Some school administrators are more equal than others

Last week, I told you about the parental and community hysteria that occurred when a white elementary school principal in Sacramento, Jana Fields, had a talk with her black students about what they could do to raise their state test scores.

In that post, I told you that Mrs. Fields is by no means the first administrator to address students by race in regard to their test scores. In fact, just today, the San Jose Mercury News ran a story about the principal at Milpitas High School in the Bay Area town of Milpitas, California. Every six weeks, the principal, Chuck Gary, actually sends a personally signed letter to every one of his black students - regardless of their academic performance - that lets the student know how he or she is doing grade-wise, what the student's GPA is, and so on. There has been no parental or student outrage, and little to no commotion from the community as well. What's the difference? Easy: Chuck Gary is black. The article even states:

At Milpitas High, the reaction has largely been positive, partly because African-American parents and a black principal are at the heart of the effort.... (my emphasis).

Even though he is doing the same exact thing as Jana Fields - trying to raise state test scores by focusing on a certain race of students, no matter their academic performance - Gary receives accolades, while Fields is excoriated.

There was something else of note in this Mercury News article besides the noted double standard between Fields and Gary. I believe that without even realizing it, the article's human interest stories revealed a treasure trove of reasons for why there is an "achievement gap" among black students in the first place.

"Acting White": Many black students don't try as hard as they should for fear of being ostracized by their fears for the crime of "acting white." Here is the story of Milpitas student Inthia White, as mentioned in the article:

Inthia White used to be the class clown. When she talked back to teachers, her disruptions would trigger laughter. The peer pressure to be "cool" rather than smart was hard to overcome.

When she changed her ways, her new focus on schoolwork surprised her classmates. Some said, "What's up with you?"

Peer pressure is just one challenge facing African-American students, White said....

Single Parents: Today, almost 70% of black children are born to a single parent household, usually run by a mother. Here is what Inthia White has to say:

...White thinks all African-American students should have their own academic adviser.

"You need somebody," said White, the fourth of five children raised by a single mom. "Not all African-American moms can take the time off of their busy schedules to help. We see them trying so hard, so we don't want to bother them with questions about school...."

Parent Participation: If you are a teacher, then you know the drill - have you ever noticed that the overwhelming majority of parents who show up to Back to School Nights and Open House are the parents of your best behaved and best performing students? Do you think there might be a connection between the parents' involvement and the students' success? Here is what one Milpitas mother has to say:

When Demetress Morris' oldest son got a bad report card, she had a talk with Gary. He told her his biggest challenge was getting black parents to attend school events.

"I started going to the PTA meetings, and I was shocked. It was all mostly white moms," said Morris, who saw her son's schoolwork improve as she spent more time on campus. "A lot of parents want to help their children but they don't know how...."

Reliance on "Relationships": I have been to more than one teacher in-service day where I and my fellow teachers have been told that black students will not academically perform for a teacher unless they have forged some sort of "bond" or "relationship" with the teacher. Hmmm, when I was in high school, I enjoyed some teachers more than others, but there was never a case where I would shut down because the teacher didn't want to be my friend. The Mercury News says:

Those connections are crucial. A recent report from the California Dropout Research Project stressed that teacher-student relationships are the strongest influence on students' decisions to stay in school. Students need a hook that reels them in and keeps them on the line: a favorite class, a teacher who cares, a sports team, a club.

Something....

As long as your personal success relies on the benevolence of others, you are going to have a tough row to hoe. Individual responsibility is a crucial aspect of making something of yourself, and as long as studies tell us that black students are going to eschew that necessary component of success, then how is any attempt to close this "achievement gap" ever going to bear any fruit?

I haven't checked lately to see if the situation with Jana Fields has blown over, or if parents are still calling for her head. If her termination is still a possibility, and her district hasn't abandoned her, I truly hope that Mrs. Fields will hold a copy of this Mercury News article high and proud in the air, and tell her detractors to get back to her when their outrage is applied equally. We wouldn't want to think that those angry parents are singling out Mrs. Fields because of her race... now would we?

Good Day to You, Sir

Newest addition to my classroom wall

After two years of lobbying for the funds, my perseverance has turned a dream into a reality. I finally got my wall map:

This world map is 13 feet wide by 8 feet tall. When teaching history, I find it very important to try to always make sure my students not only know when we are talking about, but also where we are talking about. I have always been bothered trying to point out locations on some piddly 3X4 foot map. That will no longer be a problem. I figure we can also clear the desks aside every once in a while, and my class can play some fun map games.

