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Absurdity, Bad Idea, Democrats, Education, Politics
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Warren Rally Honoring Black Women Kicks Out Group Of… Black Women
by Shifra on November 22, 2019The Atlanta group was protesting Elizabeth Warren’s opposition to charter schools and parental school choice. Warren’s son attended an elite private school. But, as the NY Post recently pointed out in ‘Warren’s ginormous school-choice hypocrisy’: …She promises to end private-school vouchers and tax credits. She’d block new programs that give families choices and work to shut down existing ones. She’d also ban for-profit charter schools, end federal funding for new charters and add more regulatory barriers to opening them. The blueprint sounds like it came straight from the teachers’ union playbook: It calls for boosts in funding to government-run schools and more red tape for their competition…. Warren screams over and over again how “the system is rigged by the...
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CA Curriculum Praising Omar, Tlaib As ‘Important Leaders’ Will Be Redrafted
by Shifra on August 14, 2019History would be replaced by “hxrstories,” cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal and convicted Puerto Rican terrorists would be elevated to status of “heroes,” praising the anti-Israel BDS movement and referring to Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) and Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) as “important leaders”? Yeah, no. Via WSJ: California Wants to Teach Your Kids That Capitalism Is Racist ….Capitalism is described as a “form of power and oppression,” alongside “patriarchy,” “racism,” “white supremacy” and “ableism.” Capitalism and capitalists appear as villains several times in the document…. Teachers are encouraged to cite the biographies of “potentially significant figures” such as Angela Davis, Frantz Fanon and Bobby Seale. Convicted cop-killers Mumia Abu-Jamal and Assata Shakur are also on the list….The Latino section’s people of significance include...
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School Apologizes After Pledge of Allegiance Recited… In Spanish
by Shifra on November 28, 2018Reciting the Pledge of Allegiance in Spanish…and German? From the Dept. of What were they thinking? Via Washington Times. Administrators at a Virginia high school have apologized for a plan to have the Pledge of Allegiance said in different languages by students. Westfield High School in Fairfax came under fire before Thanksgiving by upset parents when they found out that their children were being asked to recite the Pledge in Spanish. The original plan was to have native speakers of various languages, such as French or German, lead others in the routine. “A school administrator suggested students lead the pledge in Spanish to promote engagement and inclusion,” a statement released to a local Fox affiliate said. “Administrators believed this was...
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Hillary Wins Election… To Put Her Back In Texas School Curriculum
by Shifra on November 15, 2018Baby steps, Hilz, baby steps: Today, the Texas school curriculum. Tomorrow, the White House. Or something. Via Texas Tribune. The Texas State Board of Education backed a motion Tuesday evening to reinsert Hillary Clinton into the state’s 11th-grade U.S. history standards, two months after voting to remove the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee from the state’s curriculum. In a separate action Tuesday, the board backed restoring disability rights advocate Helen Keller to the state’s third-grade social studies curriculum standards. The action spilled over to Wednesday, when the board voted to keep Moses in high school U.S. history standards. The state board is meeting this week to finalize the changes to social studies curriculum, part of a streamlining effort that began 10...
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Co-Founder of Group Opposed to School Choice Sends Her Kids To Charter School
by Shifra on October 30, 2018Remember when Obama, whose daughters attended the prestigious Sidwell Friends School, tried to destroy the school voucher program in DC, which had given an opportunity for minority kids to attend better schools? Via Washington Examiner. Sharon Kirsch, co-founder of Save Our Schools in Arizona (a group that vehemently opposes school choice) was recently outed for sending her children to a charter school…. School choice is apparently okay for Kirsch, but not for the other families in her state. According to the Save our Schools’ website, the founders were “heartsick and angry” when a school voucher bill passed the Arizona legislature. The voucher bill expanded the same choice of schools that Kirsch and other middle-to-upper income families already had to families...
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Google Finds ‘Beautiful’ Is Top Misspelled Word in America
by Shifra on June 3, 2018Americans don’t know how to spell “beautiful” ? This is so embrrasing, er, embarrassing. Via CNET. Yacht. Chaos. Apparel. Connecticut. These are some of the words America most needs help spelling, according to a Google Trends visualization released this week. The chart breaks down to most-searched words by state. By the way, it’s Maine that’s asking how to spell “Connecticut.” In case you’re overly worried about America’s informal online spelling bee, keep in mind that Google’s data comes from top-searched “how to spell” queries. So it’s possible a lot of these searchers knew how to spell the words right, but just wanted to double check. Perhaps more interesting here is comparing the 2018 results with those from 2017. My state...
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UK Schools Remove Analog Clocks… Because Teenagers ‘Cannot Tell Time’
by Shifra on May 2, 2018Exam rooms are switching to digital clocks to reduce students’ stress. But at least they haven’t yet installed any cry closets. Via Telegraph. Schools are removing analogue clocks from examination halls because teenagers are unable to tell the time, a head teachers’ union has said. Teachers are now installing digital devices after pupils sitting their GCSE and A-level exams complained that they were struggling to read the correct time on an analogue clock. Malcolm Trobe, deputy general secretary at the Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL), said youngsters have become accustomed to using digital devices. “The current generation aren’t as good at reading the traditional clock face as older generations,” he told The Telegraph….
