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What is the Matter with Parents these Days? – Part 1/4

23 Jul

More than twenty years ago, I attended a lecture at one of the Claremont Colleges. I do not recall the speaker’s name but he was a successful journalist that wrote for major publications such as The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.

He had published a memoir of raising his normal, above average daughter and a younger son with an IQ of eighty.  The lecture was about how his wife and he raised the son to graduate with honors from high school and be accepted to Harvard where he earned a degree in engineering.

I wish I could remember this journalist’s name and the title of his memoir, but it has been too long. However, I have not forgotten his story.  If anyone reading this post knows the title of the memoir, please tell me in a comment.

When this journalist’s son was old enough to start school at age six, the parents agonized over how to raise him so he could live a normal life and compete for jobs in the marketplace as an adult.

Job hunting and earning a living is not without its challenges and competition (on July 6, 2012, The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported 12.7 million Americans were unemployed, while the number of Americans living in poverty was more than 47 million and many go hungry daily).

For the journalist’s family, to achieve their goals as responsible parents, it was decided to retire the family television to the garage and read books every night with a family hour before bedtime to discuss what each family member read.

Twelve years later, the son with the eighty IQ earned a perfect score on the SAT and the high school principal claimed he had to have cheated. The father argued that his son had not cheated, so the school made the son take the SAT again in a room without any other students, and he was monitored by three staff members. The  son earned a second perfect SAT score. Soon after that, the son was accepted to Harvard

This brings me to a post I read at clotildajamcracker (a Blog) called What’s the Matter with Kids these Days?

The post is worth reading—specially the comments. However, the problem is not kids—it’s parents.

In fact, I read one comment from the Headless Coffee Guy that said, “Hey, I hope my daughter will grow up to be a super genius who will find the unified theory in physics, solve world hunger, save the whales, and write her first symphony at 4. … But alas, I think ultimately, it’s really not up to the parent to decide what their child wants to be. We can only nurture and suggest, but it’s really up to the child to make up their own minds. All I really want for my daughter is to be happy.”

Is there anything wrong with Headless Coffee Guy’s concept of parenting as expressed in that previous quote?

Continued on July 24, 2012 in What is the Matter with Parents these Days? – Part 2

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga.

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Posted by on July 23, 2012 in Education, family values, Parenting

 

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Eager to Learn or Not – Part 10/10

21 Jul

If you visit the 2010 API State Report for California, you will discover there are four subgroups that have achieved the goals set forth in the NCLB Act — Asian, Filipino, White/Caucasian, and a child of two or more races meaning parents from two different Ethnic/Racial groups where the mother may be African-American and the father White or the father Asian and the mother Latino.

I know from experience that for my brother, the learning equation (discussed in Part 2) was 1 + 0 + 0, which resulted in failure and an illiterate child growing up to become an illiterate adult. The teacher was there to teach but my brother was not there to learn.

When I was seven and my brother seventeen with some jail time already under his tattoos, my mother stepped in and taught me to read at home, and it was not easy for her. I fought her every inch of the way as my brother did. The difference is that my brother won that battle but lost at life.

However, to succeed with me my mother did something she did not do with Richard. She used a wire-coat hanger to spank me and motivate me to do as I was told and to learn.

Public school teachers in America are not allowed to do what a parent can do at home.

The result is that I learned to read and because of my mother’s involvement in that learning equation, I now have the ability to write things such as my novels, posts for this Blog and I enjoy reading books–lots of books.

Richard, on the other hand, died a broken man in both health and spirit at age 64, and he left behind several children mostly illiterate because he was a bad role model and was never involved in their educations, which resulted in more failure.

If you return to that NPR.org piece on the public school teachers and administrators that cheated on Atlanta’s standardized test results to make it look as if more students were making progress toward meeting the goals set forth in the NCLB Act, what caused that behavior was desperate people that did not want to lose their jobs due to the flawed opinions of fools in the federal government and of course among the Walton Wal-Mart family and talking heads such as Rush Limbaugh and my “old” NLBC  friend that believe they know what they are talking about when they don’t.

