
I am sometimes forgetful. You shouldn’t go for a walk on a country highway if you forgot to put on any clothes.
Cold weather makes my joints creaky and my bones ache. My head gets fuzzy, and it makes it hard to think when my blood sugar gets low. (By fuzzy, I mean on the inside like interference in your TV picture, not fuzzy on the outside. I am fuzzy on the outside because I had to give up haircuts due to psoriasis on my scalp.)
Yes, as we get older, we get crummier and crummier. I am literally crumbling now as psoriasis flakes my skin off all over.

And as we get older… and poorer… and dumber… we have to learn how to do things to get happier. My health problems lead easily to depression. Not just a little generic sad, but deep down at the bottom of a deep, dark black pit of gloomy depression. So, I have to take matters into my own hands. Yes, I act a little goofy on purpose. I draw a funny picture. Laughter produces serotonin in the brain, the chemical that is missing when you fall into debilitating depression. Scraggles is the result of major dark back in the early 80’s. I also go to Walmart and buy chocolate. Eating chocolate produces serotonin in the brain too. I ate a whole 98-cent box of M&M’s this morning. (Of course, as a diabetic, they had to be peanut M&M’s because peanuts have niacin in them at levels that boost your body’s insulin towards working more efficiently. M&M’s make me happy.
Of course, I am not out of the woods yet. The mood of your family impacts your own mood. My children have been ill for most of January and all of February so far. And that puts them in varied states of depression and needing chocolate. It is a good thing that Valentine’s Day is near and Walmart is over-stocked. And it helps that it’s cheap.
I am old. Being old is not easy. Being ill is worse. It really is heck. But I don’t give up. I don’t surrender. I have fought back for too many years to give up now.



At long last, Robert Mueller Smurf began investigating the election hack by Gargamel and the subsequent obstruction of justice committed by Trumpy with the aid of Azrael, Gargamel’s very hungry cat. He revealed that Gargamel had secretly intercepted the ballot boxes and removed all the votes for Smurfette. Thus Trumpy won by a margin of one vote to nothing. Clumsy Smurf had been the only one stupid enough to vote for Trumpy.

The Republicans have found another scandal to pursue. Two FBI personnel were texting each other messages about how stupid and incompetent Donald Trump is. (As well as why one of them may have voted for him since they hated Hillary too.) The one agent who was involved in the Mueller investigation of Trump was immediately removed from the investigation when evidence of the possibility of lack of impartiality surfaced. This happened long before the Republican Conspiracy Elephants sniffed out the detail to make a big stinky in the media about it. Now, apparently the FBI has become a secret society wrongfully plotting against Trump.

















Of course, “Why should anyone believe me of all people?” is definitely the question. I am only a retired school teacher who spent a career finding and verifying information, followed by a simple and clearly-defined presentation of the information to be learned. I have revealed myself in this blog to have the letter “L” on my forehead for “liberal” which translate into Republicanese as “loser”. And that’s where we will stay if we don’t fight back.


Another Brick in the Wall
I sincerely hope I never appeared in any way to be like the teacher in the video of Pink Floyd’s rock opera The Wall. That teacher represents everything wrong about education and everything that looms over us as a coming darkness if the conservative privatization movement continues to move forward with their evil sausage-factory plans.
In the video you see the teacher making fun of a student for writing poetry instead of participating in the rote recitation about math that the class is engaged in. The school is portrayed as a factory that puts masks on the students, makes them march in a line, and eventually pitch forward, face first into the sausage grinder.
The song was written by Pink Floyd’s bassist, Roger Waters. It was written in the long ago 70’s as a protest against rigid education systems in general, and British boarding schools in particular. But old problems can come back to haunt us.
Here’s the evil being protested. Schools should never be used to suppress creative thinking and enforce conformity. While it is true corporate America is hot for education that treats educating students like baking bricks, with attention to precise shapes and uniform size and color, that is not how kids learn. They have to be treasured for what they are, unique individuals, no two alike, and all possessed of varied strengths, skills, and talents. The idea of education is to help them add to what they are born with, use what they are born with, and fit into the jigsaw puzzle of working with and getting along with others. We cannot teach them by pressing them into molds with standardized high-stakes tests, or taking their individual faces away by always trudging through the same low level thinking skills year after year just because a textbook written in conservative Texas says so. Learning in the classroom needs to be through guided discussions, activities, and interactions. Not through filling in all the blanks on a worksheet.
My own children, for the most part, have been cheated by the public education system in Texas. They are bright kids, but have humongous school troubles stalking them like monsters, boredom, disengagement, and feeling like the young poet betrayed by the teacher in the video. While I always, in my teaching, fought to creatively present learning opportunities, I found good teaching to be a rare thing in Texas. It was sometimes actively discouraged. And it is getting rarer. The people who think teaching English means diagramming sentences and circling the adverbs are winning the battle for young minds. I am left at a point of futility where the only thing I can do about the brick-making is write rants like this one about it.
Donald Trump and Betsy DeVos should be pleased with themselves. The sausage factories in our schools are turning out sausages. Sausages don’t think for themselves. Sausages are easy to control. And when the time comes, some corporate fat cat will eat them and become fatter (hopefully only in the metaphorical sense). And I am guessing here, but I’ll bet sausages make up most of the Republican voting public.
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