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The Damage that a sense of False Self-Esteem May Cause – Part 1/2

25 May

One of the most difficult challenges for most aspiring artists (authors, actors and singers) is being discovered and building a fan base.  National TV talent contests such as American Idol offer these unknown artists a chance at recognition and to build a fan base by reaching a large audience.

Without these national talent programs, the road to gain recognition is a difficult one, and many talented artists may never be in the right place at the right time to have a shot at the success they dream of.

In fact, it is obvious that the odds of becoming a success in the music industry are about as high as winning a state lottery, which is about 20 million to one. For American Idol contestants, the odds may be better since the program only hold auditions in about six cities, and the number that audition can exceed 10,000 people in each city. Between 1 to 60 people in each city may make it to the Hollywood audition where the top twelve finalists are selected.


Great performance but not the best original song for Jessica.

The sad news is that eventually, American Idol may be cancelled as so many TV shows are when the number of viewers drops too low. In a May 24, 2012 New York Times piece, it was alleged that American Idol’s number of viewers is dropping drastically due to audience fatigue, but I suspect that the drop in viewers may be mostly due to the five white guys playing guitars that won the last five seasons of American Idol.

For example, 29.3 million viewers watched the finale for season 10 but only 21.5 million watched the 2012 finale. American Idol once held the record for most consecutive seasons (ten years) as number one. The largest viewing audience was 37.44 million season 6. Since then, the audience has been shrinking.  Between season six and eleven there was a drop of about 57% in viewers.

The real culprit of this decline may be Vote for the Worst.com, which claimed this morning that they had succeeded. “We did it, Worsters! 132 million votes were cast last night, and in the end, we helped the fifth straight white guy with a guitar win American Idol… we succeeded yet again and helped make sure Pinoybot Jessica Sanchez was left in the loser’s circle.”


Jessica singing “I Will Always Love You:

Vote for the Worst.com launched in 2004 with the goal to support contestants on American Idol that the producers would hate to see win (according to the Worsters), and the Alexa stats show that the Worsters’ site has a very high search engine rank of 57,917 (which translates into the top .01% ) internationally and 18,539 in the United States with 693 sites linked in. Based on internet averages, Alexa says this site is visited frequently by females who are college educated in the age range 25-34 with no children.

The goal of any serious Website/Blog is to have a search engine rank in the top one percent. The Worsters have more than achieved that.

The Worsters are wrong about Jessica being a Pinoy, which is a term coined by expatriate Filipino Americans in the 1920s to refer to their immigrant ethnicity.  Jessica was born in the United States and her father is an American citizen of Mexican descent that honorably served in the US Navy as did Jessica’s Filipino grandfather. Jessica’s father and grandfather defended the United States and fought for it as I did in 1966 when I was a US Marine serving in Vietnam and less than one percent of Americans serve in the US military to fight its wars as patriots.


Great Song!  Best I’ve heard Phillip Phillips sing!

At best, Jessica is a Pinoy-Latino American.  Tacking on the term “bot” to “Pinoy” making it “Pinoybot” alleging that she is a Filipino robot or an internal parasite of animals and that is an insult and a racial slur revealing the real character of the individuals behind the “Worsters” movement that supports mediocrity. It is obvious that the “Worsters” are alleged racist Internet Trolls.

However, how long Jessica Sanchez will be left in that so-called American Idol loser’s circle as a “Pinoybot” may not last long as we shall discover in Part 2, and most of those white boys with guitars that the Worster’s claim they helped win may be the real losers as the facts suggest. In addition, Vote for the Worst.com runs ads, which means they are monetized and using their negative spin to attract a gullible audience to turn a profit.

Continued on May 26, 2012 in The Damage a sense of False Self-Esteem May Cause – Part 2

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga.

To subscribe to “Crazy Normal”, look for the “E-mail Subscription” link in the top-right column, or click on the “Following” tab in the WordPress toolbar at the top of the screen.

 
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Posted by on May 25, 2012 in family values, Parenting, self-esteem, self-esteem movement

 

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24 May

Ah, I’m not alone in what I think about the average American diet. However, the reason people eat like this is because of profits and jobs, and the government will do nothing about it because that might cause jobs to be lost and no morally corrupt politician would want that because then he or she might get tossed out of office in the next election and miss out on all those gifts and perks from corporate lobbyists. _______________________________________

It’s all about the money and a lot of people that live to eat instead of eat to live. _______________________________________

This also has a lot to do with the quality of public education in the US where teachers cannot teach kids that do not feed their brains the proper nutrition needed to make that brain work. In fact, sugar really messes up short term memory and causes energy spikes along with mood swings. _______________________________________

For example, when I was still teaching (1975 – 2005), each year, I asked my students, “How many of you eat breakfast?” The answer was usually two or three raised hands out of a class of 34/36 students (on average). _______________________________________

