Nativity 2018

Nativity 2018

 

At this

Annual Celebration

of the

Birth,

I reflect that

all that

ever mattered,

has mattered,

matters

to me

in the

Message

of the

Master

is that

Nonpareil Expression

of

Divine Devotion,

Luminous Love,

the

Gift

to be

Given,

as did

you to

me,

and I to

you,

and

we to

others,

in

Life

Death

Eternity.

 

  

               GMD

       Christmas 2018

 

A Christmas Reflection on the Nature of Love, For and To Ryan

I think a great deal about Love these days.

 

The Greeks classified different qualities of Love (Agape, Philia, Eros) in a perceptive way;  however, as if referential to the Christian Trinity, there is in my view a commonality at the core of the three designations.  The commonality features empathy, commitment, abiding concern that travels far beyond the self to hope and strive for that which is best for the person, group, or other entity loved.

 

Love is so clearly that which is best in the major world faiths:  Jesus’s abiding and demonstrated Love for people in general and in all particularities;  Yahweh’s enduring love for the Hebrews amidst wrenching emotional struggle on the part of the worshiped and the worshiper;  the calmly intense compassion of the Buddha;  and the highly singular devotion to Allah as Divine Expression of the Perfect on the part of Muslim practitioners of Islam.

 

As I express in “Nativity 2018,” Love is all that matters:

 

Without Love, all details of professed importance in ritual, creed, and theology fade to status as sham expressions by those who have no idea what genuine spirituality entails.  Love is all encompassing, proceeding from the best and most powerful and poetic expressions and formulations of each of the great faiths, to include all who walk the globe on this one earthly sojourn:

 

Love is universal empathy.

 

As a rule, I have seen mostly inadequate expressions of love that fall short of Love.  This is globally true, observed in people across continental locales.  People have a hard time not advocating adherence to social norms and familial expectations while manifesting faux love, without compelling connection to universal moral values.  Those people are rare who can put personal ego and selfish preferences aside to consider only what is best for the loved one.

 

St. Paul’s atypically poetic formulation in Corinthians I, Verse 13 is magnificent but flawed:

 

Love is patient, rejoices in the right, and bears, endures, and maintains hope through all challenges.  Love is not arrogant, nor is Love resentful or irritable as emotions emanating from the ego. 

 

But in the public forum, Love can be an expression of irritation with those who manifest petty disregard for the public good, and of anger over the treatment of particular groups of people, especially those who are vulnerable and who have suffered abuse historically.  And Love can be angry and rude in the perception of those who are guilty:  those violating the purposes of the Temple, those staffing White Citizens Councils, those who perpetuate abusive educational systems.   

 

Love is the core of Faith and Morality. 

 

Love is that which unites genuinely spiritual people within and across the great faiths.

 

And if our capacity for understanding ourselves ever equals and then exceeds our technological and destructive capacity, Love will guide us toward the Potential of Being on this one earthly sojourn.

 

………………………………………………………………………..

 

I love you and I Love you, My Dear Son, and I am so proud that you are yourself a person of love and Love---  


Gary

Jenny Arneson Should Either Issue a Public Apology for Remarks Made at the 11 December 2018 MPS Board of Education Meeting--- or She Should Resign

The saddest moment of all at the Tuesday, 11 December, meeting of the MPS Board of Education was at the same concluding segment that featured the Ira Jourdain inanity (see article as you scroll on down this blog).

 

The comment came from the best member of this board, which is a bit like citing the best member of the 1962 New York Mets, so bad in their inaugural season (40-120 won-lost record) that manager Casey Stengel was moved to write a book entitled, Can’t Anyone Here Play This Game?.

 

Jenny Arneson is the member of note here.  Included in her comments at this concluding segment of the board’s 11 December meeting was a reference to her son, a senior at Edison High School.  She relayed proudly that he had been accepted at his first choice, Grinnell College in Iowa.  She then offered this stunner:

 

“So this proves that MPS students are indeed college and career ready.”

 

You can imagine how this whammed into the moral consciousness of one Gary Marvin Davison, who sent Beloved Son Ryan Davison-Reed to public schools but never trusted those schools to give him his education---  as many a delightful evening with mathematics and Shakespeare and Core Knowledge books and writing stories together will attest.

 

Consider that this is a district with an overall four-year graduation rate of 62%, in which fewer than 50% of African American and Native American students graduate in four years, and at which the average ACT score  at Edison High School specifically and most MPS high schools generally is approximately 16---  indicating a middle school level of education at best.  And grade level proficiency in mathematics and reading is across the district just over 40%, and for African American, Latino/ Latina, Hmong, Somali, and Native American students hovers on either side of 20% proficiency.  One-third of MPS graduates who matriculate on college and university campuses need to take remedial curses.  

 

With these stark facts in view, Arneson’s comments are clueless or consciously dissembling.  Her remarks are not necessarily overtly but rather definitely covertly racist.  They partake of the institutional racism that pervades the Minneapolis Public Schools.

