Author: JimF

This is the second part of the Great Depression as seen by my mom.

THE GREAT DEPRESSION
Part 2 – Working

    Daddy did a lot of things to earn money, some of which I don’t even remember. He had a job at Bradas & Gheens Candy Company in Louisville, and he made $12.00 a week. We considered ourselves very lucky because a lot of people didn’t have that much, if anything.

    Then Daddy got lucky. He got a job at Colgate’s and he made $19.00 a week to start!  This was Jeffersonville’s main industry and we really felt blessed.. Of course, any major purchases were made on credit, probably a dollar down and a dollar a week. But the main thing was that he had a job.

    Mother worked a good part of the time at anything she could find to do. She wasn’t proud. One year the cannery got a government contract to can mutton and she turned to and got a job there. The town reeked of cooking mutton and so did mother. And when Colgate ran a batch of Super Suds soap powder at the same time the mutton was cooking, Jeff stank to high heaven. I have never really cared for lamb.

    Daddy worked at Colgate’s for quite a few years, but the powdery materials he breathed finally got to him and he went on to other things. He farmed larger farms (leased, not owned), managed the hardware department and was paint and toy buyer  for Sears. He sold cars and real estate, was Assistant Traffic Manager for Goodyear Engineering during World War II, and ran a Schwinn bike dealership. After he retired he ran a bowling alley and a tool rental store at the same time. I have often wondered what he could have done if he had gone to high school, much less college.

    Mother, in her lifetime, worked in a doctor’s office, for a loan company, for Indiana Bell, ran a bakery shop, and was the first woman to run the Over, Short and Damaged (OS&D) desk for the Pennsylvania Railroad. Grandad [My mother’s grandfather. – Jim] worked for veneer mills, had a butter-and-egg route for awhile, going out into the country and buying them up and peddling them on a route he worked up in town. He also worked on a couple of farms, and ended his working days at the New Albany Box & Basket Company.

    I was a fairly well dressed child, even with the Depression breathing down our necks. Mother and Sis [One of my mother’s aunts who lived with the very extended family. – Jim]  both sewed very well, Mother did tailoring, and they both “took in” sewing for other people. They crocheted, made quilts, curtains and whatever else was required. Chicken feed came in cotton bags, sometimes plain with lettering and sometimes patterned. The sacks were bleached and recycled into curtains, pillow cases, aprons, dresses for children – and the material wore like iron. I still have a few things packed away that Sis made.

    Mother would drift through New Albany’s most exclusive department store, looking at dresses in my size. They she would buy material (remnants, if possible), spread out newspapers on the floor, cut a pattern, and I would end up with a dress resembling one she had seen at the White House. [The “most exclusive department store” was named the White House. – Jim]

    Sometimes I liked what she had made, sometimes I turned up my nose and whined for store-bought. Some I remember with fondness:  a pongee dress with an embroidered yoke when I was five (I always did and still do love clothes); a lavender cotton with tiny white dots and flounces edged with rick-rack. When I was in high school and a member of the red-hot Booster Club, we were supposed to wear red and white. Mother made me a red basket weave wool skirt and jacket, which I wore with a white shirt, and everybody wanted to know where we had bought it. I remember a red and white dotted swiss she made me after I was married that I loved.

    Part of the strain on the budget was that I had such expensive feet!  Mother had a short chubby foot and could get a pair of shoes for $1.98 tops. I had long, skinny feet and my shoes cost $5 or $6 a pair, and then I had to take whatever fit. I went through several identical pairs of buff leather Mary Jane’s, trimmed in brown patent, when I was about four to six years old. I was so sick of them and so elated when Mother finally found me a pair of black patent slippers for Easter. I wore them as much as I was allowed, ignoring the painful blisters on my heels until Mother caught me limping.

Martha Ferguson

On October 15, 2013 my mom died. To review, she was a writer who never had the confidence to submit anything for publication. Whenever someone or some group she was working with needed something written, she’d get the job. She filled notebooks and thre-ringed binders up with poems, stories, reminiscences, and thoughts. Andi and I gave her a computer 25 years ago and she transcribed much of what she wrote and added new material until about 4 years ago.

