Tag Archives: Politics

Tuesday Morning Ramblings

April 9, 2013 D.A. Adams 5 Comments

I don’t know if I can find the proper words to describe what’s happened to education, but every single day the system gets a little worse. The bureaucrats have transposed manufacturing principles onto instruction, expecting to increase productivity by implementing lean production measures. But teaching a human being how to read, write, calculate, and think is not the same process as bolting together two components. Everyone learns a little differently, and skilled teachers adapt their methods to individuals. Today, the bureaucrats want a one-size-fits-all homogeneous model that only skims rote memory. It cannot and will not produce practical application of skills.

For most of us who teach, morale has never been lower. We are grossly overworked, grossly underpaid, and grossly frustrated by political forces that on one hand blame us for the failures of their system while on the other accuse us of causing economic turmoil with our luxurious pay and benefits. Most of us are quite literally at our breaking points, emotionally and financially. We have been placed in an impossible situation, asked to do an impossible job, stripped of nearly all authority, and then blamed for poor student performance. Meanwhile, we’re competing for the students’ attention with Twitter and YouTube. It’s nearly impossible to pry them away from their smartphones and laptops, but then, we’re blamed for not “engaging” them properly.

Our only hope for fixing this situation is for enough people to come forward and demand change. We need lower student-teacher ratios, higher pay, less standardized testing, more focus on application, less bureaucracy, and more autonomy in the classroom. We have to shift accountability back onto the students themselves. We have to halt this trend towards homogeneous curriculum and focus on personalized instruction that fosters skills application. We have to find some way to teach the next generation that not everything is supposed to be entertaining, and instead of catering to their deficits by adding flashing lights and buzzers to curriculum, teach them how to focus for more than thirty seconds. I say the next generation because I’m afraid this one is already damaged beyond repair.

Please, heed my warning: This country is about to lose an entire generation of educators. Once we are gone, whether it be from burnout, breakdown, or disgust, a wealth of knowledge will be lost from the system. Once we are gone, I fear what the system will become and what it will produce. Once thing I see for certain, we as a country are losing our ability to compete with other developed nations. We are falling woefully behind and more closely resemble a developing or third world country than the greatest nation on the planet.

General Posts

Monday Afternoon Ramblings

April 1, 2013 D.A. Adams Leave a comment

In 1801, at his first inaugural address, Thomas Jefferson faced a divided nation. The election had been highly contentious, the sides torn between those who wished to dissolve the union and those who wished to preserve it. After Jefferson won the election, thus saving the federal government, there were many who wished to run his opponents out of the country or in some way punish them for their opposition. In his address, Jefferson spoke these words:

“All, too, will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression. Let us, then, fellow-citizens, unite with one heart and one mind. Let us restore to social intercourse that harmony and affection without which liberty and even life itself are but dreary things. And let us reflect that, having banished from our land that religious intolerance under which mankind so long bled and suffered, we have yet gained little if we countenance a political intolerance as despotic, as wicked, and capable of as bitter and bloody persecutions….If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.”

This is the guiding philosophy of my life, but unfortunately, today, too many Americans seem to have forgotten these principles of a democratic republic. Yes, the majority rules, but the minority deserves equal respect and protection under the law. Anything less is tyranny and oppression. Today, the words of Jefferson need to be heard and heeded more than ever. Even the most misguided fool deserves a voice in this country as long as “reason is left free to combat” them, but now as much as ever, we need to eradicate political intolerance from both ends of the spectrum and re-cultivate a culture of common ground. If the polar extremes continue to have their way, our democratic republic will die, and we will find ourselves under the yolk of a police state enforcing one side’s unbending rules.

Right now, the greatest threat to our nation is that the extremes are the voices most being heard. Those of us who still believe in the system set forth by our founders, those of us who still believe in true liberty, not a fascist facade prescribed by political allegiance, need to speak up. We must make our voices heard above the din of the extremists. Those of us who want to live in a country where we are free to worship as we see fit, speak our minds without fear of imprisonment, and live our lives as we best see fit must come together and demand that our elected officials and mass media stop promoting only the extremes. I still believe there is time to save our country, but we have to raise our voices now. We have to stop bickering over every divisive issue and demand elected officials who live up to Jefferson’s vision of following the rule of the majority while protecting the rights of the minority. We have to shine the light of reason on the irrational. If you agree, make your voice heard.

General Posts

Saturday Afternoon Ramblings

March 30, 2013 D.A. Adams 20 Comments

Here’s the crux of our problem illustrated by two specific examples. The other day, while listening to the radio, I caught a few moments of a debate over gun control. It was the typical back and forth liberal versus conservative banter, but towards the end of the segment, the conservative challenged the liberal to talk to NRA members, not the executives mind you, but everyday people. Her response, and I’m paraphrasing, was something to the effect that she had nothing to say to those people. The second example comes from the gay marriage debate. On Facebook, two different religious conservative friends of mine posted similar rants about having other people’s sins forced upon them. In both of these examples, there is a common thread that shuts down dialogue and allows no room for discussion.

In the first example, the liberal woman refuses to talk to her opponents. In her mind, her position is perfect and flawless, with no need for improvement or refinement. The arrogance of this stance is staggering. When someone refuses to listen to someone else, that person is adopting an air of superiority, as if their opponents cannot possibly be intelligent enough to add anything to the discussion. Now, I can almost justify this stance if the challenge had been to converse with an executive from the NRA, someone with a profit-driven agenda to promote, but this challenge was specifically to talk to ordinary people, to listen to their stories, to hear their perspectives. In her own way, she dehumanizes conservatives, and her arrogance is what makes people view liberals as out-of-touch elitists.

For the second example, we have the opposite side of the same coin. Both of the religious people are operating from the mindset that their beliefs are the only ones with validity. Anyone who doesn’t believe their version of the scripture is simply wrong. Much like their liberal counterpart, they refuse to accept that their view might be flawed. Never mind that there are many, many examples of laws proclaimed by their bible that are now considered archaic and absurd. We no longer force rapists to marry their victims for one example. These people cannot see the holes in their own logic that as humanity’s understanding of science and biology and psychology has improved, we’ve let go of the obviously ridiculous “rules” proscribed in the Bronze Age. Even though they more than likely enjoy delicious, tasty bacon, to them the Holy Bible is the immutable law of God, except the passages they conveniently choose to ignore. Just like their liberal counterpart, they dehumanize homosexuals with inflammatory analogies to bestiality, and as long as they hold this stance, there can be no discussion with them.

Until we can get both of these extremes to budge off of their arrogance, we cannot find peaceful resolution to our differences. Until we can get these extremes to stop dehumanizing their counterparts, we cannot find common ground. The only way we can ever hope to heal this widening chasm is by listening to each other, but as illustrated, the extremes have no interest in listening. In their minds, their stance is perfect and beyond reproach, and I for one have no idea how to breach this irrational gulf.