Free Republic

Wow, reading that article is five minutes of my life that I’m not getting back. But I realize that “The Bachelorette” is part of popular culture, and I had an anthropological interest, so I read the story. I still have no idea how the show works, other than a vague notion that a bunch of single women get to tell a bunch of single guys what to do and then complain about the results, which sounds a lot like high school.

I was amused that a society which teaches girls about the evils of the “male gaze” have produced a young woman who cries that she’s not being looked at. Even with a low-cut dress that’s so tight the toes of a camel would be squeezed.

Back to Joe Biden, etc.

I got the two shots in January and February 2021. My left arm hurt for six months. I was fatigued, all the time, and before the shots, I was energetic and went to the gym often. Some days I could hardly get up. I experienced brain fog. By coincidence, I had a heart checkup (treadmill, EKG) in November 2019, before the pandemic, so I had a baseline to measure against. Now I have right bundle branch block problem. Interestingly, I had the same symptoms with the shot as I did when I got the disease this February, although not for as long.

In our village, practically everyone has gotten at least two shots. Six deaths followed among the 500+ people here in town, all from heart failure.

I was one of the first people in the country to get the Pfizer shots in early January 2021. Just about everyone in our little Alaskan village got it. I was there when the plane arrived with the supercold batch of shots, which was delivered quickly to the elders, which included me.

I’ve written about my experience in other posts. The side effects were long-lasting and awful. I felt as if I had aged a decade, and now there’s this article citing a study confirming that feeling. It appears as if the problems emerge from the spike protein produced by both the disease and the shot; as an interesting side note, the symptoms I had from the shots are the same symptoms I had from the disease when I got it in early February of this year.

The reality on the ground is that a lot of us were fooled (or coerced) into getting the shots. Now a lot of us are now disabled. (And, yes, I am taking a host of therapeutics right now.) If you were lucky enough, or obstinate enough, to avoid the shots, good for you, but sitting on the sidelines telling the rest of us that we’re stupid or deserve what we get is just another form of evil. Celebrating your own health while others suffer around you is not a good look for anyone.

I’m imagining if the fight against abortion had gone this way, with smug women mocking those who got pregnant about their own virtue while doing nothing to provide help for those to carry the baby to term or creating opportunities for adoption. If we are slowly dying from this shot, which seems ever more likely, look at these words and tell me that I deserve condescension and pain for not having the superior wit you showed for not getting the shot. You might be called upon to help the injured, the infirm, the dying. Are you going to mock us because you’re better people? Shame on you.

Then there’s the social impact of this. Bill Gates and Klaus Schwab and the CEO at Pfizer and the rest depend on an army of drivers, workers, and support staff. How is the driver in Bill Gates’ car going to respond when he realizes that he was fooled and his life is cut short? The janitor at Pfizer? The cooks at the World Economic Forum? When you have nothing to lose, your options expand. These folks might think that they have tall fences, but they are surrounded by the people they’ve harmed with the shots inside the fence.

Look at my words. If I was on a bicycle and you found me on the side of the road with a broken leg, would you tell me I should have been more careful and leave me behind, or would you do your best to care for me until help arrived? I’m a human being, perhaps a human being who is dying right in front of you. What do you do?

I don’t have any answers, but I’ve been teaching high school students for the past two decades, so I get to see these kids as they move into adulthood.

Getting a driver’s license is no longer the holy grail of teenage life as it was for us back in the late 1960s. Part of the appeal of that license was the instant ability to travel far from home, something that today’s teens mostly don’t care about.

I wonder about the impact created by staring into a screen all day. In order for me to see the West Coast, to use an example from my own life, I had to either get a magazine or go there myself. Today YouTube provides hundreds of poorly made travelogues.

All I know is that my kid with an engineering degree just interviewed in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Florida, so he’s apparently the outlier.

I can see why no one wants public comment on published articles. I’m thinking that selecting roles based on race is apartheid. The producers of this new show probably don’t want to hear that. So I guess I’ll just not watch it, ever.

I have no idea what really happened to JFK, but I have an interesting anecdote that supports the Daily Mail article.

Our family knows someone at Interpol through marriage, a person who would be considered senior administration at the agency. We’ve sat at the same table as the guy. His opinion about the assassination was that it was a mob hit. He gave us no details, and perhaps he didn’t have any, but he was well connected among the intelligence agencies worldwide, and that was his opinion.

Maybe someday we’ll know for certain. I enjoyed the idea found in “The Illuminati Trilogy” (which is a satire by Robert Anton Wilson) that all of the conspiracies were true, including Jackie with a ladies’ pistol in her purse ready to plug John after she found out about the affair with Marilyn Monroe.

“If you don’t say what I want you to say, I’m going to kill myself.”

