Education News

Deaf Students Win Their Latest Battle! HOORAY!!!

Elaine Meinel Supkis

The arrests of many Gallaudet students ended with the Administration finally backing down. Hooray for the brave students! The striking teachers in Mexico are now being broken by Fox and his right wing, unelected replacement. More people killed there. I will note the media makes it sound like the teachers were violent, not the murderous undercover cops and Federal soldiers.

Congratulations for not backing down despite police oppression!

By DIANA JEAN SCHEMO
Published: October 30, 2006

WASHINGTON, Oct. 29 — Surrendering to months of widening and unrelenting protests by students, faculty, alumni and advocates, the board of trustees of Gallaudet University, the nation’s premier university for the deaf, abandoned its choice of the institution’s next president.

In an announcement Sunday night that followed an all-day emergency meeting of the trustees, convened at a hotel in Virginia far from Gallaudet’s Northeast Washington campus, the board announced “with much regret and pain” that it would terminate the contract of Jane K. Fernandes, the former provost trustees named in May to succeed the outgoing president of 18 years, I. King Jordan. The board said it was acting “in the best interests of the university.”

The whole point of these demonstrations is all about the future of deaf students: will they be able to fill reasonable positions in society and within their own organizations? An education that leads nowhere is useless. The students need to aspire to something and the very minimum would be to lead their own in institutions set up for themselves!

No deaf person runs any university. So locking them out of the last place that might hire them is cruel and downright hostile. I hope this opens more doors to the deaf community.

In Mexico, the Federales move in with great violence and of course, they ain't looking for the undercover cops who murdered the film maker.

By MARK STEVENSON, Associated Press Writer 45 minutes ago
OAXACA, Mexico - Federal forces stormed Oaxaca and pushed protesters and striking teachers out of the city center they had occupied for five months, leaving the colonial city resembling a battleground, with riot police and burned vehicles lining the streets.

At least one demonstrator was killed in clashes Sunday as federal police backed by armored vehicles and water cannons tore down barricades on their way into the city. Protesters said late Sunday that a second had been died. Authorities did not confirm that.

There was still uncertainly over whether 1.3 million schoolchildren would return to classes Monday. Teachers had agreed to end a strike that closed schools across the southern Oaxaca state, but it was unclear if the police presence would undermine that deal.

Um, the police presence does undermine the 'deal' which was obviously a 'double deal' meaning there was no sincerity within the negotiators representing the State. As per usual in countries dominated by American power, the peasants, the middle class, the workers all get hammered by the rulers who use naked power, murder, assassinations, suppression of the news, no habeas corpus, a draconian Supreme Court interested in making el Presidente stronger and of course fake elections wherein the votes are not counted...WHOA. Wait. Um, let me just say, the horrors in El Norte are simply replicated abroad?

Since we lost our Constitution and the Mexican people were never allowed to have a working Constitution, it is no wonder both are following the same banana republican path. And of course, to keep this state going, there is lots of blood shed.

Because the USA gets to spend money owed to much of the world, we appear wealthy so desperate Mexicans fleeing their own police state prefer to come here.

MEXICO CITY, Oct. 27 (Xinhua) -- The United Nations would hold a serious debate on the planned U.S. border wall with Mexico, Thierry Lemaresquier, a top UN official in Mexico, said on Friday.

The United States plans to build a 1,126-km border wall to close off large parts of its 3,000-km border with Mexico.

Speaking at the sidelines of a meeting at the Ibero-Americana University in Mexico City, Lemaresquier said "The United Nations must hold a deep and serious debate on migration... which has become a major factor in international relations in the last 30 years, particularly in countries like Mexico," Lemaresquier said.

The disorders south of our borders are here, too. And as the Mexican people and American people merge on many levels, unfortunately for both, the level being chosen for us by our rulers is 'peasants who kiss our feet.'

Of course, fleeing Mexicans will find the police state here fully operational as Americans, trained to be sheep, get herded about in our schools by cops looking like Star Wars villians.

October 28, 2006
WYOMING, Mich. --A school safety drill that included police officers in riot gear with weapons has caused concern among some parents who say it was too realistic and frightened some students.

