Teacher Training

    There has been a lot of criticism of American Schools, K thru 12 and college.  Some things we ought to keep in mind.  The Catholics run very good parochial schools at very reasonable costs.  We sent our three children to parochial schools and the experience was good.  The public schools should take notes.

   I did Framingham public school up thru 9^th grade and then Westtown Friends School and then college and finally the Air Force.  I had pretty good teachers all the way.  There were a couple of duds, Miss Waters and Miss Coyne, but the rest were all fair to very good.  But the best teachers I had in all that time were in the Air Force.  USAF ran Field Training Detachments (FTD) to teach aircraft maintenance, airborne radar, jet engines, fire control, guided missiles, instruments, electrical systems, lots of good stuff.  The teachers of this stuff were really good.  They were just flight line mechanics, pulled right off the flight line and run thru a three week “How to teach FTD” course.  None of them had ever been to college.  But they were good.  They knew their stuff, backward and forward. Their classes were all teenage boys, who could be troublesome.  The FTD instructors never had any trouble with student discipline.  The students all knew they had to pass the FTD courses in order to get promoted from apprentices to journeymen, so an instructor’s invitation to a troublesome student to leave the class was effective.  

   My take away from the Air Force was two things.  The students had to know the material was essential, and the teacher had to know the material cold. 

   Which to my mind means prospective teachers ought to major in stuff they need to teach, like English, history, mathematics, foreign language, physics, chemistry, biology?  Not “education”.  My college roommate wanted to teach after graduation so he majored in “education”.  He told me it was the most worthless, boring major imaginable, and he only put up with it to get a job teaching in the public schools.  After watching the FTD instructors do a super job with just a three week “How to be an FTD instructor” course I can believe that. 

  American education would be better if we scrapped the “education” major entirely.  

Moskva, Russian Black Sea flagship sinks.

   Russians lost a nice big modern cruiser, Moskva, in the Black Sea.  The Ukrainians claim to have hit Moskva with two cruise missiles.  The Russians talk about an on board fire setting off some ship’s ammunition.  The Russians just don’t say how that fire got started, so it could have been Ukrainian missiles.  The ‘Merkins are saying they lack evidence that missiles were used.  Not very helpful to the cause of Ukraine.  We would have done better to say nothing. 

   Pictures of Moskva show a very handsome heavy cruiser; the sort of ship a Navy will build when they cannot afford air craft carriers and the air wing a carrier needs to be battle worthy rather than being just a target. Our latest carrier cost $10-12 billion, and the air wing maybe another $4-5 billion.  I notice that Moskva, in addition to a substantial missile armament also carried a nice big battery of guns.  Modern US Navy ships only carry a single little wimpy 3 inch gun. 

   Anyway you slice it, accident or Ukrainian missiles, the Russians have lost the flagship of their Black Sea fleet.  All the TV newsies agree that this has hurt the Russians. 

FAA asks for modest 3.5% budget increase for 2023

    Considering the 8.5% Biden inflation loose in the land, a 3.5% funding boost is very modest.  Total budget request is $18.8 billion, which includes the big stick of the Air Traffic Control operation budgeted for $11.9 billion.  I have no idea how many air traffic controllers FAA employs or how much they get paid.   

   After the 737 MAX disasters, two deadly crashes within months of the aircraft’s release, FAA, prodded by Congress, is tightening up its certification and safety oversight operation by adding 57 new employees.  Too bad the Boeing suits pressured Boeing engineering into the 737 MAX disasters; they have raised costs thru out the industry thru more FAA required paperwork and more inspections. 

Biden going after guns instead of criminals

    Biden was on TV this afternoon, complaining about guns with no serial numbers (ghost guns he called them).  I don’t see the point.  We need to find, arrest, try, and convict the criminal, not the gun.  No point in investigating the gun, convicting the gun is meaningless.  Apparently you can now buy kit guns, mostly plastic.  The kits lack serial numbers.  The ones shown on TV look all sorts of rough and crude.  According to Biden, the lack of serial numbers is just awful, he didn’t spell out his specific objections, he just thought it was awful.  I got news for Biden.  A few minutes with a Dremel will take the serial number off of anything. 

