COVID-19 and us — 6.12.20

A Few, Not So Random, Thoughts on COVID-19, the Police and School

Yes, I’m going to keep wearing my mask while I’m in public and around people. If I get seriously ill, my wife is in trouble because her health issues mandate 24-hour care. If she gets gets COVID-19, she probably won’t survive.

This summer, we stay home and wear a mask in public. And, if you don’t wear one, STAY AWAY!

The Police

I believe that the police, or someone who performs their functions, are a necessary evil.

Given the above, de-funding the police will not accomplish anything positive. Are reforms necessary? Yes, most certainly.

What Reforms?

I’d like to propose two reforms.

First, there is a need to better screen those we recruit and train to be members of our police departments. We need to make sure that those who become policemen, and policewomen, are primarily, if not exclusively, interested in helping people. Those who, for whatever reasons, need to bully people must be weeded out. We must screen out those who are inclined to throw around their authority and hide behind its badge and who lie to cover up their mistakes.

Think lying is not a problem facing our police departments? Look first at the videos currently circulating on the internet, and then think of how many times your friends complained about a run-in with the police in which they claimed the police lied about what they did. (I would imagine most of us know someone who was given a traffic ticket they didn’t deserve because the traffic cop lied. Maybe, it’s happened to you. Did the cop actually lie? If the cop lied about something small like a u-turn, missed stop sign, unsafe lane change, what would stop him/her from lying about an assault or firing a weapon?)

We need honest police who believe that violence is a last resort, not a first response.

Two

Second, we must de-militarize our police departments. Police departments are not armies and police are not soldiers. The primary purpose of the police is to protect a community and its people. The primary purpose of an army is to, using extreme violence, destroy an opposing army.

When a police department becomes an army, the people it is supposed to protect become the enemy. If you doubt this, look at any recent, or not so recent, video of police behavior at rallies in which people are exercising their rights to assemble and protest. Yes, like the right to bear arms, the right to protest is a right protected by the U.S. Constitution.

And, maybe, we should give the police a chance to become members of the community they are hired to protect. How about we subsidize their purchase of housing in the cities they work. Beginning officers aren’t going to be able to afford to live in high priced cities like San Francisco or Newport Beach. If they lived among those they policed, might they better identify with those they came into contact with? And, again maybe, have them park their cars and walk around the neighborhoods they patrol. Once or twice (or, maybe, more often) a year knock on people’s doors, introduce themselves and ask about the community. Make the police us and not them.

School

Ghads, the more I think about making schools ready for the 2020-2021 school year, the more I want to laugh or cry.

Social distancing? Take a class of forty students and set it up for social distancing and you have a class of fewer than twenty. If you give teachers the same 240 students, they must now teach twelve classes. (No, this is not a fantasy. During most of my forty year career, my classes had 35-40 students and I taught six classes each day.)

More classes? Or, shorter classes but teachers are still responsible for students learning the same material? Students coming to school every other day? On-line school on the other days?

Do you know any teachers who are looking forward to teaching under COVID-19 conditions next year? How about, do you know any teachers who have just retired and are breathing a sigh of extreme relief?

How about, do you know any teachers who are considering early retirement because they, belatedly, see what is coming?

Remember, the economy tanked and tax receipts will be down, school budgets will be down; teachers will get fewer supplies and salaries and benefits may, will, be re-negotiated.

More work, lower salary — they all have college degrees; do you think many of them may look for work in some other profession?

Can you imagine being a newbie, first-year teacher, just beginning his or her career under these conditions? I can and still cannot decide whether to laugh or cry.

California State Department of Education

Cal-Ed recently published a guide on how to open schools in the Age of COVID-19. What’s in it? A lot of educational and bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo. Don’t believe me? Read it yourself.

In essence it says local districts are responsible for everything, reasonably practical or not, with no realistic how-tos.

