Nivek

American manufacturers did the shroud thing in the 90’s and had enough sense to put in a flap to access the oil filter.

Ass blasters were featured in Tremors 3 actually. I am shamed.

Why would you want to remove anxiety/depression medication for children. Do you think that parents who have gone this route did so without trying exhaustive years of other alternatives or that they are not actively managed?

Let's start at a 50,000 ft view. More than a decade ago I read a book (How Children Succeed) which delved into the subject quite a bit. There was some aspects about how children who had been placed in non-traditional schools (Waldorf/Montessori if if recall correctly) had significantly lower rates of mental health issues even when these were serving the same socioeconomic (and demographic) backgrounds. So if you wanted to talk about this then we would really need our teachers to pipe in because this is really their domain. However the book and subsequent material that I have come across, states the most dominant indicator for academic performance is wealth but there were some caveats. The rates of drug use were similar amongst the poors as the elites, however the impact of this was not even, and the academic performance still improved with wealth accounting for this (IIRC). Let's zoom in a bit to what you said earlier and the quoted section above. Would you consider your son to be relatively successful in his academic career? When we talked earlier, you mentioned that you had the advantage of being able to only minimally be involved with is education, just setting expectations for the most part. How does that jive with parental involvement from what you said in this post I quoted? Or did you mean that just being involved in a non-academic manner? Also in the quoted section above, are some generalizations (we suck as a society, electorate, parents...) that I think are kind of a cop-out. Because they are nonspecific, mostly anecdotal derived opinions, and non-actionable. I think this type of thinking shirks responsibility not accepts it. It guides us to throw are hands up and do nothing or gives us an excuse for doing nothing, or minimize the issue and the involvement of people we voted for who participate in actions we disagree with. If economics are the key performance issue then it would seem that the overwhelming issues would be related to our tax and income disparity within the U.S. As we look at the current wealth distribution and how the wealth distribution has changed since the 1940s we can see how policies have helped shape this new era. So this would be a completely political in order to impact it at the macroscale. And doing so might make us have to re-evaluate our beliefs and priorities. At the regional scale, the economic factors still exist. But then we are looking at other issues which were intentional and politically motivated that we do have the power to influence and change (since we cannot vote for every member of Congress). The reduction of SPED identification and the hoops that parents have to go through to get services is intended to frustrate and push that number of students to receive that aid down. This is a systemic issue. No one is advocating for 30% of students to receive SPED access/money. But some of us are interested in making sure that the kids who need help get it and that we live up to the ideal that students receive a free and appropriate education (FAPE). This issue is not trivial. And students with behavioral challenges or students with learning challenges will have an impact on the overall performance of the class. Anecdote Warning: My son was in class with a kid who had emotional outbursts and could be violent. The kid had a medical diagnoses and needed help. He was relocated to a more appropriate school eventually but on his mother's dime. $40k a year. This is an unreal sum of money when the average salary in the US is $60k. How can people afford this and still be involved? At HISD, Miles is going to rate teachers based on their testing performance. While cutting special education and other services. So this pushes more responsibility onto the teachers. Those kids who are not getting services and have behavioral or learning challenges are going to hurt teachers ratings as well. Meanwhile Miles and his crones are exempt from similar performance reviews by the people that pay his salary. So yes Slorch, this is political. Because one political group decided to weaponize education and funding, either to hurt a county that votes oppositional to the current leadership within the state, or to simply try to siphon money from the public into the hands of their allies while likely reducing value and accountability and increasing costs, or just because they can. Whatever the reason, I am personally heavily impacted by it (time, stress, money) and my story is not special or unique in any way. We have found this out by reaching out to others in our communities.

Just to really hammer the point home. His project has 2 components a written essay and a model. Her decision to help was to help with the thing I already started on.

Username not checking out.

First, I appreciate the Bob Dole style of communication and i can still hear Dan Ackroyd’s version in my head. How is it not an “us” vs. “then” when one political party literally started this and keeps running with it. Why do you not see it that way? It is not like there are an army of Republicans running against the education fuckery or speaking out against it? Or running against their own party members to try and help protect and bolster education? I truly envy that you were able to peek in, set expectations with your kids. I would love to be able to just talk with them here or there and continue to teach them accelerated math. TEA mandated that class sizes were to be fewer than 22 students. My son is in a class of over 40. My 4th grade daughter is in a class of about 30 students and we are lucky another teacher has close to 40 students. How is this allowed? Who is advocating for or against this?

I get that we sometimes anchor to first figures thrown at us. But sometimes if it is all we got, its all we got. For example, talk about the size of some ancient warfare and the numbers just do not seem believable. But it is all that we have of record.