A nutritious breakfast is the most important meal of the day—especially for children who are still growing and that growth includes the brain. The brain does not stop developing until they are about age 25. _______________________________________

Then I asked, “What do you eat when you eat?” The most common answer was a bag of greasy French fries, a slice of cheese pizza and a soda (often Coke or Pepsi) and that soda or sodas was usually the first thing most of the students consumed because it was the easiest form of food or drink available since there were vending machines in the schools halls. _______________________________________

Since I arrived at school early, soon after the gates were unlocked at 6 AM, I had the opportunity to ask the man stocking the soda vending machines how many cases of sodas did he deliver to the high school each week. His answer, “About 2,000 cases,” which translated to about 3 sodas a day per student since the school had about 3,000 students at the time._______________________________________

What was the motive for the school district to have those soda machines in the halls? The Coke Distributer paid the district 50% of the gross take. Each bottle cost $1.00. _______________________________________

In addition, scientific research has proven that drinking one can of soda will suppress the immune system up to 50% for several hours besides messing with brain cells from the overdose of sugar.

And we blame teachers when kids don’t learn!

glennpendlay's avatarGlenn Pendlay

Why? Well it started in Guatemala last week. I was eating in the weightlifting chow hall with Donny Shankle and thinking about the food. The meal that day included a sort of salad. Tasted like it had some kale in it, had some green beans, some corn, lettuce, and bits of bacon. There were diced up potatoes, cooked with onions. Diced up carrots that most people seemed to be mixing up with the potatoes and onions. And chicken. Not fried chicken, just chicken. It was representative of most of the meals, mostly vegetables and meat, some potatoes or rice. Nothing fancy. I remarked to Donny that it would be hard to overeat and get fat on such food. Not that it wasn’t good, it was tasty enough, but it was nothing you would want to go on eating once your hunger had been satisfied. And it wasn’t calorie dense, mostly…

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Posted by on May 24, 2012 in Uncategorized

 

The results of parenting gone wrong – Part 2/2

22 May

As a teacher, I used brainstorming activities in my classroom. After all, I was taught and told to use brainstorming. The concept was to accept what anyone said as correct and worthy of being written down, so we wouldn’t bruise or injure a child’s self-esteem.

However,  Lehrer writes, “Keith Sawyer, a psychologist at Washington University, has summarized the science: ‘Decades of research have consistently shown that brainstorming groups think of far fewer ideas than the same number of people who work alone and later pool their ideas.'”

In fact, in Does Brainstorming For New Ideas Really Work? (Business Insider, March 27, 2012), it was reported that experiments where it is okay to debate and criticize (constructive criticism no doubt) generated nearly 25 percent more ideas and findings show that debate and criticism do not inhibit ideas but, rather, stimulate them…

These results prove that the self-esteem’s brainstorming mantra of refraining from judging or negating ideas is wrong. In other words, brainstorming (a product of the self-esteem movement) did not unleash the potential of the group. Instead the technique suppressed it, making each individual less creative.

In addition, Stephanie Hallett writing for the Huffington Post reported, “Barely half of Americans over the age 18 are married, according to a new report from the Pew Research Institute. The number of couples married in 2010 dropped a startling 5 percent from the previous year, and the overall number of married couples has declined by more than 20 percentage points since 1960.”

Now, let’s look at the face in that mirror again. The self-esteem movement among parents gained serious momentum in the 1960s and by the late 1970s, it was a force in the public schools leading to grade inflation and a feel-good atmosphere for students. At the same time, marriages declined in addition to an increase in a weakening of parent-child relationships, while creativity in America isn’t what it could be.

In conclusion, it is obvious that self-esteem parenting led to the weakening of the parent-child relationship, is responsible in the decline of traditional marriage and has inhibited creativity, which will hurt the United States in the long run.

Is this an example of the domino theory in practice?

Return to The results of parenting gone wrong – Part 1

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga.

To subscribe to “Crazy Normal”, look for the “E-mail Subscription” link in the top-right column, or click on the “Following” tab in the WordPress toolbar at the top of the screen.

Learn more from  Recognizing Good Parenting

 
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Posted by on May 22, 2012 in family values, Parenting, self-esteem, self-esteem movement, student behavior

 

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The results of parenting gone wrong – Part 1/2

21 May

Do not blame the teachers.  Do not blame the public schools.  If you are not a tiger mother or father and consider yourself to be an average American parent concerned about the self esteem of your child/children, look in a mirror and blame the person you see in the glass for what you are about to discover from this post.

The articles I will refer to in this post will help explain the point I want to make. The first piece I’ll mention was posted on PJ Media and although I disagree with many of the posts I’ve read on this Blog, since it is obvious the site is biased toward conservatism and the GOP, for once I agree with PJ Media’s Daily Digest in The Unteachables: A Generation that Cannot Learn.

