Cell phones banned in Dutch schools
Cell phones, tablets and smartwatches will be largely banned from classrooms in the Netherlands from January 1, 2024, the Dutch government said on Tuesday, in a bid to limit distractions during lessons.
I would not appreciate a law like this in the US.
“Because the truth is, we all know it: Discrimination still exists in America,” Mr. Biden told reporters in the Roosevelt Room.
Biden is correct. Discrimination still exists in America, and he likes it that way.
NYT: Racial Gaming in Admissions
NYT: Racial Gaming in Admissions
One of my Asian-American students asked if I believed in reverse discrimination. I told him there is no such thing as reverse discrimination, there is just discrimination, and elite colleges do it to Asian-American students all the time.
Nobody likes being told what to do or how to live. Tell a teenager how something should be done, and the mental blast shields come up. That’s one reason why vegans, environmentalists and the WOKE can be so tedious. Everyone used to know that people learn from stories. That’s why the Bible has so many of them. A story is engaging, and allows the message to slip in.
Boys need stories about heroes to learn how to be men. For those with limited comprehension, I’m not saying girls don’t, it’s just different. Boys need men to live up to. Blessed is the man who was intimidated by his dad in his teen years, but eventually hopes he can be half the man his father was.
The genre of story doesn’t matter much. Westerns, sports underdog or adventurer stories can all show a man up against the wall. He chooses to do what’s right, regardless of the cost, and there is a cost. It’s grueling, painful or dangerous. He gets his ass beat, but it works out in the end.
Rocky and the first Indiana Jones are two great examples.
Teaching Physics, telling stories and showing examples of men was part of my hidden agenda.
Furious parents marched their children across picket lines of striking teachers in Oakland, California, on Friday on the seventh day of a strike in which teachers are demanding reparations for slavery, among other demands.
Say what you want about France, but they don’t play “follow the leader”. They protect their interests and make their own decisions. On race relations, they seem to have a sensible policy. I had some idea of how they handled diversity issues, so found this Brookings Institute article to be interesting.
NPR: History and Civics scores are down, and nobody should be surprised. The response to the Covid pandemic by the government and education officials was deplorable. I heard this story on NPR this morning, and it also illustrates how trivial their news reporting has become. Everyone wants to know how much damage was done to students by long periods of remote learning.
Equitable grading is just another way to lie about education. Some students will learn more and some will learn less. If grades mean anything, they should reflect a student’s demonstrable ability. Making excuses for students of unfortunate background doesn’t change their demonstrable ability.
I can go on about all the bad that came from the Covid lock down, but one good result is that people who weren’t previously technically savvy, stepped up their game to learn new skills and start establishing an online presence.
Schools are a condensed version of the community. To stop school shootings, society has to change, and that’s difficult. It is more convenient for activists to use school shootings to their political advantage. “Never let a crisis go to waste.” The corollary is never solve a crisis if you don’t have to.
Everybody needs to grow up and act like adults.
Does anyone really want to stop school shootings? I ask because when there is a school shooting, even before the bodies have cooled, a legion of activists demand that guns are taken away from responsible gun owners.
Watch the security footage of the Nashville shooter. Why do the front doors have full-length glass panels? Adjacent to the front doors, are full-length glass panels. Those provide no barrier to entry. You see that adjacent to the office doors, there are small panels. That makes sense and is as attractive. What happened to the wire-embedded glass that was in doors back in the day?
At North Royalton, we recently opened a new wing at the high school. The rest of the building underwent a substantial renovation. Teachers had several meetings with architects as the renovation was planned. Central Office tried to accommodate our requests.
Central Office or the architects did not look to our comments to validate their decisions. The design was big on glass panels. Some were changed, but for the most part, classrooms have a full-length glass panel adjacent to every door. From a security standpoint, that is unsupportable. It doesn’t make any sense.
The walls in the new wing are drywall. The old building is concrete block and poured concrete. That can be made to look attractive, but is more expensive to build. It’s possible to kick through drywall to gain entrance and drywall doesn’t stop a bullet.
If administrators and government officials were actually interested in reducing casualties from school shootings, all classroom doors would have windows with embedded wire mesh and all glass panels would be small enough to be difficult to crawl through. Walls would be substantial enough to provide some security.
Nobody asks administrators or government officials why schools are built to be so welcoming to school shooters. I suspect the people in authority are engaging in a type of magical thinking. If it doesn’t look like we are worried about violence, nobody will think about being violent. Have high expectations, and everyone will rise to meet them.
Immediately after a school shooting, before the bodies are buried, political opportunists attempt to exploit the story to achieve their objectives. A few days later, most of the details of the tragedy are known. After a week, the commercial media has settled on a narrative that benefits their political interests or they move on to other news.
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