Typical response like Donald John: I take no responsibility; handle it at the local level. I imagine it will devolve to individual schools and teachers, like most things educational do. They have no real authority but have all of the responsibility and will take all of the blame when (not if, in my humble opinion) things don’t work out.

My take: by October everyone gives up and things go back to the way they were last October (pre-COVID-19), come heck, high water, illness and death.

Arming Teachers With Guns Is NOT the Answer

A notice for those of you who’ve smelled the wood burning around here, I’ve been thinking . . . about teachers and guns . . . and carrying them on school grounds.

I taught at middle school/junior high for some forty (40) years and never felt the need to carry a weapon.

Back in the 70s we had some bomb threats and had to evacuate from the classrooms to our fire drill stations on the fields and school periphery. Some of us volunteered to check rooms and student lockers. The only things we ever found were a few road flares hung up to look like dynamite sticks.

Shot in the butt

I do remember one time when a student fired a gun just off campus, or from the sidewalk in front of the school. He wounded another student (not seriously). One of our teachers (a WWII vet) was on duty in front and went to confront the young man. The student pointed his pistol at the man’s face and told him to go away, in rather strident and impolite language.

I don’t remember exactly how it happened but a police officer was giving a self-defense demonstration with another teacher in our auditorium and the shooter was soon apprehended. No other shots were fired.

I spent a while directing traffic around the scene as the paramedics took the injured student to the hospital. — Other than that, the years have obscured my memories as this all happened thirty plus years ago.

I do, however, wonder what would have happened if our teachers had been armed.

What if . . .

If Bill had confronted the shooter with a drawn weapon, would the student have dropped his weapon or just opened fire and shot him? If he had opened fire immediately, would he have hit my friend and wounded or killed him? Would he have kept firing until he ran out of ammunition? Would he have hit anyone else?

I know my friend would have given the student a chance to put down his gun and surrender; he wouldn’t have just opened fire on the kid.

. . . the rest of us were armed?

You’ve probably seen some of the recent videos of police officers firing multitudes of bullets at suspects, some armed with nothing more than a cellphone. Imagine a firefight in front of a school at dismissal time. Hundreds of kids, armed teachers firing from different directions, possibly armed parents getting out of their cars and adding to the confusion and violence.

The military has a term for what can happen in incidents as confused as this — friendly fire. Even in police shooting incidents, sometimes the police officer who is shot is found to have been shot by a fellow officer — and these are veteran officers with years of training and experience.

Teachers with guns

Tell me truly, do you really want armed teachers on your child’s school grounds?

If volunteer teachers are to be stationed on school grounds, how much training should they undergo? A day? A week? A month? A year? What kind of training? The kind a police officer receives?

What kind of weapon shall a teacher carry? Shall it be a school district issued weapon or the teacher’s personal property? A pistol (automatic or revolver and what caliber)? A rifle? A shotgun? AR-15 semi-automatic type? Rubber bullets or real?

Shall they carry them at all times? Only when they are on duty outside of the classroom? Where do they store their weapons? In a holster with a safety strap on their hips? How about in a desk or filing cabinet, locked or unlocked? In the school safe? In thinking about this when was the last time a school near you was broken in to and robbed or vandalized? Think of these vandals now being armed.

ROE

What shall be the Rules of Engagement (ROE)? Under what circumstances may the teacher draw his or her weapon? Under what circumstances may a teacher actually fire his or her weapon? Or are you going to leave the decision to the teacher’s best judgment? What if the teacher makes the wrong decision, freezes or just plain panics? What if the teacher accidentally wounds, or kills, your child while dealing with an on campus shooter?

Remember, we live in an overly, to my mind, litigious society. Can you imagine the lawsuits coming from any mistake made by a teacher with a gun in these kinds of circumstances? Or do we legislate Good Samaritan type “hold harmless” laws to protect them?

Who

What kind, or kinds, of teachers do you want armed on the school grounds your child attends? How about the grandmotherly type who teaches kindergarten? I still remember Mrs. Lombard from sixty plus years ago and can imagine few people less likely to pack a six-gun.

