The Conversation

                Many things in life are disappointing. More things are disappointing than might be under different circumstances. What we expect to happen often does not meet the reality after we have met that goal. This sense of expectations being far “better” than reality shows life to be creates dissatisfaction, which in turn creates anxiety and a need to reduce the negative feelings. It is this cycle of dissatisfaction that is Grass is Greener Syndrome. This series of emotional and behavioral reactions to unmet expectations are one of the causes of the social ills we find as an affluent society (or at least the sections of society that experience affluence).               We’ve all heard the phrase “the grass is greener on the other side.” In Hardcore Zen, the author points out that we always expect the grass to be greener, but it is never as gre...

 Yes, it's a boring title. Even more unbelievable, I need your help to do it. I'm designing lessons that embody the changes I believe need to happen for education to become useful again. (At least those that don't require a completely different system...more on that in my podcast: Ally's Dreamland) Anyway , if you have read or heard of a good book that focuses on the life and/or actions of one of the influential people that founded the United States of America, I would appreciate it if you could take a couple minutes and tell me about it (or at least what it's called) so I can also read it and see where I can fit in into my current project. Here is the link: Founding Fathers Book Survey Thank you so much for your help!  Please share the survey and link to anyone you think would be interested :)

  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...

       It is hot. It is too hot. It is unbearably hot in California this week, especially if you don't have an air conditioner. Even if we all had AC to make this heat wave bearable, there isn't enough energy in the grid to provide it. What do we do about this? What CAN we do about this? I don't want to live through another heat wave when someone has to die because they can't cool off.      AP reported this week that the heat was so bad that California, standard-bearer of clean and green energy for the nation, used natural gas to cope with the 52,000-megawatt demand of Tuesday (the hottest day of the wave). Natual gas is the (haha) natural backup supply for wind and solar. In a couple decades, in part because of the statewide push for moving to electric vehicles and appliances, we will use far more energy in a normal day, let alone extreme heat. How are we going to have the infrastructure to provide for these needs?     Any realistic sol...

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...

  The Great American Walkout                 This year will be the greatest exodus of educators in history. Already significant percentages of teachers are moving schools or resigning. More will follow as the summer progresses and the next school year approaches. These results have yet to be reported because the process of resignation happening now, and it will not be until the next school year is about to start when the ramifications of this trend will become painfully obvious. This is a critical moment for the country, and not enough people are taking notice.                 This past school year was subject to a national shortage of teachers in record numbers ( Frontline Education, 2021 , ). The National Guard was asked to fill positions, as substitutes in New Mexico . For all the horror stories about students not engaging in t...

 But What If We... Had Community Policing     This is an introduction for the public of the work I intend to finish this year. It is also a working title for the book, since my original idea has been taken. What if we didn't argue about the problems or judge the victims, but looked for a real solution to those problems that continued to work long after its implementation. This work takes solutions that have been presented from many different perspectives and political leanings. Throughout these writings, there are ideas you may be interested in advocating for, while there are others you will think are crazy (and you may be right). I want to throw out ideas and show how, with some intentional work on the part of the public, make these ideas become reality to have true democracy and representative government.     The first idea I want to run by everyone is the RUOK Squad. This is a new way to look at community "policing." Communities need to be cared for and held ...