Jeff
Member since Nov 1, 2006
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Re: “Fly on the Wall”
Yes we can, Memphis! Yes we can!
Re: “Fly on the Wall”
Let me guess. The bumper stickers will include a big M with an eye in the middle of it. Chris Peck got that idea watching the Disney Pixar movie Monsters Inc.
I am Monsters Incorporated! We scare, because we care.
Re: “The Rant”
Senators serve six year terms, and like most six year olds, they always chose to see how much they can get away with.
Re: “MCS Gets Gates Grant”
Now they can finally move ahead with hiring a top flight consultancy to conduct a multimillion dollar six year study to tell them what's wrong with the school system, again, while another entire generation of students is left behind, again. Woohoo!
If you take your best teachers and put them in the worst schools and worst classes, you'll end up driving most of them away. I see this in the business world all the time. Those who work hardest are given the most to do and carry the dead weight of dozens of others, until they finally burn out and quit, leaving the organization top-heavy with mediocre slackers whose primary talent is playing the system.
I think a good investment of this money would be to create a teacher training program to take people with a high school diploma, but who might otherwise not have a degree, people who can pass a battery of social, intellectual and psychological tests, and train them up with real world, real classroom experience to become loyal, dedicated teachers. Pay them while you train them, so they can support themselves while they learn, and you will have no shortage of hardworking people who otherwise could never manage the expense of the required four-year degree.
How many people spend 4 years to get their degree and their teaching certificate only to burn out in the first year because they haven't been properly prepared for the realities of the urban classroom? How many children lose an entire year because they are unfortunate enough to draw a teacher who is neither prepared nor motivated to meet the extraordinary demands of teaching? You take a kid in her first years of school, all it takes is one bad teacher, one lost year, to put her permanently behind, especially if she is passed on to the next grade without having learned what she needed to know in the previous grade.
Our teacher training system itself is broken. Teacher training should be done by the schools in a paid internship program. They should mix actual teaching experience with educational courses for as long as it takes to prepare that teacher to take over a classroom, whether that takes one year or six years. The current system serves one function and one function only - to deliver a steady supply of students and their tuitions to four-year colleges and their masters and doctorate of education programs. (No doubt the master teacher level will require a master's degree.)
Re: “The War on Facts”
Merc - that number, in my case, and depending on the accidents of fate, is anywhere between 1/5 and 1/4 of gross income. I pay more in health care than I do in taxes. And I, and my family, are healthy.
Take, on the other hand, a woman I know of (friend of a coworker). She requires a monthly shot that costs a couple grand. That's per shot. Without that montly shot, she siezes up and dies. A couple of years ago, her husband's insurance company said, sorry, you're costing us too much, we're dropping your coverage. If it hadn't been for a free clinic stepping up and offering her these shots, which she needs to stay alive, she would be dead today and her three children would not have a mother.
No one at the insurance company is going to be charged with murder, should she die as a result of not having health insurance. Though they certainly should.
Just to bring a bit of balance to the equation - $1.7 trillion is the amount of money the Pentagon loses between the cushions of the couch every year. If we scaled back our military a reasonable amount, say, by 50%, and with the other 50% required strict accounting of every dollar spent, we'd have enough spare change to provide free healthcare and education to every single American. The current cost of the war in Afganistan, according to some estimates, is $1 million dollars per soldier per year. That's a million bucks PER SOLDIER. Per year. For what? I defy even Charles to tell us why.
Despite the rotten economy, despite everything, we are an extremely wealthy nation. We can afford health care. We can afford to educate our children and our out-of-work adults. We can afford to build the infrastruture we need and repair that already built. We can afford to invest in the technologies of the future that will release us from dependance on foreign sources of energy (and thus our need for a huge military to secure them). We can afford to explore space, support science, encourage art. We can afford all these things by stepping away from our outrageous support of all things military. We starve our children to buy tanks. We let our own babies and their mothers die so we can bomb babies and mothers in foreign lands to secure natural resources so our billionaire merchants can make yet another billion.
In times of economic hardship, what is a reasonable budgetary plan? To sell off the fleet of Escalades to pay for food and medicine for our family, or to sell our food and medicine to buy more Escalades to sit in the garage? People who otherwise advise us all to roll up our sleeves, work hard, and live within our means, tell us we must also cash in our IRAs to buy fireworks for the Fourth of July.
Want to find the money to pay for healthcare? End the useless wars in Afganistan and Iraq.
Re: “The Stupidest Story You'll Read Today”
Monster Quest, like most shows on the Discovery/History/ETC channels, is about 10 minutes of information spread across an hour of show. They test the limits of my patience.
Re: “The Stupidest Story You'll Read Today”
I also love this type of stuff. Visit the Fortean Times. It's one of my daily stops on the web. That's where I saw a story about standing brooms, not too long ago. But they also have links to lots of cool science stuff, along with the bigfoot, ABCs, etc.
Did you see the story about the 30-foot cryptid spotted swimming in a Florida canal?
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Flyer Flashback
Flyer Flashback
To mark the Flyer's 20th anniversary, we're looking back at stories from our first two decades.
THIS WEEK'S ISSUE
getting crotchety and quite full of myself