WSJ: Gen-Z yearns for stability
WSJ: Gen-Z yearns for stability
Not long ago, a friend who teaches a communications course at a Midwestern business school asked me to speak to her class. Her instructions were invitingly wide: “Just tell them about your career.” And so I did, trying to hit all the points that might be relevant to students about to enter the job market.
Unmentioned in the article, and presumably the address to the class, is that Suzy is married to Jack Welch.
A course meant to inspire more Black students to take AP classes
I don’t encourage boys to go into engineering either. For individual students with the interest and aptitude to become engineers, I did everything I could to help them become engineers. I have recommended colleges, suggested specific majors and made arrangements for them to talk to people I know working in their intended field. The same things I would do for any of my students.
They are like termites, borrowing in to everything and causing structural damage that isn’t obvious until the whole thing collapses. The Ohio State University College of Engineering is committed to DIE.
OSU has a nuclear reactor for training and research. When hiring a Nuclear Engineering professor, they want a statement of loyalty to the DIE cause.
This is from The Ohio State University job posting for a tenure-track Nuclear Engineering professor.
Attachment 3: Diversity Statement (Pursuant to the university’s shared values the search committee will ask all applicants to provide a written statement that describes your commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion. Please provide specific examples such as teaching and/or mentoring students from underrepresented backgrounds, outreach activities to underrepresented groups, or conducting research that address social inequities)
At one point, diversity, inclusion and equity sounded benevolent, but now we know better.
Diversity: People are reduced to their demographic value. Quality is long term and hard to measure. Diversity is easy to measure right now. It’s too much to ask that Deans and hiring committees hire on demonstrated excellence when that could hurt their careers. The quality of research and instruction is subordinate to having the correct number of people from favored identity groups.
Inclusion: What a person says and does matters less than how words and actions are interpreted by a person with more points on the identity privilege matrix. Pretend fear by a privileged person causes real fear in everyone else. It’s like living in that episode of Twilight Zone where Will Robinson has vast mental powers, and everyone has to suck up to him constantly.
Equity: Equality of outcome means that individual aptitude and effort is irrelevant. Why would a gifted and motivated person work hard if the outcome will be the same? By definition, professors are smart. They will see that grade distribution must reflect the appropriate demographics or questions will be asked. Objective assessments are out. Grade inflation is inevitable.
Go woke and go broke. That rhymes and is true. Embrace DIE and die. Disney was the most loved company in America. Now, it’s market capitalization and public perception has collapsed. I attended Ohio State and loved my time there. When OSU won the National Championship in 2002, it’s reputation and prestige went through the roof. That can all be squandered.
The state legislature in Ohio is attempting to ban the racist and sexist hiring policies of DIE. If that legislation passes and the Board of Regents gets involved, OSU may be saved before it is ruined. The Ohio State University has huge amounts of good will, but like Disney, that can be lost.
Electric school buses may actually make sense. Electric cars aren’t a good solution for most people because they take a long time to recharge and lose range quickly in cold weather.
When I started at North Royalton a couple of decades ago, I forwarded information to the administration about a government program to subsidize the conversion of school buses to natural gas. The district had some capped natural gas wells, so this could have been a great opportunity.
Are we finally entering an era of electric school buses?
It appears that way: A growing number of school districts are upgrading their student transportation with electric buses. The Biden-Harris Administration has paved the way for electric school buses with resources and funding.
School buses have tons of room for batteries. A school bus has two steel beams for a frame, with the body resting on top. Batteries could easily be nestled between the beams. District maintenance garages would have access to 220 V charging, or even 480 V 3 phase power. Home owners may not have 220 V available for a charger, so are looking at 8 hours for a full charge. Not convenient.
Bus drivers have fixed routes, so running out of a charge isn’t likely. Transportation for field trips and athletic events could be a concern. A wise district would consider retaining a number of diesel buses for those uses.
Heating uses a ton of energy. There is no way around that. Engines produce waste heat, so heating the passenger compartment isn’t an issue. For an electric vehicle, getting stuck in traffic in the Winter could end the trip. For student pickup, buses are generally on surface streets and the entire route isn’t likely to challenge the vehicle range.
The rest of the article dwells on stupid stuff.
Electric buses also provide a smoother, better ride to and from school; fewer vibrations on the bus mean lower body fatigue for students and drivers.
