Correspondence
Correspondence TEACH YOUR TEACHERS CATHERINE SEIPP'S important testimonial about her daughter's mised-ucation in the Los Angeles Unified School District ("Public School Confidential!" Oct. 16) was...
...Whatever the background or lifestyle of any individual, the ability to possess life management skills will result in the understanding of right and wrong, thus allowing intellectual thought to flourish...
...9 issue of The Weekly Standard while passing through New York recently...
...When I saw the [sic] after Bush's "hone in" I was angry...
...Just a thought, albeit one with a Scottish accent...
...Bush may make grammatical errors and mispronounce some words, but he tells the truth and he speaks my language...
...During my very brief tenure as a teacher, I found an alarming number of my colleagues to be notoriously unschooled themselves...
...SCOTT Duncan, OK A SIC-ENING DISPLAY I WAS FORTUNATE ENOUGH to pick up the Oct...
...JOHN H. FOX Tullahoma, TN I'M TIRED OF HAVING my American heroes unjustly denigrated...
...Before society can dictate a life agenda, we must first develop emotional intelligence...
...It's sad to think that the capable teachers I met earn the same pay as colleagues who must struggle to pass a simple, high school level exam...
...NANCYANN HOLTZ Salem, MA THE SCOOP ON VIETNAM ELLIOTT ABRAMS'S REVIEW of Robert G. Kaufman's biography of Scoop Jackson ("The Last Good Democrat," Oct...
...Reconcile that, and everything else will fall into place...
...Because of this missing neural circuit-ry—which absence, by the way, seems ubiquitous within the literary community—he misses the soaring spirituality of science and technology and hears only a "flatness of soul...
...G.W...
...Without a change in tax rates, "rebate tables" can be created that produce an amount, based upon the tax owed in the current year or paid in prior years, that each taxpayer can include on a current return to reduce the amount owed...
...Learning from corporations, for example, is an attempt to deal with modern problems that could benefit the country, and thus is more than just a metaphor...
...Opponents can still call this a cut, of course, but why put oneself on the defensive from the beginning by doing it for them...
...Without coping skills and a strong sense of personal accountability we have become a generation of Bill Clinton's ilk...
...All of us individually and personally are responsible for our actions and deeds, good or bad...
...First it was Thomas Jefferson...
...Now it's Benjamin Franklin, whose studies, community initiative, and human relationships, even in youth, would put to shame the wasted hours of most modern teenagers...
...We can expect D.H...
...Social skills mean nothing to children living with contrary examples at home or watching worse elsewhere...
...Washington insiders may know in their hearts that there is nothing that can make government function more smoothly, but for the rest of us, hope springs eternal that governing is an open-ended, day to day effort that could benefit from some new efficiencies...
...So it is fruitless for the engineer and scientist to attempt to communicate the depth of feeling of (and, yes, spiritual congruity with the universe of) discovery and "workingness...
...Teaching morality and relationship skills is an admirable quest, but teaching those who cannot cope on a daily basis is for naught...
...In the context of the most dishonorable American abandonment of the twentieth century, Scoop Jackson deserves little credit, and conservatives who praise him should do so with considerably more qualification than Abrams provides...
...But Jackson fell far short of the challenge, ultimately joining so many others in refusing our allies the assistance that was the sine qua non of a successful resistance...
...morality and interests in the year before the fall of Saigon—unless it's contained in the phrase about the not-too-many times "Jackson pulled in his horns in the mid-1970s...
...DANIEL J. SULLIVAN Lexington, MA AL GORE IS A MACHINE THE PROBLEM with Andrew Ferguson's "The Metaphors Make the Man" (Oct...
...JEFFREY P. MUSCHLER Austin, MN MISUNDERSTANDING BEN HAVING READ David Brooks's review of The First American, by H.W...
...GIL WEINREICH West Hills, CA FILL THE EMOTIONAL VOID CLAUDIA WINKLER'S "Marriage 101" misses the point (Oct...
...I want to have a president I'm proud of...
...2) glides right over Jackson's participation in the betrayal of U.S...
...16) was a timely reminder of the scandalous level of unresponsive-ness and incompetence to which a public bureaucracy is uniquely able to sink...
...About 10 years ago, I worked as a substitute teacher for the LAUSD...
...I was appalled to discover that the test was so undemanding that a 10th grader should have had no problem passing it...
...Those of us in Vietnam in 1974-75, hoping against all evidence in the media that Congress would give the South Vietnamese the means to meet the coming Communist onslaught, listened in horror at the news reports of vote after vote slashing military and economic assistance...