Um. This is not a coherent response. The right has been hell bent on privatizing a public service with the intent of pushing that public money to something else, all the while underfunding it. Let's just look at a small example. Special education, which can include anything from speech classes, OT, diaper changes, and other services to offer appropriate education to children with other needs. Texas has an 8.5% special ed funding. That started in 2004 under Rick Perry, who appointed a new TEA lead (name escapes me at the moment), who created a goal to push the funding down from 10.7% to 8.5% and then celebrated how much fucking money they saved. So yeah, own this shit if you voted for these people. Because the school districts all over Texas didn't just magically land on that same fucking figure. And this rot, isn't simply because of Trump/MAGA crowd, they are just a catalyst. For reference, the national average is 15%. Do you think it is because we are just genetically superior even with all those immigrants and ESL kids? Or do you think our teachers are just better (that is the lie the TEA guy tried). Or maybe we are just underfunding it, and making it so fucking difficult for people even if they have a little means. More on that in the next paragraph. Districts and schools are systemically lying to parents on services available, how to apply for them, and who can get them. This creates time which the districts are encouraged to stall for (I have spoken about this earlier in the thread, including our own experiences). Once a written request is received they have 45 school days to respond. And then they get another 30 calendar days to stall for the first ARD meeting. This might not seem like a lot, but it creates problems where investigations start while the kid is in one grade and then it gets pushed to another without the kid getting the support they needed. Let me bring this closer to home. How many hours a week did you spend with your son doing his work and teaching him the material that is not being effectively taught? How many hours did you spend per week talking with the school and district just getting them to do what they are fucking supposed to do? Because some teachers have opted to do nothing but just pass the kid along, meanwhile he isn't learning in their class. This isn't me rambling on about perovskite or Alcibiades, this is me, taking his lessons on heat transference and breaking it down, demonstrating examples, helping him comprehend the differences, and then relating it back to his classwork and teaching him the terminology. There are 2 other kids who are getting neglected to some degree because of how severely fucked up the education is for the first kid. I had to hire an advocate to help us navigate the situation and join parent groups to see how systemic these issues really are. ----------------------- You talk about party, because it does boil down to political parties now. It used to be that we, or maybe I naively thought, that we used to both want a robust education system which would help our country out in the long term and perpetuate the development of skilled people here. But I see clearly one political group that has tried to undermine education in a multitude of ways for decades. And now I get the benefit of seeing how fucked up it is because I have to deal with it. Think about what I am really saying. I might have to leave my home where all my kids have taken their first steps, where my wife and I are happy, where my kids are happy and have friends and ties simply because the education system in one of the largest cities in the US, with the 5th largest district, in a state with 10s of billions in surplus slush funds, because education is how the right wants to punish us for voting blue. So, tell me how I am wrong. Tell me what I could do better. Tell me how I should feel. Tell me this is just in my head. Tell me I am interpreting it incorrectly. Tell me there isn't one political party to blame for this. And tell me if you take any responsibility for causing or supporting it?

I can understand why.

Boy has a project to build a model of the earth. I help him by going out and buying clay, paint, we get a box, make a stand. I help him get started and we make the inner core and outer core. Between layers painting it. Next we just need the mantle and then the crust. Then the wife helps. She doesn’t understand why we have the inner core exposed, so she mashes it down, builds a mantle layer from plain white clay, then adds some red clay to cover the outer core as well. That we painted. It is completely ruined. Boy pained the box, glued little stars in it and all it needed was the earth model. Her thought is to just make it in Minecraft. I suppose he should just toss a flash drive in the box. I am a geologist, btw.

Did anyone really put any stock into those reports?

My wife is close to giving up. She went looking for homes in Katy on the weekend. Our daughter was excited, but my wife really dislikes it there.

Gee I wonder what political party keeps doing this and which one idiots keep voting for?

It is slightly more complicated than that. Many people fleeing from autocratic regimes affiliate them with the left-wing and thus have a visceral knee-jerk reaction to the part without any messaging being involved. They see the left as a path to the Maduro/Castro/Chavez regimes and so they will just vote for the right by default. I knew a lady who grew up in the USSR but became a Republican, and thought the Left would lead to socialism/authoritarianism because the right fought against them. She knew a bit about history but it was not all factual. Coming here she didn't bother to relearn history, she had morons who talked like they were informed to share things with her.

A "Wives and the stupid shit they do" kitchen towel with some selected quotes would go over well.

How about Surly Horns diapers?

Good thing we allowed him to adopt a gun.

Most football movies are meh. Baseball and golf dominate sports movies.

"Erred badly" implies mistake. This is outright corruption and idiocy. But Roberts told us we are all too stupid to understand.

delete

I believe Missing Persons talked about this in the 80’s.

Please provide proof of this. Voter fraud and fake ballots are not just 'shady shit that happens all the time.