"The whole people must take upon themselves the education of the whole people and be willing to bear the expenses of it. There should not be a district of one mile square, without a school in it, not founded by a charitable individual, but maintained at the public expense of the people themselves." -- John Adams

"No money shall be drawn from the treasury, for the benefit of any religious or theological institution." -- Indiana Constitution Article 1, Section 6.

"...no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burthened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief; but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinion in matters of religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish enlarge, or affect their civil capacities." – Thomas Jefferson

Sunday, September 19, 2021

What do vaccine and mask deniers do when they get sick?

Delightful. Medieval America always in intimate personal confidence of the Almighty. -- George Bernard Shaw
In 1909, the women, ages 16-23, who worked at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory and the Leiserson & Company went on strike.* They were fighting against...
  • unsanitary working conditions
  • fire hazards (which would later prove all too relevant)
  • the endless fines for talking, laughing, singing, stitches being crooked, etc
  • long working hours, often until 10 at night, with only 1 break for eating
  • low wages (around $6 a week, men made $12 a week for the same work in 1907)
  • the inappropriate behavior (aka, sexual) of their bosses.
When the women were told by one magistrate that their strike was against "God and Nature" George Bernard Shaw wrote the words at the top of this page.

More than a century later, the same mentality that assures some that they know exactly what God wants is, as Shaw wrote, still present here in the United States.
DEMONIC MASKS

Let's be clear at the outset, the people who are anti-mask-in-school are a minority. Those who are against school-children wearing masks because it's "demonic" are an even smaller minority, but it's those people who grab the headlines and the clicks...like the "nurse" who went viral with this...
"Remember we have authority in Christ Jesus," Melissa stated. "These are demonic entities, and all the school boards of all the United States of America, and all of us Christians will be sticking together to take them out, or the police officers that kick us out for our First Amendment right."

Melissa went on to say that she's been a registered nurse for 13 years and that "masks just don't work."

...Melissa then went on to reiterate that the school board was full of "demonic entities," which led school board officials to cut her mic off for a final time.
Where might she, and others like her, be getting this information? Could be from politicians...
Former Missouri gubernatorial candidate Saundra McDowell recently suggested that mask wearing is part of a "demonic ritual" to take away "God-given rights."
It could be from religious leaders...
“I don’t need to be a jerk for Jesus, but ... I’m not going to kowtow down to a wicked godless culture,” Mr Locke said...

The pastor has previously claimed that Vice President Kamala Harris is a “jezebel demon” and that the Biden administration is in charge of “child-trafficking tunnels” underneath Washington, DC.

FACTS SHOULD, BUT OFTEN DON'T, MATTER

More and more children are getting COVID since school started this academic year. Yet the extreme (and minority) right-wing science-deniers continue to fight against vaccines and masks.

This is despite the fact that masks...
The report found in part that masks effectively prevented COVID-19 transmission even without physical distancing in schools and on buses.
...work.
...studies show that even in situations where these other measures aren't being used, masking makes a big difference in keeping the virus from spreading. That was one conclusion of the ABC Science Collaborative, a major research initiative involving nearly 1 million students from 100 school districts and 14 charter school in North Carolina. It found that universal masking policies helped keep transmission rates of the coronavirus within schools to under 1% last fall and spring.
...and so do vaccines.
...studies that have looked at how COVID-19 vaccines work in real-world conditions (vaccine effectiveness studies) have shown that these vaccines are working well.

WHO ARE YOU GOING TO BELIEVE?

You need to choose who you're going to believe.

Lack of Trusted Authority is Why Covid-19 is Kicking Our Butts
The US has only 4% of the world population but nearly a quarter of all Covid cases.

That’s not a coincidence.

In large part, it’s because we don’t know how to combat the virus because we don’t know who to trust.

And the resulting credibility vacuum has enabled unscrupulous politicians, agents of chaos and other charlatans to position themselves as experts.
I don't know the self-proclaimed nurse, Melissa, quoted above.

I do know that Dr. Anthony Fauci has an M.D. from Cornell Medical College (N.Y.C.) and more than fifty years of experience in the field of medicine, and specifically, immunology and infectious diseases. I also know that the Centers for Disease Control, when not being manipulated by politicians, is staffed by professionals in their respective fields.

I'll trust the experts rather than those who call down demons from supernatural myths we should have left behind centuries ago.

I'll Trust Science

I admit it. I loved teaching science to young children during my years as an elementary classroom teacher. I loved teaching science because I understand the scientific method and I trust it to provide us with answers and then corrections to answers that we might have gotten wrong. It's important for students, and all of us, to learn that science changes when we get new information.

When I was a child there were nine planets. Now there are eight planets, a collection of dwarf-planets, and tens of thousands of minor planets all orbiting the sun.

When I was a child, early computers took up hundreds of square feet of warehouse space and ran on vacuum tubes. Now we wear much more powerful computers on our wrists, or carry them in our pockets.

I'll Trust Modern Medicine

I trust modern medicine. I never got smallpox or polio because I was born at a time when vaccines for those diseases were available. Because of modern surgical techniques, I can walk on my right heel that shattered when I fell down some steps. I can breathe even with allergies, lung disease, and an immune deficiency because of advances in medicine.

What do vaccine and mask deniers do when they get sick, with COVID-19 or any other illness? What do you think they do?

