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Category Archives: Education

America’s Lost Work Ethic and the Future Fate of the United States – Part 4/5

20 Nov

“What are these jobs that Americans will not do?” Slate.com asked. “Do they exist or are they a figment of the business community’s imagination? It turns out that their claims are largely true—there are plenty of jobs Americans avoid.


Manufacturers Looking for Skilled Workers

Let’s take a tour of them.

“Americans shun pretty much any unskilled labor that requires them to get their hands dirty: landscaping, entry-level construction, picking fruits and vegetables (Reuters reports that “up to 70 percent of U.S. farm workers are estimated to be undocumented, totaling about 500,000 people”), cleaning hotel rooms, busing tables, and prep cooking in urban restaurants,” and “American workers appear to be less interested in some kinds of factory jobs.”

In addition, “Americans, it seems, are also less willing to take stressful jobs that require lots of training and long hours, and that require them to work in unpleasant environments…”

For example, “The American Hospital Association says there are 118,000 nursing vacancies in the United States.”

In fact, the Washington Business Journal reported October 2011, “U.S. manufacturing companies have as many as 600,000 jobs that they cannot find workers with the proper skills to fill, according to a survey by Deloitte and the Manufacturing Institute.”


What the American Self-Esteem Boosting Parenting Movement did to the US – Did your child have fun today by skipping homework and avoid reading a book?

The survey found 5 percent of current manufacturing jobs are unfilled due to lack of qualified candidates, 67 percent of manufacturers have a moderate to severe shortage of qualified workers, and 56 percent expect the shortage to increase in the next three to five years.

What about China? Do the Chinese have a similar attitude?

Continued on November 21, 2011 in America’s Lost Work Ethic and the Future Fate of the United States – Part 5 or return to Part 3

_______________________

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

lloydlofthouse_crazyisnormal_web2_5

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!”

 
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Posted by on November 20, 2011 in Education, family values, Parenting, Public School

 

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America’s Lost Work Ethic and the Future Fate of the United States – Part 3/5

19 Nov

DailyKos.com says, “American’s won’t work 12 hour days , $5 an hour for seven days a week.”

However, in 1973 after graduating from college on the GI Bill (working nights and weekends), my first job was 12 or more hours a day sometimes six and seven days a week on a salary without overtime.

Change.org says, “Despite high unemployment, Americans won’t work as farmhands. Have you ever read John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, which is about two Caucasian drifters working as farmhands moving from farm to farm to survive? at 112 pages, it is a small book and I recommend it.

I know, I taught Of Mice and Men to my high school age students for more than a decade.

The Center for Immigration Statistics tells us what the are that jobs “educated” Americans won’t work at. CIS says, “Of the 465 civilian occupations, only four are majority immigrant. These four occupations account for less than 1 percent of the total U.S. workforce. Moreover, native-born Americans comprise 47 percent of workers in these occupations.

“These high-immigrant occupations are primarily, but not exclusively, lower-wage jobs that require relatively little formal education.

“In high-immigrant occupations, 57 percent of natives have no more than a high school education. In occupations that are less than 20 percent immigrant, 35 percent of natives have no more than a high school education. And in occupations that are less than 10 percent immigrant, only 26 percent of natives have no more than a high school education.”

With no choice, American born citizens will work jobs most educated Americans refuse to do.

In fact, in October 2011, the New York Times reported about a Colorado farmer that decided to hire locally unemployed Americans instead of immigrant labor.  It took the farmer six hours to learn he had made a mistake.  At lunchtime, the first wave of local workers quit and never came back. Some of the workers said the work was too hard.

Since most Asian-Americans value education and work harder than most to earn one, they tend to stay in school longer.  In fact, Asian-Americans  had the lowest unemployment rate of all ethnicities. In 2010, 12.5% of Hispanic or Latino, 10% of African-Americans , 8.7% of Whites but only 7.5% of Asian-Americans were unemployed.

Continued on November 19, 2011 in America’s Lost Work Ethic and the Future Fate of the United States – Part 4 or return to Part 2

_______________________

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

lloydlofthouse_crazyisnormal_web2_5

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!”

