Pandemic Discovery

Despite the illness and death there has been a silver lining to the pandemic: we have, almost by force, confronted some harsh realities many had long chosen to ignore. We knew the city was designed to be of, by and for businesses but now they are much more open about it, revealing internal dissonance. Which winner will she pick? That might seem important until you recall that the city we thought we would get was always a myth about as real as the bodacious babe the old fart gets with each bottle of Viagra. You know it isn't real, don't you? 

So what is important? Well, we now know that as far as parents are concerned their children are important. The pandemic has burned away reliably opaque clouds of delusion as parents were forced to see what was being called "education." Not a pretty sight. Not only did parents realize they could see, they seem to have discovered there was quite a bit they needed to look into. The more they saw the less they liked and so they took and demanded action. The system, unaccustomed to scrutiny let alone criticism, pushed back declaring upset parents should be considered domestic terrorists. What is actually quite impressive is the handbook describing how the deflection techniques long used by teachers and principals can be leveraged in board meetings. Apparently some folks always held the opinion that parents should have no say in what their children were taught and were bold enough to say such things out loud. But not without consequence. This happened alongside CRT infused pedagogy and elimination of assessments and standards for social justice reasons. The latter revealed internal dissonance (much like we see with our head dwarf) with teachers at odds with admin. 

Now we know that DeKalb County Schools are not expecting a rebound in attendance and while some blame the pandemic these are the same people who've been immune to criticism until recently. Maybe the pandemic was just a catalyst.

Santa Fears Trucks Too!

A very official route shows that Santa completely avoided the joke of a no-truck-zone that the city refuses to enforce. 

Avoiding Dangerous Trucks

Even Santa won't take the risk of traveling through areas where the city all but encourages reckless, lawless, dangerous truck traffic. You DO know that Touch Down doesn't live there anymore, right? So your sins of omission are punishing everyone else and TD is well beyond your reach. So give us all a break, OK.

Hackademics

How is your student doing? After all you are the parent and until recently everyone agreed it is also your student, though the education industry has leaked their deep seated disagreement with that proposition. This may be have you considering drastic measures. Private schools? Perhaps. Tutoring? Not a bad option, but it makes you wonder if you're encouraging government schools' bad behavior. Or maybe a bandaid on a bullet wound. 

You might be considering drastic, direct action. Taking the bull by the horns. Making learning a family activity and stepping away from a system telling your student what to think rather than how to think. If you follow this path there are lots of resources available, but we at The Other Dunwoody would like to suggest LibreTexts. Here you'll find freely available texts, course support and visualization tools. Of particular interest are the math resources, covering elementary skills, to algebra, calculus, data science, economics and even today's edu-industry trend: finance. But in this case your student will not be driven towards the collectives' group-think but instead will acquire the skills needed to make their own decision about their own finances. 

Embrace hackademics. You may well learn something too.

That Must Have Hurt

The AJC, which routinely acts as Dunwoody's PR firm, recently had to cover a whistleblower of the month's victory. They tried to spin it, but still, it must have been painful to publish.

This was just a board decision that went against the city so guess what the city is going to do. That's right, they're pissing away more of our money going to court in yet another case that is directly traceable to a few bad hiring decisions. 

We should be spending our money on a search for a new city manager and chief of police, not on this useless court case. They are the root of the problem and these weeds need to be pulled out by those roots.

When The Fox Guards The Hen House...

...the hens are left to defend themselves. Given the massive mismanagement of the Dunwoody PD it should come as no surprise that this is exactly what has happened. Since its very founding the Dunwoody PD harbored an officer who demanded pornographic pictures from subordinate officers and command did nothing to stop it. Quite the opposite. Dunwoody's side-hustling self-proclaimed top cop wrote an internal "investigation" with the unsurprising conclusion that exonerated the department and command. Top cop? Maybe top fox. It wasn't long before many of the more reluctant forced porn stars were driven or dismissed from the force with one starting a non-profit in support of police whistle-blowers. Hens standing strong against the fox. It was far too long before outside review exonerated that hen since by that time the lieutenant in charge of porn had been disappeared. The Catholic church could learn a lesson here. 

The real problems remain. The system is flawed. Under no circumstances should anyone at city hall have conducted, or even supervised an investigation with serious negative consequences for those investigating. Furthermore, those involved in that decision, the police chief and his boss, the city manager, retain their positions. The stain of this sexual predation is upon them, and if council takes no corrective action, which to date they have avoided, it is upon them as well.

