Across Time and Seas and The Vicissitudes of Life.

This picture is one I set up and had a friend take of me while I was in Ethiopia in 1967. I developed it it at the base's special services shop which was a big mistake.  The "clean" water there had so many foreign elements that the film was scared and pitted in scores of places.  It was my last time to subject my film to that.  But I had 72 screwed up black and white negatives of two adventures that I had taken.

This one of the negatives smitten by dust and particles.  Now finally, 48 years later, I am able to clean off dust and grit and fix the cuts and scars with only 3 hours worth of digital work.
On this day four of us had hiked out to the edge of the Asmara Plateau, about 10 kilometers from our base.  This view looks out over the descending ranges that were between the city of Asmara and the port of Massawa about 90 k away on the shore of the Red Sea. We hiked down into the first valley below.  There we encountered, a pack of six (may have been 60) feral dogs, a troop of 30 or so baboons, and two guys making illegal charcoal (who melted away into the rocks somehow before we got there).  Ah youth, ah the stupidity of youth.  Our only weapons were our walking sticks and pocket knives.  The wilds of Ethiopia were generally safe, but we were in Eritrea, a province at war with the country.  The Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF) was fighting for independence from Addis Ababa's control. Today they have it. Most likely the ELF knew we were there and dismissed us as idiots. They didn't want to harm Americans, they wanted us to keep the bases in Asmara for their own future revenue.  Of course I knew nothing about all of this as I drug my 22 year old body up and down the rock crevasses 8000 feet above the sea.  Knowledge came latter, for example as we listen to bullets whiz by us while hiding in a ditch and the Ethiopian Air Force flying over us to provide air support to their troop fighting the ELF at a place called Matara where we were looking an archeological dig that wasn't being dug anymore.  That's an entire other story, and no I did not take pictures of the planes or the soldiers. I'm not entirely stupid, well now I'm not.

Labor Is Not The Same As Work Nor Wealth The Same As Capital

http://www.itsfridayandiwasthinking.com/2015/05/readin-riten-n-rithmatic.html

It starts here:

WEDNESDAY, MAY 27, 2015

Readin' , Riten', n' Rithmatic.

Once again I tread in waters I’m not sure of.  I am not a public school teacher, administrator, or board member.  I know practically nothing about public schools.  There, that is my disclaimer.

I do know this.  High School graduates certified to be prepared to do college level work aren’t.   That’s right.  I am saying that a great many high school students who have been certified by those schools as being ready for college are not prepared to read or write at the college level nor are they able to do college level math.

They can pass standardized high school level tests.  This is good because it appears this is one of the determining factors for funding and teacher raises/job security.   However one cannot say that the student is good at passing all test because they cannot score well enough on college level assessment exams to get into college level work.

I am willing to go along with the fact that almost all schools now have to teach to some standardized exam.  But are we really willing to blame standardized tests for all of our woes?  I watched my own child progress through the grades and I watch kids now.  These kids are in band, honor societies, sports, choir, and any number of extracurricular activities.  If they have enough time they are in school. 

It is finals week for our local school system.  The kids only have to attend about a half a day.  Most of them seem to be "exempt" from their final exams.  Which seems to have more to do with attendance than performance.  And attending half a day is really false, they need to be at school by 10:00 and stay for 15 minutes so the school can count them for funding.  A whole week of school wasted in my opinion. 

I don’t understand the modern education system.  It is nothing like when we went to school.  However it is considered an advancement.   Yet we came out of high school ready to go to college or to work, provided the military didn’t grab us first. If we went to college and didn’t make the grade we were booted and had to go to work, if the military didn’t grab us first.  There was no remedial system that we could partake of for a couple of years before starting college level work.

Teaching to the test is one more government initiative that is not working.  Yet we will continue to do it because the handful of people who do vote are voting for representation that approves of this kind of education. 

So you just continue to stay home and watch Dancing With the Stars or The Bachelor and don’t bother to read op ed pieces, watch news shows, go listen to the folks running for office or God forbid, head to the ballot box.  Your vote doesn’t matter anyway.