Nobody cares about that.
A quieter ride means children are more likely to arrive at school with a calmer headspace, ready and eager to learn.
Or that.
Electric fleets give back more energy than they consume during the day, and each electric bus has enough charge to provide electricity to four to six homes for one day.
I can’t tell what that is supposed to mean.
A mindset shift. While electric buses cost more, this should be viewed as strategic long-term investment for the betterment of our communities.
That’s a problem.
Electric buses doesn’t sound like a bad idea, but the articles proposing that approach should be more realistic, rather than just throwing in everything the author can think of. It makes me think they are lying about something.
Laws prohibiting the teaching of CRT are an overreaction, but that is what we have been pushed to. Parents will not allow their children to be taught divisive and corrosive Marxist theory. If they have to use a hammer to resolve the problem, they will.
When 10 Black shoppers were killed at a Buffalo, N.Y., supermarket, allegedly by a white 18-year-old with a history of racist writings, history teacher Mary McIntosh didn’t know how to talk about it with her high schoolers in Memphis, Tenn.
Tennessee is one of 19 states with laws or rules designed to regulate how racism and issues of race are discussed in the classroom. The Buffalo shooting was a stark example of a national news event that McIntosh says she struggled to address with students, even while teaching to a predominantly Black and brown student body.
Current events are frequently discussed in history classes. I’d be curious how this teacher would have discussed this tragedy if the anti-CRT were not passed and how the teacher did discuss it. I’m not certain why the teacher would choose to discuss this isolated crime as opposed to broader trends in crime. Young Black men are shot by young Black men much more frequently than they are shot by the police or racist young White men. That would be a valuable discussion.
“The Tennessee law does indeed have a big impact on how I can plan to teach with honesty and integrity,” she says.
The law, passed in May 2021, says it permits “impartial” discussions of the “controversial aspects of history” and “the historical oppression of a particular group of people.” But, teachers may not teach “resentment” of “a class of people” or that “an individual, by virtue of the individual’s race or sex, is inherently privileged, racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or subconsciously.” Students, parents, or employees of a school can file complaints about teachers who violate the law. Schools found to have violated the law stand to lose 2% of their state funds or $1 million, whichever is less, for each violation.
It isn’t clear how a teacher could be confused by the clear instruction to not teach racism or racial resentment. Implicit racism and microaggressions usually sound like a person can’t find any actual racism, so has to go to the sub-text. It’s heresy to suggest that teachers could be presenting implicitly racist lessons to students, but that seems to be what the teachers are afraid they are doing.
In states from Colorado to Iowa, some bills required teachers to post their syllabi and all of their class readings online—opening them to challenges from parents, or activists who might agree with their decisions.
There is plenty of evidence that some teachers view parents as un-evolved genetic throwbacks who don’t know what’s best for their children. To school administrators, it is not controversial to suggest that a child’s gender identity should be embraced and is information that should be withheld from parents. When educators withhold information from parents, my default position is that the administrators are the bad guys.
My first year teaching, a student’s parent challenged my approach to teaching Physics. He taught Physics in the Cleveland Metropolitan School District, and had a list of questions. We went head-to-head on each issue. He was a reasonable guy and, by the end of the meeting, offered to share his worksheets, labs and lab equipment with me. None of it was very good, but I appreciated the gesture. I went into the meeting thinking I was doing things properly, but open to any suggestions.
One Florida bill even proposed installing video cameras in classrooms.
This proposal is fraught with issues, but isn’t necessarily bad for teachers. When police officers got body-cams, they were initially against the idea, but found that police brutality complaints dropped by 90%. Student privacy is a concern. Also, the purpose of the cameras would need to be well established. A classroom camera would not be effective for distance learning. If the teacher had unlimited access to the video, it could be useful for test security or for disciplinary purposes.
Since Florida passed the Stop WOKE Act, which aims to regulate how schools talk about race, in April, Matthew Bunch, who teaches advanced placement U.S. government in Miami Dade County, says he’s “dreading” teaching Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” next year because it addresses citizens’ right to challenge the government if they feel like their rights are being violated. “I don’t know how, without trampling on one of those landmines, we can actually talk about the document and what it means and what it influences.”
