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.
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