Arkansas Blog

No time to comment right now. Off to church in a little Donatella Versace number I picked up on eBay!

As for MY secrets of "future success?" Marry and divorce three evangelical leaders in a row and settle for mucho dinero in exchange for promising never to air their dirty laundry in public, is my counsel.

A Google search shows some of those identical questions being used in school surveys back in the 1980s-1990s, with similar objections raised.

This survey is a joke, and I hope it will be the subject of thorough discussion at the upcoming 'New Teacher Conference and Career Guidance Endorsement In-service' at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Little Rock on Sept. 11th & 12th. Invite experts from the UALR College of Education to explain why it should never be used.

Since the agenda for this conference is already posted on the web, perhaps members of the alternative media would consider attending to get a follow-up story.

Well, I'm blogging from church. One of the back pews. My keyboard clicking and wi-fi connection drives them nuts, but I assure them I'm sharing God's word with shut-ins unable to attend.

Which I'm not, but hey.

They sort of leave me alone because they know I tithe.

Anyhoo, here's an article relative to this thread about religion in schools, from today's NYT. Which is pretty much what I REALLY do in church: surf the web and annoy others.

Enjoy!

Aside from the God stuff, check out #97: "Some of the hobbies I have are QUIET expensive." I expect to have more to say about this later if I have time, so I'll limit myself to YEESH! right now.

Remnants of Huck's 'godly' tenure combined with Monkeyboy's command to go forth and spread his religion throughout government. I'd expect this in a Sunday School class, not from a state agency. What's next...teaching girls/boys that condoms don't really work and that it's up to 'nice' girls to say no, boys will be boys, after all.. Oh wait...we already have that in Conway: Religion combined with tax money equals Excel.

YGTBKM!!!

Lets face facts here! This is a school board who is simply nosy about their neighbors and this is a sure fire way to find out for who better knows than the kids. This should be characterize as a sleazy governmental board attack on family privacy nothing more nothing less.

What concerns me more than anything else is the poor unsuspecting atheists kid who circles the 1 on all religious questions! Probably worthy of a severe religious style corporal punishment no doubt.

Unfortunately the school board is a reflection of the weird who apparently believe that religion is just another weapon in their arsenal, Religion to them is like their home faucet that they can turn on/off as needed,

From today's Frank Rich column in the dreaded and despised (by many defensive Arkansans, anyway) NYT, another brilliantly delineated look at our Presidential candidates. And yes, it relates to this silly yet sad Flippin thread.

"We don't have the time or resources to go off on more quixotic military missions or to indulge in culture wars. (In China, they're too busy exploiting scientific advances for competitive advantage to reopen settled debates about Darwin.)"

Rich gets it right about what's at stake in the upcoming Presidential election.

This election is ABSOLUTELY about "Arkansas values" as promoted by the GOP versus education, facts and truths.

Rich's op-ed piece is an excellent and reasoned comparison between McCain and Obama.

This is the same school that had Miss Arkansas give an ostensible anti tobacco presentation funded by RJ Reynolds that told kids no matter how popular smoking is you really shouldn't do it unless you're an adult. Flippin First Baptist is just down the street and I don't know why the IRS didn't come crashing down on them for sermons opposing a recent wet/dry vote. Dale Query is a pretty stand up guy. You can bet he was unaware beforehand.
This is also the same little town where the mayor sold walmart the family pasture for a super store. The county's only stop light was in front of the old walmart. They put in another stop light for the super store and built a bypass around the whole town.
Several years ago the local weekly published a photo of kids doing "Wacky Aerobics" . It was tai chi but saying that would have sounded too much like a scary eastern religion. The public school just over, Yellville Summit, made Time magazine couple of years back for a 'youth led' prayer at a highschool football game in defiance of the separation of church and state. Don't be surprised by anything up here.

"The survey tells students that scores greater than 400 mean students have a very positive outlook and could be very successful with everything they do. The survey states scores below 200 mean students don't have a good perspective of the world around them and need attitude adjustments."

Was this survey originally published in Weekly World News?

Maybe we can get Chesapeake to fund a documentary to clear the air on this issue. After all, they are a shining example of Arkansas values at work.

This 'evaluation' is supposedly to assess the attitude of 8th graders, right?

"I have a regular dental checkup at least once a year." How is it the responsibility of a 14 yr old to maintain his dental insurance?

I've looked over the Workforce Ed website many times in the past, it has always been a mishmash of unrelated topics pulled together by a semi literate bureaucrat with religious zeal replacing public policy knowledge. That leadership of that whole department should be sacked.

This thing about Flippin must be a lie. stangelove told us yesterday that there is no religion in our government or schools at any level and no attempts being made to put it there either. So the reporter from the Baxter paper must be high or making this stuff up at home in their underwear.

