Michelle and Marion: True Love?
I’m like, ‘You know what? I don’t give a crap.’ Don’t get me wrong. Creativity is good and whatever. But if the children don’t know how to read, I don’t care how creative you are. You’re not doing your job.
–Founder/CEO of Students First and former DC Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee on teachers, Time Magazine cover story, November 8, 2008.
I don’t know what it is about young boys that they love to throw rocks. It happens more in low-income communities…where there are a significant number of young people who are home after school and don’t have recreation facilities.
–Former Mayor, convicted felon and current Ward 8 DC Councilman Marion Barry on possible service cuts due to frequent attacks on city buses in his ward, Washington Post, October 28, 2012.
By most accounts, Marion Barry and Michelle Rhee can’t stand each other and disagree on almost everything. Yet here they are; making essentially the same philosophical argument about social organization, human agency and public policy.
Discuss.
Answers should either agree or disagree with the proposition and explain why, demonstrating a clear understanding of how each statement relates to social organization, human agency and public policy. It is recommended that you use the scratch paper provided to sketch out the main ideas you wish to express in your answer, but no points will be awarded for anything not submitted to the comments section.
The best answer will receive a $15 credit in the Teachbad Strictly Home-Use Teacher Store. The worst answer will receive a $5 credit. The awarding of store credit will be at the sole discretion of Mr. Teachbad.
Begin.
Is Marion a dude?
My vote.
I’m sorry. I can’t comment as much as I would like to. Ms. Rhee and her Teach for America-I was raised privileged and I’m here to save the world from all of you less enlightened privileged people – mentality. And I was a NYC Teaching Fellow.
Besides, I try to be creative and teach my students to be creative, so I’m a big failure. She would fire me for not having my kindergarten students (who are mostly non verbal on the autism spectrum) reading books at this point in the year.
I’m sorry, but is this question (& my writing used as a sample) going to be on a “standardized” Pearson test? Because, really, that’s what the question sounds like. Nonsensical–like Marion and Michelle.
As a former educational practitioner who has twice failed the myer-briggs personality inventory, I believe I am uniquely qualified to address this urgent issue.
Two Brief Points:
1. Children need to read to be able to understand their bail conditions.
2. Throwing of rocks cultivates, fosters, and engenders physical exercise and gets children away from tv, ipads and computers.
I rest my case. I must phone glazier to fix the front window.
I vote for this answer!
Disqualified. You can’t fail a Myer-Briggs test. You can only fail to show common sense when you agree to have your father-in-law administer it to you, evaluate it, and tell you that you’re a closet introvert who poses as an extrovert.
But enough about me. What was the question?
You can fail it if you don’t have a personality.
Is that what you meant, Martin?
Using the foolproof Philadelphia School District method or robotic replies to constructed response, T-A-G-E and finishing with a classic student response here is my entry:
By most accounts, Marion Barry and Michelle Rhee can’t stand each other and disagree on almost everything and making essentially the same philosophical argument about social organization, human agency and public policy because first, IDK!
(how many paragraphs is our answer supposed to be, Mr. TB?) I suspect the real answer is along the lines of not giving a shit about anyone but themselves and loving power.
Now I’m going to look for pictures of them. If one of them wears glasses and the other doesn’t, then it’s obvious that one is the secret identity to the other.
I submit the following evidence for my alter-ego, secret identity theory that Rhee and Barry are actually the same person, using disguises. Not sure if the images will appear here, but at least here are the urls:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/0a/Marionbarry001.jpg/220px-Marionbarry001.jpg
http://www.waitingforsuperman.com/action/sites/waitingforsuperman.com/files/FeedsEnclosure-michelle_rhee_0_2.jpg?1294431305
Scary!
Yes, agree they are the same person and have morphed into Mike Miles, who is running the school district in Dallas,TX. And there is a physical resemblance. Check out the blogs and news in DISD.
OMG!! I teach in Dallas ISD and all I can say is this has been a year straight from hell. Our superintendent, Mike Miles, morphed into a Michelle Rhee as soon as he landed here from Colorado where he destroyed his last school district. He’s created a district of low teacher morale, with a fear based system that has run off veteran teachers and he’s all about TFA!! On top of running our public schools into the ground and causing major havoc, he makes about $400,000/year! Yes, check out DISD blog online, read it and weep for us
OMG! Seperated at birth?
