Its Friday and I was invited to sub today but declined. Tuesday and Wednesday were both eight hour days. I managed well enough and look forward to improving and getting the rhythm of teaching down again. But I had nothing left in me either day to organize my files or write. Even getting my Duolingo French finished was a challenge.
But I got wonderful insights into several subjects that I am very interested in. Teaching in a time of covid. Charter schools that I helped birth in Duluth. The exhaustion of front line Covid troops….in this case teachers. How Covid has impacted students. Two years has helped many of them forget what being a student requires.
It has also perked up my antennae to every issue concerning education I’ve ever pondered. I have had small classes in the charters which heightens my fury at the confident stupidity of the School Board that unwittingly forced themselves to lay off about 100 teachers to pay for the Red Plan.
In my years on the School Board I voted whenever I could to expand programing, hire more teachers and close extra schools. We had an enviable student to teacher ratio until Pied Piper Superintendent Dixon cluelessly committed the Duluth Public Schools to do twenty year’s worth of facilities’ repair on the back of our teachers. Now, when I hear Duluth teachers complain that the State isn’t doing its job to keep Duluth’s class sizes small I can only dwell on the complicity of the teacher’s union leadership in aiding and abetting the loss of so many teachers to keep the construction unions happy for a couple years.
We simply have to wait until thirty years worth of bonding comes to an end or raise local taxes beyond the levels state law permits us to levy.
There used to be moderate Republicans who could talk about the dangers of financial overreach but the Republican Party purged itself of such people leaving me as one of the few fiscal skeptics in Duluth. You can get a picture of Republicans now by watching them in Congress. They are not fiscal skeptics. They are Trump Eunuchs devoted to Trump’s need to punish America for failing to re-elect him. If they screw America up enough all of America will know it was a mistake to unseat the Maralago Mortician.
They held about 167 days of Benghazi hearings about the three lost lives in the chaos of Libya. If only 10 percent of the 600,000 American Covid deaths, attributable to Republican vaccine scare mongering, were given the same devotion in Congress that would cover 60,000 deaths. 3 Benghazi deaths merited 45 days each of attention. Multiply 45 days times 60,000 Trump deaths and you can see it would take 270,000 days of Congressional hearings to air them all out to the Republican standards of Benghazi.
