I'm baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaack!

Dear Readers,

Here I am, blogging again!

Hooray! Did you miss me?

And guess what? I'm blogging from my school computer! The one that's in the classroom where I teach. Ooooooo... I'm so sneaky. I hope I don't get caught.

The students are stabbing the walls with machetes, and chewing on the fluorescent light bulbs, and I think one of the really rambunctious ones just got pregnant (right now!). I should probably be "managing the classroom" but... eh... whatever.

Ha ha ha. Just kidding.

School doesn't start until Monday.

I'm pretty sure though that the secret school computer people can see everything I do online. I wonder if I’ll get in trouble for using this computer for non-educational purposes. Ha ha ha.

Oh well.

Ha ha ha. I live dangerously!!!

Getting ready for school has been crazy so far. I'm under-prepared and nervous.

Hey, the health care bill and the cap and trade bill are postponed until after the August recess! Hooray! But they still might pass eventually. Bug your public officials and tell them that the cap and trade bill and the health care bill are swiffer-liffer quiff! Celebrate our democracy by getting involved in the political process. Democracy: Use it or lose it!

By the way, have you heard about this "Cash for Clunkers" program? Ha ha ha. Oh man, there's our tax dollars at work again.

It's a government program funded by the latest stimulus package where people trade in their old cars that get less than 18 miles per gallon for different cars that get more than 18 mpg. When they make the trade, they get 3000 bucks or something. (Maybe some of my figures are wrong.)

(By the way, I was wondering what happened to the old gas-guzzling cars that get traded in. I thought that if car dealerships were smart, they would re-sell them, but the law is, if they participate in Cash for Clunkers, they have to destroy the engine of the old car. So with each transaction, the government is losing $3,000 by giving it to the consumer, plus they’re destroying wealth in America- they're destroying a valuable engine. And many of the cars will be scrapped altogether- not just the engine.)

Well, the program was supposed to last until November, but the billion dollars set aside for the program (from the latest stimulus package) ran out in about a week! Ha ha ha.

But have no fear, economically-minded car-consumer! The government picked 2 billion dollars from their magic money tree, so now the program should last a lot longer and we’ll enter a brave new green economy, right?

Riiiiiiiiiiigggghhhhhhttt.

Ha ha ha.

That's the way the government works sometimes. They tend to handle money worse than the private sector does.

I should know. I work for the government, actually. The government cuts me checks. I’m a teacher at a public school.

And I can see that I handle my own money better than the government handles their money.

I see the funding madness happening already.

For example, voters in Florence (Arizona, not Italy) approved a "technology bond" a few years ago, where their schools got a bunch of money for technology. They voted on it before Arizona's budget tanked. But, the way I understand it, even though the economy is quiff, neither the state government nor Florence School District can divert the funds from technology to teacher salaries or anything. The money was allocated to technology and technology only.

Now, every student at the brand new Poston Butte High School in San Tan Valley (but in the Florence School District) gets a laptop computer.

Gaaahhh!!! A “free” laptop for every student.

Can you imagine how much money that costs? But class sizes in the Florence school district are huge, as they are all over Arizona. And Florence might have to reduce teacher salaries. And last year they had to RIF some teachers. (RIF = reduction in force = pink-slipped = laid off = they don’t have their jobs anymore.) Maybe they hired them back. Maybe they didn’t. I don’t know.

A less drastic but similar thing has happened in the school district that I work for. Every classroom in the whole district has a SmartBoard, which I think cost about $3,000 - $ 5,000 each.

(SmartBoards are these giant touch-screen boards that are kind of like a projector and kind of like a giant computer screen that can do a lot of tricks. They’re nice, but SmartBoards aren’t necessary. But we’re encouraged to use them. In fact, in our SmartBoard training, our trainer said something like, “We hope you get to the point where you’re dependent on SmartBoards, and you feel as though you can’t teach without it.” During the training, I couldn’t help but thinking about Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology by Neil Postman. It also reminds me of Taskstream. I whined about Taskstream on my blog before.)

