Category: Education

Oh, The Hardship

Education

Must our children suffer any more?  Yes, according to the headmaster of this school in Britishland:

A [school principal] has insisted that a 12-hour school day will give pupils ‘buckets full of endorphins’ – as the 7am to 7pm scheme comes into effect today.

Children at All Saints Catholic College in the affluent neighbourhood of Notting Hill, west London, will partake in a whole host of activities instead of spending the time at home on their devices when classes finish at 3.15pm.

This includes homework time and activity clubs from dodgeball, basketball, art, drama and cookery classes in a bid to break the cycle of smartphone ‘addiction’.

The controversial decision to introduce a 12-hour school day comes after the principal found ‘shocking’ things on confiscated mobile phones, including pupils blackmailing strangers and catfishing one another.

[He said:] ‘It’s pretty clear across the sector this is a real issue in terms of the vacuum that phones fill for children when they go home. There’s a crisis in attendance and if we look at the last 10 years or so there’s a depletion in services that are available to children after school. He said the school will ensure homework is done within that time, while also making sure that children take part in activities so they go home ‘with a bucket full of endorphins’.

Not to mention that the little shits should be too exhausted to get up to mischief.

Not that this is anything new, of course.  Allow me to present a typical day in the life of a schoolboy at my old school, St. John’s College, back in the day:

6.40am:  Rising bell
7.02am:  Roll call
7.10am:  Breakfast
7.35am:  School prep (make beds, get books together for class, etc.)
8.00am:  Morning Chapel
8.25am:  Classes begin
1.25pm:  Lunch
2.10pm:  Reading and study (classrooms or dorm rooms)
2.50pm:  Sports (compulsory; cricket, swimming, athletics, tennis, squash in summer;  rugby or field hockey in winter)
4.15pm:  Roll call
4.20pm:  Free time, unless taken up by extra duties: sports, choir practice, punishment (detention, hard labor etc.)
Day scholars could leave for home after roll call or after extra duties.  For boarders:
6.30pm:  Dinner
7.10pm:  First Prep (homework), in classrooms, with a 10-minute break at 8pm
8.10pm:  Second Prep, until 9.15pm
Lights out:  9.45pm

If the daytime classroom hours seem to be less than in U.S. schools, remember the two hours’ prep each night, and allow me also to point out that Saturday mornings were the same as weekday mornings, and pupils were only free after lunch — “free”, that is, unless the school sports teams were engaged in matches against other area schools, and attendance was compulsory (roll call again!) at First Team matches.

Boarders stayed in school on Saturday nights, which were taken up with “club” activities such as Bridge, Drama, Chess, Debate, History, Photography, Geography, Literature, Film, Pioneer (nature/history studies) and so on.  Membership of at least three clubs was compulsory. Then Sundays:

8.30am:  Rising bell
8.55am:  Roll call
9.00am:  Sunday Chapel & Communion
10.00am:  Boarders were excused to leave, with parents only
6.30pm:  Roll call
6.35pm:  Dinner
7.00pm:  Evensong & Sermon, until 7.45pm
8.30pm:  Lights out
…and the whole thing would start again the next day.

So when I read about “12-hour days”, I just giggle.

We were so exhausted (endorphins? pah) that we seldom had time to get up to mischief.  Officially, that was the theory, anyway.  The reality, especially for thugs like the Four Muscadels, was a little different.

And we didn’t even have phones.  Wouldn’t have mattered if we did, because the school would have banned and confiscated them.

Just like our Brit headmaster has.  In that, at least, we have something in common.

Teacher, Teacher

Education

Via Insty, I see that another teacher at the same school has been canned for her side gig:

A second teacher at a small Missouri high school has landed in hot water for supplementing her income by peddling porn on OnlyFans — after a student slipped a note under her classroom door that they “knew her secret,” according to a report.

Megan Gaither, 31, an English teacher and varsity cheerleading coach at St. Clair High School, told the Post-Dispatch that she was put on leave Friday after her X-rated moonlighting job was revealed.

Gaither said she joined the subscription-based site in May to help pay back more than $125,000 in student loans. Her total pay last year, including a coaching stipend, was about $47,500, the paper reported.

Her colleague Brianna Coppage, a former freshman and sophomore English teacher at the school, recently resigned to devote all her time to porn after she was placed on leave when it was revealed she was running an OnlyFans page with her husband.

It’s only fans fair to see what all the fuss is about:

I know:  cue the “They didn’t look like that back in the day when I was using a quill to write on papyrus!”  wails.

My question is of a different nature.  How the hell did she expect to pay back $125,000 in student loans on a teacher’s salary anyway?  (Corollary:  what kind of non-medical / legal degree ends up costing well over a hundred grand?)

Look, I’m no prude, but I am a realist.  The appearance of subscriber sites like OnlyFans has given women a non-academic economic opportunity.  Low up-front cost (a camera, access to a streaming outlet) and away we go.

Granted, one needs to have a fairly relaxed set of morals and (perhaps) a willing partner (or two, if we’re going to get really adventurous).  But given the apparent lack of modesty and morality among young women today, that doesn’t seem to be much of a problem.

