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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Dr. Mark J. Perry writes a Blog called Carpe Diem at Blogspot.com. He bills himself as an expert in economics and finances.
Due to his Blog’s search engine rank, he probably has a wide following so he is misleading many people when he says, “Teachers in CA Receive More in Retirement than Active Teachers in More than Half of the U.S. States.”
While his statement and the chart he included with his post may be true, it doesn’t report all the facts and may mislead many who will then blame California’s retired teachers for part of the financial problems in the US.
However, I’m one of those teachers that retired after working thirty years in California’s public schools often spending 60 to 100 hours a week ten months each year teaching, planning and correcting student work at school and at home all hours of the week and weekends with no pay during the summer break.
In addition, the work didn’t stop when the winter or spring break arrived. Most teachers take work home and spend many days of the three weeks of paid vacation time catching up correcting student work and filling in grades in the grade book.
The only time the work stops is during the summer when there was no monthly pay for two full months.
In fact, after teaching thirty or more years, most teachers are at the high end of the pay scale making the average pay appear higher for retired teachers, and the retirement amount is based on the average annual earnings of the last three years of teaching.
When I retired, the calculation was about 1.95% x 30 (years) = 60.45% times the average of my last three years of earnings. That means I retired with a cut in pay equal to almost 40% of what I was earning my last year in the classroom but it was still higher than a teacher starting out was.
That is why when an average is figured for all active teachers, many are at the low end of the pay scale since so many Boomers are retiring and younger Americans are taking their place in the classroom, which lowers the average annual pay for active teachers.
In addition, California has the highest population in the country, which means more teachers boost that average retirement number higher since there are more teachers in the equation.
When I started teaching full time under contract in the 1970s, I earned about $12,000 annually with medical benefits and paid 8% of my pay into the California State Teachers Retirement System (CALstrs) for the next thirty years with California matching my contribution.
Unlike Social Security (SS), which is broke because the federal government spent the SS money workers paid, CALstrs is a retirement fund with more than 130 billion dollars that is invested in the private sector earning a 7% or higher rate of return annually besides the money flowing into the fund from active teachers that are still paying their annual 8% before taxes and the state’s matching funds.
The money that pays teacher retirement in California does not come out of the general fund that taxpayers pay into except for those matching dollars.
CALstrs reported recently that it is fully funded and has enough money to pay full retirement benefits for the next forty years as long as nothing changes.
Unlike Social Security and many other retirement plans across the country, the American taxpayer is not stuck paying for a teacher’s retirement in California.
However, I’m sure there are many politicians drooling over those billions of dollars that fund the CALstrs retirement system. California governors have borrowed from CALstrs before to balance the state budget then refused to pay hundreds of millions of dollars back to keep the CALstrs system funded.
Then the CALstrs board took the governor and the state to court and won each time so that borrowed money was paid back keeping CALstrs solvent.
Although I worked more than ten years (I started working at 15) before I became a teacher in 1975 to 2005, I cannot collect any SS yet I earned it. The federal government calls that double dipping since I collect retirement from CALstrs and California collects Federal dollars to fund parts of its educational system.
I also retired without medical as most teachers do in California. Only one or two school district out of hundreds in California offers a medical plan as part of the retirement. The district I worked for did not offer one except for COBRA, which is expensive for the retired teacher and only lasts until the retired teacher qualifies for Medicare.
The pay a teacher earns while teaching full time is based on the number of years in the classroom and how many degrees/units one has earned from college/universities. Teachers at the high end of the pay scale in California after thirty years may earn about $75,000 annually while a beginning teacher earns about $38,000 starting out (these were the figures I knew of in 2005).
Each school district has its own pay scale negotiated between the local branch of the teachers union and the school board so pay varies between school districts. Rural school districts in California often pay less than urban ones.
I suspect that applies to the nation too.
Where cost of living is higher, the pay would be higher and real estate in urban areas of California are expensive so the cost of living is higher than most of America.
