With Age, Kids Might Lose Ability to Figure out How Gadgets Work

Study: Preschoolers Better At Figuring Out How Gadgets Work Than College Students « CBS Atlanta.

Researchers at Berkeley claims to have found that little kids can figure out how to operate an unfamiliar gadget faster than college students can.  Their study pitted a group of 106 preschoolers between ages 4-5, against 170 college students.  They had to figure out how to get a box to light up and play music.  The little kids were more likely to ‘break the rules’ and put two objects into a single receptacle  to cause the gadget to light up.

Without information concerning the study design, it’s not possible to conclude much from this study, but the purported results are amusing.   The Berkeley researchers seem to have accidentally stumbled on something that this blogger has long suspected.  Modern educational methods seem to be impeding creativity and curtailing outside-the-box thinking.  Many kids are losing IQ points from exposure to some of today’s dumbed down “educators”.

 

School Firedrill Forces Freshman in Swimsuit Out into Frozen Wasteland

“Minnesota School Freezes Live Student”, says National Review.

After a couple of generations of lefties controlling public schools, students are taught to be sheep by educators who were taught to be sheep.  Natural selection will not be kind.

Winter temperatures regularly dip below zero degrees F in Minnesota, but human adaptation to this appears to be incomplete.  When  Como Park High School in St. Paul  experienced an unplanned  fire drill, 14 year old Kayona Hagen-Tietz was forced to stand outside for 10 minutes in a wet bathing suit.  Yes, it is bad news to jump from the swimming pool and stand outside barefoot in the winter.  (A teacher had apparently prevented her from retrieving her clothes). Como Park has rules, so students can’t jump into a teacher’s car to stay warm, and Kayona was not permitted to run to the nearby elementary school.  Fortunately some students gave her a sweatshirt for her feet and huddled around her.   A teacher gave her a jacket. They had to seek special permission to let Kayona sit in a car until the fire drill was over.

That  unfortunately took too long.  Kayona now has frostbite, and her mother comments that she would be legally penalized for treating her child as the school did.

Abortion Debate at Purdue University March 3rd

Purdue Students for Life are hosting a formal debate between Created Equal’s Director of Training, Seth Drayer and Purdue University’s Professor of Communications Dr. Ralph Webb.
The topic: “Is Abortion a Human Rights Injustice?”
It will be held in Fowler Hall at 6:30 EST, on Monday, March 3rd, and live streamed at www.createdequalfilms.com, so anyone can see it.
Please spread the word, and tweet it using #abortiondebate on the day of the debate!
Watch the Teaser film HERE.

School Suspends and Charges Student for Father’s Fishing Knife Found in Car

The performance of Northwest High School officials in Clarksville, Tennessee joins the lineup of Stupid Educator Tricks, featured on this blog. The officials  are accompanied by the Montgomery County Sheriff’s dept, which is levying weapons charges against a high school kid who made the mistake of borrowing his father’s car.

David Duren-Sanner’s future is put on hold, because his father, a commercial fisherman, had a fishing knife inside the car, which David parked on school property. David gave permission for a random search of his car to be searched during the school’s lockdown exercise, likely because he had no idea that his father’s knife was there.

Now David has 10 days suspension, 90 days at an alternative school, on probation, and is facing weapons charges. Peggy Duren, David’s grandmother, with whom he is living, claims that this is his first disciplinary trip to the H.S. principal’s office. “Guilty until proven innocent” is how she describes the zero tolerance policy to Clarksville’s News Channel 5.

There is a petition online if you’d like to weigh in on one more whacko method of teaching kids to disrespect authority, exercised by the Northeast high school officials and the Montgomery County Sheriff’s dept.

Or you could click on the name and tell Principal  Galea Jefferies exactly how you feel about the handling of this situation.

Perhaps they should be asked what positive incentive would a kid have to  obey the law, if he can be so heavily  penalized for a normally legal item which is found  in a car that he has borrowed??

North West High School, Clarksville, TN
North West High School, Clarksville, TN

Biased Sociology Classes and How to Avoid Them.

