Education OMG

My kids and grandkids are always saying (OMG) Oh My GOD. When I think of that term for anything I think of education of today, and this is why I am submitting this for your appraisal!!

Now education is something we all have in common. Most of us look back at those times, if you are about my age or at least done with your formal education with nostalgia. When I started my education it was at old Frank R. Spinning School. Here is a photo (below left) of the old part of the building today.The same school and building that some of my grandkids go to today. They live on the same street I lived on when I was a kid. Kind of cool huh? It has been quite a time from when I finished my education but in many ways it seems like it was just a short time ago. After I stopped working full time I traveled but after awhile I got bored staying home and watching TV so I drove a school bus to make a little money and just to have something to fill my time. I have always liked kids and this seemed like a natural for me as the bus yard was just across from where I lived and I could walk to the yard if I wanted.

What a cultural shock it was for me. When I was a kid the first couple of grades were kind of an extension from home. The kindly teachers were more like your mom. Very kind and comfortable. We respected them as we did our parents. In my town there were about seven thousand citizens. We had one junior high school and one senior high school. There were five grade schools in the city limits. Our school, Spinning, had about 175 kids. There were 25 or so kids in each class. There was a principle, a secretary, 2 cooks, 2 janitors and one teacher for each of the 6 classes. First grade through sixth grade. There was also a librarian who helped remedial reading and a nurse. There were music teachers for band and string instruments when students were past the third grade but they were not stationed at each school, but traveled between the schools. Each teacher was also expected to lead the children in singing and music appreciation. The teachers watched us on the playground during recess and some of the teachers coached us in organized grade school sports programs. The first grade and first few grades concentrated on reading, writing, spelling, arithmetic, geography, music, and some science. We had a small library, a nurses and principles office, a combination basketball court and indoor play area, and a stage. As well as janitor areas and the kitchen. No portables, or other buildings on the grounds.
Compare that with the same school my grandkids go to today. The same old building is there, but it is now mostly just use for a staff area. There is a teachers lounge, multi-media room. School store, and copy center and administrative offices of all kinds. In my day if the teachers had an lounge they just hang out in one room or the other and had their coffee if they had a break at all. There is a new section of the school that is at least three times larger than the old school. There are dedicated areas for most things including rooms for music and art. I have not been in all the rooms so I can not say what they are all used for. Now there is not just one first grade or second grade there are 1A, 1B etc for each grade. There are teaching specialists for all kinds of activities. Each teacher has an aid. They have days off for conferences and time to grade papers. Our teachers were expected to do those things on their own time. There are many portable outbuildings that are other classrooms. I have no idea how many kids go there, and I know there are now 3 or 4 junior high schools and 3 or 4 high schools maybe more. I do not live there anymore and have lost count. The city is now about forty thousand citizens. So it is a much larger place. When I went to that school we all walked to school because most of the kids lived within a few blocks of the building. Now there are busses as nobody wants to walk and everyone is afraid their kid will get snatched away on the way to school. Most parents drive their kids or at least walk them to school.

Here in this picture is what our old school book looked like that we started reading out of. It was used in the first and second grade. It was about “See Dick run”. See Jane”. “See Puff”. We loved that old book and the characters in it.When I went to school kids would be kids. Sometime a kid would act up in class and the teacher would walk him, I never saw a girl, down to the principles office where he would get a swat with the rubber strap on the rump. The kid would come back crying. The ones who were really punished were the rest of us, because we lived in fear that we would be marched down the hall. Believe me we behaved very well.
By the time we got to high school were very well behaved kids as it had been drilled into our heads and know we were old enough to value our education. Still very occasionally someone would do something wrong. You would not get a swat but you would get suspended for some time and have to make the time up in the summer, or in the worst cases actually expelled from school. In that case you parents would have to try to get you into another school in another district if they could. That was not a good alternative because nobody wanted to start over with new friends. I never knew of anyone who was expelled but I did know one boy who had been expelled from another district. We took the discipline very seriously. We respected the teachers and the administration.

