In 1976-77, Romier elementary had razor wire on the roofs to keep vandals off. On Mondays, it was common to find fresh bullet holes in the doors. Once, we arrived to find the doorknobs had been beaten off. On another Monday, we couldn’t park our cars in the parking lot because all the lights had been shot out, and the lot was littered with shards of glass.
First Tank Battalion, First Marine Division, Chu Lai, Vietnam
That year, I made a friend with another teacher. The union rep for the school was Marshal Kahan. Soon after I was hired as a long-term sub, he came to the classroom and offered support and advice. During our conversation, I learned he was also a former United States Marine.
We stayed friends for thirty years and hiked the San Gabriel Mountains together for more than a decade before Marshall was diagnosed with leukemia. He died eight years after the diagnoses. I still miss the loss of his friendship.
The other incident is when James’s father came to shout at me, because his son’s reading score had not improved. I was alone the afternoon the father walked in unexpectedly. He cursed and accused me of being incompetent. He threw the reading book on the floor and said I’d put his son in a book that was too difficult. I shifted my body stance so one side faced him. I’d been taught hand-to-hand combat in the Marines and fought in Vietnam. If he was going to attack, I wanted to be ready.
His latest novel is Running with the Enemy. Blamed for a crime he did not commit while serving in Vietnam, his country considers him a traitor. Ethan Card is a loyal U.S. Marine desperate to prove his innocence or he will never go home again.
And the woman he loves and wants to save was trained to hate and kill Americans.
To follow this Blog via E-mail see upper right-hand column and click on “Sign me up!”
The first bully that attacked me was at a Catholic grade school during recess. For no reason, the fire-plug shaped, freckle-faced, red haired six-year old decided to hit me in the face and knock me down. Then he was getting ready to kick me when a hero stepped forward looking like a young, light haired six-year old Tom Cruise and stopped him. I haven’t forgotten the hero’s first name. It was James. I’ve liked anyone named James ever since.
The next incident was in fifth grade. I had a coin of some kind my grandmother gave me that was dated from the 19th century. I brought it to school to show to friends, and the bully saw it and wanted it. When I refused to hand it over, he started to move forward to take it from me.
I closed my eyes and morphed into a windmill with flying fists. I’d already read a comic book about Cervantes‘Don Quixote, and I was the windmill but the bully was no Don Quixote.The bully walked into my fist, and I regret that didn’t see it give him a bloody nose. He left me alone after that, and I kept the coin.
“What would you do if we jumped you, Mr. Lofthouse?”
My response was always the same. I’d say, “I wasn’t trained to fight. The Marines trained me to kill and that’s what I did in Vietnam. So, I will do my best to kill anyone who attacks me. If you or anyone else wants to jump me, do your best to put me out of action as fast as possible, because I’m going to do everything I can to kill the first person inside my reach.”
“You can’t do that,” was the common response. As if the rules or laws in this “politically correct” country were on the side of the criminal, bully or gang banger. Although the death penalty is another topic, it seems that those politically correct and properly anointed people that go out of the way protecting the rights of hard-core violent criminals should be boiled in oil. After thirty minutes naked in boiling oil from toes to chin, if they live, we do what they want.
What bothered me the most was that I couldn’t carry a weapon. In Vietnam, I carried several weapons and grenades. Several times, I had a grenade launcher.
I know how important education is to the Chinese. I’ve been to China many times.
When Chinese mothers gather, they usually don’t talk of American Idol, fashion or the latest Hollywood gossip.
Chinese mothers talk about their children and how they are doing in school and recommend the best schools.
Most Chinese parents start saving for college when the child is still in the womb. The sacrifice the average Chinese parent makes for their children’s future education is mind-boggling.
My wife is Chinese and our daughter came home and did homework without the TV on. She earned straight “A’s” since third grade and graduated with a 4.65 GPA due to the AP and honors classes she took.
If she had not earned those grades … her mother would figuratively break her legs.
Anyway, back to Grendel.
After that staff meeting with Grendel, he left the room followed by a cloud of tobacco smoke.
The rest of the teaching staff sat stunned.
Soon, we were on our way home to correct papers and plan the next day’s lesson.
For the rest of that school year, true to his word, Grendel stayed behind closed doors—most of the time—while the teachers struggled to provide a liberal education.
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”, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.