Bullying at its finest. Presented, as always, by the bully as if the bully herself is the victim.

Interesting information but the guy has to update his coding, as well as creating better organization for his webpage.

I’m the favorite teacher of students at my school, which I ascribe to never wavering from high standards. I agree with your comment.

>>>Here are my solutions to education:

1. Let students set teacher pay.

or,

2. Fire half the teachers and double the salaries of the rest.<<<

I’m pretty good with suggestion #1. Kids tend to be remarkably bad at making those kinds of decisions, and I’m willing to bet some student would say, “Hey, let’s give him a million bucks,” and a bunch of other kids would agree, without the slightest real understanding of what that kind of money looks like.

I’m also good with suggestion #2. I think I’d make the cut.

On an aside, I’m preparing for one of the cultists to ask me my preferred pronouns. My answer is going to be a series of questions. “How do I grade pronouns in student writing? Do we have to ask the person being written about for their preferred pronouns? Is it worse to misgender a person or to ignore the state Language Arts standards, which specifically tell us to teach students about the proper use of pronouns? Do we have to review the gender identities of all fictional characters before starting to write about them or discuss them?”

I could go on for quite a while in this vein. I probably shouldn’t smile while saying this.

I’ve been a teacher for 26 years, and I have to agree with the president of Hillsdale College.

My post-secondary education started at American University with a degree in political science, where I graduated in 1978 with the expectation of law school. I decided that polite courtroom warfare wasn’t my cup of tea, so I worked in a variety of jobs until deciding to return to college when I was 39 years old to do what I had really wanted to do ever since I was in the second grade.

The education classes at the University of Alaska Anchorage were easy beyond words. I took 24 credits a term in addition to 30 hours a week working and a 45-minute commute to the college from the valley. 4.0 GPA. Many of my colleagues over the years have been great people, and a few extraordinary teachers stand out, but the lemons in the baskets get to remain due to job protection embedded in tenure and union agreements. One third grade teacher asked me once to tell me that names of all seven continents. I worked with a horticulture teacher who never planted a single plant but was well loved by students because she handed out energy drinks and chips while showing Hollywood movies. The superintendent’s office was on the other side of the wall and must have heard what was going on, but never did anything about it. There was less rigor in my master’s degree classes than the classes I had in high school back in the early 1970s. The support staff, in my observation, tend toward mediocrity.

Students routinely tell me that they know American schools are failing them; they can see what schools look like with excellent teachers and stringent standards by watching anime and seeing what high school is like in Japan, superpowers and supernatural forces notwithstanding. There’s a popular anime called “Deathnote,” typical Japanese fare about a demon giving a teenager a book with the power to kill; all you have to do is write the name of a person in the book, and they die 10 seconds later. In an early episode, the demon asks the teenager why he’s not writing names in the book, and the boy says he needs to study for a chemistry test. Many anime series center around the need for study, respect for teachers, and overcoming the hardship of academic failure. The comparison is not lost on the American teenage viewer.

I’m going to be 67 on my next birthday, so this is my last year. My students tend to enjoy honest feedback and a focus on excellence. There are fewer of us every year.

Here’s some solutions to the current problem, based on my experience and observing places like Finland and South Korea, where there is robust student achievement.
- Colleges of education should be far more rigorous, on par with medical and law school. Weed out incompetence at the gate.
- Reduce barriers to professionals from other fields who want to teach, like engineering or medicine, so they can share workplace experience.
- Eliminate tenure. Poor teachers need to be quickly shown the door.
- Treat students with respect by requiring stringent competency tests to move through grades and graduate.
- Understand that teachers work for the families of the students. It’s unethical to use a classroom for advocacy.
- Every district website should have lesson plans, curriculum, readings, and other assignments posted daily.
- Salaries should be linked to student achievement.

It’s been an awful experience watching the education system deteriorate. Maybe my next step should be running for a school board in the community where I retire.

There’s a conservative in the White House press corps? That’s the surprise here. On the other hand, the survey asked about party affiliation, so maybe it’s just a group of Marxists with a few Democratic Socialists thrown in and a Fabian or two from one of the elite small East Coast colleges.

>>>“new constructivist view of the world...”

What is this supposed to mean? Constructivist.<<<

This refers to a philosophy of education in which students are encouraged to “construct” their understanding of a subject and the contents of what they’re learning.

It’s supposed to be accomplished by students constantly asking questions about a subject, getting the answers, and then using that knowledge to ask more questions. An old-fashioned example of this would be the Socratic method.

The writer is identified as a former teacher. My guess is that he wants society to create a new world.

In its best form, constructivism is fun for students, like woodshop or science experiments. In real life, though, it’s often easier just to present the quadratic equation and lead students through the process to get a right answer, and a school where students are constantly constructing their own answers to problems wastes a lot of time and effort. Constructivism has a place in the teaching tool kit, though.

