FB: Minnesota Intercollegiate Athletic Conference

[OleFan]

And to think we have not even started talking about public education yet

Are you SURE you want to open that can of worms?!

I would love to open this can of worms, the question is, does anyone else?

I will begin:
The biggest problem is people trying to reform education that do not know anything about education.  Of course part of the problem is that any vote against education is a vote against kids.  NCLB has been a failure.  It was worth a try, but now we want to try to fix the law.  Any vote against reform is a vote against children according to most voters.  I would also like to point out that charter schools are hurting public schools.  They take money away from public schools, and then fail regularly.  They might as well be for profit schools.  Standardized testing is also a problem since it tends to be biased towards certain groups.  Most schools of education are teaching philosophies that do not work in the public schools.  My biggest problem is that we are over reforming schools instead of giving the power back to local districts.  If you want to fix public education start letting the local school boards determine what students should learn.

I work for a company the develops park and recreational setting for villages and towns.  We sell a broad range of products and have an in house design staff compete with a landscape architect.  Our primary goal is to develop a plan for a community and neighborhood park and is funcitional and fun. 

One area that we get into quite a bit is new school construction.  We are often called upon to come in and meet with principals and PTO groups in regards to creating and education/functional play evnviornment.  Time and time again I pull up to these multi-million dollar buildings (which are very impressive) only to walk inside and hear a sad sad story. 

I get the tour of the school.  Compete with state of the art flash media products, learning tools, lunch rooms, athletic facilties, and music/performing arts centers.  Then I see their are for the playground.  They have a nice wide open area that is condusive to almost any possible play area.  Then they break the news of we only have 10K to spend.  I ask how many kids are in the school.  Their response is grades 1-5 we have 650 kids.  I ask how many recesses they have per day.  They respond with one 15 minute session after lunch.  They they tell me that lunch is broken into 3 shifts so that roughly 200 kids spill onto the playground after lunch. 

Ladies and gentlemen 10K does not buy you anything in my business.  It buys you enough equipment to satisfy roughly 20-30 kids at best.  Then I get into a long discuession regarding the developmental benefits of free play and how this effecting our youth.  I get into the whole deal about how ADD and ADHA are more prevlient in children today and ever before.  With all the flash media we have and all over stimulation our children are receiving at an early age, it no wonder these kids are bouncing off the walls. 

My point in this whole story is how frustrated that I get with the public school system.  The pour millions of dollars into having the best computer system and teaching aids, but they are missing the boat.  Giving children the opportunity of free play makes further strides at young ages than any computer system can ever do.  Its calms the kids down, it lets them burn the energy, it makes them feel good about themselves, and it increases concentration. 

In my elementary school days we were granted 3 trips to the playground every day weather permitting.  There was no excuse for not listening once you got back into the class.  You had plenty of opportunities to get out there and burn your energy.  This is another reason why childhood obesity is another major concern we are facing in our country today.  If you do not provide adequate recreational areas for children the less aggressive and more timid kids will stand on the sidelines.  Thus leading to more and more children not getting the proper amount of exercise per day.  Thus leading to a whole other can of worms. 

I really feel we are missing the boat on letting kids be kids.  You have your whole life the be serrious and worry about your performance.  Shouldnt we be trying to advocate our youth to be youthful and develop both through education and recreational activities?

The school I work at is trying to spend $250,000 on playground equipment.  I think that is a little excessive, but I could be wrong.  Kids need time to run.  In my opinion we are spending too much time returning to the 3Rs.  Social studies, science, PE, music, and art all take a back seat to those 3Rs.  Technology is making more of presence, and we use that to improve the 3Rs.

[OzJohnnie]

Have You Ever Seen Lorraine?

(Yes, I'm still f'ing around in order to avoid doing my expenses.  Let me ask, who suffers from my procrastination?  Yeah?  Well just because I know what I'm doing is stupid, doesn't mean I'm smart enough to do anything about it...)

[Ralph Turner]

Lots of stuff while I was away.

Mr Ypsi, you will always have haggling over what did I buy, but if everyone has their own health savings account, and there is a $20,000 deductible at the mature end, and everyone is buying the office visits and lab work and preventive health items out of the account, then most of that haggling occurs at the point of contact and stays out of an expensive bureaucracy.  Any haggling that takes place at the $20,000 mark is probably best judged in a "peer-review" quality of care level.  I would turn the management of those accounts to any group or organization that wants to handle them.  I love my USAA auto, home, life and other coverages.  Run these things as a mutual.  Let TIAA/CREF run the educators funds.  Let labor unions run them for their members.

As for NCLB and your child going to a charter school or private school, I am all for vouchers that give a certain fraction of the state-allocation for education to the parents and instill choice into the equation.  The parent/child chooses the teacher, and the teacher chooses the child/parent.  Both can leave after a set time and the teacher can negotiate a rate for his/her services.  I know that my son's calculus teacher could have pulled down twice her salary in a quasi- free market system by how good she was.  Quality teachers could earn quality/merit-based earnings and also restore autonomy to their classrooms.    With the motivation of pupil/parent to work with the teacher with whom they have selected, and a teacher to select the number and profile of kids who are intent on learning under her/him, then many of the discipline situations in the classroom would work itself out.  You would also have big breakthroughs in teachers who would set up areas of excellence by preparing only one lesson plan for those children who have specialized learning challenges.  Diagnosis and treatment of children who have learning style challenges could be treated more effectively.  Small academies for bored students would flourish.

