My Beauty Best Teacher

Cities Feeding People: a book published by IDRC highlights:

The importance of urban food production as a source of both income and food. It stresses the wide socioeconomic spectrum of urban farmers and the critical importance of self-grown food for the poorest urban dwellers, particularly those living in households headed by women. The studies also emphasize the growing commercial importance of certain foods such as vegetables, poultry, and eggs.

It goes on to say that:

Government response to urban food production has generally been one of neglect if not harassment. Land-use regulations for both public and private land are needed for urban food production to flourish. Improved information about crops and fertilizers, water, and pesticides could greatly increase crop production while immunization and advice on feeding would improve livestock and reduce the wastage by premature death. To encourage such governmental reconsideration of policies toward urban and peri-urban farming, however, careful quantitative comparative studies must be completed to understand current practices.

photo courtesy of RUAF foundation

One of the biggest problems facing the Republican Party is the perception that it is not welcoming to minority groups. To many Republicans, this upsets us- after all, our party freed the slaves, our party fought against slavery, our party fought the racial segregation in the south, our party passed the Civil Rights bills over Democrat's objections, and our party today pushes an agenda that minority groups should support.

The Republican Party has pushed for educational reform and accountability- not to help out the rich kids in the white schools, but to help out those stuck in failing schools in predominantly urban areas. The Republican party has pushed for welfare reform- not to hurt minority groups but to help them to gain dignity and freedom by moving off of the welfare rolls of the state to making their own living in this world. The Republican Party pushes for more crime fighting and tougher punishments on criminals, ideas that should be winning in communities that sadly have higher rates of crime. The Republican Party is the party that fights the drug culture that is so corrupting to the inner cities and minority communities. The Republican Party fought against raising the minimum wage, which studies have shown cause higher unemployment in minority groups. On issue after issue, it is Republicans who are pushing policies and ideas that would benefit minority groups, and yet the perception remains that Republicans and their ideas are wrong.

This is partly the own fault of the Republican Party, and efforts need to be made to change this perception. Akindele Unleashed discussed this in a recent column-read the full column by linking here- here are some highlights:

However, it seems like the biggest challenge is how Republicans can approach urban areas. The answer is simple. Just talk about issues that are relevant. I think I brought this up several times in our discussion. Instead of template talking points and foreign platforms I stressed the need for discussions on mental health, family building, global education, and even participating in race relation discussions. The key here is relationship building.

We know the GOP has ties with various Chamber of Commerces across the State of Michigan but are we partnering with other community based groups who have direct access to people in our community? When was the last time the GOP connected with Focus Hope? The North Oakland Republican Club volunteered to work in a soup kitchen in Pontiac not too long ago. Most GOP clubs will not even conduct meetings in urban communities. That alone shows the disconnect.

Civic education forums are needed to inform constituents on the issues as well as creating solutions. I said nothing about bashing elected officials. I said solutions. If the GOP becomes more solution-oriented we will see a positive outcome in urban communities.

Akindele hit on a couple important ideas that Republicans should be well aware of- relationship, making the effort to reach out, and focusing on solutions. Every Republican can should heed this advice- they can not afford to not to if they want to help out minority groups in our nation.

The 'Urban Africa and Sustainable Futures' photography exhibition by David Adjaye
will:

"...reveal a unique snapshot of life in Africa today, documenting the nature of urban life in a developing country, a unique geo-cultural survey profiling the African city in a global context...he has captured the urban development of cities including Kigali, the capital city of Rwanda showing traces of its Colonial past, Tripoli in Libya, very much invaded by the energy of the present, the informal settlements on the edges of new cities like Abuja, Nigeria and the traces of apartheid still inscribed on Pretoria, South Africa."-creative boom

HT! @digitalafrican

Via Tom Coburn, here's the latest list of wasteful spending in the bill just passed by the House (via The Corner):