In California, a teacher that retires after 42 years with a Masters Degree will earn 100% of his or her active teaching pay. However, if the teacher retires after 20 years of teaching at age 55, which is the earliest a teacher may collect at a reduced rate, that retirement pay will not even be 40% of the active teacher’s annual earnings.
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Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and disabled Vietnam Veteran, with a BA in journalism and an MFA in writing, who taught in the public schools for thirty years (1975 – 2005).
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.
If I had a dollar for every time a district administrator or a high school principal said educating a child was a partnership between the teacher, the child and the parent, I’d have a few thousand dollars.
The problem is that the average American parent is not part of that partnership.
How can that average parent be a partner working together with the teachers if the parent talks to his child less than five minutes a day? That’s what surveys and studies show us.
In fact, the average child of the average parent plays an average of 10 hours a day watching TV, playing video games, social networking on sites such as Facebook or sending out hundreds of text messages a day.
Jean M. Twenge, Ph. D., writes in Psychology Today that Narcissism is on the rise among individuals and in American culture, and says, “Our American obsession with self-esteem has not made us any more successful, and has probably made us less successful. Believing in yourself is not enough; you have to work hard. In trying to make our children happy in the short term, we may undermine the skills they need in the long term. Telling children how great they are does no good if they don’t actually develop skills.”
We need to change that average so a decade from now we read that the average parent doesn’t mention self-esteem anymore and talks to his or her child more than thirty minutes a day while the fun and games of an average American child doesn’t happen until after homework, studying and reading a book.
Dr. Twenge was right when she said, “You have to work hard.” Now, we have to get the average American parent to pay attention.
Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran.
His latest novel is the award winning 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 kill Americans.
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Before I comment on what a friend—who is still in the classroom teaching—wrote in a recent e-mail about the district he/she teaches in, I want to mention my own thirty years as a teacher [1975 – 2005] as a way to establish that I know what I’m talking about.
During my early years in the classroom, many of my seventh and eighth grade students won half the poetry awards in a state-wide contest in California. The award ceremonies were held on the Queen Mary in Long Beach.
The poems that won came out of a workshop I developed, and that success led me to develop a short-story writing workshop where two of my eighth-grade students one-year ended up published in a special edition of a Los Angeles Times Magazine that showcased maybe twenty or thirty short stories out of more than 10,000 submitted from schools in Los Angeles County.
That was back in the late 1970s and early 1980s. In fact, over the years, I developed most of my own curriculum to teach English and writing that I used successfully for decades.
In the 1990s, when I taught journalism and was the advisor of a high-school newspaper—in addition to teaching four periods of English—my journalism students won national and international recognition for their work. In fact, you can read about it here. Just click on the next link to see what the Rowland Heights Highlander had to say: Extra! Nogales newspaper a five-time winner
In the late 1990’s, a vice principal told a room full of English teachers at the high school where I taught that my students outperformed—by a large margin—the students of every English teacher in the district at the same grade level when it came to writing. At another meeting, another VP would mention that my students—year after year—always showed gains, on average, on annual standardized tests.
I was a tough, no-nonsense teacher who often created his own curriculum units and that included getting ideas from other teachers who I worked with. Some of my best teaching methods were learned from other veteran teacher like my friend.
My friend, who is still teaching—with nearly 30 years of experience—is not happy with his/her school district. I’m deliberately avoiding revealing who he/she is, because I’ve seen what happens to teachers who break the omerta of an American public school district, and I have also been a victim—it shouldn’t be a secret that school districts in America hate bad press.
I’m not saying that the administrators in my friend’s school district will make his/her life miserable if they discover who he/she is but having been a teacher for thirty years, I don’t want to take any chances, because I’ve seen the lives of teachers destroyed by administrators and/or elected school board members.
Public school teachers have due process rights, but they do not have tenure.
A vice principal at the high school where I taught for sixteen of those thirty years, once told me—even with all that I had accomplished as a teacher—that because I was an outspoken critic of what I saw as poor leadership in the school district where I taught, that my name was on a black list, and she had been told to find a way to get rid of me. She didn’t do much to get rid of me and lost her job at the end of the school year.
