, had an inconclusive question on it.
My daughter works part time in a retail shop where a lot of very wealthy people shop for their kids. Yesterday a mother with 6 and 9 yo daughters came in for clothes. They wouldn’t put down their Game Boys long enough to pay attention to getting fitted - the mother did nothing but beg “please ___, the nice lady wants you to try on the ___” and the kids ignored her. Soon the kids wandered off and discovered trading cards - had to have one of every one in the store. Mom said OK. When the older girl needed to try on a few more things, the Mom went to pick up the cards off the floor. The girl slapped her mother’s hand and said to her mother “Buzz off”. The mother ignored it !
If that had been my kid, she’d have had a very clean mouth and a very sore butt. My kid was outraged and couldn’t believe the Mom did nothing.
While I don’t necessarily agree that public schools should be abandoned altogether, I also don’t want my children attending them with all this secularism, multiculturalism and anti-Americanism going on in our public school system either.
I think what we need to do is abolish the department of education, encact a voucher system so that parents in any income bracket can send their children to the school of their choice, enact merit pay for teachers, bring back into our public schools prayer, the ten commandments and the Bible, and teach the basics once again including American history, civics, reading, writing, science and arithmetic.
Until public schools enact these reforms I refuse to send my children to them.
It is good to know that there are two Conservatives around my age. Sometimes I feel like a lonely Conservative on this island especially this blue island of Palm Beach County. I guess that is why I write song lyrics, in order to rant to somebody whoever about all of the wrong things in life, including Liberalism.
Perchance if it isn’t too personal why did you leave your School? I was thinking about leaving mine for a little bit and moving to California because I got bored of the school atmosphere and everything around it. It is quite funny hearing educators say that students learn all at different rates yet that is why Homeschooling is such a great idea.
I also got very disillusioned by school after returning from a Summer Performance Art camp, and learning that the school administrators can do anything to the students. Yet even Mrs. Pickley(I think that was her name) was hated and yet she probably stopped at least a little bit of the misbehavior that everybody else ignored. It made me think of a gulag however, I wasn’t happy at all being there and some events made me less happy.
Which leads me to another story(I hate boring people with my long rantings but my tag-line is who I am). I am a special-ed kid in a way, I have this disability called asperger’s syndrome. I also have PDD(Pervasive Developmental Disorder) so I had close ties to the Special Ed office in High School. It was during these talks and negotiations of some sort that I had an empty space in my schedule.
My parents and I worked out that that would be study hall time. I would go to a school within a school called the Hannah Moore school which was a school for those who had autism(a form of what I have). It was a small room outside of the Administrator’s office and was taught by 2-3 people including a guy named Mr. Beers(that was his name I think).
During the class I would do whatever I had to while sitting down on the ground or in a desk as the 9th and 10th graders(I was a Senior then) would listen and respond to him and the female teacher(Mrs. Zander). Unfortunately the political dynamics sometimes came out as the only person who seemed remotely Conservative was Mrs. Zanders while everybody else made constant Bush jokes. It was also during 2004 and man do I hate election years as they bring the worst out of people.
I usually try to keep my calm as I am not one to go off the pot or to respond to politics because they are irrelevant and I am a guest. However, like anything else, it was leading up to a fuse that bled. I wasn’t going to take it anymore.(I am very opinionated and also super-sensitive to politics)
I also for a while wasn’t too much going to the study school because either it was too noisy or I didn’t need to but the Administrators wanted me to stay there until class ended. Well, one day Mrs. Zanders wasn’t in the classroom but Mr. Beers was. For some reason all 4 students got into a Bush bashing event along with Mr. Beers.
I tried to tell Mr. Beers and everybody that he isn’t that bad and then he screamed to me about Michael Moore and how he tells the truth, the 59 lies of Bush, and also that Moore tells the truth because he cites his sources. It is almost like a Social Worker or public educator to be so Liberal, but it surprised me because nobody I knew was that full of BDS. Even my Liberal History teacher and my Socialist teacher in Journalism were actually very thoughtful in what I was doing(even when I wrote an article on where Homosexuality came from he was OK)
This guy however screamed and screamed and I screamed also because I felt overpowered. I then ran out of the room(he screamed that I was going AWOL which I sort of took as another Bush bashing joke), crying(yes grown men can cry. Especially if it is one of the first times I had a group of people gang up on me because my views were unpopular) to see the school Psychologist(I saw a lot of them in the 10th grade BTW). I told her the whole story and I think she sided with me. Maybe another problem was that I didn’t talk to many like-minded people at that time(my first exposure to a public forum online was the Instabark at the Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler blog)
However I had to go back to the room, apologize to Mr. Beers(I gave him the whole BS apology hand-crafted, I think even Mrs. Zanders realized that I was as stiff as stone but that was the only way I could escape penalty was to apologize) and walk out.