Wasteful and Non-Stimulative Spending in the House-Senate Conference Report (Note: Most of these items are already fully funded through the regular budget process, which already increased spending dramatically last year. This is just adding silly money to the already flush coffers of government agencies).
• $8 billion for high-speed railway (including an earmark for an Los Angeles to Las Vegas MagLev)
• $1 billion for the “FutureGen” not-ready-for-primetime near zero emission plant in Illinois
• $53.6 billion for the “state stabilization” slush fund
• $1.3 billion for Amtrak
• $24 million for USDA buildings and rent
• $176 million for renovating Agricultural Research Service buildings
• $290 million for flood prevention activities
• $50 million for watershed rehabilitation
• $1.4 billion for wastewater disposal programs
• $295 million for administrative expenses associated with food stamp program
• $1 billion for the 2010 Census
• $200 million for public computer centers at community colleges and libraries
• $650 million for the DTV converter box coupon program
• $360 million for construction of NIST buildings
• $830 million for NOAA research and facilities
• $2 billion for Byrne JAG program
• $10 million to combat Mexican gunrunners
• $125 million for rural communities to combat drug crimes
• $1 billion for the COPS program
• $1 billion for NASA
• $300 million to purchase scientific instruments for colleges and museums
• $400 million for equipment and facilities at the NSF
• $3.7 billion to conduct "green" renovations on military bases
• $375 million for Mississippi River projects
• $10 million for urban canals
• $5 billion for weatherizing buildings
• $2 billion to develop advanced batteries for hybrid cars
• $3.4 billion for fossil energy research (possibly including an earmark for FutureGen)
• $5.1 billion for environmental cleanup around military bases
• $5.5 billion for "green" federal buildings
• $300 million for "green" cars for federal employees
• $20 million for IT upgrades at the Small Business Administration
• $200 million to design and furnish DHS headquarters
• $210 million for State and local fire stations
• $125 million to restore trails and abandoned mines
• $146 million for trail maintenance at National Park Service sites
• $140 million for volcano monitoring systems
• $600 million for the EPA Superfund environmental cleanup program
• $200 million to clean up leaking underground storage tanks
• $500 million for forest health and wildfire prevention
• $25 million for the Smithsonian Institution
• $50 million for the National Endowment for the Arts
• $1.2 billion for "youth activities" (for "youth" up to 24 years old)
• $500 million earmark for NIH facilities in Bethesda, MD
• $1 billion for Head Start
• $32 million for home-delivered nutrition services
• $160 million for volunteer programs at the Corporation for National and Community Service
• $500 million earmark for the SSA National Computer Center in MD
• $220 million for the International Boundary and Water Commission, U.S. and Mexico

Just a couple comments to this insanity. Why would a fully funded Census Bureau need an additional billion dollars- what kind of a game is this hiding? I thought Amtrak and Smithsonian were going privatized- how did they suddenly get back on the nationalization path? It's interesting how many palaces government is building itself- 'green' buildings I imagine are very beautiful to look at. Am I correct in seeing that $10 million is going to build 'urban canals'- what the poop is that about? Seriously, they should just include an item for "$10 billion just to piss away" and stop with the pretend items. This makes me very angry seeing this list- anyone who reads this blog who did not vote Republican for Congress and President should go bang your head violently against a wall- this is partly your fault.

From an overview of The Places We Live photographed by Jonas Bendiksen:

For the first time in human history more people live in cities than in rural areas. This triumph of the urban, however, does not entirely represent progress, as the number of people living in urban slums—often in abject conditions—will soon exceed one billion...His lyrical images capture the diversity of personal histories and outlooks found in these dense neighborhoods that, despite commonly held assumptions, are not simply places of poverty and misery.

via Boing Boing

Professor Stephen Commins addresses the options for services delivery in Africa, with an emphasis on water supply, an area covered earlier "...In the case of water and sanitation services in African urban locales, there is a widespread acceptance that the 'model' for water and sanitation services that has worked in developed countries cannot be adapted in the short to medium term for developing countries, especially in Africa...The potential roles of independent providers and their relationships to utilities vary considerably - influenced particularly by existing supply, capacity and attitudes. The second is the informal nature of many Non-State Providers and the lack of definitive information on the effects of formalization on the creative and responsive nature of their service. The tension around the issue of formalization is central to the discussion of a number of other thorny issues concerning Non-State Providers..."

