Scenario:
Pedro fails high school English.
1958 - Pedro goes to summer school, passes English and goes to college.
2008 - Pedro's cause is taken up by state.
Newspaper articles appear nationally
explaining that teaching English as a requirement for graduation is racist.
ACLU files class action lawsuit against state school system
and Pedro's English teacher. English banned from core curriculum.
Pedro given diploma anyway but ends up
mowing lawns for a living because he cannot speak English.
What a grand display of hyper inflated over exago bull crap. And, yes, FUCKING RACIST! This is the exact kind of bullshit that will piss me off no matter who the fuck is president. The fact that...and I know this is true because I hear about it every day from some of my conservative friends....these people think that if you don't learn English you end up mowing lawns is, without a doubt, the purest example of ego centrism combined with jingoism I have ever seen. Guess what, d bags? We aren't number one anymore largely thanks to the buffoon who occupied the oval office from 2001 to 2009. If any language should be learned, it's Chinese, not English.
"English banned from core curriculum?" Douche Bag Code for "Them firners are a comin'!"
"ACLU files...?" Douche Bag Code for "Please release your inner racist or you will be speaking firner soon."
"Newspaper articles appear nationally..." Douche Bag code for "All media are liberal commies who should be taken to camps and/or shot in the head."
"Pedro's cause is taken.." Douche Bag code for "Liberals are fascists who want to take your guns."
How much longer are we going to listen to this crap? People that say these types of things are fucking liars. Period. Liars who seek only to instill fear and fan rage.
The real reason why Pedro has failed high school English was that he was probably given a standardized test (see: No Child Left Behind) that has no sensitivity whatsoever to his learning style or his culturally diverse background. This essentially means that it is the worst fucking gauge of his actual intelligence.
In addition, his instructor was more than likely a lazy ass and did not pay attention to Pedro's differentiated learning style. If, instead of lecture, he had been taught in one of the other MILLION instructional strategies available to teachers, he would NOT have failed. Off the top of my head, if I have an ELL (English Language Learner) in one of my classes, I try to use as much audio and visual material as I can. I certainly don't stand up there and jabber away with an ego the size of a hot fucking air balloon while my students doodle, text, or pass out from boredom.
So, all of you...please...the next time you hear anything remotely like this, call the moron on their bullshit. Tell them to take a walk down Main Street and see who actually lives in our country now as opposed to the make believe land they have in their delusions.
8 comments:
you sure are mad. calm down. you liberals always throw the racism charge out any chance you get then you wonder why no progress gets made on race in the country. youve been caught lying on here several times yourself. why don't you tell us who lives in this country now since you claim you are so tuned in with everything.
"you liberals always throw the racism charge out any chance you get..."
Thus we see how some people can so deftly skirt the race issue as well as living in denial regarding their own racism.
Speaking of someone being off his meds...
"Pedro's cause is taken.." Douche Bag code for "Liberals are fascists who want to take your guns."
That's just a little scary that you think that.
Seriously M. The set-up was silly and exaggerated, but your hyperventilating almost makes it seem reasonable. I swear I could just see the veins at your temples throbbing like that sci-fi movie Scanners.
While I'll be the first to admit that different people have different learning styles, I think the major problem with schools are not the teachers, not the English-as-Second-Language problem, not the curriculum, not the teaching styles. It's the kids and their parents.
First: Seems to me most kids aren't learning anything because they just don't feel like it. Sure, teachers could be better at motivating and finding the right approach for each kid. But if the brats don't give a damn, they're never going to learn.
I mean, 10-year-olds will go to extreme lengths to find the cheat codes for their video games, doing things that are much more complicated than what's in their math homework. Yet they just can't be bothered to do 20 minutes of problems.
And why aren't the kids motivated? Parents today seem to be incapable of making their kids do anything. And this is no liberal/conservative thing. I've seen conservative parents cave to their children with the best of them. Partly it's because they're overly attached to them, but partly it's laziness on the parents' part: it's much easier to cave in to the screaming brat than maintain consistent discipline.
Every time a kid does something wrong these days, the parents take the brat's side no matter how egregious the behavior. They simply refuse to admit their little darling could possibly do anything wrong, even when they watch them doing it. Conservatives blame all their kids' problems on having to be with those Spanish-speaking, scarf-wearing kids, while Pedro's mom thinks he could learn math much better in Spanish.
People have pretty much thrown concepts like justice, altruism and the common good out the window, especially when their kids are involved. And what does that teach their kids?
I'm all for learning foreign languages (I've studied several myself), but if you're living in a country you should speak like a native. It is a crime if a child doesn't learn before the age of 13 or so, because after that the brain becomes hard-wired and they will pick up a native accent. Speaking English well won't magically drain the Hispanic culture out of your kids, any more than having friends with two moms will make them gay.
