A few weeks ago, I asked my readers to tell me how many readers they have on their blogs. The response was as expected: only a few. What surprised me was the variation in the numbers reported. An even larger surprise was that some of you reported really low numbers, and some reported big numbers. I was feeling a bit low at that time and seriously asked myself why I spent so much time writing something that not many people read. My readership is low and has been low from day one when I began blogging in 2009. Over the years my highest daily average of readers peaked at 73 and is currently 13. It really doesn’t matter much at all, but I am an engineer and I love numbers. Right from the beginning I made a pledge that I would not engage myself in commercialism on grumpajoesplace. I don’t chase followers unless they write stories that engage me. I feel that if someone wants to read my opinions they are welcome to do so, if not, so what?
One thing this blog has taught me is to become a better writer. By writing often, I am forced to make my thoughts more understandable and clearly presented. Since I began using AI (Grammerly) I am learning to phrase things differently. In other words, I am being trained to write like a robot and not like Grumpa Joe. It is not really important to me, I enjoy writing for the sake of writing. If a few people find my blog and decide to read my posts so be it. I hope they enjoy it.
The most positive thing I have enjoyed is meeting people from all over the world. After commenting back and forth with them, they have become my good friends. I only wish that one day, I can meet them face to face over an adult beverage.
Those who know me understand that I have a negative view of teacher’s unions. I have never been a teacher, nor have I attended a school that was run by a union. Regardless, I hate unions in general. When it comes to student outcomes, I especially dislike Teacher Unions.
The article below is taken from the BLOG “Sultan Knish the Journalism of Daniel Greenfield.”
Once again, Greenfield exposes the facts that support my own feelings.
The More Powerful the Teachers Union, the less the Children Learned
The Biden administration is on a hunt for systemic racism. Thus far it’s found systemic racism everywhere from the highway system to the military, but the one place it hasn’t looked is among the ranks of the teachers unions who provide much of its cash and its election foot soldiers.
But new data reported by the New York Times shows that the pandemic school closures demanded by teachers unions were the single greatest act of systemic racism in 50 years.
During the pandemic, members of the corrupt teachers union machine demanded school closures to “save lives”. Unwilling to do their jobs, they instead marched around brandishing coffins at political protests while warning that if they had to go and teach, everyone would die.
Education was replaced with the Orwellian misnomer of “remote learning” which parents, students and honest teachers admitted was not actually teaching any of the students anything.
And the newest data backs that up, showing that “in districts where students spent most of the 2020-21 school year learning remotely, they fell more than half a grade behind in math.”
The numbers were even worse for the poorer students who fell behind three fifths of a grade.
The decline in math scores was the worst in 50 years making it a historic setback and while all students suffered during the pandemic, the learning experiences in districts where schools shut were far worse for poorer students, often minorities, than for wealthy or middle class students.
And while the DEI complex and the media have spent years talking about disproportionate impact, it was the Left which was responsible for the worst disproportionate impact in 50 years.
And therefore for the “systemic racism” that they had selfishly brought into being.
Previous figures showed a “larger score gap between white and black students nationally—from 25 points in 2020 to 33 points in 2022.” Fourth grade math scores fell twice as much for black and Hispanic students as for white students. While we already knew that minority students fell back further during the pandemic, the new numbers compare the schools that stayed open and those that closed in order to pander to teachers union members who refused to come to work.
“More time spent in remote or hybrid instruction in the 2020-21 school year was associated with larger drops in test scores,” the Times analysis showed. “Students that were offered a hybrid schedule (a few hours or days a week in person, with the rest online) did better, on average, than those in places where school was fully remote, but worse than those in places that had school fully in person.”
The media had accused Georgia, Florida and other states that opened up of conducting experiments in “human sacrifice”. The actual human sacrifice was carried out by Democrats and their educational establishment which brought up children as human sacrifices to the unions.
Teachers unions waged a relentless and ruthless war to close schools and keep them closed.