In Bombastic Elements:

Urban geographers have already started talking about the need to stop looking at slums as evidence of the failure of government policies or modernization in Africa, but to begin "theorizing African urbanism from the perspective that the innately complex and diverse "lifeworlds" of these slums already contain efficiencies and problem-solving designs, that due to nature of slums, remain unplugged from the urban grid.
Ajelogo: After the Bulldozers from Stretch Ledford on Vimeo.

More here

Written By Candi Peterson

Ken Saro Wiwa asks:

...where, I wonder, are the younger, vibrant leaders who can harness the energy of Africa’s increasingly youthful, urban and restless societies?

continuing he adds:

“Do any of my colleagues in government have the vision and conceptual tools to channel this youthful energy to the common good? ”

More here
photo courtesy of the Globe & Mail

MobileActive highlights a new paper which points out that:

Music making and distribution is a large scale phenomenon in urban informal settlements in Africa. The talent, vision and passion of the musicians living in the African slums would be appreciated by the music lovers around the world if only the artists had a chance to practice as well as possibilities for recording and sharing. Furthermore this would contribute significantly to livelihoods of the people living in the slums and to economic development of Africa as a whole given the estimates of the contribution that the informal music industry is already making.

Watch related video after the jump:

From Slum Dwellers International:

Once Federations begin to negotiate with local governments around secure tenure and basic services, the next step is always to find the finance for the actual implementation and delivery. Very often the lack of access to funds delays projects and results in a loss of morale for the communities involved.
These constraints have prompted many SDI affiliates to build new institutions, called Urban Poor Funds(pdf), which monetize the social and political capital of savings groups to leverage additional resources from formal banking institutions, the State, and international donor agencies. By combining the savings of the poor with external contributions, Urban Poor Funds gear up capital for large-scale construction and infrastructure development...[continue reading]

photo courtesy of SDI

Democrat President Barack Obama's economic programs can be best called "The Inside Deal." There is a long history of 'deals' in our nation, where the government expands unconstitutionally into areas where it is not supposed to be and crowds out human freedom and industry. These deals all have cool names- Square Deal, New Deal, Fair Deal, Great Society- and as Obama and his Democratic allies in Congress have jammed through considerable changes in our nation over the last year, it is appropriate that we give a name to Obama's economic policies. I hearby submit to the world that we call Obama's economic programs "The Inside Deal."

The Inside Deal is Democratic President Barack Obama's domestic economic program and is characterized by extensive government spending for politically connected groups within American society. It is aimed to reward those groups that supported Obama's campaign for the Presidency in 2010, such as labor unions, public employee unions, teachers unions, environmentalists, anti-war protesters, Wall Street, and big businesses. Some of the programs that were passed by the Democratic Congress at the time to reward these groups include the stimulus bill, the healthcare bill, and massive annual budgets.

Increasingly during the height of the Inside Deal, there is a link between who receives taxpayer money from the federal government and their political connections. Called by some crony capitalism, it is increasingly unpopular, and in the face of continuing recession in spite of (or because of) the massive deficits that marked the Inside Deal, this program was largely overturned by Republican Congressional majorities and Presidents from 2010-2020 (hopefully).

Hopefully someone will soon create a wikipedia article on this, describing Obama's Inside Deal in more depth.

The first 'deal' that was made between government and America where citizens traded their rights and liberties for the promise of 'progress' was the Square Deal. The Square Deal was Republican President Theodore Roosevelt's domestic program formed upon three basic ideas: conservation of natural resources, control of corporations, and consumer protection. Thus, it aimed at helping middle class citizens and involved attacking the plutocracy and trusts through rhetoric and expansions of federal power while at the same time protecting business from the extreme demands of the rising communists.

Democrat President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had The New Deal. This was a series of economic programs passed by Congress from 1933 to his reelection in 1936. The programs were responses to the Great Depression, and focused on what historians call the "3 Rs": relief, recovery and reform. That is, relief for the unemployed and poor; recovery of the economy to normal levels; and reform of the financial system to prevent a repeat depression. To see a list of some of the programs that comprise FDR's New Deal, see my post 1930's Are Root of All That is Wrong.