Grendel was right about too many of the parents—at least some that I met while teaching at Alvarado. They were a brutally bizarre bunch from another world. They must have been Republicans.
I’ve heard the parents around Alvarado have changed since the 80s. The Chinese moved in and the wasps with the stingers fled.
Anyone who knows Asian cultures like India, China, South Korea, the Philippians and Japan, knows that the parents tend to respect and support teachers and most of the kids are great to work with. We can thank Confucius for that.
Most Asian-American students pay attention, read, ask questions, seek help and turn in homework.
They even study for tests. None of the usual excuses such as “my dad used my book report for toilet paper and flushed it and now he’s in South America on business”.
Asian students also earn high scores on standardized tests no matter who teaches them.
Those facts are ignored by neo-conservatives and Christian Evangelicals who want a voucher system to replace the public schools so waspish parents can control what their children learn like all good Nazis—no more liberal education.
If vouchers arrive, education will be a form of tunnel vision.
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”, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.
During one of those Soviet rotations at Alvarado Intermediate, a new principal arrived, who I will call Grendel. In a few years, half the teachers at Alvarado quit or requested transfers to other schools.
On Grendel’s first day at Alvarado, we had a staff meeting after school to meet the beast.
Grendel stood there like a thin dragon with yellow teeth without reptilian skin. Tobacco breath had a raspy Marlboro voice.
Grendel had a flip chart. As the pages flapped like bat wings, I saw words and crude drawings (memory is vague but I do remember Grendel flipping page after page).
Grendel’s voice rasped, “If your students fail, it is your fault. It is your job to motivate and teach them.”
Each time he spoke, it was a blow to the solar plexus and a pain in the gluteus maximus.
Grendel said, “If your students misbehave, it is your fault. It is your job to control them. If you have problems with a student or a parent, my door is closed. Don’t come to me for help. The white-collar parents that live in this neighborhood are difficult, and I don’t need that stress.”
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”, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.
To armor myself against attacks from citizens of the Litigation Nation for telling the truth, anytime I name someone when I write posts, the names will be false.
I taught in Rowland Unified School District from 1975 to 2005. For three of those years, I taught at Alvarado Intermediate in Rowland Heights.
In the early 80s, it was common knowledge that the school district played musical chairs with their principals. In thirty years as a teacher, I worked under nine or ten principals and taught in several schools.
In 1989, I settled at Nogales High School (NHS) in La Puente, California.
In comparison, the principal at our daughter’s alma mater, Los Lomas High School (five hundred miles from NHA) had the same position for about two decades before he retired.
Before he became principal, he was a teacher at the same school.
Rowland Unified (in the 1980s) adopted the same tactics used by the Soviet army during the cold war—the Soviets rotated officers so they didn’t get too chummy with the troops.
I’ve heard that the administration running Rowland Unified these days dropped that Soviet policy.
Wouldn’t you know it—after thirty years teaching in an academic Gulag, some Santa dropped down the chimney to improve the working environment for teachers.
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”, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.
As a substitute teacher, it would have been nice to have had a black belt in judo or karate. I knew one sub that did, and he started every a class with a demonstration of his skills.
Once the class from Dante’s Inferno was mine, I moved the desks around to create a better arrangement for controlling the hyperactive squad of boys.
I moved the teacher’s desk and placed two bookshelves behind it to form a space large enough to hold one desk so no one could make eye contact with James.
Another recent substitute experience.
The problem was, James wouldn’t sit still. I had to keep my sonar turned on. When I sensed he was moving, I’d throw my arm up as if it were one of those arms at a railroad crossing to keep James from getting out and cause a train wreck.
At times, when it was too quiet in that cubbyhole hemmed in with bookshelves, I’d turn to see James on top of his desk spinning on his head like a top with his feet in the air.
If I saw anyone from the wild bunch lifting a fanny off a chair, I’d fling myself across the room twisting my face into a Marine Corps drill sergeant, evil, killer mask.
“Don’t move another inch,” I’d say in a menacing tone that threatened bodily harm. There was never a dull moment. It was in that class that I perfected the killer stare that would serve me well for the next thirty years.
His latest novel is Running with the Enemy. Blamed for a crime he did not commit while serving in Vietnam, his country considers him a traitor. Ethan Card is a loyal U.S. Marine desperate to prove his innocence or he will never go home again.