The left’s view of the Constitution reminds me of an old joke.

“I grew up in a very liberal Jewish family. My rabbi said, ‘We believe in the 10 Commandments, and you can pick the five you like.’ “

A bizarre rant. I’m so stunned I can hardly respond.

We lose the argument every time we resort to citing facts.

Joy and her leftist friends aren’t thinking. They’re feeling. They know their opinion is correct because it feels correct.

Whenever someone tells me that the Republicans want to limit voting rights, or the United States is systemically racist, or any of the dozens of leftist platitudes, I say this:

“You’re a conspiracy nut.”

If they want to argue, I’m willing to do it, but I always hit low and attack the core of their statements with emotional responses. They’re conspiracy nuts. They’re just repeating propaganda from fake news. They’re spreading misinformation. If I know the person, or I work with them, I’ll tread a little lightly with my tone of voice, stating things in a calm monotone, but if it’s just a person on the street, I’ll be quite vicious about their lack of concern for others, their nasty and cruel stupidity, or their simple-minded racism.

We got here by acting nice and rational in the face of appalling ugliness from ideological bullies. It’s best to use their own words and concepts against them, but just taking it has led them to believe that they can continue with this stuff unimpeded.

>>>The men have no voice but they are devastated…and complicit.

People kid themselves about the facts. I predict a low turnout for any pro choice activity

Some women who have had abortions will be triggered. The men will be silent as usual.<<<

You are correct, but with a small caveat. I was a young man in the 1970s, when we were promised personal freedom for the simple act of amoral licentiousness. It was a lifestyle promoted by my school, my family, my society, and even some of the religious institutions I dabbled in. Two of my children were killed by abortion, a decision in which I had no say whatsoever. The fact that I was willing, and in fact eager, to be the father of those children did not matter at all. Of course, the situation was clouded by immaturity, depravity, and the attitude of the times in the place where I was at, which is a fancy way of saying that, indeed, you are correct about the damage caused by our embrace of abortion.

I see the echo of those children whenever I look at my son. It doesn’t help that my birthday falls on the day that Roe was decided, which means that annually I get to reflect on my failings and grief.

But here’s the caveat. I’m not silent about this. I tell people about my regrets, the time wasted, the emotions spent on empty relationships, if we can even call those fleeting moments relationships. My son knows that somewhere with God there were two of his brothers or sisters, and this knowledge has caused him to be circumspect and wise beyond his years. I’m a teacher in a high school, and even though health education isn’t my subject, when I am able, I remind students, especially the young women, that all children deserve a stable, complete family, and they should be married before having children. I have been married to my wife for 27 years in a loving, companionate relationship, and hold that up as a goal for the students in the class. Whenever someone tells me that one of the girls who graduated has fallen pregnant, I ask them about the husband, and if that answer isn’t forthcoming, I remind them about the importance of faithful marriage. I have tenure. File a complaint.

One of the unspoken ugly truths about freely available abortion is that it allows men to postpone growing up. That first pregnancy, when I was 18 years old, was washed away in a Planned Parenthood clinic, and I just continued my wasted life for years before understanding the damage it caused me, let alone the girl I was with and the child we killed. The other abortion happened off stage, with a comment months later about the act. It still causes me shame to consider it. Sadly, a lot of men never get to the shame and grief part, just continuing the endless party, like Hunter Biden without the money or connections.

It’s a fallen world. I’m ashamed of the part I played in it.

No wonder the articles at the original source no longer accept comments. I can just imagine that amount of derision heaped on this guy.

>>>...all endorse gender-affirming care for gender dysphoria — the distress someone can feel when their assigned sex doesn't align with their gender identity.<<<

My sex was not assigned. It was acknowledged.

The term gender-affirming care is also deeply disturbing. Do you propose delusion-affirming care for those with paranoid schizophrena?

The truth is bubbling up.

All of the students in my second period class are taking the state-mandated competency tests, so I have a little time to respond.

First, as someone in the trenches, the problems with public education are vastly understated. I retire next year.

Here’s my best guess about what will really happen with the Washington state discipline guidelines.

White students will not be punished more. That requires paperwork and adherence to the code of conduct, which means time, effort, and wading through pages of pseudolegalistic language designed to describe every contingency, but which actually obfuscates each incident and allows students, parents, and teacher to nitpick every occurrence to find a way around the rules. What will probably happen is that all students will be punished less, with the nonwhite students learning quickly to shout empty accusations of racism whenever they’re caught doing something wrong, and the white students learning that they’re part of an underclass targeted for harassment based on race.

The deterioration of the education system will speed up as bad behavior makes learning impossible, (the remaining) good teachers quit in droves, and students come out even less prepared for adult life.

Good times.