Pleroma Playing Tag

Yes, this is how it feels. A nudge, a tap, and then Ha HA! I call it mental glomping. It's like being pounced on. He does it just to get your attention. Sometimes it can be for something serious and other times it's just because he's in a playful mood. 

No matter how many times I watch this I always laugh myself silly.

Common Core and Throwing Money at Schools

My local newspaper is toeing the line regarding the county commissioner of education's exciting New Plan to pull our "C" rated schools up to "A" level within a few years. Fantastic. What is this plan?

The article is quoted as stating that "increasing staff learning and growth and providing support and resources to students and staff" will get the ball rolling in the right direction. Oh, and throwing more money at everyone. 

Uh huh. Right. I'm no dummy. I can read exactly what's there. See all these 'improvements' they're talking about for Polk County really only mean one thing: money in the pockets of certain people who handle the money it's going to involve to supposedly implement these 'improvements.'
I'm not jaded. I just woke the hell up. It's just a money game; creating jobs for themselves especially. Our economy is crap and they're off trying to create jobs which AREN'T GOING TO HELP THE KIDS!!!!!!!! You can't fix something if you haven't got a clue about what's WRONG!!!

This is a load of crap. Don't throw more money at the problem and don't implement Common Core. Get back to the BASICS.

My (now)home schooled kids were pulled out during fourth and fifth grade due to the ridiculousness going on in class. Always catering to the lowest denominator and babyfying the kids all across the board.

We brought them home and now they have excelled far beyond our wildest dreams. One is doing college at the age of thirteen and the other is not far behind his big brother.

Here are the three biggest reasons why public school is the cesspool it is:

1) Apathy
2) ... which is spawned by 'busy work'
3) and not being realistic about which kids are college bound or not.

Now this doesn't mean that some kids won't spontaneously bloom and suddenly jump onto the path of the college bound, but I don't think that keeping the entire class on the same pace is realistic. It bores the interested kids and keeps everyone dumbed down. And then you wonder why more kids aren't 'college ready.' hmm...

Also, let's be honest here, shall we, about college? The new high school diploma is a bachelor's degree. Colleges are simply money making operations right now, only in it for themselves, since the industries they're accredited to give degrees in don't have enough positions to fill in this country.

Our jobs are being outsourced but college is still being pushed as a great idea for EVERYONE!

WAKE UP!!! This is not sustainable in our society.

Kids need to learn basic skills(through 10th grade) and then go into the college track if they're willing and able. Otherwise they can go into vocational/trade schools and get a good job. The last two years of high school really only exist for those kids who are on the college track. Look at the curriculum and prove me wrong.

I don't know the last time I've seen a cashier or bank teller use Pre-Calculus or Chemistry.

Also, the previous article about this topic in the newspaper online and everyone's comments were deleted. Here's today's article. Let's see what happens to it.

Actions speak louder than words and in this case I think the Ledger spoke volumes about their agenda to protect the money makers at all cost.

A New Road Less Terrifying

"And the new man reigns by love, by faith, by perfection, by patience, and by wisdom. Yet his king is the light mind, who is king of all. He reigns over it as he wishes." 

~Manichaean Literature

Quite a bit happened over the past few days with my youngest(12yo) boy with school and it's led me to make decisions I never thought I'd be strong enough to make. I'm brave. I'm fearless. I have taken on the responsibility of teaching this boy 8th grade US History for the rest of the school year. Yes, yes, REAL home school. He was virtual schooling up until now, curriculum and teachers provided by the county. 

Emotionally, as of Friday I was a wrecking ball of nerves after fighting with the county administration for virtual schooling over his Final Exams for 7th grade Civics. (He's worked ahead and is going into 8th now.) Long story short, there is no such thing as letting a child fail anymore. No Sir. Nope. Now, you either make a 60% or above on your Mid Term Exams and your Final Exams(apiece) or you fail the entire course and have to retake it. OR you can retake the Exam itself. Well, when a teacher resets the exam before even talking to the parents it kinda takes the whole 'choice' out of everyone's hands, don't you think? That's precisely what happened on Friday.

