Wanna Be bet his future on a belief that he didn’t need to get an education because he was going to be drafted into Major League Baseball (MLB) and earn millions.
My brother Richard’s (1935 – 1999) oldest daughter (from his second marriage) graduated from high school engaged to another student that had signed a contract to pitch for the Los Angeles Dodgers.
The weekend after he signed the contract, he threw a wild party to celebrate. A fight broke out and he was hit in the head with a baseball bat and lost his ability to pitch. The contract was cancelled and no money changed hands.
Depressed, he fell into booze and drugs along with my niece, and the marriage fell apart.
I don’t know if Wanna Be’s dream came true but most don’t.
I recently read that an average of 40,000 young people flood Hollywood annually dreaming of being the next super star to eventually win an Academy Award.
However, less than one percent lands a role on TV or in film let alone super-star status.
The tragedy is that Wanna Be wasn’t alone. Too many of the students I taught saw no reason to work in school since they had been convinced by a parent boosting the child’s self-esteem that if the child dreamed it, that dream would come true, which is another absurd example of the damage caused by the Self-Esteem movement.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
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.
I don’t recall this student’s name so I’ll call him “Wanna Be”, and he was convinced he was going to be a big league pitcher. He often disrupted the class by announcing that baseball scouts were already watching him and his future was guaranteed.
Wanna Be saw no reason to read the assignments, study for tests, or do homework and he failed both semesters.
In the mornings before first period, I’d often run into Wanna Be before he had his liquid-sugar breakfast and he was a friendly guy—nothing like the surely, moody monster that walked into my fifth period after lunch with a 64 ounce Coke in hand.
The sugar he consumed at lunch often resulted in glazed eyes, a slack jaw, slurred speech and a serious change in behavior.
Liquid Sugar is Toxic
The student snack bar, which was more of a fast food outlet that served mostly French fries, pizza slices, nachos smothered in cheese and hamburgers, sold 64 ounce Cokes for less than a dollar.
Near the end of my teaching career, the high school also had soda machines installed in the hallways to make money for the school district. The vender split the profits.
One morning, I ran into the truck driver stocking the machines and asked how many sodas the students drank. I recall that he said he stocked an average of 2,000 cases a week in the machines at Nogales and a case held 24 Cokes—that’s 48,000 Cokes a week at one high school. The high school had about 3,000 students. You do the math.
To be fair, the machines also sold water but most of the students hooked on this liquid candyhated water and had no qualms saying how horrible water tasted.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
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.
When I decided to write this post about one of the students I taught at Nogales High School in La Puente, California, I thought of The Natural, a baseball movie starring Robert Redford, Robert Duvall, and Glenn Close, where an average baseball player comes out of seemingly nowhere to become a legendary player with almost divine talent.
This is what Hollywood does best—the stuff dreams are made of.
Then I Googled “baseball movies” and discovered a Site listing almost 200 from A to Z (there wasn’t one for “Z”, but “Y” had Yankees West and The Yankles.
If you love baseball as many Americans do, you may want to visit Boston Baseball.com.
I even searched for “Baseball Movies” on YouTube, which resulted in more than five-hundred thousand hits, and I was sucked into watching a few clips.
I could have watched baseball videos for hours on YouTube. I suspect entire movies are there ten minutes at a time.
However, that wasn’t what I wanted to write about.
I wanted to write about one student of the thousands I taught. He was in one of my ninth grade English classes.
He hated water as many Americans do, and often started school with a liquid breakfast followed by a liquid lunch and a bag of greasy French fries. Then he arrived at his English class—my fifth period.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
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.
Less than 100 years ago, children were the property of parents and could be sold into a form of slavery called servitude. Children of the poor often ended in factories and coalmines as young as five years old and labored twelve-hour days six days a week. Then in 1938, the child labor law was passed and the pendulum swung the other way 180 degrees until today, we see incidents such as these taking place in American classrooms.
I knew an eighth grade English teacher that was knocked out by a student. The student ended with five days of suspension then was transferred to my English class where she walked in tardy one day and lifted a leg to fart in my face in front of about 34 students before sitting down. I never met the parents.
Between 1999 and 2000, 135,000 teachers were physically attacked by a student and over 300,000 elementary and secondary school teachers were threatened with injury in the United States. Source: Lib.Umn.edu
American teachers are not alone.
The Guardian in the UK reported, “A quarter of school staff have suffered violence at the hands of a student and a third have been confronted by aggressive parents.”
