First Blog

Often I get questions about math. Some tell me they like math but just can't solve the problems. What I always say is this. Life is solving problems. If you can’t solve problems, your life will be one speed bump after another, one crisis after another, one brick wall after another. Learn how to solve problems. First you learn at home from toys and your parents. However, school is the first place you learn this formally. Others are experience, reading, management, parenting, teaching, hunting, sports, carpentry, and many more. All teach applicable lessons for life's problem solving. As John Daly on What's My Line , would say about everyone. "My line is problem solving." Now a word about math... All that said, you may like math, but you cannot say you’ve learned it unless you can solve related problems. Otherwise, it would be self-deception.

The best any parent can do is to teach the three L's. They are    Live, Love, and Learn Community, family, and teachers all play an essential role in this equation. In rare cases, the parent can teach all three.  No surprises. In fact, the three L’s are the principal factors of every life.   ·         To live: This is the scope of your time on earth. It includes all you do, all your relations, all your dreams, and all your works. For example, you can live in a gossipy world of others or live in your personalized world of events. ·         To love: Love is the highest order found in living. It is that emotional feeling toward your life and its relations.   It is essential for the full realization of living. Many lives have no love, and without it, the life has less enrichment, stunted from higher possibilities. ·         To learn: Learning is the engine of life. It guides us toward fulfillment, improvement, and enlightenment. Too many seek the comfort of relying on early

If you consider all the knowledge, abilities, skills, and memories people possess, you note enormous knowledge resources contained by society, but maintained by individual agents.   However, when one of these agents passes, this information is abruptly lost forever. Not reclaimable, redeemable, or reconstructible, it is just gone.   For example, the unrecorded thoughts of Socrates, Kant, and others are gone forever. Sir Isaac Newton, on the other hand, wrote thousands of words on his ideas in multiple notebooks (many bizarre). Every day, individual deaths carry vast amounts of lost knowledge, factual, operational, skills, and data.   Over all time, you have wealth and knowledge, but you can’t take either along.   You can leave behind wealth but not your knowledge.   Your mind, with its lifetime of accumulations, is often the more valuable. What you know uniquely is lost and must be rediscovered. So very much of my parents has been lost forever. Such is the tragic loss

Who does what and how many do it?   Probably you have an   idea but haven’t seen just how many people do what. The Bureau of Labor Statistics knows, and they make this information available to everyone. Occupations are divided into 22 categories.   For example, there are the categories of “legal systems” and “management occupations.”   At the website below you can get even the number of elementary school teachers doing special education.   What we give below is the gross numbers for the big categories. Below you will see the category, the number of workers in each category, and the percentage of each category to the whole.   First note that just over 142 million people are included in this 2017 table.  Note that fully 6% of all workers are in the health profession, while another 2.9% are healthcare support workers.   That’s just about 9% of the population.   Education takes up another 6% of all workers.   And so on.  

Theories allow logic to be grafted to nonsense. The teacher who does not listen graduates a class that will ask no questions. Learning is a deliberate Q&A event. You can’t learn without asking questions and then discovering answers. Centuries ago, the people hunted witches. Now the witches hunt people. Both are wrong. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Debt .  The current US national debt is about $21T.  The current total debt of all Americans, including credit cards and mortgages is $13.3T.  The current non-financial corporate business debt securities and liability is about $6.1T.*  Basically, this means total US debt of consumers and corporations is slightly less than the national debt. *https://fred.stlouisfed.org/tags/series?t=corporate%3Bdebt -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

We have... a. The most difficult profession on earth. b. The twisted, torn, and tarnished profession - that pays little. c. The profession with a half-life of about five years. The current goals places teacher between a multiplicity of forces. Many just don't know what to do.  To teach, to monitor, to reflect, to test, to teach values, to act as an alternate parent?  Whatever are teachers to do? Nature of teaching:  It is a profession for very caring folks that enjoy human interaction, that are pleased to see a youngster learn, that get juiced on meeting and learning, that value education, and that see themselves as students. Yet: " The more students fail to perform, the more teachers are asked to do ." Overall: The blame game covers a gauntlet of components, many of which have little to do with classroom teaching. High stakes testing, yes or no.  yes, but it must change; yes, but it must better reflect what is taught; yes, but multiple choice testing is unf