 
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Posted by on November 19, 2011 in Education, family values, Parenting, Public School

 

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America’s Lost Work Ethic and the Future Fate of the United States – Part 2/5

18 Nov

My parents generation is the one John Steinbeck wrote of in Cannery Row. One review says, “The novel depicts the characters as survivors, and being a survivor is essentially what life is all about.” The same theme permeates Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men.

However, today, many Americans have forgotten the sacrifice it takes to survive and expects government to bail them out. In addition, many only give lip service to education but do not instill the value of education and hard work in their children.

My father, at 14, was mucking out horse stalls at Santa Anita Race Track in Arcadia, California—the sort of work immigrants do today.


It started in America and swept around the globe!

My mother worked in a laundry and at home, she baked and decorated cakes for special occasions that she sold to neighbors, co-workers, friends and family.

My older brother worked most of his life until the day he died at 64 in 1999 working the jobs that immigrants do.  When he didn’t have work, he spent his days going to dumpsters looking for cardboard and searching the roadsides for empty soda cans and beer bottles to sell at the local recycling place.

Richard, my brother, “once” told me shortly before his death that he was proud he never collected a welfare check or depended on government handouts. The Latinos he worked with called him The Horse, “El Caballo”, due to his strength.

When I was fifteen, I went to school during the day and worked nights and weekends [30 hours a week] washing dishes in a coffee shop often until 11:00 PM only to be at high school the next day by 8 AM.

After a few years in the US Marines and a tour in Vietnam, I washed cars, swept floors and bagged groceries in a super market while I attended college on the GI Bill.

One summer job before my fourth year of college had me cleaning empty 50,000 gallon stainless-steel tanks at the Gallo Winery in Modesto, California. It was a dangerous job cleaning out the tanks where the wine was fermented, and I witnessed fellow workers injured and rushed to the hospital.

However, the generation that won World War II and made American strong and powerful is mostly gone or retired. Today, the work ethic in America has changed.  The reason it changed has a lot to do with the way children have been raised since the 1960s by parents obsessed with their children’s self-esteem and happiness, while making sure these children never face a boring day and blaming teachers for the child’s bad grades instead of holding the child responsible.


Unfilled jobs due to skills gap

Since 1960, the US has not won a single war.  After more than a decade and about 50,000 dead, we lost in Vietnam. Today, after another decade at war, we are still fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan with no victory in sight.

It’s as if today’s younger generation is incapable of making the sacrifices the Great Depression (1929 – 1942) generation did when 25% of all workers were completely out of work. Some people starved and many lost farms and homes.

Continued on November 18, 2011 in America’s Lost Work Ethic and the Future Fate of the United States – Part 3 or return to Part 1

_______________________

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

lloydlofthouse_crazyisnormal_web2_5

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!”

 
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Posted by on November 18, 2011 in Education, family values, Parenting, Public School

 

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America’s Lost Work Ethic and the Future Fate of the United States – Part 1/5

17 Nov

Unless many Americans change their attitudes toward parenting, education and work, the United States will cease to be a super power.

With about 14 million Americans unemployed, millions of illegal aliens still find work in the US.

In February 2011, the New York Times reported, “Despite continuing high unemployment among American workers, record deportations by the Obama administration and expanding efforts by states to crack down, the number of unauthorized immigrants in the work force — about eight million — was also unchanged, the Pew report found. Those workers were about 5 percent of the American work force.”

Then on November 4, 2011, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported, “Both the number of unemployed persons (13.9 million) and the unemployment rate (9.0 percent) changed little over the month. The unemployment rate has remained in a narrow range from 9.0 to 9.2 percent since April.”


Unskilled immigrants are competing with unskilled Americans–mostly high school dropouts.

Imagine, if the government told unemployed Americans, “Work or starve! If you need a job, we will educate you and/or transport you to where that job is even if it is a job that only illegal immigrants have worked before.” If that happened, the unemployment rate in the US would drop from 13.9 million to less than six million and hover around 4%.

