An E-mail I received and my response

Who would have thought, and yet many are thinking it.   By Lou Pritchett, Procter & Gamble A LETTER FROM A PROCTER  AND GAMBLE EXECUTIVE TO THE PRESIDENT Lou Pritchett is one of  corporate America 's true living legends... an acclaimed author, dynamic teacher and one of the world's highest rated speakers.  Successful corporate executives  everywhere recognize him as the foremost leader in change management.  Lou changed the way America does business by creating an audacious concept that came to be known as "partnering." Pritchett rose from soap salesman to Vice-President, Sales and Customer Development for  Procter and Gamble and over the course of 36 years, made  corporate history. AN OPEN LETTER TO PRESIDENT OBAMA Dear President Obama: You are the thirteenth President under whom I have  lived and unlike Any of the others, you truly scare me. You scare me because after months of exposure, I  know nothing about you. You could always try reading his books.  Those might give you some clues to who he is and where he came from. You scare me because I do not know how you paid for  your expensive Ivy League education and your upscale lifestyle and  housing with no Visible signs of support. Hum!  I don’t know how he paid for his education either but I bet he did it the same way I did – with student loans. The Obama lifestyle was more upscale than mine but way less upscale than yours, Mr. Pritchard.  Working as a community organizer and having a wife who was an associate at a law firm and had high level positions in Chicago city government might have had something to do with their ability to pay for their life style and their educations.  No visible signs of support, indeed! You scare me because you did not spend the formative  years of youth Growing up in America and culturally you are not an  American. Last I heard, Hawaii is in America and he also spent a fair amount of time with his grandparents who lived in Hawaii but were “culturally” Kansans. He did spent 1967 to 1971in Indonesia where he attended several schools.  He did attend an Indonesian school for part of third and all of fourth grade but first, second, and part of third grade were spent at St. Fransis of Assisi – a Catholic school.  (OMG, he spent more time in a Catholic school than he did in an Indonesia public school.  I bet he’s a secret Catholic.) You scare me because you have never run a company or  met a payroll. Neither did Ronald Regan. You scare me because you have never had military  experience, thus Don't understand it at its core. Neither did George Bush and Dick Cheney who started two wars that they put on a credit card sending us into debt that we are having a hard time digging ourselves out of. You scare me because you lack humility and 'class',  always blaming others. You’ve got to be kidding!  Compared to the swagger of the previous president he’s positively groveling.  Have you gotten a load of Dick Cheney’s pronouncements from his new book?  Talk about arrogant!  The Iraq war was clearly a mistake.  Starting it without funding it, except with borrowed money, was irresponsible and neither has favored the American people with an apology for digging the hole we are currently in.  Yeah, he blames others for what they did wrong! You scare me because for over half your life you  have aligned Yourself with radical extremists who hate America      and you refuse to Publicly denounce these radicals who wish to see  America fail. What radicals has he aligned himself with?  He belonged to an organization and William Ayers was also a member.  I belong to a number of organizations and I don’t know the pedigree of all of the members.  Do you know the background and political connections of everyone you casually know?  Radicals hate America?  I bet all of you felt free to criticize your children and spouses when they committed what you perceived to be errors.  Does that mean you hate them?  Since when does honest criticism make you un-American.  If that’s the case, most of you who have read this far are equally un-American.  You, after all, rarely have a kind word for the American government. You scare me because you are a cheerleader for the  'blame America ' Crowd and deliver this message abroad. I was raised in America and I was taught that I had to apologize when I did something that hurt someone else.  I don’t get it that this concept is not a fine American value. You scare me because you want to change America to a  European style Country where the government sector dominates  instead of the private sector. You scare me, sir, because you don’t seem to understand that the framers of our Constitution believed in a balance of power, that they saw that no sector of society should dominate, not government but not business, either, and not one particular religion.  You scare me because you make these blanket statements like this and like several of the above without any evidence.  You scare me because you apparently don’t understand that one function of government is to protect the weak from the powerful.  Powerful people like you. You scare me because you want to replace our health  care system With a government controlled one. There is not now, nor has there ever been, a proposal for government controlled health care.  The Health Care Act does not even have a public OPTION.  It is all controlled by private insurance companies who do control who gets coverage and what type of treatment a policy holder can have.  There are regulations within the Health Care Act that try to protect policy holders from the over-reach of the insurance carrier but they are fairly weak.  One thing that the Health Care Act does do is break up insurance monopolies in the states and force carriers to compete.  I thought the business community was a big proponent of competition.  Oh yeah, they are in favor until they have to do it.  