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Tag Archives: tv

Some Teachers Should Earn Combat Pay

17 Feb

There’s more to the story of our daughter’s academic success than teaching her at home when one of her teachers was not doing an acceptable job. We also left the TV off Monday through Friday and provided a place for her to do her homework. Research shows that kids watch too much television. On weekends, we watched about two to four hours of TV—no more and we watched as a family.  She has never had a TV in her room.  No video games either.  We also took her to the library once a week and checked out books. When she was done with her homework each school night, her only form of entertainment was to read, and she did.

In 1977, Covina Valley School District wanted a tough substitute to tame an unruly art class at Las Palmas Middle School. The art teacher at Lao Palmas had a breakdown and was in the hospital under a doctor’s care. The Las Palmas’s principal called the principal at Giano Intermediate.

At the time, Giano had a reputation as the toughest school in the San Gabriel Valley due to the local street gangs. The principal was Ralph Pagan, a Korean War Veteran. He’d been hired to tame Giano.  I’d subbed at Giano many times the previous year, and Ralph recommended me for the job. I met the VP at Las Palmas after school one day, and he let me into the art room. What I saw shocked me.

Discover It’s the Parents, Stupid

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Lloyd Lofthouse, a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran, is the award winning author of My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition].

His latest novel is Running with the Enemy. Blamed for a crime he did not commit while serving in Vietnam, his country considers him a traitor. Ethan Card is a loyal U.S. Marine desperate to prove his innocence or he will never go home again.

And the woman he loves and wants to save was trained to hate and kill Americans.

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Posted by on February 17, 2010 in American Public Schools, Education, Parenting, Public School, Reading, Teaching

 

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Stealth Grammar arrived thanks to orders from Sauron

13 Feb

The Whole Language approach to teaching English was another magic bullet in public education that misfired. California’s educational system suffered horribly from this blunder. The theory was that the more a child reads on their own, the more the child learns.

However, children watch – on average – several hours of TV daily, and more than forty percent are latch-key children. Most of these soda-drinking sugar heads would not read even with a loaded gun to their heads. But for the Whole Language program to work, the children had to read at last thirty minutes every night on their own.

Grendel’s boss was Sauron from Mordor (Grendel and Sauron are anonymous names that represent real administrators). This latest magic bullet—The Whole Language approach to teaching English—probably came from him since most magic bullets for public education come from micro-managers like him. You’ll hear more about Sauron in a few other posts. He even appears in my memoir as Mr. Insert.

Anyway, Grendel ordered the English teachers to stop teaching grammar, mechanics, vocabulary and spelling, and this led to some of us teaching stealth grammar until Grendel recruited students as spies to catch us.

Sauron lived up to the nom de plume I’ve given him. Anyone that worked in Rowland Unified School District at that time probably knows who I’m talking about. He may even have had a Palantir, one of the seeing stones from The Lord of the Rings, to keep an eye on his administrators and teachers making sure they were doing things the way he wanted. During my thirty years of teaching in that school district, I often heard from staff that nothing was done without Sauron’s approval. The principals probably had to ask permission to visit a bathroom.

Now here’s the thing—teachers are blamed for every alleged failure in public education, and many of these so-called failures are manufactured. They are based on lies and fraud. For instance, teachers are lazy, teachers are incompetent and so one. But how could the failure of Whole Language be blamed on the teachers? Teachers protested. They knew it wouldn’t work. They knew that teachers had to keep teaching grammar. A decade later, Whole Language was quietly dropped, and teachers were told to start teaching grammar again but most of the textbooks had been recycled against the common sense and warnings of teachers–who are seldom if ever listened to by those at the top who know it all.

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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).

Honorable Mention in Biography/Autobiography at 2014 Southern California Book Festival

Crazy-is-Normal-a-classroom-expose-200x300

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 February 13, 2010 in American Public Schools, Education, Parenting, Public School, Reading, Teaching

 

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