Carnivals, Debates, Parodies, Spelling, Diet Coke, and Josh Groban
Mamacita says: The new Carnival of Education is up, over at DetentionSlip.org. Get over there NOW and get all educated about what’s going on at school these days.
Was there another debate tonight? Yeah, I’ll quote my idol Dr. Perry Cox and say, “I care so little I almost passed out.” I’ll just wait until SNL parodies it and watch it on YouTube. The parodies are enough like the real thing that I can get the general idea, and this way, they’re funny because they’re supposed to be.
I might be a little depressed tonight. I just graded papers, and among them was an Enigrish essay, an engish assignment, an Eglish paper, and an engilish paragraph. Color me picky, but this is too much. My nerves are shot.
I’m also trying to cut back on the Diet Coke, and right about now I’m ready to pick flies off the wall.
Thank goodness for Josh Groban. Mmmm, lovely.
Come, Have An Aneurysm With Me!
Mamacita says: This is my answer to a teacher forum question: Why does it seem that students have so many issues nowadays?”
Many parents don’t want to take the responsibility and administrators don’t want to anger these parents. Too many parents expect the school to supply everything and BE everything because the parents don’t know how, don’t want to, it’s inconvenient, they’d rather buy cigarettes and beer than mittens and socks, and they themselves were brought up to believe that society OWED them, when in fact society owes nobody anything. Our schools are expected to feed, clothe, counsel, medicate, analyze, supply, and educate each child according to his/her individual requirements, and no institution or individual can do that properly if all are to be accommodated – there aren’t that many hours in the day. Somebody has to be ignored and that ‘somebody’ is our good, well-behaved, average-and-above kids, who get pretty much nothing while the misbehaving attention-grabbing brat kid next to them gets all kinds of attention.
Our schools should be there to educate those who wish to be educated. Our schools are not should not be places to park a kid who has no intention of cooperating with the teacher or doing a lick of schoolwork. Students who need a little extra help and who respond to it, yes, give them that extra help. This rant is not about that; it’s about a kid who knowingly and eagerly disrupts and cares nothing about learning, only about making waves. Besides, I’m willing to give a kid the benefit of the doubt, at least in the beginning; whereas, their parents are supposed to be adults who should know better if they’re worth a toot.
Our schools should not be substitutes for a home, and unfortunately, for far too many kids today, school is the closest thing to a decent home a kid has, because at his real home, mom is shacked up with his seatmate’s dad, REAL dad is in jail or living with his parents who are enabling his immature behavior, every adult in the kid’s life is behaving more like a child than the children are, nobody is training him, nobody is disciplining him, and everywhere he goes, he gets his own way because nobody wants to deal with a tantrum, a fit, or anything from him that indicates displeasure of any kind. OR, he’s completely ignored because Mommy and/or Daddy have their own lives to pursue, and those lives are mostly in pursuit of pleasure on someone else’s dollar. Either way, genuine consequences as a result of his own actions are unknown, because the school is required to throw a cushion over him to protect him from such things, and 86-year-old Grandma is too tired and too disgusted with her own kids and too out-of-touch to raise a child in the 21st century, and because, oh poor little thing, his life is AWFUL and we must all tiptoe around him. The home has no books, no magazines (except the dirty ones the child has full access to, in Mom and Uncle Daddy’s bedroom) the house is full of liquor and tobacco and worse, they can’t pay the rent but they’ve got a full liquor cabinet and a huge flat-screen LCD tv and plenty of cigarettes, there are no bedtimes and no privacy and no personal possessions – either at home OR at school – and most of the meals are supplied by our tax dollars. Nobody in this kid’s life works, except for his teachers, and they are referred to at home as “suckers,” and expected to fill in for ho-babe mommy and her various live-ins, none of whom have a job or intend to ever get one, and the kids are great sources of extra welfare money.
This is pretty harsh, but it accurately describes about a third of most of the public school kids I’ve had, and their “families.”
The rest of the kids were sweet, well-mannered, well-behaved, smart, and worked hard, but the majority of the time, attention, and money went to the lowest common denominator. This is unacceptable.
I am extremely harsh with adults who do not act as such. They do not deserve sympathy; their children do, but the adults in their lives do not. It’s a shame we can’t permanently remove innocent children from these dens of disgusting, immoral adults and put them with loving families who would take proper care of them.
