Justice? What happened to "Hang 'Em High?"

Warning:  Rant to follow.  This post has nothing to do with writing, though it is more fantastical than fiction.  No names will be mentioned, but the facts are accurate.




In the old days of the wild west, horse thieves could be hanged for their crime.  Apparently in the 21st century, they get a cruise as well as huge profits on their stolen booty.  There is a reason that horse people have a bad name and this woman is the poster child...though she should be on a wanted poster.  Is there no justice anymore?

A dear friend of mine has two beautiful girls. The oldest is my own daughter's best friend.  With their daddy on active duty and their best friend moving away, as well as other stressors, these girls have had enough to deal with without their ponies being stolen...by someone they knew and trusted.

A woman who should have served as a role model and an instructor betrayed them all and stole their 2 ponies, selling one across state lines and the other to a family who is also a victim in all of this.  What do the police do?  Almost nothing.  "It just isn't a priority."  It has been almost 2 years since the theft occurred and roughly 18 months since the truth of it came out.  Still this woman is walking around free and trading horses and offering lessons.

As a professional member of USEF and PHSA, she should be held to a high moral standard.  I have recently discovered that they don't care about moral or professional standards as long as their membership dues are paid.  So this criminal can continue to profit from her elicit activities because the police don't have the time to deal with it and the professional organizations don't care about the unethical and even criminal behavior of their members.

Of course civil court could get involved, which means even more financial and emotional hardship for a family who has done nothing wrong.  I am stymied.  Let is not forget that two little girls are the victims here.  Two horse-crazy, loving, and innocent girls who until now had not learned that adults cannot be trusted.

No one has been murdered.  This is true.  This woman is not running the biggest meth operation in three counties.  But does that make her any less guilty of a crime against two little girls?  Given the money involved and the interstate transfer of stolen goods, she is guilty of a felony.  We have positive proof, even recorded confessions, but no one will do anything.

Perhaps it is a good thing that I no longer have a horse.  That I no longer rub elbows with such sleazy horse traders as this. I have lamented my loss for the last ten years and ached to be among horses again, but not if it means dealing with conniving, lying, thieving delinquents like this woman.

As for the response by law enforcement, God forbid my house gets broken into.  It may not rate high enough on the attention scale for the police to respond.

Meanwhile, two little girls have seen how it works.  Get screwed by one adult and then take it up the butt again by the adults who are supposed to help you.  

I have only one word for the women involved in this crime and the so-called authorities who are supposed to protect us from them:  DISGUSTED

Learning: The Quintessential Survival Skill

I've been considering picking up some additional graduate work and the following is my response to a request for a writing sample.  The topic was "the impact of three issues that challenge educators today."  This will be the last of my rants on educational topics for a while...I promise.

As I stepped through the door into my own classroom at Heritage High School eighteen years ago, I brought my passel of ideals and my passion for literature with me and laid them right out for everyone to see.  I had no doubt that these pieces of gold would inspire my students and generate a whirlwind of learning, no matter how disparate the learning styles or how severe the behavioral issues or anemic the student motivation. I had a mission. If only it were that simple.  While I had the immeasurable support of my administration and confidence in my vision, it soon became clear that there was a lot more to being a teacher than teaching, talent, and good intentions. In college, no one really prepares you for the politics of teaching.  By politics, I don’t mean the ideology of the superintendent or the social etiquette of the faculty lunch room.  I mean the white noise that both student and teacher must endure to get the job done.  