As a rule, we do not allow do-overs or resubmissions. We've always let our kids suck it up and take the failing grade so they learn from it. And until now we've never run into this 60% policy of this virtual school. With the elder boy(13yo) being such an overachiever the lowest grade he's ever made on a midterm or final was a C. John is not his brother. John has problems memorizing facts and dates and definitions. History is BORING!!!! Ergo, his grades in that class have always been on a slippery slope. I get it. I totally do. I was the same way in history classes all my life.

His teacher held the password for the last part(there were three parts) of the Final hostage until he retook the second part. He did better on the second part by a good twenty points. GREAT! Not that it's any real indication of learning since quite a few of the questions were the same the second time around and the night before I made sure he looked in his lessons and found the correct answers to figure out what happened on the test. Of course he did better the second time around! He had access to some of the same questions and had time to look up the correct answer. This is kind of a no-brainer to me.

Anyway, hubby and I were not happy and vented to every administrator you can think of with the county and the main company itself which provides the curriculum the county contracts from on a yearly basis. It's a respect issue, I feel. I think it's disrespectful to expect a kid to be happy about retaking a test because he didn't get the information the first time around and then letting it all be about the company's numbers during auditing. And that is exactly what it's about. (K12.com has a minimum of 80% by the way. On EVERY assignment, not just the tests. Imagine the stress being in school there!) Life doesn't give you do-overs and neither should school. It's a bad way to practice for 'real life' after high school. My kids totally get our philosophy and happily abide by it because they understand its worth. It helps them push harder to do better in the future.

So I decided to take the high road and home school John in 8th grade US History. We'll get a signature from a teacher at the end of the year and submit it to the county and that will be that. This is an adventure that is quite a bit less terrifying since it'll only be one class but still, when I went to the library this afternoon to find a starting point I was looking at four shelves of books for the main core topics and could only guestimate what would be best based on the time frame of the topic. 

Monday is a long way away still in my mind. I have some work to do and some decisions to make about how to make this more digestible for my boy. I want to do some old school kind of learning to help him with reading and vocabulary and writing but still teaching him the subject. I came home with five books dealing with and leading up to the Colonial era and I guess that's where we'll start. We'll compile a bibliography for his homeschool portfolio as required. Read, write essays, research using the Library of Congress for students, find things he's interested in learning about on his own and he can report it however he wants.... I'd like to make it more easy going than the cyber pressure he's been feeling in school. Not sure how successful I'll be or if I'll turn into a raving beast when confronted with his bad spelling. I don't want everything to be graded. I'd rather have an 'unschooling' approach to the final result but have structure because of John's lack of enthusiasm about the subject. 

Who knows, maybe he'll bloom within the new freedom and find that History isn't such a dry thing after all? 

I am breathing deep and finding that calm inside myself to understand that perhaps this is what this child needs right now. So what if we spend a month doing absolutely nothing but reading cool historical books and figuring things out, right?!! Oh well. We'll have fun reading and talking about the books and anything cool he discovers. Then maybe we can get a timeline going up on his cork board and put things into perspective in a more logical way for him visually. 

I'd love to do the same thing with him in English but fear I'd be biting off more than I can chew at the moment. As it is, the second semester of his LA class can't be opened yet because the curriculum hasn't been published yet. Why? Common Core is about to crash and burn in the state of Florida and the school can't figure out what to do. I know, right? It's insane!! He should be done with the second semester of this year's LA in six weeks and instead, we're still waiting for the school to retract it's head from it's sphincter and take a look at reality. People don't want Common Core. Competition is a good thing, keeping everyone on the same level is BAD. It pulls everyone down.

This momma is ready to learn whatever the journey is willing to teach. Hopefully a little boy is willing to go out and find the lessons he wants to learn best. 