What’s needed is to swing the pendulum back half way and return to dunce caps and stools in the classroom corner, corporal punishment and fines or even jail time for parents and/or students of all ages.
Of course, we could swing the pendulum back to the 17th century when some of the American colonies had laws on the books that allowed the courts to execute children that did not change unacceptable, rebellious behavior by a certain age.
Maybe we should include the parents of those children too.
However, instead of the situation improving, President Obama wants to take away job security for public school teachers and no one in Washington D.C. mentions the parents or the students when academic performance is not improving.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
To subscribe to iLook China, look for the “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar, click on it then follow directions.
Job security is perilous for teachers in America, and it’s growing worse.
A teacher is suspended for rattling a table to gain the students attention or pins a note about unacceptable classroom behavior to a child’s sweater because the mother hasn’t responded to earlier notes.
In both cases, the students were not paying attention in class or were misbehaving. The teachers were just doing his or her job.
For rattling a table, one girl ran from the room and dialed 911 to complain to the police and they came to the school. The school district put the teacher on leave. We may never know who the student was since the law protects children younger than 18.
In Florida, an angry mother complains and another teacher is put on leave. The reason was that the teacher stapled a note to the student’s sweater. The teacher wasn’t sure if the notes she was sending home were getting through since the child’s poor behavior in class hadn’t changed. Source: neatorama
The mother felt the teacher embarrassed her son on purpose. The wrong person got in trouble. The mother should have spend a month in jail for the trouble she caused.
I see no problem with embarrassing students and parents too when student behavior disrupts the learning enivronment. The classroom is where teaching and learning is supposed to take place. When a child’s behavior or academic progress is poor and parents are not doing their job, the next step should be to embarrass the child in front of his or her peers and have the parents spend 24 hours in jail.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
To subscribe to iLook China, look for the “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar, click on it then follow directions.
When it comes to combating tagging and graffiti, Michael Howardis an individual who had an idea to counter the blight with art. He said, “I figured if you address the root cause — that kids need to be creative, have their self-esteem nurtured and a safe place to express themselves and channel their energies into something positive that benefits the community — then you could reduce graffiti.”
At the time Howard had this idea, he was a teacher at the Juvenile Hall school in Orange County. While there, he launched Operation Clean Slate(OCS).
I may have read of this before but was reminded of OCS in the April 2011, Costco Connection.
The inspiration for creating Operation Clean Slate came to Howard while driving to Los Angeles. He’d seen graffiti many times, but this time he saw a way to deal with it.
I salute Howard for his dedication and effort. However, I disagree with the often misused term of self-esteem. The self-esteem movement, which started in the US in the 1960s was misguided from the start. Children do not need help nurturing a false sense of self-esteem.
Youth need positive choices to help guide them in other directions and this is what Howard offered. I doubt if he reached many gang bangers (children and teens that belong to gangs) that spend their nights marking territory with gang signs, but I’m sure he did appeal to the creative energy of taggers.
Street gangs are primitive and often dangerous tribes that exist in the barrios and ghettos of America. Most of these street gangs deal in drugs and violence. Some have been known to initiate young recruits by having them shoot and possibly kill someone (often strangers to the gang bangers) during a drive by.
Most youth that join gangs have no choice due to the pressure in the barrio or ghetto. Only determined loving parents involved in a child’s life stand a chance to keep their children out of these gangs.
I taught in a gang-infested area of La Puente and West Covina from most of 1975 to 2005.
Parents that live in the barrios and ghettos where these street gangs exist may consider contacting individuals such as Howard to see if he can help keep their children off the streets and away from gangs. Positive activities such as Operation Clean Slate are one way to do this—not wasting time building a false sense of self-esteem in a child that often leads to narcissismas an adult.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine
& Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.
Graffiti is a blight on America and may be found in Europe and other nations too. Driving down urban freeways and highways in the US, drivers often see graffiti on billboards and freeway signs.
The cost to paint out graffiti at the high school where I taught until 2005 was about $10,000 a year. I often arrived soon after the gates were unlocked about 6:00 AM. My first class was usually 8:00.
The national cost is much higher than that ten grand one school district spent to keep one of its campuses graffiti free.
