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Weekly Math UpdatesApril 4, 2007 Contents:
Hi all, One of these days my emails will slow down or stop, it's just there's a few things I've been reading or researching or receiving from people that I want to share with you and document on the site. Here's a few things this week I feel are important. National Math Panel Letter I received an email from a lady in New Jersey last week concerning the National Math Panel along with information on submitting a comment to the panel. Several of the members of the panel are people I have corresponded with over the past couple years so I feel like we're in pretty good hands. If you would like to send the panel a comment, feel free to do so. All comments become part of the public record and you can download a Word file from this page and see over 100 pages of comments received so far. I think it would be a good thing for us to have a strong national math standard that sets the tone for all states. There is no reason someone in Utah or Texas or anywhere else doesn't need the same strong set of math that a child in California needs. We should set a high standard and then help kids that have issues keeping up with it. We have to advance our country's math skills more than ever to keep up with the rest of the world. http://www.ed.gov/about/bdscomm/list/mathpanel/public-comments.html Jury Awards Teacher $1.4 Million Jury awards $1.4M to teacher who was punished for refusing to change failing grade Last week I spoke with a parent who had gone back to college in recent years (in Utah) and while taking college English she had a conversation with the professor who told her that he had two sets of grading he did, one for people that grew up years ago that knew how to write a paper, and one for kids coming out of school now who had no clue how to write a paper. The above article describes a Louisiana teacher who was flunking a lot of kids for not knowing how to write and she got canned. Now the school district is having to pay up for their actions. She now teaches at a prison and isn't available to bring to Utah. The Communist Agenda Last week I got an email asking me why the constructivist agenda is so prevalent in society. I'm going to warn you in advance that you may be in need of a standard issue AFDB (Aluminum Foil Deflector Beanie) in order to digest these points without becoming a member of some conspiracy group. If you are unaware of the value of these devices you are encouraged to check out this site: In the interest of full-disclosure you should be aware of an MIT study which seems to contradict the effectiveness of such devices and indeed gives concern that they may in fact enhance reception of conspiratorial rays rather than deflect them. http://people.csail.mit.edu/rahimi/helmet/ OK, humor aside, this is a pretty serious issue. I've talked before about the book "The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America" written by a senior policy advisor to the DOE during the Reagan administration. It was published in 1999 and you may get a free pdf copy from this link. (http://www.deliberatedumbingdown.com/pages/author.htm) Here's a quote from the preface:
I know I and many others of you are the only parents who have ever complained. :) The pdf e-book is lengthy and no, I haven't read it all, but it documents what I'm leading up to and I have read sections of it. The point is the infiltration our enemies have had into our country for a number of decades. Think about what you would want to do to weaken an opponent over a matter of time. You would want them demoralized, immoralized, and desensitized to anything virtuous, of good report or praiseworthy. How do you do that? In 1848, Karl Marx wrote the Communist Manifesto. His last of 10 points reads:
What was the purpose of free education for all children? Why would communists want this? "Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it." (Proverbs 22:6) If you have control of what is taught, you can raise good little socialists who will eventually become ripe to accept communism and athiesm. In 1963, Cleon Skousen (who spent years in the FBI fighting communism) wrote a book called, "The Naked Communist" in which he listed off 45 goals of the communist party. Here are a few items from the full list which are of particular interest in educational matters and a link to the full list if you'd care to see how fully our country has been assimilated by the communists. If you have never read the full list you really need to do so to understand how far our country has veered toward communism.
Extreme? Unlikely? Consider a few newspaper articles (click to read them): Bush plans to screen whole US population for mental illness Is your baby playing with its toes yet? If not the government wants to know why
In Belgium the same thing is happening under a U.N. Convention that Belgium signed on to and it will happen in the U.S. if we continue with the U.N. Read the article. Sort of puts the movie "While You Were Sleeping" in a new light. Now I want to mention that in saying these things, I do not indict the vast bulk of our teachers who are trying to teach our children well, but there are many people driving the "bus" of education who have an agenda to dumb down our country and weaken us so our enemies can overtake us. It's happening right now all across our country. We've torn down our Founding Fathers and made freedom and morality take a back seat to socialism, getting along, political correctness, and "tolerance." For example, some people wonder what's going on with the National Science Foundation. They have actively promoted and even funded the development of TERC, CMP, IMP and other fuzzy math programs. In this article by Dr. David Klein, he basically asks them to get out of the education field before they destroy it. It makes you wonder who's driving the bus for the NSF. http://www.edspresso.com/2006/11/school_math_books_nonsense_and.htm Here's a classic clip from the article:
One of the things I've heard from several teachers across our district is that "programs don't teach children, teachers do." Well if the content isn't in the textbook, it's not the typical teacher that goes the extra mile to figure out what children really need beyond what's in front of their face. Soft curriculum produces soft students. Over two years of reading articles and fighting fuzzy math makes a person start to reach into the arena of, "where did this really come from?" "Who actually spent money developing this and thought it was a good idea?" "Who believed them enough to implement it on MY kids?" In Star Trek VI, when Scotty physically counted the photon torpedoes on the Enterprise and said they were all accounted for and that they couldn't have fired any at the Klingon ship, Mr. Spock said, "An ancestor of mine maintained that if you eliminate the impossible whatever remains - however improbable - must be the truth." So eliminating all the things that make sense leave me with either a communist conspiracy, or extraterrestrials really have taken over our government? I report, you decide... Weekly Comic Archive: http://www.weaponsofmathdestruction.com Till next week, Oak Norton |
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