My college students often write about their childhoods, and the majority of them wish somebody in authority would have removed them from their mothers’ homes and placed them with somebody who was actually grown up, and who did not subject them to such antics as shacking up with men who didn’t care enough about them to make it legal, and forcing a child to witness it. Even the drugs and booze didn’t affect my students as much as having to live with adults who didn’t love them enough to make the relationship legally bonding. What do you think goes through a kid’s mind when he knows either Mom or Dad could walk out the door any time things didn’t go his/her way? And yes, I know that many marriages don’t work out, but I also believe most of those would if both parties would just buck up and GROW up and act like the adults they’re supposed to be. That means, of course, that people would need to keep their hormones under control, therefore keeping unlawful penii out of their pants, and one’s own out of unlawful pants. That’s too difficult for some people. We all know what kind.
Y’all should just read some of my students’ essays some time. Sometimes, I cry over them, late at night, and wish I could go back in time to somehow get some grown-up sense in their parents’ heads before they ruined an innocent kid. With some mentalities, though, I have also come to believe that no amount of anything can change the way people are wired, and some people are wired to look out for #1 and do whatever feels good for THEM. Nobody else has any rights.
Bah. Bad day, can ya tell?
I’m reading an essay by a forty-year-old man who is telling me of his life with his mother, who had him at thirteen, kept him so she could be “loved unconditionally, and get a lot of welfare money, too” and ended up raising himself because Mommy had a right to be a free and fun-loving teen, didn’t she? Her life shouldn’t stop because of one stupid mistake, should it? She’s got a right to a life! He writes of his mom’s string of shack-ups and how, after the first five or six, he stopped trying to bond with them because it hurt too badly when they left, and they all left. He writes of a mother who has dated his classmates. He writes of Uncle Daddies who claimed to love him but left him anyway. He writes of wanting desperately to go with some of the Daddies but Mommy wouldn’t let him go because “she couldn’t LIVE without her baby” which didn’t take him long to translate into “I can’t LIVE without the welfare money you bring in because it buys my cigarettes.”
And this is only one of many, all similar, all wishing their parents had been committed adults, instead of adults who should have been committed.
To some of our kids, the word “adult” means “dirty.” They don’t even KNOW any grownups, except for us.
Many of you younger teachers think I’m jaded and opinionated and judgmental, and that you have a perfect right to live as you please and old fogies like me should butt out. I used to think like that, too, until experience, and interaction with children of these dreadful non-existent “families,” taught me otherwise.
I do not say these things to pick on or hurt anyone; but I hope some people can learn from them. Not that getting older and more experienced makes you judgmental, but that experience forces you to see things as a child might see them, and might go out and do likewise.
I’m stopping now before I have an aneurysm.
Quotation Saturday
Mamacita says: 
I’m not much of a political blogger, nor have I any desire to be one, but today’s antics by our elected representatives bring to mind the phrase “taxation without representation.”
It also brings to mind this old piece of political advice: “People elected you to be their honest representative. Don’t let them down.” But that’s behind the times. Apparently now it’s more like “Every man for himself” in D.C. Or maybe “Many Americans have lost their jobs to foreign soil, will soon be homeless, and trusted the bank to take good care of their money. But who cares as long as I’ve got mine, hahahahahahah!” Shame on all who voted for it. Shame.
I mean, what do most big-time politicians know about ordinary people? They know nothing about us, and they don’t care to know. Mortgage? Debt? Insurance? Medicine? Education? What do big-time politicians care about such mundane things? Will those things put lots of cash into their own pockets? No? Then big-time politicians don’t care about those things. And from what little I’ve heard, the more a politician talks about how much he cares, the less he really cares.
