Nevada's Traditional Values
Myrna the Minx at Reno and It's Discontents on the State of Nevada:
Nevada ranks first nationally in the percentage of our population that is homeless (D.C. isn’t a state). Its finally great to be first for a change isn’t it? The comments degenerate into the usual blame the immigrants and lazy people, and there is also ignorant speculation that a drop in housing prices will help the situation. Since all homeless people own homes and 41 percent of homeless people in the US are living in families , that makes perfect sense. Couple our high homeless population with our other worst ranking, meth use, add in our 44th ranking in k-12 education and you have a recipe for low taxes. You get what you pay for. And you’re an idiot if you can’t see that a high rate of homelessness, excessive drug use, and a lackluster K-12 education system aren’t related.
The lady speaks the truth. Ask any 10 Nevadans, chances are at least 6 or 7 of them will tell you "it's the illegals". Yeah, the illegals. Not the majority of Nevadans who squeal like pigs when asked to pay a penny in taxes for useless stuff like education, law enforcement, or mental health care.
We like to stick to important issues here in Nevada. Like making sure we don't have to register our guns. You never know when you might need to shoot one of those pesky homeless people or an illegal.
Those same 6 or 7 people would probably also tell you how 9/11 happened because of the democrats. We are losing in Iraq because of the democrats too. Democrats are also likely to blame for everything from crime to global warming. Bets on whether or not we killed Kennedy just to try and make republicans look bad.
So what is the difference between the Reds and the Blues, aside from Blues clearly being the the root of all evil? Myrna has this interesting little bit on The Difference Between Liberals and Conservatives. Great advice for parents wanting to insure their children grow up to share their traditional values: be sure your kids are easily victimized, easily offended, indecisive, fearful, rigid, inhibited, and vulnerable at age 3.
Easy enough. Just whup 'em around a little bit with the butt end of your shotgun next time you're robbed and have a mental breakdown, lose your job and become homeless and don't forget to pull 'em out of school as soon as they are old enough to get one of those minimum wage jobs. That'll teach 'em.
12 comments:
The same kind of things happen here in Misery. We have the second worst roads in the country and everybody complains about them, but when a ballot initiative to increase the gasoline tax in order to fix them comes along, it gets defeated by a 3 to 1 margin. It baffles me how people can't see past the conservative mantra that taxes are evil when their government is crumbling around them.
I am really pissed off and I don't love you as much as I did just 24 hrs ago! Why, you might ask? I tell you why!
I tried to post my best ever comment earlier to just find out that for a reason beyond me I was not able to do so. Like I said, it was just a marvelous comment and now you have to settle on this, a lot lesser quality one. :)
The best tool that there is to combat the ills in any society is the education. The worse the educational standard is, the worse the performance is. As I see it, you have absolutely fantastic schools in your country coexisting with absolutely rock bottom ones. Somehow, the richest country in the world has accepted an educational apartheid based on the wealth of the parents to cough up the money needed to get a good education. This sort of practise leaves out thousands of kids outside their potential and thus hurting the society as well.
I really think, that for America to stay as the leading nation in the world has to start evening up the playing field. I can't help but wonder why these two realities are let to not just stay as they are but even allowed to grow further apart?
Just in case, if anybody reads my drivel and wonders; why does this idiot write about the education and doesn't even know how to spell? My answer would be - English is not my mother tonque.
Oh noooo, not Misery! Better half has relatives there, and yes, they are awful.
Pesu- I have a pet theory that (I think) might explain at least some of what happened to education here.
Until roughly the last 50 years teaching was the only "career" open to women so schools were able to get the best and the brightest.
Teaching is not exactly financially rewarding so the best & brightest don't flock to teaching anymore. Not knocking all teachers but let's be honest, in a significant number of cases we're scraping the bottom of the barrel to find anyone to teach. Education majors as a group tend to rank lower academically than any other group.
Instead of paying teachers better we've added layer after layer of bureaucratic bs, mandatory tests and assessments, and cadres of "support staff" etc.