...A local paper recently reported that one educator complained about a new exit exam being contemplated for 12 th graders, saying it was harder than the CBEST...
...Learning becomes an adventure and choices are better defined...
...You either have to be dreaming or you have forgotten that when you are a liberal or a Democrat you never have to say you're sorry...
...16) is that it denies Al Gore the right to think seriously about the problems America faces...
...Instruction in the eternal, subtle music of thermodynamics is lost on the tone-deaf...
...Surely at least Jackson would rally a few Democrats to provide for the minimum commitment necessary for some small chance of an honorable fulfillment of our pledges to the people of South Vietnam...
...Brands ("Our Founding Yuppie," Oct...
...MARCEL J. VAN ROSSUM Eldersburg, MD CASH BACK GOVERNOR BUSH could do much to preempt the habitual "tax cut for the wealthy" complaint about his tax plan by more properly characterizing it not as a "cut," but as a "rebate" (Fred Barnes, "Whatever Happened to Tax Cuts...
...But pragmatic men don't nurse their wounds...
...JOHN EDWARD Via e-mail I REALLY APPRECIATED "Anti-Bush Sic-ness at the Washington Post...
...The intellectual side of our brain is in a quandary when our emotional side is in flux between lethargy and rage...
...His inability to stay pure of heart in marriage illustrates that churches, schools, and families cannot teach the emotionally challenged...
...The David Brookses of the world are utterly baffled by a person's lump in the throat while standing before the mind-cap-tured-in-steel of a locomotive (or a heat pump, for that matter...
...Like Franklin, they become workaholics and console themselves through creativity...
...Lawrence to malign Franklin, but for David Brooks to say that Franklin lacked a tragic sense and moral gravity...
...If (God forbid) Gore is elected, he will be another Clinton in my life...
...And wouldn't her opponents be the first to target her if she tried...
...H. GLENN IRVINE Streeter, ND...
...Understood in that way—and repeatedly referred to as a rebate to make and keep the point clear—only the most self-serving of Americans would refuse to acknowledge the justness of Bush's proposal...
...I was also appalled to witness the educational repression of Spanish-speaking students, who in some cases were made to listen to my lectures via a translator (a 1998 ballot measure has since banned this practice...
...to blunt left-wing opposition to his candidacy for president...
...To work as a substitute teacher, I needed to take an exam called the CBEST...
...Less numerous ethnic populations learned in English because of the unavailability of translators...
...For eight years I have been unable to watch or listen to our current president...
...Worse, though, I heard a number of test-takers remark that it was their third, fourth, or fifth time taking the test, with one would-be teacher saying, "All you have to do is pass this brutal test once and you're set for life...
...23), it is clear that Brooks is tone-deaf regarding the music of science...
...MARY OBER Vista, CA WHILE REPORTING THE "Anti-Bush Sic-ness" at the Post, The Scrap-book insisted, "The Post owes Bush an apology...
...It struck me as a little disingenuous for The Scrapbook to come down hard on the Washington Post for flagging a small grammatical error by the governor of Texas ("Anti-Bush Sic-ness at the Washington Post") only to have Christopher Caldwell home in on the first lady's mispronunciation of "kvelling" 20 pages later ("Split Ticket Rick...
...Teaching your or my ideal is not the answer...
...Hopefully, enough parents and civic-minded Cali-fornians will understand that only a competitive education system supported by parental choice, as envisioned by the Proposition 38 voucher initiative, can rescue the state's imperiled students...
...Clinton should no more deny her "Illinoisan" linguistic roots than claim to be a natural-born Yiddish speaker...
...Better still, why not eliminate the cut as the means, and have the rebate be the means and the end...
...Children who develop emotional intelligence are armed with a strong sense of self-worth and personal responsibility, and become more naturally free-thinking, creative, and socially interactive, helping them develop lifelong personal relationships...
...While typically a tax cut is an end in itself, intended to correct a perceived inequity in the size or distribution of the tax burden, here the proposed tax cut is simply a means of rebating to those taxpayers who funded our surplus the amount that was, it turns out, inappropriately demanded of them...
...Until we set aside the "my way or no way" and "they made me do it" attitudes, teaching non-academic life lessons is a struggle in futility...
...Because many scientists and engineers do not require the artificial constructs of unseen beings carrying moral lightning, and understand the impossibility of a walking, talking soul, they are seen as hollow men and women by the closet mystics of the arts...
...One example: Franklin acknowledged his deep suffering when he lost two sons, though each in different ways...
Vol. 6 • November 2000 • No. 8
