Health

My Trashy Girlfriend: A Lesson on Sex, Drugs and Rock & Roll

by

My Trashy Girlfriend

I always believed that working at occupations other than teaching before I became a teacher was very beneficial. Doing other jobs helped me keep the joys, the challenges, and the frustrations of teaching in a manageable perspective. Those other jobs also gave me a rich background of examples to make my lessons more real and relatable. I’d recommend that all teachers get experience at things other than teaching before entering the field.

I’d done it all: bus boy; service station attendant; cab driver; construction laborer (a member of the Hod Carriers Union) and more and through all of it – professional musician. It was as a musician I learned something I later turned into life lessons for my kids. I learned that no matter how much you love your woman, when she gets banned from the biker bar where you are working you have to face it, “You’ve got a trashy girlfriend!”

Read more

HealthCare Reform: How Democrats and the Mainstream Media Can Make It Happen

by

Improve the messaging.

Why is quality healthcare for all Americans so hard to achieve? Greed, ignorance, and bad messaging. It’s big business, their leaders and their impact on politics that demonstrate the worst aspects of greed. It’s too many Americans who are woefully ignorant of how to reason with facts. And it’s Democrats and the mainstream media who are doing the terrible job of messaging.

The greed of corporations and too many individuals is beyond dispute. Trying to simply legislate greed out of existence is foolish. We can pass some legislation to temper greed but I recommend changing the incentives for greed [read Freakonomics, Levitt & Dubner], more on this later.

After greed, it’s ignorance that is holding healthcare reform back. Too many reports and interviews rely on numbers and impersonal logic. ‘Ten million without healthcare,’ doesn’t compute to the working class as well as ‘Your son can’t get treatment for a life threatening illness,’ does. [Go back and review your Marshall McLuhan.] Here’s what I mean:

Labels:

I’m going to use a few socio economic and political labels in this essay so it’s important to label myself first. I grew up working-class on the Southside of Chicago. I’m the only one in my family who has graduated from college (University of Illinois). I have taught the disadvantaged and at risk here in Los Angeles, California (LAUSD) for over 25 years. I’ve traveled the world and hung in the hood. I consider myself liberal in my views.

Stop calling Obama “Black” and Don’t call the ACA “Obamacare”

Read more

Teachers Are Older Than Dirt!

by

cracks in the land

Teachers can age quickly.

Let’s face it, teaching is a tough profession, and physically, it ages most of us very rapidly (those of us who stay with the profession may look old but we’re young at heart!).  Yes, there are those teachers who appear to have the sweet bloom of youth but that’s because they just recently got into teaching right out of college (time will take it’s toll!).   Review the lyrics to Don’t Stand So Close to Me by the Police or Hot for Teacher by Van Halen – sometimes the teachers are indeed young and attractive (i.e. hot).  But for most of us, once we pass 25 or 30 years old, we are considered by our students to be older than their grandparents.  And even though they may love us and respect us, it doesn’t help that children are such poor judges of age, along with being brutally honest.  Witness what happened to cute, classy, crazy Ms. Curtis (not her real name – but read more about Ms. Curtis in my novella What Happened to David).

Read more

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox

Join other followers: