Wearing a mask in public is not protected speech. Understand this guy was just walking down the street, minding his own business, while wearing a Grinch mask.
A judge decides parents cannot take their own child to the religious service of their choice. The most distressing part of this story is that most Christians would agree with the judges ruling and not have any clue as to why they should be vocally opposed to this.
I received this through back channels. I post it just in case people think I'm exaggerating how bad our schools have become. The name and location have been obscured to protect the intelligent from school administrators.
Hello. I am Khruv S, a high school sophomore from Riutoh, ZZ, whose school year just ended -- meaning that anything I write to you will not come back to haunt me until the end of August. I've been following your education discussions for about a year and a half now, and (perhaps unsurprisingly) many of the conclusions reached on your site were the same conclusions I came to during my freshman year.
For example, reading, writing and math seem de-emphasized, while science is gradually dumbed down for the hordes of students who enter ninth and tenth grade not knowing d=r*t or how cells divide. Some of this may seem like trivia, but there are many students I have spoken to who do not know the basics of evolution, can not explain cancer more than two months after the cancer unit has passed, and who have no concept of what science (repeatable, demonstrable) is or is not.
And that, sir, is from a GATE-level classroom. At Edison, one of the top 100 high schools nationwide (at least two years ago), there are about twice as many non-GATE or Prep students as there are GATE students, and these know far less. I have spoken with P students who have not read a book in their lives, who are stumped by basic algebra, and who have no knowledge of politics, government or history. Their grammar and spelling fall anywhere from middling to atrocious. Some of the teachers seem to have given up, while others do the best they can to teach classes full of 'students' who bring neither paper nor pencil to school. Many of the parents do not seem to care. And discipline is also an enormous problem; profanity and general rudeness is the rule rather than the exception.
(An aside: There is a running joke about how an observer can pick out P-students from a distance. They wear sports jerseys, have tiny backpacks or small sports bags, and swear a lot.)
In the meantime, teachers bend over backwards to fulfill 'the standards' and to teach what should have been taught before. I have one English teacher in mind as a prime example of this. We read two books and two Shakespeare plays in his class, one book/play per quarter. The rest of the time, we read stories of various types aloud in class. (! Isn't that for elementary school kids? Never mind; certain kids read very slowly, so this may have been necessary. Unfortunately.) During the entire school year, we did only three forty-minute essay-type writing assignments. On Thursdays the teacher brought out one of his old orange grammar books and retaught the basics."This is a noun/verb/apostrophe/semicolon." I lost interest in his class rather early in the school year; perhaps from my writing you can see why. But many other students liked his class. One of them said that he taught her 'a lot' that she hadn't really learned before. What he was doing ought to be taught in the third or fourth grade, not tenth. Am I missing something?
The smartest students are seeking out AP-classes to cover the loss. I switched to AP Biology midyear because we were repeating seventh grade science. (Many of my former classmates had forgotten the material, because the schools of today train students to have short-term memory. The math classes are going ballistic over this; students keep forgetting the basics over summer vacation.) Now three or four freshman want to take AP Bio as sophomores. Others are reaching out for AP English and AP European History. One or two take AP Psychology. Why? My guess is, they aren't being stimulated enough in their regular classes. This is No Child Left Behind, in all its macabre glory.
One last lament. The way certain schools are run has become ridiculous. My sister, a seventh grader, asked if she could paint out graffiti on her locker when the school was closed. The administrators kindly informed her that to do so would be a violation of the Janitors' Union or some such. And when debate started over soda machines, her middle school (Computech)replaced the soda machines with ice cream machines. Edison did the same, but replaced two machines instead of all of them. If this is an improvement, I must have missed it.
Thank you for listening. Part of this felt like a rant, but I thought you might be intrigued by a student's perspective.
Sincerely,
Khruv
New medical diagnosis: Power Point Disease. Everyone knows it isn't how much work you actually do, just how busy you can look while not really doing much.
Well, got to go. I will probably do more house cleaning later.
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