School Of Soft Raps

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Article: Principal fires security guards to hire art teachers — and transforms elementary school

This, to me, is the best story of the year thus far. Of course it’s a feel-good, hope-filled ray of sunshine peeking out from the cloudy future we see for our children, but it’s also the best tool us thinkin’ types have to battle the war on education (and intelligence in general) that has plagued our public school system and undermined our political discourse for decades.

Here we have results – a successfully tested formula we could expand to other districts as a broadened experiment on solutions for ailing schools with undisciplined youths. A fiscally-conservative approach that uses liberal methods to stabilize behavior and foster a balanced development. A top-down approach where principals takes it upon themselves to change the culture of their school and nurture an excitement that both teachers and students can feed from. Even the most hysterical helicopter parent should see potential and support this idea, if for no other reason than keeping their child safe and happy at school.

What I love about this story is how Andrew Bott defied the modern paradigm of our educational system:

  • He showed his teachers and students that they don’t have to be afraid of each other, a misconception perpetuated and escalated by administrator’s knee-jerk reactions to the threats of the few. It seems obvious that by transforming your school into a prison you will create a prisoner-type mentality in angsty, hormonal teenagers. I can also understand the difficulty in pushing back against two decades of unjustified bureaucratic “solutions” like metal detectors, security guards, banned backpacks and such, but some problems require surgery to heal, not bandages.

 

  • He eliminated the adversarial mindset by removing third-party authority from the equation, the opposite of current legislation seeking to arm our teachers and employ more security guards to lord over the student population.

 

  • He simply reappropriated existing budget back into programs that had been defunded, the same art programs that are suffering throughout America. These programs have been under attack by conservatives for years with no justifiable reasoning or responsibility, and with no follow up on the effect their elimination has had. In a school with thousands of students, you can only roster a few dozen of them on any given sports team, so offering alternative resources for the majority of students to develop their personality, skills, and vent frustration is the smartest, most responsible thing to do.

With school violence fears only intensifying, we need to scrutinize our solutions as much or more as the problems themselves. After every school in the U.S. has armed guards, armed teachers, body image scanners, uniforms with clear book bags, and every other tyrannical solution we can conjure up to strip our kids of their identity and privacy, we will have to reckon with what our children have actually learned.

President Job S. Creator, Esq., OB/GYN

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Article: After Company Executives Get Massive Bonuses, Regal Theater Chain Cuts Employees’ Hours To Avoid Obamacare

I don’t understand this “Obama is ruining America” rhetoric. He’s providing needed medical coverage to millions of Americans with a bill repeatedly proven by economists not to blow up the deficit, yet the only opposition we’re hearing is “Oh, those poor businesses… stop hurting them, socialist man!” On top of that, he’s getting his ass kicked over and over for a lack of jobs in the country. “Oh, those poor businesses… stop making it so hard for them to create jobs, socialist man!”

Meanwhile, the actual job creators purposefully hurt their own employees and the U.S.’s employment needs to keep the funnel of money to the top uninterrupted. These job creators, who receive millions in tax cuts so they can create jobs, aren’t creating jobs. Why is that so hard to understand?

When did Americans get flipped into protectors of big business, proud to stand up for faceless conglomerates that siphon money out of the country into safe harbors, then pay jack back to us in taxes on their record profits, only to make more and pay less the next year AND cut or outsource jobs? And all in the name of an economical system the companies they’re protecting are twisting and reshaping into a giant, spiked dildo. The only way to get any of that money back into our economy is through domestic jobs – meaning those job creators will have to invest in people by *gasp* creating jobs – since they won’t invest in our infrastructure via the 35% tax expectation, er, law.

I can understand wanting to remain true to the capitalist system. After the GOP and talking heads have made you choke on it, I can slightly understand fearing socialism. But the cognitive dissonance between means and ends is just absurd. If you truly understand who is responsible for creating jobs, and you know we forfeit gazillions in taxes to them with the understanding they’ll turn around and create more jobs, then why would you still put the onus on the elected leader of the public sector? Why aren’t you pressuring these companies, many of whom we’re basically paying after the taxes are all sorted out, to actually create the jobs?

“That wouldn’t be very capitalistic of us, tellin’ a company how it should be run,” you say? Then to you I say “wake up”. They don’t care about you. Those industries need you: your service, your patronage, and your loyalty. Stop being their unassuming lobbyist and take back control of your country from the greedy death-grip of big money.

Why Did The Duck Cross The Rules?

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Article: Reports: Major Violations At Oregon

How else do you recruit an entire team of sprinters to play football besides illegally (I’m talking to you, Saban)? Chip Kelly bolted, a la Pete Carroll, and now looks back from his many-more million dollar job in the NFL and scoffs, “Oh, that? Yeah, it’s fine.”

Do we have a large enough memory to add up all the NCAA sanctions, vacated wins and stripped trophies starting in the 90′s? There is a clear pattern of cheating-to-winning-to-reward that, when uncovered, we either write off as a bad apple or just plum don’t care. But we should care. YOU may not care about sports or whiny millionaires, but your kids do. Your friends do. These are their heroes, and I guarantee you the messages of “cheat now, apologize later” and “winning takes care of everything” is not lost on them. We’ve bred the last few generations to find the easiest ways around everything, so knowing full well our sports “heroes” are promoting the worst application of short-cutting we should be admonishing them far more than a few head shakes.

The perpetuated myth that coaches of organized sports are virtuous pillars of strength, wisdom and sportsmanship has long been shattered, yet nowadays unless they get caught with their dick in a student-athlete they remain infallible in the social conscious. We continue wanting them to teach, develop and lead our children into their adulthood, even after they’ve jumped from program-to-program like pedo-priests. Parents have never tried to take the reigns back, regulate the darkest coaching styles or shift the paradigm. Instead they let them go on sleepovers with Jerry Sandusky. They allow them to be assaulted by Mike Rice. But it’s not all coaches, right? Those were just bad apples. Hell, good ol’ Bobby Knight is smiling on the Applebee’s commercial during breaks, so no coach is inherently evil, right?

This is the same cognitive dissonance I blast religious folks, politicians and everyone else for. When we don’t question the trust and responsibility we place on coaches, we end up putting blind faith in a fictitious image and then have the nerve to be “surprised” by the lack of honesty and dignity we expected them to possess. Coaches are not parents, they are not icons, and they are not heroes. They are ranchers, herders of kid cattle and should be paid like farmhands. Most importantly, they should be trusted no more than farmhands and given minimal authority over our children, not the carte blanche discretion of parents and guardians.

Did the great Bear Bryant push his players to the point of death most practices? Undoubtedly. And he won. But acceptance is not the right response. Neither is acceptance of Chip Kelly’s program breaking the rules. The rub: he broke them trying to recruit kids! That must register on your evil-scale, or at least your hypocrisy-scale. The rules are there to keep recruiting fair and protect the future students. He cheated to get an advantage on winning, then he won and was rewarded, and then rewarded again for all that winning with an NFL contract.

What’s the moral? “Winning takes care of everything.” – Nike