Anna Chapman reports from the University of South Carolina that her Sociology textbook, by Karen K. Kirst-Ashman, is so extremely biased against political conservatives, “so in your face” that “people need to know about it”.  The book is used for the  Introduction to Social Work Profession and Social Welfare class, which is first in line in the USC social work program.

Selections from the textbook, trashing Ronald Reagan with false claims,  and painting conservatives as anti-woman and anti-charity, reveal the author’s divorce from reality.  Ignoring Reagan’s numerous female appointees, including first women ever appointed to the Supreme Court, UN ambassador, and Secretary of Transportation, the book stated that Reagan “ascribed to women primarily domestic functions, and failed to appoint many women to significant positions of power.”  By the way, Reagan’s HHS secretary was also female.

University of South Carolina  is preparing kids for a low paying career in social work by filling them with information that just isn’t true.  This institution and other universities are defrauding their students by 1) telling them lies, and 2) charging outrageous prices, and 3) encouraging huge indebtedness to prepare people for careers with nearly the lowest return on investment for college graduates.

There are ways to protect yourself from high priced brainwashing in Sociology class, if you need to take it to fulfill a general educational requirement.

Some high schools offer early college, and it seems that many community colleges are not as freakishly leftist as larger universities. You can opt to get a sociology requirement out of way using those options, for less tuition cost.
If you are a decent test taker, use this method to fulfill the requirement. Pretend you are a flaming leftist while taking the CLEP test. The evil “Teddy Kennedy” persona got a 98 percentile on the sociology CLEP test that your friendly Pharmer took. CLEP testing is still the cheapest and best option for earning college credit to fulfill general requirements.  Don’t forget to review a glossary or summary of sociology terminology and buzzwords before testing, or skim a textbook if you have a strong stomach. You can guess at the bogus study results and do OK.

These avoidance strategies are a form of boycott, and serve to shrink a detrimental academic industry. Never pay full tuition prices to have your mind filled with Crap.

Fix the Family: Reasons to NOT Send Your Daughter to College

Raylan Alleman at the Fix the Family website has gotten some press on The Blaze, stirring up quite a bit of controversy, over his negative view of college for women. Most are foaming at the mouth over the perceived sexism but a few have noted that Alleman has a point, when he calls College for girls a “near occasion of sin”.

Possibly the concise list of concerns provided by Proverbs 17-12NLT (commenting on The Blaze) are a driving force of this Catholic group’s negative view of college. See below:

What College Teaches- By Proverbs17-12NLT, commenter on The Blaze
What College Teaches- By Proverbs17-12NLT, commenter on The Blaze

Most of the schools are a negative overall influence on women AND men. Your friendly Pharmer determined that none of her kids would go to the IVY league, (Parents, don’t pay for that!) and am sending them to institutions which are not so screamingly leftist. Her kids have been  prepared for encounters with “the other side”, and its  general  intolerance of conservatism.

What’s interesting is that people are ‘going off’ on this Catholic group as extremist, but would not castigate the Amish (one of the fastest growing religious sects in the U.S.) for an even more contrarian view toward higher education.
Proverbs 17-12NLT‘s last point is a huge, and it applies big time to women who gravitate towards the non-math oriented fields, which drive them into lower paying jobs, and inability to pay the ginormous college debt.

Think of Raylan Alleman as turning a little bit Amish as you read through his  list of why parents should not send their daughters to college.  It might help with tolerance of another family oriented culture, the conservative Catholics.  There is quite a bit of practicality in the list from the standpoint of those who would naturally want to live a conservative or family based lifestyle.  He finds college education to be forming a kind of prison for women, because the time and money investment of it will drive the parents who fund the education to limit their family size, and the women themselves to do the same, or skip having a family altogether.  Alleman’s number one reason “She will attract the wrong types of men.”  He’s talking about lazy drones.   Pharmer has listened to the tales of working women and their marriages for years.  Nurses, those compassionate types, who want to help and heal the sick, seem often to suffer from marrying “Mr. Wrong”, a guy who contributes little to the family life, and thinks that his wife should work hard at a job, come home and take care of him full time also.    Alleman states that women wish to build a family might  think more deeply about what kind of man they will marry.

