If you have any doubt about what the US would look like under a second TFG administration, just look at Israel.  The parallels are uncanny.  Think about it – Bibi Netanyahu, the country’s totalitarian leader, is under indictment for corruption, bribery, and breach of trust; sound familiar?  Despite these charges, he was re-elected in 2022 with a tiny 4 seat majority in parliament; sound familiar?  Despite this tiny majority he’s rammed through a number of “reforms” which are nothing but power grabs.  Since Netanyahu controls both the executive office and parliament, the only check on his power has been Israel’s supreme court, which has made life inconvenient in his takeover.  He fixed that yesterday by ramming through a very unpopular bill stripping the court of much of its oversight authority; Israelis are now rioting in the streets.

Netanyahu is backed by ultra-right and ultra-religious radicals who are protecting him; sound familiar?  Since 2022 they’ve been consolidating their power and are now in the process of taking over the West Bank and expanding Israeli settlements by stripping land from Palestinians, limiting the civil rights of Palestinians, inserting religion and limiting the rights of secular Israelis, and limiting LGBTQ rights.  The military has stepped up persecution of Palestinians with violent attacks on their settlements and refugee camps, claiming to be rooting out “terrorists”.

TFG’s henchmen are already laying plans should he take office again; their intent is to consolidate all government power under the president, stripping independence of the DOJ (especially the FBI), the IRS, the EPA, the FCC, FTC, and all functions independent of the White House.  They also plan to strip government employee protections, purge the agencies and install loyalists throughout the government.  It’s exactly what Netanyahu is doing in Israel, but on a much larger scale.  Both plans are the same, and that is to institutionalize corruption.

The only real difference between Netanyahu’s takeover of Israel and TFG’s plan?  He already controls the SCOTUS.  That should send cold chills down your back.

It has begun. We got the back to work email from our principal this past week. You are seeing back to school commercials from the various stores that sell school supplies and back to school fashions. Officially my return date is August 2nd, so I have less than a week and a half of summer vacation left. As we see more and more controversy over curriculum, school policies, what is available in the school library. It’s high time for a talk with an actual teacher to help us sort through these issues.

Hold off on the school supplies

Believe it or not, most campuses are going with tablets or laptop computers. Textbooks are online or not used at all. Traditional school supplies are limited. Our local elementary did a great thing when the PTA sponsored a packet of supplies you could purchase in advance and avoid the rush of the stores. People will go out and buy pens, pencils, notebooks, backpacks, folders, and numerous other supplies they may not even need. As bad as it seems, wait until you hear back from the teacher. Also, your teacher will help you if you help him or her. They will give needy students writing utensils, notebooks, paper, and folders for those that just can’t get those items.

Just Ask your teacher

It never ceases to me amaze me how many people are convinced we are grooming kids, teaching them CRT, or whatever else their cousin Jethro told them on the YouTubes. If you want to know what we are teaching your child please ask us. Many districts ask their elementary and junior high teachers to send home weekly notices outlining what will be covered that week and how their kid’s grade will be calculated. We don’t have that kind of time in high school, but if you reach out to us we will take the time to give you all the information you need.

Your kids won’t tell you the full truth

I know this is shocking. It isn’t lying per se. Many students leave out the part of the story that makes them look bad. Others will be as honest as they can be, but don’t understand the context. Our daughter did this dozens of times. My teacher did this or my teacher told us that. We either wrote it off or sent a note to the teacher to ask them their side of the story. So many parents come in guns blazing and come away looking foolish. I work with between 120 and 180 students in a given year. I don’t have time to single out your kid and treat them badly. It would be wrong to say that I don’t think about them away from work. However, I’m invested in their success. I can’t say every single teacher thinks of things that way, but the vast majority do.

We are trained to accommodate different needs

Don’t ban the book from your kid’s library. Call up or email the school librarian. Give them a list of books you don’t want your kid to check out. I’m positive they will help you. The age of reading a specific novel or play is coming to an end. Many teachers utilize lit circles where they give their students a choice of what to read. I’m sure those teachers will work with you if you object to the choices they have. We are working on analytical skills. We want students to read and analyze what they are reading. Even if you brought in your own book that you wanted your child to read I’m sure their teacher will work with you. Again, the end goal is to build skills they will use later in life.

If you have discovered anything you have discovered a general theme across the board. We want parental involvement. We want to communicate with our students’ parents. We want you to be curious about what we are doing. It creates some work on the front end, but it makes life on the back end so much easier. So, if you have a question ask us. Just don’t assume your cousin Jethro has all the answers.

As mentioned previously here and here, after months of hand-wringing here on the Left Coast, the Temecula Valley Unified School District has finally concluded its social studies textbook adoption exercise. This post’s title gives a hint at the resolution, but skips over the outrage, so I’ll fill in the blanks right now.

This week, the TVUSD board met for a 2 hour textbook adoption workshop before their monthly open meeting where they, again, voted down adoption of what is called the TCI social studies curriculum for K-5 students in Temecula, California.

This, despite warnings from state officials that they would be, among other things, fined $1.5 million should they fail to adopt a state-approved curriculum.