Mr. Bunch has to put some thought into his racial biases and examine his own heart for implicit racism. That’s the hard thing. Most teachers are regular people who aren’t particularly political. Now that everything is political, that is changing. It was no secret that I declined to join the union. For one thing, I didn’t attend union meetings. I was invited to, but didn’t feel it was appropriate. The local union leadership was generally very good to me. My feelings were known, but I didn’t challenge or threaten them.
At North Royalton, about 10% of the teachers were big Trump supporters and another 30% were generally conservative, however, they were all cautious about revealing that. Since I was demonstrably conservative, they would talk to me. About 5% were Leftist of the Woke variety, 20% were intelligent, classic Liberals, with the rest of the staff voted Democrat because they didn’t think about i
Mr. Bunch was not expecting any push-back from his reflexive Leftism. I can see where that would not be comfortable. When Liberals talk about change being good and inevitable, they don’t mean for themselves.
Gov. Mike DeWine announced a focus on phonics.
This article shows much of what’s wrong with public education.
While Gov. Mike DeWine announced a renewed focus on phonics-based literacy in his recent State of the State address, several Northeast Ohio school districts told News 5 the transition is already underway.
It should not take the governor of a state to define educational methods. We have a federal Department of Education, state department, regional education research centers and district curriculum directors. What the hell have they been doing for the last few decades?
A phonics approach involves breaking down a word letter by letter and a student sounding out the word.
Other methods can teach words as a whole, not individual letters, based on taking context clues such as other words in a sentence or pictures as a way to recognize and remember the word.
Egyptian hieroglyphics is a character-based language. China’s Mandarin or Japan’s Kanji are modern character-based languages. Learning to read a character-based language is an all-or-nothing deal. Whole word recognition is the only way to learn it.
Western languages use an alphabet where symbols represent sounds, and can be combined to form words. Even Western languages differ in how they are taught because the symbols and sounds are treated differently.
When I was posted near Madrid for a temporary foreign service assignment, I knew almost no Spanish. Arrangements were made to have me attend an English language institute to learn Spanish. My instructor was the headmaster of the school. The lessons did not go well because the school taught English to Spaniards, so weren’t prepared to teach Spanish to an American. The Madrid lisp made it worse.
Everyone knows that “gracias” means “thank you”. Americans would say, “gr-Ah-see-ahs”. In Madrid, it’s pronounced, “gr-ah-Thee-ahs” with “thee” sounding like “theme”. It’s the Madrid lisp. This wasn’t explained to me, and sounded like a speech impediment. I politely asked the headmaster if we were learning a dialect of Spanish. He hit the roof. We were in Alcalá de Henaras, which you may know, is the birthplace of Cervantes, who is the Shakespeare of the Spanish-speaking world.
The point is that the Caterpillar sales manager, who learned English by listening to the BBC, explained to me that Spanish is almost entirely phonetic. After about an hour, anyone can learn to read Spanish pretty well with no comprehension. Verbs are the tricky part. Spanish teachers know this, and teach the language different than English would be taught.
English is a Germanic language with Romance language influence. We have some confusing phonetics, like “Though” and “Through”. Perhaps the trickiness of English left us open to alternative approaches.
It [recent research] showed that 3rd and 4th graders had lower tests scores if they didn’t utilize phonics as a primary teaching approach. This came after decades of alternative teaching programs that came from places such as Columbia University and Ohio State University.
Colleges of Education were moving new teachers away from Phonics, toward innovative new ways to teach kids to read. In education, when you see “innovative”, think “untested”. Teachers did not make the decision to abandon Phonics.
“Some of our teachers feel guilty and they feel they let students down and these are some of the most dedicated, hard working individuals in the field,” he said. “They had been trusting what colleges and universities had been telling them they should be doing.”
In my experience, teachers want students to learn. There is no joy in being ineffective and pointless. Education professors, researchers and experts, need to publish and advocate for new methods to fix problems. They don’t get attention for telling teachers to just keep doing what they are doing.
Teachers and curriculum directors were encouraged to embrace modern methods and that was a mistake.
As Tennessee, others target drag shows, many wonder: Why? It may be because encouraging perverts to celebrate with children is depraved.
The protestations have arisen fairly suddenly around a form of entertainment that has long had a place on the mainstream American stage.
That such spectacles are now being portrayed as a danger to children boggles the minds of people who study, perform and appreciate drag.
