He probably took off the mask, so he could light a cigarette.

Read "Parkinsons Law" by C Northcote Parkinson. "Work expands to fill the time available for its completion" and other gems." Old but forever timely.

Did you know that some people close their eyes when overwhelmed by noise?

Tremendously on target! I interview kids for math ability by asking, "What's 6 x 9?" The successful ones give the answer instantly.

Because I'm a confirmed Wise Guy I also ask cashiers, "Which President is on the US $10 bill?" When they say, "I don't know," I say, "Right!" I like to think that I've just shined a bit of brightness into the dull job of being a cashier.

Get those kids into working with horses. The horse has no understanding of a need to coddle imbeciles. (Also no appreciation of Royalty, as HM the Queen occasionally has discovered.)

I have had very pleasant and surprisingly adult conversations with eight-year-olds who are taking riding lessons.

The Administrative state aka deep state is the greatest danger to our nation. If action is not taken soon, we will truly loose our liberties. Getting rid of useless rules created by the bureaucrats is not enough. We have to get rid of the persons who create these rules. Write to our President and Congress and demand that this grave problem be addressed immediately. Otherwise we will have a society where we have little or no freedoms at all. This is the most pressing problem of our times.

What they have done to education is a shame.
The goal of school should be to make learning fun.
To teach how to learn. To teach how specific types of people learn, and to give them PLENTY of practice.

I tutor kids in math (I am proud that my daughter is a Published Writer and a Math person, going into accounting).
The first thing I do is find out what they are not doing, and explain what Homework should be. The parents do not even understand the math, and cannot tell if their students have done it correctly, so they just back away.

It's literally this simple to help any kid struggling in math:
1) Pre-read the section before the teacher covers the material
2) Make a list of every new word as you come across it (DO NOT lookup definitions, the list is enough)
3) Work out EVERY Example on paper. Writing the EXAMPLE for your self, step by step, organized and clean
4) Waste paper. Do not cram things on one piece. One page=One Example
5) Before Class, SCAN the list of "new words" and say each of them to yourself (like buying a new car = seeing it more)
Also, scan the examples.
6) Follow along with the teacher. YOU will get 3-5 TIMES the value out of that lecture, and stop falling behind.
7) Do EVERY homework problem on a BLANK piece of paper. Write the TYPE of problem on the top of the page. Write the problem itself (this is key for Recognition/Classification). Then write the answer, step by step. Write any insights. START on a fresh page if you screw up. Check the answer...
8) Put this away. And do something else, other homework, take a 30 minute break
9) Do your homework again. This time to turn in, or for your workbook. Do every problem again. Hopefully without peeking at your previous work.

The magic is 2 fold. 1 Being Prepared. It really helps you pay attention. 2. PRACTICE MORE. Your confidence goes up every time you do the SAME Problem over.

To study for a test, just redo ALL of the homework for the sections covered. You should be able to fly through it. Circle and flag the areas you forgot. That's an area to focus on.

My neighbor went from failing grades to scoring so high on the next test, the teacher thought he cheated. When he explained that it was really easy because 1/2 of the test was from the examples, and the other 1/2 was just like the homework, the teacher knew. I spent 2 sessions with this kid. And I did not charge them a penny. He is now on his
way to become an ENGINEER!

My degree isn't education. But if I can figure that out, and I have watched it work EVERY SINGLE TIME, why can't the schools? (Because they are there to indoctrinate, and to equalize everyone... No child gets ahead).

BTW, I don't charge. The only kids who don't improve are the ones who don't do the work. I make it easy for the parents to see that every problem is done twice. The reading list and the Examples for the next day. and when you get that call from a parent who is almost crying to say "Thank you! My daughter is in her room, SINGING while doing her math, and laughing because it is easy again!"... It warms your heart... And it breaks it too! Because this can't be accidental!


Hey, should I post a TOPIC for parents with the complete details???? comment and let me know. This is probably the one group that would gladly use it!

Never had an interest in seeing this flick until now.
My tinnitus was giving me trouble with those kids talking; but when I checked it out in my Netflix, it has English subtitles.
Yay! It's now on top of my queue and I'll likely see it next week. Hopefully, that subtitle listing isn't a lie. That happens sometimes.
Me dino also noticed there is a yet to be available School Of Rock TV show that cranked up during 2016. There's no 2017. Maybe it only lasted one season.

And with a growing push toward online education, this may actually happen. If you haven't checked out Khan Academy classes, you ought to. They are fantastic and cover a wide range of disciplines. Their math courses are especially good.

This has happened in my area as well. It's a joke and a travesty to the kids who actually have a demonstrated aptitude.

I'd love to go to more of a merit-based educational system. My son is now a sophomore in high school, but the school administration won't let him take the AP Calc exam - even though he spent last year as a freshman tutoring the Juniors and Seniors prepping for the exam for the simply BS reason that he hasn't taken the class. What is even more infuriating is that he isn't allowed - by their stupid bureaucracy - to simply test out of the lower classes (in which he is extremely bored). We've seriously considered home schooling him because the kid has a brilliant career ahead in computer science (he can already program in several languages) and at this point school is doing very little for him.

