Archive for September, 2021

Report from Louisiana: Canned Curriculum Fatigue

Posted: September 13, 2021 by Pat Austin in Uncategorized
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By:  Pat Austin  

SHREVEPORT – I highly recommend retirement.

I retired from the classroom after twenty-five years this past spring and could not be happier about it. Not everyone is cut out for retirement, or so I hear, but so far, I am loving it.

Part of the equation is that it was definitely time for me to leave the classroom; Common Core scripted lesson plans were not for me. My very nature rebelled against the canned slides, the prewritten questions, and the dull activities, the endless annotation of a “text.” I railed against all of this for the last five years of my career. You don’t realize what a burden this sort of thing places on you until you get away from it, until you strip away those bindings.

As younger, newer teachers come into the profession, this method will be the only one they know. They won’t know any other way to design lessons because they’ll never have to actually create a lesson. And the rebels, the old guard, like me, we are leaving in droves.

The result will be students that all learn the same material the same exact way.

That makes me sad, but blissfully happy that I am no longer a part of it.

When school began this fall, I thought I would miss it.  I do not. As much as I loved my students, it was time for me to go. The boring, canned lessons create more classroom disruptions. A bored kid is going to either go to sleep, pull out his phone, or act out. I no longer had the energy to battle this.

I worry a little about what is happening in education today but not so much anymore that I think I can do anything about it. I used to believe I could make a difference, that I could change things. Truth is, I could make a difference in my little room with my own students, but that was it. The future of education is in the hands of the big guys like Pearson, like Bill Gates…people with agendas and companies that write tests and publish books.

It isn’t about what is good for the kid anymore, I don’t believe.

To those teachers still in there fighting the good fight, you have my support and my best wishes.

Meanwhile, I’ll be enjoying retired life. I get up when I want to, I don’t have to wait until a bell rings to go to the restroom or to each lunch. Lunch can be whatever time and last for however long I wish. I can spend my days in a hammock reading a book, at my computer writing a masterpiece, planning delicious meals for my family. I can travel on a whim. I can spend the entire day sitting on the edge of the Atchafalaya Basin drinking a beer and watching the boats.

And for me, that’s much better than standing before a classroom of bored students reading a canned slide and having them annotate a dull passage for the third time because some suit in some office thinks that’s how kids learn.

Pat Austin blogs at And So it Goes in Shreveport and at Medium; she is the author of Cane River Bohemia: Cammie Henry and her Circle at Melrose Plantation. Follow her on Instagram @patbecker25 and Twitter @paustin110.

The greatest Indictment of Seattle I’ve Yet Heard

Posted: September 13, 2021 by datechguy in catholic, culture
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An interesting thing happened to me yesterday at church. As mass was ending I noticed a woman I did not recognize checking out the Indulgence calendars on the back table so I went over, introduced myself and explained what they were. It turned out she had come from Seattle visiting family, I introduced my wife and the three of us proceeded to the Knights of Columbus pancake breakfast downstairs in the church hall and found ourselves in conversation as we ate.

As we spoke (Dawife and her really hit if off) we found she was originally from Massachusetts but was thinking of moving back as the next was now empty and she had family both in the area & near Boston so she was scouting out various cities and towns and proceeded to ask about the Fitchburg / Leominster area. Her first question spoke volumes:

Is it safe for a woman to go to a supermarket at 8 PM in this city.

Now Fitchburg isn’t what it was when I was a teen and there are parts that are a lot rougher thanks to drugs and gangs but I was able to say “yes” without hesitation, but the implication of the question that really hit me.

When a woman’s first question when inquiring about a potential move concerns personal safety that suggests where they currently are isn’t safe.

Seattle was once of the great cities in our nation, but over the last few years it has let itself become ruled by the mob to the point where the first question from a professional woman looking for a new place to live is “Will I be safe to go grocery shopping?”

That we should reach this point in an American city in my lifetime is disgraceful and that I feel more shame over it as an American then those who actually run Seattle three thousand miles away do is the greatest indictment of their actions and inactions that I can think of.

If you don’t want such people, we’ll gladly take them.

Cognitive decline: the mainstream media is still protecting Biden

Posted: September 12, 2021 by John Ruberry in culture, entertainment, media, News/opinion, politics
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By John Ruberry

After the collapse of the government of Afghanistan last month mainstream media reporters remembered for a little while that they were supposed to be journalists instead of propagandists and protectors of the Democratic Party.

They criticized President Joe Biden for the Afghan debacle, which was easily the worst foreign policy disaster since the fall of Saigon in 1975. It may have been the worse than that, as no one expected the Viet Cong to attack America. 

But those catcalls from the media only went so far. No one, outside of conservatives, has addressed the metaphorical crazy grandpa in the basement–Joe Biden’s clear cognitive decline. 

Okay, let’s get something out of the way. I am not a doctor and I have never met Joe Biden. But even two years ago, as he announced his run for the presidency, it was clear, to phrase it as Mark Levin did, that “the spin was off of his fastball.” Of course Biden, always a mediocrity, never had much of a fastball. 

And of course to prevent a Bernie Sanders Democratic nomination and a likely Donald Trump victory, US Rep. James Clyburn led the rush to annoint Biden as their only hope to defeat Trump. And Biden campaigned, sort of, for the presidency from what Sean Hannity called “his basement bunker.” 

Greg Ganske, an MD and former Republican member of Congress, knows Biden, In an op-ed for the Des Moines Register, he decried Biden’s mental decline.