I can understand why perverts wouldn’t want people to call them perverts.
This article is intentionally obtuse in support of depravity. Everybody understands boys dressing as women for Halloween, Milton Berle doing it for a laugh or high school Powder Puff games. That’s not what we are talking about. Its transvestites, simulated strip shows and sexualizing children.
Passing a law may not be the preferred approach. Conscientious parents are not concerned with unintended consequences of the law. They will let it all burn before allowing their children to be seduced. The best approach would be for degenerates to go back to the red light district or seedy part of town and remain in the shadows, while the people in positions of authority act like they care about the children in a community. Failing that, good people should expose the child groomers, cut budgets and demand that staff changes.
Side Topic: In the Woke world, why is cross-dressing acceptable? It seems like the gender equivalent of wearing blackface. Drag is even more egregious since the performer is portraying an exaggerated version of a woman. Drag is analogous to Mickey Rooney wearing buck teeth and doing the, “Me so solly” routine in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
Administrators are responsible for far left takeover
The people in charge, deans, mayors and governors encouraged the protests and policies that are doing so much damage.
Here are two examples from my alma maters.
Occupy protest ends at Ohio State when Dean mentions consequences.
Kasey told the protesters he would not argue with them. “We simply tell you the truth and you live with your actions,” he said. When someone asked what he meant by “clear the building,” Kasey responded, “Our police officers will physically pick you up and take you to a paddy wagon.”
Nine Day sit-in ends at Clemson
“What [the sit-in] has done, I think,” said Max Allen, the university’s chief of staff, “is caused Clemson to take a solid look at itself, not only for the students involved in that protest but some faculty, staff and I’d add administrators who really had their eyes opened to what can we do as a community to make Clemson better for everyone.”
The Clemson administration supplied running water and portable generators to keep the protestors comfortable.
Over at the Teacher Reddit , there was a post about whether teachers should follow the same rules that students are supposed to follow. Of course not, the teacher is in charge, but occasionally, it’s fun to play along.
Early on, I came up with the Wheel of Science. To layout the wheel, it was easiest to have 28 cards. So, half of the deck and two jokers. Each student picked a card from the other half of the deck. That was their card for the year. Their card was used when I needed to pick students randomly.
One use for the Wheel was to choose a student to explain one of the homework problems for the class. The student doing the current problem would spin the wheel to decide who’s doing the next one. If a card came up that wasn’t assigned to a student, then we spin again. If a joker came up, then I would demonstrate the problem.
Eventually, we needed a rule for when a student spun their own card. It seemed fun to have that person do the rest of the problems remaining in that set. It just added a little peril, and the students didn’t really mind. When a joker came up, I’d spin, and more often than you’d think, another joker would come up. Sure, I didn’t really have to do the rest of the problems in the set, but it was better fun to feign irritation. “Son of b… Why do I have to do all the work? This is a rip off.”
At the end of each year, students inevitably ask what they are supposed to do with their card. I started telling them, “Keep it. It’s good for a free drink at the 10 year reunion.” I haven’t had to come through on that promise, but if a former student contacted me and asked, I would have to come through.
Steve Vaughn
It is very rare for a first-year teacher to be in charge right out of the box. Classroom management is usually a problem. I started teaching at 36 years old, so knew a lot of things, but classroom management was not part of my skill set.
When I started at Normandy, I taught three classes of Physics and two of Physical Science. One of the Physical Science kids was just a non-stop dick. The other Physical Science teacher, Steve Vaughn, offered to have that kid transferred to his class. Steve assured me that he wouldn’t be a problem.
Wanting to learn, I asked Steve how he would handle this student. Steve said, “He knows that if he screws around, I’ll kick his ass.”
Funny, right? By 1996, paddling was long gone.
“No seriously, you can’t kick his ass, so how are you going to get this kid to behave?”
“I’ll kick his ass. He’s on the wrestling team, so during practice, I will slip on the mat and pancake him. He knows I’d do something like that.”
Steve was the head wrestling coach.
Say what you want about corporal punishment, but that student behaved for Steve and passed the class. I’d bet that Steve still knows this student’s name and can tell me where he works and how he’s doing. The best coaches are like that. They don’t get enough credit for the good they do.
And Steve? Until 2025, he is the president of the Parma City School District’s Board of Education.
Here is a video of Steve Vaughn’s story
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