Good Day to You, Sir

Reconquista right under my nose

It's been there the whole time? Although it is on the opposite side of campus from where my classroom is located, in the four years I have worked at my school, I have had dozens of opportunities to walk by this mural:

In all those dozens of times I have walked by, I never took the time to really look it over until just the other day. What I found disgusted me. Do you see it? If you don't, take a closer look:

Ah, Aztlan! That mythical land that the U.S. robbed from the poor, pitiful Mexicans. While I freely admit that the United States did not obtain land formerly owned by Mexico in a totally "good faith" manner, you must also remember that what the United States did in 1848 was not some diplomatic anomaly. The Mexicans had taken the land from the Spanish, the Spanish had taken the land from the Indians, and the Indians had taken the land from each other. Life sucks, and land gets taken. If you can resist the invasion, more power to you. If you lose however, then as the generations pass, life goes on.

By the way, what are those trails of red drips? Is that blood?

Good Day to You, Sir

A great quote from today.

And I mean today; this is the ending sentence from Thomas Sowell's latest column:

Everything seems new to those too young to remember the old and too ignorant of history to have heard about it.

Sowell writes this in describing Barack Obama's notion of "Change" - that word the Obamessiah loves to use so much. Obama's economic polices are not new; they are straight out of the 1960's. His foreign policies are not new; they are straight out of the 1930s. In both cases, these policies were unmitigated disasters.

Good Day to You, Sir

The Revagogue makes the KKK proud

Spoken like a true Klansman! The Reverend Jeremiah Wright talked about all kinds of bizarre subjects during his speech to the NAACP in Detroit the other night. As a teacher, the brain-to-mouth dump that caught my attention most was Wright's theories about differences in learning. This extended quote from Wright's speech is taken verbatim from a transcript of the speech that was posted by CNN. All parenthetical statements and emphasis on the wackiness are mine:

...It was in Dr. Hale's first book, "Black Children their Roots, Culture and Learning Style." Is Dr. Hale here tonight? We owe her a debt of gratitude. Dr. Hale showed us that in comparing African-American children and European-American children in the field of education, we were comparing apples and rocks. (The E-A children are rocks?)

And in so doing, we kept coming up with meaningless labels like EMH, educable mentally handicapped, TMH, trainable mentally handicapped, ADD, attention deficit disorder.

And we were coming up with more meaningless solutions like reading, writing and Ritalin. Dr. Hale's research led her to stop comparing African-American children with European-American children and she started comparing the pedagogical methodologies of African-American children to African children and European-American children to European children. And bingo, she discovered that the two different worlds have two different ways of learning. European and European-American children have a left brained cognitive object oriented learning style and the entire educational learning system in the United States of America. Back in the early '70s, when Dr. Hale did her research was based on left brained cognitive object oriented learning style. Let me help you with fifty cent words.

Left brain is logical and analytical. Object oriented means the student learns from an object. From the solitude of the cradle with objects being hung over his or her head to help them determine colors and shape to the solitude in a carol in a PhD program stuffed off somewhere in a corner in absolute quietness to absorb from the object. From a block to a book, an object. That is one way of learning, but it is only one way of learning.

African and African-American children have a different way of learning.

They are right brained, subject oriented in their learning style. Right brain that means creative and intuitive. Subject oriented means they learn from a subject, not an object. They learn from a person. Some of you are old enough, I see your hair color, to remember when the NAACP won that tremendous desegregation case back in 1954 and when the schools were desegregated. They were never integrated. When they were desegregated in Philadelphia, several of the white teachers in my school freaked out. Why? Because black kids wouldn't stay in their place. Over there behind the desk, black kids climbed up all on them.... (Lord forbid that the black kids are held to the same standard of behavior as the white kids)

Next, I expected the good Reverend to get out a slide rule and begin measuring noses like some German Nazi elementary schoolteacher in 1935. Haven't white commentators been fired for pointing out differences in blacks and whites? Wasn't author Charles Murray demonized for saying very similar utterances in his book, The Bell Curve? When Wright says the same thing, he is ooohed and aaaahed by the adoring, mostly black, crowd, and then given multiple ovations. In what kind of looking glass world are we living?

So to review. I believe that what the Revagogue is trying to say is that we white people are cold, calculating, and logical, while black people are warm, and feeling, and emotional. This reminds me of that kook professor Leonard Jefferies and his theory about blacks being "Sun People" and whites being "Ice People." Same crap, different package.