If these shunned jobs were the only choice after the standard unemployed “benefit year” [which is 52 weeks] ran out and the benefit checks stopped coming, the choice would be to go back to school and then work where there is a job, any job, anywhere or become homeless unless a friend or family member is willing to support you.

However, taking jobs away from illegal immigrants and giving them to unemployed American citizens is not why I’m writing this series. I wanted to know why Americans spurn jobs millions of illegal immigrants are paid to work at in the US.

Continued on November 18, 2011 in America’s Lost Work Ethic and the Future Fate of the United States – Part 2

_______________________

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

lloydlofthouse_crazyisnormal_web2_5

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!”

 
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Posted by on November 17, 2011 in Education, family values, Parenting, Public School

 

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Substitute Teaching is not a “Tea Party”

05 Nov

During the 1976-77 school year, I subbed daily in a half-dozen school districts during the first semester.

Substitute teaching is not easy.

Whoever called first at five in the morning — that would be the school district where I taught.

I taught in Arcadia, Monrovia, San Dimas, Rowland and a few other Southern California school districts I’ve forgotten. Most of the time, I worked in Rowland Unified in La Puente, where I interned the previous year.

When some of the teachers in Rowland knew they were going to be out, they requested me in advance and my calendar quickly filled up.

After the Winter Break, I was called to sub at Romier Elementary for a fifth-grade class.


Watch the video and discover what it is like from another substitute teacher more than thirty years later.

The teacher had a heart attack and was in the hospital. Two weeks later, the principal offered me a long-term position for the rest of the year when the regular teacher died.

I consider that fifth-grade class as the one from Dante’s Inferno, and I worried that this would end in me losing my teaching credential while landing in jail for murder and mayhem.

I asked, “Why me?”

After all, there were many substitute teachers with more experience. This was my first year. However, I needed the job.

That’s when I learned that I had been the thirteenth substitute teacher for that class — not a good omen. The other twelve left after the first day and refused to return.

However, I survived two weeks and discovered why the regular teacher probably had his heart attack and died — a rather drastic way to escape those kids.  He should have quit or retired.

In addition, I knew why I had survived — a combat tour in Vietnam as a United States Marine had prepared me for this teaching job.


This video shows a substitute teacher that lost control. 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 too bad since over the years, political correctness has become a 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. He jumped the other students and his fists started flying.

James should 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.

As a substitute teacher, it would have been nice to have 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 to tame the wild beasts.

Once the class from Dante’s Inferno was mine, I moved the desks around to create a better arrangement for controlling the hyperactive gang.

I moved the teacher’s desk and placed two bookshelves behind it to form a space in a corner 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, and 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 causing a train wreck with the other students he attacked.

At times, when it was too quiet in that cubbyhole hemmed in with bookshelves, I’d discover James on top of his desk spinning on his head like a top with his feet in the air.

If I saw any child from that wild bunch lifting a fanny off a chair, I’d fling myself across the room twisting my face into a Marine Corps drill sergeant‘s 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 sociopathic stare that would serve me well until 2005 when I was paroled from the classroom after thirty years.

______________

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.

  Note: This revised and edited post first appeared as a three part series on January 31, 2010 in Substitute Teaching is not a “Tea Party” – Part 1

 
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Posted by on November 5, 2011 in American Public Schools, Education, Public School, student behavior, substitute teaching

 

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Blind, Deaf, and Dumber to the facts and doomed to fail — Part 4/4

30 Oct

Since so many Hispanic/Latinos and African-Americans live in poverty, you may believe poverty is the problem, and the facts support this progressive politically correct opinion. After all, in 2010, the National Poverty Center reported, “27.4% of blacks and 26.6% of Hispanics/Latinos were poor, compared to 9.9% of non-Hispanic whites [caucasions] and 12.1% of Asians.”

If you support  this “politically correct” opinion, think again as we visit one “tiny” rural Kansas school district.

Liz Goodwin writes in The Lookout, “The average student at the Waconda school district of 385 kids scores better than 90 percent of students in 20 developed countries on math and reading tests, according to The Global Report Card, published in the journal Education Next.

