Anarchy

I have time to write this today because, in responding to a request for a sub "teacher's aide" at Lathrop High School my job for the entire day is sitting in the discipline office with a single student taking the HSGQE -- that's the 'high school graduate qualifying exam' (insert eye roll here). Yesterday I was a custodian and, despite doing good work all day, the evening custodian 'ripped me a new one' when he came in and found me checking my e-mail in the custodial office instead of checking the roof drains. I went to the school office in tears, this guy following me, and admin "yelled" at him and the whole thing was a mess. All day I was begging for something to do, the lunch lady said "don't bother cleaning 'cause there's XYZ club in here after school' and I said I would just 'spot mop to keep busy' . . . you get the idea. Today the principal of Lathrop logged me onto the computer "'cause you'll need something to keep busy for 7 hours". AAAAAA!

Independent of this, (I was thinking about this yesterday even before being unfairly verbally attacked as someone 'stealing money by doing nothing') I think this ineffective socialized education system just needs to go. Let's look at this a different way. If you're hauling water up a hill to pour it into a big bucket and HALF the water is draining out of the bucket each time . . .what do you do? Do you keep doing the same thing and pouring into the same vessel? If we are "losing" half our kids -- if half are kids are being left behind in every way spiritually, academically, and functionally -- can't we begin to understand that there is something structurally wrong with public education? OK, so it's the "minorities" being left behind. . . let's pour money into "diversity" programs. No. "Minorities" ARE America. These are OUR children. Let's stop fooling ourselves. The future of a democratic America isn't white. We are continuing to try to function in a system brought over by Europeans that was formally developed in the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth centuries when literacy and the sciences were the property of a moneyed and paternal religion. Every other culture in the world at that time was educating with peer-group oriented apprenticeships and tasks.
It is just so weird for me to stand in these public education rooms and begin every day "pledging allegiance"to a flag "under God" and "indivisible", then starting lessons standing next to globes and "save the earth" while being the person who collects hundreds and hundreds of pounds of plastic lunch trash because we don't cook or wash dishes in the schools. Lunch is sent up from Outside in plastic peel-and-eat packs, of which each child gets two.

On a lighter note, there's a free-to-good-home potty trained house-rabbit in the newspaper today. The catch? "To a snake-free home." Umm . . .