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What I Always Start the Year With

Fudbucker

Philosopher
Joined
Jul 5, 2012
Messages
8,537
I've been an elementary school teacher for 17 years. My lesson on the first day of school is always "What does the word indivisible mean? You guys have said it probably a thousand times. What's it mean?" You'd be amazed how many kids think America is invisible.

They all do.
 
Well it is, kinda.

If a kid said, "Isn't the whole concept of "country" theoretical and nebulous" they would get bonus points.

And jelly beans. My class runs on jelly beans. Kids will walk over their dead mothers for a grubby handful.
 
Kids don't know what invisible means? What sort of responses do you get? Sounds interesting.
 
Indivisible is a fairly abstract concept. I'd be shocked if 1 in 30 got the word right, let alone be able to explain the concept.

In MS, maybe a good conversation. Teens/pre-teens are highly critical thinkers.
 
Yes. What they do not know (the implied) is what indivisible is/means.

Right. I should have been clearer. I give the lesson right after we recite the pledge for the first time (one nation under god, indivisible...
 
Indivisible is a fairly abstract concept. I'd be shocked if 1 in 30 got the word right, let alone be able to explain the concept.

In MS, maybe a good conversation. Teens/pre-teens are highly critical thinkers.

Last year, I taught 6th grade for the first (and last) time. One of my 6th graders knew what "indivisible" meant. I was floored. Then the kid brought a pocket knife to school, was suspended, and moved away.
 
When I recited it I figured the "indivisible" referred to God, not the nation. Mostly because I already knew lots of ways the nation was divided up by then.
 
When I recited it I figured the "indivisible" referred to God, not the nation. Mostly because I already knew lots of ways the nation was divided up by then.

Without researching it, I know the reference to god was added much later. I assume indivisible refers to the Civil War and is a pledge that something like that won't happen again.
 
Last year, I taught 6th grade for the first (and last) time. One of my 6th graders knew what "indivisible" meant. I was floored. Then the kid brought a pocket knife to school, was suspended, and moved away.

Wow, flashback to my own childhood, but without the pocketknife getting me suspended. It was the 70s. I used it to sharpen my pencil. In class. One time too many.
 
Without researching it, I know the reference to god was added much later. I assume indivisible refers to the Civil War and is a pledge that something like that won't happen again.

Yeah, you are right. It's just that, as a kid, I had the wrong idea.
 
When I recited it I figured the "indivisible" referred to God, not the nation.

Yet another reason why the words "under God" don't belong there. "One nation, indivisible" makes sense. It's a single, coherent thought. Split up "one nation" and "indivisible" with the completely irrelevant "under God", and you're forcing kids to bounce back and forth between unrelated ideas like a sawed-off shuttlecock.
 
Yet another reason why the words "under God" don't belong there. "One nation, indivisible" makes sense. It's a single, coherent thought. Split up "one nation" and "indivisible" with the completely irrelevant "under God", and you're forcing kids to bounce back and forth between unrelated ideas like a sawed-off shuttlecock.

Well, my kids usually think California is a country, so they're not exactly shaken to the core by the cognitive dissonance, but yeah "under god" doesn't belong in there.
 
Plain English works better. Drop the "Under Cosmic Muffin" part and it'd really read clearly. One "indivisible nation"....

Of course, you should get rid of the "flag" part. I owe no loyalty or respect to a piece of cloth. I'm happy with "to the Republic", though. "I pledge commitment - forget that allegiance part, too... So let's start again.

"I pledge a commitment to the Republic that is the United States of America and the principles on which it was founded. One indivisible nation with liberty and justice for all. Oh, and guns. Lots of guns."
 
At some point in my childhood, couldn't tell you when, we had lessons breaking the pledge down and explaining all the bits. My teacher skipped over the under god part (elementary school I think, so, mid to late 1980s).

My kids are homeschooled so I don't know if they still do the pledge in schools. We don't.
 
At some point in my childhood, couldn't tell you when, we had lessons breaking the pledge down and explaining all the bits. My teacher skipped over the under god part (elementary school I think, so, mid to late 1980s).

My kids are homeschooled so I don't know if they still do the pledge in schools. We don't.

I always end up forgetting by the time October rolls around. A couple years, parents have complained. Sometimes a kid will remind me and we'll say it.
 
Yet another reason why the words "under God" don't belong there. "One nation, indivisible" makes sense. It's a single, coherent thought. Split up "one nation" and "indivisible" with the completely irrelevant "under God", and you're forcing kids to bounce back and forth between unrelated ideas like a sawed-off shuttlecock.
I agree with this one. It was inserted in the 1950's. When I was very little, I had a little golden record on 78 of the pledge, and it did not have that. When it was changed, I was very upset. A stupid change that corrupted the point of what had started out as a post-civil war pledge of union.
 