Working in a township school, I was prepared for some disparities in the socio-economic composition of the student body, but the most persistent motivational roadblock came not from the students themselves, but from their parents.  Politicians argue about the accountability of the school districts for the quality of their children’s education, but one of the most damaging cultural attitudes that teachers must face is a devaluing of education by the already disenfranchised.  In this particular community, many of the parents had never finished high school, let alone gone on to college.  They were farmers or factory workers who saw school as a necessary evil.  Other families may be broken, one-parent homes relying on school to babysit their children while the parent worked two or three jobs just to make ends meet and avoid welfare.  The frustration, exhaustion, and formative experiences of the parents translated to a mistrust of school as an institution and even an adversarial relationship with education itself, an attitude which was ultimately inherited by their children. They did not see education as an opportunity, but rather as just another yard stick with which to measure their deficiencies.  It is difficult to help these students (and their parents) see the value of learning for its own sake, but that is part of our mission.  

 As our economy struggles, the divide between the haves and the have-nots grows and so does this attitude that education is not for everyone.  Lack of equity in the distribution of resources has always been an issue.  Some school systems simply do not have the same access to funding or the most modern resources essential to educational growth.  And with the lightning pace of technological advances, many schools cannot keep up, which again pits the more affluent communities against the poorer communities and the politicians get to decide who gets funding based on academic performance rather than need.  Their altruistic but misguided answer is No Child Left Behind legislation that is intended to hold public schools accountable for sloppy standards, bad teaching, and poor programming.  However good its intentions, NCLB is in large part perpetuating some of the most pervasive problems as it widens the gap and confirms those old prejudices against education. It has created a “teach to the test” mentality in many school systems that are terrified of losing their funding or being labeled as “the bad school” and abandoned by anyone with the means to transfer their child to a “choice” school.  Administrators have begun to pressure, and in some cases bully, their faculty into using a canned pedagogy that may encourage a stronger performance on the test but that will surely hinder true learning, which is whole the point of education.  Jobs are threatened, innovation is stifled, and whole populations are ignored in the name of that sacred test score.  Sadly, NCLB is now a significant part of the problem instead of the solution.    

Solid, veteran teachers will continue to inspire their students and help them learn, but in some ways their efforts may be hobbled by politics.  First year teachers do not have the experience to help them discern where an appropriate line can be drawn between content and learning so they rely on their administration and their mentors. Moreover, the efficacy of the assessment is only as good as the instrument, and we have plenty of research that demonstrates the biases and limitations inherent in many standardized tests.  So where does this leave ESL students and students with learning disabilities and other special needs?  With the ever growing diagnoses of children with ADD, ADHD, and Asperger’s Syndrome, as well as other issues that affect learning, the current trend in response to NCLB is to make few accommodations while forcing them to participate in this flawed evaluation process. There is no specific measurement of their growth as a subset of the population.  Through my own teaching experience, I saw the number of students with these issues in my classroom grow year by year.  Some of these students had early intervention, but many went undiagnosed or unserved for years.  In addition, the influx of non-English speaking immigrants is disproportionate across regions, yet these students are introduced to our classrooms, often with little support depending upon the availability of funds and programs, and included in our standardized testing which will impact that carefully guarded average that represents “adequate yearly progress” and subsequent NCLB approval.  

Teaching has always been a challenging vocation and certainly not a profession for the weak-hearted.  Education, however, is the backbone of any society and no matter what the political climate or the changing demographics or the gap in generational attitudes, learning is the essential point.  A student cannot effectively acquire content knowledge unless he learns how to learn first.  At its very core, learning is a survival skill, one that needs to be nurtured and fed and practiced throughout life.  Good teachers lead their students onward through the white noise and help them develop the most crucial competency they will ever master—the ability to learn. 

Before I started writing semi-full-time, I taught full time.  Believe me, there are very few teaching jobs that are "fluff" jobs, but lately there has been a lot of debate about the fate of tenure in American universities.  A recent essay by Christopher Shea in the New York Times Sunday Book Review addresses two books that tackle the question — Higher Education? How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids — And What We Can Do About It, by Andrew Hacker and Claudia C. Dreifus, and Crisis on Campus: A Bold Plan for Reforming Our Colleges and Universities, by Mark C. Taylor.  Earlier in July, the NYT also posted a debate that considers the ramifications of eliminating tenure and restructure higher education altogether, a thought that makes me cringe, though I am no blind disciple of the system as it is.  


