drjamesarnold.com

Deal or No Deal      Most Georgians are old enough to remember Sonny Perdue’s gift card program for teachers.  Sonny heard that teachers were spending their own money on pencils, paper and classroom supplies, so, out of his great concern for the welfare of Georgia’s teachers in an election year, he authorized about $10 million dollars in $100 gift cards, one for every teacher in every classroom in Georgia.  Rather than raise the amount of money available for teachers to spend on supplies and classroom materials, or, God forbid, give them a raise, good ole’ Sonny - the inventor of austerity cuts for education - saw that he might get a lot of votes for what amounted to a miniscule investment.  Sure it was an election year gimmick, but he showed his concern for teachers by handing out those cards and by imposing the 65% rule that said libraries and media centers and counselors weren’t really valid educational expenditures.  Go Fish - I mean...

Splasher Six is the newsletter of the 100th Bomb Group Foundation.  It was also the assembly point for B-17's of the 100th over England in WW II.     Robert L. “Bobby” Black was born in the sleepy little town of Alderson, West Virginia on September 7, 1923.  Standing on Main Street it’s not hard to imagine the Alderson HS Band leading the 4 th of July parade down the street with their version of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” with batons and instruments flashing, followed by the fire truck and a few floats and cars sporting beauty queens and local dignitaries and sponsored by local businesses and clubs.   Aldersonians, like most Americans in most places in 1940, described their town as being in the middle of “God’s country,” and they were convinced they wouldn’t be happy living anywhere else.  It was an All-American place to grow up, an All-American place to live and an All-American place to be from when you went out into the world to defe...

      President Obama has met the law of unintended consequences.  The Presidential decree prohibiting public schools from discriminating against those students that self-identify as transgender by forcing them to use the bathroom that corresponds to their biological gender effectively creates a political firestorm from what was essentially a non-issue for schools.  "There is no room in our schools for discrimination of any kind, including discrimination against transgender students on the basis of their sex," Attorney General Loretta Lynch said. "This guidance gives administrators, teachers and parents the tools they need to protect transgender students from peer harassment and to identify and address unjust school policies."  The USDOE and the DOJ created a tag-team to body slam schools that might resist their social engineering efforts by threatening to withhold Federal funds from schools, districts or states that disagreed with the policy....

    My Dad was a Police Officer for 26 years in Jackson MS.  My brothers and I were subject to almost daily interrogations from a trained professional.  Partly because he controlled the car keys and the family finances and partly because we had a healthy respect for his occasional use of corporal punishment, we were denied the use of our 5th amendment rights concerning self-incrimination. We did, however, learn from our mistakes, and became experts at answering his questions in ways that did not, at least too much, incriminate us and our teenage friends.  We also became, through observation of and participation in Dad’s investigative techniques, experts at detecting bovine scatology when we heard it.  He once pointed to a newspaper story of a Mississippi politician that proposed a 75% raise for members of the Legislature.  Public outcry was immediate and overwhelmingly negative, so a 2nd politician came immediately to his colleagues’ defens...

 In my years as a teacher and administrator, staff development meetings were unavoidable.  They were often held in the afternoons or on Saturdays, and in too many cases were held for the purpose of meeting some arcane requirement or to put a check mark on some district to-do list.  Agendas were rare, purpose was often vague, content was delivered by lecture or interminable powerpoint, questions were not encouraged and the primary purpose seemed to be for someone to make sure we put in our time.  Most of the content in sessions like these could have been more effectively and far less painfully delivered in the form of an email, but I suppose that would have meant the end of a job for whatever “expert” was making the presentation and somebody somewhere would not have been able to document the hours teachers had spent in professional development.  I remember a colleague that once noted “I hope my death comes during a professional development meeting, because the ...

Things My Mother Taught Me     Mom passed away September 2014 after living almost 84 years and going through a thankfully short illness.  All four of her sons were there with her when she took her last breath, and she waited until her two sisters arrived before she decided to give up the struggle.  Momma was an amazing woman in many ways, and the lessons she taught us go far beyond the normal table manners and polite forms of address and behaviors she expected but didn’t always get.  Raising our Dad and four boys at the same time gave her an inner core of steel hidden by a soft spoken demeanor that could be deceiving to those that didn’t know her well.       She graduated at the top of her class at good ole Ruleville HS, was responsible for raising her sisters and her brother, played French Horn and Bass Drum in the band, played girls basketball, was Class President and went to Delta State before she married Dad and I c...