Pennsylvania Monitors Ebola For 100

The Pennsylvania Department of Health is monitoring about 100 people for signs of Ebola, the Philadelphia Inquirer reports.

Most are those who recently spent time in Ebola-stricken West African nations albeit three are Pennsylvania residents who shared  an Oct. 13 flight from Cleveland to Dallas with a nurse who later tested positive for the virus.

None have tested positive for Ebola and that their risk of getting it is very low, according to Department of Health spokewoman Spokeswoman Aimee Tysarczyk.

She said the department is in touch with each person daily.

So kudos for Gov. Tom Corbett for staying on top of the matter.

Hat tip Bob Guzzardi

Not that Bob is going to vote for Corbett.

Pennsylvania Monitors Ebola For 100

 

Pennsylvania Monitors Ebola For 100

Super Batteries Loom Say Chinese

A battery that can be recharged up to 70 percent in only two minutes has been developed by Nanyang Technology University it is being reported.

These batters will also have lifespans of over 20 years, which is more than 10 times that of the existing lithium-ion standard.

If this report is accurate, it will mean electric cars might start to make sense . The vehicles could then be recharged in just minutes and battery replacement would not longer be akin to buying a new car every year.

Still, to make things truly carbon-emission free, the coal and natural gas plants doing the charging would have to be replaced. The only realistic carbon-emission free options as of now are nuclear and hydro.

Super Batteries Loom Says Chinese University

Super Batteries Loom Says Chinese University

Conundrum Defined With Examples

This Off The Internet — Conundrum Defined With Examples — is courtesy of Cathy Craddock

Free people are not equal.​    Equal people are not  free.

The definition of the word Conundrum is: something that is puzzling or confusing.

Here are six Conundrums of socialism in the United States of America:

1. America is capitalist and greedy – yet half of the population is subsidized.

2. Half of the population is subsidized – yet they think they are victims.

3. They think they are victims – yet their representatives run the government.

4. Their representatives run the government – yet the poor keep getting poorer.

5. The poor keep getting poorer – yet they have things that people in other countries only dream about.

6. They have things that people in other countries only dream about – yet they want America to be more like those other countries.

Think about it! And that, my friends, pretty much sums up the USA in the 21st Century.

********************************

These three, short sentences tell you a lot about the direction of  the  current  U.S. government and cultural environment:

1. We are advised to NOT judge ALL Muslims by the actions of a few lunatics, but we are encouraged to judge ALL gun owners by the actions of a few lunatics.   (makes sense don’t it?)

Funny how that works. And here’s another one worth considering…

2. Seems we constantly hear about how Social Security is going to run out of money.  But we never hear about welfare or food stamps running out of money?  What’s interesting is the first group “worked for” their money, but the second didn’t.

Think about it…..and Last but not least,

3. Why are we cutting benefits for our veterans, no pay raises for our military and cutting our army to a level lower than before WWII, but we are not stopping the payments or benefits to illegal aliens!!

Am I the only one missing something?

 

Conundrum Defined

Conundrum Defined With Examples
Conundrum Defined With Examples

Keep Common Core, Destroy Math

By Cynthia Walker

I became a math teacher by a circuitous route. My degree is in engineering. I spent five and a half years refurbishing nuclear submarines, and then I quit work to bear, rear, and eventually homeschool our three children.

As a homeschool mom, I participated in co-ops, taking turns teaching groups of homeschooled children subjects such as nature study and geography. As our children entered their teen years, I began teach to teach algebra, trig, and calculus to small classes of homeschoolers at my kitchen table. And as our children left home for their four-year universities, two to major in engineering and one in art, I began teaching in small private schools known as classical academies.

This last year, I have also been tutoring public-school students in Common Core math, and this summer I taught a full year of Common Core Algebra 2 compressed into six weeks at an expensive, ambitious private school.

I’ve taught and tutored the gamut of textbooks and curricula: Miquon and Saxon to my own kids and whenever the choice of curriculum was mine to make; Foerster, Saxon, Jacobs, or Holt when hired to teach at a school. I’ve tutored out of the California state adopted texts: CPM, Everyday Math, Mathland, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, McGraw Hill, Addison Wesley, and Holt. I’ve had students come to me from all of the above plus Teaching Textbooks, Singapore, and Math U See.

