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.
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.
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