The Giant Spider and the Blue-Tailed Skink

Things I have boldly vanquished in the past 24 hours . . .or shall we say at least survived, along with some nasty weather (tornado warnings traveling with biblical floods and hail.)

We all have our dragons to slay.

Why JJ Is Still on Verge of Being a Liberal Democrat

Last week I wrote how unionized labor, especially teacher unions, kept me from it. But — like CS Lewis converting to Christianity as a middle-aged adult? — I can feel it drawing me righteously in nevertheless. . .

Read it and weep.

I am often told there is a shocking quality to our story–it prompts a realization that if this could happen to someone like me, it could happen to anyone. But of course there is little that ought to surprise us; political connections are bound to be of little avail in the face of a problem politics has refused to address.

If there is an upside to the country’s healthcare crisis, it is that the problem is hurtling toward a point at which it absolutely cannot be ignored without immediate and disastrous consequences. If there is an upside for me, it is this: returning to those difficult days of poverty and fear in 1969 also means returning to a place where anger inspires activism.

I was a young woman then, of course, with a lifetime of battles ahead. I am not so young now. But I have enough years left to have one more fight in me.

Healthcare is it.

Young Son’s Kilts Arrived Today

(Photo credit FavD and her cell phone)

This is the very American, very comfy for hot weather, very Young Son version. It matches his LOTR/Ranger’s Apprentice hooded olive drab cloak, not pictured and that’s probably a good thing, lol. But the black leather belt that IS pictured is new today straight from Scotland, arrived with the handmade, eight yards of Ross tartan wool, military-pleated pipe band dress kilt. The silver Ross clan buckle is authentic, and you should see all the other traditional and completely authentic elements. A couple that I haven’t learned to spell yet! So more photos to come, I promise.

As I think I posted before, he’s been invited by his pipemaster John McIlroy to play in public with the McIlroys at the Tallahassee Celtic Games next month. So he’s gotta look good!

Unschooling the Bagpipes More Than Mere Music Lessons

Doing a Favor for a Friend

School Failure Across the Pond

UPDATE June 2010 – another kilt but the sun is brutal, see if you can get enough of a look at it being worn the first day it arrived:

Easter, Passover, Presidential Politics

Okay, how is it possible I was an American history minor in college and I never knew this??

The assassination of Abraham Lincoln was full of religious symbolism.

Did you realize what day Abraham Lincoln was assassinated on — not the numeric date itself, but the significance of the day?

It was both Good Friday and Passover, which meant that Easter Sunday the lilies were painted black and for the first time in America, reportedly, the Jewish Prayer of Mourning was said for a non-Jew. Doesn’t that seem like the kind of thing someone would have been teaching in a fine southern university’s history department such as UF?

Or maybe I just cut class that day and never knew what I missed.

My beloved history professor was Jewish too, come to think of it, Samuel Proctor. (I had come up through the local public schools with his son Alan; I remember hearing about his bar mitzvah.)

Anyway, tomorrow again is both Good Friday and Passover in this bicenntennial year of Lincoln’s birth — yes, my pattern-making mind gives me goosebumps at the thought — and Sam Waterston (my Mindwalk and Unity ’08 champion) will embody the historical Lincoln on PBS, nine p.m. I heard on MSNBC just now that the program ends with Barack Obama as a fitting revival of Lincoln’s true spirit.

Why JJ Really Still Isn’t “Liberal” or a “Democrat”

I just watched the new Ed Show on MSNBC, all about card check as the most important liberty in 40 years, oops, I mean the “Employee Free Choice Act” and how it’s Wall Street GREED that keeps the evil employers opposing it.

I have two words for anyone peddling that crap: Pat Tornillo. Godfather-like head of the teacher union in my large state for four decades, living large as he systematically ripped everybody off including all the other school districts really trying to work for school funding and teacher salaries, as he moaned and wailed and strongarmed and conspired in the name of the poor working teachers and the little schoolkids, meanwhile ripping us ALL off, including not just the poor working teachers but the schoolkids — and the taxpayers.

He might as well have been Bernie Madoff.

So maybe my two words should be: Bernie Madoff? Or: Power corrupts. Or as this newspaper story suggests, how about the words “Fidel Castro”!

Easter Classics: Hot Cross Buns, Edible Legos, Charlie Crist’s Egg Roll

And “juicy-fruit holiday slobbers”.
Happy Easter, happy edible education ideas . . .