In Waconda school district, “Most of the students are white, and no kids need English language learning classes.”

However, 65% of these white students qualify for free or reduced federal lunches, which is an indication that they live in poverty.

The formula for success in the Kansas Waconda school district is that “almost every parent shows up for parent-teacher conferences at the elementary school level and participation stays high in the older grades as well.

[Note—the public school where I taught (1975 – 2005) always had more than 70% Hispanic/Latino students, and less than 10% of parents came to parent-teacher conferences annually]

In addition, the district keeps its pre-kindergarten to third grade classes “very” small so the teachers may deal with a lot of problems quickly and early in child development.

A third difference is that the district keeps an assessment card of each student and that card follows the child from grade to grade. The card lists skills the state expects each child to master in each subject and teachers update the cards continuously.

Another factor is that this small Kansas district does not follow education trends. “We don’t believe in the next biggest thing or the next biggest theory,” the superintendent, Jeff Travis, said, “We’ve not made any major changes.”

[Note: the public schools where I taught in Southern California implemented many of the biggest theories and these education trends often made my job as a teacher more difficult and the situation worse]

In conclusion, according to Robert Weissberg, “Regardless of geography, everybody, white, black, and brown, knows what a bad school is — a school dominated by poor black and Hispanic students.”

However, it doesn’t matter if one is an American conservative, moderate or liberal, few muster the courage to speak this truth even when that truth is supported with solid facts.

Return to Blind, Deaf and Dumber to the facts and doomed to fail – Part 3 or start with Part 1

______________

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 “E-mail Subscription” link in the top-right column.

 
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Posted by on October 30, 2011 in American Public Schools, Education, family values, media, Parenting, politics, Public School

 

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Blind, Deaf, and Dumber to the facts and doomed to fail — Part 3/4

29 Oct

To understand the lack of motivation among most Hispanic/Latino and many African-American students, all one need do is be aware of a few facts, which I have written about in several posts.

In Needs versus Education – What comes first? – Part 3, we discover that forty-four percent (44%) of youth gang membership are Hispanic/Latino while thirty-five percent (35%) are African-American, which means that combined, Hispanic/Latino and African-American youths make up almost 80% of youth-gang membership in America, and youth gangs are not pro-education.

Then in Civil Disobedience and No Child Left Behind – Part 7 we learned the dropout rate in Mexico’s schools is almost 70% compared to 8.1% in the United States.

You may question why the dropout rate in Mexico has anything to do with America’s public schools until you learn that about 3.5 million public school students in the US are here illegally from Mexico and that high dropout rate is an indication of a cultural bias toward education. When those students slipped across the US border, many brought their lack of motivation to learn with them.

As most of us know, actions speak louder than words, and The Pew Hispanic Center offers more facts that indicate a lack of motivation.  Pew.org says, “Nearly nine-in-ten (89%) Latino young adults ages 16 to 25 say that a college education is important for success in life, yet only about half that number — 48% — say that they themselves plan to get a college degree… ”

In fact, In 2009, just 19.2 percent of Latinos between 25 and 34 had a university degree, while among Asians the percentage was 69.1 percent, with 48.7 percent for non-Hispanic whites and 29.4 percent for African Americans.” Source: Fox News

In addition, the largest numbers of dropouts come from Hispanic/Latino (17.6%) and African-American (9.3%) students, which is another indicator of motivation. However, only 5.2% of Whites drop out while 3.4% of Asian/Pacific Islanders do.

In Yet One More Doomed Education Reform,  Robert Weissberg defines the ‘politically correct’ head in the sand when he says, “Like the unsuccessful NCLB and every other reform of the last few decades, it speaks of transforming the ‘lowest performing schools’ as if schools, not the occupants, were the culprit.”

Weissberg then asks, “Why should a kid who hates school improve if moved to a new building?” Then he explains why Americans do not put the blame where it belongs.

