Categories
Express Yourself teenagers teens

I Could Care Less

If teenagers are amazing at one thing, it’s for us to just not seem to care or at least to put up a facade that we could care less. If you were to look at my Facebook news feed on the normal day you’ll read constant statuses about people ranting on about how they “don’t care anymore about so and so” or how they wish they just didn’t care about anyone, these of course are followed by some stupid hash tags.

It’s an understandable phase we all seem to go through, as people seem to go through so many short romances when we’re teens. Teenagers are an emotional wreck from the start and we understand that if we show that we care about someone, we’re just opening ourselves to be hurt or the chance to be hurt. One minute we can be so in love with someone and all can be right in the world, fast forward to next week and we’re sitting on the couch crying our eyes out with a gallon of ice cream. I’ve been there, minus the ice cream part, and have seen many others go through the same trouble; it’s not fun to watch it all happen and even less fun getting back on your feet.

The goal seems to be then that we want to reach the point where we just don’t give a sh*t (sorry I’m lacking better words here). Life is a journey in itself and through it everyone has to go through many obstacles, this being one of them. Going from being in love to being heart broken isn’t something anyone wants to sign up for right away but it’s something that will happen to everyone at least once. If you are the type of person who just doesn’t seem to care or doesn’t want to get hurt, you’ll never have to face this challenge because you will sit there and convince yourself you don’t need to. You’ll convince yourself you’re fine on your own, doing you, but you’re not alright.

To love someone is just being human. Last I checked I am a human and whoever is reading this is just as much a human as I am. To convince yourself you don’t need someone to care for you is just..well is convincing yourself you’re not human. We all need someone by our side, a good friend, a significant other, or even a family member; we all need somebody who will be there for us. When you act like you don’t give a dam about anyone or anything, people will start to believe you and treat you as such. I’d rather love and be hurt than be treated like I really could care less about you and myself.  Nothing should stop you from showing how much you care about someone. As far as I know there is no such thing as “loving someone too much”, if there is well it doesn’t exist in my books.

A message to all teenagers of the world: Go out there into the world and show that you care about yourself and others. Go out there and fall in love. Go out there and let your heart break. It’ll all be okay and so will you.

Categories
Mitt Romney Politics

Multiple Ways to Say ‘No’ To Being Romney’s Vice President

Mike Huckabee: His talents are best used elsewhere
Why he’s in the veepstakes: Huckabee is already a household name, thanks to his 2008 run for president and subsequent Fox News show, and he’s popular with social conservatives and right-leaning economic populists. He’s also an ordained Baptist minister with a sunny public disposition.

Why he won’t be chosen: “I think there’s a greater likelihood that I’ll be asked by Madonna to go on tour as her bass player than I’ll be picked to be on the ticket,” Huckabee told ABC News on June 10.

2. Jeb Bush: Not interested in toeing the party line
Why he’s in the veepstakes: The former Florida governor, and younger scion of the Bush clan, is a Republican’s Republican, a uniting figure who can bring together different factions of the GOP — and could help Romney win Florida.

Why he won’t be chosen: Being Romney’s running mate is “not in the cards for me,” Bush told ABC News on June 1. “I don’t know how many times I have to repeat this. I have been repeating it for the last two years. I’ve been pretty consistent…. I am not a candidate. I’m not going to be asked…. This will prove I’m not running for anything: If you could bring to me a majority of people to say that we are going to have $10 of spending cuts for $1 of revenue enhancement, put me in, coach.”

3. Marco Rubio: The Freudian slip
Why he’s in the veepstakes: The freshman senator from Florida is Latino, photogenic, and popular with the Tea Party, and he is popular at home, in the biggest of the swing states.

Why he won’t be chosen: “I don’t want to be the vice president,” Rubio told National Journal in April. “But you know he’s not going to ask. That doesn’t work. He’s watching this interview right now…. Three, four, five, six, seven years from now, if I do a good job as vice president — I’m sorry, if I do a good job as a senator instead of a vice president, I’ll have a chance to do all sorts of things, including commissioner of the NFL, which is where the real power is.”

4. Chris Christie: Too big to make the cut
Why he’s in the veepstakes: The tough-talking New Jersey governor has been campaigning for Romney since last fall, and he’s endeared himself to the Republican base by taking on public service unions as policy and politics — Christie’s short videos of himself verbally smacking down critics at town hall events have gone viral on YouTube.

Why he won’t be chosen: “Do I look like somebody’s vice president?” the famously portly Christie said at a December 2011 Romney rally in Iowa. “If you were a betting woman, I wouldn’t bet on Romney-Christie. I wouldn’t lay any money on that.”