 

For such ill-considered and racist comments, Jenny Arneson, who as the best-informed and typically most thoughtful member of this wretched assemblage of the MPS Board of Education now just symbolizes the intellectual and moral corruption of this board, should do one of the following:

 

Jenny Arneson should apologize for the cited remarks.

 

Or she should resign.

Intellectual Gnat Bob Walser Unwisely Flits My Way Again

Recall my account of my confrontation with Bob Walser in an article from last week, at which you'll arrive very soon if you scroll on down this blog.

 

The guy is a pest, a nasty gnat that goes away only after numerous swats.

 

At the beginning of the MPS Board of Education meeting this past Tuesday, 11 December, Walser caught my eye and gave me a smile of not very clear intent.  The smile could have been interpreted as an attempt to be friendly or to signal no hard feelings.  What Walser apparently is digesting only with great difficulty, is that while I wish him all good events in his personal and familial life, I loathe his presence on the school board and regard him as the silliest, most intellectually trivial and yet with regard to the advancement of excellent education the most harmful presence I have ever witnessed in the pertinent position.  So I remained impassive and conveyed in my expression the disgust that I have for him.

 

I gave my Public Comments focused on the futility of all programmatic federal and state initiatives (currently the federal Every Student Succeeds Act and the State of Minnesota North Star Accountability System) and the similar lack of favorable prospects for the MPS Comprehensive District Design and the key MPS foci of Social and Emotional Learning (SEL), Multi-Tiered System of Support, Literacy imparted via the Benchmark Reading Curriculum, and Equity (the latter of which will not occur because of the inadequacy of the other three points of the Superintendent Ed Graff program).

 

Then at 6:15 PM I headed to New Salem for two hours to run the Tuesday night program, so as to heal the young people that MPS academically abuses during regular school hours, and to give students rides home. 

 

I returned to the board meeting at 8:25 PM to endure a scattered and contentious discussion of board values that went nowhere because none of the board members has any comprehension of the key values that should abide in the impartation of a knowledge-intensive, skill-replete education.  Several times I met Walser’s eyes and stared him down every time.

 

After the meeting I went over to talk with the highly adept MPS Chief Finance Officer Ibrahima Diop.

In a real headscratcher, Walser came up and intruded on our conversation, in the same manner as this wispy pest did last week as Sharon El-Amin and I were conversing at the end of the MPS Finance Committee meeting.  I turned on him and said that he needed to wait until Mr. Diop and I were finished with our conversation.  He sweetly purred that he actually wanted to talk to me and had a gift for me.  What he was up to in this I did not have any interest in discovering.   So I looked him right through his eyes and said. “Will you back off?”  Diop, an administrator rather than a revolutionary activist, grimaced.  But Walser did in fact retreat.  I wished Mr. Diop a happy holiday---  which at least in regard to his Islamic faith, will not focus upon Kwanzaa (see the Ira Jourdain idiocy above)---   then greeted a few others and departed the assembly room.      

 

I have challenged Walser to a debate in a public forum, under formal rules of disputation, as to the history and philosophy of education.  He has declined, knowing that this would expose the facile views that he is intent on inflicting on anyone who must endure his periodic ramblings at school board meetings.

 

 But that is the only setting in which I want to have any interaction with him.

 

I will have to endure this intellectual gnat at the meetings until such time as he should blessedly just flit away.

 

Henceforth, he must know that as a leftist revolutionary I have little use for his hippy-dippy white liberal intellectual venom---

 

and that he would best keep his distance while I am conversing with those who tower mentally and morally above him.

Ludicrous Moments with Ira Jourdain and Rebecca Gagnon--- and How “I Could Just Go On and On”--- and Will

One of the many ludicrous moments at the monthly meeting of the Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) Board of Education this past Tuesday, 11 December, came at the end of this tortuous affair, when each board member gives a report or observation from any MPS-related experiences that they've had in the course of the last month. 

Ira Jourdain, endorsed as an MFT sycophant by the now blessedly defeated Rebecca Gagnon in his narrow defeat of Tracine Asberry in November 2016, reeled off a list of school site visitations and went into a mode whereby he was noting various ethnic celebrations during this holiday season.  He was doing okay through Hanukkah et al, until he got to Kwanzaa, at which reference he wished all Muslims a happy holiday. 

I looked around and caught the eye of the Muslims in the audience.


We shared an ironic smile:

Jourdain's ignorant comment would of course come as a surprise to Maulana Karenga (born Ronald McKinley Everett), whose inspiration induced the creation of the holiday for celebrating African American culture, without prioritizing any religion and certainly not as a specifically Muslim celebration, in 1966.

 

And this is a board in a district that gives so much vacuous lip service to cultural competence.