Police in the western Michigan community of Wyoming entered two classrooms at Lee Middle and High School on Thursday and announced there was a threat to the school, The Grand Rapids Press reported.
Students, who were unaware police were conducting a drill, were taken from the classroom into the halls, patted down by officers and asked what they had in their pockets, the newspaper said.
"Some of these kids were so scared, they just about wet their pants," said Marge Bradshaw, a parent with four children in Godfrey-Lee Schools. "I think it's pure wrong that the students and parents were not informed of this."
Officers wore protective gear, including vests and helmets, and carried rifles that were unloaded and marked with colored tape to indicate they were not live weapons, the newspaper said.

This is how one trains children to accept police state authority. This is all very new, you know. During the Civil Rights struggle in the South, when students rioted to prevent integration, the police were normal police...oops, except for Civil Rights organizers. Then they pulled on the 'evil cops' disguises and attacked the Civil Rights people with dogs and clubs.

But now, thanks to the TACTICAL Squads, we have heavily armed/heavily armored men wearing helmets that were the inspiration for Darth Vader in the first Star Wars movies, running around America in increasing numbers. To stop us during the Vietnam war, they developed these murderous monsters in order to stomp on us at Berkeley. Thank you, Ronnie Nazi Reagan!

Anyway, you can't see their faces nor can one fight them, they are there to stop us or else kill us. And now little communities out in the middle of Bush 'red' states have idle troops of these neo-nazis who want to be 'trained' and so they go about, scaring children and in general, treating the population as if we are in Mexico!

Good grief. I hope the parents sue. I hope the students show the courage of the deaf students who stood up to these stupid Tactical units in DC, the heart of the empire.

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GOP Gun Nut Shoots Books And Learning Isn't Supposed To Be Fun

Elaine Meinel Supkis

Aside from the loony gun nut Republican running for education chief in Oklahoma, there is a common thread in American education that is troubling: learning should be fun, not hard work. Doing anything well requires a certain amount of hard work and kids striving to be in the upper classes know they must push very hard to gain a spot in the elites but the 'fun' message is destroying the chances of the underclass as they can't figure out they are being conned.

This badly made video is quite humorous in a grim way.

by Bob Geiger | Oct 21 2006 - 11:04am | permalink
article tools: email | print | read more Bob Geiger

A candidate for state superintendent of education in Oklahoma has proposed a plan to protect schoolchildren from gun-related violence by putting old, thick textbooks under every school desk in the state for students to use in self-defense if a crazed gunman storms their school.

In case you're waiting for the other shoe to drop, yes, the candidate is indeed a Republican.

If you click on that page, you can see the video. The glee with which these morons shoot text books is quite Freudian. Like Nazis at a book burning party, they chuckle as they shoot up books that instruct them on the fine arts of the sciences, math or languages. The mooing of the cows in the background is most appropriate.

One reason why these right wingers don't care about the chaos in Iraq is due to the fact that they believe America's schools are in chaos thanks to young men or older men using guns to terrorize everyone especially cute little girls. So sometimes our schools do resemble Iraq and this is due to the same forces at work: crazed males screaming about abortions or free sex wanting to destroy their victims who are nearly universally female.

But the real problem with our schools is the fashionable notion that we should learn effortlessly and learning should not only be fun but be automatic.

By BEN FELLER, AP Education Writer Tue Oct 17, 6:53 PM ET
WASHINGTON - Scientists call it the next great discovery, a way to captivate students so much they will spend hours learning on their own. It's the new vision of video games.

The Federation of American Scientists — which typically weighs in on matters of nuclear weaponry and government secrecy — declared Tuesday that video games can redefine education.

Capping a year of study, the group called for federal research into how the addictive pizazz of video games can be converted into serious learning tools for schools.

The theory is that games teach skills that employers want: analytical thinking, team building, multitasking and problem-solving under duress. Unlike humans, the games never lose patience. And they are second nature to many kids.

So, we use games to pop learning into heads. The one major flaw in all this is the whole point of learning things is to learn the most important thing: how to think. How to reason. How to use logic. In other words, activating the forefront of the brain and disciplining it into doing things that don't happen naturally. Rational thinking is the hardest thing on earth to do and even if we fail in this, the attempt at doing this is highly important. Of course, our system hates thinkers so it doesn't surprise me to see them wishing for a systme that will effortlessly and relentlessly program pre-set designs into brains so people become robots.

