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Wednesday, April 18, 2018

#NeverAgain The Book by David Hogg, Lauren Hogg | #NationalSchoolWalkout #MarchForOurLives

#NeverAgain by David Hogg, Lauren Hogg | PenguinRandomHouse.com:


#NeverAgain
A NEW GENERATION DRAWS THE LINE
By DAVID HOGG and LAUREN HOGG
Foreword by Emma González
#NeverAgain by David Hogg and Lauren Hogg


ABOUT #NEVERAGAIN


From two students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School comes a declaration for our times, and an in-depth look at the making of the #NeverAgain movement that arose after the Parkland, Florida, shooting.


On February 14, 2018, seventeen-year-old David Hogg and his fourteen-year-old sister, Lauren, went to school at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, like any normal Wednesday. That day, of course, the world changed. By the next morning, with seventeen classmates and faculty dead, they had joined the leadership of a movement to save their own lives, and the lives of all other young people in America. It’s a leadership position they did not seek, and did not want–but events gave them no choice.


The morning after the massacre, David Hogg told CNN: “We’re children. You guys are the adults. You need to take some action and play a role. Work together. Get over your politics and get something done.”


This book is a manifesto for the movement begun that day, one that has already changed America–with voices of a new generation that are speaking truth to power, and are determined to succeed where their elders have failed. With moral force and clarity, a new generation has made it clear that problems previously deemed unsolvable due to powerful lobbies and political cowardice will be theirs to solve. Born just after Columbine and raised amid seemingly endless war and routine active shooter drills, this generation now says, Enough. This book is their statement of purpose, and the story of their lives. It is the essential guide to the #NeverAgain movement.







Big Education Ape: FIND A NATIONAL SCHOOL WALKOUT | Indivisible Guide #NationalSchoolWalkout #MarchForOurLives #NeverAgain - http://bigeducationape.blogspot.com/2018/04/find-national-school-walkout.html



Image result for national school walkout logo
 Image result for NATIONAL SCHOOL WALKOUT
National School Walkout is a movement powered and led by students across the country. We’re protesting congressional, state, and local failures to take action to prevent gun violence. America is the only country in the world where so many people are killed by guns, and yet our leaders do nothing about it. In many states it’s more difficult to register to vote than it is to buy a rifle. Apparently to some politicians, a vote is scarier than a gun.
We’re changing that.


Price Tags - March For Our Lives - https://wp.me/P9J85t-288 via @AMarch4OurLives

The NRA spends $1.05 per student in Florida. Politicians like Florida's Marco Rubio receive NRA blood money. Don't put a price on us.

Betsy DeVos, Matt Bevin, and the Smarmy Attack on Teachers | GQ

Betsy DeVos, Matt Bevin, and the Smarmy Attack on Teachers | GQ:

Betsy DeVos, Matt Bevin, and the Smarmy Attack on Teachers

It’s easy to oppose education strikes if you don’t believe teaching is a job.
Image result for matt bevin teachers
In February, West Virginia teachers shut down every public school in the state. For nearly two weeks, the striking teachers stood their ground, disregarding the advice of union leaders and holding out for a 5 percent raise and a promise from the governor to address the sharply rising cost of health care. Following their success, teachers in Oklahoma organized their own state-wide strikes, while those in Arizona are also threatening strikes for the end of the month if the legislature doesn't finally come through on pay raises. And in Kentucky, educators across the state staged walkouts last Friday.
Kentucky governor Matt Bevin was particularly irked by the walkout in his state, and had a lot to say about it. "I guarantee you somewhere in Kentucky today, a child was sexually assaulted that was left at home because there was nobody there to watch them," he told reporters, adding, "I'm offended that people so cavalierly, and so flippantly, disregarded what's truly best for children."
To be 100 percent clear, Bevin had no information about any sexual assault that happened during the walkout. His "guarantee" was a total fabrication. He's since apologized in a four-minute video, but only after facing outrage from teacher organizations and Kentucky politicians alike—the state's Republican-dominated House of Representatives even passed resolutions condemning the remarks. But he isn't the only political leader trying to make the teachers into the villains of this story. Just days before Bevin basically blamed teachers for child abuse, Oklahoma governor Mary Fallin compared teachers striking in that state to a "teenage kid that wants a better car." In Fallin's metaphor, the perfectly good car the teachers already have includes broken desks, four-day weeks, stagnant wages since 2008, and tattered, decades-old textbooks.
Even education secretary Betsy DeVos weighed in, according to the Dallas Morning News:
"I think about the kids,” DeVos said. “I think we need to stay focused on what’s right for kids. And I hope that adults would keep adult disagreements and disputes in a separate place, and serve the students that are there to be served.”
Although DeVos uses the word "adults" here, and not specifically "teachers," she's making the same argument as Bevin in Kentucky: Teachers are doing a disservice to students by letting these "adult disagreements" get in the way of their teaching. We often talk about teaching as a "calling," something that people are innately drawn to out of some altruistic impulse. And there's nothing wrong with having a sense of duty for your job, that feeling that your work is tied to a broader social good. But this romanticized view of teaching actually lionizes and devalues it at the same time. If we don't think of teaching as a job—instead of a calling, a sacrifice, a duty—then we can't talk about job conditions, material things like class size, shortened school weeks, or teacher pay. And it's not just a problem from the right. Teach for America, well-intended as it may be, is founded on the bedrock principle that minimal training and boundless passion can prepare college grads to teach in under-served communities, essentially de-professionalizing education.
Opponents of well-funded public education, people like DeVos and Bevin who want to see schools as privatized as possible, are relying on this same mindset when they attack teachers pushing for better working conditions. Teachers are caretakers, the argument goes, and therefore if some teachers are willing to walk out of school,  Continue reading: Betsy DeVos, Matt Bevin, and the Smarmy Attack on Teachers | GQ: