My Beauty Best Teacher

Many in the media are gibbering away at how the recent hurricane that struck the East Coast of the United States is some sort of sign that mankind is permanently warming the entire globe in a horrible way through their energy production and driving habits, but the truth of the matter is that hurricanes have hit the East Coast in the past and are going to do so in the future, regardless of what sort of activities that humans engage in, and that people are just talking about global warming right now because it is still warm in the Northern Hemisphere.

But in the Southern Hemisphere it is cold and winter still, and in some areas of the world they are experiencing record snowfalls. As citizens in these areas freeze and suffer and crops and food is destroyed by the frigid temperatures, they are not begging government to control their behaviors and punish them for using heat and power and technology, but rather they are suffering through record snowfalls that are a result of changes in the suns gravitational field (see my post "Bombshell" Experiment: Global Climate Change Caused by Cloud Cover for more information on my logic and evidence for this theory).

Many, including Democratic-nominee for President Al Gore, believe in the religion of man-made destructive global warming, and want humans to stop 'warming the globe.' But in many ways, a warmer globe will mean higher crop yields, less starvation, and lower numbers of people freezing to death, although if the globe does warm more people will have more to eat and will be warmer, which some people feel is bad.

Regardless, let's gain some perspective on the issue by reading this weather report from New Zealand from this August:

Heavy snowfall in New Zealand essentially brought the country to a standstill on Monday, hitting majorcities including Wellington and Auckland.

Snow fell in downtown Auckland for the first time in 72 years as the city faced its coldest day on record, according to the New Zealand Herald. The weather and temperatures are slated to get
worse in the coming days.

William Neeley, 26, an American living on a farm near the town of Clinton, south-southeast of Dunedin on the south island, said “there’s about a half a foot” of snow. “We have to dig through the snow to find the carrots” on the farm, he said and adding that “it’s awful.”

UPDATE: I just saw on memeorandum a story that reports that parts of Britain experienced the coldest summer that it has had in nearly two decades. Now, I know many people believe that as global warming gets worse that parts of the world will get colder and that snowfall will be higher and stuff like that, but if it is colder in the south and in the north the explanation very well could be that me driving my SUV isn't making the entire globe warmer, and that sometimes it is cold and sometimes it is hot, and that what drives these changes is the sun.

Here is a link to the story about cold weather in Britain.

Mr. Robbo the PE Geek is an excellent blogger and incredible teacher. Located in remote Australia, he has these students using heart monitors and high definition cameras to understand their sport. (Read his It's Now Possible blog post from today. This PE teacher taught me about QR Codes. A neat person too.)

We can talk about getting kids interested in science, however, science is interested IN them because it can unlock higher performance in the things they love. Taking science to the ballfield is only the beginning

For those of you who saw my Daily Education & Technology News For Schools this morning know that I'm having a bit of a traipse into Citizen Science.

Citizen Science is Becoming "Legitimate" Science
Authentic citizen scientist research work is becoming very useful to high level scientists. When I sat down with Dr. Geoffrey "Jess" Parker from the Smithsonian last year and the Microsoft Innovative Educator Forum in South Africa, he said that it is pretty easy to use statistical analysis to filter out "noise" of readings that have been taken in err.

Joshua Faulk helps students Treeband in south Africa at St. Cyprian's. Photo by Vicki Davis.

Dr. Parker is the scientist who discovered that trees in Maryland are growing faster than predicted. He and fellow scientist Joshua Faulk and the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center have partnered with Taking IT Global and Microsoft to create Shout Learning and the Smithsonian Tree Banding project where your students can participate.

Here are some important reasons you should have citizen science as part of your curriculum:

• It introduces students to the scientific method and data collection responsibilities.
  
• It introduces students to live science in action and makes it real. They can see questions before they have been answered and understand how science moves forward.
  
• It adds meaning to their work. No longer answering the same questions answered hundreds of years a go, they are answering questions that help our world NOW! You and your classroom MAKE A Difference. (The principle of glocalization talked about in Thomas Friedman's work - Think globally act locally.)
  
• As in the case of Mr. Robbo's lesson plan, they can use science to improve their performance which can show benefits on the field and also in their life as they realize science is in them, around them, everywhere.
  
