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Jim Hudson

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  1. Conservative Republication I am a Conservative Republican in the United States. I don't believe in socialism. I think the free enterprise economic system, as written by Adam Smith, is the best possible type of economic system in the world. There is no longer a pure free enterprise system, as some governemental interference has been put in place to protect consumers. The Constitution of the United States should be the only document that runs the country. All basis of government must be held to account as to whether the laws passed are Constitutional or not. The establishment of the three distinct branches of government should remain seperate and powerful in their own right. The presidency, the executive office of the land, is checked and balanced by congress. The legislative part of the country is checked and balanced by the court system and the executive office. The federal court system is held in check through the threat of impeachment and removal from office by the congress. The most important part of the Constitution are the first ten amendments, our Bill of Rights. These ten amendments spell out the rights of the people. It is vital that they remain intact to secure the people from the incursion of government upon their daily lives. It is also very imperative that the Federal Government remain as a support element to the states,and the states as a support element to the counties and cities. States rights need to be strong and soverign as they are the most responsible to their citizens. It is obvious that some roles have to be undertaken by the Federal government, such as national defense. but education is purely a state and local responsibility. In some states there are city wide school districts, in some county wide districts and even a few state wide districts. In Texas there are independent school districts that function under state guidelines. The teachers of Texas do not work for the state or the Federal government , but rather for their independent school district. This gives a lot of latitude for individual choices for teachers and districts. I don't like unions. They were originally good in the protection of their members, but in the past 40 years have become a major factor in inflation in the United States and have forced the prices of products up. That has driven a lot of American companies to either move to sections of the country that have Right to Work laws that discourage union membership or forced the companies to move to foreign countries, like Mexico and Central America. As free enterprise is the economy of the land, the individual companies can re-locate where they will or can without governmental approval. In many cases local governments attempt to lure these companies to their locale by tax abatements and free land to locate there. Of course this improves the local economy by furnishing more jobs to the area. The Supreme Court of the United States, originally set up under the Constitution as a law review agency, has become a law making body through legal review. The court needs to be returned to it's original role as that of judicial review and not as a law making body that is not elected. The members are appointed by the President of the United States and subject to approval by the Senate. These judges have an appointment for life. There are only nine of them, and that gives them tremendous power. To present a political conservative viewpoint on this posting would require much more writing, and as I have already spent the day at school, I am ready to end. I will be glad to answer any questions and answer any critics I might have.
  2. Teacher bashing is a favorite passtime of our local TV news channels. They look for anything to tear down the profession, then in a typical hypocritical way give little gilded apples to the teacher of the month in our area. If a custodian does something improper with a student, they are always labled as a teacher and that brings on more critisizm. All teachers are considered lazy because of the summer vacation and holidays off, yet we are only paid for the 190 actual days of instruction. We are not paid for the 2 weeks of training and inservice all teachers in the state have to do and we are definately not paid for all of the extra hours each of us put in doing additional paperwork required by the state Texas Education Agency. Actual time in classroom instruction is being consumed by additional outside work, interuption by scores of office aids, administrators and parents dropping by the classroom and public address announcements. Oh well. Today is Valentine Day, so Happy Valentine to all the teachers that read this. You should be recognized for all the good things you do and a big box of chocolate should be your reward and a big Thank You.
  3. John it is already happening. Our state legislature is monkeying around with our retirement system. Texas is already number 42 out of fifty states in teacher benefits, pay and retirement. Now they are going to lower the payment amount to the teachers and increase the fully vested retirement age by five years. As over 60 % of the teachers in the state are reaching the retirement age, the state sees a problem with the retirement system, so they are going to cut the benefits in order to try to make the system solvent. The system management made some very poor investment decisions, like investing 30 million dollars into Enron stock and lost all of the teachers money and the state will not make it up, even though they made the bad investments. There are 230,000 teachers in the state of Texas and even with that amount of political capitol, they have no power at the state capitol because we can not have collective bargaining or strike when we are railroaded by the state. I need to clarify my statement. We can join a union, and pay union dues, but the union has no power to bargain with the state on the behalf of the teachers, therefore no union members as the money is wasted. Our state education system is divided up into 1400 independent school districts, each with their own elected school board, superintendent and support staff. Just in Bexar County where San Antonio, Texas is located there are seventeen independent school districts that set their own standards, both student and teacher. Each teacher receives a school district pay check that has nothing to do with the state except for some funding. You can imagine the problems with trying to have any type of a united front. I would like to take this opportunity to thank all of you for your input. It is rewarding and fun to learn about teachers in other countries.
