EXCUSES

       I haven't posted for a while. I've got excuses...probably all of them wrong!

       First I was blown away by the comments on my last post on education. Obviously all of you have been following what's been goin on in education for a long time. You're not just recent followers when much instruction is being done on line. You wonder what will happen next in education. 

      So thanks for the great comments. 

      I got my first covid shot yesterday.  I could tell that my arm was a bit sore this morning but in an hour or so all soreness was gone. 

      I have dabbled in family genealogy for four or fine years . I have found it difficult to enter and change information so usually abandon my efforts. Last month I contacted a woman who has been working on our genealogy. I had information and photos to share with her and she sent me off on a search for information. So It was nice to make a little progress on the project. 

     I've been enjoying some spring like weather. we've had highs above freezing for about ten days which is warm spring weather for here.

    So I have some excuses for not posting but I know you won't let me get away with them.

EDUCATION

     I've been working on a post for a few days that hasn't gone well. I can't seem to get the post to say what I mean! So another topic has caught up to me. 

     The pandemic has caught up to the education system . I don't know if consideration has been given to where things are going. Kids have been out of school for a few weeks. Then they're on line for  few weeks. Then they're in school for a few weeks. I doubt that any unit can be completed when they bounce back and forth among types of presentation. 

     Even though I taught Middle School for my whole career, I have to be somewhat skeptical about  public education. I know why I taught but most of society sees only a bunch of facts that have to be carried around. 

    So today I gave the Micro Manager a few questions on topics the public thinks should be known. Now the Micro Manager is sharp and was a very hard worker. She was at the top of her nursing class! So I  asked her a few questions. What's an isosceles triangle? What's the formula for the area of a circle? What's the formula for the volume of a sphere? What's a metaphor? What's alliteration?  What's a noun? Then I asked her  few historical dates and characters. Some of these she had some idea about what it was but mostly she didn't know. 

     So here's someone in her 80's and has lived a successful productive life and very few things from school are still with her. The micro Manager has no trouble with logic, judgement, comparison, communication  and all those other things used in daily life.

     My argument is that a good education should give people skills to find accurate  information and make judgements with what they have found. And don't cheat and look for what you want to find instead of what appears. 

    So I don't think the kids will miss much. There are going to be challenges about entrance to post secondary education unless adjustments can be made to take into account what has happened. It looks like schools will be influenced for about two years . 

     I'm also sure that some new teaching strategy will be discovered as well. There will be some positives that come out of the pandemic situation. 

    

A FAMILIAR RANT

       I have written about my dislike for call centers  before this rant. We had a few issues with call centers this week. One would think that banks would be somewhat careful about the service they give but it's not the case.  Yesterday we waited 52 minutes to have someone answer. Then they couldn't answer our question so we waited another 20 minutes to get someone who could give an answer. You have to wait too long for a call center to answer. I would be willing to wait 5 or 10 minutes but any more is just plane rude . The company does not deserve your business. Then people working in call centers are very poorly trained and do not know much about the products. 

      Okay. That was mild. 

      What are we going to do about this problem. They seem to have us as it seems to be all we can get. I think most communication is going on line. 

      Today, I met up with a completely new internet and phone problem.

       Our provincial government cheerfully told us that today we could make appointments for covid-19 vaccinations. Two systems were to be used...the phone and the internet. 

      This was meant to register all the people 75 and over in this province. There are about 290000 of us.

      Things were to open at 8:00 AM and they did. At 8:01 it was reported that the system was overloaded and you could not get on. I tried off and on all day and never got on. They registered 5000 people today. At that rate it will take 58 days just to register us and then they have to find an appointment for us. 

    If it takes this long to do the elderly what will happen to the other people.

     The government is just not willing to hire more people for the call center or provide more servers to register people on line. 

    What ever happened to good old face to face contact? 

UNPLANNED DISCOVERIES

       I sometimes set You Tube going and let it go where it wants to while I do something else . I don't really know how you tube works and I don't really care. You tube thinks it knows what music I like and plays it for me. Once in a while You Tube throws something very different at me.

       The different tune thrown at me a while ago was a group called Pussycat. Ever hear of them? Well, I'd never heard of them. They were easy to listen to and You Tube played them often. 

