I am utterly addicted to this clip of Jennifer Holliday singing “And I’m telling you (I’m not goin’)” from the 1982 Tony Awards. I’m mesmerized by it. Good Lord, that woman can sing.
I’ve watched this at least once a day for four straight days now. I need help.
Lou Dobbs, who I really respect and enjoy, has posted a column about how to save our failing schools. He includes this statistic:
Workers without so much as a high-school diploma earn on average $18,734 a year, according to the Census Bureau, about $9,000 less than their counterparts who have graduated high school. Armed with a bachelor’s degree, the average worker earns nearly three times as much as a high-school dropout.
While I don’t doubt his numbers, I wonder about the cause and effect here. He claims that not having a diploma cuts your income by $9,000 a year, and not having a college degree cuts it by two-thirds, but are those two pieces of paper what prevents people from getting better jobs? Or is it the intangibles that those two pieces of paper represent?
This may be a generalization, but the ability to stay in school and earn a diploma says a lot about someone’s determination and stick-to-it-iveness. There are exceptions, of course, but to me, the decision to drop out of high school is more a reflection on someone’s judgement skills and ability to stick something out than it reflects on their intelligence or whether or not the system has failed them.
So, when a high school dropout earns much less, is it because they haven’t learned skills that they need to earn more? I doubt it. What do you really learn in the last two years of high school that you specifically apply to a job? Rather, I think that people — potential employers, for sure — make a value judgement: “This guy dropped out of high school. If he can’t stick that out, why would I want him to work for me?”
It’s the same thing with a Bachelor’s degree. Mine is in Political Science, yet I work in I.T. No specific knowledge I learned to get my degree is something I use from day-to-day in my job. But I have a degree, and that says something about the fact that I had the general intelligence to get through college; the determination to see it through even though I entered school three years later, worked full-time throughout, and took five years to graduate; and the foresight to know that having a degree was important to my future, whether or not I used it in my job or not.
When you drop out of school, the problem is not that you missed some classes. The problem is the judgements people make about your character because you dropped out.
I’m not saying this is right, but it’s true.
Very few things make me want to carry a sign in protest. Invading Iran would be one. This is another.
Some traditional childhood games are disappearing from school playgrounds because educators say they’re dangerous.
Elementary schools in Cheyenne, Wyo., and Spokane, Wash., banned tag at recess this year. Others, including a suburban Charleston, S.C., school, dumped contact sports such as soccer and touch football.
Interesting article on the state of the Clinton’s marriage and how it might affect Hillary’s expected run in 2008.
[...] interviews with some 50 people and a review of their respective activities show that since leaving the White House, Bill and Hillary Clinton have built largely separate lives — partly because of the demands of their distinct career paths and partly as a result of political calculations.
The effect has been to raise Senator Clinton’s profile on the public radar while somewhat toning down Mr. Clinton’s; he has told friends that his No. 1 priority is not to cause her any trouble. They appear in the public spotlight methodically and carefully: The goal is to position Mrs. Clinton to run for president not as a partner or a proxy, but as her own person.
Well, he’s a little late to “not cause her any trouble…”
[...] in choosing to keep their public lives separate, people around the Clintons say, there is a political calculus at work, beyond the natural evolution in a marriage that has had plenty of stresses and betrayals.
Mrs. Clinton may be the only Democrat in America who cannot look at Bill Clinton as an unalloyed political asset. He is a complicated figure for his wife, who has grown from a controversial first lady, while intertwined with him, into a popular senator by standing on her own two feet.
What a great story. I’d give my right arm to be able to plan and set this up this for kids.
Most days, 6-year-old Aubrey Matthews spends her energy fighting a brain tumor growing behind her eyes. But the first-grader managed to foil crimes and chase an arch-nemesis through Boise on Friday, serving the city as the superhero “Star” with assistance from the Make-A-Wish Foundation of Idaho, The Idaho Statesman reported.
When she donned her blue and metallic superhero costume, Star took on the super-powers of X-ray vision, superhuman strength, speed and blowing power — and a mission: To capture the villain who had stolen a golden star from the Idaho Historical Museum.
After Star was alerted by authorities, she hopped on a Life Flight helicopter to reach the crime scene, where she found a clue linking the crime to a known evildoer.
The chase was on, with plenty of opportunities for Star to use her superpowers along the way.
Before catching the bad guy, she rescued people from a “smoke”-filled building, saved a citizen from drowning in ParkCenter Pond, and vindicated ferrets at Zoo Boise who had been framed for stealing the golden star.
Is it just me, or is the stupidest, most vacuous phrase in all of marketing, “clinically proven.”
What does this mean? Does it mean, “proven in a clinic”? Which clinic? Proven by whom? To do what? Verified by what impartial judge? You hear this phrase all the time, and it strikes me as the biggest crock in all of marketing. But it sounds oh so impressive, and no one questions it.
After all, use of that phrase is clinically proven to sell stuff.
I just watched a great show on Discovery Health called 160 lb. Tumor. It was about a Romanian woman with…wait for it… a 160 lb. tumor.
The problem with these things is that they tend to scavange resources from the rest of the body. This woman probably weighed 250 lbs., and 160 of that was the tumor. So her heart, her lungs, her digestive system — it was all going to keep this tumor alive. The tumor was stealing her life very slowly.
A Romanian journalist picked up on her story. She got her to London where doctors refused to operate, fearing the woman would die from blood loss. However, they found a doctor at the University of Chicago who had done a similar surgery some years before. They arranged for him to come to Romania and successfully remove the tumor.
Besides the medical procedural, the show was just a great example of how the human condition spans borders. I was struck by this woman’s family — her husband and her son — who felt about their wife and mother like I feel about mine. It just struck me that love for one’s family is a universal condition, regardless of borders or ethnicity.
Additionally, the surgical team that flew in from Boston had no concern or regard for the borders. They were there to save this woman’s life no matter what race she was, what language she spoke, or behind what lines on some map that she lived. I think I finally understand the point behind Doctors Without Borders.
At the risk of starting to hum Kumbaya here, I just suddenly feel like part of the human race, rather than an American or a New Zealander or whatever. We’re all people burdened by the fact that someone drew lines on a piece of paper a long time ago and decreed that Person A was different then Person B for whatever reason.
We’re really not that different, you know.