I’ve recently returned to substitute teaching. Real teachers sometimes warn, “That class is rowdy.” They don’t understand that I received my best teacher training in the Army. Near the end of one school day, I issued firm orders for my fourth graders to ready the classroom for inspection. The children saluted and marched around as they cleaned. Several are proud of their military family members. A martial directness stops would-be rebels and gets the job done. Of course, I don’t bring close to full drill sergeant intensity. That would be sadistic… like my drill sergeant back in basic training was.
Though I’m too pessimistic to predict a turn for the better in higher education, it does seem that a number of schools are committed to reforming their ways — that is, if their faculty and students will let them.
Judging by the headlines, you’d have thought Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) had banned any mention of black history in Florida public schools. But of course, the headlines are not to be trusted when left-biased journalists get going.
I found myself the other day just off the National Mall marveling at the monumental blunders all around me. I was walking along southwest Independence Avenue, between Fourth and Sixth streets, otherwise known as primo federal real estate, and to the right and left of me, I was confronted with travesties of architecture.
Almost every decision that has been made in Washington and in the states that deals with COVID-19 has been about politics and money, hundreds of billions of dollars, and not about public health.
