Banff.  Love Banff.  Love Chateau Lake Louise.  Edmonton is nice too.  Although it’s milder in Kelowna.  Hell, I like Canada.  Don’t like the taxes so much, but their healthcare’s pretty good.   

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Yes.  It should be illegal because most times it is administered incorrectly and for the wrong reasons.  The reason I have heard most often is that homeschooling is necessary to protect the kids from bad outside influences especially from the liberal, secular brainwashing that happens in public schools.

Granted there is liberal, secular brainwashing that happens in public schools.  And frankly, I believe our public schools in America are a total failure at preparing the future of America to compete intellectually with other nations.  But it does teach students to operate on a schedule, in a hierarchy, and with one another.  Learning to deal with the complex social dynamics is important to function in a society.  You can’t learn that at home with mommy and daddy or by going over to friends’ houses or even participating in intermural sports.  It has to come from an environment that mimics the greater society (even if that society is corrupt and filled with idiots, criminals, and other scum–perhaps especially).

You also learn about the democratic process, even though you learn that democracy in America (or perhaps has always been even in Greece) a farce and a joke manipulated by the popular, good-looking, smooth-talking (Barak) and the rich.

It is the parents’ responsibility to keep the dialogue open and to train their child to operate in a contaminated environment and maintain her integrity.  Homeschooling is just chickening out of that responsibility.  Frankly, I’ve known and taught, too many people who have come out of that environment.  They’re stunted socially.  They don’t think that they are, but they are:  no volume control, no ability to adjust to different kinds of people, no ability to work in a hierarchical environment that requires time management and a schedule.

Look, we’re not talking about the old days of the educated leisure-class elite.  Their social activities were dances and balls and such.  Their days were filled with servants and people and teachers and tutors of all kinds of subjects from dancing, to art, to science, fencing (*sigh* for those days again–I can rely on family connections and not have to eek out a living as a schoolmaster).  There was no need for the social training we need now as bourgeois that need to function in a bourgeois workforce and workplace.

No.  Homeschooling is for the ultra-rich who can afford the best tutors and who don’t need to rub elbows with other ordinary joes and take orders from THE MAN–heck they are THE MAN.  It always has been.  As for private schools or charter schools.  That’s a different discussion entirely.

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More than my salary so I can take a year of leave.  I have to use the computer for work after all.  And if I go back to school then I’d need to hire someone to type stuff for me.  I’d record all my papers and have them typed.  Also, I’d have to hire a computer user for me to do all my other work–would that be giving up computers to hire someone to use it for me.

There’s too much technology dependancy anyway.

But to answer the question in short.  I’d probably quit using computers for 100,000,000 for absolute contact with computers.  But then how would I withdraw money from the bank?  Aren’t ATMs computers?  I couldn’t drive a car since my car has a computer in it.  I’d have to hire people to carry me on a  litter or rickshaw.

What kind of question is this?  Computers are everywhere.  I’d not be able to use an elevator for Pete’s sake.  I don’t think that I’d be able to give it up if I wanted to since there are things that use computers that I am not even aware of.

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You know, I didn’t like it when I was a kid.  People would always make fun of my name Samuel until I reinvented myself as Sam.  It was such an unusual name for a generation of Michaels, Seans/Shawns, Chris and Davids and such.  For a long time as a 5 year old I wanted to be named Michael because then maybe the people around would the foreigner in their midst.

I like it now.  It’s a distinguished name with history:  Samuel the prophet and Judge, Samuel Johnson, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Samuel L. Jackson, and of course Samuel Adams.

I googled my full name and came up with doctors, lawers, and pastors.  So it can’t all be bad if a small person like me working as merely an underling-grunt-school-teacher shares a name with those folks.

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Actions of course.  Words to come from the heart, but actions make intentions real.  The use of words can be considered an action at times–like encouragement.  But the goal of rhetoric (use of words) is always to move the audience to action whether to make a judgement based on past facts (forensic), or to make a decision for future action (deliberative), or to affirm common values by praising or blaming (epideictic).  So words to action.

Anyway, to another topic.  I heard about this story on my favorite radio station.  I find the entire thing ridiculous a student has control over his or her learning.  But in America we have to blame someone instead of take responsibility for our own failures.  And that blame and the witchhunting that comes afterward creates fear (a fear that wouldn’t exist if our justice system weren’t so broken with beauracracy and shamless pandering to the lawless mob).  Fear to fail the student because of parents suing for discrimination.  Now, fear of passing because the student will sue the school for not doing its job to teaching. 

