Monthly Archives: August 2018

“Das Lehrerzimmer wird zum Leererzimmer.”

Die Zeit: Im Leererzimmer. So kann es nicht weitergehen: Deutschland braucht viel mehr Pädagogen, als man sich heute vorstellen kann.” Ein Kommentar von Manuel J. Hartung.

“Zwischen Euphorie und Ernüchterung liegen oft nur wenige Tage. Erst feiern Hunderttausende Erstklässler in ganz Deutschland ihre Einschulung, sie zelebrieren den Anfang, den Aufbruch, die Neugier. Dann beginnt der Unterricht in Schulen, in denen Stunden ausfallen, Quereinsteiger ohne pädagogische Ausbildung vor der Tafel stehen oder aber Studenten aus dem Sofortprogramm “Unterrichten statt Kellnern” plötzlich Deutsch oder Sachkunde servieren.

“Einen derart dramatischen Lehrermangel hatten wir seit drei Jahrzehnten nicht mehr”, sagt der Präsident des Lehrerverbands. Die Chefin der Gewerkschaft GEW spricht gar von “Bildungsnotstand”.”

Deutsche Welle: Dringend Lehrer gesucht! “Deutschen Schulen fehlen insgesamt fast 40.000 Lehrer, sagt der Deutsche Lehrerverband. Nun sollen verstärkt Menschen Lehrer werden, die ihre Karrieren in einem anderen Bereich begonnen haben. Wie realistisch ist das?”

“”Einen derart dramatischen Lehrermangel hatten wir in Deutschland seit drei Jahrzehnten nicht mehr“, klagt Heinz-Peter Meidinger, Präsident des Deutschen Lehrerverbandes (DL). “Insgesamt fehlen 40.000 Lehrer“. Volker Kauder, Fraktionsvorsitzender der Union, pflichtet ihm bei: “Der Beginn des Schuljahres in vielen Bundesländern hat gezeigt, dass unser Land in Gefahr ist, langsam in einen Bildungsnotstand hineinzulaufen“. Das Problem ist das Ergebnis vieler Faktoren: Ein Anstieg der Geburtenrate, ein großer Zuzug von Flüchtlingen, eine ganze Generation an pensionierten Lehrern, ein Mangel an Bildungsinvestitionen und hohe Hürden bei der Zulassung zu Lehramtsstudiengängen.”

“[U]nder President Trump, the passport denials and revocations appear to be surging”

The Washington Post: U.S. is denying passports to Americans along the border, throwing their citizenship into question.

“Juan is one of a growing number of people whose official birth records show they were born in the United States but who are now being denied passports — their citizenship suddenly thrown into question. The Trump administration is accusing hundreds, and possibly thousands, of Hispanics along the border of using fraudulent birth certificates since they were babies, and it is undertaking a widespread crackdown on their citizenship.”

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“To Obama: With Love, Joy, Anger, and Hope.”

The Atlantic: The Education of Bill Oliver. “How a letter to Barack Obama tells the story of two strangers who became family, and one lifelong Republican’s journey to a new kind of patriotism.” By Jeanne Marie Laskas.

“Word came that President Barack Obama wanted to see some of the mail just the day after he took office. Mike Kelleher was the director of the Office of Presidential Correspondence (OPC). He got the call from the Oval saying the president wanted to see five letters. Then they called back with a correction. The president wanted to see 15 letters. They called back one more time. He wanted to see 10 that day, and every day.

“It was a small gesture, I thought, at least to resist the bubble,“ Obama later told me. “It was a way for me to, every day, remember that what I was doing was not about me. It wasn’t about the Washington calculus. It wasn’t about the political scoreboard. It was about the people who were out there living their lives, who were either looking for some help or angry about how I was screwing something up.“

And why should the president be the only one reading 10 letters a day? What about everyone else in the West Wing? Surely Obama’s advisers and senior staff could benefit from seeing this material.
[…]
Fiona Reeves, an OPC staffer who soon became the office’s director, developed a distribution list, kept adding to it. Letters to the president, dozens of them, just popping into people’s inboxes. Why not? And not just the 10LADs—the president’s 10 letters a day—but also others from the sample piles. “We send out batches of letters we think are striking,“ she said. At first she worried about being an annoyance, but then she got bold. “I hope people read them; that’s why I spam them. But I mean, they don’t have to read them.“

They did. Soon people started asking why they weren’t on the distribution list. The people in OPC came to know which people in the West Wing were particularly tuned in to the letters. The OPC staff came to regard these people as special agents, ambassadors, and they had a name for them: Friends of the Mail.”

“This is about our survival.”

Outside: Yosemite Finally Reckons with Its Discriminatory Past. “Pioneers, the government, even John Muir helped kick out Native Americans from their homes on national parks. But in Yosemite, the Miwuk Tribe is getting its village back.”

“Though nobody will live in the wahhoga, the agreement is nonetheless a watershed moment in the park’s relationship with local Native Americans, who have long sought to reestablish their cultural and subsistence connection with the park. The wahhoga could also function as an example for other NPS units, nearly all of which were created following forcible or coerced removal of the Native population. “Our ancestors used to live there, and we always felt that what was available to our ancestors should’ve been available to us,“ James says.

James, who chairs the Wahhoga Committee, sees this as one more step toward indigenous tribes reconnecting with their ancestral homeland. Next on the docket, he plans to start programs that teach Native youth about traditional plant and animal harvesting. As James says, “This is about our survival.“ “

Fresno Bee: Decades after destruction, Yosemite welcomes home Native Americans.

“Wahhoga’s return has been decades in the making. The American Indian Council of Mariposa County/Southern Sierra Miwuk Nation finally got the OK to begin construction a decade ago, only to have their work halted for nearly seven years by Yosemite’s former superintendent, who cited safety concerns.

“We knew how to build a roundhouse from traditional knowledge that’s been passed down. … The park service didn’t understand that,” said Tony Brochini, former tribal chairman and executive director of the Wahhoga Committee. “That is where we butted heads. The park service wanted us to follow project management protocol and we were moving forward with our traditional methods.”

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