How about one of the coaches? Maybe, but probably not the one your son tells you swears at them during practice, berates them for mistakes during the game and throws his headset at the referee when he is ejected from the game.

Your choice

Mentally go down the list of teachers at your child’s school. Who would you want to carry a gun on campus and, maybe, in the classroom? Is your list of the teachers you would trust the same as those of the other parents, the administrators, the teachers themselves?

And what of those of you who are, or were, teachers? Do you want to carry a gun in your classroom or the wider campus? Would you have wanted to back when you were teaching, for those of you who are no longer teaching?

I cannot answer any of the above questions, except for myself. And, the answer is NO.

No, teachers should not be armed and expected to deal with armed students, or other intruders, on school grounds.

If armed guards are needed full-time on campus, I believe we should hire retired, long service police officers who do not have records, or complaints, of resorting to violence as a first resort. They will be dealing with children, not hardened criminals; they need to know how to end touchy, potentially dangerous situations through de-escalation not by resorting to threats and violence.

Not the answer

Giving more people guns is not the answer. We need to de-escalate our entire society.

Through our government and other organizations and businesses we spend millions of dollars dealing with alcoholism and its effects. We spend millions of dollars dealing with smoking and its effects. We even put warning labels on packs of cigarettes; how about warning labels on guns?

We license and require practical, as well as written tests for those who drive our cars, trucks, buses and for those who fly airplanes. How about we require the same of those who own and use guns? (Yes, I do know the WHY/WHY NOT of the situation, but we can deal with through the ballot box and appropriate legislation.)

We will not improve the situation by repeating the same answers again and again; we will not improve the situation by yelling and screaming at each other and invoking our “God-given and Constitutional Rights” yet another time.

The answer lies in civil discourse, in wanting for others the best we have to offer of ourselves and in electing to office those best able to speak for us.

Back when

In our youth the world was simpler and better only because we had not the eyes nor experience of the adults around us.

In the 60s we had “duck and cover” drills; our grandchildren have “shelter in place” drills.

Vote

Things will not improve until we become better people.

Start with yourself: be the change you want.

Vote for those who will.


U S Commentary Flag Casualty List/Guns

English Exercise

Picked up several books at Camelot (used book store) today. Among them was Sue Grafton’s W is for Wasted. Looking at the list of her titles in the Kinsey Millhone series, I was reminded of an exercise I used to assign my seventh graders back in those days when I taught spelling, vocabulary and grammar. (May they never return.)

I’d have the kids write sentences using the words for the week–real imaginative, huh? Some of the sentences had to use two or more of the week’s words. For example: outlaw, evidence, innocent, alibi. Although the outlaw had an ironclad alibi, the evidence showed that she was not innocent and that her accomplice had given perjured testimony.

They could change nouns to adjectives to verbs to adverbs, etc. I also gave them a chance to stump me by “throwing” a bunch of words at me and seeing if I could do it on the fly. I don’t remember ever being stumped, but that could be memory’s ego talking. I do remember stretching things, especially when they’d have me do the whole list, mixed up of course, in a single go.

Well, here goes: The alibi the shapely burglar used was insufficient to save her from becoming a corpse as the deadbeat hodad’s board had evidently hidden a gumshoe of homicidal intent who was bent on blowing away the less than innocent as she passed judgment on the killer whose lawless sense of malice acted as a noose around the neck of the outlaw Pauline who realized that her continued existence was in peril as she was the quarry of the bullet ricocheting off the seawall which in its lack of silence was trespassing the pacific surfline and catching her in the undertow of its vengeance and wasted away her life in the uncaring sand.

Ah, well, the Angels won–on to Chapter 4.