The next 'deal' was offered by Democrat President Harry Truman, who presented a 21 point program of domestic legislation outlining a series of proposed actions in the fields of economic development and social welfare, including the call for universal health care. But in the face of peace and rising prosperity, the country decided that it didn't want to accept this deal, and the boom times of the 1950's and 1960's followed.

But Democrat Lyndon Johnson was inspired by the Fair Deal, and when he became President, he tried once again to make a deal between government and society whereby people would trade their individual rights and freedoms and liberties for some sense of 'fairness' in society. He called his 'deal' the Great Society. Two main goals of the Great Society social reforms were the elimination of poverty and racial injustice. New major spending programs that addressed education, medical care, urban problems, and transportation were launched during this period. The federal government has since spent trillions of dollars on these issues, and education, healthcare, urban areas, and transportation systems are now much worse today then they would have been if the federal government would not have stuck its nose into those areas and let human ingenuity and freedom and industry work unchained and untaxed.

Obama's Inside Deal represents then just the latest in a long line of usurpation's that have the goal of reducing our rights to life, liberty, and protection of property. Like our forefathers before, it is up to us to fight and overturn these injustices, least we be reduced to a state of tyranny.

John Iliffe writes:

In normal circumstances, the urban poor, while resenting corruption and the gulf between ‘us’ and ‘them’ were too vulnerable, divided, dependent on patronage, committed to rural values, and aware of recent social mobility to challenge their rulers openly.

via Aid Thoughts

Underappreciated "...Street-vended and informally vended food can contribute significantly to the food security of those involved in its production, particularly suppliers of raw produce, food processors and vendors. Women are often owners or employees of street food businesses. In certain countries (Benin, Ghana, Lesotho, Togo and Democratic Republic of Congo), they represent 70 to 90% of vendors. In Ghana and most developing countries, most women sell food in the street primarily to improve the food security of their household and also to have some degree of financial independence.Despite its growing presence, it is a sector that has rarely been the focus of strategic research initiatives that determine the importance and potential hazards of street-vended food, and what contribution it makes to the livelihoods of the urban and peri-urban poor (both producers and consumers)..."
via Natural Resources Institute

Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan - It should be about the student!

My children take tests all week. They are in AP, accelerated classes and they have to take them. This isn't really about that kind of test. I've been thinking about the modern implementation of the standardized testing procedure.

What if we had a modern doctor that practiced bloodletting?
Protests. An angry outcry against a practioner who had ingnored the past 200 years of medicine to go back to the archaic and harmful habit of draining a sick person's blood into a bowl in order to remove the body of impurities. Complete and utter nonsense. Not only nonsense, harmful.

Is standardized testing a modern day bloodletting? Perhaps not that extreme, but extreme enough to have an outcry from the masses demanding that education system be reformed. At the heart of this outcry is perhaps the standardized testing-centric curricula and methods we've adapted in order to "improve our scores."

So you want to know why this overtesting has made so many mad?

Here are the reasons I think that the modern implementation of the archaic standardized test scrapes at the sensibilities of a modern parent and teacher.

1 - The intense "drill and kill" leading up to the test themselves.
Runners know that in order to prepare for a big run, they must first scale back. In fact, no runner competing in a big race would schedule another big race in the two weeks prior. This is because the body needs time to recover. If you give everything you have, you don't have anything to give in the big race, especially when you need that extra kick. So, you drill and work hard and then a week prior you begin your taper, which is enough work to get you ready for the big day.

There is no taper in this activity. In fact, some schools give their own versions of the standardized test throughout the year to try to diagnose problems. Some even the day before. They figure if they give a monstrous test the day before the big test that things will be fresh on the student's minds. Perhaps there is some truth to that, but the fact is that the student who is supposed to do well on the test is exhausted.

2 - The intense pressure adults put on the kids about the tests
We do pep rallies, we lecture. We cajole. We bribe. We do everything we can to get the kids to take the test "seriously." In doing so, we perk up the ears of the majorly rebellious and perhaps all the kids. Except for graduation tests or advancement tests, the kids rarely have any "skin in the game" the only way the tests are high stakes is when the school is involved. Many parents don't have "skin in the game" either. Those who care have kids who make better test scores.