PJ says, “The unteachable student has been told all her life that she is excellent: gifted, creative, insightful, thoughtful, able to succeed at whatever she tries, full of potential and innate ability.”

It all started with the self-esteem parenting movement, which I have ranted about before in previous posts. PJ says and I agree: “Rather than forming cheerful, self-directed learners, the pedagogy of self-esteem has often created disaffected, passive pupils, bored precisely because they were never forced to learn… The emphasis on feeling good… prevents rather than encourages the real satisfactions of learning.”

I recommend clicking on PJ’s link above and read the entire post.

In addition, I believe that the decline in traditional marriage and the traditional family that is often the foundation and strength of a nation is also the result of the self-esteem movement, which leads me to the next article I’m going to refer to.

In The Stranger in Your Family, AARP Magazine (April/May 2012 issue), Meredith Maran reports on the rise in parent-child estrangements. In Maran’s piece, San Francisco psychologist Joshua Coleman, PhD. blames what’s behind such family fractures on a me-first mentality that he says is weakening parent-child relationships.

When Coleman launched a six-session seminar on intergenerational conflict, he expected that about 50 parents might sign up. Instead, he got 400.  He says, “Little binds adult children to their parents these days, beyond whether the relationship feels good to them.”

Remember, “feeling good” is the foundation of the self-esteem parenting movement, which leads me to the next article. Jonah Lehrer writing Group Think, The brainstorming myth for The New Yorker (January 30, 2012) reports, “The thing that distinguishes brainstorming from other types of group activity—was the absence of criticism and negative feedback. If people were worried that their ideas might be ridiculed by the group, the process would fail.”

Continued on May 22, 2012 in The results of parenting gone wrong – Part 2

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga.

To subscribe to “Crazy Normal”, look for the “E-mail Subscription” link in the top-right column, or click on the “Following” tab in the WordPress toolbar at the top of the screen.

Discover The Self-Esteem Train Wreck

 
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Posted by on May 21, 2012 in family values, Parenting, self-esteem, self-esteem movement

 

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19 May

Lloyd Lofthouse's avatarLloyd's Anything Blog

I guess I could say this is my favorite poem since it is the one that I think of the most and what it teaches us.

 When you get what you want in your struggle for self
And the world makes you king for a day,
Just go to a mirror and look at yourself
And see what that face has to say

For it isn’t your father or mother or wife
Whose judgment upon you must pass,
The person whose verdict counts most in your life
Is the one staring back from the glass.

Some people might think you’re a straight-shootin’ chum
And call you a great gal or guy,
But the face in the glass says you’re only a bum
If you can’t look it straight in the eye.

That’s the one you must please, never mind all the rest,
That’s the one with you clear to the…

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Posted by on May 19, 2012 in Uncategorized

 

19 May

Another look at parenting through the eyes of a gay stay at home dad and he makes sense for all of us dads who have been there and tried to do the “daddy thing” in a Mom’s world where we often find ourselfs left out of the loop.

 
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Posted by on May 19, 2012 in Uncategorized

 

26 Apr

“Intriguingly, we’ve had more success in connecting with teachers in places like Tanzania, South Africa, the Caribbean, and China than we have here in North America.

“Teachers are the key. We have to find new ways to work with them, to inspire them, to help them find ways to embrace these technologies, to feel they’re in charge, not the other way ’round.”
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In addition, America has to stop blaming teachers for low standardized test scores. The truth is that there are many kids that hate to read, do not study or do homework when at home and then perform poorly on standardized tests while parents at home talk less than five minutes a day to their children.
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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga.

R.G. Morse's avatarJanet Mayfield & Randy Morse

We’ve worked, since 1995, to help educators cope with — or at best, embrace and lead — the technological revolution that is rapidly changing the ways our students learn.

1995. That’s a mere 17 years ago. Yet the changes that have occurred since then are nothing short of mind-boggling.

There were no readily available search engines in 1995. No Google or Facebook or Twitter or LinkedIn or Amazon or YouTube. No smartphones or iPads or Kindles. Bandwidth was a trickle, email virtually unheard of.

We left our traditional educational publishing company in 1995 — and when I say “traditional,” I mean we developed textbooks — to form one of the world’s first web-based publishing companies, dedicated to using new & emerging digital communcultural technologies to develop and deliver a new kind of learning material to the classroom. And with it, a new breed of ongoing teacher training and support.

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Posted by on April 26, 2012 in Uncategorized

 

Not a Pedophile by a Long Shot

19 Apr

James Hooker’s poor judgment (he could have waited a few months until after Jordan Powers graduated) cost him his job and now he has been accused of having a sexual affair fourteen years ago with a 17 year old (this is an alleged accusation and may not be true although the details are compelling).