One trick used to force teachers out of education is to assign them five-different classrooms with five-different subjects to teach. For example, instead of teaching five, tenth-grade English classes in the same room, each class would be different, so the teacher would have five different lesson plans to work on in addition to rushing to a different classroom every period.
In fact, I knew one teacher who had her teaching day split between two high schools several miles apart with a half-hour window to drive from the first high school to the second one after teaching three classes in the morning to teach two classes in the afternoon. And she was assigned to five different classrooms. That tactic worked, because she quit and left that district to find work elsewhere.
As you may see, it is a myth that public school teachers have total job protection known as tenure.
Back to my old friend who wrote in his/her email, “Regarding curriculum, I just attended a depressing workshop. The three-day workshop was about the new Common Core Standards (CCS). The first two days of the workshop were good. I learned about why the CCS was developed, and I also learned more about the CCS in the primary grade levels. It’s worthwhile to know what standards your students were exposed to earlier in their educational career.
This is an ad from the company that developed and sells Synced Solution
“However, on the third day of the workshop, I discovered that my district signed up for a software program called Synced Solution. Synced Solution maps out the daily standards for every day of the school year. Then, our teacher grade level teams mapped out the objectives for every day of the school year. Synced Solution represents the first step in lock-step teaching; moreover, my district [meaning elected school board members and district administrators] thinks it represents the Holy Grail of teaching.”
“My colleagues and I still have some control over the short stories we want to cover with our students but not when we teach them. Synced Solution even has us doing a full-day of teaching on the first day of school when I am telling my students where to sit (seating chart), taking my students on a room tour, and having them interview each other. I do class building on the first two-days of school, which this new program does not account for. Also, I cover a lot of grammar in my class, which is mostly absent from this program.”
My friend’s e-mail went on: “I feel like teaching has become ALL science-based. Education officials [elected school board members and district level administrators] forget that teaching is 50% of an art-form and 50% science. This curriculum does not allow me time to conduct classroom debates, infuse my curriculum with health science-based activities and articles, and to teach grammar in a systematic way …
“I think the Synced Solution software program would be good for a first-time teacher. New teachers could use the guidance and structure, but I resent it. I think there has to be more flexibility. For example, I think the program should say which standards should be covered on a weekly basis rather than on a daily basis.
“My district wants to script my teaching; also, my district can now see if I am covering the standards using its timeline. We will have unit tests, and there is an area in the software program that we are supposed to check off (checking off the objectives and standards).
“The other teachers and I concurred that this software program will add at least an hour to our teaching day. Instead of technology assisting us, it is making our jobs even more cumbersome. Synced Solution is very cumbersome to navigate.
Teleparent is a program that teachers want and need. Who teaches students? Who makes the most phone calls to parents?
“I would rather have my school bring back TeleParent. I don’t know if you ever had this automated phone program when you were teaching [I didn’t], but we had it for two years, and then my school took it away.
“TeleParent allowed me to contact a group of students having the same negative academic behavior.”
“For example, 20 students forget their textbook. I could just go through my class list on TeleParent and check off the names of students who forgot their textbook. Then, I could check off the reason for the phone call, Forgot textbook. Teleparent would contact my parents in their primary language (Spanish, Mandarin, Tagalog, etc.).
“Also, it would use a different phone number so that my students would not know it was Teleparent; this prevented students from intercepting the corrective phone calls [which some students would do—believe me]. It exponentially increased my number of parent contacts. Negative classroom behaviors changed very quickly. Teleparent could easily raise the test scores for a high school. Every time my colleagues and I want a software program that makes our job easier, the district and/or my school rejects it. We wanted Turnitin.com, but my school refused.
Another valuable tool for teachers that teachers want.
“Turnitin.com is a powerful software program that detects plagiarism in essays and also in research papers. This software program would make my job so much easier. I would not have to hunt on the Internet to locate the research that a student copied into his paper.”
My friend teaches in the Chino Valley Unified School District.