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New Harvard U. Course is Full of… Crap
by Shifra on February 13, 2018The perfect major for “Progressives”: A “B.S.” degree in excrement. 🙂 Via Free Beacon. Graduate students studying at America’s oldest university can sign up to learn about feces. Harvard University offers the four-credit course “Cacaphonies: Toward an Excremental Poetics,” which vows to take “fecal presence seriously” in French literature. Students getting their masters at Harvard can sign up for the course taught by Annabel Kim, an assistant professor of romance languages and literatures. The course will also study constipation and whether it is unfairly “gendered” as female…. “This course proposes to take this fecal presence seriously and to attend to the things it has to tell us (hence the plurality of cacaphonies [sic]) by starting with the following premise: If...
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Professor Who Wished for ‘White Genocide’ Claims He’s Been Hired by NYU
by Shifra on January 3, 2018George Ciccariello-Maher, the Drexel University professor who tweeted last winter “All I Want For Christmas is White Genocide” resigned from his tenured position, and now says he has been hired by New York University. When reached for comment by Campus Reform, Ciccariello-Maher said, “F**k ya’ll.” Yes, spoken like a true Leftist wingnut, er, “scholar.” Via Washington Examiner. George Ciccariello-Maher, the professor who once tweeted “All I want for Christmas is white genocide,” claims to have been hired as a visiting scholar by New York University’s Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics…. In March, he tweeted, “Some guy gave up his first class seat for a uniformed soldier. People are thanking him. I’m trying not to vomit or yell about Mosul.”…....
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Top Crazy College Courses of 2017
by Shifra on December 19, 2017Remember when the dumbest college course was “Third World Underwater Basket Weaving” ? Good times… In Tammy’s Washington Times column last week, ‘Drain in Education Swamp,’ she asks: How many conversations have we had with our friends, family and co-workers wondering what happened to the millennials? We expect a new generation to have new ideas and new ways of approaching the world. So how do we explain when a new generation is steeped in bullying, complaining about hurt feelings, demanding “safe spaces,” and using pride in fragile egos and weakened emotional states as the excuse to condemn free speech? Well, the favorite new college courses of 2017 are not exactly serving the millennials very well. Via Washington Examiner. Young America’s...
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Va. Middle School Quiz Words: ‘Mistress,’ ‘Boytoy,’ ‘Trophy Wife’
by Shifra on November 15, 2017The teacher who handed out this quiz to the kids should be asked to define the word Idiot. Via Daily Caller. A Hopewell, Va., middle school faced outrage from parents last week when it was revealed students were asked to define terms like “boytoy” and “affair.” The Carter G. Woodson Middle School quiz asked students questions like “What do you call it when a married person has a relationship with someone else,” “What do you call a married man’s girlfriend?” and “What do you call the much younger boyfriend of an older woman?” WSET reported Monday…. The teacher apparently downloaded the quiz from the internet and handed it out as part of the Family and Consumer Sciences class, the superintendent...
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New College Degree Offered at N. Michigan U: ‘Marijuana Studies’
by Shifra on November 12, 2017The *perfect* college major to put on your resume…for a job where you get to ask, “You want fries with that?” Via College Fix. Northern Michigan University now offers a degree in Medicinal Plant Chemistry in what seems to be the first four-year undergraduate degree program of its kind. “The historical stigma associated with cannabis is quickly vanishing, and although there is a surge in businesses related to the marijuana economy, there is a major gap in educational opportunities available to prepare people for this field,” the university’s website states. “No other 4-year undergraduate degree program in the world combines rigorous coursework in chemistry and biology with research and hands on instrumental analysis built into the curriculum to prepare its...
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Prof Causes Uproar for Telling Students to Work Hard and Avoid Drinking
by dennisl59 on November 10, 2017*Bumped Up From TAM Wire. Posted by dennisl* The outrage of suggesting that refraining from getting wasted and having proper study habits will help pass the course~! Via Fox News. UK’s Cambridge University physical sciences professor came under fire this week from mental health campaigners and students after he suggested undergraduates will have to work hard and abstain from drinking to pass the course. Eugene Terentjev draw the fury of students and mental health activists after sending out an email last week to first-year natural sciences undergraduates at Cambridge, telling them the course will be difficult and thus they should refrain from drinking and other social activities if they wish to succeed, according to an email leaked to student-run publication...
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Cambridge U. Issues ‘Trigger Warnings’ Before Shakespeare Reading
by Shifra on October 23, 2017I don’t recall any trigger warnings when The Merchant of Venice was discussed in class. And while I did not appreciate the depiction of Shylock as a character replete with just about every anti-Semitic stereotype possible, I do recall pointing out that Shakespeare likely never met a Jew, since Jews had been expelled from England in 1290. This led to an interesting class discussion. That was then. Now? Trigger warnings, safe spaces and demanding that professors be fired for their “insensitivity.” Via Breitbart. Students at the prestigious Cambridge University have been given “trigger warnings” ahead of a Shakespeare reading assignment because the assigned play involves depictions of sexual violence…. Gill Evans, emeritus professor of medieval theology and intellectual history at...
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Professor Asks Students to Choose Their Own Grades… to Reduce Stress
by Shifra on August 9, 2017The University of Georgia prof was told to abandon his harebrained plan. But what a shame: These students would really have gotten an excellent preparation for life…on Planet Zog, where everyone gets a unicorn, the sun always shines, money grows on trees, and people sing Kumbaya in the streets. Via BizPac Review. The University of Georgia has made Professor Richard Watson remove a “stress reduction policy” from two of his course syllabi after facing national backlash for the practice. As Campus Reform reported Monday, Watson had adopted a policy that would allow students who felt “unduly stressed by a grade for any assessable material or the overall course” to “email the instructor indicating what grade [they] think is appropriate, and...