Keep on talking Reverend Wright; you mire Obama's candidacy with every word that leaves your profane tongue.

Good Day to You, Sir

To-Do List Overload

I don't even think I have made this officially clear, but the saga of the selling of our house is almost over. My wife and I have a buyer, and we ourselves have become buyers as well. Now we have begun the delicate dance of sweating two escrows while we prepare to vacate one house and move into another. At the same time, my wife and I have had to humble ourselves with home and pest inspections, where some guy with a clipboard and a digital camera walks around our abode and tells us (and our buyer) everything that is wrong with it. In the wake of the inspections by these diligent dictators, I had some repairs to do, and I spent this past weekend doing them. This would explain why I have been such a bad blogger. Here is just a partial list of some of the items that I - not exactly the world's greatest handyman - have done:

I spent this weekend patching a few holes in our rain gutter with galvanized sheeting that I had to snip, shape, and cement into place; I replaced a leaky sprinkler valve (actually, my father accomplished that one task) and two leaky outside hose faucets; I fixed a gap in our laminate floor in the kitchen; I put metal covers on a few exposed power outlets in the garage; I measured and cut a piece of sheetrock to fit into an open outlet to the attic that is located in our garage; I fixed a faulty drain in the master bathroom sink; and somewhere in all that, I mowed the lawn. By the end of the weekend, I felt pretty darned manly! I mentioned to my wife that it is accomplishing stuff like that that raises self-esteem, and not some authority figure tell you what a wonderful person you are, like what happens in our schools. I felt so proud of myself when I accomplished these tasks. It makes me want to take on more challenging and complex tasks once we move into our "new" house that was built in 1966. Isn't building the confidence to take on new tasks what building self-esteem is all about?

Good Day to You, Sir

Great Quotes

I'll be busy doing inspection fixes on my house so we can begin packing up in order to move to the new house. In the meantime, here are some more great quotes from history; these addressing the issue of religion in our government and society:

"... liberty cannot be established without morality, nor morality without faith."
--Alexis De Tocqueville (Democracy in America, Vol. I)

"Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle." --George Washington

"We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other. --John Adams

Good Day to You, Sir

You have no idea what "availability" means

Tough times in Chicago lately. In the last six months, 20 public school students have been killed in various shootings, 9 people were shot and killed last weekend in various shootings, and now 5 people have been found killed in a house. I will go ahead and speculate that those 5 people were shot as well.

I always smirk when I hear a common argument that anti-gun types use to explain all this, and that argument is "the availability of guns." The Brady Center and the Violence Policy Center make it seem as if guns are just lying in the streets, and you can pick one up at your leisure. If you are a law-abiding citizen, do you know how difficult it is to purchase a gun nowadays? Let me tell you how it was in the old days.

I always remember an anecdote my father once told me, and Dad, I know you read this blog, so if I have totally flubbed this up, feel free to write in and set me straight. My father, who was born in 1941, spent his childhood in Oklahoma; he moved to California in time to start junior high. He once told me of a hardware store in his little hometown that had a barrel full of 1911A .45 caliber pistols - surplus from World War II. You could just dip your little ol' hand into that barrel, grab a pistol, and take it up to the counter: no background check, no forms to fill out, just go on your merry way with your new hand cannon. Miraculously, there were no murder sprees or spates of wanton killing taking place during that time. What changed? I don't have the time or the energy to go into the sociological, pharmaceutical, and psychological reasons for the increase in our country's murder rate (and crime rate for that matter) since the days of my father's childhood. However, I can assure you that one factor that doesn't play a role is the "availability of guns." Contrary to what the anti-gun nuts want you to believe, guns are not nearly as available as they used to be. It is the willingness to use the guns for illicit purposes that has gone up enormously, and the increased unavailability of guns for law-abiding citizens to use in order to defend themselves from our nation's predators.

Good Day to You, Sir

Protest planned against the racist genocide of Planned Parenthood

The history of Planned Parenthood is an ugly one. The organization's founder, Margaret Sanger, was a proponent of Eugenics, which is the theory of strengthening a race of people through selective breeding. Sanger believed that a certain "spawning class of human beings," blacks included, shouldn't reproduce, and she spent her life trying to make her beliefs a reality. Seeing as how a hugely disproportionate number of abortions are of black babies, it seems that Sanger's dream has largely become a reality.

Planned Parenthood is often associated with the political left - you know, the denizens of love and tolerance? Last year however, an undercover investigation by a pro-life group showed how far Planned Parenthood hasn't come in separating itself from Margaret Sanger's ultimate goal. The pro-life group called Planned Parenthood offices and asked to make a donation for the specific purpose of aborting a black baby. The callers didn't sugarcoat it either; they said purposefully inflammatory statements about not wanting more blacks in the world. Planned Parenthood still took the money, often enthusiastically. The following is an example. There will be a short phone call and opening credit montage, and then listen to the primary phone call that will carry through to the end. This made my blood boil:



According to WorldNetDaily, a protest by black pastors and other anti-abortion activists will be held this Thursday in Washington, D.C. The protesters will be demanding that the federal government stop giving financial grants to Planned Parenthood. John and Jane Q. Taxpayer gave Planned Parenthood a cool $336 million dollars last year. I guess that's not enough money, because Planned Parenthood will gladly take private donations in order to target black babies for destruction. And life just keeps getting cheaper.

Good Day to You, Sir

Carnival of Education

The EdWonks host this week, and they have kindly included my post about the travesty of an elementary school principal being excoriated for doing exactly what our state and federal government do.

Good Day to You, Sir

Life under our government in 1900

Imagine how free we were just over 100 years ago. Here are but two examples:

Federal spending. In 1900 federal spending was $0.5B. In 2000 it was $1,789B . Those amounts translated to 2.5% of GDP in 1900 and 21% in 2000. Government spending at all levels in the U.S. was 36.5% of GDP in 2006. That 2.5% of GDP that could sustain the entire federal government in 1900 is not even enough to cover the Medicare program today.


The Medicare program, by the way, did not exist in 1900; it was established in 1965.


Federal taxes. A federal income tax did not exist in 1900; it was unconstitutional, and would remain that way until the 16th Amendment was ratified in 1913. The first 1040 form included one page of instructions, and appeared to apply to both individuals and businesses. Today's 1040 instructions for individuals runs 155 pages, with no guarantee that you won't have to fill out other forms and consult other instructions.

For more nuggets of nostalgia, read the rest of the article here.

Good Day to You, Sir

Sacto high rise update

Every once in a while, I take my two kids on a little field trip to downtown Sacramento to check progress on two high rises going up on Capitol Mall, which is a divided street that runs between the State Capitol building and the Sacramento River. I wrote a post last year about all the construction either in progress or planned for downtown Sacramento. One of the buildings that was but a steel skeleton at the time was the U.S. Bank Tower. The envisioned rendition looked like this:

This building's exterior has now been completed, the sky crane has been taken down, and now the completion of the interior and outside landscaping are currently underway. Here is the actual building as seen through my lens:

Further down the street, 500 Capitol Mall is in the skeleton stage. When it is completed, it will look like this:
Right now, the building is looking rather unfinished, but the skeleton seems to be more and more visible on the city skyline with each passing day:

I took this photo on the last day of March. That skeleton is undoubtedly several stories higher by now. These buildings are great, but all is not well downtown. The most impressive projects of all that I talked about in last May's post have fallen through for various reasons and will most likely never be built. These building include the Capital Towers:

The Epic:

And the Aura:

A lot of the building cancellations have to do with the real estate downturn, but you could just as easily blame our dysfunctional city government. In the meantime, I will definitely keep an eye on the sky.

Good Day to You, Sir

So what will you do this summer?

How about teaching English in Ethiopia? That is what a friend of mine, Mike Nevin, will be doing during a good portion of his summer vacation. Mike is a high school history teacher in the Sacramento area, and felt a calling to take on this selfless adventure when he learned about the opportunity at his church. I say "selfless" because Mike will be leaving behind his wife and three young children to spend a month in a very unstable continent, and the country of Ethiopia - along with its neighbors - aren't exactly stable either.

Mike has started a blog in order to document the events leading up to his departure, and he will also apparently be able to blog from Ethiopia as well, as there will be internet access available where he will be working. Mike is a great writer and teacher, and I look forward to reading about his experiences teaching English a half a world away to people who live in conditions few of us can fathom. You can click to his blog from the link provided, but I will also be adding it to my blogroll in the Education section.

Godspeed Mike Nevin!

Good Day to You, Sir

When NCLB and PC collide

Once upon a time, a school's Academic Performance Index (API) score was determined by the collective scores of the entire student body of a particular school. If one sub-group was performing badly (usually black and Hispanic students), the superior scores of another sub-group (usually white and Asian students) could cover up the deficiency.

