The Conversation

  The Viral Candidate – On Hold               I really don’t want to run for office. I’m an idea person, not an implementation person. I have a lot of ideas that I think would do a lot of good. I realized that all the political candidates have done something “noteworthy” in politics or life before trying to run the country. This feels elitist, but also ensures intelligent, capable people are the ones running. Or maybe those are the people who refuse to run because our political landscape has gotten so toxic. With that thought, I want to finish some of my ideas and do something larger than being a high school teacher before I try to imagine a national political campaign. Therefore, I am putting the Viral Candidate project on hold for a year.               I have been trying to find a way to build a platform and have done so with little guidance so far...

Kids               I don’t want to run for public office, I never have, but if I did, I would focus on our children and how to set them up for future success. As a member of the first generation in this country predicted to be worse off than their parents both physically and financially, this is particularly important for me . Kids are our future, and we need to do a better job taking care of them and enabling them to have the quality of life we wish for them (which I’m assuming is better than the one we have made for ourselves). I’m a public-school teacher of middle and high school students and have been for over a decade (since before the iPhone came out and teaching fully metamorphosed into an exercise in frustration). As a public servant and one who has a heart for the future success of our nation through the next generation, I find it important to address what we are going to do for our descendants (while figuring ...

  Sick at School                 Students and staff alike are discouraged from staying home when they are sick. This has been true for the decades that I have been a part of the system. The discouragement stems from the method through which schools are funded and the punitive enforcement policies schools enact to protect their funding. The major downside to this policy is that more people get sick and fall behind in their learning. The band-aid solution to this (alleviating the problem without changing the system) is simple in both concept and implementation.                 Students, parents, and staff dread being sick. The illness itself may only take a person out of the classroom for a couple days, but the road to educational recovery can take weeks, months, or even years. This is far longer than the handful of days that is the...

Article Title : US Schools Need an Infrastructure Upgrade Source: California Educator (CTA monthly magazine) Date: 2021, month unknown (I tore it out of the magazine months ago)      Okay, both an obvious and boring opening topic, I know. This is also not really breaking news, and I wanted the stories I wrote about to be more recent than last year. This is news because I have only just left the teaching profession in part because of this issue, and the infrastructure issues featured in a graph in this article clearly demonstrate how critical this issue is to the future (of everyone, not just the kids who have to learn in these conditions). When I say school infrastructure, I mean the basics that include running water and roofs that don't leak, let alone mental health services and internet access.             The article itself is only a few paragraphs, but it is the graph that tells the real story. The key takeaway is that at leas...