EDUCATION GETS AN 'F'....

 

EDUCATION GETS A ‘F’…

No one I know wants to go to a doctor who graduated last in their classes at medical school. The same goes for a phlebotomist whose first patient was you. If someone is taking my blood from my arm, I want the person who can do it without me feeling anything. I hate the ones I’ve gotten who have to dig around for the vein. Give me someone with experience.

Now, you and I have the option to pick our doctors and lawyers based on their experience and reputation in our community. What we don’t have is any choice in the experience and ability of a lot of things that can potentially kill or injury us by someone with little or no experience or a bad design.

Think about a bridge engineering company that wins a contract by being the lowest bidder. Their employee base could make the difference between you safely traveling from point A to point B or falling into the river with your family.

So, the question of the week is simply this…should you be graded on your merits and performance in schools or college or just advanced to the next level because you attended?

The University of Michigan announced this week that incoming freshmen will no longer receive grades for their efforts, only a ‘pass-or no-pass’ rating. This is designed to decrease the level of ‘anxiety’ which students may feel by having to actually put more effort into their studies.

In Oregon, the governor eliminated any grading for proficiency in reading, writing or math. In other words, just pass them with a diploma without checking to see if they are ready to face the real world.

The University of California at Berkeley has just issued a report that students enrolled in college calculus classes cannot keep up with the lessons and perform middle school algebra and fraction problems. The report states these students are 5 to 8 years behind what is required.

In recent reports, the teachers in New York City were reported as ‘98% effective’ while over 43% of their students were failing. How can these numbers make any sense? New Yok City spends more per student annually than any other school system in the country and still has almost half of their students failing. Whose fault is this? Who will actually hire a student who cannot read or write?

When I went to school (back in the Dark Ages) my teachers wielded a mighty red pen. Some of my papers actually looked as if they might bleed to death. I flunked Geometry II my senior year and had to go to summer school in order to graduate. My teachers were not very sympathetic to my pleas about my shame and that I had already sent out graduation invitations. They were totally immune to my description of the loss of my deposit for my cap and gown. I was probably traumatized for life but I was unaware that a high school student could actually be traumatized.

Nope, I had failed the class, pure and simple. No consideration, go directly to summer school, don’t pass Go. It’s on you and you didn’t study hard enough. Learn from this event.

Today, it seems as if a kid wants to believe that 2+2=5, then bully for them and how brave they are to ‘express’ themselves. Never mind that in the real world, the answer is 4, not whatever you want it to be. Trust me the kids in China know the answer and it is not 5.

Elementary, high schools, colleges and universities are supposed to be facilities to teach us the basic fundamentals for us to survive once we enter the ‘real’ world.  If you are allowed to graduate without learning to read or write, what are your chances of success once you seek employment? No real company with responsibilities to their clients and customers can afford to hire you for a job if your production could ultimately affect someone’s life. Remember the bridge example.

Now, you may obtain a job in which your career effort is nebulous with a lot of latitude for interpretation such as teaching psychology, but how important is math if you are designing that bridge or English if you are writing a book? you can’t just throw numbers or words around without any form or effort and have it be taken seriously.

And to develop that form and effort, you need what? Practice.

And how do you judge your level of achievement in practice?

By grading your effort.

You want to be a major league baseball player? You had to start playing and practicing almost from the time you could walk. Those hours of practice might lead you to a scholarship and a minor league farm team and if you are good enough, then possibly onto the majors.

I’m sure there are some natural piano payers, but most of the ones I’ve known spent hours practicing. Actually, hours and years.

So, the question is are you helping or hurting kids by telling them the truth about their efforts by grading them and requiring some level of proficiency? Or do you harm them by ignoring their lack of knowledge at a level consistent with their age?

In high school, I knew I had not prepared and studied my geometry lessons, I deserved to fail.

If we shield our children from the valleys of failure, how can they ever learn to appreciate the efforts needed for the mountains of success?

See you next week…Peary Perry

 

RETIREMENT...????

 

Retirement ……?

One of the questions I hear most frequently is ‘what do you do all day?’…

I have a lot of friends who must stay bored when they retired. Not me, I get up at 5:30 am and go to bed at 10pm and am busy all day, every day.

Once you leave the money-making rat race and get to enjoy life, you will find more than you imagined to keep you busy. When you were working you hardly had any spare time to indulge yourself with something fun, didn’t you?

We were too busy trying to get ahead. Bigger house, better car, new schools for our kids…go..go…go…never stop. Always something more to do before we rested. We all thought it would stop at some point. Trying to make our kids lives a better than we had when we were young. We never even realized the vicious treadmill of life we were on for so many years.

Then one day, for some of us, it stopped, just like that. For those of us that it happened to, we are most blessed and fortunate. I only wish all of us could get this get this experience.

Some of us take up golf…not me, I suck at golfing.

Some others take up fishing, not me, I’m a terrible fisherman.

Tried wood carving…nope, not for me.