I do not blame my brother Richard’s teachers. They did their job and taught. However, Richard did not learn because he chose not to learn and our parents were not directly involved in the process when Richard needed them to be tough and say no and mean it even if it meant using a coat hanger as an enforcer.

During those 30 years teaching in the public schools (1975 – 2005), I met many students like my brother Richard and my goal was to convince and/or motivate these individuals (both boys and girls) to be an active part of the education equation. It was never easy and the successes were rare but there were a few.

Return to Eager to Learn or Not – Part 9 or start with Part 1

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

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Posted by on July 21, 2011 in Uncategorized

 

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Eager to Learn or Not – Part 9/10

20 Jul

During the 30 years that I taught English, reading and journalism in the public schools, I worked with thousands of students from every ethnic and socioeconomic group.

My family, although of White/Caucasian heritage with roots to England, Ireland and Europe would have been placed in three of the categories that the Academic Performance Index (API) identifies.

My brother and I would have been labeled as White (Caucasian), Socioeconomically Disadvantaged and Students with (learning) Disabilities.

A student that is labeled “Socioeconomically Disadvantaged” is defined as “a student neither of whose parents have received a high school diploma or a student eligible for free or reduced-price lunch program”.

A “Student with Disabilities” is defined as student who receives special education services and has a valid disability code on the student answer document (or) a student who was previously identified as special education but who is no longer receiving special education services for two years after exiting special education. This student is not counted in determining numerical significance for the SWDs subgroup.

The API monitors and measures the schools to see if the NCLB Act’s goal of reaching an average and/or norm for all Ethnic/Racial subgroups that is 800 or better on the API is being met.  Failure for schools and teachers to reach this goal for all subgroups may lead to being fired and/or having schools shut down while students will be bussed long distances to schools that have been successful.

For 2010, in California, the norm/average for Students with Disabilities was 544; for Socioeconomically Disadvantaged that norm/average was 701 while the norm for White/Caucasian was 842.

During the thirty years I taught in a public classroom, the subgroups that (on average) resembled my brother Richard and I are found mostly in Black or African American (API 676) and Hispanic or Latino (API 706) subgroups.  Source: 2010-11 APR Glossary-Base API

Continued on July 21, 2011 in Eager to Learn or Not – Part 10 or return to Part 8

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

To subscribe to “Crazy Normal”, look for the “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar, click on it then follow directions.

 
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Posted by on July 20, 2011 in American Public Schools, Education, family values, literacy, Parenting, politics

 

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Eager to Learn or Not – Part 8/10

19 Jul

Did you know that the Walton family, which owns a controlling interest in Wal-Mart, is the wealthiest family on the planet with an estimated worth of more than $90 billion dollars. The Waltons are also one of the largest supporters of the school voucher movement.

The last time there was a major initiative in California for school vouchers, the Waltons (WFF) were ready to open hundreds of private storefront schools to accept vouchers and take over the teaching of millions of America’s children. Do you want to turn your children over to Wal-Mart and the Walton family?

Both the Walton family and the company (Wal-Mart) have made education a major funding priority.

Many of the WFF’s education gifts have a distinct ideological tilt, emphasizing a “free market” approach to education reform, a vision the late John Walton embraced with particular enthusiasm. The WFF funds advocacy groups promoting conservative school “reform” — otherwise known as privatization — like the Center for Education Reform and the Black Alliance for Educational Options, as well as the actual programs these groups champion: charter schools and voucher programs.

In fact, the WFF has become the single largest source of funding for the voucher and charter school movement.

The modern movement for school vouchers can be traced to an individual by the name of Milton Friedman, who won the Nobel Prize in Economics.  Friedman wrote a paper on “The Role of Government in Education” in 1955.

The national debate that followed resulted in the use of vouchers in the Southern states as a means to continue the practice of segregation amongst black and white students. Source: School Vouchers

Continued on July 20, 2011 in Eager to Learn or Not – Part 9 or return to Part 7

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

To subscribe to “Crazy Normal”, look for the “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar, click on it then follow directions.