On the 15th of each month, I’m going to publish something of hers. This month I’m going to break my self imposed rule and publish a longish piece she wrote about The Great Depression into four shorter pieces over the next ten days.

THE GREAT DEPRESSION

Part 1 – The Family & Food


   As I grow older I find myself becoming a storyteller. When I was younger I didn’t have a great deal of patience with those elders who began a large part of their conversations with “When I was a boy/girl,” or “Many years ago -.”  Now I find myself falling into that pattern.

    There are, however, events in my life that have left such an impression on my memory that I feel an uncontrollable urge to share them with the “younger” generation. The Depression, which began in 1929 and did not want to leave, is one of those things.

    I was born in 1922, so I was seven years old on Black Friday in 1929. I had learned to read at a very early age and was reading newspapers by this time. I well remember all the newspaper articles regarding the stock market crash. I wasn’t sure what the stock market was, but I knew it dealt with MONEY. I have always been blessed and bedeviled with a vivid imagination, and I was horrified at the articles describing business men who leaped from windows to their deaths, the soup kitchens and bread lines, and the pencil and apple sellers on corners. The newspapers had photographs of the above, with the exception of those poor people who jumped from tall buildings, and they had drawings of those!

    Prior to the crash my mother and step-father worked for the same firm, a wholesale paint company. Daddy was a salesman and Mother was the bookkeeper. I remember being taken to work on rare occasions and being allowed to play with the Royal typewriter (very “manual”). I also remember Mother’s ledgers. She was a double entry, full charge bookkeeper and, since she wrote beautifully, her ledgers were works of art. The rows of tiny figures were written in very black ink with a “straight” pen, the kind you dipped in a bottle of Carter’s ink and blotted carefully. You could buy blotters, but a lot of companies used them as advertising, their message on one side and green or blue blotting paper on the other. I suppose the advent of the ball point pen made blotting paper obsolete.

    When the stock market crumbled, taking large and small businesses with it, Mother and Daddy’s jobs went along. The full weight of this catastrophe did not sink in on me for some time. I was an only child and there were many things I did not suffer that lots of other children did.

    For one thing we always seemed to have food in relative abundance. It may not have been gourmet fare, but it tasted pretty good. Daddy’s mother had a small truck farm and everybody hove to and gardened and farmed like crazy. Summer was a continual succession of steaming kettles in equally steaming kitchens. And every time you looked up somebody was coming in the back door with a basket of something that had to be seeded, peeled, broke or otherwise prepared for those kettles. Mother, my great-aunt Sis, and all the other women in the family canned, preserved, jellied, pickled – you name it, they “put it up.”

    To them the mark of a good housewife was to have every Ball fruit jar, jelly glass, crock, or whatever container that didn’t have a hole in the bottom packed full of goodies. Cold packers were modern inventions which they used, but a lot of the canning was done by the open kettle method. We are now told that either method is sometimes a quick passport to botulism, but it worked for us and nobody died. The filled jars were lined up in rows in basements, cellars, cupboards, or whatever nook or cranny that was available. And they looked beautiful!

    One of the loveliest things they produced was watermelon rind preserves, made of recycled rinds. Watermelon rinds were religiously saved and turned into very sweet preserves. They glowed with stained glass colors inside the jars, but two bites of total sweetness were enough for me. Apple butter was made in a large copper kettle over an outside fire, stirred with a long handled paddle, and if it “plopped” on you the resulting burn was no fun. Sauerkraut was made in a large crock in the cellar, with a brick-weighted plate on top. It smelled terrible in the making and tasted great when it was done.

    We – or someone in the family – always had cows, chickens, sometimes turkeys, and we raised hogs. The cows furnished us with milk (unpasteurized), cream and butter (full of that nasty cholesterol), and the chickens laid eggs in abundance (we thought these were healthy, too). Leftovers from the above fattening products were fed to the pigs, which became hogs, and the first really good cold snap was butchering time.

    The worst thing about butchering was just that – the killing of the hogs. I hid in the house, fingers in my ears, because I did not want to hear the shots and the occasional death squeal.

    Now the following passage may be too gory for some of you tender-hearted city folks, but this is just the facts. Once the hogs were killed, they were bled, scalded, scraped, hung up on a scaffold, slit up the middle and gutted. The intestines were saved, cleaned and became sausage casings. The head was turned into head cheese (souse), the feet into pickled pigs feet. Daddy’s family, being German, saved the blood and made that national delicacy, “blood pudding”. I ate everything else but not that.

    Since home freezers were non-existent, you ate as much of the small meat as possible and shared the rest out with neighbors. The nice thing about that was when the neighbors butchered, they shared back. Small meat consisted of tenderloin (do you know what that costs now?), back bones, ribs, liver, etc.

    Hams, shoulders and bacon went through the smokehouse and came out tasting heavenly. They hung in the smokehouse indefinitely, with a daily fire going beneath them. Sometimes before they were used up they molded just a tad, but that was sliced off and nobody worried about it.

    As the old saying goes, we used everything about the pig but the squeal. The excess fat was cut up in little pieces and rendered (cooked) into lard. This is where I earned my keep, cutting lard and sausage meat. It was a greasy mess, but somebody had to do it!  My memories of all this may be tempered by time and distance, but I do remember good food – and I stayed as skinny as a rail!

    However, there were things that the farm and garden could not provide. These things required cash, which was in very short supply. The forerunners of today’s “super markets” were the A & P in Jeffersonville, and the Piggly Wiggly in New Albany. Mother preferred the A & P and when she went shopping there she counted pennies very closely. She figured that each large brown bag of groceries would cost $2.00. Eventually she had to raise her rule of thumb estimate to $3.00 a bag and she was shocked. In the fall they would have cases of canned goods on sale, and she would buy whatever fruit or vegetable that had been in short supply in the garden that summer.

    We seldom raised beef to butcher, so when we got sick and tired of pork and chicken she bought chuck roast or hamburger. She always had to buy staples and cleaning supplies. We had toothpaste when she could afford it, but when the cash was skimpy a mix of salt and soda did just as well. I am sure everyone has laughed about the comedy routines concerning the Sears catalog in the outdoor johnny, but this was no joke. There was no use to waste money on toilet paper if you did not have an indoor bathroom and had last year’s catalog handy.

Martha Ferguson

A little after 1:00 this morning I lost my mom. I’d really lost her months earlier to Alzheimer’s; her body just caught up this morning.

She was a writer who never had the confidence to submit anything for publication. Whenever someone or some group she was working with needed something written, she’d get the job. She filled notebooks and thre-ringed binders up with poems, stories, reminiscences, and thoughts. Andi and I gave her a computer 25 years ago and she transcribed much of what she wrote and added new material until about 4 years ago.

On the 15th of the month, I’m going to publish something of hers. This month I’m going to start with my favorite piece. I think it tells you a lot about her.

WORLD WAR II, WELDING AND ME!

Jim Bob and I met, eloped, and caused quite an upheaval at home.  All these things happened in 1941.  He was from a farming area just south of Indianapolis, I was from Jeffersonville.  We were introduced by a connection of the family – a really nice girl according to my mother’s belief, but after a really short courtship I do think Mother changed her mind about HenryEtta!

This was the era of Hitler, Churchill and Roosevelt – Japan was our buddy, but the attack on Pearl Harbor was in the making.  The E. I. Dupont Powder Plant was built above Jeff at Charleston, and the Goodyear Bag Loading Plant was close by, loading the powder into silk bags, or something like that.  Daddy worked at Goodyear, was Assistant Traffic Manager.