We could fire about 70% of the add-on people, pay teachers 100k or better annually and I'm willing to bet we'd have a school system that would be #1 in the world within a few decades.
p.s. I'm not responsible for the mysterious inner workings of Blogger :)
Try my trick, I always right-click and copy before attempting to post so if it fails I can just paste & re-post.
Copy my comment before posting? What a great idea! I feel so stupid for never having thought of it myself. {smacks forehead with palm of hand}
OK, so there is no sinister neocon plan to have poorly educated masses to get into an exciting life of a worker ant. :)
mama and pesu--
As the parent of girls still in school, I'd like to weigh in on the system of education we've got here. It sucks. When three months out of the academic year are spent preparing for tests that's three months less the kids are actually being taught. As a matter of fact, the entire school year is spent preparing for the tests, it just gets more intensive for three of them. My kids haven't been taught how to think, they've been trained how to answer damn test questions like rats trained to run a maze. There has been a tremendous upswing in the number of kids with reading difficulties... Why? Because they are being taught to read by memorizing the words, rather than being taught how to sound them out. Want to discuss the teachers? My daughter's Social Studies teacher taught the kids this phrase associated with the Revolutionary War... "No Taxation Without Revolution"... Yep, that's right, apparently we all learned it incorrectly cause I always thought it was "No Taxation Without Representation". She also told them the Revolution ended in 1763... that's 20 years earlier than it actually ended... There's more, but I won't continue the rant. Suffice it to say that the public education system is in a downhill death slide.
I am soooo glad mine are all grown, I went through much the same as you describe and I'm sure it's gotten worse since then.
Great example was last years Great Las Vegas search for a new district school superintendent. They upped the ante to 400K annually so they could recruit "the best". Ok, the best person to run the district in which at least 50% of his job is to lobby for more funding.
Never mind that NV had to hire temps to fill teaching positions because no teacher in their right mind was going to come here to teach for 30k or 40k annually when you can't even dream of buying a house for less than 300k. We even sent recruiters out post-Katrina to try and recruit teachers from New Orleans.
Just throw more money at administrators, that'll solve the problem, right?
Did I mention the $14.5 million new school district building we tossed in to sweeten the deal? The kids already have portable trailers for classrooms and the teachers can form communal living quarters can't they?
Put the district offices in a manufactered office building, cut the superintendant's salary in half, fire half the support staff and pay the damned teachers. Oh, and the next time we get a 4-star applicant with 20 years worth of credentials let's not send her away because we don't accept teachers who did their teaching internship at a California college that isn't on our approved list.
Why is that so complicated???
BTW, the NV bias about accepting credentials from other states, especially certain "blue" states like CA is a very real problem here.
I have 16+ years experience in forensic mental health, I can't even get an interview here.
Yep... the last principal search our school had they turned away a fabulous applicant with amazing credential and a level head cause ( although his was never admitted out loud) she was in her late fifties and they didn't want to have to implement a search again in case she decided to retire. Instead we got a guy in his early thirties, unmarried, no kids... needless to say, parental concerns don't rank real high on his empathy scale. And that's another thing... seems to me that the schools are always complaining there isn't enough parent involvement, yet when you try to get involved they call you a "helicopter parent" and , for all intents and purposes, tell you to sit down and shut up. They're the experts... the "educators"... never mind that you know your child better than anyone else on the planet... They want you involved alright, as long as it somehow involves you opening your checkbook.
Women on the Verge, you've hit the nail right on the head by saying that children are not being taught to think anymore. I thought that this problem was something that only we in the third world face, apparently education is deteriorating everywhere.
Schools are no longer institutions of knowledge that are set up to further develop the minds of tomorrow's leaders. Instead in the third world they are turning into business ventures, anyone with the financial resources can set up a private school with unqualified teachers and demand outrageous fees.
It amuses me when people wonder why the world is such a mess. Why shouldn't it be? We've let so many essential things do down the drain…
informasi yang agan sare sangat menarik sekali, semoga dapat membantu saya dan kawan2 yang lain nya. tenks.
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