Education

What’s the Matter With Paul Gust?

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

Oh-oh...now I'VE searched for her too!

Combine the Anthony Weiner debacle and the Naked Teacher Principle (in reverse), and you get the travails of 45-year-old Paul Gust, the computer teacher at the Saugatuck Public Schools in Michigan. He has been fired, and I would fire him too. But which of his actions were a firing offense?

1. Storing photos of naked women on his school computer?
2. Being such a klutz that he accidentally flashed some of the photos on the screen in the middle of a presentation on computer technology?
3. Having the FBI find photographs of underage girls on that same computer, though not photos that constituted child-porn?
4. Having the FBI also discover that he had searched for photos of Miley Cyrus braless, when she was under 18?
5. Having personal e-mails on his computer—beyond dispute involving personal discussions, off hours, on his own time, using his own accounts—that included discussions of sexual fantasies involving teen-age girls? Continue reading →

Incompetent Elected Official of the Month: Tennessee State Rep.Joe Armstrong

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

SEDITION!

In a “who most deserves to have to resign?” contest between Tennessee State Rep. Joe Armstrong and sexting New Jersey County Commissioner Louis Magazzu,  Armstrong wins by a lap. The University of Tennessee bookstore has pulled a brand of novelty breath mints from its shelves, in compliance with a request from Armstrong, a loyal and incompetent Democrat. The mints  lampooned President Obama. They were packaged in tin cans with an  image of Obama and the motto, “This is change? Disappoint-mints.” The horror.

Armstrong said that the mints were offensive. Oh weally? Izzums wittle feewings wounded because evewyone doesn’y wuv your bewuvved weader? Continue reading →

Comment of the Day: “Atlanta Parents’ Verdict: Cheating’s No Big Deal; Grades Are What Matter!”

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

Is this the current condition of public education?

Michael, a teacher, delivers a powerful but depressing comment in response to the post about Atlanta parents, at least in one school, siding with the cheating teachers and administrators in the school system’s testing scandal. In the original comment he also includes some videos that are amusing, sharp, and illustrative. I didn’t import them here, but you can find them with the original post.

“…I am not positive that the education system can be fixed anymore. The teachers don’t feel that teaching is their job and they are proud of it. In many cases, they feel their noble goal is to teach only the amount of material the slowest student in the class feels like learning. The flip side of their mission is to make sure that no one else in the class learns more than that student. We can’t have people getting all ‘uppity and learnin’ or anything like that. The principals believe this is the way to go, the school boards think everything is hunky-dory, and the parents like the fact that their kids are all getting good grades. Any teacher that actually wants to teach the children is drummed out by the other teachers and the students.

“Our school system stopped using books. Why, you might ask? Because they are only teaching the parts of the subject covered on the state test. They know what will be and what won’t be covered and they just don’t bother teaching what won’t be on the test. They stopped issuing books so no one would get suspicious as to why they were only on chapter 4 of 12 at the end of the year. The attitude this breeds in the children is horrific….

“The terrible thing is that they are ruining these students for life. When you are young, your brain is set up to learn. This becomes harder later on. We waste all their learning years sitting them in a classroom learning nothing. Then they go home, watch reality TV and text. When they are in their late 20′s and they don’t know how to do math, not much can really be done.”

Atlanta Parents’ Verdict: Cheating’s No Big Deal; Grades Are What Matter!

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Atlanta's integrity is burning, and its students are the victims

Here is one reason American education is in the sorry state that it is.  And speaking of sorry states, how about that Georgia?

After  revelations of a massive conspiracy among teachers and administrators across Atlanta’s schools to fix the scores on state-mandated tests, parents at least one of the schools vocally supported the teachers involved. At a town hall meeting, parents praised the education their children received from the cheaters.

“We’ve been extremely pleased with the instruction my children have received,” said Quinnie Cook-Richardson, a parent at the West Manor Elementary School. Her child’s teacher had him reading within a year, she said. “They are an example of what is right with Atlanta Public Schools.” Cook-Richardson was among a many parents who defended the school, teachers and  the principal who has been asked to resign as a result of the scandal.

Why are parents defending cheating school personnel? They are defending them because the parents don’t care about cheating, ethics or integrity; they just care about their children getting good grades on the tests. They care about results and credentials and their children succeeding, and if cheating helps, that’s just fine with them. This why their children cheat, as they almost certainly do and will; it is also why the teachers and administrators cheated. It isn’t the culture of the schools that is corrupt;  it’s the culture of the entire community, parents and students included.

And are we so naive that we can believe that this corrupt culture, in which education is seen as nothing but marks on a transcript, and values like integrity and honesty are seen as impediments to “education” rather than  part of it, is confined to a few schools, or Atlanta, or Georgia?

This our nation’s culture in 2011.

We had better start recognizing it, and repairing it.

Fast.

Word Use Ethics

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

"Super Glue doll? "Mucilage buddy?" "Fly-paper friend"

Ah, politics! Words that are dishonest are winked at by the media without objection, and harmless terms generate apologies that support ignorance and vagueness.

I. Colorado Republican Congressman Doug Lamborn apologized yesterday for using the term “tar baby” during a Friday appearance on a Denver radio program.  Lamborn said this: “Even if some people say, ‘Well the Republicans should have done this or they should have done that,’ they will hold the President responsible. Now, I don’t even want to have to be associated with him. It’s like touching a tar baby and you get it, you’re stuck, and you’re a part of the problem now and you can’t get away. I don’t want that to happen to us, but if it does or not, he’ll still get, properly so, the blame because his policies for four years will have failed the American people.” Continue reading →

Comment of the Day: “The Folly of Sacrificing Integrity to Kindness in Competitions”

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

Today’s Comment of the Day is on the post about using awards and honors to make the less fortunate and unqualified feel good, as Michael carries the issue into the related matter of grading:

“I run into this every semester. I can’t give anyone a C in a class. I can’t give anyone a B in a class. You have to earn it by demonstrating that you understand and can apply the relevant material. You may be the most attractive, most charitable, most loved person on the planet, but if you can’t do this work, you can’t pass. Usually, they still don’t understand, and I have to give a speech I title “What a C student does.”

