It makes sense now. Thanks for explaining. Before, I couldn’t figure how a school smart enough to employ you would have a dumb order of rotation. Now I see that your employer is intelligent too.

Cheers.

“You’re sitting here. And you’re— you are laughing. You are laughing about some of these problems. Are people going to look at this and say, ‘I mean, he’s sitting there just making jokes about money—’ How do you deal with— I mean: explain. . .” Kroft asked at one point.

“Are you punch-drunk?” Kroft said.

“No, no. There’s gotta be a little gallows humor to get you through the day,” Obama said, with a laugh.

The teachers don’t rotate, the groups of children are dismantled and new groups are formed. I’ll have one group of kids for cognitive lessons, a different set of kids for fine-motor lessons and a third group of kids for self-help lessons. Speech and gross motor is integrated into all three. Those groups remain intact for six weeks. It actually works very well.

New group dynamics challenge both the kids and the teachers. Oftentimes, if a child is stuck on a task, a new set of eyes can determine why. A different approach and…..voila! Things are rolling again. Mimicking behaviors is minimized and higher functioning role models encourage competition where possible. Social skills are enhanced.

Strictly the staff’s fault.

I always thought it was about sex..you know like Bill Clinton and a few others in the spot light. Then I thought about Pelosi…OMG…puking. Well, it is about sex! Nothing but sex! And the hippies which are the far left liberals brought it out in public. I did not need to attend a major college to figure that out but I am a product of public schools. SEX SEX SEX and more SEX.

What ARE they doing, messing with the rulemaking on this blog without informing us? What are they doing, treating us as guiney pigs?

Where do our posts go? Who owns them? Where do they live? What do they eat for breakfast?

Fully twenty-five years ago the feds stopped letting contracts to engineers who couldn’t think to speak the language of “user-oriented design”, and yet the powerfreaks at the AJC get off tweaking Jim’s re-jiggered blog site at our expense without a thought of letting us in on what they’re trying to do.

Much less will the arrogant cover-ups of their own under-training give us an explanation as to why the thing is an intermittant Black Hole according to a seeming randomness which only they control.

Just like the politicians who are the subject of this blog: perfect twisted power-maniacs.

Please don’t think I blew you off upstream, when you mounted your defense of Charles Murray. I simply had other things going.

My problem with Murray is his racialism, which centers around his last-ditch defense of the discredited Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale (SBIS), largely a military effort which surely has done more damage in peacetime than it ever did in wartime service. Murray, who obviously knows nothing of the lucrative scamminess of pyschometry, never noticed that, for example:

A quantifiable rating “intelligence” claims that it is fixed, inherent and ineducable, whereas people’s scores on the SBIS tend in fact to improve over time, in cases in which the test is readministered;

The thing supposedly quantified by that exam, in the exam’s variously shameless editions, is ultimately “reaction time”, by which quotient rabbits, say, are far more intelligent than any human;

The exam always has been over-reliant on oral and literate language, making the SBIS more a test of linguistic fluency than of anything like innate “intelligence”;

The exam is, in strictly scientific terms, a sure marker of only one thing: a person’s ability at test-taking. (An important skill in these times, I grant you, but not the one for which millions upon millions of dollars exchange hands while this fraud continues to snake its way.)

As for your separatism, Charles, I really don’t see how it comes into this discussion and, like Jackie, I wish you’d explain. You and I have had this out before, civilly — as have you and Jackie (and others) done. It seems to me that this state and country accept your right to separatism. You obviously hold strong convictions in that direction.

You know from before that I myself am a white integrationist. I’m something more. For some 20 years now I’ve been increasingly under the spell of the Mexican Revolution, which ultimately was not only integrationist, but formally miscegenistic. I really love that about Mexico.

Before the Revolution, two things. First, Mexico was a nation with one great, huge city, three small cities (ports, and Durango), and about 700 villages. Second, Mexican residents were routinely divided according to Spaniard, Mestizo, Indio, French, German, Gringo, Afro-Caribbean, Portuguese, etc., etc.

But the Revolution changed that. In the end its rallying cry was, “La Raza Cosmica!” (The Cosmopolitan, or Universal, Race!) The idea was that from all these strains Mexico could make itself stronger, in its place, than any other People, or any other combination of Peoples, could be.

Since those days, a kind of classicism (not so mention political corruption) has continued, but beginning in the 1920s you’re either Mexican or you’re not. There are no longer hyphenated Mexicans.

I like that about Mexico.

First, to @@, a correction:

In an attempt to recommend Sizer’s advocacy of two-person team-teaching through an entire school term, I rolled out the word “team” prematurely, when I’d intended “term”.

Next, to norman ravitch:

That’s quite so, but “father in…tow?” Anyway, our correspondent @@ and I have been trying for awhile to imagine something like a hierarchy of desirable conditions for optimal child rearing short of the ideal of a loving, stable, two-parent household of biological parents. For example, earlier this month we wondered in fairly clinical terms whether a parentless child might not be better off parented by a loving and stable lesbian household, say, than endlessly palmed off through our largely broken and tragic system of Foster Care.

It seems that we might be able to develop a kind of pyramidal schematic that could help lay persons of good will to sense how well off a child might be, in a given proposed circumstance, than he is at present. Does such an effort seem worthwhile? Naive? Misguided? Morally wanting? Culturally destructive? Helpful?