 
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Posted by on July 19, 2011 in American Public Schools, Education, family values, literacy, Parenting, politics, Public School

 

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Eager to Learn or Not – Part 7/10

18 Jul

It is a fact that my “old” friend the neoconservative, libertarian, born-again Christian (NLBC) and the authors of the No Child Left Behind ACT (NCLB) along with tens of millions of other Americans, would reject with ignorant laughter the opinion and argument that I am offering.

My old NLBC friend will claim that I have been brainwashed by the liberal media and am singing the same old arguments, which are based on my personal experience, reliable sources and facts.

However To “old” NLBC, that does not count.

In fact, instead, people such as NLBC will turn to totally biased and often-misleading conservative talk-radio hosts such Rush Limbaugh and conservative politicians that have judged public school teachers guilty, while ignoring the responsibility of students and parents in the learning process.

In addition, the authors of the NCLB Act from both major political parties had to believe that “all” children are eager to learn without any consideration that there will be students who will not cooperate or do the cass work a teacher assigns.

Eager to Learn or Not – Part 10

leading to the average American child of today spending more than 10 hours of his her daily time either watching TV, listening to music with an iPod bud plugged into ear holes, playing video games, spending time on Social Networking sites such as Facebook, and sending endless and mindless text message from one cell phone to another.

The same lack of parenting has led to an epidemic of obesity and diabetes among today’s children, which also affects the brain’s ability to function and learn.

No matter what the facts are, my “old” NLCB friend, and the elected officials that authored the NCLB Act will continue to believe that the public schools in America have failed. They will believe public education is a fraud and teachers are not teaching because that is what they keep hearing from conservative talk radio and/or conservative Blogs and Forums.  These people will never admit that too many students are like my brother Richard who refused to cooperate with his teachers to learn what the teachers taught.

To my “old’ NLCB friend, school choice and a voucher that pays private schools run by the private sector is the “magic pill” that will fix all of America’s problems and he isn’t alone. Millions agree with him such as the Walton family, the wealthiest and one of the most powerful families in America today.

Continued on July 19, 2011 in Eager to Learn or Not – Part 8 or return to Part 6

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

To subscribe to “Crazy Normal”, look for the “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar, click on it then follow directions.

 
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Posted by on July 18, 2011 in American Public Schools, Education, family values, literacy, Parenting, politics, Public School

 

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Eager to Learn or Not – Part 6/10

17 Jul

After turning 18 and gaining the freedom he wanted, my brother Richard worked long hours at low paying jobs to earn enough to pay the bills so his family could have a house in a barrio infested by street gangs, which was the best he could afford.

Without the education that Richard spurned, he could not afford a better place to live, since he could only work at unskilled jobs such as digging ditches and/or mixing concrete alongside men that spoke mostly Spanish that also did not read English.

By the ime Richard was in his fifties, his feet were ruined and he had pins holding the bones together so he could hobble about while surviving on disability from Social Security.

In his fifties, to stay out of jail after another DUI, a judge told Richard to enroll in a literacy class but my brother often fell off the wagon and skipped class to drink and chase women on the weekends while his wife stayed home to take care of their many children.

America’s community colleges offer literacy classes and American libraries offer free literacy programs but to take advantage of them, the individual must be willing to be there and learn what is taught.

In fact, finding a literacy program today is easy. All one has to do is use LINCS to find a program in his or her area or go to the nearest public library and ask for help to find the nearest literacy program.

My brother’s children, like their father, who was their role model, were not eager to learn either and mostly followed the father’s example, which helps explain one of the reasons many children and teens in America do not learn what teacher’s teach.

The reason my brother didn’t learn was because of his attitude toward work and fun and the fact that he had dyslexia, which meant Richard would have to work harder than most children. He chose to give up.

However, that is not an excuse. I also have dyslexia but that did not stop me from learning to read as it did him.

For Richard, schoolwork wasn’t fun, but drinking, hanging out in bars, smoking, and chasing women, even after he was married with children, was his “pursuit of happiness”.

The reason I am writing this series of posts is because that “old” stubborn friend that is an evangelical born again Christian that listens to too much conservative talk radio and reads too many conservative Blogs is also a neoconservative libertarian that firmly believes the public education system in the United States is corrupt, which is the reason children do not learn.