  4. John, I believe you are on the head of the tack on this one. A true researcher will, without a doubt, place themselves totally into the subject matter of the research. When investigating horrific events such as the Rape of Nanking, one has to feel the horror and pain of the people, coupled with the brutality of the Japanese soldiers that committed such unspeakable genocide against these people. We often don't look at why people kill themselves, we just feel that they must be crazy.
  5. In the frosty Georgia mornings, in the skies over Fort Benning, of 1943 and 44 soldiers and officer candidates travling to and from the fort often saw the sky filled with white parachutes. Most of them assumed that the faces beneath the were also white but some were black.The black soldiers of the United States Army drove the trucks, waited on the white soldiers in the mess halls and rode together in the back of the bus when traveling off the fort. They even had their own clubs on the fort. These troopers had traveled a long road. One of their sergeants had seen the morale of the black troops sagging because of the menial jobs they had been relegated to and bargained with some of the officers on the paratrooper physical endurance course to allow his black soldiers the opportunity to work out when the white soldiers were not using the course. This practice continued for several weeks until Sergeant Walter Morris, the ennovator of this physical program had a message to report to General Lear's office. Fearing he was in trouble he approached the general fearing the worst. His heart lightened when he was told by the general that Washington had ordered him to start training black soldiers to become paratroopers. In 1944 the first black paratroopers graduated and earned their silver jump wings. They were first assigned to the 505th Airborne Infantry Regiment, but later as the cadre of black troopers expanded, the 555th Parachute Infantry Battalion was established. The "Triple Nickles". The choice of name is obvious. First the triple fives. But the old Buffalo nickles of the pre-war time denoted the famed Buffalo Soldiers of the late 1800's . I recently met one of these old airborne warriors at a resturant. He had a baseball cap with the three fives on it and U.S. Airborne wings. We had a very pleasant visit and he followed me to my home where I took him for a ride in my restored 1943 GMC 2 1/2 ton truck . One of the heros of a time past had graced me with his presence and my old WWII truck also.
  6. I have been in war. I have experienced hand to hand Infantry combat . I have wrestled with myself and my conscience for my deeds. War is inhumane and brutal and is the worst thing that humans can do to each other. War is inflicted one upon another and when this happens, then if a country wants to be victorious then all the stops have to be pulled. Is it more humane to kill 100,000 thousand people with fire raids, like the Tokyo burn raids or an atomic bomb? Is it more humane to kill everyone in a village with napalm or shoot them all dead? Is it more humane to try to force a surrender by destroying a city with all out bombing or let the war continue because the leaders will not quit? As noted War is Hell. Sadly enough civilians have always been affected by war and sadly they end up dying along with the combatants. As we progress technologically we have the means to destroy more cities and civilians when we have wars. I don't buy into the idea that the bombing of Dresden was a war crime. I don't buy into the idea that the destruction of Hiroshima was an act of terrorism and a war crime. I do buy into the fact that they were acts of war, plain and simple. While tragic, they were deemed necessary at the time. I was not there when RAF Bomber Command and the U.S. 8th AAF made the decisions to destroy Germany from the air so I can't make the judgments if they were right or wrong. To do so is revisionist history and we may be interjecting our own political prejudice into history and not necessarily teaching the truth.
  7. Sir, while I applaud your WWII service, as all of your generation, the Greatest Generation, we only differ on our political and economic philosophy. I am a conservative, and while I grew up as a registered Democrat, as that was the way it was in the South some 40 years ago, in my eyes, the Democratic party deserted it's base and moved farther and farther to the left towards socialism and I disagree with that form of government and economics. I have a daughter that lives in California and she loves it there. She is on welfare and California has the most generous welfare in the country. She left Texas to go there for more welfare benefits. She hates your governor because he is wanting drastic cuts in the welfare program. She has a degree in computer programming but found life to be easier by not working and learning to live on the efforts of others. I, on the other hand have worked for all I have. I spent 24 years as an Army officer with two tours of duty in VietNam and now teach school. I was considering retirement soon, but here in the state of Texas they just changed the retirement rules, so I will have to work untill I am 72 before I become fully vested. Thats OK with me. I had rather work than be a leach off of the system. Again I thank you for your service. We owe your generation a lot, not only this country, but the whole civilized world.