 

What this board could in fact use is the education I provide in Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education, of the knowledge-intensive, skill-replete sort that the K-12 Revolution will bring to students of all demographic descriptors.

 

I could go on and on, but with more knowledge at my disposal than when in Women’s Month March 2018 Rebecca Gagnon lauded the two most famous 19^th century African American women figures (Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman) and claimed that, “I could just go on and on…”

But did not. 

Probably could not.

 

Farcical if all of this were not so serious with regard to the education of our precious children, of all demographic descriptors---

 

But I could go on and on---

 

And, unlike Gagnon, I  will.

Epiphanies and Denouements in the Production of the Two Seminal Works of the K-12 Revolution

In a life in which I was already feeling such gratitude, this has been one of those weeks of demarked accomplishment that I will long remember.

 

Yesterday (Thursday, 6 December 2018) at 11:43 AM I reached a goal that I had sensed was coming soon as I vigorously assembled myriad articles pertinent to the national Every Student Succeeds Act, the Minnesota North Star Accountability System, the Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) Comprehensive District Design, school profiles for all 73 MPS sites, descriptions for all departments and divisions at the Davis Center (MPS central offices, 1250 West Broadway), presentation of MPS organizational and leadership structure, with academic training and credentials of all department heads and other key figures, and many other updates to the bevy of information that I already had gathered into the three parts (Facts, Analysis, and Philosophy) of Understanding the Minneapolis Public Schools:  Current Condition, Future Prospect.  At the noted temporal juncture, I arose from my study to rustle up lunch and had, in my beloved kitchen, after three years of research and writing, an epiphany:

 

I’ve done it.

 

The material in the three parts now stands at 802 pages in single-spaced 11-point type for articles and various designs for data presentation. 

 

I intend to cull the current abundancy of information and data, the analysis and the philosophic and historical observations, to 350-500 book-size pages, even as I continue to add a bit of material pertinent to charter schools, private schools, and post-secondary institutions to establish the education environmental context in which the district of the Minneapolis Public Schools functions.

 

But all of the core information now resides in the three parts, now merely awaiting meticulous and refined arrangement in the concluded work. 

 

After having had that epiphany, and as I waited for some simmering on the stove to finish lunch preparations, I sat in the chair so favored by My Love and looked northward into one of the great backyards in all the world.  I took a deep breath and felt a wave of relief and satisfaction that was all the more splendid for coming as something of a surprise.  I love reading and research, and writing the book on the inner functioning of the Minneapolis Public Schools has been a Labor of Love, the development of a Legacy by which I intend to overhaul K-12 education for the delivery of knowledge-intensive, skill-replete education to students of all demographic descriptors.

 

But of a sudden, that wave swept over body and metaphoric soul and I realized just how intensely I have been driven every moment of the day for three years to collect, reflect upon, and record the vast amount of information that I have gathered.  

 

That phase is now complete.

 

And the completion occurred so organically as to produce as epiphany concerning something that might have been more explicitly recognized as coming precisely at 11:43 AM.  But the magnitude of this accomplishment did not hit me until I roamed upstairs into the kitchen, then sat at that wondrous living room roost.

 

Wow.

 

A tome that will have many uses is now essential complete.  At early afternoon I sent the three parts by attachment to FedEx to render in hard copy, so that a heightened sense of security further undergirds my feeling of task accomplished and a work of great significance to the world in essence ready to offer to the inhabitants therein.

 

………………………………………………………………………..

 

Tuesday (4 December) began with a delightful 7:30 AM meeting with a key MPS staff member, continued throughout the day with an elongated period of highly productive reading and academic session preparation, and then featuring a bevy of amazing interactions with students at an especially well-attended New Salem Tuesday Tutoring.  I did more work in the office after conversing with My Love upon return home and went to bed at the end of what had turned out to be a 17-hour work day.

 

I then devoted Wednesday and Thursday, as partially noted above, to reading, research, writing, and assemblage.  I make the “partially” reference because in addition to the culminating work that produced the epiphany, I did in the interstices of the pertinent activities also complete updated ACT Practice Mathematics Test written explanations for my advanced middle school and high school students and similar explanations for a test that students of mine must take as course prerequisites at Anoka-Ramsey Community and Technical  College.

 

This then brought yet another epiphany in the form of a realization that I can use those preparatory guides as the core of my Mathematics chapter in Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education, and that the answers that I have prepared cover such a complete breadth of mathematical knowledge and skill sets as to essentially conclude that section of the book. 

 

Now that I have essentially completed Understanding the Minneapolis Public Schools:  Current Condition, Future Prospect, I can now concentrate on finishing just three (there had been four pending until I realized that the math chapter is complete) chapters of the fourteen encompassed in this other authorial and ideational legacy, Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education.

 

These books will then be powerful tools of activism for and impartation of knowledge-intensive, skill-replete education.  I assert that these works in the scope of my life will form the denouement for a successful concluding segment in the dramatic overhaul of K-12 education.