School Daze: Movie Review of Steve ★★★1/2 Illustration by Michael DiMilo By Geoff Carter The film industry has always been fascinated with the classroom. There is a long history of school-based movies going all the way back to Blackboard Jungle, Up the Down Staircase, and To Sir, With Love and extending to more recent offerings like Lean on Me, Stand …
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Category:Education
Kickass and Back to School
Attribution: Photo by Deleece Cook on Unsplash By Bill Stokes Kickass, the doorstop dog, reports that the keeper and Phyllis have respective mobs of wonderful, flawless, perfect grandchildren and great grandchildren scattered across the country and currently marching proudly in the back-to-school parade; and they would like them all to know how great it is to see their …
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Kickass and Last Day of School
Photo by Phyllis Stokes By Bill Stokes Kickass, the doorstop dog, reports that the keeper, prompted by fellow poster Scott MW, acknowledges the significance of this time of year as it marks the last day of the school term and what that means to young minds. Was there ever a time so important to a …
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Unschooled
Illustration by Michael DiMilo By Geoff Carter I was a public-school teacher for over thirty years. I mainly taught high school English, but because I was at one point assigned to the Home and Hospital Program, which serviced students at home who were too sick to go to school, I had occasion to teach all …
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Kickass and Plastic Bags
Attribution: Basile Morin, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons By Bill Stokes Kickass, the doorstop dog, sometimes joins the keeper in the morning as he watches the students walk across the parking lot from their parked cars to Memorial High School on the other side of Gammon Road. It is the keeper’s observation that the students …
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Kickass and School Opening
The Pen in Hand Blog featuring Bill Stokes
Attribution: Roberto Ciucci, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons; https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Turkey_Gaziantep_going_to_school_(14166610457).jpg
Dialogues on Getting Schooled: The High in Higher Education
Attribution: Tichnor Brothers, Publisher, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons Featuring the Fabulous Dadbots: Dave S., Mark M., Mark O., Dennis C., Paul C., and Geoff Carter Found this insightful, if not entertaining. Gail and Brett…and others have been espousing the value of the 3 year college degree—fits like a glove with this Economist value centric …
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The Miseducation of America
Artwork by Michael DiMilo By Geoff Carter The 1983 study, “A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform” sounded major alarms about the American public education system. It maintained that our schools were failing because that, among other things, that SAT scores had dropped drastically, students could no longer write coherent essays, draw inferences, …
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Kickass and Back to School
Attribution: See page for author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons By Bill Stokes Kickass, the doorstop dog, at this time of school openings, lends a hand/paw to the keeper in authenticating the challenging route that he and his sister and brother faced in getting to the one-room country school they attended in northwest Wisconsin back …
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No More Pencils, No More Books, No More Teachers…
Artwork by Michael DiMilo By Geoff Carter Summer is drawing to a close. School will be starting soon. It’s the time of year that parents usually welcome and kids usually dread. We’ve already started to see the avalanche of back-to-school ads from Target, Walmart, Old Navy, and the other big box stores. This is usually …
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Kickass and School is Out
Attribution: Rasheedhrasheed, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons Kickass, the doorstop dog, assures the keeper that there is no way for him to replicate the joyous feelings he once knew when school days ended and the glorious summer laid out there like the yellow brick road. If there is another individual transitional experience of such magnitude, …
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Freedom from Thought
Artwork by Michael DiMilo By Geoff Carter In the latest in a series of educational innovations from the far-right extremist Republicans—the MAGAs—executing their regressive agenda, a new round of book-banning has been sweeping the nation over the past three years. Along with old favorites like To Kill A Mockingbird, Huckleberry Finn, Catcher in the Rye, Fahrenheit …
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