“I just want my kids to be happy”
Monday, November 24th, 2008“I just want my kids to be happy”
How about this: “I just want my kids to be responsible and productive citizens and if they’re happy that’s a nice side benefit.”
I Want This Person Eliminated From The Universe
Sunday, November 23rd, 2008I Want This Person Eliminated From The Universe
What is wrong with people?
Rachel Lucas: Stupid Kids Have Stupid Parents
Wednesday, November 19th, 2008Rachel Lucas: Stupid Kids Have Stupid Parents
It’s not just bad schools. Parents are the problem, too.
Letting Kids With Autism Off The Hook
Friday, October 10th, 2008It’s not a good idea generally to be to easy on kids. Like all humans, they’ll go toward pleasure and away from pain, and choose the short-term pleasure path even if it nets them long-term pain. The problem with a kid is that they don’t have a long-term perspective. They don’t know that the short-cuts today will hurt them tomorrow. Parents who let their kids off the hook do them a disservice.
Autistic kids often suffer with lowered expectations. I remember one ARD where a teacher said to me, “He does really well for an autistic kid.” Hells, bells! The autistic spectrum is wide and there are children who don’t speak, interact, can’t learn and are profoundly mentally retarded. If that’s the litmus test, he would succeed no matter.
This isn’t an isolated problem:
In fact, one of the reasons we pulled our son out of public school was because of the lowered expectations placed on kids with autism. Every “I can’t,” every anxious wince, every meltdown, was rewarded with fewer and fewer demands.
Finally, by the middle of October of our son Tom’s second grade year, Tom had achieved precisely what was easiest for him: his 1:1 had withdrawn him from art, music, gym, and all mainstreamed classes – and sat alone with him in a classroom rather than support him in a challenging environment.
Of course, it’s easier – and often pleasanter – to allow our children with autism to simply opt out of challenging situations. And sometimes there’s really no choice: as we all know, for example, melt downs and airplanes make a poor combination.
Right. But the classroom isn’t an enclosed airplane (something I’ve written about before) and the educational system is required to teach. It is not always easy, granted, but lowered expectations result in a child never reaching his potential. And, ironically, it results in the taxpayer being responsible for the care and keeping of a person dependent on the system when some investment early could have prevented that.
It is everyone’s best interests, not just the child’s, to expect great things.
Parents Propagandizing Their Children–Updated
Tuesday, September 30th, 2008Somebody taught their kid this. They wrote the lyrics, played the music, practiced and then performed this.
Barack Obama is just a man. Evidently, way too many people have a life absent of a real God.
Update:
Instapundit says: “Daddy says if we sing well enough, we might get an extra flour ration!”
More Dear Leader love from Rovian Conspiracy (more links, too):
Michelle Malkin says,”Who’s behind this? Hollyweird libs and MSM moguls, of course.”
Confederate Yankee has more about the weird and elites:
While described as a grassroots effort, Kathy Sawada, who posted the video and can been seen directing the children in the video, is a bit more than just an enthusiastic music teacher you might find in your average public school.
Sawada is a teacher at an elite and expensive Colburn School of Performing Arts in Los Angeles as part of the Piano faculty. Colburn just built a $120 million 12-story high-rise addition for their musicians.
Does a concert-quality musician in an elite school in the middle of the most ego-centric city in the United States count as a “grassroots” effort?
Here’s a partial list of those who helped produce this “grassroots” effort:
Jeff Zucker — American television executive, and President & CEO of NBC Universal.
Post-producer (former choreographer?) Holly Shiffer.
Motion picture camera operator/steadicam specialist Peter Rosenfeld (appropriately enough, worked in “Yes Man,” a movie about ” a guy challenges himself to say ‘yes’ to everything for an entire year.”
Darin Moran, another motion picture industry professional, who just finished filming — how appropriate — Land of the Lost.
Andy Blumenthal, Hollywood film editor.
Hmmmm…..NBC denies involvement. Of course they do.
Rachel Lucas, as usual, captures my queasiness, thusly:
That song reminds me of one thing and one thing only, and it ain’t hope or change. It’s church. Which I suppose is the exact idea because for today’s progressive leftist, there is no “church” anymore; there’s just Obama. He fulfills all the needs that they so derisively snark at religious people for when the religious get the same needs fulfilled by a deity.
