Does anyone still believe that the unions have the best
interests of the City of Gilroy at heart?
Does anyone still believe that the unions have the best interests of the City of Gilroy at heart? The city spent years hearing arguments and reviewing multiple environmental impact statements before deciding to let Wal-Mart build their Supercenter.
Now the unions have filed a lawsuit alleging that the city did not adequately review the EIRs. This lawsuit is not merely frivolous. This lawsuit is a temper tantrum. This lawsuit is the unions throwing their weight around, at the expense and to the detriment of the city as a whole. This lawsuit illustrates that the unions care only about money, power, and having it all their way.
* * *
Anne laughed in disbelief when she saw the photos of the shaved heads of Mount Madonna Continuation School staff.
“Why do they have to shave their heads just to get the kids to take their tests?” she asked.
Anne has mastered the First Basic Rule of Homeschooling: Do Thy Chores and Lessons. Or as Mount Madonna Principal John Perales puts it, “I was brought up where you do what’s expected of you and you don’t get a reward.”
Or, as Thomas Huxley put it, “Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not; it is the first lesson that ought to be learned; and however early a man’s training begins, it is probably the last lesson that he learns thoroughly.”
Anne has never had to take a meaningless test. Every test she has ever taken, including the Algebra II final her class is working on as I write, has been to demonstrate her mastery of skills and knowledge.
When she passes this final, she will be allowed to study trigonometry next year. When she passed her oral, written, and physical tests in broadsword, she acquired the rank of scholar in her class.
When she passed the California High School Proficiency Examination last year, she acquired a certificate that is, in California, the legal equivalent of a high school diploma. (She also got bragging rights: Nick passed the CHSPE at age 14 and Oliver at 13. She passed it a month before her 13th birthday, purely to beat her brothers’ records. She is cutthroat competitive, when she has a chance.)
But she has never taken a test that didn’t have an intrinsic award, nor one that is used solely to judge her school’s performance.
The students of Mount Madonna, indeed, the public school students of California, receive no individual benefit from taking the current series of standardized tests. Consequently, the staff has had to resort to a major gimmick to even get them to attend.
I am ambivalent about such gimmicks, and so is John Perales, as evidenced by his remarks. I applaud him and his staff for setting aside their ambivalence and doing what they needed to do to get the students to attend for testing. That shows that they have mastered Huxley’s first lesson.
Student Tamaya Duenas is quoted as saying that she made it to class every day on time for testing, but that, “I usually come after 9 a.m. sometimes.” Unless she is spending her tardy and truant hours reading “War and Peace” and solving quadratic equations, she would probably be learning more from attending school during regular class days.
Will she ever learn to do what she needs to do even when the payoff is not immediately obvious? Or will she always require bread and circuses to be motivated? GUSD has some difficult problems to solve.
* * *
Mr. Wayne Scott is correct on one point: I should not have used quotation marks when I paraphrased his remarks as, “If you don’t like what we are doing, then teach.”
However, what he actually said was: “Mr. Meier and others … should apply their word processors to GUSD applications. … Become part of the solution – teach.” He did not just say, “Don’t just tell me how, show me how.”
My paraphrase was at least accurate. Your quotation was a lie by omission, Mr. Scott. Do you pull tricks like that on your hapless math students?