Jim Bob’s baby brother, Ernest, graduated from college, but since he was unmarried and classified as 1-A by the Army draft, he was as good as gone.  Since he was going to be a teacher, no school would take him, since his departure to the Army was imminent!  He had a friend from college, Kenny Baird, who lived in the Charleston area, he came down to work for Kenny in his hamburger hangout, which also included a taxi service.  Ernest being the youngest child, Jim Bob’s mother sent him along to watch over Ernest.  He drove the taxi!
Jim Bob was 28 or thereabouts and the Army did not want him.

And so we were married!  BIG upheaval at home.  We had to live at Mother’s, because there was such an influx of workers that came to build and work at the war plants you could not rent a chicken coop for miles around.  Daddy decided there was no future in driving a taxi cab, so he jerked his new son-in-law up to Goodyear and Jim Bob became a guard.  More money.

Then came Pearl Harbor.  Age was no longer considered a deferment.  Jim Bob was drafted in April of 1942.  He had not been feeling well, and Dr. Garner, of New Albany, diagnosed him as having appendicitis.  He sent a letter with him when he went to Indianapolis saying operate on him NOW or send him home and I will do it; you can have him later.  The army examiners ignored the whole thing, pronounced him physically fit, and he became a private in the U.S.A. army and was sent to Camp Chaffee, Arkansas.  This was a raw, new camp, his unit in the 6th Armored Division going in as soon as the cadre pulled out.

Finally one morning in June he could not get out of bed.  So they operated, found out he had a perforated appendix, took it out, and he was one sick little cookie.

To make a long story short, I hopped on the train, when I saw him I thought he was dying.
Found an apartment, two part- time jobs and stayed until he was transferred to California, then came home

The next day I went up to Jeff Boat to get a job.  I knew they were building boats called LST’s, and that was the sum of my knowledge.  I applied for a job as secretary.  The man who interviewed me said, “We do not need secretaries now.  We are starting a class in electric arc welding, would you like to do that?”  Of course I said yes, not knowing beans about welding.  I did have sense enough to know what a boat looked like, so I asked if there would be climbing.  I couldn’t then, nor ever after, climb.  He said no, the first ones that completed the class would be working in the Plate Shop.  I did not know what that was either.

I went home, told Mother and Daddy I had a job.  When I described what I would be doing Mother rose and circled.  Daddy said “Don’t worry, Mabel!  When one spark hits her she will come home!”  Well – a lot of sparks hit me, but I didn’t come home.

When I went in the next morning we were instructed as to what kind of clothes to get, showed the big helmet we would wear, welding equipment, etc.  They did not show us the plate shop.  We had to sign various papers regarding secrecy, were told about guards on the gates, NEVER go in or out without showing our badge and being cleared by the guards, etc.

Then Mother and I went shopping.  We had to get boys jeans, those for women and girl’s had not been invented yet.  Boy’s boots (since I have a skinny foot I had to wear two pairs of heavy socks).  Boy’s flannel shirts with long sleeves.  At first we got bandanas to tie over our hair, otherwise we would have been bald.  These did not work too well, since sparks lit in the place where we tied them, so we went through them pretty fast.  Then I got lucky.
I found, at the Fair Store in New Albany, a bunch of caps like pilot’s wear, only they were made out of rather heavy tan cotton.  Once you crammed your hair up under them,the ear flaps came down the sides, and you were pretty safe.  I bought a few, we tried them out, then we raided the place.  Thank goodness they bought a bunch.

There were five of us.  Stella Morgan, Opal Chadwell, Laverne Daffron, Hartsell Durham, and me.   As time went by (and we were a blazing success) more women were added.

The plate shop was a very long, tall building, open at both ends.  A train track ran in one end and out the other.  There was an overhead crane that ran the length of the building.  It carried big pieces of steel in all shapes and sizes, and put them on the tables for us to work on.  The “tables” were large “floors” of steel, raised up to about 3 feet high by brick pillars.
There were probably 6 or 7 scattered down the sides of the shop.  

The overhead crane ran back and forth over our heads, and when it’s horn sounded especially shrill and steady, someone would probably yell “Down!” and you pretty well flattened yourself.  A lot of the time they brought large flat sections of steel, and angle iron, and we welded the angle irons in rows to the steel to strengthen it.  This was “flat” welding.
I always said welding was like sewing with hot steel.  You wanted to lay an even line, with no gaps or bubbles of air, just a nice seam.  You had to keep your welding rod moving in a steady back-and-forth flow, if you hesitated in one place you melted the steel, which made a hole.  Then you had to let it cool, then carefully repair it, so it would be strong.

 Sometimes they brought big bow sections, which were already shaped, some so large we could crawl inside and weld whatever was needed.  One of the several strange people in the gang on our table was a man named Elmer Clay Carpenter from Clay County,Ky.  He was otherwise known as “Carp.”  He was a tall, well-built man.  Our gang leader was a smaller and slighter man whose name escapes me.  Sometimes a piece of metal would need to be flattter in one place than it was, so our leader and Carp would attack it with sledge hammers.  We would gather around to watch – the rhythm of first one blow and then another was fascinating.  They were very good, but we waited for one or the other  to break that rhythm, which would have painfully damaged somebody!

If a welder suddenly threw her welding iron away, began to dance around and yell, every person on the table began to help her disrobe.  Now this did not mean that she was doing a strip tease, it meant that a chunk of red hot slag was somewhere in her clothing and she was burning!  This happened to Opal one day.  She was the only one of us qualified to do overhead welds, and that is what she was doing inside one of the big things.  A large piece of slag had zoomed down her shirt , between her breasts, and lodged in her bra.  First Aid was close by, they slathered her with some kind of ointment, took her to the hospital, because it was a big burn.  Unfortunately she was allergic to the medication, developed a big itchy place and couldn’t come back for about three weeks – couldn’t keep a top on.

One of the men in the gang on our table was a LARGE man named George Lynn.  He came in very handy when some steel plate had a bulge in it and George would be called to

stand on it.  In other words, he flattened bulges.  The second day I was on the table after training, he asked me for a date.  I said (loudly) “Why, I’m married!”  That remark went
around and around the shop forever more.  

Most of the men were very nice and protective of us.   As more women were trained,  truthfully they were not picked and chosen as closely as we were so we got some different types of welders.  But we all worked hard.

One of the things you had to watch out for were “flashes” in your eyes.  I was fortunate, I have dark eyes.  If you flipped your hood up, or didn’t get it down soon enough and a welder struck an arc near you, it could burn your eyes.  Blue eyed people went around all red-eyed and weepy looking a good part of the time.

In the summer we baked, because we had to wear so many clothes.  The train smoked us,
the welding and hot steel cooked us.  In winter we froze.  When we came in in the morning we fired up our equipment and “welded” us up a few rows on the steel table and sat on it!
Heat came from the big “salamanders”, steel barrells with legs welded on in which anything burnable kept us from turning into an icicle.  We also wore long underware.

I reached the place where I began to hurt.  Neck, shoulders, back, had a lot of colds and coughs.  Mother carted me off to the doctor.  He told me that if I did that much longer I would porbably have rheumatism or some other dread disease.  So I told the office I was going to have to quit.  But I didn’t get away that easily.  They transferred me to the Outfitting Department.  For a few months I worked my way through an office in the upstairs, and then I moved to the old Stokley building on Court Avenue, which had formerly been a cannery.

Not only was an LST a big boat with big bow doors that opened, took in a bunch of tanks and other vehicles, and spit them out on some foreign shore, it was chock full of “stuff” and I was the one with the big ledgers that kept track of it.  The warehouse was filled with big cages made out of fencing that reached floor to ceiling, and had a number on it of the LST everything was to go on.   Everything had one item and a spare (2 typewriters and I tried them all out before they went on the boat).  Some things (nails, screws, whatever) had thousands.

There was always a Navy captain on site at the yard.  When the ships were nearing launching, the Navy crew would come in.  What a cute bunch of little sailors!  All the females iin the yard drooled, married or not.

