Mock slave auction in a 4th grade class.

Have you read the story on Drudge about the 4th grade teacher in Norfolk, VA who set up a mock slave auction in her classroom? The story is copyrighted so I can’t post it here but you can find it at The Virginian-Pilot via Drudge.

This goofy liberal teacher separated her black and mixed race students and offered them for sale to her white students as a classroom lesson in  — I’m not sure what. To teach 9 year olds mmmm I can’t really come up with a reason she would do something so stupid, so out of line, so really inappropriate, all in the name of being “well meaning” or “in everyone’s best interest” or “for the good of the children.”

To paraphrase C.S. Lewis, the statist restrict other people’s liberty and peace with a clear conscious because they are doing it for the greater good of those people who just really don’t know what IS good for them.  They really see nothing wrong with these behaviors because they are doing what they believe is best for all of us. Never mind that most of us would just like to be left the hell alone.

The Virginian-Pilot goes on to report that last year a guidance counselor resigned her job after giving out 80-100 fetus figurines to elementary students; another left after parents complained that she had anointed a student with “holy oil”; while a third (high school teacher) was reprimanded after it came to light that he/she was teaching from anarchist materials and organizations that were pro-marijuana legalization.

Our tax dollars at work, boys and girls.

Where do you find a fetus figurine? Let alone 100 of them? And more importantly, how is that possibly age approriate for an elementary age child? And whether this counselor was pro-life or pro-abortion, matters not because it simply has no place in elementary school.

I just cannot imagine what these teachers are thinking.  I’ll say this, though, they are good promotion for home schooling.

Howard Dean raising a slush fund for the Wisconsin 14

Interesting story at the American Spectator. It seems that the Dean brothers (Howard and his brother Jim) have put together an organization to raise money for the support of the 14 Wisconsin democrats on the lam. And they’ve raised over $120,000. The money is being funneled into the Wisconsin State Senate Democratic Committee. Wisconsin law prohibits contributions of over $6000 in one calender year from any one organization or person, so the this violates that law by a large amount – well over $100,000.

Donations in the sum of at least $14, to support the 14 runaway politicians or as they call them- heroes, are being accepted at this website. “Please contribute $14 to the Wisconsin State Democratic Committee right now and tell these 14 Hero Democrats to stand strong…”

I’ve wondered how these guys were supporting themselves in Illionois and I knew that not one of them were staying at a Comfort Inn or Motel 6. Now I have an answer.

“Alas for the Wisconsin senators and their Dean Dollars, Governor Scott Walker is watching. So too their doubtless appalled Republican colleagues. Not to mention the horrified and mad as hell taxpayers of Wisconsin.

Did I leave out the entire nation?

Where are Wisconsin State Senate Democrats’ Dean Dollars going? And based on the reality that Wisconsin teachers and some doctors are seen lying… on camera!… who will believe the answer when it comes? From either the Deans or the missing state senators?”

“Thanks to the Deans and 14 AWOL Wisconsin Democrats in the State Senate — now flush with a slush fund of over a hundred grand — the idea of being a “public employee” and “teacher” will never be seen the same way again. Not to mention being a Democrat in the Wisconsin State Senate.”

It’s pathetic to me that the Deans can raise this kind of money in less than a week for these renegade, outlaw politicians but the American Spectator is trying to only raise $25,ooo to keep its website going and struggling at just over $6000, so far.

Couple of facts from Karl Rove to confound your goofy liberal friends

from Karl Rove in todays WSJ

Mr. Obama and his people also mischaracterize where most stimulus dollars go. Their constant prattle about “shovel ready projects” is an attempt to leave the impression that most goes to bricks and mortar. Not true: Only 3.3% of the $814 billion stimulus went to the Federal Highway Administration for highway and bridge projects.

The administration’s misleading statements and obfuscations aren’t limited to the economy. On health care, for example, Mr. Obama continues saying that (a) health-care reform will reduce costs and the deficit, (b) no one who wants to keep existing coverage will lose it, and (c) the law’s cuts in Medicare won’t threaten any senior’s health care. These assertions are laughable.

The president’s habit of exaggeration and misstatement has infected other Democrats. Speaker Nancy Pelosi, for example, routinely talks about how the recently passed “Stimulus II” spending bill protected the jobs of police and firemen.

But it didn’t.

Stimulus II consisted of two parts: $10 billion for education and $16 billion for Medicaid. States can’t spend Medicaid money for anything but Medicaid, and they can only spend the education money on education, i.e., they can’t shuffle state funds around. Language allowing Stimulus II dollars to pay for police and firemen didn’t make it out of the Senate. Yet Democratic leaders persist in saying that their latest stimulus has helped keep police and firefighters on the job. The claim is flatly untrue.

Heavy accents preclude some from teaching in Arizona

I work with a naturalized Romanian and several Filipinas.  Last night they brought up the story of teachers being reassigned or laid off because of their accents. Of course when they told me this story, they didn’t mention that it was teachers being let go, because they didn’t know that part of the story. So this morning I looked for the story, online and found it at the Wall Street Journal.

My daughter’s an elementary school teacher. She teaches immigrant children in a program called ELL – English Language Learner.

About 150,000 of Arizona’s 1.2 million public-school students are classified as English Language Learners. Of the state’s 247 school districts, about 20 have high concentrations of such students, the largest number of which are in the younger grades.

Jane is not supposed to speak Spanish in her classroom in order to teach English to these children.

Needless to say, she’s lost some students in the last couple of weeks, since this law in Arizona was passed. Many of these families are fleeing to California. This has been heartbreaking for her.  But she also sees the need for these people to do things the legal way.

The Journal story emphasis is on teachers from Latin countries who are teaching in Arizona, and speak with a heavy accent (that’s a subjective criteria and even I don’t see how that can be fair – a heavy accent to me might not be to you) and do not speak in a grammatically correct way (I can see the importance of that.)  And Arizona passed a law long ago that English is the language of the classroom and fluency is mandatory: that means grammatically correct.

Ms. Santa Cruz, the state official, said evaluators weren’t looking at accents alone. “We look at the best models for English pronunciation,” she said. “It becomes an issue when pronunciation affects comprehensibility.”

It would be a lot like having a math teacher in the classroom who can’t add or subtract. Teachers must be fluent in English in order to teach our kids. There is no way to be successful in America if you can’t read, write and speak the language. I would never expect to open business or apply for a job in Japan, for cryin’ out loud if I didn’t know the language. This is not hard to understand. A teachers job is to prepare children to be productive members in the American society and if they can’t even speak the language correctly, why would we want to put our children in their hands?