Migraine ahoy

Let's make this quick because I can't look at while screen too long.
This is Engaged Intellectuals.
If you can figure out how to read this shit please tell me because I don't understand it.
Usually you read left to right and up to down but we seem to be subscribing to some sort of high bronze age reading logic.

Words fail me when I hear of violence in schools, and the unspeakable events that unfolded yesterday in Connecticut seem like a horrible nightmare – a dream gone terribly wrong. 

Dream gone wrong?
When I think "Dream gone wrong" I think "I was about to bang every member of Girls' Generation but then my alarm got me up" not "30 1st graders getting shot"

Children and adults – likely trying to protect the children – victims of the most horrific kind of events we can’t even imagine. My cousin’s 4th grade child was in a nearby school under lockdown. Some of you may have connections to this devastating event too, but even those who have no concrete ties find themselves weeping or staring silently – some things we do when our language fails us.

Yeah I was standing in a class when it happened.
Had no idea it had happened until well after the fact though.

This morning I received an Open Letter to the President of the United States (see below). The letter might hit home for some of you like it did me. How can we make school about creating “winners” of all children and youth?

The shooter was a 30 year old grown ass man. What the fuck are you talking about?
What follows is a whining post about school achievement that I'll just summarize with this:

Once they have destroyed children’s intrinsic motivation and trust in school sufficiently, albeit unintentionally, educational leaders have only extrinsic motivators — ironically, more competition, reward programs, motivational speakers, role models, school reform, high expectations, zero tolerance, accountability, etc. — to address the problem.

You know you can undo all that shit by talking to them for five goddamn seconds like a human being and not some brainwashed PC robot.
Like just today
"look guys you were really misbehaved I need you to do better tomorrow because I know you're capable of better" and that's really all it takes.
If you act like an asshole
I'll treat you like an asshole.
Tomorrow they'll do better.
I could have written their names on a list and gotten them in trouble when their real teacher got back but what the fuck good is that?
That's another thing you can do to motivate them.
I'm not keeping some goddamn naughty list like Santa Claus. If you fuck up the penalty will be immediate.
Heavy reliance upon extrinsic motivation reflects a failure to understand that children were born motivated to learn.
Shut the fuck up you PC robot.
Kids don't give a fuck about learning.
Think back to school for a second. Did you care about learning?
No you fucking didn't. If the teacher seemed cool you were interested in what he had to tell you.
You learned without him having to beat you over the head with it.
School is like a popularity contest that you have to win.
Kids aren't these magical snowflakes that come wanting their heads filled with knowledge.
I know that doesn't sound very teacher of me to say but it's the fucking truth.
Have you seen the average person?
Anti-intellectual.
You can convince them, though, to learn basic shit so they won't wind up mixing concrete.
I'd love it if these punks would come to appreciate The Odyssey the way I do but then again I also recognize there are probably about five people alive today that appreciate it like I do.
I'm unlikely to run into another so instead I'll have to settle for some critical thinking related to The Odyssey.

Hence, high on educational leaders’ list of obnoxious utterances should be “every child can learn” and such.  Of course, every child can learn. That should never be an issue.

They can learn.
Never mind the host of lies we indoctrinate into them.

To be literate is to live a wide-awake life in this world – wide-awake to the tiny details that come together to create the predictable and unpredictable. To be literate is to know you are a meaning-maker and a world-maker, and you use all the creative tools at your disposal to make life more humane for yourself and with others.

Jesus Christ.
I remember having to read bullshit like this in pussy sensitivity.
I remember the looks of almost terror I got when I said "being literate is to be a meaning-maker? What the fuck does that mean? Don't you know writing is just a stand in for the spoken word?"
It is. Writing is an unnatural action meant to be an abstract representation of what comes naturally to us.
Nothing about writing is elegant or sensible.
Why are we pretending it is?

To expand our literacies, then, we need time and space, we need to dwell with others cultivating their artistic/literate lives, and we need to tend to – and deconstruct and reconstruct – the literacies we’ve learned that use us to perpetuate injustice (classism, racism, sexism, homophobia, elitism, judgment, hatred, and the list goes on).

Here's a fucking comma
this is how it works
I don't give a shit if you're a special snowflake this is how a comma works.
You can write your special snowflake thoughts in proper English.
There's my gift to you. You can form a coherent thought.

What is inquiry? This question has haunted me for quite awhile as I hear folks talk about inquiry-based education, inquiry-focused curriculum, and what is and is not inquiry.

If only you had a dictionary.
Protip: inquest, inquiry, inquisition all have the same root word.
Wonder if there's a connection holy shit there is it's amazing.

Can silence be inquiry?

God I remember the rhetorical questions with answers in pussy sensitivity.
Yes, silence can be inquiry because an inquiry just means an investigation.
You can investigate silently.

As I sit in a large unfamiliar room right now at the National Council of Teachers of English, I am silent, and I am wondering. How does a room like this get built? Why is it that so many people have arrived early for this session? 

Bunch of pretentious fucks like you have to get together and jerk each other off.

Why is it that something like “inquiry” is linked to a particular way of using our body and our language? Couldn’t it be a way of living in the world? That we can inquire into the topic or issue at hand, that we can inquire into our own imagination and thoughts, that we can inquire into the words and actions of someone else?

I am an inquirer. Whether or not that fits within the educational term inquiry is left unknown.
I'm an inquisitor.
Be judged.

Find power where you are, learn to deconstruct power and privilege based on economic resources that were determined long before you were born, and be savvy and smart about navigating the social and political terrain where you are and where you want to go.

No
sorry
don't care how poor or rich you are
that's how a comma works.
If you're poor it would behoove you to learn this shit so you don't stay that way.

 Now that the Common Core Standards includes writing, people all over the country are scurrying around to knock down the cobwebs of good writing instruction from years past in an effort to be in compliance with new requirements. Of course we should have been focusing on writing in schools all along during the torturous decade when phonics, phonemic awareness, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension (sponsored by The National Reading Panel and No Child Left Behind) high-jacked literacy in every school across America.

>phonics
>hijacking literacy
>2013
That proves you live in either a parallel dimension or you really do have your head that far up your own ass.
If only these punks knew some phonics.
I still remember that argument.
"Phonics are fundamentally unfair to students."
"What's unfair?"
"It doesn't support all learners."
"What doesn't? How the English language works?'
"The English language isn't built on phonics."
THEN WHY
THE FUCK
ARE ALL THE EARLIEST WRITINGS WRITTEN IN METER WHICH REQUIRES A FIRM GRASP OF SYLLABLES WHICH MEANS YOU KNOW PHONICS?
ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR FUCKING MIND?

If we make the desires of “future employers” the focus of our work rather than the students in front of us, we will fail from the beginning.

Look I don't care what you do with this knowledge.
More to the point I have no say what you do with it after you leave.
 But I worked at Harris Teeter. If you have any goddamn sense you'll use what you've learned to avoid working there.
Anyway fuck blogs.
Fuck pussy sensitivity.
Fuck migraines.