As one example demonstrates, the city of Los Angeles spent $3.7 million dollars to paint over, “Just one of the MTA’s tags — its initials painted 57 feet high and a quarter-mile-long on the Los Angeles River concrete embankment.… The maneuver underscores authorities’ exasperation with a subculture that prizes prolific defacement of public property, including buses, street signs and freeway overpasses, and costs taxpayers millions to remove.” Source: KRQE.com
At Nogales High School in La Puente, California where I taught for sixteen of the thirty years I was a public school teacher in the US, after the daytime-custodians arrived to set up the campus before students arrived (putting out trash cans and inspecting the buildings for damage), one custodian climbed into an electric-powered flat-bed cart and spent an hour or so driving along the covered walkways around campus with paint the color of the school sitting on the flat bed ready for use. Every morning, he would discover gang signs and graffiti on the lockers, doors and walls and cover them with fresh paint.
Metro Tagger Assassins (MTA)
After our daughter started high school, we joined her each morning on the one-mile walk to school and part of the walk was behind a super market, which was often covered with tagging.
Tagging is different from gang signs. Tagging is the signature of a graffiti artist or a crew of taggers attempting to become immortal and/or infamous by marking up as many buildings and walls as possible.
Some of this tagging is creative and artistic in nature but most is an eyesore.
A few of these misguided youths have fallen from freeway overpasses where they cling to chain link fences like cockroaches climbing a wall. These urban cockroaches hang above the traffic spraying their unique tag and some fall to be hit by traffic sometimes killing drivers and passengers in cars and trucks.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.
There has been a recent debate on the Internet and in the media that college is a waste of time. There is some truth to that.
However, that is also wrong.
Costco ran a piece in the April 2011 Costco Connection that’s worth mentioning, and I agree with Dr. Richard Vedder, who said “NO”!
Richard Vedder is a Distinguished Professor of Economics at Ohio University and is the author of Going Broke by Degree: Why College Costs too Much.
I taught for thirty years in California’s public schools. I started out teaching in fifth grade then substitute taught for a few years before moving up to middle school for ten.
I finished the last sixteen at Nogales High School in La Puente, California where I taught mostly English with seven years teaching one journalism class in addition to four English sections and ended by teaching reading to students far below grade level the last two years.
I asked two questions of my students annually for most of those thirty years.
I. How many of you eat breakfast?
2. How many plan to go to college?
For eating breakfast, about eight percent said yes but what they ate wasn’t that nutritious. More than 90% did not eat anything and most of them admitted that the first drink or food consumed each school day was a sugary soda, candy and/or a huge bag of greasy French fries.
The school also sold pizza slices dripping with cheese at lunch. For three thousands students, one large bowl of fruit was available.
For the second question, 97% said yes, they planned to go to college.
Yet, only 5% turned in homework on a regular basis. Most did not study for quizzes or tests. The failure rate often approached half of the students I taught. Most did not read outside of class (even though they were told to read daily) and many did not read in class.
Most of the students at the high school where I taught read below grade level and had no qualms saying they hated to read.
However, they were proud to say they were going to college.
A few years before I left teaching, I attended a workshop at CSU Cal Poly Pomona, where I earned my multiple-subject, life teaching credential in 1975-76.
At that meeting, there were English teachers from the high schools that fed students into CSU Cal Poly.
We were told that 60% of high school graduates entering Cal Poly as freshman could not understand nor do college level work and had to take “Bonehead English” classes to catch up.
At the time, there were five levels of “Bonehead English” (the lowest one was equal to 8th grade English) at CSU Cal Poly.
None of these “bonehead English” classes counted toward college graduation.
That’s why I agree with Dr.Vedder that college is not worth it for everyone.
Vedder said, “Students with excellent high school grades and college-entry test scores have a lower risk of failure and thus many should pursue a four-year degree. Students with poor high school grades and/or test scores have a higher probability of dropping out and or being unable to get a good job even if they are successful in graduating.”
Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran,
who taught in the public schools for thirty years (1975 – 2005).
His third book is Crazy is Normal, a classroom exposé, a memoir. “Lofthouse presents us with grungy classrooms, kids who don’t want to be in school, and the consequences of growing up in a hardscrabble world. While some parents support his efforts, many sabotage them—and isolated administrators make the work of Lofthouse and his peers even more difficult.” – Bruce Reeves
Lofthouse’s first novel was the award winning historical fiction My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. His second novel was the award winning thriller Running with the Enemy. His short story A Night at the “Well of Purity” was named a finalist of the 2007 Chicago Literary Awards. His wife is Anchee Min, the international, best-selling, award winning author of Red Azalea, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year (1992).
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Last night, my wife and I watched 60 Minutes for Sunday, March 27. Every public school principal, vice principal, counselor, teacher and parent may learn an important lesson from the basketball coach featured.
