charisstoma | Entries tagged with really really life

All I had to do was attend a Beginning of the Year Meeting. Easy 8 hours or should have been.

What was hard and sapped me of pretty much all my energy to the point of feeling nausea was the being lost and late. Took me an hour to find the building where the meeting was being held. Luckily I left 30 minutes early for a 15 min trip. Thank goodness for cell phones so I could call my boss and have her guide me in... well except it's illegal to drive and talk on the phone; which I did not do. Non-Absorbtion of information while in a panic is a failing of mine.

There was a university campus cop in his golf cart. I stopped in time at a stop sign and so didn't hit him. Don't know if he had right of way of not but I was panicking. Last time I got lost in that general area of the city, took me hours of wandering. No my cell phone doesn't have GPS. Yes I did write down the directions but that area, the street goes along then it changes its name and you have to turn sharply left onto another street before the T-intersection you reach becomes the original street's name if you turn to the right. Streets mysteriously disappear and reappear one block over after splitting in two into 2 separate streets and then the one you want goes around a curve.

Think I'll go to bed now. I'm going in early to make up the 30 min I was late. I can set up things and find the coffee maker and microwave from wherever I put it before summer break. Too they've been having meetings in the room this week and will tomorrow too. If I'm going to be crawling around on the floor, it would be nice not to do it while there are people in the room.

Crossposts: http://charisstoma.livejournal.com/1357962.html

Accused of having an incorrect visa, Mem Fox detained by immigration officials at LA airport
DEBORAH BOGLE, Books Editor, The Advertiser
February 22, 2017 9:33pm
http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/accused-of-having-an-incorrect-visa-mem-fox-detained-by-immigration-officials-at-la-airport/news-story/aa712d3867d1509c52c3608798e19db5

AUSTRALIA’S best-loved children’s author, Mem Fox, was left sobbing and shaken after being detained for two hours and aggressively interrogated by immigration officials at Los Angeles airport.

Fox says she’s unlikely to ever travel to the United States again after being made to feel like “a prisoner at Guantanamo Bay”.

President Donald Trump had created the climate for this sort of behaviour, she said, adding: “This is what happens when extremists take power.”

Mem Fox. Picture: Matt Turner
En route to Milwaukee for a conference on February 9, where she was to deliver the opening keynote address at a literacy conference, Fox was ushered into an airport holding room and told she was travelling on the wrong visa. This was incorrect and the US Embassy in Canberra has since apologised. Fox, 70, said that by the time she checked in to her hotel she was shaking and sobbing.

“I am old and white, innocent and educated, and I speak English fluently,” she said. “Imagine what happened to the others in the room, including an old Iranian woman in her 80s, in a wheelchair.

“The way I was treated would have made any decent American shocked to the core, because that’s not America as a whole, it really isn’t. It’s just that people have been given permission to let rip in a fashion that is alarming.”

The irony that the two most popular of her more than 25 books published in the US, Ten Little Fingers and Ten Little Toes and Whoever You Are, are both about diversity, was not lost on her. Nor was the fact that the theme of the conference she was attending was inclusivity and diversity.

Fox has visited the US more than 100 times since 1985, and is widely known there as an author and literacy educator.

After returning to Adelaide, she made a complaint to the US Embassy in Canberra, and received an emailed apology. An embassy spokeswoman told The Advertiser consular cases were not discussed with the media for privacy reasons.

Her experience has confirmed in Fox the importance of her new book, I’m Australian Too, about multiculturalism, illustrated by an Indian-born Australian, Ronojoy Ghosh. Fox wrote the book in late 2014 in response to what she saw as a rising tide of antagonism towards immigrants and refugees. “And it’s got worse since then,” she said. “I just feel that the hate speech that is going on is trying to change that aspect of our national character and it would be heartbreaking if that happened.”

Originally published as Mem detained in Trump’s America

If you have not seen this, you need to watch.
The questioning near the end ... yes. If your teaching materials, and training from the company that makes the tests results in worse test scores than before then there is something very wrong. I would give them an failing grade. Texas pays $500 million to Pearson with a 5 year contract.

Paranoia catches Abbott’s attention: Gov orders Texas guard to monitor military exercises over fears of federal takeover
--- Christy Hoppe
(Because this is Texas Ya'll) -- internet at home down again *sighs*

http://trailblazersblog.dallasnews.com/2015/04/paranoia-catches-abbott-attention-gov-orders-texas-guard-to-monitor-military-exercises-over-fears-of-federal-takeover.html/

Gov. Greg Abbott ordered the Texas Guard to monitor federal military exercises in Texas after some citizens have lit up the Internet saying the maneuvers are actually the prelude to martial law.