This last year was my first experience first tutoring, then teaching Common Core, and I was curious. I had read the reports of elementary-school children crying over their homework and staying up past midnight to complete it, so I expected Common Core to be like Everyday Math, Mathland, and CPM: poorly explained, abstruse, confusing. I was correct on those counts.

What surprised me was that Common Core was also hard.

Now, I like rigor. I have high standards. My goal for my students is that they will become competent and confident mathematicians. But I was stunned to see that my tutoring student’s pre-algebra work incorporated about a third of a year of algebra 1. The algebra 2 text incorporated about a third of the topics I would expect to find in a precalculus course. And so forth.

This did not mesh with the reports from Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Utah, or New York, where Common Core is alleged to lower standards – in one case, specifically, to move multiplication tables from third grade to fifth grade. It appears that Common Core is not being implemented in a consistent (or common) way across the United States. But I can only address pre-algebra through calculus in texts claiming to be Common Core in California. These texts are shoveling about a third of the subsequent year’s topics into the current year.

This problem is exacerbated by the recent fad for accelerating students through their math classes. Fifty years ago, algebra 1 was a ninth-grade course for fourteen-year-olds. Now it is routinely taught in eighth grade, sometimes in seventh. Algebra 1 in seventh grade means that pre-algebra is taught in sixth grade to eleven-year-olds, and few 11-year-olds have achieved the cognitive development necessary to master the abstract logic of one third of a year of algebra.

Cognitive development proceeds not in a smooth curve, but in jumps and plateaus. Just as most babies learn to walk at 12 months, so most adolescents become capable of logical operations such as algebra at 12 years. And just as whether a baby walks at nine months or 15 months has no bearing on whether he plays football in college, so whether a student learns algebra in 7th or 9th grade has no bearing on whether he becomes a National Merit Scholar…save that a child who is pushed and flounders and fails is unlikely to love an activity.

That is what I am seeing with my tutoring students: the math-bright ones are being encouraged to take honors pre-algebra at age 11. In prior years, this would have meant that they first had a thorough, final review of arithmetic: adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing whole numbers, decimals, and fractions; long division; changing fractions to decimals to percents and back. Then for a treat, they would be introduced to the glories of algebra, the fun stuff: Rene Descartes’ brilliant invention, with plenty of lists of points that, if properly executed, form an outline of a fish or a dinosaur. They would be taught signed numbers, order of operations, distributive property, and how to solve for x, and that would be about it. They would finish the year happily aware that math is fun and that they are good at it. If they were fortunate enough to be taught from Jacobs’s Mathematics: a Human Endeavor, they would learn about sequences and mosaics and logarithms and even networks, but all with a very concrete development, suited to the emergent logical thinker.

The reform mathematicians who put together Common Core are ignoring cognitive development. My Common Core pre-algebra students are hurried through the arithmetic review and taught the coordinate system. They graph lines and parabolas. They do transformations, exponents (including zero and negative exponents), and a truly horrendous percentage of percentage problems. The homework can be finished in an hour if the student’s parents can afford to hire a BS mechanical engineer to sit at his elbow and remind him when he takes a wrong turn. Otherwise, he is up ’til midnight. Students work hard at tasks beyond their strength; they flounder; they fail; they learn that math is no fun.

This isn’t education. This is child abuse.

Another aspect of Common Core that surprised me was the emphasis given to parent functions and transformations. People over 40 years of age, even techies such as physicists, chemists, engineers, and mathematicians, won’t know what parent functions are. People under 35 who have been educated in reform mathematics textbooks will be surprised that is possible to learn mathematics without learning about transformations.

Fifty years ago, transformations were not taught, although math-bright students would figure them out for themselves in analytic geometry (second-semester pre-calculus). Today, they are taught systematically beginning in elementary school.

The treatment of transformations reminds me of the New Math debacle of the 1960s. The reform mathematicians of the day decided that they were going to improve mathematical education by teaching all students what the math-bright children figured out for themselves.