Well, how is the school supposed to do its job if:

1. Parents don’t to theirs.  It’s their kid.  It is THEIR responsibility to teach and train their children.  They brought it into the world after all.  It is NOT THE SCHOOLS’ REPSONSIBILITY TO MAKE THEIR CHILDREN LEARN.  Schools teach.  Parents make sure their kids learn.  That’s the social contract.

2. Schools are not allowed to discriminate based on test score and ability.  Let’s face the truth:  education is by NATURE discriminatory.  Not about ethnicity per se, but about merit and ability.  It is supposed to separtate those that know from those that do not hence degrees.  If everyone can get (not earn) one then degrees are worthless.  We might as well be communist and have doctors work on the farm and farmers perform surgery!  Which brings me to my next point.

3.  Schools are afraid of accusations of racism from racist minority people.  We all know who they are.  People who would readily blame their ethnicity for all their woes.  People who would cry havoc and immediately think that whatever failure they have achieved in life is because “The Man” is sticking it to them, oppressing them.  Well, I’ve got news for those people:  YOU’RE THE MAN NOW.  Everybody’s afraid of you.  You’ve already killed “The Man” in the ’70s.  Yet you keep on beating his dead body and then threaten to do the same to others (kinda reminds me of one time at Hollywood Park.  A man lost a race and kept on screaming that the man rigged the race while beating his own hand with his racing form.  ‘sblood.).  You keep reminding us of your skin color, of your past oppression, of perceived oppression, special disabilities, etc.  Geesh! Stop oppressing the rest of us.  You are not the victim anymore, you are the victimizer now.

Schools can’t do their jobs when racist people keep terrorizing the weak-bellied administrators.  I guess it beats actually having to earn something.  If you can’t beg, you beat it out of someone else.

Anyway, it all reminds me much too much of the satirical movie Teachers with Nick Nolte.  The movie put everything bad about education in the 1980s and spun it as a worst case scenario.  Well, I guess that satire isn’t far from the truth.  Our education system is a genral failure.  You have to be a lunatic, like Custer, to stand with your limited resources, shoulder to shoulder with incompetents, and try to stave off the lawless horde of America’s future.

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My favorite movie of all time has to be Empire Strikes Back becuase it’s all dark and moody, but really, because it’s a well made movie with good story elements and good pacing and it just had that dramatic emotional connection with the audience.  To be honest it just went downhill from there for the Star Wars franchise.

Other favorites are Star Trek II: Wrath of Khan same reasons as above.  Emperor’s New Groove, Emperor’s New Clothes.
   

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On just a bad day I read a book in a quiet place preferably away from people.

On a really bad day, I call up a friend to talk or maybe go out and eat a really nice dinner at one of my favorite restaurants.

On really, really, really, bad days (I’ve only had a few) I go and get a drink.  There was one time in 2003 my buddy, Willie, and I went to get drinks a McCormack and Schmick’s–I was in a really, really, depressed mood and three or four hard ones helped me forget the pain of ending a relationship.  I don’t think I’ve been the same since then.  That drink signified the beginning of my emotional numbness.  The stopping of joy and ending of smiles in my life.  I don’t think I really smiled out of contentment or love since. 

The other two times I had to go to my favorite spot in the Fullerton Arboretum (there’s some pain that not even alcohol can’t numb) on the steps of the Heritage House (the victorian house in the arboretum).    The place in ’93 when I parted from Kelly McNally.  A place of permanant sorrow and regret.  That’s the place I put them ever since that December evening when we said “That’s it” and parted.  I never could bear to tell her how I really felt about her.  That’s my Waterloo where I surrendered to my fear of inevitable rejection by terminating a perfectly good relationship.  It’s easier to be in exile.  At least the boundaries are clear and all the relationships are safely certain.

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What is forever?  Like Aurora and Tithonus?  How is that possible?  No I do not think that two people can stay together.  Maybe they can be together until one dies, but forever? Nah.  Staying also doesn’t include love.  So it’s posible to stay together but not loving is possible.  Even in the Greek myth it being together forver is bittersweet at best.  All things end.  Sometimes, most times, it’s for the best.

