Addendum to Obama's legacy: The Symptoms of Ebola!

Remember when President Obama promised Ebola was under control and would not reach America:
 
First and foremost, I want the American people to know that our experts, here at the CDC and across our government, agree that the chances of an Ebola outbreak here in the United States are extremely low. We’ve been taking the necessary precautions, including working with countries in West Africa to increase screening at airports so that someone with the virus doesn’t get on a plane for the United States. In the unlikely event that someone with Ebola does reach our shores, we’ve taken new measures so that we’re prepared here at home. We’re working to help flight crews identify people who are sick, and more labs across our country now have the capacity to quickly test for the virus. We’re working with hospitals to make sure that they are prepared, and to ensure that our doctors, our nurses and our medical staff are trained, are ready, and are able to deal with a possible case safely.

Over time, symptoms of Ebola become increasingly severe and may include:

• Nausea and vomiting.
• Diarrhea (may be bloody)
• Red eyes.
• Raised rash.
• Chest pain and cough.
• Stomach pain.
• Severe weight loss.
• Bleeding, usually from the eyes, and bruising (people near death may bleed from other orifices, such as ears, nose and rectum)

Below: A street artist, Stephen Doe, paints an educational mural to inform people about the symptoms of the deadly Ebola virus in the Liberian capital, Monrovia, on Sept. 8, 2014

The Nightmare of Common Core!

The Emperor Has No Clothes. The Common Core standards are an overly complicated way of doing the same thing we have always done. It all started with former Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano, who was the 2006-07 chair of the National Governors Association and now leads the University of California system. The great flaw in all this is that just making things harder does not make kids smarter. You start with what a child can do and work from there. Good teachers assess the child's needs first; they do not force arbitrary lessons on children of varying maturity levels and abilities. Also, they offer a variety of ways to learn something - that's call differentiation, which has been stressed in education courses, and rightly so, but is now being dropped for the Common Core. The reality is schools are suffering because of poverty. Plain and simple, but the politicians don't want to hear that because they don't know how to fix it, or don't care to. When kids arrive at school well-rested, well-fed, when they live in an environment of stability and calm, they will learn. They will fulfill their potential.

The Standards mandate that eight principles of mathematical practice be taught:

1. Make sense of problems and persevere in solving them.
2. Reason abstractly and quantitatively.
3. Construct viable arguments and critique the reasoning of others.
4. Model with mathematics.
5. Use appropriate tools strategically.
6. Attend to precision.
7. Look for and make use of structure.
8. Look for and express regularity in repeated reasoning.