And the woman he loves and wants to save was trained to hate and kill Americans.
To follow this Blog via E-mail see upper right-hand column and click on “Sign me up!”
There are many ways to measure the success or failure of public education in the United States, and one way is to compare functional Illiteracy in the United States to similar English speaking countries and Mexico, because culture plays an important role in children’s attitude toward education and literacy.
It’s arguable that the four MOST similar countries/cultures in the world, when compared to the United States, are Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom, because they share an Anglo Saxon heritage, culture, and the same language. In addition, almost 80% of the U.S. population is white alone (in 2013, 77.7% were white), and the more than 13% who are African American, who have been in the U.S. for several generations, due to slavery, are no longer linked to an African cultural heritage. If you doubt that, consider that 78% of African Americans are Protestants and 5% are Catholics and—forced—immigration from Africa stopped and/or slowed drastically after the Civil War in 1865. What this means is that African Americans with roots that reach back 150 years or more are culturally American. If interested in this topic, I suggest you read a study out of Yale: African vs. African-American: a shared complexion does not guarantee racial solidarity
The United Nations defines illiteracy as the inability to read and write a simple sentence in any language, and it’s arguable that English is one of the most difficult languages to learn—if not the most difficult—if it is your second language. To understand this, I suggest you read 10 Reasons Why English is a Hard Language
Huan Japes, deputy chief executive of English UK, a trade body for language colleges, says a rule of thumb is 360 hours—120 hours for each of three stages—to get to the standard the government expects benefit claimants to reach. …
Dr Elaine Boyd, head of English language at Trinity College London, says, “If someone is really highly motivated, they can learn really quickly. It’s common for children under the age of 11 to be very immersed and be fluent in about six months.” …
Philida Schellekens, a language consultant, says that when she researched English language learning in Australia a decade ago the figure of 1,765 hours was used. That could mean four years of classes. It signifies the standard needed to do a clerical job in an office.
InEnglish Spelling Confuses Everyone, Professor Julius Nyikos, a linguistics expert born and raised in Hungary, learned numerous languages in his elementary school, high school, and university training. He came to the US in 1949 and, after a few years of studying English, was able to continue his profession as a linguist that he began in Europe. He spent many years as a professor at Washington & Jefferson College in Pennsylvania studying the languages of the world. In his scholarly article for the 1987 Linguistics Association of Canada and the United States Forum, titled “A Linguistic Perspective of Functional Illiteracy,” he made the statement, “It would be both ludicrous and tragic if it took lawsuits to jolt us into the realization that neither the teachers, nor the schools should be faulted as much as our orthography [spelling], which is incomparably more intricate than that of any other language (emphasis added). If English is not the absolute worst alphabetic spelling in the world, it is certainly among the most illogical, inconsistent, and confusing. This is due to the developmental history of the present.”
Literacy is the ability to read and write. In modern context, the word means reading and writing in a level adequate for written communication and generally a level that enables one to successfully function at certain levels of a society.
The standards of what level constitutes “literacy” vary between societies.
In the United States alone, one in seven persons (i.e., over 40 million people) can barely read a job offer or utility bill, which arguably makes them functionally illiterate in a developed country such as the US.
In 2003 the National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL), conducted by the US Department of Education, found that fourteen percent of American adults scored at this “below basic” level in prose literacy. More than half of these persons did not have a high-school diploma or GED. Thirty-nine percent of persons at this level were Hispanic; twenty percent were Black; and thirty-seven percent were White.
Now, to compare the five countries listed in the post to the United States.
First – Mexico: The OECD reports that 7.2 years is the average years of schooling of adults in Mexico.
Second – Canada: In 2012, Indicators of Well-being in Canada reported that 22% of adult Canadians had less than a high school education in addition to 16.5% reading at Level 1 or Below Level 1. Canada has five literacy levels. Canada’s Below Level 1 and Level 1 are equal to Below Basic in the United States. 83.9% of Canadians read at levels 2, 3, and 4/5. If Canada measures literacy the same as the United Kingdom, then 48.5% are ranked at Level 2 and below and are functionally illiterate.
