patrick.net

Jennings writes 15 hr ago

We homeschooled our kids - I’ve been “retired” now for nearly a decade. I had one graduate at 15, one at 16. Both were in Honors at college. (While they’re bright they aren’t geniuses or anything!) Both have been excellent employees - one is now an entrepreneur with her husband, the other (the youngest) still working but he’ll end up an entrepreneur too, if the government doesn’t totally disincentivize it. My son in law was also homeschooled. My kids never went to public school, and even though our property taxes went to the system, weren’t allowed so much as a school library book. It was worth it.

Rob DWrites The Rumble Strip 13 hr ago

Beautiful. My family has similar stories. It is very difficult financially and in other ways, but well worth it in the long run.

chadi nabhan MD, MBA, FACP
@chadinabhan
1h
Regarding school closures: an observation:

Public schools go virtual
Private schools stay open .

This virus is fascinating. It affects teachers only in public schools. Somehow it spares private schools.

Amazing.
Jan 3, 2022 · 3:22 AM UTC

Chicago Public Schools are closed today after the teachers union voted last night (73% approving) to return to remote learning. So, after two days back in the classroom, parents of the 340,000 kids in the nation’s third-largest district are left scrambling to accommodate having their children back at home in front of a screen. But hey, at least the union did it with “a heavy heart and a singular focus on student and community safety.”

Please.

The singular purpose of a union is to advance the interests of its members.

Since last week we saw a rise in school disruptions driven by Covid 19 cases, in particular among staff. In this report we introduce a new "disruptions by day" chart that gives a more precise look at the post-vacation dynamic of the school year.

The singular purpose of a union is to advance the interests of its members.

Empty classrooms: Every room must be hermetically sealed for a minimum of 3 months and flooded with bleach daily. Those cesspools of germs known as “kids” must not be allowed within 100 feet of a physical school. Let’s be honest-- the fact that children are gross is undisputed. We teachers simply cannot risk being exposed to actual children and their grossness.

Teleportation machines: We all know that for us young teachers dying from a traffic accident is a thousand times more likely than dying from COVID. So what kind of insane maniac would drive a vehicle? Teleportation must be available to all possible destinations a teacher may need to go-- like the coffee shop, or the yoga pants store.

Dance lessons: Dancing is one of the most important parts of a union protest. Teachers are being harmed by people mocking our dancing all the time. They don’t seem to get that we’re professional teachers who are supposed to be teaching, not dancing. We need to become professional dancers to adequately express our feelings, and so everyone will stop making fun of us.

End all science classes: But if kids take science classes, they might start listening to actual scientists. If they listen to actual scientists, they might find out that there they are at an almost 0% risk for contracting or spreading viruses. Then we might look bad.

Triple-masking at all times during Zoom calls: Seeing children's actual faces on Zoom would cause tremendous anxiety. Triple-masking is a must until we are sure the virus cannot be spread through the World Wide Web.

Biden gave schools $130 BILLION for health measures so they could stay open... now a bunch are spending it on CRT and closing anyway for Omicron 🙄




It's never been about your kids.

Joe Biden gave schools – and their very hungry teachers' unions – $130 billion of your dollars last year so they could put measures in place that would mitigate the spread of Covid and help them make schools "safer" for children who are already not statistically at risk from the virus.

All $130 billion of those dollars were greedily devoured, disappearing into a black hole from whence they shall never emerge.




... It's almost like Covid became a coordinated excuse to use tax dollars to fight against the wave of angry parents who don't want their kids to become racist communists!

College is hard enough without having your progressive values challenged. It’s important to make sure that your learning space is a safe and equitable environment. There’s nothing worse in life than a micro-aggression under the guise of an opinion.

Here are eight things to keep an eye out for when starting a new class. If you have a professor who exhibits any of these behaviors, report them to the Dean of Diversity immediately!

1) They just got fired: If your professor just got canceled by a woke mob and fired, he's probably a conservative. Great news! You won’t have to drop their class, but you should still keep tabs on their social media and dox them as soon as they let their guard down.

2) Can have a normal conversation: If someone can go more than five minutes without mentioning how many trans women of color are being murdered then they are part of the problem.