However, the truth is that between 93 to 99% of the teachers are teaching what they are supposed to teach, but too many students are not learning, and the reason these students don’t learn is because of choices made in the “pursuit of happiness”.

Continued on July 18, 2011 in Eager to Learn or Not – Part 7 or return to Part 5

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

To subscribe to “Crazy Normal”, look for the “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar, click on it then follow directions.

 
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Posted by on July 17, 2011 in American Public Schools, Education, family values, literacy, Parenting, politics, Public School

 

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Eager to Learn or Not – Part 5/10

14 Jul

An “old” friend (with a closed, rigid and voluntarily brainwashed mind) sent me a link to a post from Minding the Campus where Herbert London claimed there was fraud up and down our (public) education system.

To support his opinion, London quotes Charles Eliot, who was the president of Harvard (what London doesn’t say is that Eliot was born in 1834 and died in 1926 well before the birth of today’s modern public education system).

A lot has changed in America since Charles Eliot said, “the freshmen bring so much in and the seniors take so little out.”  Yes, this is the phrase London interpreted to mean public education is a fraud.

In fact, I am going to use sugar consumption as one example of how much has changed since Charles Eliot was born and died.

The New England Primer.com says sugar consumption in the 19th century was about 52 pounds per person a year in the UK.  In 2003, that consumption was more than 150 pounds, and we know today that too much sugar in the blood causes havoc to the brain affecting a child’s ability to learn, which will be another subject of discussion in another post at another time.

Herbert London says in Minding the Campus, “At the elementary school level it is simply embarrassing to have a large number of students leave illiterate or semi-literate.”

My response to London is to offer up my dead brother Richard as an example of one of those illiterate students.

After you get to know my brother, you will learn why he left school illiterate and stayed illiterate his entire life.  Richard died December 1999 at 64.  If he had lived, he would be 76 today.

From an early age, Richard had no desire to do the work it took to gain an education. He fought our mother, father and his teachers from kindergarten until his last year in high school.

By the time he was in high school, he cut classes as often as possible to hang out with friends and have sex with his girlfriend of the moment. He went as far as to have a friend or girlfriend forge excuse notes or to get the girl friend of the moment to call the school and pretend to be our mother, which was easy since our parents both worked and were not home to catch him in the act.

That was what Richard wanted — to have a good time and as much sex with as many female partners as possible, which led to excessive drinking, smoking and drugs and a painful death after spending 15 of his 64 years in jails or prisons.

Richard died at 64 riddled with cancer and heart disease.  While he was 64 chronologically, his biological age was more than a hundred.

My brother never had a desire to read, to do homework or to study. In that education equation I mentioned in Part 2 of this series, Richard was a “zero”. The opportunity to learn was offered to Richard, and his teachers taught what they were required to teach, but Richard was the horse that refused to drink water.

Continued on July 17, 2011 in Eager to Learn or Not – Part 6 or return to Part 4

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

To subscribe to “Crazy Normal”, look for the “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar, click on it then follow directions.

 
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Posted by on July 14, 2011 in American Public Schools, Education, family values, literacy, Parenting, Public School

 

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Eager to Learn or Not – Part 4/10

13 Jul

The first time America’s Founding Fathers used the word “equal” in the Declaration of Independence, it said, “When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”

The second and last time King George read the word “equal” in the Declaration of Independence was in the second paragraph where it says, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Do you know what pursuit means?  It does not guarantee that the government or parents are responsible to see that every citizen and/or child is happy all of the time.

What the word “pursuit” means in the Declaration of Independence is that the common person and/or citizen has a right to seek happiness.  However, there is no guarantee that happiness will be found, and for a fact, it is not the government’s responsiblity to provide happiness as some seem to believe.

King George’s response to the Declaration of Independence was to declare the revolutionary leaders as “rebels” and to order British military and civil agents to suppress the revolt, which led to years of war and rebellion in the thirteen colonies.

In fact, The Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution do not  define “equal” in any way to mean everyone is born with the same intelligence, health, wealth or ability or that the government should pass laws to make it so.

According to The Freeman – Ideas on Liberty, “What the Founding Fathers meant by equality is this: All men share a common human nature. The assertion that all men are created equal means that all persons are the same in some respect; it does not mean that all men are identical, or equally talented, wise, prudent, intelligent, or virtuous; rather, it means that all persons possess the inherent capacity to reason. “

This also means that there are no guarantees that if a teacher teaches, the student will learn the skills and knowledge taught as if he or she were a sponge and had to do-nothing but sit there as many do.

Continued on July 14, 2011 in Eager to Learn or Not – Part 5 or return to Part 3

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

To subscribe to “Crazy Normal”, look for the “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar, click on it then follow directions.

 
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Posted by on July 13, 2011 in American Public Schools, Education, family values, literacy, Parenting, Public School

 

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Eager to Learn or Not – Part 3/10

12 Jul

After the NCLB act became law while President G. W. Bush was still in the White House, teachers had to be both teacher, parent and responsible for the student to learn, while most of the nation seemed to believe a modern fable that every child is equal and has a right by law to be happy all the time.

However, the Constitution of the United States, which offers protection for American citizens from the tyranny of government, uses the word “equal” only eight times.

Only once does the word “equal” refer to common citizens when the Constitution says the people have equal protection of the laws.

The other seven times the word “equal” deals with the process of government and has nothing to do with people outside of the federal or state systems.

In fact, studies prove that teachers are teaching while there is plenty of evidence that some students are not learning what is being taught.

If you don’t remember what your teachers taught you about the meaning of the US Constitution (Whose fault is that?), then I suggest you visit the U.S. Constitution online and search for the word “equal” and read each section where the word is used in any of its forms.

If you want to know where “equal” was used differently than the U.S. Constitution, you will have to discover that from the Declaration of Independence, which is not the law of the United States.

Instead, the Declaration of Independence was a document signed by America’s Founding Fathers and sent to the king of England as a notice that thirteen colonies in North America (except Canada) were willing to fight to be free of the British Empire.

Once the thirteen colonies earned their freedom from the British Empire, the Declaration of Independence, became history and has never been (before and after the revolution) the law that guides the US government.

Continued on July 13, 2011 in Eager to Learn or Not – Part 4 or return to Part 2

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

To subscribe to “Crazy Normal”, look for the “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar, click on it then follow directions.

 
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Posted by on July 12, 2011 in American Public Schools, Education, family values, literacy, Parenting, Public School

 

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Eager to Learn or Not – Part 2/10

11 Jul

After listening to the NPR.org piece about the Atlanta school scandal, I concluded that the enemies of public education (that by coincidence support the school choice voucher movement that would add billions of taxpayer dollars to the profit margins of private corporations) were at it again.

After all, the next presidential election of 2012 is starting to gather steam and the alleged failure of public education will be a topic of discussion with accusations being hurled about as if they were grenades in the hands of terrorists.

The pressure that caused these teachers and administrators in Atlanta’s public schools to cheat was due to the impossible demands set by No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), which requires America’s teachers to teach as if all students are equal and eager to learn, which many are not.

An old English proverb says, “You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink.”  This idiom means that if a teacher teaches he or she cannot force the student to learn regardless of a law written in Washington D.C. by a bunch of ignorant, elected fools.

For a child to learn, he or she must come to school motivated and ready to learn, and this is often not the case, which is the reason behind the fact that not all students are equal.

There is an equation/formula that shows what it takes for a student to learn.

This formula is as simple as 1 (teacher) + 1 (student) + 1 (parent) = 3.

1. The teacher teaches

2. The students listen/pay attention, follow directions, ask questions, study, read and learn

3, parents support both teachers and students so learning takes place

 If one or two elements of that equation are missing, the education process suffers.

Continued on July 12, 2011 in Eager to Learn or Not – Part 3 or return to Part 1

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

To subscribe to “Crazy Normal”, look for the “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar, click on it then follow directions.

 
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Posted by on July 11, 2011 in American Public Schools, Education, family values, literacy, Parenting, Public School

 

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