1. Integrity is telling myself the truth. Honesty is telling the truth to other people. –Spencer Johnson
2. Honesty is the best policy. If I lose mine honor, I lose myself. –Shakespeare
3. If it is not right do not do it; if it is not true do not say it. –Marcus Aurelius
4. To be persuasive we must be believable; to be believable we must be credible; to be credible we must be truthful. — Edward R. Murrow
5. The trite saying that honesty is the best policy has met with the just criticism that honesty is not policy. The real honest man is honest from conviction of what is right, not from policy. — Robert E. Lee
6. In politics, nothing happens by accident. If it happens, you can bet it was planned that way. –FDR
7. Politics is the diversion of trivial men who, when they succeed at it, become important in the eyes of more trivial men. –George Jean Nathan
8. The incestuous relationship between government and big business thrives in the dark. –Jack Anderson
9. There is little place in the political scheme of things for an independent, creative personality, for a fighter. Anyone who takes that role must pay a price. –Shirley Chisholm
10. When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are the legislators. –P.J. O’Rourke
11. Policies that emanate from ivory towers often have an adverse impact on the people out in the field who are fighting the wars or bringing in the revenues. — Colin Powell
12. If you ever injected truth into politics, you would have no politics. –Will Rogers
13. Trade is much superior to piracy. You can rob and kill a man but once, but you can cheat him again and again. –Louis L’Amour
14. Private and public life are subject to the same rules; and truth and manliness are two qualities that will carry you through this world much better than policy, or tact, or expediency, or any other word that was ever devised to conceal or mystify a deviation from the straight line. — Robert E. Lee
15. If you want to gather honey, don’t kick over the beehive. –Dale Carnegie
16. Some men change their party for the sake of their principles; others their principles for the sake of their party. –Winston Churchill
17. Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler. –Einstein
18. Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. –DDE
19. A business that makes nothing but money is a poor kind of business. –Henry Ford
20. He that is of the opinion money will do everything may well be suspected of doing everything for money. –Benjamin Franklin
21. Whenever the people are well informed, they can be trusted with their own government; that whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied on to set them to rights. –Thomas Jefferson
22. If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich. –JFK
23. The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy. –Martin Luther King Jr.
24. Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power. –Abraham Lincoln
25. You cannot shake hands with a clenched fist. –Golda Meir
26. No man is above the law and no man below it. –Theodore Roosevelt
27. I always remember an epitaph which is in the cemetery at Tombstone, Arizona. It says: “Here lies Jack Williams. He done his damnedest.” I think that is the greatest epitaph a man can have. –Harry S Truman
28. Few men have virtue to withstand the highest bidder. — George Washington
29. A politician thinks of the next election – a statesman, of the next generation. –James Freeman Clarke
30. What has destroyed liberty and the rights of men in every government that has ever existed under the sun? The generalizing and concentrating of all cares and powers into one body. –Thomas Jefferson
31. It’s not the employer who pays the wages. Employers only handle the money. It’s the customer who pays the wages. –Henry Ford
32. No amount of charters, direct primaries, or short ballots, will make a democracy out of an illiterate people. –Walter Lippman
33. Beware the politically obsessed. They are often bright and interesting, but they have something missing in their natures; there is a hole, an empty place, and they use politics to fill it up. It leaves them somehow misshapen. — Peggy Noonan
34. There is no more independence in politics than there is in jail. –Will Rogers
35. Government has come to be a trade, and is managed solely on commercial principles. A man plunges into politics to make his fortune, and only cares that the world shall last his days. — Ralph Waldo Emerson
36. The flood of money that gushes into politics today is a pollution of democracy. –T.H. White
37. Politics, it seems to me, for years, or all too long, has been concerned with right or left instead of right or wrong. –Richard Armour
38. Reporters thrive on the world’s misfortune. For this reason they often take an indecent pleasure in events that dismay the rest of humanity. –Russell Baker
39. The most important political office is that of the private citizen. —Louis D. Brandeis
40. An election is coming. Universal peace is declared and the foxes have a sincere interest in prolonging the lives of the poultry. —T. S. Eliot
41. It is better to be violent, if there is violence in our hearts, than to put on the cloak of nonviolence to cover impotence. —Mohandas Gandhi
42. When one may pay out over two million dollars to presidential and Congressional campaigns, the U.S. government is virtually up for sale. —John W. Gardner
43. Life without liberty is like a body without spirit. —Kahlil Gibran
44. We live in a world in which politics has replaced philosophy. —Martin L. Gross
45. We would all like to vote for the best man, but he is never a candidate. —Kin Hubbard
46. Whenever a man has cast a longing eye on offices, a rottenness begins in his conduct. —Thomas Jefferson
47. Ninety percent of the politicians give the other ten percent a bad reputation. —Henry A. Kissinger
48. Instead of giving a politician the keys to the city, it might be better to change the locks. —Doug Larson
49. I don’t make jokes. I just watch the government and report the facts. —Will Rogers
50. Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a member of Congress; but I repeat myself. —Mark Twain
Political? Nah. Opinionated? Perhaps.
Disgusted? Definitely.
The Founding Fathers, and the Founding Mothers, too, are turning over in their graves. And no, Virginia, the Constitution is not now nor will it ever be outdated.
The inmates are running the institution. God help us all.
You may quote me.