The operation causing rampant suspicions is a new kind of exercise involving elite teams such as the SEALs and Green Berets from four military branches training over several states from July 15 to Sept. 15

Called Jade Helm 15, the exercise is one of the largest training operations done by the military in response to what it calls the evolving nature of warfare. About 1,200 special operations personnel will be involved and move covertly among the public. They will use military equipment to travel between seven Southwestern states from Texas to California.

On Monday, command spokesman Lt. Col. Mark Lastoria attended a Bastrop County Commissioners Court meeting to answer community questions and was met with hostile fire. Lastoria, in response to some of the questions from the 150 who attended, sought to dispel fears that foreign fighters from the Islamic State were being brought in or that Texans’ guns would be confiscated, according to a report in the Austin American-Statesman.

He was forced to rebut that martial law was underfoot and said misinformation has been spread by those with a “personal agenda.”

“You may have issues with the administration. So be it. But this institution right here has been with you for over 200 years,” he was quoted as saying. “I’ve worn this uniform across five different administrations for 27 years.”

Radio host and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones has been sending out warnings for weeks regarding the exercise, saying it is the U.S. military positioning itself to take over the states and declare martial law.

Abbott apparently has heard the concern and ordered the Guard to monitor the training and U.S. military personnel.

“To address concerns of Texas citizens and ensure that Texas communities remain safe, secure and informed about military procedures occurring in their vicinity, I am directing the TExas State Guard to monitor Operation Jade Helm 15,” Abbott wrote in his letter to the commander of the Texas Guard.

Abbott hedged the suspicion inherent in his message, saying, “The action I take today comes with the recognition of Texas’ long history of supporting our military forces.”

Related
Army says Jade Helm’s a training op coming to Texas this summer. Internet says it’s a takeover!
White House: No liberties at risk from Special Ops exercise, despite Gov. Abbott concerns

Crossposts: http://charisstoma.livejournal.com/872035.html

Monday and Tuesday both schools I work for are doing STAAR testing. Not the 6th grade and maybe not all of the 9th grade though.
Both schools have 6th grade.
This time they are not using the Library for testing in. BUT they decided to pull both of us from the Library to monitor the hallways. In one hallway they are having 4 monitors. Most of the action would be at the one set of restrooms where as far as I know there will be one monitor. There will be one at the Library entrance which is so close it makes no difference except it would be at the backend of the line of restroom supplicants. There will be one at the junction of two hallways which is as close to the Library entrance as the Library entrance is to the restrooms and then way at the end where the students who are not supposed to test are to use the other set of restrooms is where I'll be. Not even at those restrooms but in front of the gym and cafeteria with the restrooms being around the corner a short walk from them.
There are students who would/need to read. They are doing a thing called Zap reports because students need to read 25 books a year. They have to document that they've read these books and the stress is that it be done by multiple choice tests done online using the Accelerated Reader program. They used to have to document the books through a short annotated bibliography but that means more work for the teachers and the students. Those behind students who are not testing could be in the Library READING.

So they've determined that by such and such a date the students should have read x number of their 25 books. Students are blowing it off ergo ZAP done on a weekly basis.

Students were and still are, with the powers that be's (administrators) approval, allowed to read under their grade level, way under. Think books as long as Dr. Suess long.
We have elementary level books for the international school's students who are learning English, Kindergarten (age 5) and up.
The native English speaker students who are on ZAP are being allowed to read as low and lower than 3rd grade (ages 8-9) books. *Indignation* What the hell are they doing in a Middle School (ages 11 - 14)?!

We caught one student doing the test as open book with one of these lower level books and complained to the administration. The answer back, they encourage this method of test taking because it teaches them to go back and find the information in the book just like is done in the STAAR Reading test. The lower level books... usually have 5 questions and at most 10. EVEN the international students aren't allowed to take the test with the book open to find the answer after the first week.
So Wrong.So So Wrong.

The quality of student that is going to be produced from this ... The applied learning school used to be a jewel in the crown for helping students to master skills and excel at them. That admin is crippling them.

Today is my mother's 89th birthday. She has as many marbles as she did before but she plays with them a little differently now. Age will do that.

Today after walking through the overgrown area that is the walkway from the front door I picked up a passenger. I didn't know that the passenger was there until I felt a stabbing pain on the body side part of my upper arm. Pulling the green 1.5 cm. bug with striped legs off me and crunched it before throwing its dying body out the window where I hope some bird ate it, waste not. It hurt like someone has stuck a thick pin into me and left a not small red spot that did the raise bump that bites do. The pain stayed for longer than it should for a normal bug bite.

Looked the thing up. And though my son insists that it was defending itself because my arm was squishing it, the bug's name says otherwise. Zelus tetracanthus, probably, though the nymph stage photo was species, the striped legs match the adult. Assassin Bug. And I'm not the first person bitten by one. Some of these prey on small mammals. The one that spiked me, obviously had larger ambitions.