American Federation of Teachers (AFT) boss Randi Weingarten called reopening schools “reckless, callous, cruel”. Union members protested, threatened, sued and even physically blocked schools from reopening. The teachers unions won while students and parents lost.
Rep. Aaron Bean noted that “school districts with lengthier collective bargaining agreements were less likely to start the fall 2020 semester with in-person instruction.” Surveys found that the more powerful the teachers unions were, the more likely schools were to stay closed.
And therefore, the more powerful the teachers union, the less the children learned.
Teachers unions chose not to work and they leveraged school reopenings to extract personal and political benefits without paying any price for it. That is true of the lockdown advocates nearly across the board, but the teachers unions emerged politically stronger than ever from the educational disaster they had helped to cause. Strikes, slowdowns and elections made them wealthier and more powerful. And they continue to grow more powerful every year.
As late as 2022, 73% of the members of the Chicago Teachers Union voted not to come to work while claiming that COVID-19 was still too dangerous. A year later, CTU organizer Brandon Johnson was elected as the 57th mayor of Chicago.
What happened during the pandemic was not a unique event, it just accelerated the current state of affairs in which teachers unions have wielded their political power to demand more money for less work while dismantling all the basic standards of the educational system.
According to teachers unions, the ideal educational system has no test scores and no expectations but that students be taught to parrot the politics of their teachers.
The price for the dismantling of the educational system by the educators, during the pandemic or the rest of the time, is being paid by students. Especially poor and minority students.
Teachers unions claim that they advocate for students and that when they wield power, they do so to improve educational outcomes. The data, not only during the pandemic, proves otherwise.
In 1960, the American Federation of Teachers had a mere 60,000 members. Today it’s 1.7 million. And students are less capable of reading, study less and know less than their peers in 1960, but receive much higher grades than they did 60 years ago.
What has improved in schools since 1960 are the teacher salaries, by “45 percent in real terms”, so that teachers union members, like other government workers, are outperforming the taxpayers who pay their salaries.
The growth of the teachers unions has been great for teachers, but terrible for students.
The pandemic brought home the consequences to many parents and the years since convinced many that the public school system, fatally corrupted by teachers unions, is incapable of reform. That’s why movements such as homeschooling and school choice continue to grow, not just for the stereotypical conservatives, but for a spectrum of parents, many of them minorities.
Restoring public education will require many reforms, but the most fundamental of these will be ending the death grip that the teachers unions have over the nation’s students.
I choked on a carrot this morning, and all I could think of was, “I’ll bet a doughnut wouldn’t have done this to me.”
Nothing spoils a good story more than the arrival of an eye witness. (Mark Twain)
It only takes one slow-walking person in the grocery store to destroy the illusion that I’m a nice person.
It turns out that when asked who your favorite child is, you’re supposed to pick out one of your own. I know that now.
It’s fine to eat a test grape in the produce section, but you take one bite of rotisserie chicken and then it’s “Sir, you need to leave!”
One thing no one ever talks about, when it comes to being an older adult, is how much time we devote to keeping a cardboard box because it is, you know, a really good box.
I can’t believe I forgot to go to the gym today. That’s seven years in a row, now.
If you drop something when you were younger, you just picked it up. When you’re older and you drop something, you stare at it for just a bit contemplating if you actually need it anymore.
I like to make lists. I also like to leave them laying on the kitchen counter, and then guess what’s on the list when I am at the store.
Ask your doctor if a drug with 32 pages of side-effects is bad for you.
I just read a book about marriage that says treat your wife like you treated her on your first date. So tonight after dinner I’m dropping her off at her parent’s house.
The best way to get back on your feet is to miss two car payments.
I love bacon. Sometimes I eat it twice a day. It takes my mind off the terrible chest pains I keep getting.
As I watch this generation try to rewrite history, one thing I am sure of is that it will be misspelled and have no punctuation.
