State of the Schools

I keep hearing from teachers looking to leave the profession. They’ve had it. Some are hoping to squeak out another year or two before they can retire. Others, retirement being too far off, are walking away from the profession. 

Low pay has always been an issue, but that’s not the main complaint I’m hearing now. The big complaint is that they can’t do their jobs. Politicians determine what can and can’t be taught. Children can’t be disciplined and their parents support that. Kids feel they don’t need to learn anything as everything is available on their phones. 

In the mean time elite private schools have banned the use of phones and computers in class. That, boys and girls, is how the elite will continue to be on top. 

Personally, one of the big things that concerns me is the lack of respect for hard facts. Right answers in Math isn’t important. Superstitious beliefs and Science are on the same level in people’s minds. That is,  when superstition doesn’t rule totally supreme. 

Then there’s the simple fact that young people aren’t learning social skills needed for a functioning society. 

Darn, I sound like a cranky old man. Perhaps that what I am. 

Doesn’t mean I’m wrong.

-Sixbears

Remote Learning Stories

Right now most of the kids are back in school. There are still some classes in some places that are taking place on-line. That’s more likely to happen at the college level. Most parents are relieved to have their kids back in school. Even home school families are glad. They often have events with other home schoolers and those were canceled. Sometimes they participate in one or two regular classes like band or lab science that can’t be easily done at home. 

It was hard on kids. A buddy of mine was telling me his kid took a “gap semester” during the seventh grade. 

“A what?” I asked.

“A gap semester,” he said. 

The kid decided to take a semester off from remote schooling. His parents were checking to see that he was keeping up with the assignments. The kid discovered he could just hit the submit button and the system would accept it. About halfway through the semester the teacher got hold of the parents. Only then did they learn the kid wasn’t actually doing any work. All the submissions were blank pages. Eventually it got sorted and the kid caught up. 

Then there’s what happened to my grandson who’s in grammar school. He was doing his zoom class but there was a glitch in the system. When it came back on-line the system recognized my grandson as the host, not the teacher. Maybe being close to the school with a strong Internet connection had something to do with it. 

My daughter heard outrageous laughter coming from the other room. My grandson had changed his name to Spiderman and was telling silly stories to the rest of the class. Everyone was laughing. Better yet, he kept refusing the teacher’s requests to be let into the meeting. 

My daughter had him let the teacher in. The lady was pretty cool about it. She thanked him for letting her into the meeting and went on with the lessons. 

Most families made the most out of a bad situation. This hit everyone before they had a chance to prepare so there was a lot of winging it going on. At least there’s a few funny stories to come out of it. 

-Sixbears

New Blogger and other Stuff

Looks like the formatting of my last post was a bit messed. I don't know why Blogger thinks it a good idea to make people have to learn a whole new system every now and then. Some bloggers have just given up. This post is being done a bit different so I hope it works.

 

I'm not a survivalist. I'm into thriving. Fear is a powerful control mechanism. It's a trap

. . . . and yet, I wear a mask. That's because I did a lot of research and came to the conclusion that it couldn't hurt and might help a lot. Also, I like messing up facial recognition. If I'm wrong there's no harm done. If I'm right, I might save my life. My mask is so good that using a public porta potty is not a bad experience. 

My lovely wife and I have been doing some local travel and really enjoying the outdoors. Temperatures have been pretty hot for northern NH, so being on the lake has been a good thing. Odds are we'll be staying clos to him this winter. Looking forward to a lot of winter activities. As long as temperatures don't linger below zero for weeks on end it should be doable. 

 There's a lot of debate about kids going back to school. It got me thinking about how I'd feel about it if this would have happened when I was kid. Personally, I would have jumped at the chance not to go to school. It sucked. My grades were good, but I always felt school took too much time and kept me from learning cool stuff. 

There's a lot of things changing right now. That can be a good thing. Frankly, there was a lot of stuff that didn't work for most people before this pandemic. Since we have restart everything, might as well do it in a new way. It could be in big ways, like work and school, or in smaller ways. For example, I think I'm done paying for haircuts. 

 -Sixbears

Endless Summer

When I was kid, I used to live for summer school vacation. It's when I was let of prison for an all too brief reprieve. As a little kid, summer seemed to last forever. When old enough to work summer jobs, summer got a whole lot shorter.

