The US needs to totally revise teacher training.

Today to get teacher certification you have to have taken the Education major in college.  No other major need apply.  If you have not majored in Education you don’t know how to teach.  Thus saith the Ed majors who run the teacher certification process.

Trouble, they are wrong.  There is no magic knowledge in teaching.  Successful teaching calls for the teacher to establish a trusting relationship with the student, in fact all the students in the class, and know the subject they are teaching.  The education major does not teach this. 

 My college roommate wanted to teach school so he took the education major.  He told me it was the most useless and boring stuff he had ever suffered thru.  And my roommate was a sharp guy, if there were anything worth learning in the Education major he would have found it.  Essentially there is no real content in the education major, and they rehashed nothing, over and over again.  Junior and senior year, education courses met twice a day. 

  I have had a lot of teachers over the years.  Mostly good, many very good, a couple of dud’s (Miss Coyne and Mrs. Waters) but in general a pretty good bunch.  The absolute best teachers I ever had were in the US Air Force.  These guys were just enlisted men, pulled right off the flight line and set to teaching in the Field Training Detachment.  They were extremely good; they knew their subject matter backward and forward.  They maintained order in class rooms full if 18 and 19 year olds, the prime age for making trouble.   None of them had gone to college, let alone taken the education major.  My takeaway from this experience is successful teachers know their stuff and develop rapport with their students. 

  For US education I would first abolish certification of teachers.  Let the principal and the faculty at the school look at resumes and interview candidates and hire the ones that seem good.  Allow them to lay off new teachers that are not working out without doing a bunch of paperwork.   Look for college majors in subjects that they will be teaching, English, mathematics, US history, French, Spanish, physics, chemistry, and not wasting time on the Education major that has nothing to teach anyone.  

 

 

Fourth Amendment

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Trump’s lawyers are talking lawsuit against DOJ over the Mar-a-Lago raid.  I think they have a case.  No one is secure if DOJ can send 30 FBI agents to paw thru everything in the house.  I hear that the language used to describe things to be seized was so broad as to cover everything in the house, the garage, the pool, and the women’s bedrooms.

Alec Baldwin and shooting his camera woman.

 I assume it was an accident.  I don’t know any of the principles personally but I don’t think they are the kind of people who would commit murder. 

The TV news has talked and talked about the shooting that resulted in the death of the camera woman.  What really happened is Alec didn’t know, or didn’t bother with, the first and simplest rule of firearms safety.  Namely ALWAYS check that the gun is NOT loaded when you pick it up.  Open the action, remove the magazine and look in the chamber to make sure no live round is lurking therein.  The gun in question I believe was an 1873 Colt .45 single action Army revolver, the kind that loads the cylinder one round at a time thru a loading gate.  This means when Alec picked up this gun, he had to check all six positions of the cylinder, one by one for being empty.  A little tedious.  In this case, the check was not made either because Alec was ignorant of gun safety rules, or he found the check too tedious to bother with.

   This makes the shooting of his camera woman an accident, but it is Alec Baldwin’s accident.  

How to Teach Children to read.

 The Phonics method works.  We teach the children the sounds of each letter.  This is not hard after the children learn to sing the Alphabet Song in kindergarten.  And learn the rules about long and short vowels.  And learn the more common digraphs like “th”.  Teach them that long words can be broken down into syllables. Each syllable starts with a consonant, has a vowel in the middle and a consonant on the end.  Sound out the syllables, one by one, and then say them in order and you have the word.  There are only 26 letters in the alphabet, that and the other stuff is probably less than 50 things the child has to learn by heart.  And with them, the child is equipped to handle new words, something that happens a lot when the child is just learning to read.

 

The Whole Word method is popular with Ed majors, but it does not work.  It cannot be taught.  The child is taught to look at the whole word.  If he/she is lucky, the mind will recognize the word and the child will know how to pronounce the word, what it means, connotations and denotations.  If the mind fails to recognize the whole word, the child is out of luck, the word is meaningless.  Whole word requires the child to learn by heart a lot more than just 26 letters and some other stuff.  The King James Bible is noted for restricting itself to a vocabulary of only 850 words.  Whole word requires memorizing at least 850 words and probably a lot more.  That is a lot harder for a child to do than Phonics. 

 

   Whole Word is what skilled readers do.  I picked it up by fourth grade.  It just came to me after doing some reading.  Some people, like my best friend, don’t have it by high school.  Best friend was plenty smart, he graduated with a degree in mechanical engineering and went to work computing the intensity of the sound fields around the Saturn V engines.  NASA wanted to know if the sound from 27 rocket engines, all firing at once, would be enough to crack the concrete on the launching site.  Senior year in high school, best friend went out for tutoring in reading, and came back able to read Whole Word method.  He was lucky, and bright, and supported by loving parents, and attending a top notch private high school with me. 

The big Tent Sale, Littleton NH.

Word got around.  The tent was supposed to open at 9 AM this Saturday.  I got there a few minutes after nine.  The place was already packed with people who got there before nine.  The stuff was mostly house wares, rugs, books, sports equipment like ice skates and golf clubs.  I didn’t see any tools.   There was a nice brass set of fireplace tools.  I have a fireplace.  I though long and hard about buying them.  On the down side, my hearth is small and mostly full of firewood.  The nice brass tools would probably get knocked off the hearth, onto the living room rug.  On the other hand they would look cool.  I sat in a chair to rest my feet and contemplate the fire tools.  After some agonizing I decided not to buy them.  I did get away with a Donald Hamilton paperback,  a Wallace and Grommit VHS tape, a couple of whisky drinking glasses, and two nice woven scrap baskets that will replace my existing ones which are 60 years old and falling to pieces.  Much nicer than the extruded plastic scrap baskets down at Wally Mart.  After an hour the crowd thinned out.  Word to the wise, if you want to get anything nice as a yard sale, best to get there early.

 

Wall St Journal reports Chinese students in US colleges down 50%

 This is too bad.  American college is fun to do, girls, parties, sports, dorm bull sessions, and more.  Any Chinese exchange student will leave for home with a nice warm feeling about America after doing four years of college here.  And, it is a good bet that any Chinese who can swing an American college deal will in later life become an important official in China.  Which has gotta be a good thing for us.  Plus the Chinese students bring money; say $100,000 for a four year college. 

I will pay a bit more for a product marked "Made in USA"

 Used to be, nearly every thing in stores was marked "Made in USA".  Not any more.  Take a walk thru Walmart and everything is marked "Made in China" or unmarked which I figure means the same thing. Japan and Korea are selling as many cars as Detroit.  Me, I still drive a Made in USA Buick and would buy Made in USA product even if it cost a bit more.