But at the particular Middle School where I work, even though there’s a SmartBoard in every room, there's no money for drama textbooks, no money for afterschool busses, (no afterschool busses means no after school activities) no money to hire more teachers to get the class sizes down, and the principal told us to really watch the number of paper copies we make, because the budget is tight this year.

It seems a little crazy.

I don’t mean to criticize the people who make the money-spending decisions, though. Maybe I would have done the same thing were I in their place. I don’t want to be a disgruntled teacher mad at the system already. I just started!

In related news, I was watching Fox News last night, and I saw a report on a teacher conference for CTE teachers. (CTE stands for Career and Technology Education, I think.) They had some big wasteful conference at a lavish convention center where the teachers were supposed to attend a bunch of classes to help them teach better. Instead, the CTE teachers just sat by the pool for hours and hours and hours and got drunk. They were probably drinking coffee and smoking big cigars. (Quick! Name that song lyric reference!)

All on the tax-payer’s dime…

I'm suspicious about the CTE stuff, and the madness of government funding. When I was an intern at Sedona Red Rock High School in the fall of 2007, I learned how the drama teacher there got extra funding from the government by disguising her drama classes as CTE classes. She had to change the titles of the classes from something normal like "Drama" or "Theatre" to "On-Air Talent Development" or "Technical Production Management" and career-sounding things like that. She had to change her syllabi, too, to show the right government agency that she was teaching bon a fide CTE classes. But really, the classes were just normal drama classes. And a lot of times the classes sat around and did nothing. The Sedona high school did put on a good play, though. I remember that.

The same kind of wasteful spending can happen with teacher unions. Last year, a California teachers union donated $1 million to the No on Prop. 8 campaign. Several members of the teachers union disagreed with that controversial use of funds, but the money was spent nonetheless. That actually prevented me from joining the teacher’s union here. Plus joining the union meant getting an extra $550 taken out of my salary.

Maybe the general principle is that individuals who are spending their own money on themselves know how to spend their money better than leaders of groups do.

I just thought of an allegory.

A large group of people are trying to buy a pizza together, all contributing to the price of the pizza. Some of them hate anchovies, some of them love anchovies, some are strictly Jewish so they can’t eat ham, some are allergic to mushrooms, some are vegetarian, and etc. But for some crazy reason they insist on pooling their money together to buy one big pizza. They all chip in, get the pizza, and eat it, even though they are compromising their dietary preferences. They miserably swallow the pizza down with ugly faces.

That’s pretty much communism.

Everybody buying their own custom-made pizza slice is pretty much capitalism- people making their own decisions about what to do with their own private property.

Now one place where my general principle doesn’t hold up is at church. (My general principle about individuals spending their own money on themselves working better than groups spending money. Though, to be honest, it’s not really my general principle, it’s Milton Friedman’s.)

I give 10% of my income to the LDS church, and Church officials decide how to spend it. But I trust that church officials spend it well, because I trust that they are called of God.

I hope you don’t think that I talk about money too much. I’ve noticed that I do tend to talk about it a lot on this blog, but I’m not obsessed with chasing after cars and mansions and etc., (after all, I’m a teacher) but I’m interested in what money represents, and what money does to people, and how it moves around among our society. Because money equals power.

Well class, what have we learned?

We’ve learned that in a fallen world, in a post-Garden-of-Eden world, the right to have private property for all people is essential to liberty and individual autonomy. We’ve also learned that if people want different types of pizza, then they should each buy their own different types of pizza with their own money, dag-nabbit! (Subtle hint for my roommate: Keep your hands off of my side of the kitchen cabinet!)

Ha ha ha.

(I enjoy writing about this stuff on Telemoonfa Time, I really do, because I can’t teach it to my students or else I’ll get fired for indoctrinating them with conservative propaganda.)

Take care and I’ll see you later.

Sincerely,
Telemoonfa