Eye on Education
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Sid Shroyer
March 1, 2024
In this week’s xxxxxxx Sid Shroyer reads the news again.
Indiana Second District Congressman Rudy Yakym sent me a survey wanting to know if I agree with his vote to impeach the Homeland Security Secretary. Seems to me like Yackie should have asked me before the vote. “Otherwise,” I replied, “what’s the point?” Might not get another one of them their surveys.
While I’m on the topic of closing the barn door after the horses get out, the St. Joseph County Board of Commissioners last week appointed someone from New Carlisle to something called the St. Joseph County Redevelopment Authority that was created to grease the skids for the giant battery factory taking over New Carlisle area water and farmland. We’ll see how long retired mailman Dan Caruso lasts. The South Bend Tribune reported that “he told commissioners he was against the way the issues were being decided without input from the community that will most be affected by the development.”
More irony later in the newscast.
Indiana’s Attorney General Todd Rokita needs to know that I’m headed back into an area classroom soon to again brainwash children by connecting the Holocaust to the racist ideas that led to it. Did you know that Iowa born, Princeton Doctor of Science Harry Laughlin was honored at Germany’s Heidelberg University in 1936 for work in the United States that served as a model for the 1935 Nuremberg Laws that removed Jews from German society? Did you know that Joseph Mengele’s Auschwitz experiments on twins like Terre Haute’s late Eva Kor began in 1937 in a Frankfurt eugenics lab that was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation? Better be careful: One man’s connecting inhumanity to humans is another man’s blaming America for the Holocaust.
To turn me in, go to Rokita’s new “Eyes on Education” turn-in-your-teachers 1984 Youth Spies Memorial portal. Not to worry, you can do it. There’s nothing on the “Education Transparency Form” about having a kid in the class I’m addressing, or having read the material in question. I’d expect a link on the Mom’s For Liberty Page. The banning books things has petered out, so the Mom’s might need something to do. Maybe they’re already at it. Someone has submitted New Carlisle’s New Prairie schools for its “Gender Support Plan,” and Penn is on the state Attorney General’s list for its “diversity activities.” Presenting a perspective that does not adhere to traditionally straight white male Republican Party talking points dominates the complaints about the 15 Indiana schools that were listed when I looked last week. Google: “Eyes on Education Liberty in Action.” Modern technology at its finest. Nothing backward about Indiana.
The folks over at College Board are ecstatic this week as Ohio Congressman Jim Jordan provides them with a much-needed last minute prompt for this year’s Open Argument portion of the AP Language exam. It’s a secret so don’t tell anybody that the problem goes like this:
Support in your own argument to what degree the following single statement provides the reader all three main types of literary irony.
(here goes): Republican Ohio Congressman Jim Jordan said the fact that the FBI arrested his star witness for lying about the facts in the impeach President Joe Biden case does nothing to change the facts of the case.
Students will have had to bone up on the three kinds of irony, of course, being sure to identify how the sentence shows “the audience knows something that the story’s characters do not, resulting in poor decision making or ironic consequences;” how it shows: “plot events with unexpected or contradictory outcomes;” and how it shows: “where one thing is spoken, but a contrasting meaning is intended.” The definitions courtesy of Writers.com. Have Todd check that place out. Is teaching irony un-American now?
Once the student has the terms and the definitions for verbal, situational, and dramatic irony clear, he or she should be in pretty good shape. Thesis, evidence, commentary, and for a top score, some sophistication. Do you think it’s too easy?
Over in the science wing AP testers are scrambling with a way to come up with wording that allows students to successfully argue that, like corporations, embryos are people. For AP history it’s how best to prompt providing evidence for some people being above the law.
The more things change the more things hurt my brain.
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