Dune 2021

   It came in today after a long wait.  It only covers the first half of the Frank Herbert novel.  It brings the story up thru Paul’s duel with Jamis, and meeting Chani.  I assume if this one gets good box office, they will do another one (or two) to bring the story to the end.  None of the names in the cast meant anything to me.  Paul Atreides looks like a skinny teenager, but tall. Looks to be about 19.   

   In the book Bene Gesserit Mother Moheim asks Jessica “is he not small for his age?”  Jessica replies that Paul is only 15 and Atreides are late gaining full size and strength.  Paul has a shaggy wavy haircut that is always falling in his eyes.  I would think a warrior prince, trained by the likes of Gurney Halleck, Thufir Hawat, Duncan Idaho, and Duke Leto would have adopted a shorter military hair style that was not so long as to allow his opponent in hand to hand combat grab his hair and tug on it.  Jessica comes across as awfully short, shorter than Paul where as Paul’s mother ought to be a bit taller than Paul.  She has a very plain face that makes me wonder why Duke Leto saw anything in her.  The Harkonnens, Duke Vladimir, Beast Rabban, and Feyd Ratha all look adequately villainous. 

   Few names are ever mentioned.  I am an old fan of Dune; I bought the hardback when it came out back in 1967.  I was able to figure out who was who, and remember some of the back story of each character, but if you have not read the book, you will find the movie confusing.  The plot pretty much follows the book. 

US Air Force asking for some strange things for 2023

 The Air Force wants to retire a bunch of aircraft.  21 A10’s, 33 F22 interceptors, 8 E3 Sentries, and some other stuff, total 150 aircraft to be “retired” otherwise known as “scrapped”.  The A10’s will be missed.  They are the only aircraft in the inventory that can fly low enough and slow enough for the pilots to see ground targets, like tanks, and then hit them.  The supersonic jet fighters are not good for this.  The Air Force is run by fighter pilots.  They all worry about what it would be like flying an A10 and get bounced by Migs.  Answer, you supply fighter escort to your bombers.  This was the lesson of WWII.  The fighter pilots seem have forgotten it. 

   The 33 F22 interceptors is a long and sad story.  The F22 is a very hot air-to-air interceptor.  Numerous writers, in Aviation Week and other places claim that one F22 can beat 4 or 5 of any other kind of fighter.  The original F22 program planned to build 400-500 of them.  They were expensive; the last and cheapest batch was still $80 million a plane.  The defense secretary back a few years ago decided that was too expensive and canceled the program at 182 aircraft. Now they want to scrap nearly 20% of the not very big force.  Back in the Viet Nam war my fighter wing lost 90 fighters in as many days.  Keeps that loss rate going and in 6 months we won’t have any F22s left. 

   The E3 Sentries are better known as Airborne Warning and Control AWACs for short.  An AWACs will warn our aircraft away from enemy fighters and vector our fighters onto the enemy.  They are in high demand all over the world.  Especially for a war against a first world enemy that has a real air force.  They are not so necessary going up against a third world power that lacks an air force. Which is the kind of enemy we have been engaging for many a year.

Colleges can cut expenses, a lot.

 Colleges could have students do the lighter work around campus, rake the leaves, shovel the snow, mow the grass, sweep the halls and classrooms, wash the dishes, set the tables, help in the kitchen.  We used to do that at my old high school, Westtown Friends School.  It worked out fine.  Westtown started the system during WWII when they could not hire anyone.  Each “work job” only took about an hour a day of student’s time.  With students doing a lot of the work, the buildings and grounds employees could be reduced to a whisper. 

  Colleges could get rid of all the “administrators”.  These employees don’t teach, they do nothing to educate students, but they all draw six figure salaries.  I have read that some colleges have as many administrators as professors.  I suppose administrators do various sorts of paperwork.  Should some agency demand that their paper work be turned in on time, the college should mail them a nice form letter saying “we are working on it” as politely and vaguely as possible.  The only paper work that has to be accomplished is report cards (a faculty responsibility) and the college catalog listing all the courses, their times, and the credits and courses required for graduation in all of the different majors.