Then, they don’t like it so much because they can’t gouge a captive public. You scare me because you prefer 'wind mills' to  responsibly Capitalizing on our own vast oil, coal and shale  reserves. Yeah, it’s always so much better to rely on dirty fuel than clean fuel.  Obama is such a jerk for thinking that clean air is better than dirty air. You scare me because you want to kill the American  capitalist goose That lays the golden egg which provides the highest  standard of Living in the world. It’s not providing the highest standard of living now.  The last 30 years have seen the biggest transfer of wealth from the poor and middle class to the upper class this world has ever seen. You scare me because you have begun to use  'extortion' tactics Against certain banks and corporations. This is absolutely laughable.  In the opinion of some of us, the banks and corporations should be criminally charged.  The Attorney General in the state of New York is pursuing a criminal investigation of the big banks and hedge fund managers and the Obama administration is actively putting pressure on him to stop the investigation.  The only extortion that anyone is experiencing is directed at the AG of the state of New York. You scare me because your own political party  shrinks from Challenging you on your wild and irresponsible  spending proposals. “Wild and irresponsible” spending proposals that several Nobel Prize winning economists think are a good idea.  Those of us on the left are disgusted because Obama has hired rather conservative financial policy advisors who are advocating “conservative” solutions to our economic problems. You scare me because you will not openly listen to  or even consider Opposing points of view from intelligent  people. The acquiescence of Obama to the demands of the conservatives in Congress puts the lie to this allegation. You scare me because you falsely believe that you  are both Omnipotent and omniscient. WHAT?  Back this up with some evidence, please!  Exactly what has Obama actually done that indicates he thinks he’s omnipotent and omniscient?  He certainly isn’t more arrogant than the current crop of Republican presidential candidates. You scare me because the media gives you a free pass  on everything You do. WHAT!!??!! Have you taken in any media lately?  MSNBC is supposed to be the liberal answer to Fox News and I hear criticisms, legitimate ones, of Obama every night!  On Meet the Press yesterday, a Republican operative asserted that Rick Perry has created more private sector jobs in Texas than in all the rest of the country combined.  Maxine Waters stated that she has heard that the job growth in Texas – then David Gregory CUT HER OFF.  Liberal media, indeed!  What she was going to say was that Texas experienced a net loss of 40,000 private sector jobs and that the growth in jobs was all in the public sector.  I tried to verify this and found numerous articles from reliable sources that essentially said how great the job growth was depended on what time frame you examined.  What most agreed on, however, was that while the number of jobs increased, so did the unemployment rate, meaning that the number of jobs created did not keep pace with the number of people entering the job market.  The media is not liberal.  They are a bunch of corporate slaves who worship whoever is in power and think we are all supposed to go into a tailspin every time Lindsey Lohan breaks a nail. You scare me because you demonize and want to  silence the Limbaugh's, Hannitys, O'Reillys and Becks who offer  opposing, Conservative points of view. The next time you are listening to Limbaugh or Hannity notice how many times they back up what they say with evidence.  If all they are doing is character assassination with no evidence, they are lying.  We don’t get to judge a person’s thoughts or intentions, we get to judge their actions and words.  If the criticism is all about what Obama thinks then the criticism is not legitimate! Psychologists call this kind of behavior projection -- accusing another of thinking or intending what you would think or say yourself. You scare me because you prefer controlling over  governing. Again, give me some evidence.  The only controlling party that I’ve seen is Republicans.  The recent made up debt ceiling “crisis” is evidence.  Obama repeatedly conceded to them and every time he did they upped their demands.  They refused to have any compromise.  Republicans ran for Congress and state offices on jobs and all they have done since they got power was try to CONTROL a woman’s right to choose, CONTROL who gets to vote, CONTROL who can join a union and what union members can do, CONTROL municipal governments al la Michigan, CONTROL education. Finally, you scare me because if you serve a second  term I will Probably not feel safe in writing a similar letter in 8 years. Again, I need some evidence that Obama is trying to eliminate anyone who criticizes him.  It was Bush and Cheney who instituted domestic spying and Republicans who label anyone who disagrees with them un-American. Lou Pritchett * * This letter was sent to the NY Times but they never  acknowledged it. Big  surprise. Since it hit the Internet, however, it  has had over 500,000 hits. Keep it going. All that is necessary for evil to succeed Is that good men do nothing.. It's happening right  now.* http://www.snopes.com/politics/soapbox/youscareme.asp  If you go to the snopes link above they say, “Correctly Attributed” meaning that Pritchett did indeed write the letter.  They don’t verify that  anything he says is true. This letter is pure propaganda.  America is the greatest country the world has ever known and as citizens you are free to believe whatever you wish, but I’ll thank you to remember that there are plenty of us who are terrified by this type of misstatement of facts.  I don’t want to be Conrolled by people who seem to believe that the means justifies the end and that there are no rules governing legitimate debate.  I was educated to believe that this was the motto of Communists.

