Strange Little Collecting Project

I didn’t’ expect to spend my first day of summer break thinking about next school year. But I also didn’t expect the State of North Carolina to pass their anti-education budget yesterday. After the budget passed, the State of North Carolina became 49th in the nation with spending per pupil. Last year we spent about $8,300 per student and with this new budget we will be spending $7,800 per student. That sounds like a lot of money but when you consider that the national average is $10,500, North Carolina still falls short. That amount becomes even less significant when you look at how much money North Carolina spends per inmate each year. According to the North Carolina Department of Correction website, during the 2009-2010 fiscal year, NC spent over 23,000 for each minimum security prisoner, over 27,000 for each medium custody prisoner, and over 32,000 dollars for each high security prisoner. I’m bad at math, but even I was able to figure out that the Senators and Representat...

I’ve always been a very indecisive person. And it’s not that I don’t want to make a decision, it’s just that I’ve always looked at things from both sides. (Please know I don’t mean this in a self-righteous way because I don’t. In fact, I wish I weren’t this way every day because as soon as I make my mind up to do something, I second guess it within a day or two…sometimes within a minute or two). This is something I’ve struggled with my entire life, but I think it’s started to get worse since I began my teaching career. Every day I play the Devil’s Advocate for my students when they are learning how to write an effective argument. Over the years, I’ve encouraged students to think about both sides of assisted suicide, animal testing, affirmative action, technology in schools, universal healthcare, reduced funding of arts programs, reduced unemployment benefits, etc, etc, etc. Spending 10 months a year out of the last 4 years on the fence of these controversial issues in my profess...