The analytic training one can achieve within gaming can only be accessed if one has already won the art of analytical thinking. This is a seeming paradox. Namely, if one is forced into various paths by the nature of the game which is set up by a person acting as the 'magician' this means accepting the parameters of the game as a thinking process and thus it doesn't train the mind to think actively since one is reacting to a limited set situation. Namely, even reading books makes the brain captive but it is worse with a game since this taps into the wrong parts of the brain to activate. The wonder of writing is, it didn't 'evolve' as part of the brain but was 'trained into' the brain by dint of learning and this process lies at the roots of our ability to rationalize and think clearly. I hope everyone isn't confused by this, heh.

Learning how to use research tools and how to assemble bits of information so it forms a greater image, the ability to delineate a philosophy and then apply it to the real world is the ulimate form of 'education.' Most of what passes for education is merely skill aggregations leading to a working job making money.

Many philosphers made little or no money. Indeed, this was part of the program: the word 'math' ultimately means 'an old geezer who likes to write down numbers sitting in a hut at a crossroads, begging.' Well, namely, the mathematicians of the deep past were all religious believers in a higher order of things which was expressed by the fact that numbers do all sorts of amazing things on their own and this is a key to understanding not just the universe but has higher magical powers.

A favorite topic here.

They were not rulers but people who lived strict lives devoted to uncovering the secrets of Her Majesty, Nature and the Universe. More akin to prophets and hermits, they lived very austure lives. The famous story of the mathematician and the Indian ruler who asked the mathematician for a prize for figuring out how to tax people (heh), the philospher coyly said to lay a seed on the first square of a chess board and then each successive square, double it.

The end is near infinity, of course, and the king was rather annoyed and amused because the clever mathematician kept his head by reminding the king, he didn't want earthly goods or power, anyway.

Which takes me to this paradox that our media misreported in a bad, bad way.

WASHINGTON -- Kids who are turned off by math often say they don't enjoy it, they aren't good at it and they see little point in it. Who knew that could be a formula for success?

The nations with the best scores have the least happy, least confident math students, says a study by the Brookings Institution's Brown Center on Education Policy.
Countries reporting higher levels of enjoyment and confidence among math students don't do as well in the subject, the study suggests. The results for the United States hover around the middle of the pack, both in terms of enjoyment and in test scores.

In essence, happiness is overrated, says study author Tom Loveless.

Children in all the countries that best us in technology and science as well as math scores, hate the hard work. Children always hate trying to think hard. Except for a very few who relish this and demand more (er...yes). They toil very hard in many Asian and a few European countries and dislike this effort of course, but they keep on doing it because it is most important to them, collectively. On the other hand, there is little reward in America if one is studious and tries to figure out things. The Zeitgeist here is totally different. Kids want to have fun and they want as little involvement as possible in the process so their important parts of the brain can be used for better things like sex or games.

I remember as a child being annoyed to death by classmates who memorized all sorts of stupid trivia and then they would whine like crazy when asked to memorize simple multiplication tables, for example. I was ostracised for refusing to memorize pop songs and movie star information. But then, I memorized all the important stuff. This earns no status in a school or even outside a school.

For I will note here, there is a huge effort to not memorize or remember salient facts that runs in our culture. The internet helps in retaining information and correcting faulty memories, even the best of us can get confused on exact dates or sequences of events!

But the push to be dumb is very strong. Dumb but clever means one manipulates reality to gain power and glory and being a great mathematician isn't part of that. The math geniuses who cooked up a hedge fund several years ago lost everything and nearly brought down the entire world's currency systems! Kind of like the revenge of the mathematician who asked for just one seed to be doubled on each square of the chess board.

The USA is falling behind the youth of other nations. And this is due 100% to the fact that the youth in other nations work longer and harder at doing things and our lazy system that leans on the idea learning should be fun, is failing us. Learning IS fun but only for queer, wierd, awful children who scare adults and annoy everyone asking questions and bringing up facts everyone wants to ignore.

No wonder all despots kill such people.

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