Fitness, Testing and Evaluation

LA TimesThe Los Angeles Times this week came out with an article on a tentative agreement between the L.A. Unified SD and the teachers’ union to use student test scores to evaluate the performance of teachers – http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2012/11/la-unified-teachers-union-agree-on-teachers-evaluations.html .

and

Friday’s Orange County Register contained an article by Scott Martindale about students failing the California Physical Fitness Test – http://www.ocregister.com/news/students-379296-percent-school.html

To me, these articles are related. Both of them revolve around issues which seem to be societal in nature rather than the responsibility of an individual – the teacher. Orange County Register

The Register’s article on fitness seems to realize this as there is nothing about relating a student’s performance on the test to his or her physical education teacher. Weight and fitness are rightly seen as problems which cannot be attributed to or overcome by individual teachers. Although if we are going to hold English, Math and Science teachers responsible for the test scores of their students and, at least partially, evaluate them based on their students’ test scores, shouldn’t we hold physical education teachers responsible for their students’ scores on the physical fitness test? (I have no idea on how we use student test scores to evaluate teachers of other subjects.)

But, rather than using standardized tests to evaluate teachers, I’d like to see subject matter pre- and post-tests used to do the evaluations.

Seemingly ages ago I gave my social studies students pre- and post- geography tests. These were fifty question multiple-choice tests of my own design. They covered the geographic knowledge and skills related to being able to understand the seventh grade social studies curriculum. I gave the test to them at the start of the academic year and at the end of the academic year. The first test did not count on their grade, unless it was higher than their first grade report average; the test at the end of the year counted on their last grade report, regardless of their score.

These tests allowed me to see whether or not my students learned what I thought they should learn and, what I needed to do better at teaching. 

If you are going to evaluate teachers based on the test scores of their students, you should base the tests on what the teacher is supposed to have taught the students.

Here is the seventh grade curriculum. Test to see what they know at the start of the year; test again to see what they have learned. Did the students learn what they were supposed to have learned; did the teacher adequately teach what he or she was supposed to have taught? Evaluate the teacher based on factors that the teacher can control; do not evaluate the teacher based on factors beyond that teacher’s ability to control.

Don’t evaluate my ability to teach seventh graders how to use Word, Excel and Powerpoint by the girl who just came from Poland and doesn’t speak English (The counselor says she can just sit at the computer and type.); don’t evaluate my ability to teach seventh grade social studies on the student who reads at less than second grade level and speaks Spanish at home because neither of the parents speak English (“Joe, we don’t have anyplace else to put her; just put her next to another student who speaks Spanish.”).

An individual teacher cannot solve society’s problems; he can do his job and teach what he is supposed to teach – evaluate him on how he does that job. And, when he has time, he’ll do what he can to help those who need it most, even if he can’t speak their language.

12.2.2012

A Memory

Yesterday I received a postcard in the mail from my high school (Class of 1968) and decided to visit the website.

It was a nice looking site and easy to navigate. The cross country team did well at Mt. SAC and the Fall Open House is this next Sunday. Mandatory attendance for all students. But I made a mistake and looked at the Alumni section and looked at the memorials. I found that an old friend had passed away.

Memory

He and I attended the same elementary school. If I remember correctly, his father was an egg farmer/rancher. I learned we were going to high school together on the first day of school when I boarded the bus two blocks from home; he was already on board, living farther away from the school than I. It was a technical high school with the usual academic classes and two and a half hours of shop (I was in Drafting and he was in Machine.)

After he got his driver’s license, I rode to school with him. What a car. He had a black Chevrolet Chevelle SS 396 and could lay rubber in all four gears. It was great fun going to school and we picked up a couple of other guys on the way; I even got to drive it a couple of times.

At the time Arcadia was all, or almost all, white. Our high school it now seems was about a third Mexican/Chicano/Latino (I don’t remember what term was in use all those years ago.). Lo and behold I found out that Izzy was one of them. I had had no idea that he was a member of a different ethnic group. And, I hope that it wouldn’t have mattered had I known. Sunset

I wish now that I hadn’t lost touch with him; he was a nice guy. The world is poorer without him and so am I.

11.15.2012