As regular readers know we lost one of our cats – Bailey – a little over a month ago. Our remaining cat, one of the original members if the WP Feline Contingent, is Pip and she’s 17 years old. She was never a ‘lone’ cat, always having other cats around, so she wasn’t doing well by herself. This past Friday I made a trip to one of the Humane Society homes here in the Lakes Region. After spending a couple of hours one of the cats sheltered there chose me to take her to her new home.
She’s a sweet cat, about 7 years old, and she seems to get along with Pip now that she’s been here for a couple of days. I wish I could post a picture of her – Zoey – but Blogger is still broken and I can’t post any new photos. It won’t even let me upload them. (Blogger has been particularly unhelpful.)
All I can say for sure is that Pip has not been wandering around the house calling out for Bailey since Zoey arrived.
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Only $1 billion?
DOGE says it has generated almost $1 billion in savings from Department of Education cuts.
Earlier this week, DOGE launched an “Agency Efficiency Leaderboard” that ranks government agencies based on how much wasteful funding has been cut.I keep hearing arguments that Congress should be the ones making the cuts, but anyone who has been around a while knows Congress would make token cuts at best and take years to do so. That would still leave us with multi-trillion dollar deficits and the graft, corruption, and expansion of bureaucracy jobs would continue apace. We’re at a point where the drastic measures being undertaken by DOGE are necessary because the government cannot continue to spend money we don’t have on things we don’t need.
The Department of Education is currently ranked in first place.
Campus Reform reported that DOGE has canceled nearly $900 million in contracts and training grants at the Department of Education.
This includes “over $600 million in grants to institutions and nonprofits that were using taxpayer funds to train teachers and education agencies on divisive ideologies” such as critical race theory (CRT) and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), according to a press release from the department.
Is it going to hurt people, particularly government employees? Yes, without a doubt. But there’s no such thing as guaranteed jobs, whether you are talking about government or private business. It will be worse if we don’t take these measures because when it collapses, everyone will lose their jobs.
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When my son BeezleBub was still in high school over a decade ago, our school system did away with Home Economics and greatly cut back on Shop (now called ‘Tech Ed’). That was a mistake.
I know when I was in Junior High School - it wasn’t ‘Middle School’ back then – Shop was mandatory for boys and Home Ec for girls. My school suggested that boys and girls take both classes, they being far ahead of other school systems around the country.
Now it seems that some schools have realized that doing away with them was a bad idea and they’re bringing them back. This WSJ article talks about schools now reviving Shop Class as “a hedge against AI future.”
In America’s most surprising cutting-edge classes, students pursue hands-on work with wood, metals and machinery, getting a jump on lucrative old-school careers.It makes perfect sense. For the past few generations kids have been told the only way to get ahead was to get a college education. They were lied to. That didn’t stop students from going deep into debt going to college chasing degrees that, in the end, didn’t help them get ahead. It did leave them owing a lot of money and helped enrich our institutions of higher learning. It also left the trades hurting as fewer and fewer young adults were entering the trades. Today that appears to be changing. I am certainly seeing that here in my part of New Hampshire.
School districts around the U.S. are spending tens of millions of dollars to expand and revamp high-school shop classes for the 21st century. They are betting on the future of manual skills overlooked in the digital age, offering vocational-education classes that school officials say give students a broader view of career prospects with or without college.
With higher-education costs soaring and white-collar workers under threat by generative AI, the timing couldn’t be better.
In a suburb of Madison, Wis., Middleton High School completed a $90 million campus overhaul in 2022 that included new technical-education facilities. The school’s shop classes, for years tucked away in a back corridor, are now on display. Fishbowl-style glass walls show off the new manufacturing lab, equipped with computer-controlled machine tools and robotic arms.
Something else that also seems to be reappearing here is Home Economics class, renamed Family and Consumer Science Class.
There’s mathematics, nutrition, applied science, teamwork, budgeting, problem solving and hygiene — and if they’re lucky, the students in Tiffany Dube’s class will also get a tasty batch of cookies. All of the above are on offer in her Family and Consumer Science class, taught at Laconia Middle School for the first time since the building opened in 2008.It used to be that when most students graduated from high school they knew most of what they needed to be an adult. Once Home Economics and Shop went away, that was no longer true. Hopefully the return of such classes will help make young adults better prepared for the adult world.
Budgetary pressures kept the class from appearing on student schedules until this year, when a convergence of factors created an opening. The middle school was unable to fill a couple of exploratory teaching positions, which left some extra money on the table for salaries. Dube, an experienced teacher who has a passion for family and consumer science, reached out to Principal Aaron Hayward, who was receptive to the idea. He found an equally enthusiastic response from Superintendent Bob Champlin and the school board.
“When I applied, I really just threw it out there. I wasn’t thinking it was going to work,” Dube said. Instead, she was hired mid-year, developed a curriculum that blends personal finance with cooking and kitchen safety, and career exploration. She’s hoping to add sewing and other practical skills in the future.
While family and consumer science might have been seen in a previous generation as appropriate for future homemakers, Dube said the skills learned in the class would be useful to any future adult.
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From Gateway Pundit comes this discussion by Elon Musk about the “Non-profit grift that George Soros has been running on the U.S. Government and taxpayers.”
Considering George Soros was allegedly one of the members of WRBA (Whoever is Running the Biden Administration) who saddled us with Biden and the awful policies that burdened us all, crippled our domestic energy production and hurt the economy certainly explains a lot.
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Stacy McCain is asking the needed question, that question being “Why are the media blaming Trump?”
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And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where it’s been really cold but is going to be in the 50’s by Friday, we’ve been working on cutting back the snow banks because we know winter is nowhere near over, and Monday is raising its ugly head...again.