3) Doesn’t wear a giant yellow pin with his pronouns on them: There’s nothing more offensive than demanding people assume your own gender.

4) Did not cancel class on January 6: I had to get out of bed and do things!

5) Classroom missing requisite 36 posters and slogans related to BLM and Trans Activism: Flags are acceptable in place of posters.

6) Teaches you in-person: This is tantamount to murder. He might as well be committing war crimes in Iraq.

7) Uses outdated grading system: Education experts agree that grading systems need to move away from the ‘pass/fail’ concept and be replaced with a ‘racist/also racist’ system.

8) They treat all students with dignity and respect regardless of race or gender: I just threw up in my mouth a little.

And the worst part is that Dr. Wen is right. Evidence continues to amass that shows not only was remote learning as a full-time substitute for in-person learning (rather than a temporary stop-gap for snow days, deep cleans, or even for "two weeks to stop the spread") a colossal failure academically, it has resulted in a mental health crisis of generational proportions...

Of course they should. Plenty of scientific evidence now proves without question that schools are not a major facilitator of community COVID spread. The few stories of teachers and counselors actually dying of the virus invariably end up revealing that school wasn't even in session when they fell ill.

There IS another option! Find a Creative Academy. I pulled my son out of his private school due to the mandated testing, segregation of vax/unvaxx’d, pressure & bribes to get vaxx’d. Because a creative academy is not a “school”, they do not follow the same mandates of public or private schools. Not all teachers are accredited but the curriculum is fantastic and the kids get to choose from a wide array of class options. This semester my son chose:
- Constitutional Rights
- A deep dive into the Bill of Rights
- Art, Music, Math, Science, Rock Climbing
And one day of the week, the kids have 1-2 outdoor classes at a hiking spot, then spend the rest of the day hiking. Connecting with nature and learning… I’ve gone with him & love it.

Only masks indoors, but lots of outdoor classes and zero questions about medical “status”.

Since the first reports of novel coronavirus in the 2020, public health organizations have advocated
preventative policies to limit virus, including stay-at-home orders that closed businesses, daycares,
schools, playgrounds, and limited child learning and typical activities. Fear of infection and possible
employment loss has placed stress on parents; while parents who could work from home faced
challenges in both working and providing full-time attentive childcare. For pregnant individuals,
fear of attending prenatal visits also increased maternal stress, anxiety, and depression. Not surprising, there
has been concern over how these factors, as well as missed educational opportunities and reduced
interaction, stimulation, and creative play with other children might impact child neurodevelopment.
Leveraging a large on-going longitudinal study of child neurodevelopment, we examined general
childhood cognitive scores in 2020 and 2021 vs. the preceding decade, 2011-2019. We find that
children born during the pandemic have significantly reduced verbal, motor, and overall cognitive
performance compared to children born pre-pandemic. Moreover, we find that males and children
in lower socioeconomic families have been most affected. Results highlight that even in the absence
of direct SARS-CoV-2 infection and COVID-19 illness, the environmental changes associated COVID-19
pandemic is significantly and negatively affecting infant and child development.

How to Reign In Rogue School Districts
It's time put the education system in its place

Bill Hennessy

... I didn’t read the story and didn’t have to. Neither do you. If you’re a parent or a taxpayer, you know that most public school districts are out of control. They are run by boards that do little for education but a lot of the education industry.

They buy unproven learning systems from big publishers at extremely high cost

They hire consultants who make things worse

They hire superintendents with political agendas to impose the community

They act like the teachers’ unions are their bosses

That Fox News headline says it all: Democrats say parents and taxpayers should give them their money and shut up.

No more.

It’s time to start a two-pronged attack to take back the schools.

Take Over School Boards

First, make your local school board election the most important race in your life. Stop trying to fix Washington DC before you fix the school down the street. It’s much easier to get a few thousand neighbors to show up and vote than to get a few million people in states you’ve never visited to vote.

Many of my readers live in Rockwood School District, which is a national disaster. Two candidates for Rockwood Schools stand out:

Izzy Imig, a true war hero originally from Iraq who understands the threats the current board’s policies pose. She is a natural fighter who will put parents and taxpayers back in charge.