This is kind of like having a group of runners and telling them that if they can finish as a group, first, that their coaches will get a ribbon. The students won't get a trophy on their wall or a picture or anything. Just the coaches. While some students love their coaches enough to do this, it is rare.

Additionally, we don't even tell the kids if they won or not. We don't show them their test scores. They don't know how they did. It is a black box of agony and they don't see the point.

3- Measures of improvement are unrealistic
Our football team right now is entering the playoffs. While the coaches want to win as much as the students, these playoffs are about the kids on the field. Coaches know that some years they have more talent than others and do the best to win with what they have. We've had 23 games of winning in a row. Our coaches have done a great job advancing our kids and improving every single game.

But to tell them that they have to keep winning forever and always be better. Is that realistic. All schools go through an ebb and flow. For whatever reason, we don't know, some of our classes at school are full of boys and others are a mix of boys and girls. We don't know why. Sometimes the same happens with academics. We have a strong class one year and the next year the class isn't so strong.

4- We're not measuring the delta but rather a raw, unscientific measure of scores
To be fair, you should measure a single class all the way through and how that class advances. To compare one year of eighth graders to the next isn't an apples to apples comparison. A set of kids may have a great test score but compared to their prior year, they fell back. To compare this year's 8th grade to last year's 8th grade (unless you have an incredibly large "sample size") in most schools just isn't a fair comparison of whether the school improved. A measure of this year's 8th grade to the scores of the same students last year is a better measure. We're not looking at the delta.

The delta is the change. To be the most fair, a student's test scores would travel with him/her no matter what school the child went to. Each year, a child would have their scores this year versus their scores last year compared and the delta would be calculated. (The increase or decrease.) The addition of all of those deltas would help us see if those students were improving or not improving.

You'd also have to factor in that at some age levels kids naturally improve more than at others. (During puberty, for example, a child has a problem learning a lot and you're lucky if they hold steady - their body is just too busy doing other things to learn a lot. -- Geil Browning of Emergentics told us this at a Leadership Georgia workshop some time back.)

Material is everything. My husband runs several production lines.He runs the same line every day. Sometimes everything goes wrong in the line. It might be the temperature or a certain person who is out who is a key player but most often it is something subtle wrong with the materials.

You can't always blame it on the kids. But the fact is that some classes are smarter than others. For whatever reason, who knows. But the fact is there. So it becomes a matter of punishing a school when they have a class that doesn't measure up to the prior year.

5 - The test is standard
When you have a standard test, you make it easy to cheat. Everyone is given the same test. The stakes are high. The kids don't care. This class of kids is not as smart. I may lose my job. My husband lost his job and I can't afford to lose my job. What can I do? I've taught them everything I can. What is going to happen?

There is no excuse for cheating. None. But when met with a hopeless situation there are very few people who will fall on their sword. There just are. Teaching is noble and when teachers cheat it brings us all down. If you're perfect, please message me on Twitter, so I can meet you. I am not excusing the cheating but I am saying that good teachers make bad mistakes every day. Usually when we're tired or upset or under a lot of pressure but it happens.

The real world isn't standard.
One year I was upset about one of my children's K4 performance on the "environment section" of the standardized test. The teacher showed me what he missed. He didn't properly identify a SUBWAY TURNSTILE. He also didn't identify a judge (shown in a gray english style wig with a gavel) and he didn't know what a bus stop was. While my urban counterparts may argue that every 4 year old should have been on a subway, we are in a rural community and that is simply unimportant for a 4 year old to know here.

Schools teach different things. They are in different environments. The things that call out words and experiences that most kids have in urban areas penalize rural students and vice versa. There should be a way to control for this, however, we are trying to standardize.

The real world isn't multiple choice.
There are only 4 answers - multiple choice. In the real world when a factory worker needs to use a gauge to measure, there are no multiple choice answers. I know a local plant that turns away 80% of applicants because they don't know fractions. Even more than that they have to take metric, convert to inches and go back to metric again.

The reason we did multiple choice in the first place was so a computer could grade it an we could test cheaply. The only reason we keep doing it is because the testing companies prefer it that way. There is no reason at all to keep having multiple choice as the only mode of input. That is ludicrous.