Neither of which technique I can get behind myself, but it sure is fascinating to watch these people training their kids to worship a man while at the same time, odds are, they mock Christians for their blind faith and bible-clingin’. I guess the progressives think they’re evolved and enlightened because their clingin’ is all about a politician instead of an ancient deity, real or not.
Hebrews 11:1 defines faith: “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”
The problem with having faith in Obama is that his substance is suspect and his evidence isn’t good either–what evidence you can find. I guess that’s why liberals keep obscuring the evidence–as long as people don’t see it, they can deify him and have faith. Once he’s know, the religion is lost.
Cross-posted at RightWingNews.com
School Choice
Monday, August 25th, 2008Conversation with an acquaintance in anticipation of school starting:
Acquaintance: I’m not happy about my son’s class placement. Well, the teacher is good, but the kid who rubbed his penis against another kid and then peed on his leg last year is in my kid’s class.
Me: So ask to get your kid switched.
Acquaintance: Well, what do you think about Karma? You know, that he’s meant to be in that class?
Me: I think you need to get your kid switched.
Acquaintance: I was not really happy with Kid Genius’ education last year. He didn’t learn anything.
Me: He’s what 6 or 7?
Acquaintance: Yeah. These are the formative years. The FOUNDATION.
Me: No they aren’t. First grade is for fun. Really, elementary school is a waste, generally speaking.
Acquaintance: Do you really believe that?
Me: Yes. It should be a lot more fun than it is. I mean, can your kid read and comprehend what he’s reading? That’s all that counts, really.
Acquaintance: Yes…he can read, but I’m worried about his math skills.
Me: They’ll come.
Acquaintance: Yes, but he learned like nothing last year.
Me: It’s public school.
Acquaintance: But don’t you think they should learn something?
Me: In theory, yes. But it’s public school. I don’t have high expectations. In fact, brace yourself, because third grade is a black hole. My girlfriend’s kid went backwards last year.
Acquaintance: But I’m worried about academics!
Me: Obviously not too much, otherwise you wouldn’t have your kid in public school.
Acquaintance: But you have your kids in public school.
Me: Yes, and the administrators don’t like me much. And I home schooled last year because third grade stinks. And my kid is probably two years ahead in math. She won’t learn a thing this year.
Acquaintance: Doesn’t that bother you?
Me: It’s a trade-off. The private schools have their own problems as does home schooling. I can push academics at home. You could home school.
Acquaintance: Oh, I could never do that. I’d be crazy. But I did teach Boy Genius more math in one day than he learned all year.
Me: Yep.
Acquaintance: I don’t know what to do.
I probably wasn’t too supportive. In fact, I know I wasn’t. It’s a crap-shoot. Some years a kid gets a fantastic teacher. Sometimes the teacher is mean, or hates boys, or hates girls, or is lazy and apathetic, or is stupid. Or, and this is the case with third grade in Texas, the curriculum just stinks. No one wants to teach third grade. The year is spent teaching to the TAKS test and kids and teachers hate it.
And while the happiest I’ve been curriculum-wise was this last year home schooling, there are other trade-offs. Families have many choices to make. Anyone who opines dogmatically about home schooling or public schools or private schools or parochial schools seems to have an ax to grind, to me, since all choices have positives and negatives.
In some ways, I resent the pressure. When I was a kid, a parent’s character wasn’t called into question based on the schooling choice he made. (Well, home schooling families seemed a little strange–turns out they were just ahead of the curve.) Everyone went to public school or Catholic school. Each year, a bunch of rebels got kicked out of Catholic school, came over to public school and usually excelled at sports. That was the extent of choices. And I might have just been completely unaware, but I don’t recall many aspersions cast based on what school a kid went to. The bigger thing was the school district.
Not now. A good parent volunteers in a classroom so many hours per week. A good parent home schools. A good parent supports public school education. A good parent invests in their child’s future with private school.
In the scheme of life, does it make a huge difference? I really would like to know. Because what I see in the grown kids is this: there are good products out of every kind of education and the parents, not the schools, have everything to do with that.
Cross-posted at RightWingNews.com
Texas Grand Jury Indicts Three From Polygamist Group
Thursday, August 21st, 2008The Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints case has been a mess from the beginning. And yes, the government raiding on flimsy evidence was troubling. With that being said, something rotten is going on with this polygamist group. The case is ongoing:
The grand jury returned the indictments after meeting for more than seven hours and hearing from at least eight witnesses, including seven young sect women and Willie Jessop, a spokesman for the group.