Izzy

Jessica Clark is a fearless fighter for American values rooted in strong families and great schools. She has seen Rockwood drift away from the community’s values and will use the power you give her to restore order and decency to Rockwood.

Jessica

I have met both of these women. They are fighting to win and go out of their way to meet the voters. But they can’t do it alone.

Great candidates need great support. Conservatives have a history of ignoring April elections and ignoring school board elections. That’s exactly how we got into the mess we’re in.

Tell your friends and neighbors Rockwood needs Izzy and Jessica. We need them now. And they need you on April 5.

Property Tax Rollbacks

The second prong to the battle is property tax rollbacks.

School districts gone bad used your money to do it. They use your money to stock pornography in school libraries. They use your money to buy bad, theoretical, and unproven learning systems with which to miseducate your kids.

Worse, they use your money to fund campaigns to raise your taxes.

ENOUGH!

Taxpayers need to start initiative campaigns to roll back property taxes. Starve the beast.

Taxpayers have every right to impose their will on the schools they commissioned and fund. Don’t let Democrats tell you otherwise.

Putting a property tax rollback initiative on a future ballot will consume 100% of the district’s staff’s attention. Just getting enough petition signatures to put a rollback on the ballot will do wonders. You won’t hear superintendents saying parents should have no voice in education with 20% pay cut headed his way.

I know it sounds harsh to impose one’s will on another, but every employee of a school district is serving at the leisure of the taxpayers. When a district gets out of line, it is the right and the duty of the people to smack it back into shape, and nothing gets an education administrator’s attention like a loss of funds. They’re coin-operated.

Start Today

Find out the date of your next school board election.

Meet the candidates.

Pick one excellent candidate for each open position.

Fund that candidate.

Tell your neighbors.

Put up yard signs.

Vote.

Why we pulled our kids out of public school
And you should too

Systemic child abuse in the age of Covid

We’ve instilled a constant, low-grade fear into children that will affect them for the rest of their lives ...

It’s particularly hard to justify this one: the Ronald McDonald House in Vancouver, Canada is soon to evict all unvaccinated patients and visitors over five years old and up, including cancer patients. In Massachusetts, police dogs have recently been employed to sniff out Covid inside schools in order to locate the “diseased” children. At another school, a woman said her daughter got detention after being “caught” with her mask pulled to her chin in the bathroom. No breaks allowed for the mask mafia. ...

Scientific American reports masks are detrimental barriers to babies’ speech and language development and the National Institute of Health reports that masks hinder emotional development as well. On top of that, dentists are reporting a downturn in dental hygiene thanks to “mask mouth” — and just imagine the impact masks have had on the deaf community at large, not to mention deaf children who need to learn to read lips to survive and thrive in life. All of this data comes with the 2022 confirmation from the scientific community that “cloth masks are not effective” in fighting Covid. Yet schools continue to require them and people keep wearing them as if such barriers are doing anything more than marinading in kid spit and causing adult acne. ...

If you want to talk about systemic oppression, talk about this: the systemic abuse of children in the name of Covid-19. The consequences will haunt us for a lifetime.

Unjabbed students at the New West Charter school in Los Angeles are separated from the rest of the school with tape.

Jordan Peterson has left his professorial post at the University of Toronto. He announced his departure with characteristic blunt honesty in Canada’s National Post.

Peterson first came to my attention in 2016, as he did for many, for his refusal to bow to demands to use novel pronouns preferred by the transgendered. For this, he was denounced as a bigot, his university threatened his career, his speaking events were disrupted, all done under the cloak of civility: all transgender people wanted was respect, to be addressed as who they were. How dare Peterson be so uncivil?

Lost in the shrieking winds that enveloped him was his basic point: it’s no longer civility when it’s backed up by the force of law. Civility is no longer on the table when you can be thrown in jail for an opinion. The proliferation of pronouns at the bottom of email signatures everywhere is silent testimony to the iron fist inside the velvet glove.

in praise of lawn darts
the basis for a civilization of free people resides in the skills that children learn from the benign neglect of unsupervised play in an un-nerfed world

Banning critical race theory in schools isn’t enough
Just as conservatives changed the courts, so too do they need to overhaul the education system

Stop Teachers Unions from Pushing the Covid Vaccine Mandate.