Confessions of a Self-Made Woman

If you are old enough to remember the Phil Donahue show, you may remember the show devoted to folks who graduated from high school in 1965 and college in 1969.  According to Phil, that particular group is the last group of kids raised with traditional American values and social structure and the first to encounter a changed world of civil rights for African-Americans, feminism, and anti-war protests.

I'm part of that group.  I didn't finish college in 1969 because my mother just couldn't see spending the money for college when, after all, I was going to spend the rest of my life changing diapers.  I got my first job at 19 and I've worked ever since.  I'm now approaching my dotage and I've come a long way, baby.  I have a master's degree and I'm a board level employee in a large urban school district.

Here's how I did it.  I worked -- hard!!  I worked full time, raised two children by myself after my divorce when my youngest was four, read voraciously, went back to school when my children were teenagers.  I took a teaching job at an inner city school and worked -- hard!! while going through a master's program.

Oh, did I forget to mention?  I took full advantage of the free public education provided me by the tax payers of Tennessee as a child.  If I hadn't, I wouldn't have been able to read voraciously and keep up my academic skills until going back to school was possible.  Oh, and my children were able to go to public schools on the tax payer's dime.  And then there were my parents who frequently baby sat, picked up my children at school, paid taxes to keep the society afloat, and helped out in other ways as necessary.

I had no problem finding or keeping jobs thanks to government policies that enabled business to prosper.  And then, I probably should mention unions.  I never belonged to one but I was able to work only 40 hours a week because of the action of union members that I never met.  My wages, even though I was not a union member, were higher than poverty level because of the pressure that union members elsewhere kept on employers to keep wages high.

I was saved from devastating childhood diseases because back in those bad old days, the government funded research and supported developing vaccines.   Remember the lines at the school to take the polio vaccine?  Did you pay for them?  My children were spared, partially because I paid for their vaccinations but also because the children who they went to school with had been vaccinated.  Those government regulations at work.  Without them, my children might have had to endure seeing their classmates laid low by disease.

I was able to go back to school thanks to low interest student loans.  It wasn't as good an arrangement as the old National Defense Loans of the '60's but some financing was available to me.  Again, those pesky government regulations to the rescue. I drove on roads and bridges built at taxpayer expense.  I had police and fire protection available to me on the taxpayers' dime.  My tuition and student fees were not as high as they should have been because every institution of higher learning I attended received federal funds.

I'm sure I'm omitting many benefits that I've received from the government -- things I don't remember or things I'm unaware of.  But I'm not going to fall into the ingratitude of claiming that I pulled myself up by my boot straps through the force of my will.  My will was certainly present but I don't want to forget that I wasn't able to do it entirely alone.

Life in a Small Town

I have an aunt who lives in a tiny town in central Illinois.  This town consists mostly of a Presbyterian church, a Catholic church, a tavern, a school, and my aunt's house.  I happened to be visiting one Sunday morning when I noticed that I was about to run out of cigarettes.  I asked her where I could go to replenish my supply, figuring that I would have quite a drive to another town that was large enough to have a Seven/Eleven store.

When I asked her for directions, she said, "Why would you want to go that far?  The tavern will be open any minute." I patiently pointed out to her that it was Sunday morning and the tavern wouldn't be open.  She looked at me with a rather surprised face, consulted her watch, and said, "Oh yes it will.  The Catholics will be out of church any minute."

Pay for Performance

A friend has asked for a comment on an article about merit pay for teachers.  Here's the link for the article in question: http://www.tampabay.com/blogs/gradebook/content/study-teacher-merit-pay-didnt-work-nyc

Part I

"A New York City program designed to improve student performance through school-based financial incentives for teachers did not improve student achievement, most likely because it did not change teacher behavior and the conditions needed to motivate staff were not achieved, according to a RAND Corporation study issued today."