“Powerful Aroma of Home and History In Hot Cross Buns”

“Teaching What’s ‘Very Important’ About Easter Holiday”

“I think it’s a great experience for them,” Crist said as he surveyed the children scurrying around the lawn or sipping orange juice in the shade of the mansion porch. “I hope some of them are actually old enough to remember it. We’ve got a bunny rabbit here for them and Easter eggs all over the yard. It’s just a very important holiday and an opportunity to share with others.”

“Loving Legos, Stuffed with Story for Holidays”

“Liza gave us little plastic bricks rather than edible eggs and peeps for Easter, but now the Pastafarians present (entirely in Legos) the amazing Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster!

Thus edible faith has now been rendered in the true building blocks of the universe, Legos, which although not edible, do multiply miraculously like the symbolic foods of the faithful — Legos are limitless fishes and loaves in every room of OUR house, how about yours?”

and then it meanders through various morsels of meaning and palate “clarifiers” toward school reform as the out-of-season dessert most of us stay too stuffed with story to appreciate in any season:

Double-Oh Bama!

OOBama: International Man of History.
You just gotta love Jon Stewart.

Wait, or is he really SUPERMAN disguised as James Bond?!

Peep-Toed Pump on Sarah Palin’s Other Foot Now

How dare anyone make hurtful comments (true or not) about her and her family on TV?
SHE certainly would never do that to anyone . . .

Although hmmm, the retort her office issued would apply to her, with the names changed to protect reality:

We’re disappointed that [Sarah Palin] and family, in a quest for fame, attention, and fortune, are engaging in flat-out lies, gross exaggeration, and even distortion. . .

It is unfortunate that [she] finds it more appealing to exploit [her] previous relationship with [us, during her flash-in-the-pan celebrity] than to contribute to the well being of [this child, her other children or everybody else's children in America and around the world].”

Then I remembered

Why Germany and Homeschooling Don’t Mix

If you’ve been following the HSLDA-World Net Daily campaign against the German view of homeschooling as socially dangerous deviation from the public interest, you might want to read this for context:

The Lines a German Won’t Cross

. . .In most daily interactions, the Germans do not need anyone to enforce their rules. They follow them — and remind one another to follow them through impromptu lectures that are often heated — because they are raised to know that is what they are supposed to do.

What the Germans call Ordnung . . . is the unwritten road map of one society’s concerted effort to permanently banish the instability and violence that have marked its history.

. . .For self-reliant Americans, the German devotion to all manner of precise rules and regulations is impressive and stifling in equal measures.

So I can easily see why Germany and home education don’t mix. What I don’t understand so easily, is why the same conservative politics so angry about enforced norms and government rules in Germany, want more duty and rules and uniforms and law enforcement here in America.

Gun-toting conservative white women for example, who think of themselves as homeschooling and tea party redux rebels, constitutional freedom fighters in a persecuted minority AND as conservers of one nation under only one tradition, a culture of hierarchy, standards, definitions, rules and obedience to authority, crime and punishment, child-beating — even torture if the official rules can somehow stretch to justify it.

Take one of the “fightin’ mad white women” I mentioned in that earlier post, who poses with a handgun for her blog’s homepage and has decided to model nude for meat-eating against PETA. [ed. note -- the latter was an April Fool's joke according to comments below]

Suddenly she sounds more like obedient German rule-followers and social norm enforcers, as she mocks the experimental movement of “consensual living” as dangerous social deviance. [ed. note -- NOT an April Fool's joke] Her world view is that children must shut up and obey blindly in all matters, or else be punished repeatedly to show ‘em

Living in a Material World? If You’re Smart

After years of independent research — no corporate, charity, think tank or government sponsorship of any kind! — my own education and education policy experience has borne a new kind of fruit (perhaps one CAN cross apples and oranges?)

I hereby propose an elegantly simple instrument to assess what we might call human reality intelligence. One question, one yes-no, true-false binary response.

Call it JJ’s Intelligent Belief Quotient (IBQ) Test — that’s all you “really” need to cut through the Shakespearian sound and fury signifying nothing, to determine whether you, or anyone you know or might consider voting for, really are intelligent enough to be a fully functioning human in this world (the next world is a topic for some other day.)

Here, try it for yourself and I’ll show you: