It is teacher appreciation week. I know these things get dizzying after awhile. We have to keep these things straight and many times we don’t know we are celebrating a profession until the calendar on the wall tells us we are. We have secretary’s day, librarian day, counselor’s week, and custodian’s day. That’s just in the education field. All we have to do is multiply that by all of the professions and we soon realize that every day on the calendar celebrates something.

Of course, the ultimate irony is that we are administering the STAAR test during our appreciation week. Thanks Texas. A number of people ask what we would want for our week. As a high school teacher, I am accustomed to getting nothing from our students. I see them only 45 minutes a day, so a large part of that is understandable. Still, Starbucks cards go to my wife because I don’t drink coffee. Nick nacks are nice as well, but I really don’t need anything along those lines.

A lot of people talk about teacher pay and that is a big deal in some areas of the state. For me, it’s not that big of a deal. I earn a comfortable living and I don’t really want for anything. The biggest two issues are related. I want to be treated like a professional adult and I want state testing to go away. I’ve mentioned my wife before. When she needs to go to the doctor she goes to the doctor. When she needs to take time off for other things she takes time off. She doesn’t get read the riot act or made to jump through hoops to get that done. I once had to bring in a doctor’s note for missing a summer professional development workshop that occurred outside of our contracted days. My word wasn’t good enough.

All that being said, there can be no greater irony than giving out the state tests during our week of appreciation. It is a not so subtle nod from the state telling us that they don’t trust us collectively. Yes, it is important that we figure out what kids have learned so that we can work on helping those that haven’t mastered those skills. We don’t need to base accountability on it and we don’t need to pay faceless corporations more than a billion dollars to write those tests. We have smart people that can write those tests on their own.

When you take the pandemic into account, we have missed upwards of five weeks of instruction by administering the five high school STAAR tests, the SAT and PSAT, TSIA exam, and AP exams,. Any time you take those tests you also have to take benchmark tests, mock tests, and take a week or so out of regular instruction to do specially designed test preparation. We have three weeks of school after this week in most districts. So, you are asking teachers to teach 36 weeks worth of information and skills into 28 weeks. For the English exams it is 24 weeks.

Meanwhile, the general direction of education is to provide students with an authentic experience so they can connect their learning to real world experiences. It’s hard to get more unauthentic than a state test. This would be the greatest gift the state could give to teachers. It would greatly reduce our stress and maybe keep more of us in the profession for longer. Maybe it doesn’t compete with e jeans day pass or breakfast burrito in our mail box, but what could possibly compete with those things?

I sat there in the bleachers watching my daughter play in her last volleyball tournament (indoors) of the year. I listened somewhat intently to the conversation next to me. It was hard not to at least catch bits and pieces of it. Admittedly, I was already a little annoyed.

You know, Republicans are just plain ole mean.

There’s a special election being held in the Texas 6th congressional district today. The district is bright cherry red. There’s no way a Democrat can win it, so 23 Republicans are clawing each other to death for a highly likely run-off. I call it a jungle primary.

All the polls show that the leading candidate is Susan Wright, widow of the late congressman who died of COVID earlier this year. But, while she may be leading, she does not have the 51% necessary to pull off a full win.  The race for second place is tight and could be about any one of five folks.

So, this happened …

Texas Republican congressional candidate Susan Wright is seeking help from federal law enforcement the day before her special election, after supporters reported receiving robocalls that accused her of being responsible for the death of her late husband.

Wright’s campaign reached out to the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Justice on Friday after discovering robocalls baselessly alleging that she had “murdered” her husband, the late GOP Rep. Ron Wright.

They are accusing her of purposefully contracting COVID and deliberately giving it to her husband. After, of course, she took out a million dollar life insurance policy on him.

That just seems like a whole lot of trouble when this is Texas and you can shoot people in the face and call it an accident. So, I think they are just being mean. On the other hand, Donald Trump endorsed her so she’s earned all the mean she gets.

And now there’s also this one.  Mark Samsel is a Republican state legislator in Missouri.

On Wednesday, Samsel, R-Wellsville, was substitute teaching at the Wellsville school district’s secondary school. Throughout the day, high school students began recording videos of the lawmaker talking about suicide, sex, masturbation, God and the Bible.

In one video shared with The Star, Samsel tells students about “a sophomore who’s tried killing himself three times,” adding that it was because “he has two parents and they’re both females.”