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Categories
Politics teachers

We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Teachers

It’s simply amazing what happens when people get elected to statewide office. They seem to become experts on everything. Today’s Exhibit A is education, specifically in Idaho and New Hampshire, where the legislatures have passed legislation that not only threatens the role of teachers in their classrooms, but also undermines their expertise and reduces them to penitents at the altar of official incompetence.

I’ve been thinking about Idaho for most of the week. Not just because I used their yummy potatoes to make latkes for Chanukah (this should be Idaho’s official dish), but because of a law passed last year that mandates the use of technology in public school classrooms and requires students to take two online classes in order to graduate high school. What’s wrong with that, you say? Plenty, because it was passed with no teacher input and is based on faulty educational premises.

Why would any state pass rigorous teacher certification requirements and observe educators for a number of years to make sure they’re competent, only to ignore them when making key decisions about how to implement a costly program of technological innovation? That’s what happened in Idaho. Teachers had almost no input into the law, and even though the Governor said this was not a first step in reducing the number of teachers in classrooms, that sentiment was contradicted by the online course requirement.

It’s not a leap of imagination to believe that if the online component proves successful, either academically or economically, then the course requirement would be increased. Further, part of the funding for this program would be taken from teacher and administrative salaries, which is usually the first step towards the self-fulfilling prophecy that says since we need computers and they cost money, we need to reduce staff because we’re paying too much in salaries.

The even larger concern is the legislature’s, and governor’s, ignorant attitude towards the classroom teachers. From the article:

Idaho is going beyond what other states have done in decreeing what hardware students and teachers should use and how they should use it. But such requirements are increasingly common at the district level, where most decisions about buying technology for schools are made. 

Teachers are resisting, saying that they prefer to employ technology as it suits their own teaching methods and styles. Some feel they are judged on how much they make use of technology, regardless of whether it improves learning. Some teachers in the Los Angeles public schools, for example, complain that the form that supervisors use to evaluate teachers has a check box on whether they use technology, suggesting that they must use it for its own sake. 

The most effective scenario for any change in the curriculum is to have teachers at the table engaged in the process they will be asked to implement. Educators are the experts in child development, learning theories and styles, and how best to guide their particular classes (which change every year) so that every child has the opportunity to learn at their optimal level. When politicians get involved, you get attitudes like this:

For his part, Governor Otter said that putting technology into students’ hands was the only way to prepare them for the work force. Giving them easy access to a wealth of facts and resources online allows them to develop critical thinking skills, he said, which is what employers want the most. 

When asked about the quantity of unreliable information on the Internet, he said this also worked in favor of better learning. “There may be a lot of misinformation,” he said, “but that information, whether right or wrong, will generate critical thinking for them as they find the truth.” 

First, technology is not “the only way” to prepare students for the work force. Teachers know that technology can be a valuable tool in the classroom, but there are many other skills that students need to learn. Tell me how a computer teaches a student interpersonal skills. Tell me how technology actually teaches a student correct spelling, grammar and usage (and no, a red or green underline doesn’t count). Tell me how a computer teaches someone how to negotiate for their salary. Tell me how technology alone teaches critical thinking skills. Tell me how technology teaches organizational skills. Tell me how technology teaches a student which websites contain legitimate information and which do not.

The truth is that teachers teach these skills. They can use technology as their activity or resource to support and facilitate the lesson’s educational objective, but the technology is not the end itself. So when the governor says that technology is the only way and that computers themselves can teach critical thinking, he’s wrong. And that’s exactly the problem with the Idaho initiative. I applaud its goals. Classrooms should have technology available to all students because not all homes are equipped, but education decisions must include teachers. Even the students in Idaho’s schools get what the state’s leaders miss:

Last year at Post Falls High School, 600 students — about half of the school — staged a lunchtime walkout to protest the new rules. Some carried signs that read: “We need teachers, not computers.” 

Having a new laptop “is not my favorite idea,” said Sam Hunts, a sophomore in Ms. Rosenbaum’s English class who has a blond mohawk. “I’d rather learn from a teacher.” 

New Hampshire’s new law has nothing to do with technology. I wish it did, because it’s even more frightening and potentially damaging to teachers and public schools. This Nashua Telegraph article tells the story, and here is a summary:

Public schools can now be forced to come up with an alternative to any lesson or assignment that a parent finds objectionable.

On Wednesday, the Legislature overturned a veto from Gov. John Lynch on a bill, HB 542, that will require school districts create a policy “allowing an exception to specific course material based on a parent’s or legal guardian’s determination that the material is objectionable.” 

The legislation does not attempt to define “objectionable,” giving parents complete discretion.

