drjamesarnold.com

        Where did public education run off the rails?  When did we surrender our pact with children to those only interested in education as a new avenue of personal enrichment? Like most revolutions, it didn’t happen all at once, but over time and with the same ultimate effects - resegregation, the denigration of the teaching profession and indoctrination rather than real education.  You remember real education, don’t you?  It wasn’t so long ago the purpose of education was still to give students the skills required to develop in an orderly, sequential, age appropriate process into contributing, functioning members of society; to teach students critical thinking and to provide basic reasoning skills. An overabundance of educational initiatives in the past 25 years or so have served to incrementally replace critical thinking as the primary goal with social constructs and standardized test prep that have no business in classrooms or schoo...

   People still argue about where the musical genre Blues came from.  Some say Memphis, some say St. Louis, and some say other places in between, but if you’ve ever driven a dirt road through the Delta on a Friday night in the summertime with the windows down and the bugs hitting the windshield and the radio turned up loud on a Delta AM station you’ll know for sure the Blues came from right by God HERE and you can feel it in your head and your heart.  If you can identify with that feeling then I might know your people, and the chances are better than even that we’re related somewhere back down some hidden genealogical or geographic line.   I think it’s pretty safe to say that Memphis used to be part of the Delta.  Geographically and musically it still is, but they went and got all citified and international on us and only Beale Street and few barbeque places are left to show how it used to be.  Most of it is just like any other big city and nothin...

       Most of you know what I mean when I say “holler.” Like many Southern colloquialisms, it can have several meanings, and context is everything. When I tell you that Uncle Rufus and Ain’t Sally live directly east about 5 miles from us down in a holler, that has nothing to do with yelling and everything to do with the small valley where they live.  If, on the other hand, I were about to enter a holler where I thought there might be a still, I would holler loudly before I entered so my relatives wouldn’t think it was revenoors sneaking in to interfere with their alcohol production systems.  They don’t take kindly to visitors of any type, but will occasionally tolerate relatives for short periods of time, especially if they don’t drink.      My Dad was a world class profanicist, and used profanity sprinkled around in everyday conversation like most people use salt on their butterbeans.  He’d been doing it so long the...

 Now That All Else Has Failed , Ask Your Teacher       I have been personally subjected to and persecuted by a rather large number of educational revolutions devised by experts to provide solutions to problems the experts themselves discovered or even created.  The very first was in elementary school in the early 60’s when we were subjected to “New Math” because if we didn’t improve our national test scores the Russians would establish world dominance through Sputnik and the race to space that would end The American Way as we knew it.  It was quickly obvious to us that our teacher was rather confused about the entire process but dutifully tried her best to implement those processes and teaching methodologies to the extent she understood them, and she managed to struggle through the year without actually crying in front of us.  We eventually overcame our fear and loathing of math through years of intensive remedial efforts by junior high and h...

       Once I was hyphenated.  It was all the rage back in the 70’s, along with using only the letter of your first name followed by the other two.  J. Snuffy Smith, for example, sounded much more sophisticated and presumptuous that simply James Smith, and we were convinced that German - American and Irish - American and African - American or Cuban - American or whatever - American added an air of aristocracy to our mundane American lives that belied our untraceably mixed racial identities and multi- geographic heredity.  In other words, we are all here in America now and our past did not follow narrow genealogical paths to result in us.  None of us has ancestors of just one color, type, race or only one geographic area. The people that came before us traveled the seas and the deserts and the mountains and really didn’t have time to worry much about genealogy or hyphenation when they were mostly concerned with basic stuff like food and n...

  Wokeness and The Beaver      I’m pretty sure it all started with Theodore Cleaver. Many of you might not be familiar with the name, but at one time he was the cat’s meow.  In the early 1960’s Leave It To Beaver was a hit TV show that a lot of America, to their unknown detriment, watched almost religiously.   Every week a new episode about a cute little kid named Theodore - his nickname was Beaver - got into trouble and was rescued by his parents, June and Ward Cleaver.  Beaver would do really stupid stuff like order an accordian from a magazine ad and try to hide it from his parents when the bill came in the mail, or give his alcoholic uncle a bottle of bourbon from his Dad’s cabinet without asking his parents or feed a neighbor’s cat and try to hide it in his room. Nothing that really stretched the imagination too much, but usually things that most kids (like me and my brothers) might have thought of but never followed through on because we wou...

       I’ve mentioned before that I don’t watch news shows.  In 1974 I found myself yelling - rather loudly - at a 19 inch black and white TV with Richard Nixon on the screen. A little while later, rather ashamed of raising my blood pressure and having the neighbors knocking on the door to make sure everything was alright, I decided that the TV show had done exactly what it was designed to do; manipulate me into being upset about something, reacting poorly and repeating the cycle endlessly as they moved on the next day to another crisis.  The crises never seem to last more than a few days until they’re forgotten, replaced by others, or maybe several more, usually followed by opinions on what or who caused the latest brouhaha and how we should react and, of course, several opinions as to what a terrible crisis this event is. No solution is ever applied and the outrage is rapidly followed with another incident in rather short order.  In a rare ...