Make getting a driver's license something that only a student in good standing can get at 16.  Otherwise make it 19.  There is much more to this system, but it will not see the light of day, because teachers' unions do not want to have that loss of control.

As for standardized competency testing in education, there is no board certified physician in America whose license has not been earned by numerous episodes of standardized competency testing.

[Ralph Turner]

An interesting opinion piece on Health Insurance

[Mr. Ypsi]

Ralph,

Very interesting piece (one of the few WSJ opinion pieces I've ever agreed with! ).  Certainly reinforces my notion that the insurance model is not the answer.

Re: your earlier post: $20,000 would be doable by you or me (I suspect more so by you than me! ), but do you have a provision for those for whom $20,000 may as well be $20 billion?  Or, more importantly, for their kids?  (Without some government component, I don't trust hospitals (or other health care providers) to be universally reasonable in their negotiated settlements.)  I'm very intrigued by the promise of HSAs, IF there are safety nets.

As to the public education debate, my older son got a good education from a 'failing' school.  My younger son has some serious problems that I am not yet prepared to address here.  In principle, I believe the American experiment in democracy owes much of its success to public eduction, and that NCLB is a noble experiment with a flawed premise and poor results, but I'm not speaking further.

[OzJohnnie]

All;

It's possible I'm not reading the pulse right, but regardless I would like to apologize to the long term denizens of the MIACPP for helping to stir up and contributing to this off-topic hornet's nest.  Here's part of a mail I sent to someone who asked why I was stopping, if you care to read it:

In the end I changed my mind about the wisdom of continuing the thread because I didn't think that UMAC comment was true, but we were well on the way to making it so, and in just a couple days.

The MIAC PP is the strongest PP board by a country mile and the UMAC comment reminded me that it was done without all the political debating.  It's done because a bunch of guys (and a couple gals) get together with a fun loving (and admittedly often juvenile) attitude toward killing some time and BS'ing.  We almost never post about football, instead we post about a lot of crap and still have a pretty good time.

JFlash, a goodly part of the soul of the board, pointed out that it was all a lot of hot gas getting shot around for our personal (potentially selfish?) gratification - and at the expense of those who didn't like it.  And then I looked at the board and saw those PP'ers that normally get 5 or 6 posts in a day had gone silent.  I noticed them logging in to have a look and then they went away without comment.  And that is the beginning of turning the MIAC board into the UMAC board.

I figure I like what the board does on it's normal days too much to threaten that with a little political debating, even if it is pretty civilized.  If PC creates another board for us to do this raging debating on, then I'm back in the game, but I don't think it is wise to do it where we were.

[janesvilleflash]

So here's something to keep people busy.

http://www.addictinggames.com/dumbasstest.html

[BDB]

So, as I reviewed my e-mail filter this morning they almost got me.

Gone are the male enhancement ads.

Filled in with Gucci watch offers and designer shoes. 

But then I spy in the mix:

Scarlett J finally in the nude...

Damn, it was hard not to open that one. 

[57Johnnie]

Scarlett J finally in the nude...

Damn, it was hard not to open that one. 

Freudian Bob 

[BDB]

Scarlett J finally in the nude...

Damn, it was hard not to open that one. 

Freudian Bob 

Let's just say that for a guy that buys his shoes at K-Mart, not opening the designer shoes junk e-mails is pretty easy for me. 

[Kilted Rat]

So here's something to keep people busy.

http://www.addictinggames.com/dumbasstest.html

Hard to believe in a "dumbass test" that uses the wrong your/you're, as in "your not a retard"[sic] which is also mildly offensive.

Here's the thing, if you're not sure whether your sentence needs to be you're, your, or yore, figure out another way of saying it unless you're sure that people won't think that your intellect is insignificant.





PS. Thanks to OxyBob for bumping me into the 1k k+ club! +k to all within striking distance!

[Rugman]

So here's something to keep people busy.

http://www.addictinggames.com/dumbasstest.html

Hard to believe in a "dumbass test" that uses the wrong your/you're, as in "your not a retard"[sic] which is also mildly offensive.

Here's the thing, if you're not sure whether your sentence needs to be you're, your, or yore, figure out another way of saying it unless you're sure that people won't think that your intellect is insignificant.

These dumb ass tests always remind me of the time my son called me up and said "Dad you have to look at this new deal on the Internet called Google Earth.  I'm looking at your apartment building from a satelite photo right now.  Of course, I said, hang on a second, I'll lean out the window and wave my arms.  Let me know if you can see it."

[Kilted Rat]

Scarlett J finally in the nude...

Damn, it was hard not to open that one. 

Freudian Bob 

Let's just say that for a guy that buys his shoes at K-Mart, not opening the designer shoes junk e-mails is pretty easy for me. 

MrsKR's family referred to that store as K-mapart  because everything they bought there usually did!

[Johnnie Red]

Time to get back to Collegeville. Had a meeting in St. Cloud Saturday morning (Minnesota Baseball Association) and then made the trip out to St. John's. Always great to be back on campus. Bought some Johnnie bread and went to the bookstore. Still plenty of snow in the area, enough for the snowmobilers to be out.

Speaking of town team baseball, the season begins in less than two weeks. Go to www.stateamateurbaseball08.com for updates on the state tourney this year.

[OzJohnnie]

So here's something to keep people busy.

http://www.addictinggames.com/dumbasstest.html

Hard to believe in a "dumbass test" that uses the wrong your/you're...

I've been staring at the dumbass test url wondering if jFlash is subtle enough to be passing a message with it.  I know it's a long shot that he is, but I still wonder.