Third – United Kingdom: The Telegraph reported that one in five Brits is functionally illiterate—that’s 20% that read below level 2, the common definition of functional illiteracy, and the OECD reports that the UK is ranked 22nd for literacy and 21st for numeracy out of 24 countries. BBC.com
Fourth – Australia: Uses the same five level literacy skill level rating system as the UK and Canada, and in 2006, almost 46.4% of adults read at Level 2 or below and were functionally illiterate. abs.gov.au
Fifth – New Zealand: The distribution of literacy skills within the New Zealand population is similar to that of Australia, the United States and the United Kingdom. Analysis of New Zealand Data from the International Adult Literacy Survey reports that 45% of adult New Zealanders were in Levels 1 and 2 for prose literacy.EducationCounts.govt.nz 5731 andEducationCounts.govt.nz 5495
Sixth – United States: 14% or 30 million were ranked below basic on the 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL), and 49% of adults who ranked below basic had less than/some high school but did not graduate from high school or earn a GED/high school equivalency. The United States has four literacy levels compared to five for the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. 87 percent of American’s read at basic or above. 65 percent read Intermediate and above. As reported by the OECD, one in six adults (16.6%) in the United States scored below level 2, in literacy. nces.ed.gov
In Conclusion, in case you are wondering why I included Mexico in this comparison, the PEW Research Hispanic Trends Project reports that “The number of Hispanic students in the U.S. public schools nearly doubled from 1990 to 2006, accounting for 60% of the total growth in public school enrollments over that period. There are now approximately 10-million Hispanic students in the nation’s public kindergartens and its elementary and high schools; they make up about one-in-five public school students in the United States. Most if not all of these students come from the poorest population in Mexico, and they bring with them the same attitudes toward education that they held before they came to the United States.
Ranking functional literacy in English speaking countries and Mexico
1st Place: In the United Kingdom, 80% read at Level 3 or above.
What explains the UK having such a low functional illiteracy rate? The Guardian.com reports that the “UK publishes more books per capita than any other country.” Does this translate into the UK being a more literate society? If this is the reason, it might be a cultural difference between the other major English speaking countries with similar cultural heritages.
2nd Place: In the United States, 65% read Intermediate Level or above.
3rd Place: In New Zealand, 55% of adults read at level 3 or above
4th Place: In Australia, 53.6% of adults read at level 3 or above
5th Place: In Canada, 51.5% of adults read at level 3 or above
6th Place: In Mexico, 64% of adults do not have a high school degree or its equivalent, and the The World Bank estimates that in 2012, 52.3-percent of Mexicans lived in poverty in their home country compared to 15-percent of the U.S. population who live in poverty—and 25.6% or about 12 million are Hispanic, and 35-percent or 6 million of the 16 million children who live in poverty in the U.S. were also Hispanic. In fact, over half of Mexican youth at age 15 are functionally illiterate and cannot solve simple equations or explain basic scientific phenomenon. WorldFund.org
In addition, theNew York Times reports that many of these children from Latin America are boys between ages 15 and 17 when they arrive in the United States, and they come from some of the poorest regions in those countries. Do you think these children arrived in the U.S. functionally literate in their own language?
_______________________
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 isCrazy 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!”
After all, there were many substitute teachers with more experience. This was my first year.
That’s when I learned that I had been the thirteenth substitute teacher—not a good omen. The other twelve left after the first day and refused to return.
However, I had survived two weeks and knew why the regular teacher died from a heart attack.
And I knew why I had survived—the combat tour in Vietnam as a United States Marine had toughened me for the job.
This video shows a substitute teacher that lost control of herself. With students like these, I cannot blame her. Do you know that half of new teachers quit within three years and never return to education. This is one example that explains why.
That fifth grade class had thirty students in it. Half the boys were hyperactive, which probably isn’t the politically correct term to call them but “fuck” that.
Over the years, political correctness has become the language bully.
One boy, James, would attack anyone that stared at him for more than a few seconds. It didn’t matter if the student staring at him was a girl or a boy. His fists started flying.
James could have been America’s secret weapon in Vietnam.
Another example why it is so challenging to teach in America’s public schools may be found at Narcissism at its Best.
His latest novel is Running with the Enemy. Blamed for a crime he did not commit while serving in Vietnam, his country considers him a traitor. Ethan Card is a loyal U.S. Marine desperate to prove his innocence or he will never go home again.
And the woman he loves and wants to save was trained to hate and kill Americans.
To follow this Blog via E-mail see upper right-hand column and click on “Sign me up!”
Crazy Normal - the Classroom Exposé 