Did you know the Teachers Union donates millions of dollars to political campaigns and is a prime driver in the vaccine mandates for school aged children? This campaign is aimed to urge the heads of Teacher’s Unions in CA and across the country to say NO to vaccine mandates for K-12 children.

There’s no doubt that you or someone you love has been affected by the Covid-19 vaccine mandates. The pandemic has many living in a state of fear. Lockdowns, masks, and vaccines are a pervasive part of everyday life. But, what about our children? What about how this all affects them?

According to the CDC children are at a statistically 0% risk of serious illness or death from Covid. The CDC also acknowledges, the vaccines do not prevent infection or transmission of the virus. Vaccine efficacy against Omicron is down to 27%, far below the 50% threshold required for FDA approval. Therefore, there is no need to vaccinate children against Covid.

On the other hand, there have been 41 reported deaths after COVID-19 vaccine among children aged 0 to 17. There have also been 602 reports of myocarditis and pericarditis among and 51 reported cases of blood clotting disorders among children. It is evident that these vaccines carry serious risks for children.

Vaccine mandates override the right to provide informed consent for this medical intervention by not allowing patients or parents to make their own decisions. Considering the low Covid-related risks for healthy children, the risks associated with the vaccine, declining vaccine efficacy against new variants, the protection from any liability for vaccine manufacturers, it should absolutely be the right of every parent to decide whether to vaccinate their child.

Many school districts are requiring the Covid-19 vaccines and soon will likely mandate boosters for in person learning. Children in CA have already been forced out of schools due to mandates.

This is a crucial time in our Nation’s history. People across the globe are raising their voices and fighting for individual rights and freedoms and are mounting resistance to vaccine mandates and other coercive and ineffective pandemic measures. With less than a minute of your time you can take a single step and make a powerful impact! Join us in the fight against the k-12 student Covid Vaccine Mandate.

https://alignact.com/take/action/form?campaign=304

I don't know if it was overprotective mothers or greedy lawyers.

JEWS BEHAVING BADLY: A SOUR WINE GARDEN
by Romo1979
Posted onJanuary 30, 2022

Man, what is it about Jewish lesbians? It’s a triple whammy: The wokery of Jews, the wokery of women, and the wokery of homosexuals. This week’s Sapphic insanity belongs to Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT).

Often at this point I would translate stuff from Latin about harpies and furies and Stygian beasts, but sometimes a picture is indeed a thousand words:




There she is: All about Covidianism, all about BLM, all about the cult of St. George.

Despite being Jewish, Weingarten is the complete opposite of Janusz Korczak, the magnificent teacher who could have saved himself, yet jumped into the gas chambers after his students.

Weingarten is quite another character: At any given opportunity where minor risks to teachers are weighed against the benefit to students, she chooses the former. Her choice is ever to close down schools, shut down education, and cater to the baseless fears of her hysterical union members. For instance, here.

But that’s nothing new. What is new is that Weingarten now promotes, as the official policy of the AFT, that all its members and their students receive online information through the lens of something called “NewsGuard”. Apparantly it is a browser plug-in that uses a traffic light feature to indicate what information is kosher and what is not. Or in the words of the AFT:

“For years, educators have fought battles against suspect sourcing, with their students often misled by dubious outlets and spam sites posing as “news.” NewsGuard offers a practical solution, alerting students and educators to those sites while also providing a valuable lesson in media literacy.”

Now, we know how to read through these leftist platitudes, don’t we folks? “Spam” here clearly means conservative and right-leaning information, and “media literacy” means Wokery. And indeed, a study by the Media Research Center demonstrates NewGuard to be heavily biased against right-leaning websites.

So not only is Weingarten not willing to jump after the children to the bitter end, she insists on indoctrinating them first.

And thus she wins this week’s Jews Bevaving Badly Award, and with it a generous kick from Balaam’s donkey.




How very educational.