come together... right now... over me!

...and our children

I have long been an advocate of teachers

i have long been an advocate of students

i have long been a proponent of the current educational system

the trouble that i have is that if i want to make the system better, then sacrifices will have to be made.

when it comes to battles of improving education, someone always has to be right and someone always has to be wrong. is that really necessary? to that, i say no.

i truly believe that it is not the idea of "my idea is more right" but the idea of "lets see if we can get it all together and do better for the education of our children".

SYNERGY goes a long way. i learned in a college level Afro-Caribbean dance class that in order to make a dance speak, you had to combine many elements. my son goes to a public charter school and i will say in all his 6 years of public, private, parochial, and other charter schools, he is getting the best offering for advancement.

guess what??????
his teachers are not union members.
i am a full supporter of unions that work, but i think the way teachers are treated is deplorable and the trickle down is uneducated children who will do society no good in the next 20 years.
we have to pay teachers what they are worth, reward them for what they do, and offer consequences for those who don't meet the requirements of the future of America.
hiding behind a union who will hold you up in the system even if you should NEVER be teaching children or tenure because you did your time is disappointing to me.

will we lose people in the fray? absolutely.

but there must be sacrifices for growth to happen. think about these things:

1. dendrite pruning

2. rose bushes

3. young peach trees

Goddess

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The Cold's Prayer*

*recited in a rhythm close to "The Lord's Prayer" Our head cold, who art in sinus, how did you get so bold? Thy dripping nose thy ice cold toes Theraflu and Nyquil's in the closet. Give us this sneeze our daily dread and forgive us our coughing as we forgive those who have coughed against us And lead us not into the ER but deliver us from dry tissue noses for thine is the hot tea, the vitamin C, the Zicam Now and forever. Amen.
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the military drawdown. will we sit and wallow or be called to action ourselves?

there are many provisions made for members of the guard. in the instance of this particular serviceman, he did not have a job that valued him enough to allow him extended leave. that should be a given for anyone who hires a protector of our country. they should allow them to come back to the job they held while protecting our nation. I do not blame the Obama administration for this specifically. this is the case always when we have military drawdowns. if we look at the situation with the funding cuts to our nations education system, the same turmoil has been created... dilapidated buildings low funding for key programs low test scores. what is worse for our schools is that we cannot start a war or join a conflict to raise the bar on the bottom of the heap educations our children receive in public schools; hence, charter, private and home schooled children are becoming the norm. war is easier to assemble for than to disassemble from. everything looked fine when the nation was at war. we have so much more to focus on within our own borders. we wanted them home... they are coming home... WE AS A PEOPLE have to make sure they are taken care of and honored for their service. unfortunately, GI (government issue) means that the government owns you and can toss you about as it pleases. it is a form of servitude, still voluntary, with the perks looking no less for wear as when young men were drafted for Vietnam in the mid '60s where does the way out of this begin? perhaps the way out begins in the minds and hearts of our nation’s people, young and old. we have a duty to support not only our military personnel, but also the future of our children, and the elders who have raised us. there is so much for us to do. so much more... Goddess
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Why strike?

Why strike?

50 years ago, strikes were important
there 470 strikes in 1952

just last year there were only 50 strikes of more than 1000 employees

there is a better way to assist in change for us and for the union. i believe the media is our best form of leverage in changing what we want at our jobs.

we all know what is going wrong at ATT . why not blow the whistle on them?

now is the time to use what you find against a company.

there is so much that the public is unaware of. things that they might want to know.


say the 5000 jobs that were brought back to America. ATT created jobs in new call centers and then PURCHASED the contract call centers in India!

think about it. they now own the centers in India and can do what they want.
instead of the customers getting Prahad and Bhagavad for DSL support questions they now get Dick and Susie from Wisconsin. The downside to this is now the internal customer, read: employees can now spend countless non-productive ours at work attempting to garner assistance for their computer and technical issues.

for example, i have had a phone down at my desk since about the 14th of March. we no longer have a number to call first to expedite assistance with work related technical issues, we have to go online and create a ticket number.

that ticket is funneled through Georgia and most likely ends up in Madhapur India where mine did. I post no ill will to the workers in India. they need jobs too, but training is very important when dealing with company infrastructure.

I have a soft phone or what most people would call VOIP at my desk. one down side to it is that it is not VOIP but instead a soft phone that uses an ISDN circuit. this leads to many problems. instead of all of the system being virtual, most of it is.

technical assistance is only offered for the virtual phone. I knew after changing out equipment, doing downloads, updating, installing and uninstalling etc, that it was a physical problem that needed a telephone technician to repair.

I would figure that i know this because i know a little about phones as i work for the phone company. meh!

still i prescribed to the company idea that that trouble ticket i opened would eventually be turned into a work order and a tech would come out.

i got an email message on Wednesday from a 'tech' saying he would be at my desk.
it was the company computer guy. he did an un-install, install, update yada yada yada. i think you get the picture. before he even sat down, he knew that he was not going to be able to help. obviously, he had been here done this' before.

he still took his 25 minutes assigned to prove out the program issue.

1 down... how many more to go?

he closed my ticket.
there would be no other person coming out.
i now had to create another ticket.
i got to Georgia this time. that is Georgia in the US and not Georgia in the Ukraine :)
i sat at my desk and had them access my computer remotely to download a new push into the equipment that i had already changed out and tested at another station and had proved out that it wasn't the equipment.
she did her best. i thanked her proficiently, she said she would watch the ticket closely and the then she referred it back to the company computer guy.

he got a message from me that said "don't bother to come out. enjoy your lunch"

it was at this time that i tried to take a familiar path.
i called REPAIR!!!!!
me and the rep on the line had a good laugh. she knew she couldn't help me and i knew too, but i just had to vent to someone who actually understood the ridiculousness of the whole situation.

i told her that all i wanted was a warm body with a tool belt to come on down and fix my phone. the guy with the clipboard was wasting his time.

she laughed, i laughed . it was all good.

by now, Georgia had closed my ticket.
Hello again to limbo.
so my boss overhears me making the warm body and a tool belt comment and decides that it is time for him to step and an be more professional. hahahahaha
it was time to allow my manager to feel my pain.
i could not get an answer from him in the beginning, but somehow he felt that he could get things moving for me now.

i have never enjoyed a watching a man squirm as much as i did this day. hahahahaha!
i followed him to his office and watched him go through all the motions. he was not nice for long. i was sitting there waiting for his bells palsy to come back he was so stressed!
after he asked for a manager a couple of times and got his nose bit a couple of times, he tells me that he has a tech coming out on Monday.

stay tuned. ..






strike?
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This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.





This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.