In exactly the same way, the current crop of reform math educators has decided that transformations are an essential underlying principle, and are teaching them: laboriously, painfully, and unnecessarily. They are tormenting and confusing the average student, and depriving the math-bright student of the delight of discovering underlying principles for himself.

One aspect of Common Core that did not surprise me was a heavy reliance on calculators.

The main problem I see with my algebra students is that they have poor number sense. They can’t tell whether the answer their calculator shows is reasonable or not. They cling to the notion that 1.41 is somehow more precise than square root of two. They also can’t add fractions or do long division, which puts them at a severe disadvantage when they must add rational expressions or divide polynomials.

Common Core exacerbates this problem. At every level, the problems are designed to be too hard to solve by hand. A calculator is necessary even in elementary school – unless a child is to spend 5 hours a night on homework. A graphing calculator is necessary for algebra – calculating correlation coefficients by hand is not a viable option. My students are whizzes with their calculators. But they reach for them to square 1/3…then write it as 0.11.

Common Core advocates claim that they are avoiding that boring, rote drill in favor of higher-order thinking skills. Nowhere is this more demonstrably false than in their treatment of formulas. An old-style text would have the student memorize a few formulas and be able to derive the rest. Common Core loads the student down with more formulas than can possibly be memorized. There is no instruction on derivation; the formulas are handed down as though an archangel brought them down from heaven. Since it is impossible to memorize all the various formulas, students are permitted – nay, encouraged – to develop cheat sheets to use on the tests.

The second-biggest problem with Common Core is the problem of Big Mistakes. Pretend for a moment that a homeschool family did something as asinine as giving their eight-year-old a calculator instead of teaching him his times tables. That child would be a calculator cripple.

But that would be a small mistake, affecting one child. Now consider what happens when a state made such a mistake. We don’t even have to pretend. In 1986, California adopted Whole Language Arts, which proved to be a disaster. Within a decade, California plunged to 49th out of 50 in reading performance. Millions of children were affected. Big mistake.

If different states have different curricula, we can observe what works and what does not, and improve thereby. But Common Core is being pushed nationwide. This could be the Biggest of all possible Mistakes.

But the worst problem with Common Core is its likely effect on the educational gap between rich and poor in this country. The students I tutor have parents who would describe themselves as “comfortable.” No one likes to admit to being rich. But the middle class and poor cannot afford to pay a tutoring company $50 to $100 per hour so that someone will sit with their children and explain trig identities.

The oft-repeated goal of Common Core is that every child will be “college or career ready.” Couple that slogan with the oft-expressed admiration for the European system of education – in European countries, students are slotted for university or a dead-end job at age 14, based ostensibly on their performance on high-stakes tests, but that performance almost inevitably matches the student’s socioeconomic class. Do we really want to destroy upward mobility and implement a rigid class structure in the United States of America?

To recapitulate: Common Core teaches about a third of algebra 1 in pre-algebra, a third of pre-calculus in algebra 2, et cetera. Common Core teaches unnecessary abstractions as essential principles. Common Core creates calculator cripples. Common Core fails to derive mathematical expressions, instead presenting them as Holy Writ.

I predict that if we continue implementing Common Core, average students will drop out of math as early as they are allowed. Even math-bright students will hate math. Tutoring companies will proliferate to serve wealthy families. The educational gap between rich and poor will widen. If we want to destroy math and science education in this country, keep Common Core.

This article originally ran on AmericanThinker.com on Sept. 28.

Hat time Joanne Yurchak

 

Keep Common Core, Destroy Math

 

Keep Common Core, Destroy Math

Kyj’s Bakery Gets Deserved Kudos

Kyj’s Bakery at 2702 W. Third St. in Chester is the subject of a well deserved article in The Delaware County Daily Times by Kathleen Carey.

The Ukrainian bakery is 60 years old.

It was founded by Wasyl and Lydia Kyj and is now operated by their daughter Christina Pluta.

It has affiliates at 23 E. Brookhaven Road, Brookhaven which opened in 1973 and at  3372 Chichester Ave. Boothwyn (Upper Chichester), which opened in 1993.

Yes, it really does have the best babka.