I'm not going to rant and rave about why tenure should be protected or why colleges should cutout the bulk of administrative fat that clogs the financial and social arteries of most institutions of higher learning.  However, I find it funny that so many people seem to think the majority of tenured college professors are self-indulgent fusspots who rest on their laurels and do little teaching and spend their time spouting communist propaganda and cranking out fluff scholarship and books that no one reads while the adjuncts do all the heavy lifting with no benefits or job security.  Come on folks!  For every job in America, from sanitation to corporations, you will find that guy.  


As an English teacher, I constantly warn my students against laying out sweeping generalizations to prove a point.  It undermines your credibility and obscures the real issue.  Yes, such examples of vocational gluttony do exist, and I'm sure those professors feel they are entitled because of their own years of slave-labor and hard-won scholarly credentials.  But most of the tenured professors I know do teach full loads AND work on research or scholarship or service projects.  Their extra-curricular work makes considerable contributions to their students as well as their field of study and their campus community.  


As for who gets the money...few college professors I know make more than $50,000-80,000 a year, while college administrators and athletic personnel go well into 6-digit salaries.  And that's where Shea gets it right:  

And if colleges are ever going to bend the cost curve, to borrow jargon from the health care debate, it might well be time to think about vetoing Olympic-quality athletic facilities and trimming the ranks of administrators.

I know that from city school districts to small colleges to major universities, administrations are far too often top-heavy and the distributions of funds less than equitable or reasonable.


When it comes to tenure, let me say this.  In a profession where speaking your mind is one of the most essential tools in your belt, as well as the most dangerous, and where your "superiors" can wield an Orwellian power that could extinguish a brilliant mind just for having an opinion if there were no protections against such dictatorial rule, tenure is merely a safety net that allows a professor an iota of freedom to do his job well.  Without it, education would cease to exist and indoctrination would takes its place.  Yes, that may be a little over-dramatic, but think about what a professor's job is all about.


Now consider the ever-growing complexities of the university system as a whole and the competitive playing field that now encompasses web presence, commercial appeal, financial growth, and social credibility in addition to its altruistic roots of education.


Every college or university has its own agenda...it's own "mission."  For some, research is their claim to fame, while others subsist quietly on the satisfaction of educating eager minds no matter what their next step may be.  So while I sit up and wait for my tenure-track professor husband as he sweats out the next book or the next service project or the next committee meeting along with preparing inspiring class lectures and activities and grading essays and advising students, I'll think about how "overpaid" he is.  Next time I take my calculator to the grocery store and put back six items because they just aren't in the budget, I think about how "overpaid" he is.   And next time I try to plan that family vacation that we have never taken in 15 years...I'll think about how overpaid he is.


At least he has job security...

I'll have a plate of Hypocrisy and a side of Stupidity, please...

I don't like to talk politics, especially on a blog, but when some ignorant group of fascists declares a "national burn the Koran day," I simply cannot hold my tongue. Yes, that idiot pastor Terry Jones appeared on a recent episode of HARDBALL with Chris Matthews as well as CNN to proclaim 9/11 as a demonstration against Islam. Sure, he says "Muslims are free to worship here, but they must respect the constitution...that's why we have declared 9/11 national burn the Koran day." Really? Are you kidding me? How can he not see the hypocrisy in that statement?

What gets me about these fundamentalists is their complete tunnel vision and lack of self-reflection. Shall we say that Jim Jones represented all Christians? How about the Ku Klux Klan? Or even Timothy McVeigh?



Mr. Jones calls for "radical times" and all but incites violence against Muslims. Interviewer Rick Sanchez called him to task, saying he does a disservice to Christians. Amen. What astonishes me even more is the fact that this guy actually has followers who take him seriously. This is how Hitler got his start, isn't it?