People will strive toward what motivates them. In the case of bureaucrats what motivates them is to justify their job by pretending that their decisions are important to accomplishing the goal. This can happen in business bureaucracies too. The difference is one is freely chosen and usually quickly learns to abort any activity that is destructive while the 'enforced' rules of a government continue to grow and continue to toward stupidity all the while crushing ambitious and talented individuals while claiming the right to protect them. It is the road to serfdom and America is on it and well near the end.

I was in public secondary schools in a southern border state in the fifties, when skipping grades was possible (I skipped the third) and classes were divided into "sections" or "groups" based on the innate and demonstrated differing abilities of the students. There was some discussion even I was aware of about the wisdom of this, and it was explained to parents that this was simply a way of teaching more effectively and had nothing to do with the intellect of their child (which all the kids, even in elementary school, knew was B.S.) As the years progressed, I grew a bit ashamed of my "special" status which was known by the other kids, but kept on trucking through the years. It ended in engineering school in college ge where a whole bunch of other "gifted" students made me average, to my great relief. I noticed that the "gifted" students mostly worked harder or were more dedicated or interested students, not necessarily of higher IQ's. It was an interesting time of experimentation in public schools which ended in the sixties, when that system was trashed.

One prime example of useless rules, imposed by bureaucrats: the requirement, now thankfully abolished by the Trump folks, for hybrid and electric vehicles to have artificial sound makers, so people can hear them coming. The sound made by modern, well-muffled internal combustion vehicles comes primarily by road friction from tires, and air turbulence. Electric vehicles would make the same sound, and would possibly be more noisy, thanks to the high pitched whine of the motors. Do the idiots who make up these rules even live in the real world?

The purpose of government appears to be to further the aims of government itself and its minions. Anything that might actually benefit us citizens is purely accidental.

publish his comment in the NYT, Wash. Post and all other newspapers in the country. then have the comments as the lead story on all television news media and can it go viral?

Keeping it interesting, stimulating curiosity,
Explain connections and pertinence of skills and knowledge. https://youtu.be/yMvpJDbWX_c

The problem is trying to govern natural selection In the past, the brightest students were allowed to skip a grade or two.They usually thrived on the greater challenge. But taking care of exceptional children has changed because it might make the regular kids feel inadequate.What a bunch of bull crap.I think that the entire grading system should be looked at and revised.

My daughter now teaches in the same elementary school that she attended as a gifted and talented student. Her role is to lead that same program.
It has changed, now the gifted students are no longer allowed to meet separately. The concern is the rest of the students will feel bad. The result is
to limit the expansion of knowledge for the brightest. It is one way to close a gap.

I was a mental drop-out. I put in my time and got out as soon as I could. It taught me that "achieving" was boring and the pursuit of anything else was better.

“Owing to the shape of a bell curve, the education system is geared to the mean. Unfortunately, that kind of education is virtually calculated to bore and alienate gifted minds. But instead of making exceptions where it would do the most good, the educational bureaucracy often prefers not to be bothered.

In my case, for example, much of the schooling to which I was subjected was probably worse than nothing. It consisted not of real education, but of repetition and oppressive socialization (entirely superfluous given the dose of oppression I was getting away from school). Had I been left alone, preferably with access to a good library and a minimal amount of high-quality instruction, I would at least have been free to learn without useless distractions and gratuitous indoctrination. But alas, no such luck.

Let’s try to break the problem down a bit. The education system […] is committed to a warm and fuzzy but scientifically counterfactual form of egalitarianism which attributes all intellectual differences to environmental factors rather than biology, implying that the so-called 'gifted' are just pampered brats who, unless their parents can afford private schooling, should atone for their undeserved good fortune by staying behind and enriching the classroom environments of less privileged students.

This approach may appear admirable, but its effects on our educational and intellectual standards, and all that depends on them, have already proven to be overwhelmingly negative. This clearly betrays an ulterior motive, suggesting that it has more to do with social engineering than education. There is an obvious difference between saying that poor students have all of the human dignity and basic rights of better students, and saying that there are no inherent educationally and socially relevant differences among students. The first statement makes sense, while the second does not.

The gifted population accounts for a very large part of the world’s intellectual resources. As such, they can obviously be put to better use than smoothing the ruffled feathers of average or below-average students and their parents by decorating classroom environments which prevent the gifted from learning at their natural pace. The higher we go on the scale of intellectual brilliance – and we’re not necessarily talking just about IQ – the less support is offered by the education system, yet the more likely are conceptual syntheses and grand intellectual achievements of the kind seldom produced by any group of markedly less intelligent people. In some cases, the education system is discouraging or blocking such achievements, and thus cheating humanity of their benefits.”
― Christopher Langan