So essentially, any parent can’t walk into any public school and demand an alternative curriculum by objecting to any lesson plan they want. As opposed to Idaho, Governor John Lynch vetoed this bill but was overridden by the Republican majority. The effect is the same, though. Teachers will now have to look over their shoulders at every turn and will need to craft alternate lessons, indeed an alternate course, if one parent objects. This not only undermines educational professionals in New Hampshire, but also subjects the schools to even more political mischief in the form of pandering to particular groups and stirring up dissent over familiar targets like sexual references, defense of non-western religions and vocabulary that others find objectionable. All you need to do is read the comments under the article to see what kind of damage awaits New Hampshire’s educational community (Pete Perkins, you are my hero). Yes, parents will need to pay if there’s a cost involved, but replacing a book or video for one child would have minor economic repercussions.

But there’s also the matter of the new national test score craze.What happens when a parent opts their child out of enough lessons and the child doesn’t perform well on the tests? Who’s responsible? Is it the teacher’s job to develop an alternative state test to measure what that students has learned in their curriculum? Will the parent be responsible for the parts of the test that the student never learned (already know the answer here). How can a teacher prepare all students when there are so many potential changes due to parent objections? Who’s thought this one through (already know the answer)?

As a resident of New Jersey, I am used to having politicians with no teaching backgrounds expound on their damaging ideas. Governor Christie is a fan of using test scores to evaluate teachers, but he ignores the research that says how difficult it is to design an accurate evaluation model or the economic and curricular impact of testing every student in every subject every year. He’s also excluded public school teachers from a panel that studied reform ideas that, surprise, concluded that Christie’s ideas were more beneficial.

A recent New York Times article used the Value Added Model to reinforce the idea that good teachers have an impact on their students that reaches far beyond the classroom. What makes a good teacher according to the research? Why, one that raises student test scores. I call this Reinforced Illogical Garbage, or RIG. And right now, the system is RIGged against informed, rational, collaborative educational policies that tap into the enormous knowledge base of teachers, who actually know best how to educate children.

Join the debate at facebook.com/WhereDemocracyLives

Categories
Politics weekly address

Although Republicans Killed American Jobs Bill, President Fights On

Senate Republicans handed the President and the American people a defeat earlier this week, when they joined together and voted against putting Americans back to work. But unlike other times when President Obama would move on to another issue, this time the President is not giving up the fight, vowing to get Americans working again, by making his jobs proposal issue number one.

Coming off a week when his nearly $450 billion jobs bill died in the Senate, Obama made no reference to that failure, instead promising to renew efforts to get Republicans to vote on individual components of the legislation.

“Next week, I’m urging members of Congress to vote on putting hundreds of thousands of teachers back in the classroom, cops back on the streets and firefighters back on the job,” Obama said in his weekly radio and Internet address Saturday.

“And if they vote ‘no’ on that, they’ll have to tell you why,” he said. “They’ll have to tell you why teachers in your community don’t deserve a paycheck again. They’ll have to tell your kids why they don’t deserve to have their teacher back. They’ll have to tell you why they’re against common-sense proposals that would help families and strengthen our communities right now.”

They will vote “NO!’

It’s what they’ve done ever since President Obama was sworn into office. So expect to hear their talking points, their lame excuses explaining why teachers shouldn’t get a paycheck, why middle class Americans don’t deserve to find work. And I’m sure we’ll be hearing these excuses real soon.

Categories
Politics taxes

I.R.S – 1400 Millionaires Paid Zero Taxes in 2009

If the family struggling to put food on the table, or keep a roof over their heads make a mistake on their tax returns and is audited, the taxman will bring out the army to make sure that family pays all the taxes they owe. But if you’re a millionaire, you could get away with paying nothing, while your income reflects six or more digits.

A new report issued by the IRS shows that over 1400 people who earned more than 1 million dollars in 2009,  paid zero in taxes. Credit this effort to keep the rich happy to two things;

  1. The raping of the tax system through tax loopholes set up to primarily pacify the greedy;
  2. A lobbying group voted into Congress by the American people. This group of lobbyists is called the Republican Party.

But let’s not forget the Republican’s claim, that providing the rich with more tax cuts in the form of Corporate loopholes and welfare, is the only way to create jobs. With this ideology, no one would have expected the unemployment rate to balloon to 10.2% in 2009 and now stands at 9.2%

It is time that Americans and Republicans face the truth – extra tax cuts and tax loopholes that benefits the rich does nothing for everyday middle-class America, and the Bush Administration supports this conclusion when massive trillion-dollar tax cuts were given to the wealthiest people in America, resulting in 700,000 people a month losing their jobs at the end of his term.

At a time when middle class America is being asked to give up the shirts off their backs to keep the economy from falling into total destruction, the millionaires and billionaires in this country should at least be asked to pay something back. Maybe not 90% like they paid in the 1950’s, or the 50% they paid under the Reagan administration. But having millionaires pay zero in taxes should be unheard of, especially in this economic crisis.

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