So I leave you with this poem by one of my favorites.  Sing it to the Yellow Rose of Texas, or Gilligan’s Island for all I care.  Heck try Amazing grace!  Enjoy.

Parting
by Emily Dickenson

My life closed twice before its close;
        It yet remains to see
If Immortality unveil
        A third event to me,

So huge, so hopeless to conceive,
       As these that twice befell.
Parting is all we know of heaven,
       And all we need of hell.

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Haven’t a problem saying no.  Say no everyday.  Students always have unreasonable demands.  Bosses too.  One example was when the Dean for Special Ed told me that our Assistant Sup decided that I HAD to go to the special education collaboration meeting.  I had already been out of the classroom four times in the last three weeks.  My answer was an emphatic “no.”

More specifically I said:  “I am a  teacher.  I have been out too much already.  I don’t know what that masculine woman, excuse me–penis-less man, thinks makes a good teacher, since she, it, obviously belives that always being out of the classroom make teachers better.  Personally, I like being in the classroom TEACHING kids.  That’s what I think makes a good teacher–TEACHING.  Practicing teaching, by actually teaching, makes me a better teacher.  Not another onerous and officious all day meeting.  Tell her FUCK no!  Tell her she’s already taken four days away from my instruction and that I’ve got at least another three coming up.  If she wants to schedule yet ANOTHER set of useless all day meetings, I’m filing a grievence with the union.  She’s keeping me from doing my job.”

Needless to say I haven’t been pulled out for useless eight-hour meetings since.
   

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Thank you for the comment Peter.  It allowed me to do some reflection.

Whatever he did was fine, his successors have made what he did an an
excuse to scream “racism” and “oppression”  when there is none. 
They’ve made his legacy into a monster.

Have you faced racism from “African-Americans” or
“Hispanic-Americans?”  I have.  Especially in the field of public
education.  The people I have had the pleasure of encountering use what
MLK has done as an excuse blame the White Man and don’t think that we
as Asians are exempt from that blame either.   Here are a couple of instances:

I had been told, by my master teacher, when I was student teaching,
God bless her African-American heritage, that “All ‘em y’all Asians,
think you’re white!  You’re The Man’s bitch!”  I asked both my master
teachers, whom were black if that’s generally what black people think. 
They answered yes.  I trust their answer since they’re so active in
their “awareness” groups.

Another stinging encounter, years later, with a parent, of the same
heritage, who adamantly demanded that his child’s “rights” had been
trampled by all his teachers–not admitting the fact his child could
not read beyond a 1st grade level.  He turned to me during one of the umpteen
conferences and said, “my son, is African-American, he doesn’t have all
the support that you had growing up and it’s not fair.  You have to
pass him.”  How can he assume that I had the support?  Did he know I spent my
elementary years as a penniless child in East LA?  No.  Did he know that my mom worked the graveyard shift in the hospital to support me and my dad as he went to Computer Learning Center for years?  No.  Did he know that I didn’t know how to read until the 3rd grade because I went to school in East L.A. and they only did the “bilingual” thing and that wasn’t in my lingo? No.  He assumed, in
his own racist ignorance, that, because I’m Asian, I’m in on it with
The Man.

I have no problem with what MLK did.  I believe in it.  What he did was
good, what his successors did with it is perversion.  His goal was for
ALL minorities to be on par, not give them a golf club to beat each
other and the White Man with.

So far all I’ve seen is a lot of beating.  A lot of fear, not respect. 
Just fear of “minority” people and what they’ll do to you if they think
you’re “oppressing” them.  And if you think for a jot that you and me,
Peter, are part of it the “minority”, we’re not.  To many of the people I’ve
worked with (coworkers, students & parents), us Asians are just as good as The Man.

From my perspective it has everything to do with the “Model Minority.” 
Our African-American and Hispanic-American brothers, in many, many,
instances don’t see us as the “model”  but as  some sort of twisted
reflection of The Man that oppresses them.  And that that is what we strive to be.  I think many don’t think of
us as oppressed as they.  That we don’t understand or cannot understand
or even empathize.  I don’t think they like us very much because of
it.    And so they treat us accordingly.

It hurts me to think that MLK has become the symbol or even the launching pad for them to feel
so.  Well, that’s how my discussion is related to MLK.  I hope you
understand where I’m coming from.