It’s easy to see that there are some explosive and divisive events going on in not only the world, but the USA. How do I talk about these things? In this podcast I speak in the way I speak to students, and take a look at current day shenanigans.
There were some issues with the transcription, so I will put the print version of the transcript below:
“Hello everyone, this week in Schule, brought to you as usual by MVHS Room Education Forensics. Welcome everybody just doing one podcast here this weekend and gonna continue the conversation we've all been having, some of you actually in face-to-face in terms of who's on the email list and who I know personally. Turns out, a little bit of a side note, the parent liaison at the school, the new one, is a former student of mine. Was in English class, not in room 108, back then it was room 246. and that was 2010. So that made me feel old but satisfied because she's a competent young woman, has a three-year-old, and is tasked with dialing up and turning up the intensity on parents in terms of being involved. making them come in and have incentives to come in and realize the benefits, you know, and so they sure did pick somebody capable in that role.
So, and I, of course, I'd like to grab all the credit because I mean honestly Who else than to take the credit for somebody's success in life other than ninth grade English teacher, right? That's the way I see it. But anyway, continuing what we've been talking about in terms of what's beneficial for young people in the world that they live in, this week in schule is here to tell you … I'm here to explain to you, kind of what I'm seeing and what's happening.
We did a short story called “To Build a Fire”, which many of you remember, and the main character is done in by pride, mostly. The guy is strong, smart, knows how to handle rough living in the Yukon, but he doesn't listen to the Old Man that he had spoken to a couple of days before who said, “you really shouldn't travel in the Yukon if it's 50 below zero by yourself”. Actually, you shouldn't travel at all. But if you have to, you need to bring somebody.
At first everything is going okay, and the guy is even laughing at the old man's words. Then a minor thing goes wrong, and of course, there's no room for error when it's 50 below zero let alone 75 below zero, and the guy winds up freezing to death. And as I tell a lot of young people that kind of idea, that kind of arrogance, that kind of pride will do you in, especially in today's world. Students sometimes ask “well what do you mean? Because back then we only had a TV in the classroom. We had a chalkboard. Now, I know how this sounds, right? Like this is the old man talking, hey, get off my lawn. I get it. But this wasn't that long ago. This was the 2011 school year. We had a chalkboard. I had a computer in the corner where every once in a while, I would ask everyone to be silent so we could turn your head and look at the CRT monitor computer and listen to a short video on that screen, no lie.
If I wanted to do anything feature-length, I had to have the DVD VHS combo player sit on top of a bunch of schoolbooks. But my point is that sometimes, not as often as it should be, and this is where opportunity comes in; students will ask me, what do I mean by how different things are now and how the differences between years ago to now? That list of differences has grown exponentially. And I also use the word ‘clown world’ a lot. I use that here in this week in schule. I use it in my write-ups about finance and stocks. I use it in terms of earning potential and employment: everything, like, because we are kind of in clown world! And I bring up a couple of things that are not necessarily within our control. And by what, I mean is my control or students’ control, right?
It's not like I have some kind of special dispensation and can control these things. And in the United States, I let students know two things, two or three things that really make it so that the awareness of these things can help you navigate. What I mean is: The direction of dollars from Your Federal Government. And we are in a country where it is seen as acceptable, and not only Acceptable, But Necessary to Spend Billions Upon Billions of Dollars In A Conflict On The Ukraine-Russian Border, Billions And Billions Of Dollars. Now, I don't know about you, but I'm sitting in the Bronx and the road in front of me about 10 feet away from me to the right, is a pretty good-sized hole in the street.
Okay, that's not the federal government's problem, but all right. Is it possible that instead of the billion dollars that went to Ukraine last year or whatever, the number is, one-tenth of that could go to a large city for road repair? I mean, are these really weird ideas? Is this out of the realm of possibility? And forget the pothole in the road. We have a federal Department of Education. How about instead of well, I don't really know, what the Federal Department of Education does, but and it probably gets too much money, so maybe skip the Federal Department of Education and have federal monies flow into local schools and not give it to any person. See to it that those dollars go toward rigorous merit-based educational programs and make it impossible for them to be shut off. What I mean is, sometimes these programs attract only the families and the parents and the children who are academically inclined and want to work hard. And you know, the grievance industry doesn't like that. So, there's money to be made in the grievance industry. So, you got to somehow send the money in if again, I'm just thinking off the top of my head where the people who want to end a merit-based program, like the specialized high schools, like Talented and Gifted. Those people have no way to do that. You know, this is just thinking out loud.
Or, and I tell students this as well, so, right, so money can go to the quote-unquote fight for Ukraine. Whatever. The other thing is now money goes to billions upon billions to a conflict in the Middle East between Israel and the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. I mean how much money needs to go to that? How about redirect it towards the high-speed rail line that was supposed to connect Washington DC to Boston with all those cities in the middle? It doesn't exist. I don't know. I mean, this is just one of these things where this is the country that young people are in and as soon as they realize it, it makes navigating easier because too many students are raised in an environment where they think, okay, the government is going to fix it, or whatever issue comes up, the government's going to take care of it.
And I talk, I mentioned things and the students who are currently juniors, when they were freshmen, man, that was a crazy year. But I've mentioned this group of guys before and it was weird because, you know, a lot of the intelligent, capable, question-asking, intellectually curious people in class are often the young women. But in this case, I had a bunch of dudes who were really like, they were pressing me hard on my beliefs. And so, I told them that it was kind of a dangerous world they're in because you had two events in the national, international arena that were troublesome. One was During the Donald Trump administration. He had said “no, we are not going to do Continued military exercises in various parts of the Middle East”, and he's the commander-in-chief and the Joint Chiefs ignored him!
