Friday Morning Thoughts

It was clear, 19 degrees & frosty at 5 a.m., a perfectly normal March morning. The gurus & weather wonks at AccuHunch predict we'll have low 40s and rain, this weekend. That's normal, too.

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So after the Seattle Times cleans the egg off its collectivist face, and after they admitted no one threw a brick through a Congressperson's 30th floor window*, perhaps it should consider a name change. "Post-Intelligence" comes to mind.

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Speaking of collectivists, the Anchorage Birdcage Liner-Glass Polisher reports:

As 48 other states are participating in a national re-writing of their state education standards, Alaska is taking a look at its own and wondering if it should get on board and raise the bar for the state's students. But while some educators say Alaska kids deserve to be held to the same standard as the rest of the country, others are saying we are different and the current, laxer standards are just fine.

Earlier this month, the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers released the draft of sweeping new school standards that could lead to students across the country using the same math and English textbooks.

~snip~

Among the things that the national standards would call for: middle-schoolers will be ready to read "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" and letters from John Adams; 10th graders will be up to mastering John Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath."

The state standards don't mention specific reading material. Instead they say that middle schoolers should be able to identify foreshadowing in literature, and that by the 10th grade a student should be able to do things like identify syntax...

I don't know why not; I had to learn those things, and I seem to be able to string more than two words together without drooling.

After the NEA and various governmental entities (you know who you dare, Dept. of Lowering Our Educational Standards) have been dumbing the kids down for the better part of a century, I think it's high time to actually, you know, teach the kids something.

Besides, this move comes from the States, and that's the way it ought to be. I keep harking back to that silly ol' Constitution ... and it doesn't say anything about the General Gov't. setting standards for education. But maybe I'm just old-fashioned.

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There are a lot of things to discuss, stuffed shirts to puncture, and inflated egos to pop ... so many progressives; so little time ... (sighs). But work beckons.

Y'all come back, hear?

*"Threw it through the window" is confusing to many, with so many homonyms. Perhaps, as Lewis Grizzard once suggested, we should switch to southern spelling. "He thowed it thew the window" is more clear, no?