Kent Grusendorf, the anti-public school/charter crusader who is the head of the Texas House Committee on Education has lost in the Republican primary for his district. Grusendorf is almost singlehandedly responsible for making sure Texas schools are perpetually underfunded . Stories will follow later.
Over at Joanne Jacobs I managed to get in another pissing match, but this time I didn't even know I was involved! In a post entitle, "Out of Control" a group of "reformers" started hurling insults my way when I hand't even commented on the story. Ah, gotta love that "compassionate conservative" crowd!
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6 comments:
Glad to see that news, Mike.
Re: Joanne Jacobs
When I'm on the road, I only hit my short list. I'll check it out Friday or Saturday when I get home.
Pissing contest? Hardly. We were just trying to save you some time, as I wrote. It's not as if you're going to post anything startling and novel. How many ways can you state that:
-public education isn't fully funded!
-teachers aren't paid what they're worth!
-teachers can't be held responsible if kids don't learn!
-if you think it's so easy, you try it!
There's more that I can't think of right now but it's probable that I'm almost as familiar with your positions as you are.
Anyhow, enough of that BS. Ran across an interesting site. A bunch of the projects wouldn't be of interest to you but there were a couple that were downright clever:
http://www.instructables.com/
The site's pretty new so there are things they ought to do that they don't but the idea's not bad and it's been executed in a fairly approachable manner.
Gee Allen, I didn't get in on the post until you guys starting slinging the insults, so lets see hwo many times you can recite the anti-public school mantra:
1. public schools bad
2. teachers bad
3. crooked businessmen good
4. any Republican good
5. anyone who has never been a teacher must be extremely knowledgable, more so than any professional educator
Thanks for the link, the pinball coffee table looks pretty interesting.
I can understand why you'd want move the topic off your predictability and onto your tedious misrepresentations of my positions but since you brought the subject up:
1 - no
2 - no
3 - no
4 - no
5 - no
And, I'd be interested if you could point to any posting of mine which in any way suggests any of the above.
Back to instructables.
The site needs some more flexible, user-driven structuring. You can't sort or extract the projects in any way which sucks. Among some of the projects which seem doable enough though were:
3D scanner - the hardware setup's no big deal, it's the software that'll be a problem.
3D Chocolate printer - I thought this was pretty outrageous. Be neat if you could drive it with output from the scanner.
Electrostatic motor - looks simple enough for almost anyone who's interested to complete successfully.
Burning visible images on CD - looks like it might be fun but I'm not sure how to use is as a lead-in for something worthwhile.
Invisible Monitor - might be fun for a little "Oh, wow" factor.
I've been amused at the various commenters at Joanne Jacobs's site who slam on Mike without ever actually refuting what he says. Most conservatives seem to think that their positions are intuitively true. It's the same thing that leads them, despite all evidence to the contrary, to claim that there's a liberal bias in the media. Then again, there are those commenters like Andy (who I think brought up Mike on that thread to begin with) who hates public education, unions, and teachers, and who should never be allowed to express an opinion on schools until he's taught in one. If I want to read intelligent discussion of education, I head to JennyD; if I want ravings by lunatics who want to destroy the public schools, I head to Joanne Jacobs.
Thank you for that psychiatric evaluation and the gratuitous insults.
It pleases me greatly to know that my opponents feel that their view of my personal qualities, and, by inference, their own, are more important then the issue under discussion.
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