Tag Archives: Teacher

Teacher fired for giving 0 to student for missed assignment

From CANOE.

Excerpt:

An Edmonton high school teacher suspended for giving zeros was officially given the axe Friday in a letter from the Edmonton Public School Board.

[…]The Ross Sheppard physics teacher — suspended last spring after he gave a student a zero for not handing in an assignment — now plans to seek legal council and file an appeal.

[…]Despite the months of uncertainty and scrutiny over his controversial teaching decisions, Dorval says he doesn’t regret his actions.

“I keep saying I will never regret it,” he said. “If students don’t do the work, they don’t deserve the mark and I stand by that.”

It’s important for children to learn when they are young and the stakes are low that there are consequences for choices. Punishing teachers who try to teach this to children early does no favors to the children. The world is a tough place, and it’s better to learn that when it’s relatively easy.

The public school board made a mistake by firing this teacher. It says a lot that teachers can do almost anything wrong and not be fired, but that they can be fired for doing the right thing. That’s another reason why the public school monopoly needs to be broken up.

A parent’s guide to intelligent design and science education

An excellent PDF report prepared by the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture.

Here are the contents:

Introduction

  • Part 1: What Is Intelligent Design?
  • Part 2: What Is Evolution?
  • Part 3: What are the Scientific Problems with Neo-Darwinian Evolution?
  • Part 4: How Can Parents Influence Evolution-Education in Local Schools?
  • Part 5: What is Theistic Evolution?
  • Part 6: What Can Parents do to Support Intelligent Design?
  • Part 7: Basic Tips for Parents and Students
  • Part 8: Recommended Resources

First, there’s a definition of intelligent design: (the thing that people in the news media never define correctly!)

Intelligent design (“ID”) is a scientific theory which holds that some features of the universe and living things are best explained by an intelligent cause rather than an undirected process such as natural selection. ID theorists argue that design can be inferred by studying the informational properties of natural objects to determine if they bear the type of information that, in our experience, arises from an intelligent cause.

Proponents of neo-Darwinian evolution contend that the information in life arose via purposeless, blind, and unguided processes. ID proponents contend that the information in life arose via purposeful, intelligently guided processes. Both claims are scientifically testable using scientific methods employed by standard historical sciences. ID is based upon the claim that there are “telltale features of living systems and the universe which are best explained by an intelligent cause.”

Scientists investigating ID compare observations of how intelligent agents design things to observations of phenomena whose origin is unknown. Human intelligent agents provide a large dataset for studying the products of the action of intelligent agents. Mathematician and philosopher William Dembski observes that “[t]he principal characteristic of intelligent agency is directed contingency, or what we call choice.” When “an intelligent agent acts, it chooses from a range of competing possibilities” to create some complex and specified event. Dembski calls ID “a theory of information” where “information becomes a reliable indicator of design as well as as a proper object for scientific investigation.” ID seeks to find in nature the types of information which are known to be produced by intelligent agents, thus inferring a prior action of intelligence.

The type of information which indicates design is generally called “specified complexity” or “complex and specified information” (CSI). Dembski suggests that design can be detected when one finds a rare or highly unlikely event (making it complex) that conforms to an independently derived pattern (making it specified).

Intelligent design looks at features of nature, like cosmic fine-tuning and DNA, and infers an intelligent cause because of the nature of the effect. Information is best explained by an intelligence. Computer programs are best explained by an intelligence. Blog posts are best explained by an intelligence. Cross stitched art is best explained by an intelligence. Intelligence can create complex things that are composed of simple parts that are sequenced together in such a way that they have meaning and purpose that is independent of the properties of the components themselves.

Here’s a good video explaining intelligent design applied to biological information in proteins and DNA: (suitable for complete beginners)

For anyone who is looking for a good basic book on intelligent design, I recommend “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design” by Johnathan Wells. He holds a Ph.D in biology from the University of California at Berkeley. The best intermediate book on intelligent design is Stephen Meyer’s “Signature in the Cell“. He has a Ph.D in the philosophy of science from Cambridge University. The best advanced book is Michael Behe’s “The Edge of Evolution“. He has a Ph.D in biochemistry from the University of Pennsylvania. For Christians looking to understand the relationship between science, evolution and monotheism, I recommend “God and Evolution” edited by Jay Richards. He has a Ph.D in philosophy and theology from Princeton University.

The consequences of the feminization of education in the UK

Dina sent me this article from the UK Daily Mail. The article starts with an excellent explanation of what male teachers bring to the classroom when they are not regulated by politically correct feminists, using one Eric Sutton as an example.

Then there is this:

Which brings me to the reason I’m taking a trip down Memory Lane today — the news that there has been a significant increase in the number of men training as primary school teachers.

For the past 40-odd years, the feminisation of state education has been a disaster. There are more than 4,250 schools in Britain where not a single male teacher can be found in the staff room. The Eric Suttons of this world are as extinct as the stegosaurus.

Coupled with the trendy, ‘child-centred’ teaching methods indoctrinated by Marxist training colleges, this has been responsible for a collapse in discipline and an alarming increase in illiteracy.

Generations of boys have been utterly betrayed by the system set up to educate them — many written off as suffering from a bewildering array of fashionable ‘hyperactivity disorders’ and pumped full of mind-bending drugs simply because young female teachers have no idea how to control or inspire them.

Mr Sutton didn’t need Ritalin to bring an unruly child to order, just a well-aimed blackboard eraser.

With no competitive sport to channel their physical excesses — a consequence of the pernicious ‘all-must-have-prizes’ culture identified by Melanie Phillips — and zero intellectual stimulation, young men are leaving school unsuited to the adult world.

The rise in single motherhood and absentee fathers, coupled with a monopoly of female primary school teachers, means that countless thousands of boys reach puberty without having encountered a male role model, apart from the local ‘gangstas’.

Our sick society, which considers any man who wants to work with children to be a potential paedophile, has helped to turn primary schools into testosterone-free zones.

A male teacher who volunteered to take young boys and girls swimming would be lucky to escape without a knock on the door from the nonce squad or a petrol bomb being lobbed through his front window.

Those hardy male souls who have taken the plunge report hostility and ‘intimidation’ from all-female staff rooms — which tends to suggest they are probably not cut out for dealing with a class full of seven-year-old savages, either.

All this combined with relatively low wages has conspired against encouraging any young family man to become a primary school teacher.

The good news is that recent changes which allow teachers to earn a salary while they train in school have begun to attract more men into the profession. And the Government has launched a campaign to persuade male graduates to take up a career in primary education.

The numbers applying have risen by 51 per cent, albeit from a low base.

Eric Sutton would have approved.

Boys simply do not learn well from female teachers, and they especially don’t learn well when they are distracted by girls. Boys are in rapid retreat as a result of these policies. Not only that, but feminism’s emphasis on sex education and recreational premarital sex does nothing to encourage men to take on the traditional male roles and commit to a woman in order to get sex in the context of marriage. Much of the idiotic “man up” rhetoric on the right and left fails to recognize these three factors which discourage men from stepping into their roles as leaders, providers and protectors.

I think that more male teachers is a good sign for the success of boys in the UK, because boys who lack male leadership from fathers and teachers do not easily accept the roles that society needs them to play – including protecting, providing and leading on moral and spiritual issues. It’s nice to see that the UK is taking steps to come out of the long dark night of feminism, even as America dips further and further into it, with the decline of males aided by government intervention. Maybe the collapse of the traditional family needs to happen realize the harm that feminism has done to children, and especially to young men.