       The group consisted of three female singers and a good band made up of rhythm guitar, lead guitar, bass, drums and an instrument not seen often...the steel guitar. 

        So I had never heard of this group. They were active from about 1975-85. They had hits and one of their hits was Mississippi so I naturally thought they were Americans. 

       So one day I decided to look up who this group was.

       I found many surprises. They were  a Dutch group. The female singers were sisters. That one blew me away. As I said before they had some big hits.

       So that gives a different perspective about the group and their music.

       So tell me now, how many of you have ever heard of this group? Am I the only one who missed it?

BRUTAL WEATHER

      I have been noticing with some alarm the extreme cold weather across the southern part of the United States. 

    The air with the extreme chill is a location where they are not prepared for extreme chill. They rarely get these low temperatures. I saw some temperatures with lower than minus 20 C. I would find that very cold if I had to stay outside and I'm used to cold and have winter clothing. I can only imagine the discomfort these people are going through. Everything is stacked against them: extreme cold, no electricity, no water, no heat, no food.

    Houses cool off quickly when the power is off. When the power is off most other things are off too. 

   All the power lines in my city are underground. We get power outages but not from weather. Our water lines are a minimum of 8 feet underground. We still get pipes freezing.

    So I feel very badly for the people suffering  through the brutal  cold in the United States. I hope they all survive and that the weather changes quickly.

LUCK THAT TURNED ON A DIME

     Sometimes we have a streak of good luck and at other times bad luck hits us over and over again.

     I had some bad luck the other day and before I knew it my luck had turned.

     I had to tighten the handle on my kitchen sink which required the use of a small Allan wrench. As can happen wrenches can magically slip and go flying away. This Allan wrench chose to go down my sink drain before I could see it. In other words the wrench goes down the drain and stops in the trap. Oh ! why didn't I put the cover on the drain.

Well. when a problem occurs you immediately begin looking at how it can be solved. The Micro Manager happened to be there and immediately said , "Have we got a magnet? Red says , "Can I take the pipes apart and get the wrench out."

     Well I admit the the magnet use would be the most sensible. You can see the magnet the Micro Manager found. It's a magnet on a telescoping rod. Whoops! The end of the magnet was too large to go down the holes in the drain. 

     Well, look around and see if there's something else that could be improvised.  For some reason I decided to look in a cheap tool kit my daughter left me. To my great surprise there was another telescoping rod with a magnet. 

     I put the magnet down the drain very carefully. There was a small bend that I didn't think I got around. I was checking to see how to navigate the bend when I suddenly noticed that the Allan wrench on the end of the magnet. What a surprise.

     So some bad luck turned very quickly into some good luck. 

     So the Micro Manager and I had a good laugh.

REALITY

       I have a few thoughts on reality tonight. I thought I knew what reality was but after tonight I'm not sure if I know what it is anymore.

      I was a teacher for thirty seven years. All of my teaching was at the middle school level. Some may say well, that was crazy but I look back and enjoy every minute of it. So from time to time there was a little disagreement . The Joe lawyers of the class would defend their friends but they were all in reality. They rarely told a lie. They knew the proper rules of behavior and stuck by them. If they got in trouble they accepted their punishment and life went on.

     After today and before I'm not sure that many of our politicians know what reality is . I'm not sure if they understand honesty. I'm not sure if they recognize that they are to serve the citizens of the country. I don't think our politicians understand law and order. I really wonder what politicians think their responsibility is. It doesn't look like it's to uphold the law

     For the last few years politicians have been playing fast and loose with the truth. Take the law into your own hands. Count your own ballots. I wonder how many of these people can count accurately? 

     So is reality gone? Will the word reality be taken from our dictionaries and not be used anymore? 

     Is there something to replace reality. Can we bring reality back? 

    For democracy and society to function properly caring and respect for one another has to be a basic quality.

     I was not happy to see how law order and justice played out today in the impeachment trial. Come up with any lame excuse to protect your buddy. 

    I have to make a disclaimer as I'm not an American but a Canadian. Because we live side by side and have respected one another, it's important that I know what's going on. I'm not hopeful about improvements in the near future. Some major changes are going to have to take place. How will this happen.

   Could we start with some major penalties for telling lies?