I wrote back to my friend and said what was happening in his/her school district was nothing new. During my thirty years as a classroom teacher—especially after standardized testing became one of the gods of public education in the United States—what I call magic-pill programs like this Synced Solution thing came along and always promised to revolutionize education boosting the school’s standardized test scores.
And from my thirty years of experience, I can tell you that all of the magic pill programs teachers were often forced to use failed miserably—so bad that they often caused test scores to drop instead of increase—and a few years later these costly programs would be replaced by another magic-pill program.
I worked with some excellent principals and vice principals, but I do not have much praise for administrators who worked out of the district office.
In October 2000, The Los Angeles Times ran a piece about Education’s Failed Fads. The lead paragraph says, “Misguided and bumbled attempts to fix schools are nothing new, as education historian Diane Ravitch relates in painful detail in her new book, “Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms” (Simon & Schuster, $30). I recommend that you click on the LA Times link and read about all the failed education fads to see what I’m talking about.
It is obvious to me that Synced Solution is another fad that will fail mainly because a majority of the teachers were not allowed to be part of the final decision.
For example, there was the Whole Language Approach to teaching reading in the 1980s and 1990s—that supported the idea that children can and should learn to read text in the same easy, natural way that they learn to understand speech. But in Finland “reading instruction is intense in grades 1 and 2, and is uniformly based on teaching phonemic analysis and phoneme-grapheme conversions. Source: THE GLOBALIZATION OF EDUCATIONAL FADS AND FALLACIES
It was my experience that teacher generated programs worked best the same as many of the programs I developed for the almost six-thousand students that I taught over a thirty-year period. This is what teachers in Finland do and Finland has one of the best school systems in the world.
Reading: Finland was in 3rd place vs. the United States at 17th
Mathematics: Finland was in 6th place vs. the United States at 31st
Science: Finland was in 2nd place vs. the United States at 23rd
Synced Solutions is nothing more than another popular, politically correct fad supported by another elected school board to be implemented by administrators with no job protection in a do-as-your-told-or-else educational environment adding another nail in America’s mediocre public-education system.
Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran.
His latest novel is the award winning 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 kill Americans.
To follow this Blog via E-mail see upper right-hand column and click on “Sign me up!”
After I watched the video to the end, I Googled the topic and read several responses that made me angry since most are feeling sorry for the kid and not the teacher.
I taught in a tough, barrio high school surrounded by multi-generational, violent Latino gangs.
Over the years, I had hard-core gang bangers known as shooters in my classroom—meaning they had shot and killed rival gang bangers. One kid I taught had a price on his head from another gang and had killed several rivals. Not a year went by that one of these gang bangers didn’t threaten me.
Once, I witnessed a drive by shooting from my classroom as school let out with students streaming out of school while parents waited. Another time, there was a shooting outside my classroom at night while I was working late with the editors of the school paper.
What I witnessed Sheri Davis doing to this dysfunctional kid was something I came close to doing several times during the thirty years I taught. I don’t blame her. I know what it is like to get angry with a kid like the one she beat.
What she says in the tape is true. The system must change to deal with disruptive kids like the one she assaulted. Instead, the system is too soft and talks to kids as if they actually listen and comply with all the self-esteem soft talk. Instead, those types of kids learn to play the system while they continue to terrorize teachers and other students.
Mr. D was in charge of discipline at the tough high school where I taught and he said 5% of the kids at our high school earned 90% of the 20,000 plus referrals written each year. Having dealt with these types of kids and their parents, I’m sure the only thing those parents are thinking about is how much money they are going to get. I can see the bumper sticker on their car now: GO AHEAD, MAKE MY DAY AND BEAT MY KID.
I read once that there is an average of 5,000 students assaults on teachers in America annually but we don’t hear this type of outrage about that. After all, teachers are second-class citizens in the US who are the only Americans who can be tried for the same crime twice.
So, I call out to all those comments that expressed outrage at Sheri Davis beating one problem-causing idiot. I do not feel sorry for this kid. After hearing about his behavior on a daily basis, there’s only one place for him—the US Marines for six years or prison and throw away the key.