However, it would have been fun to have my youngest daughter in that class, she would have surgically removed the arms, legs and head of the teacher conducting this survey. Like wingnuts tell their kids to stay away from the sinner in their schools, we can combat this kind of crap by informing our children ahead of time to be on the watch for wingnut behavior and supporting them when they go nuclear at school when such a survey pops up in their faces. The other side always wins when you sit on your ass and do nothing.

Hmm. I actually TOOK the survey. Admittedly, I did it on the toilet (extreme visual - weren't quite ready for that were you?) while Delbert McClinton roared from the living room stereo. I got a 307. So, I guess I'm OK with it, and maybe I won't be climbing the water tower with a .308 afterall. If only I'd gotten one more point on that "like to decorate my room" question, I might have had to consider it a message from God. Maybe it doesn't apply to adults. Number 21, for example: "I would rather spend a summer working to earn money than to go on a paid (PAID) vacation". Are they kidding? You get more points when, given a choice, you're getting paid for digging ditches than drawing the same money sitting on a beach in Cabo?
And, where the hell are you gonna get dental work, OR a week's vacation for a hundred bucks? (#26). There's a couple of dental questions in that thing. Do ya s'pose the Flippin kids have issues with their toophies? And, why does having "expensive tastes" get you a higher score? And who the hell thinks they are qualified to tell the difference between a "really fine painting or drawing and an ordinary one"?
There are a lot of other questions on the thing that are just as suspect as the religious ones.
So, please, don't condemn the survey based purely on those reasons.
Personally, I think you can learn a lot more about somebody (grown-ups, anyway) by looking through their music collection. Kids? I dunno.

What should Arkansas adults expect when they elect the kind of Governors who have to think about whether or not to execute mentally retarded people or when we elect Democrats who agree with our only AR Republican (Boozeman) on torture, needless wars and the constant dismantling of our constitution? It's all connected..and we are quickly becoming the third world mongrels we so adamantly pretend we are not. keep teaching kids in this manner, it will only get worse.

In a sane world, the local churches should be as upset about the public schools doing this as anyone else. Any church or school who tells my kids what to do with their money..when the kids shouldn't even have any money to speak of.. well it says much more about the true nature of our society than it could ever tell us about the kids. Also, it's odd the preference shown.. when 35 percent of Americans attend church on a somewhat regular basis.. according to a 2005 pew poll at my name. The school is telling the majority of supposedly free american students that their family's beliefs and choices are wrong.

Something along the same lines except it's the law enforcement boys doing their thing.

Who wrote this assessment? The religious questions are totally inappropriate. However, the other questions are just as outrageous. Why do I need to want an expensive hobby to have a positive attitude? Also, why more points for liking poetry more than math? It doesn't seem consistent with the large, expensive house question. Math careers sure do pay better than poetry careers! If my child's teacher gave this survey I would assume that he/she is either lazy and didn't read the whole assignment and just printed it out from the website and gave it to the kids OR a total idiot and thinks that wanting to make the most money and be an actor instead of a script writer (?) is a indication of future success. Either way, that teacher has no business teaching kids about future success.

What a joke. What a sad joke.

And how about the summary at the end--- turning positives into negatives! Wearing black, dressing in dark colors....hmmmmmmmmmm, now which very large cities around the world must have a zillion negative attituders?
I think they might be mixing up attitudes and symptoms and consequences and depression and poverty with smiley happy face values a la Walmarts.
This really stinks.

In 2005 we took in my partner's teen niece as a ward. She was applying all over the place for scholarships. One of her friends rec'd a scholarship to a religious college. Our niece joined her friend for preliminary visit, somewhere in Missouri.
Niece just had to attend the religious college. She was completing the application and came out of her room plopped down with the personal statement part of application and asked "Should I say I'm seeking a closer relationship with god? Will that do it?"
I said, "Honey write down something that is personally valuable to you."
She said "Screw that, I want the scholarship money." Her late mother had taken the girl once too often to Wiccan meetings.

I cannot vouch for 8th graders but 16&17 year olds are pretty hip on playing adults.

Obviously, this survey is Huckabites at work. It's good they slipped it in the 8th grade cause by the
10th grade most teens could play it.

Oh, Norma Bates and Rick Baber, you cost me two extra inhaler puffs this afternoon. Still LMAO. Even Pippin the Dog came in to see if I was ok.

.