Susan B. Anthony explained it well in 1896, when she said,
I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do to their fellows, because it always coincides with their own desires.
Protect unvaccinated kids in school. Wear a mask. Get vaccinated.
*Triangle Shirtwaist Factory women strike, win better wages and hours, New York, 1909

⚗️πŸ”­πŸ”¬

Tuesday, September 14, 2021

Blogoversary #15 - Ignorance, Allied With Power, is a Ferocious Enemy

Today marks the fifteenth blogoversary of this blog. When I began it on September 14, 2006, I was in my late 50s, teaching Reading Recovery in a small public school in northeast Indiana (which has since closed), the US was at war in Iraq and Afghanistan, there had just been a mass shooting at Dawson College in Montreal, and George W. Bush was the US President.

In September of 2006, BeyoncΓ© and Justin Timberlake released their second albums and Elton John released his 29th; naturalist Steve Irwin and former Texas governor Ann Richards died; the Cubs finished last in the National League Central (a year later they would finish first); and Star Trek celebrated 40 years of television and movies (premier Sept 8, 1966).

Public education in the US was deep into the mess of No Child Left Behind. Testing defined everything taught in America's public schools. In Indiana, we hadn't started spending millions of dollars of tax money on vouchers and charter schools. Hoosier teachers still had seniority rights, the right to due process before getting fired, and collective bargaining for things like prep time and class size.

My blog's focus was on 1) the overuse and misuse of standardized testing, 2) the overwhelming intrusion of politics and politicians into public education, 3) my students, and small, occasional forays into music and baseball. I was reading education authors like Richard Allington, Gerald Bracey, Susan Ohanian, and Alfie Kohn.

I taught part-time for a few years, and then retired in 2010, taught a semester at a community college, volunteered in three different elementary schools after retirement, and joined with others to advocate for public education. Since retirement, and in no particular order, I moved to a new house; made a few trips to the hospital; fought and beat cancer (so far); voted in seven elections; watched the Cubs win the World Series (Bucket List item #1); signed up for Social Security and Medicare; welcomed two more grandchildren, a grandchild-in-law, and a great-grandchild into my life; made new friendships and said good-bye to some old friends and family members; drove Route 66 from California to Illinois; celebrated a fifty-first wedding anniversary; reached half-a-gross years in age, and written 1423 blog posts (this one is #1424).

Here are some quotes about life and education that I've gathered the last year.


EDUCATION

“Three years ago, we started to learn how to run from armed intruders. Last year we learned how to pack bullet wounds. This year, we’re trying to figure out how to bring back learning in a pandemic.” -- St. Louis psychology teacher Amanda Kaupp


"We live in a country where the state legislature must mandate play but congress doesn't need to approve a war." -- Tweet by Fred Klonsky


"Public education isn't important because it serves the public, it is important because it creates the public." -- [Attributed to] Neil Postman, former chairman, Department of Culture and Communication, New York University


“I have stayed true to my own memories of childhood, which are not different in many ways from those of children today. Although their circumstances have changed, I don’t think children’s inner feelings have changed." -- Beverly Cleary, 1916-2021


APHORISMS

"Don’t be afraid of walking away from a mistake just because you took a long time making it." -- Unknown


"The moment you’re in now is the moment that matters." — Don Lemon in This is the Fire.


"Silence in the face of evil, is itself, evil...Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act." -- Misattributed to Dietrich Bonhoeffer


"The secret of freedom lies in educating people, whereas the secret of tyranny is in keeping them ignorant." -- Maximilien Robespierre


"Don't be in such a hurry to condemn a person because he doesn't do what you do, or think as you think or as fast. There was a time when you didn't know what you know today." -- Quoted by Maya Angelou (quote reproduced in James L. Conyers, Andrew P. Smallwood, Malcolm X: A Historical Reader, Carolina Academic Press, 2008, p. 181 and Elaine Slivinski Lisandrelli, Maya Angelou: More than a poet, Enslow Publishers, 1996, p. 90)


“You can’t go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.”Misattributed to C. S. Lewis

POLITICS, RACISM, AMERICAN HISTORY, AND THE AMERICAN EXPERIMENT

“You can’t teach American history without talking about race, it’s impossible. If you do that, what are you really teaching your students?” -— Rodney D. Pierce


“Assertions that CRT is being taught in America’s elementary and high schools is ludicrous–as I have been complaining pretty much forever, schools aren’t even teaching the most basic concepts required for civic literacy, let alone a theory that requires a familiarity not just with the Constitution and Bill of Rights, but with significant elements of America’s legal structures.”Sheila Kennedy


[Frederick] Douglass announced that the abolition of war and peace he envisioned, would never “be completed until the black men of the south and the black men of the north shall have been admitted fully and completely into the body politic of America.”Race and Reunion by David W. Blight.


“It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.” -- James Baldwin


"It is possible to read the history of this country as one long struggle to extend the liberties established in our Constitution to everyone in America." -- Molly Ivins, great American newspaperwoman


"This country once led the global effort to eradicate deadly diseases for the benefit of all.
"It's a sad testament of our decline as a nation and the selfishness of who we've become as a people that we no longer lead the way in something as easy to do as getting a vaccine."
-- Jim Wright


"We must all live together and work together no matter what race or nationality. If you have an opportunity to accomplish something that will make things better for someone coming behind you, and you don't do that, you are wasting your time on this earth." -- Roberto Clemente


"We either overcome our innate tribalism and learn to live amicably together, or this experiment we call America is over." -- Sheila Kennedy


🚌🚌🚌