“Where do my ‘C’ students go? What do ‘C’ students do after they leave? ‘A’ and ‘B’ students go to graduate school, medical, and dental school. They may hold people’s lives in their hands in their careers. But what about the ‘C’ student? Surely there is no harm in letting someone squeak by with a ‘C’? Well… they test your water to make sure it is safe. They determine what amounts of new pesticides can be used without causing harm. They run the tests that determine if you raped someone or if that really was a bag of cocaine in your car, or just some borrowed powdered sugar (as you insisted). My ‘C’ students work jobs where people die if they mess up. The ‘C’ stands for competence. If you don’t have it, you don’t get a ‘C’. Continue reading →

The Folly of Sacrificing Integrity to Kindness in Competitions

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

"Great idea, Mandy! Let's elect President Obama our school Homecoming Queen! He could use a a boost."

Integrity. 

Violate it at your peril. This is especially true if you are running a competition, no matter how trivial it might be.

Not only may a momentary waiver of integrity for what seems like an admirable cause permanently render a competition and the honor of winning it meaningless, it well may inspire the well-meaning and misguided to stretch the questionable logic of your decision to the breaking point.

Almost everyone has seen the heart-tugging TV ad from the mysterious Foundation for a Better Life, in which a high school girl with Down Syndrome is crowned Homecoming Queen. (“True Beauty. Pass it on!”) It bothered me the moment I saw it—at least after I wiped the tear from my eye. Based on a real incident in Missouri in 2008, the spot illustrates an ethical conflict between kindness and caring on one side and fairness and integrity on the other.

Of course this was a nice thing to do. It was undeniably kind, and the student involved will surely regard it as a high point in her life. But what does the Homecoming Queen title mean now, once it has been awarded for purposes completely divorced from its original purpose? If there is another Down Syndrome student in future years who doesn’t get a crown, will this indicate to her that she is less deserving of the award, and somehow lacking, since, after all, a girl like her won in a past year? Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: The California State Bar

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

This question should be easy.

This will be a short post, unless I snap in the middle of writing it and get hysterical.

Why is The California State Bar August’s first Ethics Dunce? This news item says it all:

“A California State Bar panel is considering whether an illegal immigrant who passed the exam to practice law should be admitted despite his status.”

Pardon me, California State Bar, but exactly what is there to “consider?” 

I can see the value of some general consideration of the insanity of California’s laissez faire attitude toward illegal immigrants, and the fact that California residents seem to have no problem with allowing them to use schools, hospitals, public schools, universities and others services that their bankrupt state can barely afford. I can see the need for some reconsideration of the foolishness of creating incentives for illegal immigrants to continue living a lie in America by giving them the benefits of a Dream Act, like the one Governor Brown recently signed into law. Continue reading →

Ethics and the Right to Truck Nutz

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

Classy!

The provocative T-shirt issue? Kid’s stuff. If you like your public civility quandaries straight and not watered down by such matters as political speech, get ready for the Great Truck Nutz Controversy.

Truck Nutz (also known as “Bull Balls”) are a…decoration?… favored by people whose sense of humor runs to farts, loud burps and titty-twisters, whose favorite films are the “Jackass” series and Farrelly brothers movies, whose idea of the perfect woman is Kim Kardashian, and whose idea of a genius is Howard Stern. They are large, usually red, approximations of male testicles that are hung (well-hung, you would have to say) on the back of trucks. They say, “I’ve got a big, scary, motherfucking truck here!”

Or, if you prefer, “I am a moron.”

A South Carolina woman named Virginia Tice was given a $445 ticket for displaying Truck Nutz on her truck, and she’s going to trial to protest the ticket. Blogger Ellie Mystal of “Above the Law,” which brought the adornment  to my attention and which I will never forgive for doing so, commented, Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: Central Bucks East High School

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

"Hello class! I'm your teacher, Miss Munroe, and as you know, you all disgust me. Now, I expect your full trust and respect this year. I am a professional, and my superiors and I agree that the fact that I hate you with all my soul won't change how I treat you, because hate doesn't affect how people treat each other in life. Wait...why are you all looking at me like that?"

Administrators at Central Bucks East High School in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, have decided to reinstate suspended teacher Natalie Munroe, who had made it very clear in several blog posts discovered by the school and her students last February that she detested her job and a great many of her students and their parents, spewing  diatribes that ridiculed specific students for their appearance, habits, speech and character.

There is no conceivable  justification for this. Munroe both deserved to be fired, and had to be fired, because she cannot be trusted to be fair, unbiased or diligent in educating students when she is so disgusted, annoyed and infuriated by them. “I hate your kid,” she wrote to the generic parents of her charges on her now discontinued blog.

“I hate your kid.” This is a smoking gun, but the school has chosen to ignore it.

How responsible is it for a school to entrust schoolchildren to the instruction of a teacher who admits that she hates them?  It is as responsible as letting a caregiver at a nursing home continue employment after writing, “I dislike old people.” As responsible as hiring a nurse who tells the hospital that  she is  nauseated by sick people. As responsible as entrusting an orphaned  child with an adoptive couple who announces that they can’t stand him.

Amazingly, Munroe has never denied that she meant what she wrote. Instead, her defense was this: Continue reading →