• It is project based learning in action and can lead to other cross curricular activities including math, writing reflections, technology (using spreadsheets) and more.

http://scienceforcitizens.net/

Doug Ross has put together an excellent summary of all of President Obama's recent foreign policy actions. Let us not forget that while we have a Congress to worry about and work on domestic policy, it falls on our President to worry about and work on foreign policy, and Obama has performed very poorly in it. This is some fairly harsh criticism of Obama, but it is not wrong:

• Pakistan is said to have increased its stockpile of nuclear weapons, secretly surpassing India's level of atomic arms. In addition, Pakistan is becoming 'enveloped by Islamists' as radicals hold more and more sway over the people and the government.
• The government of Egypt is about to fall, threatening a replay of the 1979 Iranian revolution in which a populist democratic movement was quickly subsumed by a well-organized and violent cadre of religious extremists. Unlike Iran, however, Egypt's "military is a powerhouse in the region, possessing hundreds of advanced tanks and fighter aircraft that could fall into the hands of the Muslim Brotherhood.
• Lebanon is under new management: the vicious, Iranian-backed group called Hezbollah, which is responsible for the terrorist attack that killed 241 U.S. Marines in Beirut. Their aim is written into their charter -- to destroy Israel, Britain and the United States
• Tunisia is in the throes of its own revolution with hard-line radical Islamists poised to take control of the government
• Iran continues its work on nuclear armaments and intercontinental ballistic missile technologies, its steady progress delayed only by a clever cyber-attack
• Gaza's Hamas-led government is reportedly importing a new strain of Iranian extremists; Hezbollah agents are said to be making their way into the Palestinian enclave to train soldiers for an attack on Israel; in their spare time Hamas is lobbing missiles into Israel
• Venezuela, Hugo Chavez' dictatorship, is now said to be fielding Iranian military personnel and missiles with 'scientific' collaboration revolving around warhead design and nuclear technology
• The military regime of North Korea recently torpedoed a South Korean warship and is threatening to retest its nuclear weapons. It was also busted importing nuclear technology into Syria and has -- as a bonus -- assisted Iran with its development of missile guidance technologies
• China is on the move: building aircraft carriers, stealth fighters, locking up energy contracts all over the world, and generally preparing to occupy Taiwan and -- eventually -- regions closer to the U.S. All the while, it uses North Korea as a proxy for delivering advanced technologies to rogue regimes to ensure that the United States can never rest easy
• According to a disclosure in Wikileaks, Al-Qaida is "on the brink" of using a nuclear weapon and is far closer to deployment of chemical and biological weapons than previously believed.

Now I know that I have a lot of liberals and Democrats read my blog, so go ahead and list in my comment section all of the incredible foreign policy accomplishments of Obama, and we'll all compare. I predict that the best that Democrats and liberals can do is offer a laundry list of excuses and reasons why bad things occur whenever they are in charge, or lame attempts to pin the blame on someone else, or things that they can take credit for that were things they voted against or spoke out against when they were running for office. The balance is likely to be pointing one way on this one, and that is against the competence of the Obama administration's handling of foreign affairs.

Ayisha Osori in NaijaBlog:

We tell ourselves that the decay in our society is because we have lost our values and followed the western world. The truth is we have lost the best of our ways and adopted only the worst from outside. We have traded the strength of the Aba women and the governance of Hausa Queens for western consumerism. We continue to buy machines we cannot make or fix and continue to treat children as chattel, while ignoring the science of psychology. In the West the young have a voice, they thrive and innovate, ours use drugs in the north to escape a bleak future and in the south, use arms to rage against inequity and to join the band of greed...[Continue reading]

Dwell speaks with Erika Gee about the upcoming "Sightlines" lecture series. One of the questions was:

courtesy of Dwell

"The talks range in location from South Africa to quite literally Timbuktu. Tell me about that Timbuktu lecture and what it hopes to say about architectural cross-pollination across the continent.
That lecture looks at West African architecture and how often times academics are quick to treat it as something apart from the rest of Africa and particularly North Africa. But curator Labelle Prussin looks at the Jewish influence in Timbuktu and tries to make connections between West Africa and North Africa. She sees an influence in architecture, art, and commerce, and makes the point that West Africa is really an area with a number of different styles.

More here

Image via WikipediaIn Sahara Reporters Gary K. Busch provides a contrarien view about the crisis in Ivory Coast:

The civil war which broke out between the North and the South in the Ivory Coast was largely about the efforts of the Gbagbo government seeking to achieve real independence; a breakaway from the colonial dominance of the French which controlled almost every aspect of national life. He had the support of the Ivorian people. However now, after all the fighting and suffering by both sides, the current policy of Gbagbo seemed to veer away from confrontation to a policy of restoring the status quo ante; French neo-colonialism. This didn’t work. It fostered is a level of bitterness and rancour among a people who were watching the yoke placed on their necks again and, despite their current apathy and discouragement after years of fighting and sacrifice, they realised that, North and South, they had nothing to lose by sweeping the board clean of their black Frenchmen and installing genuine Ivorian patriots in their place...[continue reading]