Women with a practical mind might want to balance their future desires  by educating themselves in the construction skills of domestic life, as well as a lower cost, technical education that can  bring needed income.   Domestic engineers (formerly called housewives)  are constantly making, building, and fixing things, as well as people.   It is highly skilled labor, and that’s what is currently in precariously short supply in our industrialized world.

Your friendly Pharmer supports women’s freedom to ignore the expectations of feminazis, and choose to major in the field of domestic engineering.

Pro-lifers Show up at Portland School Meeting to Support Bill Diss

Friday’s Hearing for  Math Teacher Bill Diss, who was suspended for his opposition to Planned Parenthood,  was well attended by pro-lifers showing support.
Says Brendan O’Morchoe for LifeNews.com: “The principal of Diss’ school (who has a documented history of attacking and reprimanding Diss for his pro-life views) and vice principal testified against Diss citing instances of students “feeling uncomfortable” with some of the assignments Diss required from them in his math classes. Curiously, evaluations of Diss prior to 2007 were all exemplary.
Only after Diss’ public opposition to Planned Parenthood in his community did the scrutiny and harassment begin. Fellow teachers and a teachers’ union representative dismissed the concerns raised by the principal and vice principal, citing evidence supported by Portland school laws that Diss had not committed any legitimate wrongdoings in his classroom over the course of his career.”

The name of the principal not given in the LifeNews article, but there has been a change of staff. The Old list from last year  shows Bill Diss, still teaching, and Carol Campbell as Principal The New List,  mostly shown below shows Curtis Wilson as the current principal, and the exemplary math teacher, Mr. Diss is unfortunately gone.   One wonders why there was a change of principals for this school year.  It’s a mystery.

Lifenews says that Mr. Diss has a lot of support among the students, parents and other teachers.  Students for life will be providing the updates and outcome of the decision at the Portland Public School district.

Benson High school without diss, new principal
Benson High school without Bill Diss,  new principal shown BELOW 2013-2014
Benson High School without diss, new principal bottom
Benson High School without diss, new principal bottom

Bottom of list shows the new principal

Update: LA Teacher, Bondage Abuser, Pleading No Contest to Charges

Mark Berndt, the LA teacher at Miramonte Elementary, who played bondage and ‘special sauce’ tasting games with his students had managed to hold onto his health benefits, and tie up his firing in legal processes since his activities were exposed in 2009.

Things have finally caught up with Berndt, and he plans to plead no contest to 23 charges of child molestation on Friday.   The plea agreement is for a prison sentence of 25 years.  Legal settlements for the LA Unified School district run into Eight figures.

Seventy six teachers at Miramont were cooling their heels at an empty high school while restructuring occurred, and 46 are returning to Miramonte under a new principal.  A second Miramonte teacher, Martin Springer,  awaits trial for fondling a second grader in class.

Unmentioned is whether Berndt has lost his health benefits yet.

McBean Elementary School Bans U.S. Veteran Mom From School Ground

Why????  Because the mom, Ms. Tanya Mount posted a  picture of her concealed carry license in her hands on Facebook.

When Mount, whose daughter attends Bean Elementary, asked what she had done wrong, she was told that the principal was scared of her and did not want her on the school grounds.

News media reports that the principal, Janina Dallas confirmed that the facebook photo was the source of her problems.  Tanya Mount says that this was her first conflict with the principal, and she has since gotten permission to transfer her daughter to another school.  The Army Veteran is demanding an apology from McBean Elementary.

The full news story is available here

Ms. Tanya Mount, U.S. Army Veteran
Ms. Tanya Mount, U.S. Army Veteran

 

Georgetown University Course Teaches Students How to Promote O-bortion

Catholic University To Teach Students How To Promote, Protect Obamacare-Covered Abortions.

Abortion proponent, Kelli Garcia, senior council at the National Women’s Law Center will be teaching a course at Georgetown University called Regulatory Advocacy: Women and the Affordable Care Act.  Students will be called on to develop projects with Garcia’s organization and assist with its [abortion] advocacy efforts.  The law center has supported insurance coverage for abortions as a part of the HHS mandate of Obamacare.

Garcia is a big supporter of planned parenthood, and has decried the institutions which refused birth control coverage as discriminatory to women.