Crisis Is The Fulcrum

Agenda is the lever.

And both were in full misuse in a recent opining from the AJC's fave left wingnut when he took his anti-conservative agenda and propped it on a recent school shooting to someone draw a twisted line, one that can only be straight in his mind, between parental desire for age-appropriate materials and practices and a reluctance on the part of Republicans to eviscerate a constitutionally enumerated, inalienable right. He pulled out all the Liberal Fascists' Propaganda Handbook memes. Hyperbolic "weapons of mass destruction." Dancing around "we ain't teaching CRT." 

Given a recent op-ed from the AJC exposing the incredibly poor performance of our schools at teaching reading, one might have thought the most obvious response to age-inappropriate material in schools would be: "no worries, they can't read it anyway." This would unravel as a brief glance at most classroom and libraries would reveal that words are few and pictures dominate. A concession to the fact that schools haven't been teaching reading for some time, that they are well aware of that fact and have adjusted accordingly.But...not the agenda.

But there are real issues here that deserve informed debate by rational, deliberative stakeholders. How has allegedly representative government schools disenfranchised parents, voters and taxpayers to the point that asserting their position as stakeholders results in vitriolic vilification? In the presence of this failure how do parents best care for their children and what are the socioeconomic consequences? What role should parents have in directing curricula, modalities and pedagogy? And yes, how do we enforce current laws prohibiting firearms from our schools. And why has law enforcement, at all levels abdicated their primary responsibility as well?

But all we get, and all we're are likely to get, is incessant harping from nags drunk on partisan agenda.

Let's Lead With That...

...and that would be? Agenda. 

Reports had hardly surfaced of a new variant first noticed in Southern Africa when media, including the AJC, wrapped the incredibly scant information around their agenda. In this case vaccinations, particularly for kids. At the time of publication no solid information, beyond the number of alterations to the virus, were available. Pretty much everything else was anecdotal. It was being touted as faster spreading, but R-naught values were strikingly absent. Not that R-naught has appeared much in any US mainstream media, regardless of variant. And it will be difficult to gather the necessary information because reports are also indicating that symptoms are notably weak closer to seasonal flu than you're-going-on-a-respirator and where testing is driven by symptoms, many of those "afflicted" won't bother. Many report fewer, weaker symptoms than the vaccine side effects reported on the CDC's VAERS. You won't read that in the paper because it it is not well aligned...with their agenda.

Reversing Osmosis

Over at the AJC, their bloggin' schools' apologist has had an epiphany: readin' don't just happen and it ain't like catchin' a cold. The decades old pedagogical orthodoxy was based on osmosis, the notion that by simply watching someone else read, or even having someone, particularly for a photo-op, read to you then magically those capabilities will transfer to you. As if our schools (which means teachers, admins, teachers of teachers, and yes, media apologists) have adopted a monkey-see-monkey-do approach. It has its advantages. For them. They offload responsibility for their inability to teach even basic reading skills, and NAEP has diligently reported these failures, onto parents claiming "there just ain't 'nuff readin' goin' on at home." And they still take credit for that third of students who are teacher-proof and will become proficient at reading, even though, as we all now know, this happens at home. 

The techniques (modalities?) that work require effort. On the part of the student who must actually spend significant time practicing and on the part of the teacher who must intercede, correcting any mistakes. These are the kind of draconian tactics Sister Mary Vattaveist  used back i the day. Effectiveness not withstanding, that just ain't the way learning gets done these days. Of course the NAEP reports that not much learning is going on anyway.

Maybe the problem is systemic lack of domain expertise. Given how long this failed pedagogy has been in effect it is very likely we have the illiterati "leading" in the classroom and school offices. How can someone who never encountered the teaching of reading in their own life ever figure out how to teach our children? Especially if they cannot even read about it.

Bad Signs

Do you know what is wrong with these signs? Not just that they're illegal (and downright ugly) by how so?

Constant Offender

How Could You NOT See This Put Up?

Touch The Sign-Kick Your Ass

Good Cause? Still A Bad Sign

North Point? WTF! Really?

99&44/100s Pure Bad Sign

Well, if you know the answer then you are overqualified to work in Dunwoody Code Enforcement.