One of the consequences of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act, passed in 2002, was that in addition to a school's overall API score, the API scores of each subgroup had to be calculated and published as well. Look at the School Accountability Report Card (SARC) of any school in California, and you will see a detailed breakdown of these API scores. In addition to ethnic groups, there are also breakdowns for low socioeconomic students and English learners. This has prompted school teachers and administrators to begin focusing their attention on raising the scores of these low-performing sub-groups. One strategy that has been tried in the past is for an administrator or teacher to pull aside all the students of a certain low-performing sub-group and talk to them about their scores and what can be done to raise them. Every time this has been done, controversy has followed because the diversity crowd objects to students of a certain race being singled out. The ridiculous part about all this is that these parents' children are singled out by race every day.

This has happened once again, this time in the Sacramento area. In the Rio Linda Union School District, Madison Elementary principal, Jana Fields, spoke to all the black students of her school in an effort to stress to them the importance of doing well on the upcoming STAR testing. Mrs. Fields was also planning to have a similar meeting with the school's Hispanic students as well. That second meeting never happened, because soon after Mrs. Fields met with her school's black students, all hell broke loose.

Black parents complained, and the local fishwrap and T.V. news stations picked up on the story. You must register to read articles from the Sacramento Bee, so I have pasted the AP wire story in its short entirety:

RIO LINDA, Calif. -- A Sacramento area school official has issued an apology after an elementary school principal summoned black students to a meeting to urge them to improve their test scores.

Gloria Hernandez, educational services director for the Rio Linda School District, said Friday that the district offered "sincere apologies to all students and families who were offended" by principal Jana Fields' decision to convene a meeting of fourth, fifth and sixth grade black students to discuss their test scores.

One parent, Marie Townsend, says Fields should have met with all students, regardless of race, who were performing poorly on state tests rather than singling out blacks.

A meeting that Fields planned to have with Hispanic students to discuss their test scores has been canceled.

Very sanctimonious of you Ms. Townsend, but the scores are not broken down according to who is performing badly on the exams, the scores are broken down by race. I fail to see how there is anything wrong with the principal dealing with students' test scores based on race, especially since under NCLB, that is exactly what the state of California, and the federal government both require schools and school districts to do when they compile and report their test scores. A quick review of the state scores for the last several years on the SARC for Madison Elementary confirms the necessity of Mrs. Fields' meeting with her black students, along with her canceled meeting that was planned for her Hispanic students (click to enlarge):


I sincerely hope that the principal, Mrs. Fields, is not made a sacrifice at the altar of political correctness. I also hope that in the future, school districts and their mealy-mouthed spokescritters cease making pathetic mea culpas for doing what they should be doing all the time, and that is to acknowledge the elephant in the room. Lord knows they already keep enough statistics on the elephant - letting the elephant know about it is probably a good idea.

Good Day to You, Sir

The future will be funkdified

Sorry for the dearth of posts since Tuesday. I have been working like a dog getting our house ready for the pest/dry rot inspection and the big inspection which both happened yesterday. There are few dry rot areas I have to fix; other than that, the inspections went very well. This morning, my wife and I signed the offer on the house we want, so if everything goes right, we will be residing in a new domicile by mid-May!

In all the melee, I did take enough time to watch a rather amusing movie. In the wake of the death of Charleton Heston, I kept hearing reference to a sci-fi movie he starred in, called Soylent Green. The movie was also the final performance by tough-guy actor Edward G. Robinson.

So I watched Soylent Green, and it was quite unintentionally humorous. This humor was mostly due to the the year 2022 looking like 1972, when the movie was made. The scenes were awash with shaggy sideburns, poofy afros, and groovy digs. Most fashion of the 1970s seems to have been based on a dare, and I am amazed that people actually dressed that way and looked at it as normal.

When we are living in a time when so many movies from my childhood predicted what life would be like in the early 2000's, it is interesting to compare their vision with my reality. Just think of some of the movies that fit the bill, along with the year they portray:

2001: A Space Odyssey
2010: The Year We Make Contact
2013: The Postman
2015: Back to the Future, Part II
2017: Blade Runner
2022: Soylent Green

Did I miss any?

Good Day to You, Sir

Do you pay your fair share, Senator Kennedy?

Jason Mattera of Young America's Foundation strikes again! This time, he corners that socialist blowhard Ted Kennedy (Dumbass-MA), and questions Kennedy about his enthusiastic support for the estate tax, even thought the Kennedy family dodges the estate tax through the extensive use of trust funds. Check it out:



Hat tip to Hot Air (see blogroll) for this little gem.