Standing outside the courthouse after appearing before the grand jury, Jessop called the testimony “a very painful process.” He said the group would mount a vigorous defense for all those charged.
A source close to the group said prosecutors were getting no help from any of the members called as witnesses.
To every question asked, the source said, “everybody is taking the Fifth.”
That legal strategy — refusing to answer questions so as to not incriminate oneself — was also being used by girls, the possible victims, who testified today and at previous two proceedings, the source said.
The tactic was infuriating prosecutors, stated the source, who spoke on condition of anonymity because grand jury proceedings are supposed to be secret.
The charges handed down today may not be the last against members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. Documents seized during a raid on the group’s Yearning for Zion Ranch last spring and introduced as part of a separate custody hearing link 10 men to unions with minor girls. Last month’s indictment did not include those men.
These guys are pedophiles. Their wives are enablers. Their children are brainwashed. Ugh. Let this crap happen in some third world Muslim nation (it’s vile enough there), but not in America. I hope the prosecutors have enough solid evidence that the girls don’t need to testify. They won’t get the truth from the girls. They are programmed to serve the men. And what if the men don’t get convicted? The girls have the pleasure of spending their lives in subservience to these guys.
Cross-posted at RightWingNews.com
Give That Guy A Drink!
Wednesday, August 20th, 2008College presidents want the drinking age lowered. From the Wall Street Journal’s Scott Hensley:
But now more than 100 college presidents and chancellors have signed a statement calling for politicians to consider lowering the drinking age in the face of widespread flouting of the law and a wave of dangerous binge drinking on campuses around the country.
The college officials liken the effect of the current drinking age to the failed experiment to ban alcohol for all during Prohibition. But supporters of the restrictions on alcohol say any loosening would lead to more deaths on the roads.
Color me cynical, but this strikes me as a way for colleges to avoid liability since it is their role to protect students–en loco parentis. If the drinking age is 18, then a kid can legally drink. It’s not the college’s fault or the frat’s fault that a student, abiding by the law, goes overboard. But when there is drinking and it’s illegal, the colleges and fraternities are not only condoning excessive behavior they are condoning illegal behavior.
This doesn’t mean that the drinking age shouldn’t be lowered, because it should be. The reason it should be lowered is simple: if a person can vote, enlist and get married, a person should be able to drink a beer which is a much smaller responsibility. People will cite brain research saying that 18 year olds are immature. If that’s the case, then why are they allowed to make other life-changing decisions.
There is a slight problem with this: 18 year olds (as I was) can be high school seniors which could encourage underage drinking in high school. I know more than one kid who spent his high school years drunk even with the 21 age limit, so that argument seems unjustified.
A kid who can make adult decisions should be able to have a drink.
Cross-posted at RightWingNews.com
Frosted Flakes: Breakfast of a Capitalist
Wednesday, August 20th, 2008
Forget the breakfast of Champions, Michael Phelps, by choosing to hawk Frosted Flakes, promotes the triumph of capitalism. Endorsements….they’re GRRRRRREAT! Not that there’s anything wrong with that. In fact, I’m happy for Phelps and hope he makes a gazillion dollars. But some people are clucking about Phelps’ choice:
You better eat your . . . Frosted Flakes?
Olympic legend Michael Phelps will appear on boxes of the Kellogg’s brand sugar cereal, drawing sharp criticism from health experts worried about the message he’ll be sending to children across America.
“I would not consider Frosted Flakes the food of an Olympian,” said nutritionist Rebecca Solomon of Mount Sinai Medical Center.
“I would rather see him promoting Fiber One. I would rather see him promoting oatmeal. I would even rather see him promoting Cheerios.”
The announcement yesterday that Phelps, 23, winner of a record eight gold medals at the Beijing Olympics, would grace Frosted Flakes and Corn Flakes boxes instead of the traditional athlete’s choice of Wheaties left many perplexed.
Frosted Flakes has three times the amount of sugar as Wheaties and 1/3rd the fiber.
Oh brother…had Wheaties or Fiber One offered Phelps an endorsement deal and if any human under the age of 50 ate those cereals and therefore were big sellers, I’m sure he would have chosen them. He got a Frosted Flakes deal because Frosted Flakes is a huge seller and so can have a huge marketing budget and pay guys like Michael Phelps the big bucks.
