March 1, 2015

Gary Stein

The Sun Sentinel

RE: Education Problems and the solving thereof in your column in today’s unlinkable Sun Sentinel.

Big Stein. 

Having heard of the academic endeavors of Little Stein I am glad to learn of the presence of Boss Stein, whom you describe as a teacher. [If she is an English teacher maybe she can tell me if Wordsworth is still on the chick-lit shit list? Little Stein has not been able to come up with an answer]

I take it that you don’t think much of Utah. I suggest Monument Valley as an antidote to that seemingly elitist attitude to what qualifies as quintessential fly-over country. Maybe it’s too late for you but I believe that “as long as the light is left to burn the vilest sinner may yet return”. Plus, in my other life, I owned some coal leases there. I l like to think that if I had stayed in that business that you could thank me for A/Cling your “villa”, coal being the main ingredient in the “hit the button and banish summer and let the polar bears sink or swim” continuing series.

I mention Utah because you do.

“In Florida, we’ll have a critical test 

that was used in Utah.

Who knows Florida students better -

our teachers or somebody talking to 

students about life in Salt Laker City?”

Today

You

When Little Stein was in high school did he have any courses in Chemistry, Geometry, Spanish, Geography, Civics, Biology, Gym, or Music?

Is PI different in Moab? Are sit-ups done differently if a Mormon from Vernal has the whistle and the clipboard? Are the verb endings in the pluscum perfecto different if they are taught in Logan? Is gold still AU or silver AG in Ogden? Is it OK to listen to Mozart if you are hard by the Great Salt Desert? Are there any rhomboids in the foothills of the majestic Wahwahs? 

Is modern American Liberal “non-malodorous fecal matter syndrome” only to be found in parts of Broward County or has its importation been stopped at the Jordan River or at Swan Lake? [They both are to be found there]

“Every school and every teacher’s 

situation is different, just as students

are different. To treat them all like clones

makes no sense. Which is probably

 why it is being done.”

Ibid

Would I be far off if I were to assume that Boss Stein, in addition to her housekeeping and child rearing accomplishments, is a good teacher?

           Let us acknowledge some of the big bobbing turds in the punch bowl of American education. Why is a bad teacher paid as much as a good teacher? Why is a bad teacher paid anything? If failure isn’t punished how can success be rewarded?

         Did it not drive Boss Stein mad knowing that she and the boob or the boobette 2 classrooms down the hall had the same gross salary? Are the inmates running the asylum?

         2 Broward high schools, one public and one Catholic, won state championships in basketball this weekend.  That the non-athletic teachers should be held to the same expectations and standards as the coaches should be a given. It isn’t.  

        “Silas Marner” yes. “Beowulf” less so. “The Odyssey” never.

         I was speaking at an alternative high school some time ago. Talk about a captive audience! The alternative to listening to the curmudgeonly White man was to go to prison. I said that the reason for reading the Iliad, the first guts and gory war story, is that you get to read the Odyssey, the first love story. With that, a potentially feral Black teenager stirred. He said the Odyssey was about the dude who took 10 years to get back to his old lady, right?

         Absolutely, dead on, center perfect. Nothing but net.

         If “every school and every teacher’s situation is different” how can modern American Liberal apologists square that with the encompassing circle of Common Core?

Kevin Smith

WARRIORBARDIT@BELLSOUTH.NET

PS – Do  you think it would have been better for American public education if the Obama girls had gone to any of the fine, really fine, public schools in Washington?