“The term “bad school” is a euphemism,” Weissberg says, “a way of avoiding political trouble with grievance group leaders just waiting to exploit alleged [ethnic/racial] “insults” to rally the troops to extract material benefits.”

Continued on October 30, 2011 in Blind, Deaf and Dumber to the facts and doomed to fail – Part 4 or return to Part 2

______________

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 “E-mail Subscription” link in the top-right column.

 
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Posted by on October 29, 2011 in American Public Schools, Education, family values, media, Parenting, politics, Public School, Teaching

 

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Blind, Deaf, and Dumber to the facts and doomed to fail — Part 2/4

28 Oct

In Yet One More Doomed Education Reform , Robert Weissberg hits all the important points of why any meaningful education reform will never take place in the US as long as Americans refuse to take their heads out of the sand, abandon conservative and/or liberal political correctness and accept the facts.

I may not agree with everything Weissberg believes or writes but he is spot-on in this essay.

Weissberg is a professor emeritus of political science at the University of Illinois and points out that “one feature of American education that dares not speak its name in public: the intellectual quality of students.”

Anthony Daniels writing for The New Criterion says, His [Weissberg] choice of topic and method of attack has led him to be described as a ‘slaughterer of sacred cows’.

In Weissberg’s 2010 Bad Students, Not Bad Schools, he claims that Hispanics/Latinos and African-Americans have lower IQs [on average] than whites and Asians [which has been documented by valid and reputable often ignored scientific studies], a difference, he claims, that is genetically determined.

If you doubt Weissberg’s claim, I refer you to Appendix F, Racial Group IQ Comparisons on page 575 of the hardcover edition of K. D. Koratsky’s Living With Evolution or Dying Without It to see these facts.

Koratsky documents that 61% of Asians have IQs above 100, 52% of Caucasians, 33% of Hispanics and 17% of African-Americans.

Those above an IQ of 110 make up 37% of Asians, 27% of Caucasians, 13% of Hispanics and 7% of African-Americans.

In addition, 58% of African-Americans have an IQ lower than 90, while Hispanics number 41% in this category, Caucasians 27%, and Asians 15%.

Of course, reputable studies have discovered that IQ is not an indication of success and motivation is more important, but what happens when IQ and motivation are both missing?

Continued on October 28, 2011 in Blind, Deaf and Dumber to the facts and doomed to fail – Part 3 or return to Part 1

______________

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 “E-mail Subscription” link in the top-right column.

 
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Posted by on October 28, 2011 in American Public Schools, Education, family values, media, Parenting, politics, Public School

 

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Blind, Deaf, and Dumber to the facts and doomed to fail — Part 1/4

27 Oct

There are at least three ‘false’ truths in America. There is the liberal/progressive truth, the conservative truth, and a moderate truth and then there are the politically incorrect but true facts many ignore for fear of being criticized by one or more of the politically correct mobs.

To define these mobs, we pin them with terms such as liberal/progressive or conservative and even these terms may be broken into smaller mobs such as hard-core liberals and conservatives. As for moderates, they seem to be spread all over the political spectrum.

For example, in August 2011, Gallup reported, “41% of Americans interviewed in national Gallup Poll surveys describe their political views as conservative, 36% as moderate, and 21% as liberal.”

In addition, hard-right Republicans outnumbered hard-left Democrats two to one.

If you are curious which way the majority leans on a number of hot-button issues such as abortion, Gallup reported May 2011 that 49% of Americans are “pro-choice” while 45% are “pro-life”.

However, “pro-life” is politically correct to conservatives while “pro-choice” is politically correct to liberals but only 21% of Americans are considered liberal.

It appears few moderates support “pro-life” but when it comes to handguns, on October 26, 2011 Gallup reported, “A record-low 26% of Americans favor a legal ban on the possession of handguns in the United States…,” which tells us that when it comes to handguns most moderates support the conservative politically correct agenda on this hot-button issue.

However, when it comes to public education, the issue gets confusing. Gallup reported in August 2010 that, “Americans continue to believe their local schools are performing well, but the nation’s schools are performing poorly. More than three-quarters of public school parents [77%, which has to include at least 20% of the conservatives] give their child’s school an “A” or “B,” while 18% of all Americans grade the nation’s public schools that well.”

