Source: Serving Up Slop to Teen Readers
Please pardon me, if you will, for again resorting to this hymn–Maddy Prior and the Carnival Band’s knock-down, drag-out rendition of John Bunyan’s To Be a Pilgrim. The pilgrim’s path is hard and steep, and we need encouragement when we can get it. I hope this rousing hymn reaches you as it reaches me.
Living in a humans’ world, cats have a lot of challenges to meet. Like, for instance, when an ordinary squirrel suddenly, and for no apparent reason, swells into giant size and comes right at him. Could you handle that? How well would we do in a world designed by and for cats? (And don’t say we already live in one!)
In the secular humanist quest for an earthly paradise, no stone is small enough to be left unturned.
My hometown school board, as reported today in our local paper, has “enacted guidelines for assigning homework.” It seems the kiddies are all stressed out from too much homework, after a special committee worked on it for two whole years.
To quote from the news article by Claude Deltieure, “The recommended daily homework load is ten minutes per grade level”–ten minutes?–or a whopping 15 for reading. So a kid in 8th grade might be saddled with as much as 80 minutes per night, presuming all his teachers that day assigned homework.
It seems the board’s chief concern is “stress.” Homework is stressing out the kiddies.
No normal kid wants a load of homework. Back in the Bronze Age, when I went to school, you learned to do your homework efficiently, expeditiously, so you could move on to more important things, like playing stickball. Homework was just one of those things the adult world saddled you with. By the time I was in high school, I’d learned to finish almost all my homework in study hall.
As a teacher, I knew many teachers who hardly ever assigned homework–because, after all, they would have to read it and grade it. Most of my teachers went over the homework in class the next day, rather than take it home and grade it.
There’s something creepy about this whole drive to protect young people from stress of any kind, with all kinds of unavoidable stresses waiting for them in the world outside. Who’s going to tell their employers, when these kids grow up, “Only this much work, and not a minute more”?
My parents insisted that I do my homework, and helped when I needed it. As a boy, I would have loved to pass it up altogether. But doing it taught me how to work. And work can be stressful. You have to learn to handle it.
Well, easing way up on the homework will surely prepare these kids for collidge, and Play-Doh, and coloring books, and demonstrating for tampons in the men’s rest room, and shouting down, or assaulting, anyone whose opinions expose them to stress.
You could, of course, homeschool your kids and preserve their minds from the ravages of public education. But then we wouldn’t need school boards with multi-million-dollar budgets.
So there was a White House press briefing the other day, with Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders; and some nozzle from CNN asks, “Sarah, does this administration believe slavery is wrong?” (https://townhall.com/tipsheet/laurettabrown/2017/10/31/april-ryan-asks-white-house-if-trump-administration-believes-slavery-is-wrong-n2403031)
Well, let’s see… Slavery in America was ended over 150 years ago, the only places left where it exists are in certain corners of the Muslim world… and they wonder why anyone with an ounce of sense or decency despises today’s nooze media?
“Why, no, Stupid, all of us here at the White House think slavery is right, and that’s why we’ve just opened a slave market on the White House lawn…”
Really, why would you even ask such a question, unless you were an unmitigated ass trying to show off to all the other asses? “Oh, I’m so clever, I could just hug and kiss myself to death! Now they have to deny that they’re in favor of slavery–what a headline!”
To the noozie with nothing but impenetrable wood between her ears: Well, my ancestors were enslaved by the Romans, and what’s anybody gonna do about it? What–you don’t care, because it was so blamed long ago?
The Democrat Party, including its subsidiary known as “the nooze media,” is the race-baiting party: and slavery, albeit so long ago, the best damned thing that ever happened to it. A race riot is music to their ears, the sweetest music that they know.
They richly deserve to be put out of business forever.
There they stand, on the slopes of Easter Island, strange, enigmatic–3 million years old, according to Godzilla vs. Megalon–these nameless, timeless portraits in stone. Whose portraits are they? Why here, on the most remote and isolated island in the whole Pacific Ocean?
Ah, well, never mind. What I really want to know is White Rabbit’s mailing address so I can send him the book he won in the comment contest. Oh, and he should also tell me which book he wants. Dave, are you copying this? Send me that information at leeduigon.verizon.net .
Here’s my Newswithviews column for this week. Bon appetite.
Well, now it’s off to the vet for Robbie’s checkup–but first a hymn. Holy, Holy, Holy… a glimpse into the Book of Revelation.
For a while there Rowan Atkinson stopped doing comedy because he was afraid he’d be thrown in jail for making someone laugh: Political Correctness in action. But he has left us a wonderful legacy in hilarious “Mr. Bean” videos. Watch how he makes use of his time in the dentist’s waiting room.