When you get a chance, check it out. You won’t regret it.

Kyj's Bakery Gets Deserved Kudos

Kyj’s Bakery in Chester Pa Gets Deserved Kudos

Stonewalled Reveals CBS To Be See B S

Sharyl Attkinsson Stonewalled Reveals CBS To Be See B S

Sharyl Attkisson, a five-time Emmy Aware winning reporter who served for two decades at CBS before leaving in disgust on March 14, has written a book blowing the lid off the blatant dishonesty that runs rampant at her former employer.

The book is Stonewalled: My Fight for Truth Against the Forces of Obstruction, Intimidation and Harassment in Obama’s Washington.

It describes how conservative analysts must always be labeled conservatives — albeit if their opinion really upsets a supervisor they bet to be labeled “right wing” — while liberals are merely called analysts.

She describes how her reporting on the Sept. 11, 2012 Benghazi attack  was pulled off the air starting in October and regulated to the web.

She notes how an exclusive on-camera interviewed with Nakoula Basseley, the YouTube filmmaker initially blamed by Hillary Clinton for the disaster, was squelched.

It should be noted that Ms. Attkisson covered numerous stories critical of the Bush administration and other Republicans which her organization happily ran.

The book is proof positive that the old media who many so long depended upon for their information about world and political matters is inherent untrustworthy.

Stonewalled Reveals CBS To Be See B S

 

Rongione Made False Claim Of Residency Says GOP

The Delaware County Republican Party today, Oct. 27, filed complaints with the Delaware County Board of Elections and Delaware County Voter Registration Commission against Democrat Vince Rongione, a candidate for State Representative in the 163rd Legislative District. The complaints ask the agencies to investigate Rongione for violations of Pennsylvania’s Voter Registration and state election laws.

Under the Pennsylvania Constitution, an individual must be a resident of the district in which they are running for a minimum of one year prior to the election. In October 2013, the last date to file a voter registration prior to the 2013 general election, Rongione filed a change of voter registration with an address of 1251 Wilson Drive, located in Upper Darby’s 3-7 voting district. However, newly obtained witness statements show that the property was for sale, unoccupied, and vacant – despite Rongione’s assertion that he was residing there according to his voter registration form, county GOP Chairman Andy Reilly said.

The real estate agent who listed the property has provided a statement that he visited the property weekly from July 2013 through January 2014 and that the residence was vacant and unoccupied the entire time, Reilly says. Similar statements from a neighbor of the residence, the new owner of the property (who settled on the house in January 2014) and their real estate agent also confirm that the property was unoccupied and vacant.

“Based on the statements we have obtained, it appears that Vince Rongione lied about residing at this address in order to establish a basis for proof of residency so he could run for the seat,” said Reilly. “This appears to be part of an elaborate deception orchestrated by Rongione in an attempt to circumvent the state constitution’s residency requirements. If, for some reason, voters were to elect Rongione in spite of his repeated deceptions throughout the campaign, he could not be seated as a legislator if he fails to meet the residency requirements.”

Specifically, the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania requires that a State Representative “shall have been citizens and inhabitants of their respective districts one year next before their election.”

On Dec. 7, 2013, Rongione subsequently registered to vote at his newly purchased house on Blanchard Road in Upper Darby. This was more than one month after the Constitutional deadline for establishing his residency.

Rongione’s Republican opponent, Jamie Santora, has been raising questions about Rongione’s residency claims throughout the campaign. However, officials just became aware that the house he used in an attempt to establish residency was for sale and vacant.

“I have asked the voter services agencies to investigate this apparent fraudulent voter registration and unlawful voting that occurred in 2013,” said Reilly. “This is a serious matter, no mere campaign rhetoric, and there are serious consequences if prosecutorial agencies confirm the facts we have discovered. Unless he can immediately produce evidence that he actually lived at 1251 Wilson Drive and intended to make this his permanent domicile, Rongione should admit his wrongful actions to the residents of this district, end his campaign, and seek immediate court permission to withdraw as a candidate.”

Rongione Made False Claim Of Residency Says GOP

Rongione Made False Claim Of Residency Says GOP