He Can Be Taught

Many of us were taught while growing up that if you're carrying a sharp object and you drop it, let it fall. It's great practical advice, you know.

Among the accessories available (I adore alliteration) for the drain snakes I sell are retrieving tools. They are sharp and typically pointed objects. They have to be, so that they may puncture and burrow into a blockage in a drain and retrieve it. 

A year or so back I was carrying not one but two of them into a customer's office. And I dropped both. And I tried to catch them. 

It was like a juggling act which had gone off the rails. There I was trying to corral those two retrievers, each bouncing off my hands one to the other, and each time digging a barb into my palms. "Oh, ah, oh, ow," I repeated many times over trying desperately to grab them. Of course, they ended up hitting the floor anyway.

Why I had two handkerchiefs I don't know (usually only having one) but it was fortunate that day. I had to wrap them around my hands driving home, hoping the bleeding would stop by the time I got there. Tiny puncture wounds take awhile to seal.

The moral of the story, in case you - as I - didn't get the lesson originally: if you drop a sharp object, let it fall.

Education and Learning

The Warren Consolidated School system in suburban Detroit has announced that it will soon open a math, science, and technology center for middle school students in the district. It is all part of a strategic plan to 'focus on student learning'.

Weren't they supposed to be doing that already? What have they been doing all these years if they weren't strategically focusing on student learning? How long has the WCS been in business that they now have come to realize that schools are for learning? For crying out loud, isn't the whole point of education supposed to be about pupils learning things? Yet this is precisely the thing which sounds so good when enunciated that the general public thinks, without actually thinking, 'ohh, that sounds so good: schools focusing on student learning'. How could you not vote for new or recurring millages, knowing your schools focus on student learning?

But to the point. Schools used to be about teaching. Now they're about learning. It doesn't seem like much of a difference, but it is. At one point, teachers were supposed to teach. Now, students are there to learn. What does that do?

It takes the responsibility off the teachers, that's what it does. And we all know how many maladies exist to excuse students from learning. They're everywhere, and more are concocted every day and with every imaginable acronym. Soon there will be no reason we should expect a teacher to teach, or a student to learn. Schools will be a place of academic schizophrenia; no one will know how to act. As such, no one will be at fault for the mess. What to do, what to do?

A good thing to do would be to vote against any and every millage which comes around your local school district, new ones indeed but also renewals. If what we are paying for are schools which don't seem clear on what they're doing (and they can't be clear if it has taken them decades to realize that their focus should be on the obvious) then they don't merit our support. Don't give them money. That is rule one when dealing with charlatans and shysters. They will only want more when the fish have taken the bait.