Now in my bus driving experience that I did for 5 years. The kids have no respect for anyone or anything. I know what you are saying…All kids? Well of course not all kids but so many that it makes it hardly worth talking about. I did not drive in my old hometown school district but the size of the cities is almost exactly the same today and I am sure the kids are about the same. Today the schools are way way overcrowded. The government put so many requirements and restrictions on schools that they are really not able to be effective. They are scared to death about law suits. They are not supported by the parents and the teachers are not supported by the administration. They are unionized and union rules like tenure that make it hard if not imposable to get rid of poor teachers which diminishes productivity and moral of good teachers who want to do better for their kids. The kids for the most part just want to do what they want to do. There is no real discipline. They give them slips to go home to their parents to sign but they are a joke as there is nobody checking to see if the parent signs the note of just another student. They barraged on the bus about how many they got. Many don’t care what their grades are. You can not hold a student back unless the parents allow it and most will not. If the teachers call a parent in because of a discipline problem the parent is all over the teacher and just defends their child. Don’t even ask me about minority kids. The race card comes out first thing. I know that sound racist, but I am sorry that is the way it is. They teach them a valuable lesson in life doing that don’t you see? If my dad would have been called to the school I would have asked to be kept at the school, because my dad would have killed me and that is not just a figure of speech. I thought I would have a rewarding and enjoyable time driving busses for school kids. I drove all levels from kindergarten to through high school. I had grade school kids told me more about sex than I knew when I had been married for a few years. Kids told me about finding their moms drug stash and the guys their mother’s were sleeping with when they got home from school. Very few had a home that had not been broken up by something like divorce or one of the parents going to jail or drug rehab. Fathers who had just left them or how many fathers they had and that all the kids in the family had different fathers and sometimes they were not sure who their real father was. So no wonder kids are crap, families are crap. Depressing isn’t it? When a real winner family shows up it is so refreshing you feel like hugging them and taking their essence to spread around. It is so so so so depressing. I know all generations feel their kids are disrespectful and good for nothing, but really they did not bring guns to school, and kill people. We never had to have guards and locker checks to find drugs. We did not have teachers sleeping or raping students. We did not have kids that were active gang members and dress and act like gangs in schools. At least not in my part of the world.

Much of the rest of the world just laughs at us. Our kids know all about video games, and who is on MTV or how to text message and listen to the I-Pod or phone. They do not know about much else. They have a hard time doing even the most rudimentary mathematics. Their understanding and appreciation of history and geography are absolutely appalling. We give these people the vote. In a recent TV show I happened to see someone was asking young people who had just voted who they voted for. Most said Obama. They asked them if they voted for Joe Biden? They did not know who he was and said “no”.

Our children are not competing against each other here in this country. They are competing against kids in India, Pakistan, China, and many other areas of the world where those kids only hope of ever having anything is understood by them to be from their education and they spend their time studying when our kids are fooling around. I used to interview and hire young persons for jobs. Some were entry level but well paid positions in a computer data center. Let me tell you that the most demanding and less qualified applicants were invariably white middle class or upper class kids. When they found out they may have to work nights or weekends and holidays at times they just could not have their lives disrupted like that and would hold out for a bank president position or something like that where they could start at the top and work their way down. The emigrant kid or the kid who had studied and had it hard during their younger lives most appreciated the opportunity and worked the hardest to make something of themselves. I hate to say that about my own race but it is true. We are way to pampered.


What would I do if I were captain of the world:

1 All Children would receive physical punishment in early years for misbehaving in school. Not beatings or hitting, but a formal uniform punishment like a supervised swat.

2. All Children would wear a cheap, clean, uniform attire to school. All clothing would be the same in a school district.

3. Teachers would be graded by pears in other districts and raises given based on that grade each year. Teachers consistently rated at the bottom would be dismissed.

4. No unions NO tenure.

5. Teachers would be paid at about ½ as much more as they do now and outstanding teachers could make more than those administrating them. Much more.

6. Schools building would be uniform as mush as possible and be cheap and easy to build. They would house no more than 200 students and be in neighborhoods. Busses would only be used in vary rural areas of the country and then not more than 10 miles to the next school even if it was in the middle of a field somewhere.

7. Students would not be classified by grade or year but by an accumulative score. Lets say 15,000 points to graduate from high school no matter how many years you were in school. A breakdown somewhere would divide between Grammar, Middle and High School and building would change when that level was reached. At the beginning of each year, a new teachers on each subject would be assigned to each student so that a student would not be stuck with a poor teacher for more than a year.

8. Children with special needs would be educated in a special needs school and sent to a regular school when they, their parents and the school administration felt they would be competitive in the regular school system.

9. Allow for Charter and Home Schooling as long as those students could pass the tests administrated at the public schools so that they could be awarded graduation points each year.


I could think of many more things but we are to lazy to even get this done and the all powerful ACLU would never let us try.