Let's see: The more greedy and superficially religious you are, the more content you are with your life; the more you focus on self issues the happier you are. Bad grammar and lack of logic indicate too much exposure to NCLB. It is from Flippin! Sounds like a Republi-Huck survey to me! I'm guessing most people in Marion County are puzzled about why a few people are riled up about this survey. Those of you in more diverse parts of the state have no idea about life in God's country. (I know it's God's country because they are all Republicans, and God is a Republican.)

Oh, heaven forbid. Our children will be corrupted. Why couldn't the survey have asked them what kind of sexual practices they engaged in? That would have been more agreeable to the majority on this blog. It is really terrible asking if they tithe. I'm sure they will be permanently damaged. All of you should try and listen to yourself sometime.

The problem strange, is that these questions have nothing to do with future career success. Neither, might I add, do questions about sexual practices. If we're REALLY interested in helping school kids have successful careers, we'll teach them to write clearly, think logically and believe in themselves enough to go for what they want.

"It is really terrible asking if they tithe."

Yes it's terrible that a state agency is asking questions about whether students believe giving money to someone's god is a good thing. It's has nothing to do with education, it's not a state agency's place and it helps sustain idiots like Huck, Haggard, Falwell, Swaggart, Osama, Jeffs, etc...

I'm sure many religious-nut Muslims argue the same point, strange, as they send their kids off for 'special' training. Got to line up the little soldiers (like Monica Goodling) and indoctrinate proper conformity early in life.

But other than that nonsense, I've enjoyed the hell out of this thread...LOL, rick!!

The document itself has some problems (spelling, usage, punctuation, etc.), so it loses credibility to me on its face, even without the silly nature of the questions.

But there were some interesting things in the survey. For example, question #11 asks, "Do you use standard English?" It makes me wonder what they really wanted to know by asking that question.

There were a couple of items not flagged as being religious in nature but they seem so to me. Number 42 reads, "If I knew a family that had no food for Christmas dinner, I would try to provide it." Number 43 reads, " I like to spend holidays with my family." Granted, contemporary use of the word "holiday" isn't the same as "holy day", but still....

I hope someone calls these doofuses out.

Well, the problem I have is with your consistency. You go apoplectic over the tithe question but the sex questions you ho hum off. Really not surprising for liberals.

Tell us what the sex questions would be, strange, and then we'll decide if we go apoplectic or not. Until then, it's just a strawman.

Sex is a whole lot more necessary to a happy life than tithing, that's for sure.

I didn't notice any sex questions on the survey, unless you mean #86, "I do not smoke." But I don't think it said, "I do not smoke after sex." I'll check again.

Those looking for a career in pole dancing aren't likely hip to this survey, anyway.

repubforobamayomama said: Sex is a whole lot more necessary to a happy life than tithing, that's for sure.

Considering the source, you are probably right. However, there are some who see something much more in your statement about the source.

Tithing is really not an issue for most of the people on this blog. Why don't you limit yourselves to something that you can identify with? How about a discussion concerning multiculturalism or diversity or leftist politics in the collectivist age?

Like: Is tithing one-tenth of your earnings your duty to God?

And the answer is NO!

Thank you, Fay. Aside from the religious stuff, you noted the very things than jumped out at me this morning.
Poetry or art/drawing versus math? Do I detect a little math anxiety here? Daydreaming about acting? Wonder what the originator of this survey would say to a 14 year old boy who told her (I presume "her" because of the gift emphasis) he didn't have to learn to write poetry or short stories because he was going to be a multi-millionaire football or basketball player? 'Specially if he didn't always employ standard English? Can you say immature? Can you say short-sighted?
Daydreaming (there's that word again) about what you'd do if you had a lot of money, about getting in that big expensive house, having expensive tastes and craft projects? Seems it's all about money, money, money.
Something tells me the originator of this little "attitude inventory" embraces Joel Osteen-ianity. It's all about money, money, money.
Another thing. Maybe it's just me, but that sense of satisfaction you should get from nursing someone back to health? Seems to me that if that's the case, it's more about the caretaker than about the patient. Around here, it's just been relief that the patient was getting better.
You call this a career orientation survey? From the Arkansas Workforce Education Department?
I wish you were kidding.
It's that clear. Like Delta mud.
Kiddie should prefer be an officer rather than just a club member? The chair at meetings? Wants a much higher salary than an average worker? Little wonder that anyone gets out of school with any idea of what might be expected of them in the workplace. Workforce Education Department indeed.
The whole "Attitude Inventory" is unprofessional and a silly waste of time.
Beyond that, it's a blatant attempt to impose on students values which may be contradictory to those taught at home.
My advice to the department? MYOB, if you ever figure out what it is.

Really, Strange, I thought you were all for sex. You're the one who's always squawking about women in the United States and Europe not having enough babies to keep up with the rest of the world.

Oh.

Turkey baster, huh?