Why don't we have adaptive testing?
Right now, if a child doesn't know decimals he/she may still have to answer 10 decimal questions. How many questions does it take to know a child doesn't know decimals? Probably just two or three. At that point, a computer could start going "down" to see if a child knows fractions. It should adapt and say "OK, what does this child know?"

If a child is reading below grade level, the test is on grade level. If they can't read it, they can't answer the questions. At all. The entire reading section is pointless. Instead, the test should adapt and say, "OK, what reading level IS this child on?" The same with every subject.

The fact is paper and pencil can't adapt. And adaptive testing is really about personalizing the knowledge of the student. It is about understanding the individual student. If we can understand enough individual students and then aggregate that together then a school can create a plan to help those students progress and move ahead.

But it isn't about really understanding and helping an individual student at all. No. It seems to be more about finding more heads to put on pikes than it is about helping every child get ahead.

A paper, standard, non adaptive test is a waste of time for a child who is underperforming. It is also a waste of time for a child who is overperforming. One of mine scores 99% on math every year. Well, how high is this child in math, anyway? We do not know, "because the test only goes up to a certain grade level and then it stops." We could have some real math prodigies among us and not know it. If a child is exceptionally gifted in an area, that test should adapt and go up to the level so we can see where that child really is.

Teach well and test when it is time.
At our school we just teach away, take a few days to test and then we keep teaching. Not much of a lead in. Not a big fanfare. We just work hard to teach exceptionally well and then we take a look at what happened. Our leaders look at the teachers to see if a class of kids drops from one year to the next to see if there is a weak link.

The parents get a copy of the test scores. I always tell my children their strengths and their areas where they are going to have to work.

Standardized Testing: The Modern Bloodletting
So, all of these things add together to go against the modern sensibilities of parents. When they see questions that don't line up to experiences and to the curriculum of the local school. When they see their children stressing out. When they see test prep starting earlier and earlier and even going year around. They realize that the customer is wrong.

The customer of education should be the individual child about 5-10 years after getting out of high school. Is that child thankful and feel well prepared for being successful in the world? Did that child learn something to make their life better.

The customer of education has become the DOE and the standardized testing data keepers who determine the money and resources that flow to a school because of  a test score that is flawed at its very core.

Many of us are sick and tired of what public education has become because we see that the students coming out are not well educated.

Perhaps I should go back and restate. I think that perhaps standardized testing is the modern bloodletting of education. We are zapping our resources, our time, and our energy on something that is not truly measuring what our kids are learning. We are bringing all of the kids to the middle and bringing down our gifted and we are missing a valuable opportunity to really personalize learning for students.

The fact is that we are falling behind in international test scores. Is it because we're so busy testing that we've hurt learning? Is our desire to improve our test scores actually having the opposite effect because we're focusing on the wrong thing? We have to get better, but how.

If you improve every student in the country then the entire country will improve.

But some will say that this isn't about the student anyway.

And such is my point.

The discussion on the firing of the Hart principal, Ms. Webster has sparked a lively debate on blogs, amongst colleagues, parents, community members and on Wash. Post blogs. Surprisingly in the comments I read, many expressed outrage that termination is the only strategy that our DC chancellor uses to address the multiple problems that our urban school system faces. An anonymous poster on this blog wrote: "Rhee believes she is a weapons expert at DC police academy. "Fire, Fire, Fire". Donald Trump is starting to look a little soft."

Jerome Brocks, a DCPS special educator of 34 years speaks out about the situation at Hart middle school. Having worked at Hart during his career , Jerome contacted me and asked if I would post his comments on my blog. I titled this entry: Taking It To Hart. Here goes:

"Let the truth be told. No one seems to be willing to tell the truth about the problems at Hart Middle School. Not the president of the Washington Teachers' Union , who blames the problem on administrators, not Chancellor Rhee who does not have a clue about what is going on in the neighborhoods of DC which is evidenced by her decision to close down PR Harris and send students to Hart and subsequently fire the principal because she (Rhee) can't solve our schools multifaceted problems, and certainly not the Washington Post who fails to do a full investigation and print the truth.