Dang! Rhee, the uber-pooper educator, changed the page holding her image! She *knew* I was using her in my contest entry (cue: scary music from Wizard of Oz)
So here’s a different one instead: https://encrypted-tbn1.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQh_EedZywtFW4G4e8kg3bLFJMDel7YQW4O-VHqjVLKKJjUX9go
I have decided my response will be written the same way my students write.
MICHELLE AND MARION
by UtzTheCrabChip
Michelle A. Rhee (Korean: 이양희;[2] I Yang-hui; born December 25, 1969) is a public figure involved in the American education system. She was chancellor of the Washington, D.C. public schools from 2007 to 2010. In late 2010, she founded StudentsFirst, a non-profit, tax-exempt political advocacy organization which works on education reform issues such as ending teacher tenure.
She began her career by teaching for three years in an inner city school, then founded and ran The New Teacher Project, which in ten years recruited and trained more than 23,000 new teachers to work in urban schools.[1]
Marion Shepilov Barry, Jr. (born March 6, 1936) is an American Democratic politician who is currently serving as a member of the Council of the District of Columbia, representing Washington, D.C.’s Ward 8. Barry served as the second elected mayor of the District of Columbia from 1979 to 1991, and again as the fourth mayor from 1995 to 1999. In addition to his current term, Barry also served two other tenures on the D.C. Council, as an At-Large member from 1975–79, and as Ward 8 representative from 1992–95. In the 1960s he was involved in the Civil Rights Movement, serving as the first president of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).
I think that the two people in this article are wrong creativity is important and so is being able to read and write so schools should teach both of these things to be a good school. Also throwing rocks at busses is not good and i think that people should not do that but if they don’t have anything better to do some people will do that.
If I was grading it, my commemnts would be: Hmm… suspicious. The first two paragraphs are well written, but the third is terrible. I think you copied and pasted the first two front the Internet, in a not-so-clandestine attempt to fill-in space, and then tried to answer the question with a lame and poorly written response in the third. However, I don’t want to argue with your parents about it, because they’ll just tell me that they proof-read it and found no problems, and if they need to they’ll file a complaint with the school district about my unfounded accusation of plagiarism; so fuck it, you get an A.
Can you differentiate the questions for me?
I’m an auditory learner.
Perhaps you can attach a Real Player clip in order to better support my wants and needs.
Btw, my IEP says, and I quote, “you have to do this or you’re a sh*tty teacher.”
Agree that love chooses odd bedfellows. These two are so much in love that they have morphed into one and are running (ruining) the large Dallas school district under the name of Mike Miles. There is even a physical resemblance. See for yourself here: disdblog.com
Truly Mad Libs with Michelle
I’m like, ‘You know what? I don’t give a crap.’ Don’t get me wrong.
________________ is good and whatever.
But if the _______________don’t know how to ____________,
I don’t care how _________________ you are.
You’re not doing your job.
Enjoy the following substitutions:
1. Bureaucracy; administrators, lead, online educationally degreed
2. CCCS; core course, kill the curriculum, standardized
3. Teaching; teachers, write lesson plans, effective in the classroom
4. Learning; learners, learn, smart
5. (Add your own…..it’s Rheely fun.)
The two are very similar in their philosophies:
1. I need to eat.
2. I don’t like to work much.
3. I love to criticize others until they want to commit suicide or homicide, or both.
4. I need protection from those people (see number 3)
5. The best place to do little and still get paid and get a free bodyguard is public office.
6. I can fool enough of the people enough of the time to get elected (apologies to Mr. Lincoln. You know, the one who was president. In the 1860′s. Who almost survived the Civil War. In the United States. Oh, never mind.)
7. In order to get elected, I need to blame somebody for something and state the obvious a lot.
8. I am really good at that.
9. I will blame people who are trying for trying to help the people who aren’t trying much, and since helping those that don’t want help is a lot like trying to teach a pig to sing, I am not really blaming them for failing at anything meaningful, and they will want to kill themselves rather than me.
10. I will also pretend to those that didn’t try much that breaking the law is a public service (a lot of them already feel that, as they have the second best job in the world, convicted felon.)
11. If you have any questions, see number 1.
If this doesn’t win, I will buy you a TB mug.
You are very kind =)
MaeWTeach has it down perfectly. One could almost believe she teaches at my school…
It’s creepy, the way I do that, I know
.
