Crew Has NO Business Moonlighting

I read in Willamette Weekly that Oregon Chief Education Officer Rudy Crew is thinking about "moonlighting".

Mr. Crew has no business seeking to supplement his income by engaging in work that will distract him from the job that he was hired to do in Oregon. His full attention and efforts should be given to ensure stable and adequate funding for public education in Oregon. If Mr. Crew is unwilling to do this, Governor Kitzhaber should immediately remove Mr. Crews from his position. Then the position of Chief Education Officer should be left unfilled as it was poorly conceived and unnecessary in the first place.

A Modest Proposal for Preventing American Public School Students from Being a Burden and for Making Them Beneficial to Society

Jonathan Swift, I apologize.

I want to make it clear at the outset that I am not proposing that public school children be harvested as a food source to reduce class sizes and to generate revenue to hire more teachers. 

My proposal is this:

Declare all public school students to be "enemy combatants". 

Congress will be sure to act with alacrity to appropriate hundreds of millions, nay, hundreds of billions of dollars to address this threat to homeland security by finally fully funding federally mandated educational programs.

Public education. If we value it we must pay for it.

Middle School Breakthrough

I had a breakthrough with middle schoolers while subbing today. I lost the anxiety that I've experienced in the past with this age group. Were the students different than others for whom I've subbed? No. The difference is in me. Two experiences within the last month have contributed to this. 

The first was a nine-day assignment at a high school before spring break when I had to put the Serenity Prayer into practice.* ("God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can;and wisdom to know the difference." Reinhold Niebuhr) I realized that I was not in a position to expect students to change behaviors for me if the behaviors were acceptable to the teacher for whom I was subbing even though I might dislike the behaviors. There are harmful behaviors that must be addressed. Most of the adolescent behaviors that "bug" me are not harmful.

The second experience was participation in a two-day Oregon Intervention Strategies (OIS)  training.  OIS advocates the use of positive behavior supports (PBS). PBS requires that adult educators interact with students in ways that contribute to student quality of life and that means affirming students for who they are in their "biopsychosocial" (biological, psycholological, social) development. 

Middle schoolers will be middle schoolers. I'm not going to change that. I can change how I interact with them...and I did.

*Even though I'm neither a pray-er nor a believer in a deity.