I Ayn’t Gonna Work on Randy’s Farm No More

The Ayn Rand Institute has been offering free classroom sets of Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead, etc., and eternally-cash-poor schools have been snapping them up to the point that the Institute is temporarily out of Anthem and others.   

“All You Have to Do Is Teach the Book”  

the friendly Institute book request page says in an extremely appropriate blood-red font.  

As a literature teacher at one of those eternally-cash-poor schools, this Rand thing has me thinking of other possible sources for free books.  Let me think…who else out there might want to help?

• How about some L. Ron Hubbard? Note the cool Kraftwerk-era techno music.
• Whoo-boy!  Some fine folks are offering The Anarchist Cookbook online!
• Those slackers at the Church of the Sub-Genius are only offering bumperstickers and keychains.  Besides they have “church” in their title and we can’t have that.
• Getting back to things with “Philosophy” in the title, the Frederich Nietzche “Circle” has an Amazon page (and much of the work in free on Kindles)
• But we need something more Randian!  More low-brow philosophy meets high oap-opera fiction.  And without the sex, drugs and wrong style of free-thinking in Tom Robbins.  Where could we teachers possibly score free copies of such a combination outside of Ayn Rand?  Well there is the very first Google hit for “free books copies,” but we’re still talking churchy stuff here.
• Oh wait, here’s an interesting story.

The best part on the last link…

 In a column for the local paper, Wesley Scroggins wrote that Slaughterhouse-Five “contains so much profane language, it would make a sailor blush with shame. The ‘f word’ is plastered on almost every other page. The content ranges from naked men and women in cages together so that others can watch them having sex to God telling people that they better not mess with his loser, bum of a son, named Jesus Christ.”

Problem solved folks…sign this literature teacher up for as many copies of Slaughterhouse-Five as possible.  This Wesley Scroggins fellow is such a good salesman he had me at “contains.”  

 

 

Why I Live in Albuquerque, New Mexico USA

Trust me, I complain about it.  Ask my friends.  They can tell you that I’m a fairly reliable source for information about everything that’s wrong with Albuquerque and the State of New Mexico.  Truth be told, I scoffed about that 100th Anniversary of Statehood bullshit.  Bigtime.

Perhaps deservedly there…that was pretty stupid.

But let’s get serious.  I, your humble blogger, used to live in “Portlandia.”  There’s no other way to describe Olympia, Washington.  We were all strident liberals all trying to stridently out-do each other with our liberalness.  We compared and critiqued each other on our composting strategies.  We sat around the telephone cable spool-as-kitchen table and verbally battled each other on how utterly devoid of race/class/sexism we were.

Every single White, Male, Twenty-something of us.  Every single White person who almost never had an interaction with any person-of-color whatsoever.

We were so &%^*#$@ brave.

And now I’m down here in beyond-imperfect Albuquerque, New Mexico, bitching and moaning about this and that, but let me tell you.

I want you to read this story from today’s Seattle Times from beautifully perfect composting-to-a-T Emerald City, Northwest USA, and then I want you to read every single *&%^$#@ comment to the story about illegal immigrants trying to get scholarship money.

Every single one.

And then you’ll know why I live in Albuquerque, New Mexico USA.  *&^%#$@-A right.

 

 

Newly Hot For Teacher-Designate

This new school grading is so stupid. How can they give a letter grade to the efforts of an entire school?  And how can they know about our school without visiting it and seeing the specific challenges and efforts were making to meet those challenges?  This is all a political ploy to make us look bad and cast us as scapegoats for societal ills…again.  I refuse to play these politicians’ stupid game.

Oh, we got a B?   And my kid’s school got an A?

Come to think about it, I really like this new school grading system.   It’s meaningful and really shows all the hard work we’ve put in.  We deserve this B.  Look everybody, we got a B!  And my kid…his school got an A!  Whoo-hoo!  We’re #1!  We’re #1!  U.S.A.!  U.S.A.!

Now let’s go look and see which schools are worse than us.  This new grading thing is so cool.

Steve Martin as “The School Grade Jerk”

News has it the State is releasing its first A-F grades for every public school in New Mexico in coming days.  This breathtaking news has the following famous movie exchange stuck in my head (updated for topicality):

Navin R. Johnson:  The new school grades are here!  The new school grades are here!

Schooteacher:  Boy, I wish I could get that excited about nothing.

Navin:  Nothing? Are you kidding? Page 73 – Our School! We’re somebody now!  Millions of people look at these grades everyday! This is the kind of spontaneous publicity – your name in print – that makes schools. We’re in print! Things are going to start happening to our school now!

Schoolteacher:  Navin.  The grade means nothing.  Everyone knows it means nothing.  The only thing that will happen now is that everyone, knowing they are meaningless, will still complain bitterly about them and claim a conspiracy if their grade is a D or F, or jump and down and pat each other madly on the back inexplicably in celebration if given an A or B, this despite everyone’s complete understanding that the grade is meaningless. On top of that, everyone will try to see how many schools got worse grades and feel somehow superior to them, while those at schools with Fs will be subjected to show trial-esque shame and a ton of horribly boring meetings about the “crisis”.  Think Stalin, but with lots of response “*Parking Lots” and “*Plus Deltas”.

Navin:  What if the grade is a C?

Schoolteacher:  Navin, please stop.  Stop right now.

Okay, I can’t scriptwrite comedy.  Or much of anything else.  Have a good weekend everyone.  Try to sleep as best you can given the breathtaking excitement of anticipating these grades.  It’s like Christmas in Soviet Russia.  But weren’t they officially atheists?

*Sorry…very obscure teacher meeting references.

Following the Testing Monte

I can’t help but notice WordPress is now setup for shorter, Twitter-like, posts. As in…quit yammering so much.  Too much writing makes the brain hurt, don’t it?  

I don’t know if I can keep this to 140 characters, but it’ll be short.  Yesterday, I hear tell that high school sophomores will now be taking the SBAs, unlike previous years.  Evidently this news went out to high school teachers yesterday, about 60 days before testing.  

I don’t see any news reports about this change (although that could be search operator error), and perhaps this isn’t really news.  Still, it’s worth noting that we middle school teachers have been told for a few months now that testing was being cut back for us, in particular writing would no longer be tested at 6th and 7th grade, due to budget restraints. 

Communication has never been our strong suit, has it?  Thus the cutbacks in writing testing seem supremely appropriate.  Twitter über alles.