The ships were built on “cradles” that ran alongside the river.  When they were done as far as the building part, they were launched sideways.  All work stopped and everybody went to the launching.  The ropes and supports were chopped away, the boat slid down, hit the
water with a resounding splash, tipped almost over (everybody took a big breath and held it)  then righted itself. Then there was a big whoosh as every body let their breath out!

The fitting of the boat was done by the Navy crew, then they took it up river on a test run, maiden voyage, or whatever.

And then everybody went to work on the next one.

Then the war began to wind down, and it was obvious that the Yard would eventually go back to making barges.  One of the girls that I went to school with, and worked in another department at the Yard, said her dad was needing an office manager for a government agency that made farm and crop loans.  So I retired from the war effort, went to work for Mac McCarty, Jim Bob eventually got home – but that is a whole different story!

Martha Ferguson

                         

… from the fact that austerity isn’t working.

http://www.thestar.com/news/world/2013/05/28/northern_irelan...

Northern Ireland town turns into virtual Potemkin village ahead of G8
More than $78 million expected to be spent on security for G8 summit in Northern Ireland next month.

Enniskillen may not have a $2 million Muskoka-inspired fake lake exhibit, but it does have giant stickers plastered on abandoned storefronts to make it look like business is booming and shelves are fully stocked.

The Northern Irish town and surrounding area is getting a $460,000 fluff-up in advance of next month’s G8 summit. Gum is being scraped off sidewalks. Roads will be freshly paved to ensure a smooth ride for convoys of world leaders. Virtual Potemkin villages are springing up on the road to the Lough Erne Resort, where heads of state will gather to discuss tax evasion and reforms, food security, trade deals and the crisis in Syria.

Potemkinization seems to be all the rage nowadays.

http://www.jimhightower.com/node/8052#.Ubu13BYgIqY

Recently, this surrealistic phenomenon of unreal “thereness” appeared in Seaside Heights, New Jersey. This shore town had been devastated by Hurricane Sandy last October, shutting down its boardwalk shops and rides. But in mid-May, England’s Prince Harry came to Jersey for a royal visit, and Gov. Chris Christie led him to the town’s boardwalk to highlight the people’s resilient spirit and determination to rebuild.

The shops and rides remained closed, yet, bizarrely, the prince saw bustling enterprises and kids having fun. Did his royal eyes deceive him? No, Christie did. The governor staged a business-as-usual visual for the visitor. Spiffed-up clam bars and hot dog stands were staffed with people who appeared to be preparing and serving food, but nothing was actually being cooked. Also, children were brought in to play darts, whiffle-ball, and other games at booths that had been opened, staffed, and stocked with prizes – just for the brief time of Harry’s pass-through.

Between the centennial of the battle and the address of Gettysberg

http://www.ajc.com/news/news/gene-patterson-a-flower-for-the-graves/nTt8Q/

A Negro mother wept in the street Sunday morning in front of a Baptist Church in Birmingham. In her hand she held a shoe, one shoe, from the foot of her dead child. We hold that shoe with her.

Every one of us in the white South holds that small shoe in his hand.

It is too late to blame the sick criminals who handled the dynamite. The FBI and the police can deal with that kind. The charge against them is simple. They killed four children.

Attacked by psychopaths

http://www.salon.com/2013/01/15/this_man_helped_save_six_children_is_now_getting_harassed_for_it/

“I don’t know what to do,” sighed Gene Rosen. “I’m getting hang-up calls, I’m getting some calls, I’m getting emails with, not direct threats, but accusations that I’m lying, that I’m a crisis actor, `how much am I being paid?'” Someone posted a photo of his house online. There have been phony Google+ and YouTube accounts created in his name, messages on white supremacist message boards ridiculing the “emotional Jewish guy,” and dozens of blog posts and videos “exposing” him as a fraud. One email purporting to be a business inquiry taunted: “How are all those little students doing? You know, the ones that showed up at your house after the `shooting’. What is the going rate for getting involved in a gov’t sponsored hoax anyway?”

