Come Heller high water …
- A substitute teacher in Battle Creek was fired this week for using the word “vagina” in an eighth grade class discussing art history. Oh, come on. Don’t these kids get sex ed? Isn’t that word pretty much just a word to this generation? What was she supposed to use instead – lotus blossom or vajayjay? How about going the Voldemort route and saying, “The female body part that must not be named.” Yeesh. As usual, the only thing wrong with education is the grown-ups.
Maybe she should have giggled into her fingers and said, “Tee hee!” after using it. That way the kids would have known there was something shameful about it.- I don’t even like Trump and even I think it’d be grossly unfair to disenfranchise the vast majority of Republican voters who say he should be the nominee. Besides, he’s far less scary than Cruz. Like I’ve said before, Trump is mostly kidding with half the things he says he’ll do. Cruz means them.
- A Disney cruise ship this week rescued three refugees off the waters of Cuba. It took them six hours to get aboard, however, because they didn’t have a FastPass.
- President Obama said the U.S. is preparing a “shield” against North Korean missiles. I doubt that worries Kim Jong-un. What might worry him is if we threatened to unleash James Franco and Seth Rogen again to do “The Interview II.” (Jong-un and the rest of humanity: “Nooo, anything but that!”)
- The car company Mitsubishi says now it cheated on mileage ratings for decades. Wait, so my Outlander doesn’t get 120 mpg? Damn. I thought I was just using the wrong gas or something.
- A conservative Christian activist group has gained more than half a million signatures from people pledging to boycott Target over its transgender bathroom policy. Oddly enough, that’s great news for transgender people since there will now be plenty of room in the bathrooms at Target.
- As a friend said about the boycott: “Good. Now the mouth-breathers can head over to Walmart and I can get some shopping done.” Harsh but kinda true.
- One of the best comments I’ve seen about the whole transgender bathroom issue is this: “I’m fed up with idiots conflating ‘transgender’ with ‘sex offender.’” Yup.
- Prince supposedly died without a will. That seems to shock many, but I get it. Everyone should have one, but a will is admitting you’re going to die, in a sense, and that’s tough for anyone to swallow. I think some small part of us always thinks, “It can’t and won’t happen to me.”
- That was a little depressing, but still true.
- Sorry, Tyler Collins, your apology for flipping off Detroit Tigers fans fell apart when you said, “I just want you (fans) to understand that I love this team and I want to win so when we come home and get booed, it’s tough to swallow.” Badly done, son. When you blame the boos it’s not an apology at all now, is it? It’s mostly saying, “You guys made me do it.” Enjoy the Mudhens.
- Honestly, as bad as the Lions have been in the NFL draft, they should do the George, as in George Costanza from “Seinfeld,” who once decided that every decision he made was wrong, ergo the opposite must be right. That’s what the Lions should do.
- Now that spring is kinda, sorta here, I suddenly feel this need to frantically plan the summer, which of course I haven’t done yet because planning for summer in the middle of winter is hard, y’know?
- “I never dreamed about success, I worked for it.” – Estee Lauder.
While working as a substitute teacher in a nearby inner city school I wrote the N word on the board for a social studies lesson. The kids have all heard it, and read it, so it’s an important lesson. But damn if the room wasn’t bugged or something because security and admin came barging into my room and summarily dismissed me for the day and EVER from subbing in that district again. Good thing I didn’t talk about religion…
As far as the word vagina goes, there’s worse on national tv all day every day now. For instance, the commercial with the girls in bikinis trimming bushes, much less the sex situations on just about every show. Reruns at 4 pm of shows that used to be on at night.
SERIOUSLY, I have one..it is in GREY’S ANATOMY! GET REAL!
8th grade…hmmm…my guess they KNOW ALREADY, if they don’t…THEY SHOULD! Can you say TEENAGE PREGNANCY? Ignorance isn’t always bliss.
Tyler Collens should be shown the door period. No mud hens release him. What a fool. That’s part of being in pro sports. If he can’t handle it get a job like everybody else. Nobody knew for sure anyway if they were booing him or BJ Upton for booting the ball after he couldn’t see it. Remember Joe Nathan’s salute? I hope that give Collens one more start so he really knows what booing is. That will be worth the price of admission!!!