I agree with this one. It was inserted in the 1950's. When I was very little, I had a little golden record on 78 of the pledge, and it did not have that. When it was changed, I was very upset. A stupid change that corrupted the point of what had started out as a post-civil war pledge of union.
I always find it odd when people claim this is a christian country or that the founders were christian, because they were not and it isn't. Neither was the pledge intended to indoctrinate people into a religion. I am not sure but it seems like WWII set off a revival of religion almost in the US that we are still dealing with.
 
The God part bothers me less than the flag part.

I don't know if I'll be tutoring, subbing or teaching this year, but I think I'm going to start by preparing a teacher kit and a rotation of activities to fill every minute of a classroom period. That's not expected of a sub but I'd like to keep the students so occupied they won't have an opportunity to "act out." If a teacher leaves a worksheet to do I'm going to be prepared for the kid who finishes in 5 minutes and says, "Now what do I do"?

I'll say, "Now, add up all the numbers from 1 to 100." When they're done with that I'll say, "Finally. Why didn't you use the shortcut?" :)

The sad part is I collect these resources - then forget I have them. No lesson plan survives first contact with the enemy. I call it "the fog of school."
 
I always find it odd when people claim this is a christian country or that the founders were christian, because they were not and it isn't. Neither was the pledge intended to indoctrinate people into a religion. I am not sure but it seems like WWII set off a revival of religion almost in the US that we are still dealing with.

The alternate theory to that is that the two world wars and the interregnum merely served as a distraction for the fundamentalists who've been gaining traction, one pin head at a time, since the 1870s.
 
I worked at a school where a 7-year-old atheist refused to say the pledge. His mom was director of the school and a product of the USSR education system. The irony was that quite a few students were formerly home-schooled by fundamentalist parents who thought that this smallish charter school was preferable to the general public school system. (Which it might have been, but definitely not for religious reasons).
 
The God part bothers me less than the flag part.

I don't know if I'll be tutoring, subbing or teaching this year, but I think I'm going to start by preparing a teacher kit and a rotation of activities to fill every minute of a classroom period. That's not expected of a sub but I'd like to keep the students so occupied they won't have an opportunity to "act out." If a teacher leaves a worksheet to do I'm going to be prepared for the kid who finishes in 5 minutes and says, "Now what do I do"?

I'll say, "Now, add up all the numbers from 1 to 100." When they're done with that I'll say, "Finally. Why didn't you use the shortcut?" :)

The sad part is I collect these resources - then forget I have them. No lesson plan survives first contact with the enemy. I call it "the fog of school."

:thumbsup::):thumbsup::):thumbsup::)!!!!!!!
 
The pledge is a public school system conformity drill. I am not sure what the core point of the OP is. It isn't the students who are notable in this story, but rather the school system, for inculcating mindless conformity.

The students are performing to exactly the standard the public school system has set for them: mindless obedience.

As homeschoolers we are flabbergasted at how little public schools accomplish in an eight hour day. When we speak with the local public school teachers one of the most remarkable things is how arrogant they are despite being so incompetent in the fields they teach.

Math teachers who can't do math. Science teachers who don't know science. I don't understand why we even need them really, because the curriculum is set district-wide. The teachers don't plan curriculum, select books, homework sets, etc. - they're just automatons mindlessly doing what they are told, like the kids mindlessly reciting the pledge. Mindless conformity. I could never have tolerated such a work environment, owing to having self-respect.

I see now how insulated they are from reality. Their third-world performance at staggering price tags is easy to pass off as competence in front of children, their captive audience. So they have these posters up literally calling themselves incredible, fantastic - inculcating this ridiculous teacher-worship in the kids.

It reminds me of what I see in the third world educational systems like North Korea with all this mindless pageantry and flag-waving conformity. The important thing in this system is obedience to the state.
 
The OP is great for showing how thoroughly rotten our public schools are.

OP proves that, according to his count, the kids are directed to recite the pledge of allegiance thousands of times without knowing what "indivisible" means.

lol. They also don't know what a Republic is. Nor allegiance. Nor do they have any appreciation whatsoever for the ideals of the enlightenment embodied in the pledge.

I would not go so far as to say the teachers do not know either. Generally, they're in utter contempt of them, as their paychecks come from the barrel of a gun and compulsory attendance laws.

What the pledge does is teach the kids to do as they are told without asking questions or understanding. The important thing is blind obedience.

Why would anyone be amazed that public school teachers have never taught what the words in the pledge mean? Logically, it is against their self-interest.

Were public school teachers to actually teach the meaning of the pledge, they would be immediately confronted with the hypocrisy of the operations of the public school system. Conformity, conformity, conformity.

