Holy Grail

Thanks to Tanya for this cartoon idea! TM

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Trinidad Beach

Drying Seaweed. (Tommy Photo 2012)

We now live near enough to the fishing village of Trinidad, CA that we can drive there in less than an hour.

You must walk down a long log and packed dirt staircase to visit the public Trinidad Beach.

When you arrive, the beach is awfully nice, with sand, rocks and seaside plants.

When we were there recently there were a few people playing with their dogs--some with children-- all having relaxed beachy fun and a couple of harbor seals were sleeping on the nearby rocks too.

T&T (Tommy Photo 2012)

Trinidad Beach is one of those places where everywhere you turn there is a beautiful scene just asking to be photographed.

Isn't it?

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Albert

Albert

Subbing again--one of the college-age students was concentrating on his drawing and since he was holding still and since I was there I made this quick sketch and later colored it in.

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More Subbing

More subbing. 

This time for a high school computer class.


Perhaps students not interested in classroom-type education should be excused from attending such classes.


Years of student and teacher's time could be saved which now is pretty much wasted with fooling around.


Probably most students would prefer to simply have a period of social clubishness--with mild adult supervision--than the more or less pretended traditional academic classroom situation as it now exists.


Take the one or two percent of really interested students and give them solid instruction with highly qualified teachers and expect them to perform to high standards--demand it, in fact-- and let the rest of them pass along the path of least resistance.

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Algebra

Sub's View

It's a high school algebra class and I am the new substitute teacher--very new in fact. I haven't been in a classroom for years and I feel pretty much like a fool.

I was called late so I am late--I walk in and introduce myself to a silent class and find a student teacher already hard at work!

To my great relief he takes over and offers me the comfortable, padded seat behind the teacher's desk.

He is a student teacher from Humboldt State and he has been here for some time--he knows the students and the routine--I am just here to satisfy the legal requirements. (Every class in California has to have a certified teacher in charge and, lucky me, I am certified!) 

So here we go with algebra.

It hasn't changed as much as I have over the years.

I look around the class of sixteen-year-olds. Pretty much the same as I was. Doing what they have to do to get through.

In a couple of years they will all be out looking for jobs. I wonder how this algebra will help them. There are presently no jobs for anybody in the United States--except in the military--and they don't care much if you know algebra.

I have spent a fairly long lifetime in this body and I don't remember that I ever used anything algebraic--not a thing--yet here they are and if they don't pass the course, they will take it again and pass it or they won't get a high school diploma.

What an exercise in futility.

Maybe one in ten thousand high school graduates will be in a field that actually requires a little knowledge of algebra--but here they all are.

It reminds me a lot of high school Latin. Yes, we had to take it in the old days because it somehow did us good--the exercise of the mind and all. But when the last Latin teacher finally died unlamented, the high school I went to finally decided Latin was not all that essential and it was dropped as a subject.

Arithmetic, yes. But algebra?

So many wasted hours. Such an awful joke. Algebra.

I use to study algebra

To balance x and y--

And now I study people

I really don't know why.

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Flying Time

Teacher's Cottage, Stillwater Cove Ranch, Jenner, CA by "Starship", 1971.

1977. Where was Tommy Morganstern back then?

 "Assistant Everything" at Stillwater Cove Ranch, of course!


I was "Starship" back then and the CEO of Little Red Hen Published Communication of Jenner CA, thank you very much.


Well, SCR was really not so  seriously much back then and it is much changed now--but it WAS good fun while it lasted.


The beautiful sixty-five acre ex-boy's school ranch, across two-lane Highway One from the big Pacific Ocean, was a six-room motel in those days and a very funky and small-time, but so--may I use the word--"wonderful" a place to work and to be that I would have to call it one of the best places I have ever hung my hat.


If you were a guest there in the old days you were lucky. 

It is closed to guests now so you missed your chance.

I made this highway sign for the ranch thirty-some years ago. Don't time fly?

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Protected

Of course one of the reasons the kids in the Special Ed class are so different is because they have been sheltered and protected in school from the very first. 

Being educated without unnecessary stress, they have every advantage--close supervision by specially trained adults--small classes--individual attention to their needs--medical help on call--free transportation from home to school and back and practically guaranteed paid work at their personal level of efficiency when they themselves become adults.

"Normal" kids are most usually thrown into regular classes to swim or sink--and, unless they are helped and protected by parents or other interested adults, most will sink to the least common denominator.

They are SO normal they are given little instruction about how to behave--so they behave like their peers in order to survive in a hard world where there are no guarantees--and most of their peers get their  patterns of behavior from TV, movies, computer games and slightly older children.

Kids will soon learn enough "blackboard jungle morality"--to lie, cheat and steal--the common morality of their peers and of their most looked-up-to adult heroes--and slow learners will not survive long.

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