That was one advantage of the old “one room” country schools. With a bunch of farm kids, and all of the students in one room, it didn’t take long for the second graders to know what the eighth graders had picked up. A few years of that, and you had some fairly knowledgeable third graders. Today it would be hard to not use language in the class room you just heard the students using in the hallways.
Ugh! Just heard that Cruz has chosen a running mate. I thought that was unusually done after the candidate for President was nominated at the convention. And why did he choose her? So he could use Trump’s comment early in this fiasco about her.
Wake up, Cruz! Folks don’t like you, you are going nowhere. I thought you were well educated. Of course that doesn’t mean you’re smart.
As to the vagina….my four year old granddaughter knows she has one. Kids are taught to use the proper word for their genitailia.
Transgender….sex offender are worlds apart. Amazed adults don’t know the difference, these days. But e-one has to be outraged about something anymore!!?
I disagree about the vagina teacher. She was showing Georgia O’Keefe flower pictures, and those pictures really do look sort-of like vaginas. Georgia did it on purpose. The teacher said vagina half a dozen times during the class, according to a Free Press article. The teacher was teaching about sexual symbolism and such. That is a dopey lesson plan for thirteen-year-olds.
The teacher could have chosen almost any other topic in the universe of art, but she chose vaginas. If she wants to teach about symbolism, she could have taught about clouds in art, or birds, or there are plenty of other symbolic flower paintings that do not involve vaginas.
All the kids already knew the word, and it is not a bad word, but it is a loaded topic. This was a Junior High class. It is not as if she were just speaking frankly to college students or adults. (I am an adult, and I like vaginas, but I probably would not want to talk about them with this teacher.)
I can think of sassy stuff to finish off here, but I will not write it. The teacher showed bad judgement, not with her word choice, but in her topic choice.
I’m not sure if Trump truly doesn’t mean what he says but he says so many stupid things, it’s hard to equate him with an intelligent person. Personally I think both Cruz and Trump are scary.
The problem with Trump and with many of his followers is that they do not understand the process of how their party’s nomination is accomplished. During the primaries and caucuses, the voters are choosing how each state’s party’s delegates will be divvied up at the national conventions, and that divvying up is done according to each state’s party’s rules.
The additional problems in securing the Republican party’s nomination is that if Trump does not reach that coveted magic number of 1,237 secured delegates before the convention, he may only have those delegates for just the first nomination voting. After that, anything can happen. Some delegates are released from their obligation to vote for him after that first ballot and some states’ delegates that Trump thought he had can even vote for somebody else on the first ballot.
Is it fair? I can only answer that if anybody is unhappy with the nomination process of the party of their choice, then they have to get very involved at their state level within the party to try and make changes.
The most important thing to remember is that these rules have been in place long before Trump chose to run so his and his supporters’ whining is childish because all of the candidates have to follow these same rules at both the states’ and national levels.
Americans do not directly vote for a Presidential pick in the November elections; instead we vote for who the individual members of the Electoral College will later vote for President. The Electoral College process is written in stone in our Constitution.
In 1876 the Democratic nominee Samuel J. Tilden won the popular vote but the Republican nominee, Rutherford B. Hayes, won the Presidential election in a highly contested Electoral College battle.
And the same kind of thing could happen to Trump at the convention just through the strategic use of the many rules concerning the delegates’ votes by any anti-Trump movement, despite the popular votes that Trump has accrued.
I agree with you completely, Andy, concerning the stupidly Puritan firing of the teacher who used the word vagina. We HAVE to do a much better job of starting to talk with our children, whether it is in school or at home, about all of the functions of their bodies, with no shame or snickering or stuttering.
Children as young as two will point to the various parts of their body and ask us what they are called. We delight in having them learn the names for their toes, fingers, eyes, hair, etc., and since they will always point to their genitals as well, why can’t more parents simply answer, without a red face or hesitation, that that is their vagina or that is their penis.
The firing of that teacher was wrong because apparently she was only teaching what those children should have already known about, and should have been earlier taught that it is not shameful to say the words vagina or penis.
You are completely right that the only thing wrong in education is the adults, most especially the adults who are so immature that they have fainting spells when they hear about vaginas and penises.