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Category Archives: literacy

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.

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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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Eager to Learn or Not – Part 1/10

10 Jul

I woke up recently to read about “Cheating Investigation Focuses on Atlanta Schools”.  Then later in the morning, my wife and I walked to town to see Larry Crowne with Tom Hanks and Julie Roberts, which was a movie my wife and I enjoyed.

Since Larry Crowne also dealt with the value of earning an education to become more competitive in the workplace, it fits the goal of this Blog so I felt it was worth mentioning.

Last week, I read the review of Larry Crowne in The New York Times, which was extremely negative. Knowing how biased and wrong the New York Times critics often are, I was convinced the movie was worth seeing, which brings me back to the subject of this post.

After returning from viewing Larry Crowne, I searched the internet for a reliable source on the Atlanta schools cheating scandal and discovered a story on NPR.org dated October 12, 2010.

You may not believe this, but studies of bias in the media have demonstrated that NPR offers the most balanced news possible, which may explain why conservative Republicans want to cut federal funding from public radio. After all, well-balanced news is not the goal of conservatives.

When I saw the date of the NPR piece, I realized this was old news, so why was it being treated as if it were new again?

Continued on July 11, 2011 in Eager to Learn or Not – 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 10, 2011 in American Public Schools, Education, literacy, Parenting, Public School

 

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Debating about the “Educated Elite” – Part 1/2

29 May

An “old” friend, a libertarian, evangelical conservative that may agree with what  the Sovereign Citizen movement preaches ( Sixty Minutes on May 15, 2011 ), sent me two links disparaging college education failing to educate good citizens.

I did not agree with the evidence he submitted.

The video link he sent was of college students claiming to support freedom of speech but wanting to ban conservative talk-show hosts Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck from both radio & TV (the video was filmed at CSU Fresno).

How do we define the term “educated elite”?

Is being a student at a college or university enough to be considered among the “educated elite”?

I don’t think so, since many students that start college don’t finish.

Only a “fool” would call a college student that may fail all or most of his or her classes then drops out of college a member of the “educated elite”.  Attending college doesn’t automatically make someone a member of the “educated elite”.  You have to graduate first and get a job that pays well, which I will talk about in more detail in Part 2.

How many students graduate from college and have a chance to join the “educated elite”.  Remember, graduating isn’t enough to achieve the status of “educated elite”.

“At public colleges and universities only 29.0% of students graduate in the traditional four-year time frame.

“Of course, the timeframe most used to discuss graduation rates is the six-year window. This timeframe appears to be used because here graduation rates pick up substantially. At public schools the percentage of students that graduate within six years nearly doubles to 54.7%.

“One might think those more expensive private, non-profit schools would have significantly better numbers. They do in fact have better numbers but given their overall selectivity the rates continue to be extremely disappointing.

“Over the four-year timeframe, we see that private schools graduate 50.4% of their students, a number that nearly mirrors the six-years of public institutions.” Source: Open Education.net

Continued on May 30, 2011 in Debating about the “Educated Elite” – Part 2

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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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Posted by on May 29, 2011 in Education, literacy, media, politics

 

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Putting the Blame where it Belongs — Part 5/6

19 May

The last step to input this data into the new API index would be easy.  Teachers would make a digital copy of the grades on a CD or a thumb drive or attached to an e-mail sent to an administrative site where the information was fed into a database.

If the law says we cannot reveal student names, then we use student ID numbers, which are kept confidential at the school site.

The district has information on ethnicity, age and sex for every student so that information is merged using the student ID numbers.

The result would be an index that reveals which students are working and those that aren’t. Teachers would only be responsible to teach, correct student assignments and record grades, while students and their parents would be responsible to see that the work and reading is completed.

To make sure that students are learning, there would still be the standardized test to measure growth but with students actually involved instead of watching TV, playing video games or sending the average 1500 text messages a month, there would be reading outside of class, doing homework and studying instead.

This puts the responsibility where it belongs—on students and parents. If a teacher is not doing a good job teaching, students are going to complain and administration is going to observe.

Every few weeks, I printed out a progress report for each of my students that told them everything I’ve mentioned in this series of posts and I required those students to take those reports home and have their parents sign them.

However, if our society is unwilling to hold students and parents responsible to cooperate in their education and we keep placing “ALL” the blame on teachers, America has failed and nothing will solve this problem.

On May 20, 2011, in Solving the API Dilemma – Part 6, we shall see a comparison between the actual API scores in California and my friend’s suggestion of how to show results on standardized tests without being racist when showing who is responsible for the results.

Continued on May 20, 2011 in Putting the Blame where it Belongs – Part 6 or return to Part 4

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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.

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

 

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Putting the Blame where it Belongs — Part 4/6

18 May

To make this new Academic Index work, most if not all teachers use computer grading programs.  All teachers need do is make sure there are categories for homework, class discussion, students asking questions related to the work, class work, quizzes and tests.

I taught for thirty years and kept track of all of those categories easily.  I also fed that information into a computer-grading program. I knew who wasn’t doing homework—the same goes for class work and in many cases no matter how many phone calls I made or how many failure notices I mailed home to the parents, little changed.

For example, if the parent of a failing student came to a parent conference, I could tell them that his or her son did eight of 23 homework assignments and what the average grade earned was.  I could do the same for class work, students asking questions, quizzes, tests and for class discussions.

Since most of my tests on literature in the English textbook were open book, it was easy to see who didn’t read the story or study.  After all, I handed out study guides before each quiz and test.

For class discussions and questions related to the class work, I carried a clip board with a seating chart where I kept track of who said what by putting a mark next to the name of the student that was involved.

I transferred that information into the computer-grading program and at parent conferences, I could tell parents every facet of their child’s grade.

Students that never asked questions or took part in discussions had no marks next to his or her name for those categories and I could easily tell parents that their child never asked questions or took part in discussions.

In fact, I could tell them how many classroom assignments had been turned in and the grade for every assignment or the average grade.

Continued on May 19, 2011 in Putting the Blame where it Belongs – Part 5 or return to Part 3

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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.

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

 

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Putting the Blame where it Belongs — Part 3/6

17 May

Students, teachers, parents, everybody can use these “new” rankings to improve education. A black or Latino student with a low API score can clearly see how he can improve his score. If he puts in more homework time, increases classroom participation, and strives to bring up this classroom test scores by studying and asking questions, he will move up.

This is how API scores should be evaluated, but we don’t because our society is deeply brainwashed to see everything in terms of race.

Those who create and blindly accept the current Academic Performance Index Growth by Student Group – 2010 Growth API Comparison are themselves racist and don’t even know it.

The Black or Latino student looking at this racial ranking clearly sees it is hopeless to even try! Racism like this keeps low achieving racial minorities suppressed which clearly must be the purpose of this modern day version of Jim Crow.

The challenge is to show who is involved in class participation (class work, academic discussions and asking questions), doing the homework, and studying for tests and quizzes.

This is easy to show and Part 4 will show everyone how this will be accomplished.

Continued on May 18, 2011 in Putting the Blame where it Belongs – Part 4 or return to Part 2

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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.

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

 

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