Now I want you to think about that because I know what you were taught. I know orange man bad racist all kinds of stuff, right? I know what the corporate press told you and I mean, I don't know, the TDS people, as I've mentioned before, are unreachable. So, if you've got it, if you have an affliction like that, then and you're getting triggered just bail. I don’t know. Neither I nor other like-minded people really have time for you, but that's repellent. The commander-in-chief says we want I want to do things more peacefully and cut off and a lot of this military action. We don't need it. It's not affordable. It doesn't make sense. And the Joint Chiefs of Staff ignored him. They just they just didn't do it. That is telling. It's also criminal and people should have been court-martialed for that and it didn't happen.
And naturally you didn't hear much about it in the press because again, Trump, Orange Man Bad, Right, all the other stuff, Drumpf, whatever. This is the other part that the thinking students really started to realize, and one young man named Will, I don't know if he hears this. They were like, oh, wow, it's really easy to manipulate people's thoughts. I said, yes, and you're watching it in real time.
And the other one, the other event, the other thing I talk about, and it's escaped a lot of the news cycle, was the banning of Huawei phones by the Chinese. Because the Chinese are now the new boogeyman and where are the dollars going to go? They're ginning everybody up for a winding down of the completely pointless and lost Ukrainian foolishness. How much blood and money and treasure and land and lives were destroyed on this uselessness? I don't know. The numbers are horrible. And for what? And now they're slowly, you know, doing the rollout for China. Now China is a mega power and it's not going to be a Ukraine thing, right? It's a different story. But the banning of the Huawei phone was a big one because Huawei is a company where the technology was amazing and, it's almost as if a conspiratorial minded person would think, let me say it this way, that the federal government didn't want regular people to have the things available in the Huawei phone that they could do. I don't know how else to say it because they were really, really, intense. Joe Rogan got into trouble by talking up Huawei phones. He's like, “man, these things are incredible!” And he was talking about how amazing they were - and they were blocked. This is all before Trump came in. This was years and years ago, but it was an amazing bit of brinksmanship and trade blocking, especially from people who keep yelling at us that free trade is the answer, which it isn't, of course.
Free trade is a horrible thing. NAFTA, GATT, right, all these free trade agreements, all they do is take American industry and they sent it to Mexico at first and then it wound up being in China and now we're in the predicament we're in, which is a complete disaster. So, the people who tell us that free trade is the most amazing thing ever, and you shouldn't be an isolationist, and why are you one of those disgusting nationalists? You know, you're terrible. Now all of a sudden, they, well years ago, somewhat quietly blocked the infiltration of Huawei phones. You got to wonder why. You know what I mean? Like if you're going to talk to me about free trade and how it's the answer to everything and an open border as well, right? This is human capital. Bring in the human capital. Gut the industry. Bring in human capital from Central and South America, not from anywhere else, of course. And this is the recipe for success. It makes no sense.
And this is the world that our teenagers are, well, let me rephrase: This is the country that our teenagers are growing up in. Who is helping them navigate that? Right? This is the way that we talk. This is how we talk in Room 108. Which is why I say what I say. If this is a problem for you as an adult listening to this, why are the 9th graders and the 15-year-olds in 108 able to handle it? Why can't you? And if they're, you know, this is how we do it. Let me rephrase: people are used to being told what to think from Fox News or MSNBC or Rachel Maddow or you know CNN? you know there are people out there who you know if Sean Hannity says it or Wolf Blitzer says it then it's then it just is I don't understand these people but okay, whatever.
But the China thing is interesting and young people need to understand that for a long-time people laughed at the Far East, particularly China, because you know, they made underwear, and they made cheap trinkets, and we outsourced that labor and that manufacturing to there and it was actually cheaper to have it made there and shipped over. You should know that China now doesn't just make that stuff. They're now, they have a trade surplus, and you know why? And I'm going to leave you with this. China is now making cars and selling them by the truckload, boatload, you know, shipping tanker load to other parts of the world. They make an $11,000 electric vehicle. They make small internal combustion engine cars. They make a ton of cars and they're selling them and they're not expensive. And guess what? They're not expensive for some good reasons and not expensive for some bad reasons, right? China is not friendly to their environment. They don't have the OSHA regulations, all the stuff that we have here. So they can sell a $11,000 electric car. Their version of environmental stuff is, you know, the wastewater goes from the pipe into the river. Hopefully they figure that out.
And not only that China sells heavy industry. in the old days okay, China would buy heavy industry from Caterpillar and these other huge monster … John Deere … companies for their heavy equipment. Now they make it themselves and they use it themselves and they sell it to others. None of this is mentioned as talked about to American teenagers at least in mind. All right, at least the teenagers that I speak with that I work with it's just not on the radar and that's a crying shame because what this does is it limits opportunity for high schoolers. If you are mechanically inclined or like technology or want to work with stuff you want to build here in the United States, because we've gutted our industry and our intellectual capital, because everybody's worried that the temperature is going to go up 1.5 degrees. (That was, actually that was a big truck, right?) It's going to go up 1.5 degrees. The temperature of the world is going to go up 1.5 degrees by 2050 and we're supposed to cry and scream and yell about that? Then so okay and now what?
What's step two? We're supposed to discuss these things and yell about them on social media. Well, how much money does that put into your pocket? Answer: none. So, you know, dealing with issues, competency, the world we're in, being realistic, all these things play a huge role. And so, this week in school and other weeks and the upcoming weeks these are the kinds of thing I try to inject into the English curriculum as best as I can. So, if you're listening to this and you can, you know, try to talk real talk with a younger person, you'll find you'll be popular, right? They like hearing this kind of stuff. No two ways about it. All right? So, let's talk next week.
It's been great. Talk to you soon.”
