Pat Buchanan Hearts Obama

August 31, 2008 in Reading Response
Tags: barack, bipartisan, buchanan, convention, democratic, effusive, examples, excessive, firebrand, hearts, keith, likes, loves, msnbc, national, obama, olbermann, pat, praise, right, support, transcript, wing

MSNBC gave Pat Buchanan two minutes to react to Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama’s acceptance speech. Having just watched all 45 minutes of Obama — including three minutes of cheers and thank yous at the beginning — I agree with Pat Buchanan.

I’d bet that viewers and the audience genuinely wished that MSNBC would have shown some savvy and let Buchanan ramble as long as he wanted — I was a thousand times more interested in what this right-wing firebrand had to say than whatever the rest of the panel could have mustered up.

Transcript follows.

It was a genuinely outstanding speech. It was magnificent. It is the finest … I saw Cuomo’s speech. I saw Kennedy in ’80. I even saw Douglas MacArthur. I even saw Martin Luther King. This is the greatest convention speech. Probably the most important because unlike Cuomo and the others, this is an acceptance speech. This came out of the heart of American and he went right at the heart of America. This wasn’t a liberal speech at all. This is a deeply, deeply centrist speech.

It had wit, it had humor, and when he used the needle on McCain, he stuck it into McCain, and it was funny as with Kennedy’s speech in ’80. I laughed with Kennedy when he was needling Ronald Reagan. That was so good.

Let me read you the passage, though, because this man is a professional orator and he’s a writer of his own speeches. But let me read it because here’s where you get into the roll and the cadence and how a speaker can really pound a point home. He says:

“I love this country, and so do you, and so does John McCain. The men and women who serve in our battlefields may be Democrats and Republicans and independents, but they have fought together and bled together and they have died together under the same proud flag. They have not served a Red America or a Blue America — they have served the United States of America.”

That is how you bring people off their feet, by pulling at their heart and spleen and guts. It was beautiful.

He didn’t get much longer before the panel cut him off.

I’d like to think that Buchanan meant it, rather than just chose his words so as to do as much damage to McCain as possible. Tell me that taking Buchanan’s words at face value isn’t self-deception.

BTSA Bullshit

May 2, 2008 in The Way It Were
Tags: assessment, beginning, benefit, btsa, bullshit, contract, crap, credential, edublogosphere, fired, hire, kremen school of education, little, master, master teacher, new, new teacher, no, practical, program, student, student teacher, support, teacher, test, useless, worthless

There’s this one cross-eyed, big-nosed, eyepatch-wearing peg-legged teacher at my school who is about to finish his “Beginning Teacher Support and Assessment” program. While the contracted last-chance-to-fire-beginning-teacher-on-circumstantial-evidence date has passed, I’ll keep him anonymous.

BTSA is a requirement for new teachers, as it works on staff development and that sort of thing. Beyond that, it’s a mystery to me, so I asked him very casually what he thought about it.

It’s bullshit.

Could you elaborate?

It’s bullshit.

While he spoke in a higher register this time, the answer still didn’t help me. I said so.

He sighed.

It might be good if I hadn’t grown up around all this, or if I hadn’t been a high school student. It might be good for new teachers who didn’t go through a credential program. It might be good for teachers who somehow didn’t pay attention during their credential program.

As far as I’m concerned, it’s useless. It’s just more of the same credential program crap.

He didn’t elaborate much further.

I used to think that graduation meant I didn’t have to put up with inherently worthless exercises in busywork. I more recently used to think that getting out of the credential program meant that I didn’t have to put up with an excessive workload of exercises that have very little to no practical benefit in the classroom.

Nope. Two more years.