Good Day to You, Sir

Damned if you do, damned if you don't

In response to my recent post on quotes about the importance of learning history, good friend, regular reader, and high school history teacher, George, commented with an interesting anecdote that I think deserves more visibility than just being a blurb in the comments section. The situation he describes cuts right to the heart of matters that concern us educators, including reasons for the so-called achievement gap, distrust between teachers and students, disrespect for authority, and a myriad of other issues. Here is George's comment in full:

We were reviewing the American Revolution today and I used a PPP slide of the Boston Massacre in my High School world history class. It was a print of the death of Crispus Attucks (the first casualty in the American Revolution). One of the ways our school is trying to close the achievement gap has been by incorporating African-American history where ever possible in the curriculum.

Some of my African-American students questioned excitedly as to why I showed a black man being killed. They verbally protested that, " . . . of course you gotta show a black man gettin' killed . . ." To which I answered with " This is Crispus Attucks . . .", they still complained. When I retorted with " . . . you all argue that I should do more African-American history. . . " , they still replied that what I was doing was not good enough. I then replied with, "Damned if I do and damned if I don't then?" To which they said, "Yup, pretty much." I then moved onto the next slide discouraged, not having the time to argue with them about their position.

I think this illustrates the difficulty that teachers face (whether they are African-American or not) when trying to teach European history to most African-American students. I have taught for many years and have encountered this resistance to European history repeatedly from African-American students. Even though many of my African-American students share the same political values as their Western-European counterparts they fail to see connections. There is a tendency to separate themselves based upon race, expressing that only white people do this or that. It is a frustrating experience as the state standards for World History have nothing to do with African-American history.

Oh, and by the way, this resistance was encountered while teaching a group work based review lesson. In fact, the resistance has happened all semester as the students have continually labeled the course content as "racist" and "only about white people"(even though its mostly about concepts like the militarism, etc.) Here again some of my students see those "isms" as only things white people do.

I wish I was not bound so much to the state curriculum. With all these Sophomores loaded with "piss and vinegar", I'd like to be able to challenge more of their assumptions about the world.

But, alas, I am bound by the calendar and the state standards and the seemingly endless drive to close the achievement gap.

In my view, some African-American students are in the gap because of their unwillingness to suspend their views about the history of Europeans and their ethnic group. Would you listen and learn if you thought that everything you were being taught was lies? In other words, their sense of history is that it does not belong to their group; it is not theirs.

Funny thing though is that I do not experience this type of resistance from any other ethnic group on campus (of which there are 35).

I think this is connected to Chanman's previous post on being easily duped.

Thanks for reading,
George

And thank you, George, for your insight and honesty.

Good Day to You, Sir

Tag, I'm it!

Polski3 (see blogroll) has seen fit to drag me into a Meme (I forgive you Polski ;), and what the hell, I have a minute.

The rules are:

1. Pick up the nearest book
2. Open to page 123
3. Find the fifth sentence
4. Post the next three sentences
5. Tag five people and acknowledge who tagged you.

Here goes:

Nearest book to me: 1776 by David McCullough (paperback edition).

And sentences 6,7, and 8 on page 123 say:

King's College, west of the Commons, one of the largest, handsomest buildings in town, had been taken over as an army hospital, once the library books were removed, lest the soldiers burn them for fuel. For the troops from New England a roof overhead of any kind seemed the height of luxury, and New York, however changed, a center of wonders. Joseph Hodgkins decided, "This city York exceeds all places that ever I saw," though he found the living "excessive dear."

I see nothing has changed in New York in over 200 years!

I suck at tagging, so I tag any blogger who loves to read!

Good Day to You, Sir

This is why our First Amendment is a good thing

In France, you're not safe from The Man, even if you are Brigitte Bardot.

Brigitte Bardot on trial for Muslim slur:

French former film star Brigitte Bardot went on trial on Tuesday for insulting Muslims, the fifth time she has faced the charge of "inciting racial hatred" over her controversial remarks about Islam and its followers...

France is home to 5 million Muslims, Europe's largest Muslim community, making up 8 percent of France's population.

"I am fed up with being under the thumb of this population which is destroying us, destroying our country and imposing its acts," the star of 'And God created woman' and 'Contempt' said....

Actions like what the French government is doing to Ms. Bardot are why Europe's days as a non-Islam-dominated continent are numbered.

Good Day to You, Sir

The Carnival of Education

Click yonder, and check out this week's edition. My post about my dressing down of my class for mocking a new student is included among many other fine entries.

Good Day to You, Sir