Two years ago, I witnessed a mob of students from Hart Middle School entering PR Harris Educational Center looking for several students from PR Harris. Both schools have an ongoing rivalry. The Hart students went through the building looking for their victims until the police came and then they ran from the building. Everyone knew there was an ongoing battle between Hart and PR Harris students. Michelle Rhee decided to close down PR Harris and transfer many of these students to Hart MS making an already bad situation worse. This is what happens when a new person comes to our city and is not aware of important facts when making decisions to close schools and relocate students from one neighborhood to another.

Ms. Webster, principal of Hart was set up for failure. Adequate staffing and supervision was never received. Teachers were put in dangerous situations where their safety was at stake. This person that we call chancellor is responsible for all the problems that have been allowed to occur at Hart and she should be held accountable. Equally responsible is George Parker, so called president of the WTU who has been derelict in his duties as he has failed to take an active role in speaking out on what is in the best interests of DC students and teachers. Shame on all of them who have been directly and indirectly involved in sidestepping the multiple problems at schools like Hart middle school. They say children first -what hypocrites they are!!!! If anyone should be fired it should not be principals and not teachers but Rhee herself should be fired immediately ! Lastly, WTU President George Parker needs to resign at once !" (Posted by The Washington Teacher).

Jerome Brocks
DC Teacher ( 34 years)

Since my my last post (My Personal Experience Fighting the Worship of Earth Hour) was so serious, I'm going to follow it up with a lighter post today, about stuff that I find funny.

First, take a look at the picture of the bear- according to the US Fish & Wildlife Service office in Kalispell, Montana, that little fella has taken to sitting every day at the picnic table apparently waiting to be fed and to have his winter den dug by government employees. Although he once was self-sufficient, he now begs for a handout every day from our generous government. Because of this, residents have taken to calling him Bearack Obama!

Next, according to the Detroit News, a new industry is starting up in Detroit, and I suspect that it actually is the fast-growing industry in the city (other than working for the government). The new industry is urban hunting and skinning. Yes, like a scene out of I Am Legend, the wilderness is retaking the city of Detroit, and the animal population is moving into areas that were once inhabited by productive men. Years of Democrat control in action!

The story in the Detroit News is the story of a young 69-year old entrepreneur, who has to supplement his Social Security checks by hunting raccoons in the city of Detroit. Apparently this guy kills coons with the help of his rifle and coon dog, butchers the meat, and sells it to local residents, and he also sells the skins- but doesn't pay taxes on these sales (must be a Democrat). The meat is not USDA approved (probably something to do with rabies), but the video about the story (go to the link for the article to watch it and howl with laughter) shows coon meat being served with liver and onions and Faygo red pop- just the way mom made it!

In other news, Obama recently was in England, and since he had to talk to people over there, he brought with him 5 speech-writers and 12 teleprompters for the weekend. I don't think that was enough- I heard some of his stammering and stuttering in a press conference- but still- 12 teleprompters? Can't you just bring one and move it from place to place? Or do they have to put a separate one up everywhere he goes and load it with his thoughts?

Sadly the teleprompter didn't let his wife know that you aren't supposed to touch the Queen of England- it's apparently a big no-no. Doesn't anyone on his staff do any research on this stuff? I guess not- Michelle put her arm around the Queen and gave her a noogie on national television- probably not a good idea, but at least her arms were fantastic!

Lastly, least we forget how low the bar was for Presidents (and yet Obama still gets under it), here is a hilarious clip from a George W. Bush press conference where he is talking about fighting the biggest threat to our lives- zombies. That's right- laugh if you want, but apparently zombies are a big threat, and I am glad our President did everything he could to wipe them out- click on the link if you don't believe me. Enjoy!

NOTE to NEW READERS: New readers, please feel free to also check out some of my recent good posts like Obama is a Caudillo, The Inside Deal: Obama's Economic Program, Employment-Population Ratio Drops to 58.5%, Earth Day: Is it just one big Communist Plot?, Gifted Programs in Schools Training Future Liberals, or Obama On Inner and Outer Circles of Leadership. Also feel free to link to blog-curhatanku.blogspot.com on your blog, and bookmark conservativeteacher.blogspot.com so you can become a regular reader of the battles of a conservative teacher's attempt to advance the principles of liberty and freedom.