I spend my days coaching teachers on how to work with ELLs (English Language Learners). Take all the ignorance, dishonesty, bias, apathy and whatever other negative things teachers have to deal with, and add a whole bunch of Supreme Court rulings (“that’s not a law, where is it written that I have to do that?”) and you have my job. It helps me to keep believing that teachers want to do well and can do well with just a few tips (like how to actually KNOW which students are visual, auditory, and kinesthetic, and how to really help them quickly).
I like to comfort the disturbed and, occasionally, disturb the comfortable.
Thank you, Teachbad, for giving us a place to vent. (I hope that doesn’t disqualify me from the contest. I didn’t MEAN to sound like I was sucking up!)
Mae
kill me now kill me now kill me now kill me now kill me now kill me now ibid.
There was a time, when dinosaurs roamed the earth, that children were taught how to construct a sentence. They knew about nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs and even punctuation.
Higher grades reached the lofty heights of paragraphs.
Since the end of the ice age, and the advent of solar flares and the ozone layer or whatever they call it these days, children have been reduced to coloring in answer bubbles with the required hd2 pencil… [not even an ipencil mind you].
Texting has mangled literacy and sentence construction. All knowledge is reduced to 140 characters. OMG, WTF? Is there anyone out there who will step up and take a stand for what used to be called “communication skills?” Surely ‘higher order thinking’ must mean more than not coloring outside the lines of the bubble.
It is time to storm the testing citadel… pitchforks at the ready!
Everyone should watch the movie Idiocracy (if you haven’t already). It’s where we’re headed.
Hmmm.
Rhee’s solution is: demonize teachers, make it less attractive to teach. Having fewer teachers means having fewer bad teachers.
Barry’s solution: get rid of the buses. Having fewer buses means fewer targets to throw rocks at.
Sure sounds like they spend lots of time in the same chatroom. Not sure how reducing service delivery addresses the underlying problems, but I’m pretty sure these “solutions” create newer and larger problems instead. But that’s for the next guy to solve, right?
Here’s an idea: let’s cut back on decision- and policy-making zealots. That way, we’ll have fewer bad decisions and policies. Who’s first?
Y’know, like, i cnt read an its all my techers fault. I aitn’ because i hate homwework an my mama is too buzy to help me wit it cuz she is on crack and leaves me to tak care uf my baby brother while she gets it on wit her 5th boyfriend this year and it ant cuz i rather hang out with my friends or bcuz the only TV on in this house is crime shows an honeybooboo. its cuz my teacher sucks. my mama says so too she got my back she says i dont half to do any (expletive deleted) homweork cuz i gotta watch my bother brother so f–k the teacher and if she get in my face i’m gonna kick her ass cux she gotta respect me
Ooops! You revealed your actually knowledge of written language in the correct usage of “too” and the proper apostrophe placement in “i’m.”
Otherwise, good answer.
Real stuff!
Is it another Twilight story?
What?! Has Mr. Teachbad gone over to the Dark Side, and taken a job for Pearson? Or ETS? Or McGrawHill? Because this question has the exact same lack of coherent thought you find in their standardized exams. (Also in their textbooks, but that’s another blog post.)
Michelle and Marion are talking about two different subjects using the most inflammatory language possible. Why? Because they were speaking to reporters and they follow the Willie Brown (former mayor of San Francisco) philosophy of publicity. Namely, all publicity, whether positive or negative, is good. Michelle and Marion both know that the crazier they appear, the better chance the media will actually name them. Thus the utterly ridiculous comments.
From my vantage point, the only commonality between Marion and Michelle is my desire to lock them both in a small closet for the rest of eternity.
Oh, Mr. TB.
Don’t you see that this is all just a way to weed out the teachers that aren’t smart enough to hide how they cheat on their student’s tests? This is the whole point of merit based testing. I need to prove I’m smart enough to not get caught. Just like our students and Mr. Barry.
He failed.
Further to recent commentary herein, it is apparent that the personages under discussion are polarizing figures, resulting in staunch opposing camps regarding their merits.
Surely the real issue must needs be what the school system is doing to children. I highly recommend viewing the following clips by Sir Ken Robinson from a TED conference…an enlightened view..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG9CE55wbtY
I teach 12th grade. If one of my students can’t read, I’m sure many people are responsible. You know, mom, dad, kid, administration that keeps changing the reading program. Maybe that pain in the ass 2nd grade teacher who hasn’t realized he or she really hates kids (or, even worse, knows he or she hates kids) and is still “teaching” because the principal rubber stamps summative evaluations.
But, ahem, not me.