Dancing Teachers

The title of this post is rather explicit, but it might not hurt to give a little bit of information before delving into the content.

Teachers are strange creatures. They are well educated individuals who have been tricked into wanting to spend nearly all of their waking hours with children of varying ages, but this is only a small portion of what makes them so strange. A truly complete analysis may never be conducted, but I will say this:

As evidenced by the 30 second clip below, there is something incredibly entertaining about a secondary school teacher dancing.



The addition of music was especially artful in the way it matches nearly ALL of the movement.

Still, nowhere near as incredible as the Robert Englund lookalike that was my high school algebra teacher:

Yes, We ALL Can

There probably isn't anybody who's going to read this who isn't well aware of my support for Barack Obama's campaign bid. With that said, a video was posted on Youtube today interviewing a class of students from the Bronx High School of Performance and Stagecraft and their reactions to Obama's racial speech earlier this month.

Anyone who's attended high school in the last decade should be duly impressed by these kids and their teacher. Obama's right: the American people are not the problem; they are the solution.

Students at Bronx Highschool for Performance and Stagecraft respond to Obama's 3/18 speech on race.

Fiscal Year '0X - The Brain Drain

Poor spending seems to be one of the many recurring themes of the Bush Administration, and striking a balance between the departments of Defense and Education is precisely what many critics suggest. But how many Americans actually know where their taxes are going? What exactly is this great disparity that has so severely burdened Bush's budget?

I took the time to peruse through some of our nation's spending habits and found some interesting information. The gap between the cost of war and our investment in knowledge isn't just large, it's unnerving. In 2006, the United States government spent nearly $500 billion in national defense, while only $93.4 billion was invested in education; and that was high. In 2005, $72 billion was spent on education, and the 2007 budget granted the Department of Education only $68 billion. Between 2004 and today, the US has spent over $1.95 trillion on defense. Comparitively, the Department of Education has recieved less than $300 billion.

In all fairness, the Department of Defense is not quite the fattest agency on the books. By year's end, the 2007 budget will encompass expenditures of over $671 billion on health and human services alone, a substantial increase from the $581 billion spent in 2005; impressive figures for a worthy cause. It seems odd, then, that nearly 47 million Americans (16%) were without health insurance in 2005. Odd, too, that this number was about 1.3 million higher than the year before it, despite a $40 billion budget increase.

In 2004, despite a record voter turnout, only 58% of Americans aged 18-24 were registered to vote. In the same category, only 47% actually voted, the lowest category by far. Based on these numbers, it would seem that young Americans are uncaring, uneducated, or otherwised discouraged from taking part in arguably the most important aspect of American Government.

What does all this mean? My guess is as good as anyone's, but it seems that the correlation between the ignorance of politics in American schools and an ailing education budget may be more than coincidental. If anything will help politicians desperately cling to a conservative platform, a collective brain drain will do it.