However, Jordan Powers is 18 and in California 18 is the age of consent (the average age of consent in most states in the US is 16). Regardless of opinions that she is still a child, she hasn’t been a child since probably the age of 13, and her mother doesn’t have to like her daughter’s choices of who to love, but she should drop the pedophile accusations. A 41 year old man having an affair with an 18 year old is not being a pedophile. The definition for pedophile is: The act of fantasy on the part of an adult of engaging in sexual activity with a child or children. Powers stopped being a biological child four to six year ago and I’m sure she has a mind of her own regardless of her judgement falling in love with a man more than twice her age.

I taught middle and high school for most of thirty years, and believe me, once a young girl becomes an adolescent capable of being pregnant, most are not the so-called innocent child we want to believe in.

_______________________

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!”

Stacy Lynn Kingsley's avatarBazaar Daily News

MODESTO, CALIF: According to Yahoo News,  18 year old Jordan Powers is stupid enough to have actually taken James Hooker back as her boyfriend even though he was arrested for oral copulation of a minor from back in the 90’s.,

Yahoo notes that the two have moved back in together despite the wishes of her mother Tammie Powers, whom I might add is knowingly soaking up the attention she’s received on Facebook.

I don’t condone this kinds of relationships, but this mum just irks me. She’s loving every bit of attention she’s getting.

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Posted by on April 19, 2012 in American Public Schools, child abuse, family values, media, Parenting, politics, Public School, student behavior, Teaching

 

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Modern-Day Witch Hunts and Vigilantes — the politically-correct Mob’s (sex) War against Teachers – Part 6/6

16 Apr

There may even be a benefit for an older man or woman to marry a younger person.

For three examples of famous relationships that have survived the test of time, there is Woody Allen, Celine Dion and Rupert Murdoch.

In 1991, when Allen’s relationship with Soon-Ye started, she was 21 and he was 56, and they are still married even with a 35 year age difference.

Woody Allen and Mia Farrow, who adopted Soon-Ye, had a son outside of marriage, and Ronan Seamus Farrow said of his biological father, “He’s my father married to my sister. That makes me his son and his brother-in-law. That is such a moral transgression. I cannot see him. I cannot have a relationship with my father and be morally consistent… I lived with all these adopted children, so they are my family. To say Soon-Yi was not my sister is an insult to all adopted children.”


Robert Murdoch (81) and Wendi Deng (44)

Then there is Celine Dion (born 1968), who married René Angélil (born 1942), her manager—a twenty-six year difference.

By all accounts, these marriages are doing well even with the age disparity and when a relationship doesn’t work out, there is always divorce, but a “UK study showed that while marriages between older men and younger women were more predominant in 1963, overall numbers have increased, including the number of marriages between older women and younger men. Although divorce rates continue to rise in the UK, divorce rates among married couples with an age difference do not show a disproportionate increase.”  Source: eHow.com, divorce rates age differences.

However, how can a relationship such as the one between James Hooker and Jordan Powers stand a chance when there is so much media attention and public pressure condemning this couple? When love is true, it transcends age.  When it is false, it doesn’t matter what the age is of the man and woman involved.

Internet and Psychiatry says, “An interesting study by German experts revealed that men who marry younger women enhance their chances of longevity, and those who tie the knot with older women meet a premature death. The analysis was carried by a research group at Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock, Germany. The researchers looked at the deaths of the entire population of Denmark between 1990 and 2005. Danish men who marry women much younger than them live longer.

According to research, if a man marries a woman 15 and 17 years his junior, his chances of dying early are cut by one fifth. Also, it suggests that men cut the risk of premature death by 11 percent if their wives are seven to nine years younger. Another aspect highlighted by the study was that men who opted for older wives have an 11 percent higher chance of dying earlier.

Return to Part 5 of the Mob’s War Against Teachers or start with Part 1

_______________________

Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran,
who taught in the public schools for thirty years (1975 – 2005).

lloydlofthouse_crazyisnormal_web2_5His 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!”

 
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Posted by on April 16, 2012 in American Public Schools, child abuse, family values, government, media, Parenting, politics, Public School, student behavior, Teaching

 

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15 Apr

An example of a life-long learner and why it is a rewarding experience to be one…

Personal Concerns's avatarPersonal Concerns

The world of languages fascinates me. Given a chance to fulfil a wish, I would jump at mastering as many languages as possible. It is one of my earnest desires. Thankfully my career as a student of Sociology and Social Anthropology does not come in the way. For having a way with languages is considered to be an added qualification in this branch of social science. The level of fascination is so high that on meeting new people, I make all direct and indirect attempts to find out the number of languages they know. People with multilingual abilities impress me so much. I must confess of a sense of envy that crops up in the subconscious.  

So far I have been a slightly decent sample of the ‘rolling stone’ variety with a little moss gathered here and there in my brain. My efforts directed towards learning languages have met a…

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Posted by on April 15, 2012 in Uncategorized

 
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