In other words, almost 80% of American parents [including almost half of all conservatives] believe the public school his or her child attends performs well but all other schools in the nation suck unless you are the parent of a child at one of those other public schools.

This is the opposite of the “grass is greener on the other side of the hill” attitude and more a belief that the grass is dead and failing where I never visit.

In addition, looking closer, we discover 67% of respondents say the amount of money spent on a public school student’s education affects the quality of his or her education “a great deal” or “quite a lot”, while 34% [Note—this probably represents the audience that regularly listens to conservative talk radio] respond that to earn an “A”, the public schools have to improve the quality of teaching.

How can that be when almost 80% of parents are satisfied with the public school [which would include the teachers] his or her child attends?

Improving the quality of teachers to solve so-called public school problems tends to be a conservative politically correct belief while spending more money on public schools leans toward the liberal/progressive aisle—another switch for most moderates and some conservatives.

After learning the confusing facts of public opinion in the United States, we hear from Robert Weissberg writing for “the American Thinker”, who complains of Yet One More Doomed Education Reform, a post that smashes many politically correct toes of all types.

Continued on October 28, 2011 in Blind, Deaf and Dumber to the facts and doomed to fail – Part 2

______________

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 “E-mail Subscription” link in the top-right column.

 
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Posted by on October 27, 2011 in American Public Schools, Education, family values, media, Parenting, politics, Public School

 

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The importance of Diet, Vitamin D and a Child Ready to Learn – Part 3/3

13 Oct

What I discovered about Vitamin D deficiency may explain one of the reasons why so many school children age 6 to 18 in the US perform poorly in school and on standardized tests.

In November 2009, Scientific American asked an important question and then provided the answer.

The question was, “Does Vitamin D. Improve Brain Function?”

The answer, “The first study, led by neuroscientist David Llewellyn of the University of Cambridge, assessed vitamin D levels in more than 1,700 men and women from England, aged 65 or older…

“The scientists found that the lower the subjects’ vitamin D levels, the more negatively impacted was their perform­ance on a battery of mental tests. Compared with people with optimum vitamin D levels, those in the lowest quartile were more than twice as likely to be cognitively impaired.”

“A second study,” Scientific American reported, “led by scientists at the University of Manchester in England and published online this past May, looked at vitamin D levels and cognitive performance in more than 3,100 men aged 40 to 79 in eight different countries across Europe. The data show that those people with lower vitamin D levels exhibited slower information-processing speed.

In addition, Science Daily says, “Doctors McCann & Ames point out that evidence for vitamin D’s involvement in brain function includes the wide distribution of vitamin D receptors throughout the brain. They also discuss vitamin D’s ability to affect proteins in the brain known to be directly involved in learning and memory, motor control, and possibly even maternal and social behavior.”

But how much sun should be absorbed to create adequate levels of Vitamin D?

U. S. News.com says, “If you’re fair skinned, experts say going outside for 10 minutes in the midday sun—in shorts and a tank top with no sunscreen—will produce about 10,000 international units of the vitamin.

“If you’re already tan or of Hispanic (Latino) origin, you need maybe 15 to 20 minutes, and black skin may require six times the sun exposure to make the same vitamin D levels as a very fair-skinned person…”

So, next time you hear someone criticize teachers when children are not learning, say there’s more to educating a child than a teacher teaching. A vital aspect of education has to do with what parents feed their children and how much time a child spends outdoors absorbing sunlight.

In fact, Shine.com offers 7 Ways to Increase Your Child’s Success in School and says, “A recent study by Columbia University showed that kids whose families eat regular, relaxed meals together are not only less likely to abuse drugs and alcohol and develop eating disorders-they are also more likely to achieve higher grades.”

Return to The importance of Diet, Vitamin D and a Child Ready to Learn – Part 2 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 October 13, 2011 in child abuse, Education, family values, Parenting, Public School, student behavior, Teaching

 

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