 "He breaks off from his teacher and the brothers. He always wants to go in and come out alone, a solitary man. He will always walk alone. It is a sign that the closeness of his brothers does not persuade him." 

~Manichaean Literature

And this is the way of gnosis, entirely. It is a solitary pursuit when it's all said and done. We take cues from the world around us which are available but we must apply it to our heart and sort out the gold from the chaff.

Cat's Eye Nebula, Hubble telescope

Flora

It's nearing that time of year again....

Can anyone name this related flowering plant? It only blooms when in the perfect environment in perfect conditions.

These are pictures of my mother's plant. When she moves it to the other side of her porch it refuses to flower. Talk about picky!!

Vedic Meditation and Star Bodies

I've added a link to the Blogging for Freedom section. It's to Jeff Kober's Meditation page. He's also on Facebook here.  I'm really enjoying the Daily Thoughts he posts. The pics and essays are fantastic. I follow him on Facebook and also get daily emails from the site itself. Go check it out!!!

Meditation's not really my thing, to be brutally honest. I tend to fly off into the ether, connect with pleroma, sit there for a while and have some laughs or get a few hugs, and then wander off. Or fall asleep. I get overwhelmed with the Mind Cramming he does in such a short amount of time and then know I have to come back down. I can't stay for long. But the contemplative type of mini-meditations.... I can do that. Jeff makes it fun. Relevant. He's also got a great book suggestion list he mentions from time to time.


Well, here's my little inspirational pic for the day. The Eagle Nebula. The depth of this phenomenon is just amazing to me. Think about how far it must be from one side to the other. Between stars, even. This doesn't make me feel small, it makes me feel larger than I am in my own skin. Why? Because THIS is pleroma! This is the 'rest' of our own body. 

Now don't you feel beautiful?

 

And this is the 'back of the Horsehead galaxy' according to the people with Hubble. Not sure how we managed to get around behind this thing to take a picture of it, but it's very lovely.

Just one more hug, please?

This is the connection gnosis grants us with the All. 

 

Playfulness

Oh come on now, let that laugh out. You know you want to. 
This guy has a sense of humor!

Mainstream Media Chemtrails

They're trying SO hard to make this seem normal. It's not. Normal. Or entertaining. Or even remotely humane. I've seen stuff like this more and more in movies and shows nowadays. They point to a plane or refer to it in some way and yup, it's got chemtrails spewing out of it near the engines. There are dispensing canisters located beside the engines. Or you see a few streaks of chemtrails across the sky and it all just seems normal. It's NOT! Go back to any television or movie production pre-1960 and you will NOT see any of these streaks or intersecting lines in the skylines! They didn't exist back then.

While I'm thankful the geoengineering idea isn't so hush hush now, it still appears that we need to wake up more of our friends to the reality of what this means. The UN has blatantly announced that without geoengineering like weather modification(available at weathermodification.com company for instance) then we're in for another Ice Age. It's not a theory. It's a conspiracy. All the higher ups have known about it for sixty+ years and have been doing all sorts of research on us like we're lab rats.

I want to get off the wheel now. 

I've had enough. 

Raise Your Glass, brightspark!

This song jumped out at me today and gnostically speaking- it kicks ass, baby, YEAH! 

Pink is telling us not to be so hard on ourselves, stop comparing our own 'coolness' with everyone else's 'coolness' and just generally live life to the fullest no matter what mistakes you make along the way. Live and learn, baby, but live it!!

Her waking up with the nun made me laugh.

What do you guys think? Does this message make you happy and upbeat or does it make you feel like grabbing a bottle of tequila and chasing the worm?

He spoke to me through joy- Manichaean writings

"Beloved! beauty of my bright nature!
From filth and corrosion I will cleanse you through perfect light.
You are my beloved, the love in my limbs, 
and I am the light of your whole structure, your soul and base of being."


And on an even BRIGHTER note!

Yes, I am an Ironman fan. That poor dog...(not mine!)