It’s gotten worse since the election. In a CNN interview, he opined, “Um, you know there’s a, uh, during World War II, uh you know, where Roosevelt came up with a thing, that uh, you know, was totally different, than a, than the, he called it, you know, the WWII, he had the War Production Board.” In March he forgot the name of his Defense Secretary, Lloyd Austin, at a White House event, calling the Pentagon chief “the guy who runs that outfit over there.”

I am not alone in seeing a difference in President Biden. Mike McCormick, who worked 15 years as a White House stenographer and with Biden from 2011 to 2017, has said, “He’s lost a step and he doesn’t seem to have the mental acuity he had four years ago. He doesn’t have the energy, he doesn’t have the pace of his speaking. He’s a different guy. He read that Democratic National Committee speech verbatim — it’s not Joe Biden anymore.”

John Kass, the former Chicago Tribune lead columnist, calls Biden “President Meat Puppet.” 

During the 2020 presidential campaign while watching Biden, well, sort of campaign on television, I was reminded of a Star Trek episode centered on the doomed and flawed John Gill, Captain Kirk’s former history professor, who creates a Nazi government because that fascist nation was, in Gill’s opinion, “the most effecient state Earth ever knew.” Not true, I need to add, although oddly enough Spock agreed. 

The Enterprise’s power trio watch in horror and pity as Gill, a puppet of the evil Melakon, addresses his planet in a televised address by announcing an attack on the scapegoat planet Zeon. “Captain, the speech follows no logical pattern,” says Spock. “Random sentences strung together,” Kirk adds. “He looks drugged, Jim,” observes Dr. McCoy, “Almost in a cataleptic state.”

“They’ve kept what’s left of him as a figurehead,” Kirk says. 

Last year Lou Aguilar of the American Spectator noticed the similarities between Biden and Gill in 2020. So did Victor Davis Hanson for American Greatness last month. But these men are conservatives.

Now I am not claiming Biden is a fascist. Calm down, leftists. He is not. Biden is a confused and tired old man–but only conservative pundits are noticing that. Are we smarter than liberals? Well yes, of course we are, but it seems at the very list our “betters,” the liberal elite that is, are looking the other way in regards to the president’s mental status. Or perhaps the liberal media is purposely hiding Biden’s cognitive decline, as seems to be the case with George Stephanopoulos, who allowed a portion of his most recent interview with the president to end up on the cutting room floor as he confused key details of his late son Beau’s military service. I suspect the latter scenario is the case.

Dr. Ronny Jackson is now a Republican congressman. He was the White House physician during the Trump presidency. Two months ago he called on Biden to take a cognitive test and for the results of it to be made public. Three years ago Jackson said he administered one to Trump and he reported that “45” answered every question correctly.

Here’s the problem the mainstream media faces. Biden will continue to have good days and bad days–but as I’ve observed with relatives of mine suffering from cognitive decline, the good days always become fewer. 

Oh, how many more times will Biden be hours late for a press conference? Why always so late?

Eventually Biden’s slipping mental state will be too obvious for even the liberal media to ignore. And when they finally do notice–it’s up to us to remind them that conservatives blew the whistle on Biden first. 

Perhaps at that time, in an act for redemption, the lefty talking heads and writers can reveal who the power is behind the Biden the Figurehead.

Kass has an idea, “Ron Klain, the White House chief of staff, is now openly referred to as President Klain.”

John Ruberry regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.

9/12 Thoughts Under the Fedora

Posted: September 12, 2021 by datechguy in Uncategorized

I’ve never liked 9/11 ceremonies. It always seemed that it was celebrating the enemies victory. My thought was we should crush and destroy them first and then when they are finished remember the day, particularly those who died in PA fighting back.

I accidently ended up at a 9/11 prayer service on Friday where the church that I go to Friday Morning Mass had their school kids file in for a service as a group of us were praying a Rosary. We were allowed to stay but frankly I wish I didn’t. 9/11 was painted as more a natural disaster done by people for no rational reason instead of the deliberate attack that it was and furthermore while they remembered those who died not a word for the soldiers who fought for us to prevent its repeating. It’s as if they were grooming these kids to be victims. I expect this from a public school but not a Catholic one.

One thing I mentioned in the last paragraph needs to be repeated and emphasized. For all the critiques of Afghanistan and Iraq the primary goal of both of those conflicts (at least in my mind) was to prevent another such attack here. Instead of launching attacks against civilian targets in the US for two decades terrorists concentrated on fighting the best Army the world has ever seen and for the most part dying in the attempt to beat them. Say what you will abut the various decision made but that primary goal was maintained for twenty years.

Like many others I would like to hear a clarification of the remarks of President Bush concerning domestic extremists specifying exactly who he means. Given he was using the same language as the MSM I’m not surprised a lot of people are angry at him, but unlike others I don’t regret my votes for him at all. He was the right man at the right time and as per the goals I outlined above left both Afghanistan & Iraq in a condition where they were in no position to repeat or support such an attack. It took Obama to give away the victory in Iraq and now Biden is dong the same in Afghanistan. Poor remarks not withstanding if Bush had still been in charge neither of these things would have happened.

Finally I’d like to say I was shocked by articles going on about Islamophobia yesterday during the same period that we have seen slaughter & slavery in Afghanistan as soon as the Islamists took command, a slaughter that if nothing else confirms that any “phobia” concerning Islam is well founded. Alas I could not be surprised. If the 40,000 plus people killed by radical Islamists since 9/11/01, the 219 attacks in 23 countries last month killing over 1500 and the 116 killed in attacks this month doesn’t catch the media’s eye why would I expect the slaughter in Afghanistan involving us to do so particularly on 9/11.

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