  8. Interesting responses. I have, for years, found it sad that we teachers in the U.S. have only concentrated on Black History during the month of February. That has been declared Black History month. That is a sad commentary as black history should be inclusive in all of the history at all times.
  9. Jean I feel for you and the other teachers there. At least those that cause the most disruption in our classes are still in self contained classrooms. The young man I mentioned in my post yesterday was withdrawn from school today. The administration , with the approval of the parents, removed him as he was not going to graduate anyway because of failures . That should help my classroom considerably. It is shameful that we are robbing a good education from those that want and can attain that goal for the sake of a few that will never be tax paying productive citizens because of political goals from politicians. The biggest enemy of the classroom teacher in the state of Texas is the state legislature, a mixture of ranchers, lawyers, business men and women, who only meet in a legislative session every two years. They have little to no contact with the education system but have all kinds of ideas how to tweek the system to improve standardized scores while offering no more money to teachers or even the same benefits that the other empolyees of the state get, yet more paper work and additional time taken from the teachers personal time to complete the tasks assigned to the teacher. We can not have teacher unions in Texas, so we have weak teacher organizations that have little effect on the legislature because there is no collective bargaining allowed and if the teachers strike they lose their teacher certificates. Thank goodness I am getting towards retirement and feel I can handle the system for a few years.
  10. Well sir, I love the free enterprise system. It is understandable why you would love socialism as England is steeped in it's history. You should spend time in California. It is a great place to visit, but even greater knowing tha one can leave it and go back to a less socialistic state. The problem is that California is going broke with all of it's socialistic policies and feels that the rest of the U.S. should bale them out of their financial woes. Most Americans find that socialistic and communistic economic systems are deplorable and prefer the free enterprise system. The socialistic welfare state does not stimulate a good economy. This should give you some hope, as most university professors in this country would prefer a socialistic democracy, but sanity prevails and we keep our economic system regardless of their misguided theories.
  11. Here, in the U.S. most television produced documentaries are so filled with half truths, plagerism and political leanings that generally they are not used that much in classrooms. The best channel we have on our TV is a cable network called The History Channel. They have some very well done shows that are user friendly to teachers.
  12. Sadly enough history teachers in the U.S. seem to concentrate most Black History in our contry during the month of Feb., as that is Black History Month. I have always tried to teach inclusion as history progresses, and not as a pull out for a one month celebration.
  13. Thanks for the historical information. Great post.
  14. I will answer your post. I hope that all Europeans don't believe that you and your left winged ideas represent all of that are history teachers in the U.S. There are plenty of us that believe that GW Bush has done the right thing in Iraq, and I know that our soldiers and those of our British, Italian and Polish allies have done the right thing and to intimate that our soldiers are slaughtering innocent Iraqui children is an insult to these brave men and women. All one has to do is look at where you are from and you instantly realize that California would be better suited to be part of a socialist country and not the rest of the U.S.
  15. Several years ago the U.S. Department of Education decided that all Special Education students should be included into mainline classes as much as possible. Only the most severly mentally handicapped were kept in self contained situations and those that were suffering with emotional problems, ADD, ADHD, and other mental abnormalities were put into regular situations in a program labled "Inclusion". The punishment that can be administered to these students is severly limited so disruptive behavior is to be tolerated in the classroom. This behavior, of course robs the other students of a good education because the teacher is required to spend their time trying to settle the student and keep the others on task. I had a senior special education student yesterday, 2-7 that was so disruptive that there was actually no time spent on the subject because of his attention getting antics. This young man is 18 years old, but is protected under U.S. Federal guidelines and there are no punitive proceedures either I or the school can take to handle the situation. This is part of the problem in the U.S. school system. Please keep in mind. Our federal government has little control over the public school system except for Special Education, which they fund. The states regulate hundreds of Independent School Districts or county school districts through local elected school boards. The local property taxes fund 98% of the schools in the U.S. Because the U.S. Government funding of Special Education is such a windfall to the local districts in money they continue to qualify more and more students in order to receive this large amount of cash. When you receive you must give, so as they receive more and more federal money the more the Department of Education in Washington controls the local district through rules and regulations. When I started teaching 20 years ago less than 3 % of our students were classified as Special Ed. Now over 40% are classified that way, mostly for the extra money received from Washington DC.
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