What did you say or do when you read about a teacher being beat up by kids in school? Probably, you just shrugged and forgot about it as soon as possible. After all, in America, teachers are like broken glass to be stepped on and ground into the pavement.
This question was about the time I was spending writing posts for one of my Blogs (I maintain four). To answer, I used how I managed my time as a teacher.
We have a need for the efficiency and worth of our efforts, don’t we?
If I ramble in my response, it is because of the comparative example I provide and there are far too many elements involved beyond the Blog.
It would take time to keep track of the time. Even after I finish meeting my goal each day, I still get e-mail alerts from the Blog when a comment is left and I return to reply. For me, it’s a survival process learned as a teacher. You take care of what needs taking care of at the instant it needs your attention.
When I was teaching, my workday started when I woke up at 4:00 AM to get ready to go to school. I would arrive at 6:00 AM when the gates were unlocked and have two hours to correct papers, prep and plan, record grades, etc. There were a hundred teachers on the staff at the high school where I taught. Less than five of us arrived soon after the custodial day staff unlocked the gates. About the same number of teachers arrived seconds before the first bell. Oh, how I hated bells. Most teachers arrived in between the early starters and the later arrivers.
During lunch, I stayed in my classroom with a “few” students often coming and going. Especially when I was the journalism advisor for the school paper. My editors would often arrive soon after I did and still be there when I left.
Some days, I would return home by midnight fortunate to get four hours of sleep. I had to leave my classroom because the custodians turned on the alarms, and so did the students that stayed late when I was the journalism adviser. And when I drove off, there would be two or three other teachers driving home too.
Every spare moment was spent correcting papers and I never finished. My workweeks often ran 100 hours a week with 25 of those hours in class teaching. The other 75 hours was spent correcting, prep, planning, parent contacts, attending meetings, etc. The public and politicians are so ignorant about what goes on in education it’s painful. The assumptions and solutions behind the Pollyanna Leave No Child Behind act are idiotic at best and I’m being polite.
I put one foot in front of the other foot and never stopped. When needed, I made phone calls to parents, which was every day, because there were always problems that needed fixing or at least the attempt to fix and the record keeping was a mountain to climb that never stopped growing. Every contact required a form to be filled out in triplicate. Every time a child caused a problem during class, another form had to be filled out in triplicate.
Marketing is both an exact and inexact science. The Blog is only one element of the marketing process. There’s the Websites for the books, and other social marketing like the conversation I’m involved in at LinkedIn about Obama’s national health care proposal, comments I leave at another site called the IAG, and other social Websites and blogs, answering E-mails that come often from friends, former colleagues from teaching, etc.
My books have also won honorable mentions at seven book festivals so far. Then there are the reviews from Book Review Blogs and Websites like the Midwest Book Review to Peeking between the Pages and the time I spend maintaining my Websites. The primary Website has more than fifty pages on it and I haven’t checked the links on many of those pages for more than a year—no time. I focus on the homepage and several others that are related to sales and promotion. Many of the pages are about China. I also read books and write reviews for a Website Blog called PODBRAM.
Then there is the saying that seems so true. “Half of marketing works and half doesn’t and we don’t know which half works.”
My goal is to learn as much as I can about all the elements of marketing and spend as much time working the methods as I can manage. Even though the Blog shows page views increasing and page views increasing at my Websites, there no way to pin down exactly which efforts are resulting in sales because I’m doing so much spread across a wide spectrum of the Internet.
As a teacher, we did study numbers. We tracked grades, test scores and results and altered lessons to focus on the skills and concepts that the majority of students were having problems with. We targeted students who were borderline and stopped by their desks often to make sure they understood what they were doing and were on task because our goal was to move them to the next level.
My work habits were honed razor sharp in the classroom and like so many teachers who taught as long as I did, I am an expert at what it takes to educate a child while struggling not to become a burned out hulk, which happens to some. Most parents, voters and politicians from both parties have no idea. They are fools who won’t listen to the experts but blame them instead.
Back to marketing. For me, it is a process and I don’t have time to keep track of the time spent on any one element.
Crazy Normal - the Classroom Exposé 