The underlying assumption is that student test scores will be improved if teachers just work hard enough.  They will work hard enough if there is a monetary incentive.  The idea that teachers aren't working hard enough is patently false.  Of course there are some bad teachers; the percentage will be roughly the same as the percentage of bad doctors, lawyers, and Walmart sales associates.  We don't work 7.5 hours a day.  Most of us work 10 or more hours a day during the school year.  And a day is very intense.  I used to arrive at school around 6:30 to get my room ready for the day.  Once the kids were in the building, we were non-stop until they left.  We were in the classroom teaching all day.  Between classes we were required to be in the hallways keeping kids from congregating.  In theory we were supposed to have a planning period every day but that was iffy.  If an assembly, pep rally, test, or game was scheduled during our planning period we were required to chaperone.  Team meetings and professional development were scheduled during those periods.  If a teacher was absent and the substitute didn't show up, we were required to monitor the absent teacher's class during our planning period.  Lunch was supposedly 30 minutes but by the time we cleared the halls and got back to our monitoring position after lunch, we really only had 20 minutes.  Did you notice that breaks weren't mentioned.  We couldn't leave our classrooms while students were there to go to the restroom without risking our jobs and we couldn't go between classes because we were required to monitor the hall outside our doors.  We had to turn in detailed lesson plans and grade every exercise we asked students to do.  My student load ranged between 135 - 175 students and I always taught the writing assessment so few short answer tests for me.  I did leave the building at 2:30 most days because I was so exhausted I had to take a nap.  When I got up, it was lesson plans, grading, paperwork required by the district, photocopying hand-outs sometimes until 11:00 or 12:00 pm. It is hard for me to imagine how anyone could think that I should work harder.

The other part of the assumption contained in the above paragraph is that teachers will be motivated to work harder for money.  I suppose this will come as a big shock to some but money is not really the reason that most of us chose to become teachers.  Does anyone really believe that we all got degrees and teaching certificates before we found out what the teaching profession pays?  Most of us went into teaching because we love kids, or our subject, or we wanted to make a positive contribution to the world.  If we were money-grubbing scumbags, we'd all be hedge fund managers.  So money's not really a big motivator for us.

These myths come straight from the business community.  Because so many of them are motivated by money, they think everyone is.  Because they don't spend their days in a dead run, they don't think anyone else does either.  Because they have never taught a class they have no idea how complicated and time consuming it is to do it well.  Because they don't care about other people's children or the community, they can't imagine people who do.

Hot Biscuits

My mother was a member of a minority group not often encountered in the South.  She was a Norwegian-American.  Born in the United States of Norwegian immigrant parents, she spent her early childhood in a totally Norwegian community in Illinois called Freedom.  Because there were no English speakers in the community, he spoke only Norwegian until she was seven and started school.  Her language problems continued, however, because at school they only spoke that perverted form of English that we here in the South refer to as the “Yankee accent.”

When mother married dad, she had barely been south of Chicago much less the Mason-Dixon line.  She expected a little culture shock.  She realized that making the adjustment from being a single woman to a married woman would present a challenge.  The most insidious problem that she faced, though, was the language barrier.  She often felt that she had immigrated to a foreign country for all she understood about the conversations swirling around her.

One of the bright spots in this cacophony of adjustments and demands was one of my father’s aunts, name Mabel.  Aunt Mable was a country lady.  She understood both city and country life and delighted in all the “feminine arts” from gardening to baking to interior decorating and she was kind and good to “the Yankee” (my mother).  Mother took to her instantly and a real friendship developed.

Aunt Mabel seemed perfectly rational and sensible except for her constant bragging about her “hot biscuits.”  According to Aunt Mabel her hot biscuits were the most beautiful around and he couldn’t wait until they came in so mother could see them.  Since her immigration south mother had made the acquaintance of several varieties of biscuits but had never encountered a beautiful one and how a biscuit could “come in” was a total mystery.  She imagined that, perhaps, there was some exotic form of yeast or baking powder involved, which necessitated a protracted period of rising or curing or something.  In any case Aunt Mable was such a delightful person, her fetish with biscuits seemed a minor eccentricity.

One day, in the middle of the summer, mother got a call from Aunt Mabel.  The hot biscuits were coming in.  Mother got there as quickly as possible.  Imagine her surprise when Mabel led her through the house to the yard and proudly pointed to what my mother had always known as hibiscus.  They were truly beautiful and they were worth the wait, but it took mother about 20 years before she felt confident about her ability to understand the spoken Southern word.