Before then, however, I had huge gobs of unstructured time. Not only did I have time, I had freedom to do things in it. My buddies and I would disappear into the woods, only to come back at dark. Our bikes would take us to local lakes, neighboring towns, and deep into the woods on logging roads. Today parents would be arrested for giving their kids such freedom. Back then, it was normal.

It saddens me to see how summer has changed for young people. Every minute of the school year is structured but summer is just as heavily scheduled. Little people are dragged from one supervised activity to another.

Kids that aren't shuttled around all summer spend day after beautiful day inside playing video games. The outside world isn't safe.


Maybe it's by design that those endless summer days are no more. Perhaps too many of us, having gotten a taste of freedom, wanted it in their adult life too. Now we should all be happy little drones who should feel lucky that we can work constantly without a vacation, never mind a whole summer off.

As for me, it's too late. Having tasted the sweet fruit of freedom I'll never be a model worker drone ever again.

-Sixbears

Dear Friends

My lovely wife and I had the chance to visit with some old friends on our last trip downstate. People have such busy schedules that it takes some extra effort to connect. We hadn't seen each other since a third friend's daughter's wedding. That was a year ago. Where does the time go?

It's interesting to compare how our lives are going. They appear to be doing quite well and are very much tied into the system: good jobs, house in an expensive suburb, retirement plan, medical, kids in college -the whole bit.

My wife and I . . . not so much. We have a fraction of their income, live out in the country, and our kids are older and on their own now. We've given up on the whole career thing are living in an alternative economy. Every year, we are less and less connected to the dominate system.

All that doesn't really matter. While we don't have much in common anymore, we still enjoy each other's company. Everyone is trying to get by in a messed up world.

They do seem to enjoy hearing about our adventures. However, they keep referring to “my poor wife,” who has to put up with me. She's not being dragged along. “My poor wife,” is a partner and enabler.

I think we both enjoy seeing how the other side lives. It's always a pleasure to get together and they even treated us to dinner. That was pleasant.

There aren't a lot of middle-aged folks who are still in contact with their old school buddies. (Facebook doesn't count.)

-Sixbears

How we’ve been trained

Most modern humans are pretty bad at cooperation. It should be natural. We all need each other to survive and thrive.

My guess is that, to a large extent, it’s been trained out of us.

All our lives we’ve been divided up into different teams and told to compete with each other. As school kids we are taught to hate the team from the next town. Everyone is trying to do better than everyone else, be it at school, in sports, at work, or just about anything.

Most of our games have winners and losers. The winners are better, of course -never mind how they went about winning.

I’m as bad as anyone else. Just ask anyone who’s played games against me. I’m in it to win.

It doesn’t have to be that way. There are activities without winners or losers. Ever put together a puzzle with other people? No matter who finds the next connecting piece, we all are happy about it. The goal is problem solving. The activity is simple enough, but it is one way we can work together for a common goal. There are some board games that do the same. As a kid, I used to play Dungeons and Dragons. (Yeah, I was a Geek sometimes.) It takes all the talents of the group to have a successful quest.

The quest of life needs a team. Wouldn’t it help if we got more practice working together?

I’ve got to ask myself: who benefits from our disunity? Is there a reason we have so little training in working together. Have we been divided so we can be conquered?

-Sixbears

Not much slack

I like to try new things, be it new experiences or building some new gizmo. The problem is that I’ve never had much room for failure. If my time and energy is invested in something, it’d better work well enough to justify the resources.

When I was first striking out on my own, I made some hard nosed decisions based on my limited resources. After High School, I went to the local community college. My grades were good enough to go too better schools, but those schools were expensive. As it turned out, after one semester, I dropped out of the community college. My savings were all gone. The courses were challenging enough that I had to quit my part time job. Lack of sleep was really getting to me.

College is supposed to be this great stimulating experience where we can entertain new ideas and deepen our appreciation for the world. It should be a time to experience new philosophies and study the great thinkers of the past. When I was 18 it was all about getting a return on my investment. Back then, I didn’t think my potential income would justify going into debt. I was probably right.