I think the problem for me is that my mind is still moving at the warp speed zone of the business world while I am now living in the school speed zone of being retired. My mind is at odds with itself. Think about it, I started working at 14 years old and quit at 82….that’s 68 years of employment with routines and responsibilities. Now, you must mentally adjust to a lifestyle that had you racing along a plateau very quickly and then falling off a cliff into soft clover. You aren’t hurt or shocked, just confused without any direction or guidance except yourself.

It is much harder than you think. Some folks can’t handle it and go back to work. Some give up and complain about not having any friends or purpose. They descend into depression because of their lack of mobility or economics or they are just plain tired out after so many years of struggles.

May I humbly suggest that you deal with the realities of your older years. First, your friend base is shrinking due to deaths or folks moving away. None of us can do the things we did when we were in our 20’s. my body might be 84,  but my mind is still chugging along about age 12.   

The reason I failed at golf, fishing, and wood carving is simple.

I didn’t practice nor did I take the time to learn about any of these to the extent where I was successful.

Now, I have time. Now I am going to learn how to get proficient at something. It takes time. Time I never had until now. Now there isn’t any excuses for failure. I can try, I can fail and I can try again, until I get it right.

I am going to learn how to grow things , like plants and flowers. There is a lot to learn and a plethora of information on what to do and not to do. I can do this. I must do this if I want to survive and keep from getting stale in these remaining years.

You can too, pick something, learn about it. If you don’t like it, try something new. No one is grading you at this point in our lives, are they? Experience curiosity again. Get those long dormant juices flowing. Find a solution to some part of the problem or some hobby. It will be good for you.

Remember, life isn’t about avoiding the storm, it’s about learning to dance in the rain.

You might not have done so in the past, do it now.

See you next week..Peary Perry

 

Ps…pass this along to your parents or grandparents…

 

RANT #14

 

RANT #14…

Today the United States Post Office announced another rate increase. Now postage is going to cost us at least .82 per envelope. This is to offset an estimated 7 billion dollar deficient for the coming year, or was it 10 billion? My question is….why don’t they just go ahead and make it $1.00 and then they might stop increasing the rates almost annually? We all know they can never be profitable and will never be able to operate without a subsidy every year. Just get it over with and leave us alone for a year or so. No one uses the mail anymore anyway except for politicians and the Crate and Barrel and the Signal catalog people. I could do without those without any problem, especially the politicians. The Signal catalog has some cute things every once in a while, keep it coming.

Enough about the good old USPS, I’ll do more next January when my annual rant comes out. I’m usually good for about 6 months on them before I find something to gripe about. However, in all fairness, who could actually put a letter in an envelope and transport it across the entire country for just $.82? No one could, but since it’s a free country (at least for now) I can still pick on them from time to time.

This week I’d like to focus our attention on things that we are told but cannot do anything about. My question is….why are we told about it in the first place? Do we care or do we want to care? Or more importantly, do we need to care?

For example, the other day I was reading that the earth’s axis had shifted about 3 inches as a result of earthquakes. This also had an effect upon the length of a day and our time had been shortened by about 1.27 microseconds over the course of 1 million years. If you are like me, I’m certain this news is going to ruin your day. Just think about it for a second….on the other hand forget what I told you, who cares? It isn’t like you and I will lose any sleep over this information. What I’d like to know is just who tracks this kind of stuff and why? Did someone go to school to become an expert on the position of the center of the earth? If so what school? Who would hire anyone for this and what would they get paid? Better yet, why would they get paid? Why is this important to anyone? I bet there is a government grant of some sort keeping up with this stuff. No, forget those questions, I don’t want to know.

On the other hand, we have the daily recall information. Or perhaps I should say the daily auto recall information for just about any make and model automobile. In my opinion you’d be better off driving a used anything than a new something. It seems to be brakes today and engines yesterday. You could spend most of your waking life driving back and forth to the dealer just to get the necessary repairs. You must also take into consideration that the days are getting shorter as I mentioned earlier, so you don’t have as much time to waste on repairs. Think about it.

Got a cell phone? I’ll give you something to think about. Try tumors for your brain. Do cell phones cause tumors? Who knows? It seems they do in mice, but I have a hard time visualizing mice making many cell phone calls. Who could they call and what would they talk about if they could call? It isn’t like they could make any plans to travel or go fishing or skydiving, is there? These are things we don’t need in our brains.

So, is coffee good for us or bad for us? One day it is and the next day it’s terrible. On Monday 1 cup is good, on Tuesday 3 cups is better and on Friday any cup at all will cause your liver to petrify. I drink it anyway and so that probably puts me in the rebel category, but then again, I use a cell phone, so I guess my life is going downhill in a hurry. As far as global warming is concerned, I’m all for it. Or maybe I’m against it…I can’t seem to remember from one day to the next which way I should position myself. I do know that I have cut back on my carbon footprint by making sun tea instead of using the stove. I tried baking biscuits on the hood of my car, but I found it took more than four hours, and I was missing a lot of work. So much for that idea. They also fall off when you are driving over 25 miles per hour. If you go any slower, people get really agitated on the freeway and honk and wave their fingers at you in a strange way. They also yell and mumble things about your parents.