“The quantity of the material is overwhelming,” he said. So much so that a friend shields him from most of it by doing daily sweeps of the Web so Rosen doesn’t have to. His wife is worried for their safety. He’s logged every email and every call, and consulted with a retired state police officer, who took the complaint seriously but said police probably can’t do anything at the moment; he plans to do the same with the FBI.

What did Rosen do to deserve this? One month ago, he found six little children and a bus driver at the end of the driveway of his home in Newtown, Conn. “We can’t go back to school,” one little boy told Rosen. “Our teacher is dead.” He brought them inside and gave them food and juice and toys. He called their parents. He sat with them and listened to their shocked accounts of what had happened just down the street inside Sandy Hook Elementary, close enough that Rosen heard the gunshots.

A Mom to be proud of beyond the normal things we’re proud of moms.

http://www.schoolbook.org/2012/01/05/matt-damon-and-mother-reject-unions-award

The actor Matt Damon and his mother, a professor of education, on Wednesday turned down the opportunity for an award from the country’s largest teachers union after reading an opinion article that the union’s president had co-authored with the founder of Teach for America.

LINK to AP story

A Wisconsin judge on Friday struck down nearly all of the state law championed by Gov. Scott Walker that effectively ended collective bargaining rights for most public workers.

Thinking: When did you first run into Thomas Kuhn
? (1974, Philosophy of History, Prof. Godbout)

Thomas Kuhn: the man who changed the way the world looked at science

Fifty years ago, a book by Thomas Kuhn altered the way we look at the philosophy behind science, as well as introducing the much abused phrase ‘paradigm shift’

Stinking: Sometimes paradigm shifts are more alimentary than elementary

The Reinvent the Toilet Challenge asked engineers to dream up a replacement for the antiquated flush toilet. Michael Hoffmann and his team at Caltech responded with a solar-powered toilet that disinfects waste and reuses wastewater to flush. Better yet, it pumps out hydrogen gas for use in fuel cells.

Good for Business; Kids Not So Much

While most education reform advocates cloak their goals in the rhetoric of “putting children first,” the conceit was less evident at a conference in Scottsdale, Arizona, earlier this year.

Standing at the lectern of Arizona State University’s SkySong conference center in April, investment banker Michael Moe exuded confidence as he kicked off his second annual confab of education startup companies and venture capitalists. A press packet cited reports that rapid changes in education could unlock “immense potential for entrepreneurs.” “This education issue,” Moe declared, “there’s not a bigger problem or bigger opportunity in my estimation.”

Moe has worked for almost fifteen years at converting the K-12 education system into a cash cow for Wall Street. A veteran of Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch, he now leads an investment group that specializes in raising money for businesses looking to tap into more than $1 trillion in taxpayer money spent annually on primary education. His consortium of wealth management and consulting firms, called Global Silicon Valley Partners, helped K12 Inc. go public and has advised a number of other education companies in finding capital.

Pearson Profits. Do students?

Should Pearson, a giant multinational, be influencing our education policy?
Pearson, a business that sells education products and services, seems to be gaining an ever-growing influence on school life. But whose interests is the company promoting – students’ or its shareholders’?

Education seems to be the one thing Republicans and Democrats agree on.
“There’s money to be made in education, and our backers should get it.”

In my role as the education guy at the Reader, I’ve dutifully read Mitt Romney’s position paper on public education–a feat I doubt even Romney has accomplished.

You can read it yourself, if you’re up for the challenge. It’s called “A Chance for Every Child” and it’s only 30-some pages long, even with all the footnotes intended to make it seem like a scholarly dissertation as opposed to a salvo in a presidential campaign.

Here’s the big takeaway for Chicagoans: in many respects, it reads like it could have been written by our very own union-busting, charter-school-loving Mayor Rahm Emanuel.

Yes, that’s right–Republican Romney and Democrat Rahm are like two peas in a pod when it comes to public education. It’s a little ironic given that Romney blames President Obama–Emanuel’s former boss at the White House–for everything that’s wrong with education today.

So other than enriching the test makers, what are we doing all this testing for.