Other kids picked the right ancestors. They could go to the good schools without worrying about working to pay for it. Changing majors and schools was no big deal. It didn’t matter if the credits didn’t transfer and it took a couple more years for the degree. Some could do fun things like take year off and backpack through Europe. Deep family pockets guaranteed things would not go too badly. You need time to find the career you truly love, no problem. Run out of money on your backpacking tour? Daddy will wire you more and pay for the plane ticket home.

When I cut the roof off the lake cabin and replaced it with a dome, it had to work. It was a big roll of the dice. Had I made some major error in my calculations: structural or financial, we’d have huge debt and no place to live.

Solar energy had to work. It would have really stressed the budget if it didn’t. My system was only about as expensive as a decent new snowmobile, but I couldn’t afford one of those either.

When I bought an old Mercedes Benz to experiment with waste veggie oil, it had to work. My wife needed that car to go to her job. In fact, she was driving it back and forth to work long before I got all the bugs out of the system. She’d put in a 12 hour day, then find herself bleeding air out of fuel lines on the side of the road.

Fortunately, my experiments that have fallen flat have cost me little cash. My failed waste vegetable oil heater cost me less than $20. That was mostly for saw blades, welding rods, and nuts and bolts. The rest of the materials were from things most people would have sent to the dump. It’s failure wasn’t due to the materials, but because of a poor fuel feed design.

Working class people don’t have much slack for failure. They buy a house, because they are told property values will always go up. The don’t. Don’t worry about being able to afford the house, as over time your wages will go up. Those don’t go up either. Kids take on huge college debt to get that good paying job that isn’t there. The working class never fully recover from those failures.

They have no extra resources to recover. If something doesn’t work out just right, it’s disaster. If you are upper class, not only do you have your own resources, family wealth, and you have access to lines of credit that regular people can’t even conceive.

When you don’t have money, you’d better have brains. Thanks to the Internet information is available. However, you have to be able to sift though that information and judge it’s value. You have to know what you don’t know and figure out how to learn it. You plan things in great detail in hopes that everything will go right. Even so, sometimes there are circumstances beyond your control. Maybe it’s a small detail you had no way of knowing, a defective part, or the fact that something successful on one place might not work as well at your place.

Quite a few of us have been doing a lot with little. We’ve had years of working without a net. I’m curious to see how well the rich would do with our limited resources.

-Sixbears

Reunions

It was my High School class reunion today. I did not go. The event was held only 25 miles down the road from me, yet I had little interest. What’s the point? I had a group of friends I was close to in High School. We kept in touch. As for the rest, there’s a reason we don’t hang out.

Some people go to these events to see how they measure up to their classmates. I don’t care. I measure success differently than most. Independence and freedom mean a heck of a lot more to me than money.

College reunions are even worse. I’m almost 20 years older than my fellow students. I’ve got grandchildren the age of their kids. A few lasting friendships were made, but not all that many. My path since college isn’t something they put in the college promotional literature -they measure success differently also.

I will stop by the Fire Station once in a while. There are still guys working there who I once served with. That’s a tight bond that lasts. They are always good for a cup of coffee and a few laughs. However, every year there are fewer guys I served with. Retirement and death takes its toll. When the last of those guys are gone, I probably won’t stop in there anymore. The new guys know who I am and would still be happy to pour me a coffee. We are still all brothers together, but we haven’t found the same dragons.

The past is the past. Looking back once in a while is fine, but treat it like driving a car. The occasional glance in the rear view is prudent. Don’t let it distract you from where you are going. Keep most of your attention on the present and future and you’ll be lest likely to drive into a ditch.

-Sixbears

The path to adulthood

Growing up is hard. There’s so much to figure out, and the adults don’t understand. Everything is a crisis. The teen years are the worse. School is boring. You can’t drive. The kid games are no fun and the adult games are off limits. The worse thing for me was being told it was the best time of my life and I’d better enjoy it. How’s that for a depressing thought?

A few things kept me sane: Hiking in the mountains, hunting, fishing, snowshoeing and especially white water canoing. I loved time on the river. Often I paddled my boat alone through the rapids. The adrenaline rush is something I knew I needed. What I also craved, but didn’t realize until years later, was being in control of my canoe through rough waters. Teenagers have so little control over things. Mastering white water did much for sense of well being.