As for the empty calories that are Frosted Flakes. If the 50 million kids who eat the cereal get off their collective butts and get into a swimming pool to burn those empty calories, it will be worth it. Had Phelps endorsed Fiber 1, he’d be inspiring like two kids. His mug will be in every house in America and kids who heretofore thought about playing Nintendo might actually want to join the swim team. One can hope, anyway.
The endorsement is a win-win. Phelps makes lots of money. Lots of kids consider swimming. Sounds like a sweet deal.
Cross-posted at RightWingNews.com
The Consequences of Rotten Government, Rotten Post-Modernism and Rotten Parenting
Monday, August 18th, 2008How dare we judge a woman who has had 9 children by five men, who lives on welfare, takes the kids to some 3rd world country, leaves one 15 year old daughter in the care of an old guy and the daughter winds up dead? In an article about how bad it is to be a British kid:
What explains the nonjudgmental attitude among elites? The reluctance to criticize Fiona MacKeown might be an expression of sympathy for someone in the throes of grief: however foolishly (or worse) she behaved, she certainly did not deserve the murder of her daughter. Furthermore, the Guardian and Observer journalists might argue, we do not know enough about the details of her life to criticize her fairly. Perhaps she is a good mother in most respects; perhaps her children, apart from the drug addict and the murdered Scarlett, are happy, and will lead lives of fulfillment and achievement. After all, no style of upbringing guarantees success or, for that matter, failure; and therefore we should suspend judgment about her.
I suspect, however, that the main consideration inhibiting elite criticism of MacKeown is that passing judgment would call into question the shibboleths of liberal social policy for the last 50 or 60 years—beliefs that give their proponents a strong sense of moral superiority. It would be to entertain the heretical thought that family structure might matter after all, along with such qualities as self-restraint and self-respect; and that welfare dependency is unjust to those who pay for it and disastrous for those who wind up trapped in it.
Theodore Darlymple concludes:
The British government thus pursues social welfare policies that encourage the creation of households like the Matthews’, and then seeks, via yet more welfare spending, to reduce the harm done to children in them. But was the Matthews household poor, in any but an artificial sense? At the time of Shannon’s current stepfather’s arrest, the household income was $72,000; it lived free of rent and local taxes, and it boasted three computers and a large plasma-screen television. Would another $5,000 or $10,000 or $20,000 have made any difference?
A system of perverse incentives in a culture of undiscriminating materialism, where the main freedom is freedom from legal, financial, ethical, or social consequences, makes childhood in Britain a torment both for many of those who live it and those who observe it. Yet the British government will do anything but address the problem, or that part of the problem that is its duty to address: the state-encouraged breakdown of the family. If one were a Marxist, one might see in this refusal the self-interest of the state-employee class: social problems, after all, are their raison d’être.
So children in Britain suffer from emotional lack and material indulgence. This is a deadly combination. Not only that, but the elites refuse to hold the parents responsible for this disastrous mix. Expecting parents to work, or women to stop at one or two men, etc. is simply not done because it would call into question liberal policies and ethics (or lack thereof). It pays to be irresponsible and reckless. It pays in America, too.
There is a good way to change this bad behavior. Stop underwriting it with tax-payer dollars. Remove the incentive to live licentiously and reinforce the behavior that’s desired. Part of me would also like to punish parents who have rotten kids. I know that’s not always fair. Still, in my short time on this earth, I have yet to see “bad seeds”, but I have seen loads of bad parents. And they always seem shocked when their precious offspring become Satan’s foot soldiers.
And another thing: being a single parent is no excuse. Michael Phelps was raised my his mom. He and his sisters turned out fantastic–they are a credit to her dedication. But she worked and she was committed to something she loved, education, and they learned by her example. Even in less-than-ideal circumstances, children can succeed. But someone has to care.
It’s time to throw out the nonjudgmental, post-modern nonsense that there are no absolutes and no ideals. It is time to judge and heap scorn upon the parents who produce these rotten kids. It is also time to stop reinforcing bad behavior of the parents. Children deserve better. And when children are deprived of what they really need, society ends up paying a steep price.
H/T Instapundit
Cross-posted at RightWingNews.com