Bob Hurley is tough. The workouts Coach Hurley demands of his team are known as one of the toughest and most demanding in America, and he doesn’t go soft on the language, insults and shouting.
Yet the results are impressive and prove what Tough Love may accomplish.
What can we learn from the legendary coach that does nothing to build false self-esteem but everything to build confidence, discipline and skill?
If taken seriously, the answer to the previous question is that being a demanding coach, teacher and parent results in stronger, more successful adults.
Watch the video to discover what I mean.
After all, isn’t a parent in the home and/or teacher in the classroom supposed to prepare children to be the next generation of adults—not to have fun ten hours a day?
Another example of this approach to teach and raise children to become stronger, disciplined, adults with a better chance to survive and succeed, comes from Amy Chua, who wrote an infamous essay for The Wall Street Journal then with the release of her memoir, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, a firestorm of criticism and support swept across America.
Since Bob Hurley is as tough as Amy Chua, why aren’t Amy Chua’s critics complaining about him?
When I was nineteen and in boot camp at MCRD in San Diego, the drill instructor called us recruits “maggots”. How is that different from Amy Chua getting angry and calling her younger daughter “garbage” or Coach Bob Hurley harshly criticizing his high school basketball players?
Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran,
who taught in the public schools for thirty years (1975 – 2005).
His third book is Crazy is Normal, a classroom exposé, a memoir. “Lofthouse presents us with grungy classrooms, kids who don’t want to be in school, and the consequences of growing up in a hardscrabble world. While some parents support his efforts, many sabotage them—and isolated administrators make the work of Lofthouse and his peers even more difficult.” – Bruce Reeves
Lofthouse’s first novel was the award winning historical fiction My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. His second novel was the award winning thriller Running with the Enemy. His short story A Night at the “Well of Purity” was named a finalist of the 2007 Chicago Literary Awards. His wife is Anchee Min, the international, best-selling, award winning author of Red Azalea, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year (1992).
To follow this Blog via E-mail see upper right-hand column and click on “Sign me up!”
In a recent March 2011, 60 Minute segment, Katie Couric reported on an experimental New York City charter school founded on the idea that paying teachers $125,000 annually would attract the best people for the job and make a difference.
The principal’s name was Zeke Venderhoek. The students were mostly African American and Hispanic and almost all came from poor families. The teachers often put in 80 to 90 hour weeks.
When the fifth graders from Venderhoek’s charter school took the New York State Math and Reading Exam, the results revealed that on average the public schools in the district scored better than the charter school.
At the conclusion of 60 Minutes, Venderhoek said one year wasn’t enough to show improvement.
Halt!
Wait a minute!
I taught in public schools for thirty years (1975 – 2005) in a barrio with multi-generation, Latino street gangs, and often worked 60 to 100 hour weeks. From my classroom doorway, I witnessed a drive by shooting one year. Another year, in the evening when I was working late, a student was gunned down outside my room next to the school gate as he was leaving the campus.
However, over the years, district records revealed that my students often outperformed all other student in the district at the same grade level on standardized tests with improved writing skills. District administration said the records showed this to be true year after year and I did not teach in a charter school.
In the early 1980s, one African-American mother with a seventh grade, twelve-year-old daughter came to me. The mother was upset because the previous year’s standardized test scores said her daughter was reading several years behind grade level.
I told the mother the only way that would change was for her to turn off the TV and spend time with her daughter every evening and on weekends making sure her daughter did the homework, studied for tests and quizzes and read at least one hour or more every night seven days a week with a discussion before bedtime about what had been read. If there were questions, call me.
By the end of the year, that student’s literacy level had improved five years. That mother made the difference, and my mother did the same thing for me when I was in grade school. Without my mother’s effort at home, I would not be able to read today.
Why couldn’t Venderhoek’s Charter School show similar results?
The answer may be found from a 2009 Stanford University Charter School study that discovered only 17% of almost 5,000 nationwide charter school delivered on the promise that they would succeed where public schools often failed.
Seventeen percent is a FAILING grade and many of these charter schools had smaller class sizes, longer school years and days with stricter behavior codes with school uniforms.
In fact, students that did not perform could be sent back to the public schools, which is something private school may also do.
When will the country wake up and hold parents and students responsible to turn off the TV, shut down the Internet, study, do homework and read? Teachers cannot do it alone.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.
Crazy Normal - the Classroom Exposé 