High School guidance councilors push the kids with good grades on a college path. My grades were decent, not through any love of school, but because I wanted to get through it without having to repeat anything. It was the same motivation that prisoners have for good behavior: early release.

One semester was enough for me to realize I wasn’t ready for college. In fact, I didn’t go back to college until I was 37. At 18, it like more high school and I’d just gotten out of that. Fortunately, I landed a job with the local Fire Department. I made a living, had time off to enjoy the outdoors, but the job itself was hugely satisfying. Fire and rescue provided that adrenaline rush I craved. Even though I eventually was badly injured on the job, I don’t regret my career choice. Beats the heck out of shriveling to death in a cubical.

It’s a good thing I didn’t discover sailboats back then. I’d have disappeared at sea. Probably would have either bought an old fix ‘er upper boat or built my own in my dad’s garage. Sailing fills the needs of my soul. It’s on the water, which is where I belong, be it a small river or the ocean. A sailboat is cheap way to go to new places and meet new people. There’s the sense of discovery and adventure. When the wind comes up, the waves build and spray flies, the heart beats a bit faster and I feel more alive.

Growing boys today have it even tougher than I did. They don’t have anywhere near the freedom that I had growing up. Everything is “safe” taking away the chance to learn from mistakes. Nothing like bruises and scraps to teach lessons. Activities are scripted and supervised. No wonder they get lost in computer games. It’s the only time they get to win at anything. Virtual world adrenaline rushes have to substitute for real world adventure. Today, the feelings I had growing up would be managed with drugs. I didn’t need drugs, I needed a fast river, a good canoe and a strong paddle.

I hope to heck that some of today’s kids find their way off the beaten track. They have to know disdain for the “normal” is fine. Heck, most of the people working in firefighting or EMS ain’t right. That’s what makes them good at their jobs. You don’t have to like everyone else. It’s a big world. There might be something out there for you.

Maybe it’ll be messing around in boats.

-Sixbears

They've gone back

It's that time of year again. The kids are back in school. I feel for them, I really do.

When I was a little a kid in grammar school, I looked at all the years of mandatory schooling ahead of me and despaired. Little kids shouldn't have that level of discouragement. Eventually the years went by and I got out of prison. That's how I looked at it.

After high school, I made a mistake. Everyone told me I couldn't get ahead in life without a college education. Couldn't face 4 more years of school, so a 2 year degree seemed doable. Back in the late 70s, there was still this idea going around that a person could go to college and pay his way by working. They don't even talk about that anymore. One semester was all I could handle before I'd end up in debt, which is something I really wanted to avoid. Dropping out proved to the best the answer.

Best decision of my life. I was broke, had no prospects, but for the first time in my life, I was free. It felt wonderful.

It drove me nuts when adults would say their school days were the best days of their life. For me, it was like telling a prisoner that once he did his time, he'd be transferred to a worse prison. If it wasn't for vacations, I don't know how I would have survived.

Getting married. Raising kids. Working jobs. Buying property. All that stuff was so much better than going to school. I could do what I wanted to do, read books I wanted to read, do my own experiments, hunt, fish, hike, travel -it was and is great.

School is where we are supposed to learn reading, writing, mathematics, history, and all the other stuff they want crammed in our heads. It's the "all the other stuff," that bothers me. We were taught to follow orders, obey the rules, please our jailers, and even respond to bells like Pavlov's dogs. Good training for life in factories, cubicles, and in a Fascist state.

The sad thing is that school couldn't even teach me how to read. My mother noticed I couldn't read as well as the rest of my class. One summer, teaching me mornings, I went from reading below my class to several years above it. The city should have refunded her school tax money that year. She did the job they were unable to.

As a kid, I rebelled in school. Not enough to get into too much trouble, but enough to stay sane. Was always looking for loopholes around the rules. My grades were petty good, but that's because they actually made kids repeat years. The thought of an extra year of prison was a strong negative motivator.

I must admit, my own kids went to public school. My lovely wife made shut up about my "prison days." She didn't want the kids to have a negative attitude. They all got through it, and did it better than I.

Used to hate the month of September. Now, I love it. It's a wonderful time of the year. Too bad those kids in prison can't enjoy it.

-Sixbears