While Jordanna Matlon writing in Africa Report discusses the "high stakes" for southern loyalists:

In a country of long-term and soaring unemployment, these men found that their political activities gave them slight leverage in an atmosphere of otherwise dwindled opportunities. As one of my respondents astutely remarked, in a crisis-ridden Côte d’Ivoire, “the one business that works is politics.” Admittedly these men were far from gorging themselves off the fat of party politics. Instead, situated at the bottom of the hierarchy, they received little more than its crumbs. But crumbs – to appear as a guest speaker here, to get help to pay a medical bill or a child’s tuition there and to be relatively immune to the informalised state extraction in the form of the regular bribes – are all heavy incentives in the absence of gainful employment. Moreover, each speaker boasted of meeting warm congratulations after a speech, having his name called when walking down the street or being bought a beer from an admiring spectator he encountered when out on the town...[continue reading]

Blessing-Miles Tendi writing in the Guardian:

The standard explanation offered by Africans opposed to gay rights is that homosexuality is alien to their culture and was introduced to Africa by European colonialists. A good deal of African-American homophobia relies on the same justification. But late 19th-century records on Africa and African oral history show that homosexual practices existed in pre-colonial Africa. One case in point are the Azande people in the north-east of modern-day Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), where it was acceptable for kings, princes and soldiers to take young male lovers.
Further evidence for the existence of homosexuality is that pre-colonial African ethnic groups ascribed tribal classifications to gay people. While some of these categorisations had negative associations, many had neutral connotations. Certain tribes in pre-colonial Burkina Faso and South Africa regarded lesbians as astrologers and traditional healers. A number of tribal groups in Cameroon and Gabon believed homosexuality had a medicinal effect. In pre-colonial Benin, homosexuality was viewed as a boyhood phase that males passed through and eventually grew out of.

More here

This weekend marked the two year anniversary of this blog, so I thought that it would be fun to look back a bit. As I wrote in my inaugural post My Goal, this blog is primarily an outlet for my thoughts on education, teaching, local politics, and national politics. My background in government, business, and education has given me a unique perspective from which to comment on these subjects and I have continued to do a lot of different things in these areas, and so my hope was that these experiences would further the political discourse in this country and maybe even educate some of my readers. What motivated me to put together this blog and what continues to motivate me to spend the hours each week on it is the desire to make the world a better place.

My blog has been described as "like Glen Beck, minus the Mormonism" by one of my readers. Another reader wrote to me and said "What I like about The Conservative Teacher is the focus on national and regional politics, the reporting -- often in real-time -- on the dynamics of the liberal fascism of today's public schools, and the entertaining mix of popular culture. I read The Conservative Teacher every day, and you should too." Some people have said that my blog "gives them hope that there is actually still conservative teachers in education," and others have written that "each post is fun and entertaining and informative."

It is surprising how many regular readers that I have and how many people my blog has reached. Oh, I know I'm not a huge blog, but based on the numbers, I am the biggest conservative teacher blogger in Michigan. Each year has more and more people are checking out my blog, linking to it, adding it to their list of favorites, and emailing friends and family links. This year alone alone twelve thousand new readers have found their way to my blog! And they are not all from the US- I have readers from the United Kingdom, Australia, South Korea, India, Germany, and Italy, and have even had readers from Egypt, Iran, Russia, Turkey, China, Pakistan, and North Korea.

Being a blogger means that I am part of a community and could not have spread my message and observations without the help of other bloggers out there. In particular, I would like to thank Pundit and Pundette, TheBlogProf, Vox Day, Net Right Nation, Right Michigan, and For A Better Day- thanks for letting your viewers know about my blog.

Based on reader responses and feedback, here are some of their favorite posts on politics, the environment, teaching, and popular culture- be sure to check them out!
Democratic Aide implicated in Scheme to Bilk Millions out of taxpayers through Michigan Film Credits, Obama Nicknames, Coon Hunting, A Bear Named Obama, Teleprompters, Queen Touching, and Bush Fighting Zombies, or David Petraeus says a special Cherokee word to soldier in coma, soldier wakes up!.

In FP Nasir El-Rufai on the need for a fresh political dispensation in Nigeria

...we all need to use a fresh lens when looking at Nigeria. Backroom deals in which political elites negotiate the fate of Nigeria's 150 million people are a relic of the past -- or they should be. The North-South power rotation, or "zoning" arrangement, that pretends to offer stability to Nigeria's ethnically diverse population has morphed into a convenient justification for self-centered politicians.

More here
via Abuja City