The nation is founded upon liberty, which is why your parents will be imprisoned for violating compulsory attendance laws. The nation is founded upon justice, which is why little white boys who have only been alive for 60 months need to be punished for the alleged crimes of white men against all the other privileged classes (everyone else) in past generations.

Individual justice /= social justice. Individual justice has to be destroyed in order to undertake class warfare, ie "social justice" as taught and implemented in the public schools.

The public school system is modeled after the Prussian Kingdom, the darling of the "Father of American Education" Horace Mann. It's how we've managed to go from the most noted educational success in the world to tied for last place in 2 out of 3 subject areas on the PISA, among the OECD.

Public school teachers, like OP and other posters in the thread can congratulate themselves for personal responsibility coaching this crack team of American students being outperformed by the likes of Viet Nam who we bombed into the Stone Age one generation ago.

How is it possible? :eye-poppi How could they go from near utter destruction as a civilization, yet roar past the Americans educationally in one generation? At a fraction of the cost?

The public school system tells us what is important to them in their own reports. Who gives a **** what the attendance figures are? Is there any NBA or NFL category for "attendance" in their season highlights? lol - no, their reports tell us how they did against other teams.

Do American manufacturers drone on about attendance in their stockholder or consumer reports? How ridiculous! They report on profits: on their performance against their competition.

As with the pledge of allegiance, the important thing to the schools is their power of compulsion. Our local school reports go on and on about attendance, broken up into all manner of sub-component. Illustrated in cross-sectional data and time series data formats. Tracking "retention", but not meaning what learning the students retained. Rather, how many of the captive school plantation slaves were retained starting from kindergarten.

The annual reports are indeed capital asset sheets. The slaves produce income for the school plantation. Multiply each slave times the school's per capita allotment to arrive at plantation revenue. That is why school attendance is so uber-critical to the administrators and teachers: because each mindless automaton reciting the pledge of allegiance is a revenue stream. Just like an acre of land or a tractor, of course we would report plantation assets in our annual accounting.

I think its great that OP has selected such a defining characteristic of the public school system's mindless conformity: Forcing students to recite the pledge without any understanding of it.

Because it gives us an opportunity to compare how this system of mindless obedience/conformity does against any other form like other regions of the world and homeschool within our own borders.

Our six year old knows what indivisible means, and he doesn't know the pledge. As compared with his public school kindergarten cohorts, who can all recite the pledge but understand hardly a word of it.

That's why he and his younger brother are not only kicking the **** out of the Americans, who are no competition, but kicking the **** out of the Shanghai kids, the Hong Kong kids, the Singapore kids - everyone at the top of the international exam score list.

Because it isn't even very hard. To learn "indivisible" takes a couple of minutes. His cohorts have said it a thousand times and he has said it half a dozen at most. But he understands it and they don't.

Blind obedience is the core public school value. It is the primary public school product: people who will obey without question. So if course a key drill in this system is a Pledge of Allegiance, mindlessly recited.

How can a teacher force you to say it a thousand times, with the compulsion of state violence behind that power, yet never once teach you what the word means?

When the teacher only cares about blind obedience. That is the small recompense for public school teachers in the USA for their humiliating status: failures against their international competition. Failures in producing thinking humans. Success in dumbing down the electorate. Success in reversing the Ascent of Man.

But the one thing a public school teacher has, despite his complete fealty to the State, his mindless obedience not just to curriculum but to every aspect of his working day: the rules and regulations of the School Plantation. The one thing he has is children that must obey him. Children who will agree this stupid man, this incompetent man, this man with no drive or ambition to compete - this man is a great man.

So we thank God every day that our children are not in the clutches of the likes of public school teachers - made to mindlessly recite the pledge and be punished for questioning authority. Our great teacher Jesus Christ instructed us to question authority, not to lick their boots. We offer up this prayer to the membership in closing:

Heavenly Father,

Forgive them. Forgive their greed, their avarice, and their shameless hypocrisy. Forgive their stupidity and incompetence. Forgive their Narcissism, Sadism, and Machiavellianism. Forgive their bad character.

For we are free of them.

In the name of Jesus Christ, a fictional figure of the Christian superstition, Amen
 
This was supposed to be a humorous thread, Alaska.

I liked the teachers' paychecks coming from the barrel of a gun.

I know it's referencing the normal 'taxation is theft' libertarian ********, but I have the mental image of elementary-school teachers as mad-max raiders mugging people at the parent-teacher conferences.
 
I liked the teachers' paychecks coming from the barrel of a gun.

I know it's referencing the normal 'taxation is theft' libertarian ********, but I have the mental image of elementary-school teachers as mad-max raiders mugging people at the parent-teacher conferences.

I was thinking of the school mascot launching paychecks out of a t-shirt cannon at a pep rally.
 
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