A study published this week in the Journal of Research in Science Teaching covering thousands of Indiana high school seniors from three graduating classes finds that students at schools showing consistent improvement on the Indiana Statewide Testing for Educational Progress exam performed no better on the ACT science and math college entrance exams than classmates from declining schools.

Follow the money.

Here is the answer: The demand for virtual schools is a sure indicator of the dumbing down of the American public and the triumph of American capitalism at its greediest.

Q: Who does well in virtual charter schools?

A: It’s not the students.

The new NEPC report found that students who enroll in these virtual schools do worse in academics than those who attend a brick-and-mortar school.

The authors of the report urged states to slow down in their headlong rush to open more such “schools.”

Now why would Bill Gates want schools to use more computers?

In Bill Gates’ vision of the classrooms of the future, students are grouped according to skill set. One cluster huddles around a computer terminal, playing an educational game or working on a simulator. Another works with a human teacher getting direct instruction, while another gets a digital lesson delivered from their teacher’s avatar.

This kind of “game-based” learning is one of the priorities of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, a nonprofit founded by the Microsoft creator.

If Bill’s vision comes to pass the answer to the next question will be a resounding yes.

ARE SCHOOLS BREAKING CHILDREN’S SPIRITS? Life and Learning Beyond Walls

When starting out as a teacher, I heard Joseph Cornell say that keeping children inside one room five days a week is akin to breaking a horse. I’m haunted by that analogy. Our tendency is to keep children in, especially as academic demands only increase. And for discipline or missed work what do we do? Keep them in at recess. Breaking horses.

What would happen if we gave students opportunities to go outside and interact with the natural world as part of the school day? Does a natural classroom give us a way to maintain our students’ inner wildness, as Mercogliano calls it?*

First read this.

When I meet new people, I like to do a small social experiment. When asked what I do for a living, I sometimes say “I work with Teach For America.” Other times, I leave that out entirely, and just say “I’m a teacher.”

The responses often are vastly different. As a kid right out of college, I thought using the Teach For America line was great. Girls would actually talk to me and even seemed impressed by my association with TFA. But when I told people I was a teacher and left out that piece, you could almost see them start to wonder just how bad my LSAT must have been for me to have ended up teaching.

Then read this.

Remember The Onion is satire.
Or is it?

What did you learn in school?

“I learned strategies. How to focus and… I forget the other one. Oh yeah, practicing doing tests.” He’s talking about the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness (STAAR^TM) that Texas began administering this year in the hopes that testing our children will make them smarter. Texas is paying Pearson Education $470 million over five years for STAAR test, but since Texas also cut $5.4 billion from the public school budget, the state decided the tests shouldn’t actually count towards anything.

Second Nature posted an interesting link to a Henry J. Kaiser Foundation PPACA knowledge quiz at Facebook.

The health reform law promises to deliver big changes in the U.S. health care system. But, as with other sweeping pieces of legislation, it can be hard to get the real facts about what it does. And it is all too easy for misinformation about the law to spread.

Take our short, 10-question quiz to test your knowledge of the law, and then find out how you compare to the rest of the country, as represented by the findings of the Kaiser Family Foundation’s monthly Health Tracking Poll.

After you finish the quiz, download the document to compare yourself to the survey sample.

There’s a whole lot of misunderstanding / misinformation out there.

I wonder what would have happened if he hadn’t been the former governor of Arizona.

LINK

The wife and a friend of former Arizona Gov. Raul Castro are calling for changes in Border Patrol procedures after agents recently detained the frail 96-year-old in 100-degree heat for more than a half-hour.

Castro said he was traveling from his home in Nogales, Ariz., to celebrate his 96th birthday in Tucson when his vehicle triggered a radiation sensor at the Border Patrol checkpoint on Interstate 19 north of Tubac.

Castro said agents sent him to another inspection area and continued to question him outside his vehicle for 40 to 45 minutes even though he explained that he had undergone hospital testing on his pacemaker the previous day, likely triggering the sensor.