Don’t even get me started about microwaves, you can find over 200,000 articles about their dangers or safety. I just know that I should not put live things inside of them and I don’t stand in front of them for hours at a time. I figure that’s being cautious enough. Of course, I don’t stand in front of anything for hours at a time, so that’s not much of a stretch for me. Who watches things getting cooked in a microwave anyway? If you do, you need a hobby of some sort.

If, you are in your twenties, then I guess it’s ok to worry about these things, you still have lots of room in your head for useless things. But after you get to be my age you start to consider all of that useless information you have put into your brain over the past years and wonder if you have a lot of room left for any new stuff. Putting something new into a brain as old as mine is dangerous since it could push something out that I needed. Perhaps some of those people who are found wandering outside of a nursing home got that way because they read about mice getting tumors from cell phones and then lost their memory of how to get home? It’s possible, isn’t it?

Personally, I think anything relating to the post office or the location of the earth’s axis falls in the category of stuff I don’t need to know about. I can’t do anything about either one, neither can you.

See you next week…Peary Perry

IS YOUR C\GLASS HALF FULL OR??

 

IS YOUR GLASS HALF FULL OR ?

I have a friend that grew up very differently from myself. He is black and I am white. I grew up in the 40’s and 50’s in Texas. I worked with black men at various jobs but each of us ignored each other. When I was in the army, I roomed with a black guy from Louisiana and we both discovered we had more in common with each other than we had differences.

I cannot identify with my current friend as I have not had his experiences. I do not know what kind of problems he has suffered due to his skin color. I can only recall once or twice in my entire life where I felt unwanted because of my white skin. I do admit that a white kid in the 60’s had a better shot at various things than a black kid in the same era. I am not, nor have I ever been a racist unlike my parents.

I have raised my sons to appreciate people for their character not their status or skin color. I am proud to say that I have many friends of various nationalities, religions and cultures that I am glad to know. I have been in a number of prisons with church groups, and I have the same problem with convicted people. I don’t know the reason they were there or their circumstances. What advantage did I have that they didn’t? I’ve never been convicted and had to suffer all that conflict or the cause of their conflict and issues with society.

I have had very few people in my life who encouraged me or tried to help me. My parents were certainly not there for me; they were divorced as soon as I left to go to Korea for the army. The FBI told me about it when I turned in the paperwork to go to OCS. I don’t think we were ever close.

All this to say, life is hard. Mankind is hard. Humans have had conflicts and inequality since the beginning of time. There have been wars since the dawn of time. Countries invade other countries and cause changes that affect everyone. There isn’t any country or society in history that has been perfect. Power, envy and jealousy are the corruptors of all mankind in every society that has existed or exists at this time. If there is any country in which this doesn’t exist, I certainly don’t know about it.

All countries and all civilizations have made mistakes. We have all made mistakes. Slavery was a mistake. Lots of things have needed correction throughout the years. But we have made progress over the past 250 years. We let women vote and own property. We passed multiple civil rights acts. We still have a long way to go. The system obviously needs tweaking and adjusting as the years go by. It seems frustrating and slow, but we are a civilization of some 350 million people with different experiences and different viewpoints from each other. Ever serve on a committee and try to get something agreed to the first time? Then you know what I mean.

We all know the problems; there isn’t any sense in repeating them over and over. There is error, misjustice, unfairness, prejudice and bias on all sides of the political spectrum. We are all the sum of our own experiences along with our successes and our failures. We have to live with ourselves and the decisions both good and bad that we have made in our lives. Did we help or hurt more people throughout our years? Those are the kinds of thoughts that should concern us in our days ahead.

I prefer to look at the glass as half full and see the positive side of life. Just look at these monumental events that have happened in our world in the past 150 years or so:

Wright brothers first flight- 1903

Woman’s suffrage- 1920

End of World War II- 1945

First organ transplant- 1954

Civil rights act- 1964

Man on the moon- 1969

DNA discovered- 1953

Berlin wall comes down- 1989

Insulin discovered – 1921

UN created- 1945

Polio vaccine discovered – 1955

We can play the blame game all day and night long with each other and either side has both good and bad points of view. I choose to look at the positive sides of our world and try to communicate with those who don’t see things the same way that I do. Unfortunately, the media of today operates on a mantra of “if it bleeds, it reads”. So, the more blood, gore, sex, and negative information that can be put out there, the more their advertisers are seen. The more discord there is, the more attention it draws to the source.  Follow the money, see for yourself.

I believe we all have more in common than we have differences so I will not refuse to discuss with those with opposite opinions. I think talking about all sides is healthy and good for all parties.

Having only one side and refusing to consider any other points of view is counterproductive in my humble opinion.

See you next week. Subscribe today….it’s free…Peary Perry