Driver: “What am I supposed to do with this speeding ticket?” Officer, “Keep it. When you collect four of them, you get a bicycle.
I asked a supermarket employee where they kept the canned peaches.
He said, “I’ll see,” & walked away. I asked another & he also said, “I’ll see,” & walked away. In the end, I gave up & found them myself, in Aisle C.
I told my physical therapist that I broke my arm in two (2) places.He told me to stop going to those places.
I put our scale in the bathroom corner & that’s where the little liar will stay until it apologizes.
When I was a kid, I used to watch the ‘Wizard of Oz’ & wonder how someone could talk if they didn’t have a brain. Then I got Facebook.
Do you ever get up in the morning, look in the mirror & think, “That can’t be accurate!”
I want to be 14 again & ruin my life differently. I have new ideas.
Apparently RSVP’ing to a wedding invitation with “Maybe next time” isn’t the correct response.
A guy walks into a lumberyard & asks for some 2x4s. The clerk asks, “How long do you need them? The guy answers, “A long time. We’re gonna build a house.”
I just burned 1,200 calories. I forgot the pizza in the oven.
Who knew that the hardest thing of being an adult is figuring out what to fix for dinner and doing it every single night for the rest of your life until you die?
I hate it when people act all intellectual and talk about Mozart, when they’ve never even seen one of his paintings.
Never trust an electrician with no eye brows.
So my neighbor knocked on my front door at 3 am. 3AM!!! Luckily I was already up playing my bagpipes.
Instead of cleaning my house, I just watch an episode of “The Hoarders,” and think, “Wow! My house looks great.”
I’m back from the walk I ended my last post with. I’m still cold, but at least dry. The embarassingly hilarious part of feeling cold was revealed when my Lovely, also complained. She is a cold human who comes from a cold country and enjoys living in the cold. I took her mild complaint as a sign that something was seriously wrong. I was right. I checked the thermostat and discovered that in my morning fog while adjusting the temperature upward, I had put the blasted thing into Aircon mode. Being an obedient artificially-intelligent device it responded accordingly. There was ice-cold air blasting from all of the vents. The expected 74 degrees was down to a chilly 69 and dropping fast.
This morning, I looked out my window and saw what I thought was rain coming in at a seventy-degree angle. It looked like rain, but it was snow, turning into sleet and eventually into rain as it slid in against the ground. April showers are supposed to bring May flowers, but we are still a long way from May. I don’t expect anything but daffodils to bloom.
I feel my body becoming weaker as my daily exercise consists of shuffling from one chair to another. Either I’m reading a book or pounding keys on my computer trying to finish my book. I came across an old note on my phone yesterday, made in October 2013. I started writing my book, Space Rod. There is nothing like taking a few breaks in the project. I think I may have overdone it a bit. I have promised myself that I won’t stop until it is complete.
I’m debating whether or not to waste another three dollars on a lottery ticket. The winning numbers will net one billion dollars. It is wishful thinking on my part, but the price increases due to inflation are draining my resources faster than I want them to. I don’t mind spending money, but prices on food, a somewhat essential necessity, are as high as ten times. I remember reading many years ago about inflation in Argentina rising to the point where a person needed a bushel basket of paper money to buy a loaf of bread. Somehow Argentina continues to exist, in spite of the pain it has imposed on its population.
The moral of that story is that, somehow, a body will continue to exist no matter how much prices rise.
Nature has a funny way of waking a person up. Lately, like yesterday and today, I have been cold. My hands are freezing, and my shoulders and neck feel like they are in an icy atmosphere. I’m sure this signals me to challenge my heart with cardio exercises to get blood moving. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak. In my case, I think it is the other way around, the flesh is willing, but the spirit is weak. The honest truth is that neither the spirit nor the flesh are willing. What I need is a good dose of inspiration and motivation to move from my chairs and to force the blood in my veins to flow. Now, if you will excuse me, I have to take a short walk.
