Tuesday, March 19, AD 2024 2:08am

Thought For the Day

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Art Deco
Art Deco
Tuesday, July 27, AD 2021 7:14am

TS Eliot: “Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don’t mean to do harm; but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.”

In a sane world, the manpower devoted to school administration is invested in support staff functions. The school’s comptroller, bursar, custodian, purchasing agent, systems administrator, &c. You have some exceptions: whoever functions as the school’s provost, working with department heads to hire, evaluate, and terminate faculty; whoever functions as the dean of students, working with the school’s security guards and other employees to maintain order and with the faculty and school psychologist to flag students having learning problems; and the principal responsible for general supervision and considering what instructional programs to offer given a menu of alternatives approved by the school board and state board of regents.

In a sane world, teachers understand the goals of the prescribed curriculum and do their best to lead their students to mastery in whatever situation they’ve been placed.

In a sane world, few if any members of the public would be surprised by the character of what the prescribed curriculum is (thought they might be dismayed that their children are not being challenged, or being overly challenged, or being subject to harassment because of a bad disciplinary regime). The curriculum has practical and consensual goals.

In a sane world, a 4th grade student of middling competence can read a novel, write in cursive, spell English words (with errors), and might be able to diagram a simple sentence. She can add and subtract and learned her multiplication tables. She’s also getting lessons in the chronology of Anglophone North America, 1604 to the present, lessons in the physical and human geography of North America and points adjacent, and perhaps some exposure to the material culture of the colonial period.

AND THAT’S IT.

We don’t live in a sane world.

Tom Byrne
Tom Byrne
Tuesday, July 27, AD 2021 8:18am

Somebody PLEASE SUE THE TEACHER AND SCHOOL. Education codes (although I speak for California) do not allow us teachers to ask kids to keep secrets. The kids can ask us (sometimes), but we can’t ask that of them. If it is not the law in this child’s state, it needs to be.

Art Deco
Art Deco
Tuesday, July 27, AD 2021 8:40am

Somebody PLEASE SUE THE TEACHER AND SCHOOL.

Yes! And can we please remove some of the immunity public employees have? Until some dean loses his house, you’re going to have try-every-door noncompliance.

Frank
Frank
Tuesday, July 27, AD 2021 12:33pm

Art: “ And can we please remove some of the immunity public employees have?”
Indeed, please! The doctrine of sovereign immunity, which says the government cannot be sued without its consent, is an extra-Constitutional legal fiction, derived from the English common law principle that “the King/Queen can do no wrong.” It never had logical application to a non-monarchical form of government. I believe there certainly is a place for some limited forms of immunity, such as for police and firefighters, to pick a timely example. However, the idea of insulating most behavior from the risk of being accountable for one’s incompetence, or even malfeasance, simply because the actor is employed by a governmental entity, is absurd. In my opinion, anyway. The Federal courts created the doctrine because they could, not because it really needed to be created. Again, in my opinion.
I went around and around with my Con Law professor in college on this point. (He is still teaching, by the way, in his mid-70’s now.) I maintained (and still do) that the courts usurped the Legislature in placing this rule in US law from the start. He maintained that adopting general English common law was not an unreasonable approach, in that the judges in America’s infancy believed a contrary rule would too greatly discourage good people from seeking government service. I still think I was right. Here’s a good Law Review article that agrees with me.,😁

https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1685&context=faculty_scholarship

SouthCoast
SouthCoast
Tuesday, July 27, AD 2021 12:33pm

There was a phrase used back in the Sixties to describe the sort of deliberate psychological sadism the school committed. The first word was “mind” and the second was a now all-too-common expletive. I have spent decades expunging my college/counterculture vocabulary, but, in this case…

T. Shaw
T. Shaw
Wednesday, July 28, AD 2021 4:42am

Pitchforks! Tar And Feathers!

Every year, we [taxpayers with no kids in school] vote down the inflated [always rises by CPI+++], local school budget. And, every year, the grossly-over-paid administrators and PTA mobilize the parents to pass it on the second go. The law ought to require a lower budget amount on the second try.

Parents, Get with the program. The education PhDs don’t give a tinker’s dam about your children.

Equity – “It’s a term chosen because it sounds like equality, which is popular, but is actually about treating people unequally, which isn’t, but which our Gentry Class urgently wants to do.” Glenn Reynolds

Ezabelle
Ezabelle
Wednesday, July 28, AD 2021 1:11pm

Yes Sue them. That’s psychological abuse. Parents are children’s first and foremost educators. Any institution or person anywhere behaving or telling parents otherwise need to be stared down to their face. I had a preschool teacher (and this is preschool mind you) tell me what my kid liked to eat and what to put in his lunchbox. Grrr. I squarely told her in tense words that I decide that and he will eat what I put him. It didn’t concern her. They are my rules. She backed down like a mouse and didn’t try that one again. They need to know their place. Schools sometimes take it too far, they don’t know when to pull their nose out of the parenting part. Schools work WITH the children FOR the parents. Parents stand up and stare down.

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