And it just doesn't end: parents coddle their children long into adulthood. They drive their kids back and forth to college, help them move into the dorm, help them do their job interviews, call potential employers, etc. Ain't these kids got any gumption? Who would hire a guy whose mommy has to babysit him through his job hunt? It used to be just the very rich who micromanaged their offsprings' budding careers (like GWB), but in the last ten years middle class parents have fallen into this same self-defeating trap.
We are foolish for thinking that spending more money on education, heaping more requirements on top of teachers, grinding kids through multitudes of tedious and dumbed-down standardized tests will make our kids do better, without requiring more effort from them. If they don't care enough to try, nothing anyone else does will make them learn.
School should be the first step out of the home into the real world, a place where you start to learn the harsh realities: you don't always get what you want, everyone isn't just like you, sometimes you have to do things you don't want to, sometimes you have to do a lot of work for very little reward.
Who is this blk and what have you done with the blk that usually posts here. Can't be the same person 'cause I'm in complete agreement with you - and that just can't happen! ;-)
It was a good post Juris, even though he couldn’t resist inserting a "Most conservatives think..." line that Mark likes to use instead of simply asking the conservatives on here what they think. That’s asking too much apparently.
Full disclosure – I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about other peoples education. I think about my education (aka the business law class I am in now) much more. Speaking for myself, my job, my relationships, my social life, my health, my hobbies and my finances are far more relevant to my day than the macro-economic and political stuff that revolves around what is best for the children. It's not that I don't think people should care about things political on a personal level but my life is lived in a smaller sphere, thank God. To some that might sound selfish, but I would hate to be someone so wrapped up in the larger world that I couldn't find happiness in a job well done, a hug from my gf, a beer with a friend, a night of softball, being at the salsa club, etc.
Everyone has their own opinions on what’s wrong with education. My opinion is that what is wrong can’t be broken down into simplistic one-liners like blaming the political party you don’t like, blaming lack of funding, calling teachers lazy, calling methods of teaching racist, etc. It’s probably a little bit of all of that.
The best teachers I had were the ones that spent a few years doing something besides teaching. The best teacher I had in business school spent many years as an executive at Coca Cola. So how about no hiring of education majors except for K-6 and special ed. Incent to have people with real world experience teach middle school and high school after they’ve decided to get out of the grind. People who are potentially motivated at age 22 to pursue a career because it has summers off are not the ones who should be teaching teenagers. Is that harsh? Probably. I don’t care.
Speaking of college, the method of instruction our 7th graders are subjected to isn’t really going to mean a whole lot if most of the kids coming of age now can’t afford college. The fact is that employers want workers with college degrees. A great many students are not going to be able to afford a degree program at a community college, let alone a major private university. Sure there are Stafford loans and Pell grants but many recent college grads are finding themselves in the middle of an unfolding education hoax on the middle class that's just as insidious, and nearly as sweeping, as the housing debacle. The ingredients are pretty similar, too: Misguided easy-money policies that are encouraging people to go into debt; a self-serving establishment trading in half-truths that exaggerate the value of its product; plus a Wall Street money machine dabbling in outright fraud as it throws unaffordable debt on vulnerable people.
I’m saying that I think the next bubble to pop may be student loan debt.
The root cause of this impending bubble is the same for the housing market. Politicians decided that all students should go to college and if you questioned the policy THEN YOU ARE AGAINST THE CHILDREN!!!!!!!! Oh I remember the times when politicians decided that all people should own their own home (see how that worked out). Those are certainly admirable goals, but prescriptions for disaster as public policy. Rather than create public colleges with no requirement for tuition, which would have been the honest way to implement that policy, the federal government pushed for tuition loans, upping the demand at universities. With billions of dollars flooding the market and consumer demand dramatically rising, prices increased across the board, predictable from the basic economic law of supply and demand. When prices increased, the subsidies increased, which increased demand and pushed prices higher, creating a vicious cycle … exactly as it did in the housing market.
Government has to get out of the lending markets altogether. If politicians want to subsidize education, they should create more supply and lower the price in order to create the increased accessibility they want, not create bubbles in lending markets. Better yet, government should stay out of it altogether and let the market take care of itself.
Wow. Aren't you proud, M, that you can fisk a known and extremely exaggerated (if not false) snopes-worthy email? /sarcasm
Give it a rest and go fisk something real. You can always look at Kevin's work at Smallest Minority to get a clue on how to do that. This wasn't worth the effort and emotion you put into it - kind of like fisking a comic book.
You might want to wipe your mouth, Markadelphia. There's froth coming out.
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