There are lots of Tipping Points approaching. Parent who “get it”—that Tipping Point is a long way off. But the supply of teachers who want to get stomped (stabbed, shot, killed) in Art Class is not endless. So that those who have died in government schools will not have died in vain: Abolish government schools.
They had an inkwell on each desh back then, too. So if we bring back inkwells, the schools would be much more orderly, also.
No matter what the statistics may be, I’m sad to see a FReeper defending collective, communal, government schools at all.
I can agree with the changes you comment on here. Unfortunately I don’t see it happening anytime soon. We’ve not yet reached rock botton in this country, which is what will be needed before people realize we need those changes.
I’m a product of public education. My children are too. All four of them are conservative, but for anything they received in their education in public schools, but for what they were taught at home.
My granddaughter attends a public school, and she is receiving the education she needs with respect to conservative principles at home. We are vigilent enough to be able to counter the misinformation any teacher might give to her. Thus, I’m not worried about the liberals in public education. People should know, though, that there are more people with conservative values who work in public schools than you might realize.
I think it’s sad that people use such sweeping generalizations to denegrade people who work in public schools with little more knowledge than just what they see in the news or read in a short snipet of informaion on a website. There may be many things “wrong” with public education, but that’s not the entire story. There are a good number of people who are conservative who work in public education (as I can attest to as I’m one of them). Throwing out the baby with the bathwater is a really poor solution to the problem.
This all started with the Supreme Court’s decision to take the authority to discipline away from the teachers so that teachers are afraid to discipline any one for any reason.
“Reintroducing corporal punishment in government schools doesn’t sit well with me, if only for the fact that I’ve had the pleasure—sarcasm, of course—of meeting some rather unsavory characters currently employed in K-12 government schools.”
I’m with you there. The only time that I ever got whacked was in seventh grade for being caught playing table football (where you make the triagular football and flick it back and forth on the table) after being told not to do so while in study hall. Granted, I didn’t listen the first time but the punishment wasn’t commeasurate with the offense. I was taken out to the hall right outside the classroom and whacked where everyone could hear what was happening. Besides hurting like hell, it was humiliating. It wasn’t like I had a history of being in trouble or was a bad student. Also, the decision who got whacked and who did not was extremely arbitrary. It really served little purpose. OTOH, a more reasonable and less humiliating punishment would have been after school detention. Interestingly, in eigth grade, there was a kid who was supposed to get one whack and afterwards put his hand on his rear when the teacher whacked him again and broke his wrist. I don’t know how that was resolved (this was in ‘77). Today, I’m sure the out of court settlement would been considerable.
The government schools in the cities are nothing more than holding pens.
And really, nobody cares. I know I don’t.
If you reintroduce corporal punishment in schools you had better have an army of lawyers handy to defend the policy because the district will be sued right and left.
And it would only work with younger kids.Let me tell you from experience,if you lay a hand on any of the”boyz in the hood”you had better be strapped or a karate expert because,in their words,”we ain’t having that”
All that being said,I got few swats from the VP paddle and whacked across the hand with rulers but that was back in the 1954-1964 era.
A whole lot has changed since then.
Fall,1959.Mr Farrell,Seveth Grade shop teacher,is trying to make a point to the class on different types of finishers to put on our wood projects.
Mickey Young,fat boy extraordinaire,is busy in the back yapping away oblivious to the lecture.
Mr Farrell picks up this huge eraser and hurls it full force,smacking Mickey in the upper chest and enveloping him in a cloud of chalk dust.
No more problems in old man Farrell’s class from then on.
Fall,1959.Mr Farrell,Seventh Grade shop teacher,is trying to make a point to the class on different types of finishers to put on our wood projects.
Mickey Young,fat boy extraordinaire,is busy in the back yapping away oblivious to the lecture.
Mr Farrell picks up this huge eraser and hurls it full force,smacking Mickey in the upper chest and enveloping him in a cloud of chalk dust.
No more problems in old man Farrell’s class from then on.
There are all those children on waiting lists to get into charters, or receive a voucher. The legislators are not going to ignore the cries of these children and their parents.
Another tipping point is the taxpayer. As boomers move into retirement they are going to be less supportive of high property tax to support government schools when vouchers, tax credits, and charters are so much less expensive.
The homosexual agenda in the schools, SB 777 in California or the Parker case in Massachusetts, will push some parents to remove their children.
Then it is becoming absolutely evident that homeschooling produces superior results. This movement is showing no signs of slowing its 10 to 15% growth each year.
Taking all these tipping points together, we may have a “Perfect Storm” brewing. ( I certain hope so!)
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