He also kneed a student in the groin and then asked as the student was on the floor, “Did it hurt?” He told the student he could go see the nurse and she’d “check it out.”

You know, that’s mean.

Just in case you were wondering what our country would look like if Trump had been reelected, just look at India and Brazil.  That’s exactly what would be happening.

The state of Telangana reported 10,122 new COVID-19 cases on Monday and it was the fifth consecutive day where the state saw over 6,000 cases in 24 hours. At such a time, when the health mechanism is grappling with the crisis, political parties in the state are contributing to the swelling number of cases by holding election campaign rallies and road shows.

Yeah, Trump would be doing that.

And this sounds familiar.

Dr Navjot Dahiya, the national vice president of the Indian Medical Association, on Monday called Prime Minister Narendra Modi a “super spreader” of the coronavirus for holding political rallies in poll-bound states and allowing Kumbh Mela to take place amid the second wave of the pandemic, reported The Tribune.

So, that would be us.

I learned a long time ago not to argue with my wife about matters of science. Science is just one of those courses I avoided in school. Maybe it was because my high school Chemistry teacher managed to suck any joy there ever was out of science. Maybe I just didn’t have the brain for it. I’ve always done better in English and Social Studies and that is why my school primarily puts me in those classes to support students.

We have seen this story in the comments on previous posts, so I will not belabor it here. A private school in Florida has chosen to bar teachers that have been vaccinated from working with students. I’m not much of a scientist and even I know that is the dumbest thing anyone has ever heard. That is until you hear the reasoning for doing it. I can just imagine the kind of teacher they get for their 30K bonanza of a salary.

Instead of poking fun at these people I decided to ask a serious question. How can we adapt our science curriculum to help our students and future voters not fall for junk science and alternative facts. The scientist in the house had a very simple answer to the question. The answer seemed simplistic to me and yet I went back to my mantra I mentioned in the first sentence. I should not argue about matters of science.

Her answer was one word. Christianity. Both of us are cradle Catholics and yet we somehow came down on the more liberal end of the Christian world. Mind you, she is more politically conservative than me, but I think she’s more fed up with the interference from the Christian community into science and the natural mistrust that is there.

You can’t paint anti-vaxxers with the same brush, but most come in with a Christian mindset. God will protect them. Of course, the irony is palpable. Much of the Old Testament is a recorded faith history of the Hebrew people. Included in that are the kosher laws. As a general rule we don’t follow those laws anymore, but these people seem to have a lack of historical understanding of the purpose of those laws. They discovered that certain foods or combinations of foods led to more deaths. Kosher laws were meant to protect them.

That is at least partially built upon the basic tenets of the scientific method. They made observations and changed policy and practices to fall in line with what they observed. Of course, we’ve learned more since then, but it was very much ahead of its time and built nearly entirely on science and not faith.

The funny thing is that God is not supposed to be in our public schools. Yet, we tend to avoid subjects like evolution almost entirely because it would tend to offend. The teaching of science becomes particularly problematic when knowledge itself becomes political. Experts become scorned and replaced with those without credentials on YouTube. Biologists with PhDs like my wife are replaced with celebrity anti-vaxxers like Jenny McCarthy and Rob Schneider. I know which one I will be listening to.

I thought y’all would be happy to know that Rudy Giuliani had visitors today.

“Executing a search warrant is an extraordinary move for prosecutors to take against a lawyer, let alone a lawyer for a former president, and it marks a major turning point in the long-running investigation into Mr. Giuliani.”

I wonder if they found the shoe polish he uses on his hair?  I mean, face it, that’s gotta be criminal.

The part that struck me hard was this from Giuliana’s lawyer, who was not happy about the raid.

“What they did today was legal thuggery,” Mr. Costello said. “Why would you do this to anyone, let alone someone who was the associate attorney general, United States attorney, the mayor of New York City and the personal lawyer to the 45th president of the United States.”

So, all men are equal under the law except those who got elected?

But there is light at the end of the tunnel.  Investigators for the FBI tried to execute these warrants last year.

Under Mr. Trump, senior political appointees in the Justice Department repeatedly sought to block such a warrant, The New York Times reported, slowing the investigation as it was gaining momentum last year. After Merrick B. Garland was confirmed as Mr. Biden’s attorney general, the Justice Department lifted its objection to the search.

The big wheel keeps on turning, Rudy.