At least they’re not calling them “re-education centers” like most fascist states do.
I donno, ‘discipline’ centers sounds worse.
The worst I ever have seen is ‘Study Hall’. That was actually a place where ALL students went to catch up on the homework that they forgot to do. Did it every day. We just all did it. You could read or work. Whatever.
And, what the F is going on with these morons. Make libraries a scary place? Of course they want everyone to be as stupid as they are. That’s the goal of these stupid fucks.
Turning libraries into detention centers is a headline that triggers, for sure. But from eddyteddyfreddy’s link, I read:
The libraries at those schools will continue to include books that can be read or checked out by students but are otherwise being reimagined as “team centers” where special programming will be held and disruptive students will be sent so as not to interfere with their classmates’ learning…
Does the Houston school district have an inordinate amount of disruptive classroom cases? If so, if I’m trying to give the benefit of the doubt, it might be a far from ideal but necessary measure to take to make classrooms in some modicum of control.
I’m totally ignorant of the situation so please please correct any wrongheaded assumptions I made. Just trying to not let my triggered emotional reaction rule my thinking.
They fired the librarians and checking out books will be a before and after school thing. The stacks won’t be available during the school day nor will regular students be able to go the library during the school day
No need to give that jackass (not HISD but the new state-imposed superintendent) any benefit of any doubt
But why the library rather than the auditorium, the gym, the cafeteria, an empty classroom, a portable classroom brought in to be an empty classroom, etc.?
Or metal folding chairs spaced 15-feet apart on the football field? That’ll straighten 'em out!
Empty classrooms are pretty rare, gyms always and auditoriums often have clases going on in them all day (PE and theater) and portables are expensive, unsafe, and often impractical (you have to have room for them).
Its already a problem that schools often take over the library when they need a space, for things like testing or visitors. We do it all the time. If you want a “discipline center”, its probably going to be in the library. And if ypu are Mike Miles and you don’t think teachers add value to education, you certainly don’t think librarians do. So firing them and repurposing libraries is a win win.
I don’t know about “unsafe” and “impractical”—a lot of junior high school for me was in bungalows (=portable classrooms), which were often miserably hot.
But I still question the premise that the library-qua-library is less valuable, and therefore easier to repurpose, than an auditorium or gym. As you say, schools already default to taking over library space, and it’s already a problem. But if undisciplined students are really a problem, I would think something with space for them to move around a bit and burn off energy would be better.
My junior high school in Connecticut had a few portable classrooms (though they were semi-permanent, in that they were there for decades). Unlike the main building, though, the portable classrooms actually did have air conditioning.
Because libraries encourage them to think.
I blame it all on Dewey Decimal and his vast card catalog. I understand that Mr. Decimal has fled the country and is now living without references, somewhere on the fiction shelf…
They are difficult to make ADA compliant (ramps are expensive to install, and if someone has mobility issues, its usually a ramp out of the building, another into the portables, and ypu have to repeat in just an hour), vunerable to bad weather/tornadoes, and dangerous if there is ice out. They are also always falling apart, which can lead to safety hazards until they are repaired. They are suboptimal in many ways.
The flat reality is that if you have 60 kids scheduled to meet in the gym every day and you decide to repurpose the gym, it means you have to find a place for those 60 kids every period. Where would they go? And you can’t just not have a gym: at least in Texas, its a graduation requirement. Same for theater: those kids are scheduled to be there, its a class, there is no where else for them to go. No one is regulalry scheduled to be in the library. No one has to be moved out.
I’m not defending the choice ro "transform"the library. Making schools more prison like is not the solution. But I don’t think the issue is the place they chose.
The ultimate goal will be banning every book but the Bible, in KJV of course, English of course. Protestant version of course. You won’t need any other books. If they contradict the Bible, they’re evil. If they don’t, they’re not needed.
B-b-b-but what about all the sex, murder, incest, and other bad stuff in the Bible? Won’t that just give kids ideas? Let’s just stop teaching kids to read at all. (Like we’re not teaching cursive writing any more.) Reading just leads to uppity kids/grownups who expect something out of life.
I know cursive but I don’t use it unless I’m signing my name, writing a check (which I almost never do), or writing something that I want to look “fancy”. It’s pretty useless. There’s no reason to teach it.
Unless someone wants to read something written in cursive.
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My cursive is pretty good, but I can’t read it half the time because a lot of people either suck at it, or use some weird variant that bears no resemblance to anything I was taught. Knowing how to write it doesn’t guarantee the ability to read it.
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You don’t have to know how to write it to understand it. I suppose a quick course on reading it might be of some extremely situational use, though as outlined above it varies so much that it’s questionable how useful it would be.
I mean, if the only justification for teaching cursive is to understand it when someone writes it, the objectively best course of action is to not teach it, so it dies out.
When do you do a lot of cursive [NB not in the sense of a particular mandated style, just whatever can be sustained fluidly for a stretch of time] writing? When you are in class, or going through a— you know— book, taking notes because you are trying to study something; for instance in the library. Eliminating writing goes hand-in-hand with eliminating reading and more generally eliminating creativity.
I’ve never done that. Printing is faster for me and easier to read later. I’ve always used that for taking notes or doing class assignments. Unless it was grade school and it was a lesson on cursive writing.
We don’t teach calligraphy as a standard in school either. My brother learned it because he was really curious about it. I expect cursive to end up the same way. And no harm will come because of it.
Immediately after I posted, it occurred to me that there’s a major plot fail in Fahrenheit 451. What difference does it make if someone has books in that society? Wouldn’t the population already be illiterate?
I find that writing cursive is quicker than writing the words with each letter not connected to the other.