And being even more realistic, an OnlyFans gig is a million times safer than other prostitution options, which involve walking the streets and being at risk from all those Green River Killer wannabes, not to mention the chances of being abducted and sold to some Arab in a Gulf state.

At least we have equal opportunity here, among women anyway.  Unlike a “straight” movie career, looks aren’t that important because, let’s face it, there are no limits to male depravity — okay, male tastes — in this kind of thing.  Even someone who looks like Hillary Clinton will find a willing (and paying) audience in the “GILF” world.

Sorry about that, but you get my point.  Even the most hardened, tattooed and pierced chick is going to be guaranteed an audience that is not confined to still pics on hotbikerbabes.com;  in fact, that seems to be a positive advantage.

Anyway, before this post turns into a treatise, I deplore the fact that people who are supposedly “educating” our kids academically are in fact giving them another kind of education altogether.  Witness the fact that somehow, the little sneaks in the above article seemed to have had no problem in not only finding and identifying Teacher Dearest on OnlyFans — a whole ‘nother topic all by itself:  what the fuck were teenage boys doing on OnlyFans?  where did they get the money?  where were their parents? — but these boys were apparently going to blackmail the hapless teachers (which has happened before).

For all the opprobrium heaped on the religious schools of yore (I know, lust-filled Catholic priests and nuns with rulers blah blah blah), I can’t help thinking that Napoleon had a point:  let the Church educate children until age 12, and then toss the little shits out into the world to earn a living, was his dictum,  Certainly, cossetting them in schools until age 24 (which is what we have today) doesn’t seem to be working that well for them either.

It’s a little sad to think that the kids in the above pic are going to end up with untold thousands in tuition debt, and only the girl on the end is going to have the OnlyFans option to pay it off.

On the other hand, maybe that’s all they deserve.

Double Win

Education, Marxists, Unions

Here’s a win-win situation: 

The Fresno Teachers Association (FTA) is demanding that the Fresno Unified School district set aside parking for homeless families, as a part of their larger list of demands – such as free laundry services – as the union prepares to go on strike.

Yes;  nothing says “We Care About The Children!” more than putting a squatters’ camp right on school property.

Fortunately, the school district is showing just a little common sense:

The district has previously stated that it does not plan to bow to the union’s demand, with the district’s chief communications officer saying that, “We do not plan to open our parking lots,” since “education, not housing,” is the school district’s area of expertise.

The union has other demands:  money for “security”, an end to Global Warming, banning tooth decay and some other equally-important stuff, but nemmind.

Here’s the win:  the longer this bunch of malcontent Marxists can stay out of the classroom, the better-off the kids will be.

And here’s the other win:  the longer the school district plays hardball, the sooner the striking schoolteachers will have to join the ranks of the homeless they seem to care so much about.

Of course, there’s another way to deal with these striking teachers:

…but no doubt someone’s going to have a problem with this.

Immigration Bastardy Update

Government Thugs, Homeschooling

From HSLDA comes this email:

Dear Kim,

We just received news from ICE that the Romeikes are going to be given a one-year stay of deportation on Wednesday. This is excellent news! According to our friends on Capitol Hill, this outcome is the direct result of your calls, your petition signature, and your outreach to Congress on this issue. Now the reality is that until this is signed on Wednesday this is not guaranteed, but we do expect a positive outcome. We are sending our attorney, Kevin Boden, to join the Romeike family while they meet with ICE next week.

According to Kevin, “I spoke personally with the ICE officer in Knoxville, who told me we can anticipate them signing the order of supervision out for another year. And while we are very grateful for this news, we are continuing to advocate for a long-term solution for the Romeike family to allow their permanent stay in the United States.”

As Kevin said, this stay is not a permanent solution. It’s a bandage, but a very important one—and one that could not have happened without your diligent efforts on the Romeikes’ behalf.

The long-term solution is that the Romeikes need to be granted either asylum or permanent residency status. While we still have work to do, we are very grateful for this temporary reprieve. Please continue to support the Romeikes as we move forward. To do that, please go to hslda.org/Romeike.

We will update you as to the result of the Wednesday meeting. Thank you so much for your signature, calls, emails, donations, and prayers.

Sincerely,

 

I don’t like the fact that this is only a temporary stay of deportation.  I bet that ICE and the apparatchiks who “changed” the original orders are hoping that in a year’s time we’ll all have forgotten about them and their persecution of this family.  But I’m going to be following it closely.

For the back story of this saga, here are Part One and Part Two.

Do Something To Stop The Bastardy

Gummint, Homeschooling

A little while back I talked about how some refugee family (actual refugees) had fled Germany to homeschool their kids, because the German public school system is like our own, only worse, and they being Christian, thought they could find refuge Over Here and school their children according to their own beliefs and not in the godlessness of the public school system (as prescribed by German law).

So now they’re facing deportation because Gummint.

It’s bad enough that the German government was fucking them over — the State fucking people over has a long and storied tradition Over There — but now our Gummint is fucking them over despite the family not having broken a single U.S. law.

I urge you all to follow this link and sign the HSDLA petition.  Please.

And pass the link on to everyone you know who might support this family.  Every bit helps.