Their workshop was 1 hour and 45 minutes of utter boredom that all school board workshops tend to be until the agenda item “Next Steps” came up. It was then that board member Daniel Gonzalez erupted into a homophobic hissyfit that was inflicted on half of the audience in the public meeting as seen in this YouTube video. 

The other half of the meeting’s audience cheered him on.

During this last part of the workshop, Gonzalez read a passage from a chapter in the text under consideration. Quoting:

“I want to bring up a specific note in this article that says ‘over time groups like the Gay Liberation Front and the Human Rights Campaign fought for the civil rights of gay people.’ “

At that point he jumped the track to his own research, citing a person he claimed to be a founder of the Gay Liberation Front or GLF. Quoting:

“This is a document that I was able to find online, which is the statement of purpose and the manifesto of the founder of that organization, by the name of David Thorstad, written in 1970.”

Right there, in sculpting that poorly worded screed, he departed from truth.

David Thorstad was not a founder of the Gay Liberation Front. Thorstad was one of the founders of the Gay Activists Alliance (GAA) in 1970, not the GLF. I know, what’s a few letters? Besides, they’re all Gay.

But it was important to Gonzalez to conflate the GLF with the GAA because, as Gonzalez continued, Thorstad went on, in 1978, to found NAMBLA, the North American Man Boy Love Association. What could be worse than having a pedophile as a founding member of a group (i.e. the GLF) when that group is mentioned in an elementary social studies textbook? Basically, Gonzalez’ “research”, which he went to great effort to include in the workshop’s transcript, illustrated an idea born of intolerance and ignorance: that gay people are all pedophiles.

The workshop ended, and the board met, again, to reject the curriculum. Asked about the fact that Governor Newsom was paying for and sending to TVUSD the rejected materials anyway, board president Komrosky said that he would “send them back”.

Fast-forward to yesterday, Friday July 21st. In a “special meeting” the same school board met to adopt the twice-rejected curriculum. In their staring match with state government, apparently the board blinked.

Maybe they paused at having $1.6 million deducted from their state funds that would buy the curriculum materials, on top of the $1.5 million in fines that the board was promised they’d have to pay (I assume through another deduction from their state allotment).

And so, after months of bitter fighting from the vocally ignorant in Temecula Valley, the fiscal reality of the affair was clarified to the three newly-elected board members. Where reasoning failed, arm-twisting succeeded.

So all the “ado” in Temecula turned out to be “nada”.

Sometimes I am baffled as to why anyone on God’s Green Earth thinks Ron DeSantis would be an improvement over Donald Trump.

Here’s his explanation as to why we can’t have transsexual people, who he calls “cultural problems.” Couple that with how weak we are abroad now, and …

And then the audience of old white people clapped. So get your act together, people.

You can watch it yourself here if you want to, but I dunno why you would. I already did it for you. It’s like a jillion degrees here today so I figured what the hell, I can take it.

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Occasionally you come upon a story that asks you to take the bait. You read a teaser and you know you should let it go, but something inside tells you to scratch that itch. The parents from the Uvalde shooting were in Washington trying to get something done on gun control. They were handing out pins. When it came to handing one to Lauren Boebert you could probably have predicted how well that would go.

There are any number of reasons why this story shouldn’t be told. The first and best reason is that this is exactly what she wants. She wants to be the center of attention. She wants a majority of the country to think she is a despicable person. It’s what trolls do. The second reason is that we know she would never vote for gun control anyway, so it really doesn’t impact our day to day lives any. It is just an excuse to become more aggrivated and upset. I wanted to throw out these two caveats before giving her exactly what she wants.

The parents of Maite Rodriguez made lapel pins of their daughter’s shoe for lawmakers to wear to honor her memory and urge them to act on her behalf and provided pamphlets asking lawmakers to act. As the story went, that was the only way they could identify her in the aftermath. Let’s be fair here. This is an obvious manipulation. Wearing the pin means you support common sense gun legislation. If you don’t and you still wear the pin then you are just being a liar to score cheap political points. What she should have done is graciously accept the pin, simply not wear it, and then discard it in her office or home.

Boebert can be clearly seen in video throwing the pin away within eyeshot of the families that were there. What she should do is be respectful of them. It’s a basic lesson we were all taught growing up. All of us have received gifts that were just hideous. We had the presence of mind and manners to say thank you and wait until we got home to discard the item.

It’s at this point where we have to move to idle speculation. Maybe Boebert wasn’t taught that growing up. We know she dropped out of school because she became a teenage mom. We know the hot water her husband and her got into earlier in life. We know her son impregnated a girl that she would only say “is older than 14.” Given all this, it is fair to ask what manners she was taught. When we consider her academic record it is also fair to say that she could have been taught but she just didn’t learn.

On the other hand, this may not be a question of manners. It may be a question of performance art. Socrates called himself a “gadfly” in Plato’s Republic and in other assorted works that described his life and work. Gadfly seems to highbrow for Boebert. We could instead call her an ass. In that world, whoever can say or do the most outlandish thing wins. Congratulations Lauren, you’ve won that label for today.