Experienced and certified teachers providing parent engagement resources for schools, ACT test prep classes and private tutoring for students.
Bowling Green, KY
Joined August 2014
- Tweets2.6K
- Following481
- Followers336
- Likes4K
Bluegrass Learning retweeted
My uncle fixed American warships for 41 years.
He was a welder at the US Navy base in Yokosuka. He started at 19. He barely spoke English. He didn't need to. He spoke steel.
Destroyers. Cruisers. An aircraft carrier, more times than he can count. If a ship in the Seventh Fleet had a seam, there's a decent chance my uncle welded it.
He never met most of the sailors who sailed on them. He just knew they came home safe. Because the seams held.
Last spring, he retired.
He expected a cake in the break room. Maybe a certificate.
Instead, when he walked out of the shop on his last day, there were sailors lined up on both sides of the pier. In dress uniform.
A boatswain raised a whistle to his lips.
My uncle had no idea what was happening. Someone had to explain it to him later.
In the US Navy, when a sailor retires after a long career, they "pipe him ashore." Sideboys line up. The whistle sounds. Everyone salutes.
It's an honor the Navy gives its own.
They gave it to a Japanese welder.
My uncle walked between them slowly. Every few steps, he stopped and bowed. They held their salute the entire time.
At the end of the line, the captain shook his hand and said something my uncle didn't understand.
That night, he asked me to translate it.
"Fair winds and following seas."
He made me write it down in Japanese letters, so he could say it right.
Now, every time we leave his house, he walks us to the door and says the only English sentence he knows by heart.
"Fair winds and following seas."
Bluegrass Learning retweeted
If someone asks you how much a single family's life is worth to the United States Navy, tell them the exact price: ten million dollars of steel.
On April 29, 1975, as Saigon fell, a tiny two-seat wooden-and-fabric Cessna plane with almost no fuel left circled desperately above the American aircraft carrier USS Midway.
Inside that tiny cockpit, a father named Major Buang-Ly had crammed his wife and five small children, including a baby. He scribbled a note on a map, wrapped it around his pistol so it would not blow into the ocean, and dropped it onto the carrier deck.
A young American sailor picked up the crumpled paper and ran it up to Captain Lawrence Chambers.
The note read: "Can you move these helicopter to the other side, I can land on your runway, I can fly 1 hour more. Please rescue me. Major Buang, Wife and 5 child."
The flight deck of the USS Midway was completely jammed from bow to stern with military helicopters. A Cessna has no tailhook to catch carrier wires, and its pilot had never landed on a ship in his life.
By every military regulation, Captain Chambers had been in command for only five weeks. Throwing millions of dollars of U.S. government aircraft into the sea without permission from Washington could end his career in a court-martial.
Chambers looked up at the tiny plane circling in the wind with five children inside. He did not call an accountant in Washington.
"Clear the deck," the captain ordered.
Hundreds of young American sailors in yellow and green jerseys ran to the edge of the ship, put their shoulders against massive Huey helicopters, and shoved ten million dollars worth of machinery straight off the cliff into the South China Sea.
Captain Chambers turned the giant carrier into the wind at twenty-five knots. The tiny Cessna came down, bounced once on the steel runway, and rolled to a safe stop with feet to spare.
When the cockpit door opened and five small children stepped out onto the deck, three thousand American sailors roared so loud it drowned out the engines, and immediately passed around a hat to collect cash for the family's new life in America.
When the math says a child's life is too expensive, an American throws the math into the ocean.
🤖 Made with AI
Bluegrass Learning retweeted
Im not shre people realize how terrible math instruction is right now
No drills. No memorization of math facts. No direct instruction, modeling, or practice
Lots of “curiosity” and “exploration” to build “math confidence”
Essentially, kids are left to just figure it out
Bluegrass Learning retweeted
The teacher who gives a failing grade has to explain it to the student, the parents, and the principal.
The teacher who gives everyone an A has a quiet weekend.
Still confused about how grade inflation has gotten so bad?
Bluegrass Learning retweeted
I hand out my reading grade level tests like candy.
Many parents are surprised in a bad way. It only takes a few minutes.
thephonicspage.org/gradeleve…
Bluegrass Learning retweeted
The relationship is one of the clearest I've ever seen. Colleges where entering classes have higher SAT/ACT scores have higher completion rates.
Bluegrass Learning retweeted
reasons to read old books:
1. definitely not written by AI
2. written by people who were NOT doomscrolling
3. written for readers who were expected to have long attention spans
4. will give you useful points-of-view that have been forgotten
5. vetted by time
6. will give you access to words, arguments, and ideas that are unavailable in the current discourse
7. will give you a panoramic historical view of what changes across time, and what does not
8. if you're an artist, old books will enrich your set of creative references
9. old books free you from the gravitational pull of the Current Thing
Bluegrass Learning retweeted
Nobody seems to grasp that the college student low math problem requires addressing what's going on for 8-9 year olds.
Bluegrass Learning retweeted
44% of students scoring below 1000 on the SAT say they get all or mostly A’s in school
Bluegrass Learning retweeted
RIP Wendell you beautiful beanpole of a farmer poet king.
What a great time to celebrate our nation’s greatest writer by digging into The Unsettling of America or Hannah Coulter or send some love to @Berry_Center
You know who wrote a great essay about the late Wendell Berry? @Nick_Offerman in @outsidemagazine, that's who. outsideonline.com/culture/es…
Bluegrass Learning retweeted
If you only watch one video today, PLEASE watch this.
A high-school English teacher breaks down crying on camera because the high-school SENIORS in his class cannot write a SINGLE SENTENCE.
"I have SENIORS that cannot read. I have SENIORS that cannot write."
My gosh...
Bluegrass Learning retweeted
After surviving the sinking of the USS Tang in October 1944, Richard O'Kane was captured and secretly transferred to the Ōfuna Interrogation Camp, near the naval base at Yokosuka. The Japanese military did not register him as a POW & the Navy listed him as MIA, most presumed he was dead for nearly a year. Following Japan's surrender, Allied forces entered Tokyo Bay to liberate nearby camps. On August 30, 1945, an emaciated 88-pound O'Kane was brought out to the USS Reeves anchored in Tokyo Bay where he gave a groundbreaking interview to the Associated Press, revealing to the world for the first time that he was alive.
This is the oldest fast attack in the US Pacific Fleet, USS Scranton (SSN-756), transiting Tokyo Bay two weeks ago today to pull into the naval base at Yokosuka...
carrying aboard Admiral O'Kane's cribbage board.
Bluegrass Learning retweeted
Commissioner of Education Robbie Fletcher talks about the procurement process for Kentucky's college entrance exam during the second episode of our new series, KDE Inbox!
You can email questions to [email protected] and Commissioner Fletcher will answer them!
Bluegrass Learning retweeted
When I was young, every now and then, while browsing through used-books stores in Romania, I could still find many books printed before the 50s. It wasn't only the smell of old glue that fascinated me but, more importantly, it was the fact that many of these books had been so obviously loved by their former owners: annotated and re-annotated, they bore the marks of people for whom the characters and settings had come to life.
My generation had already been raised with a rather modern approach of trying to read books without altering them in any way. (I do not know if that was the communist way, perhaps consequence of the idea that everything had to be shared, and you could not make anything your own.)
It was thus that, by seeing how the generations before my parents' read— unequivocally making the books theirs, writing their own thoughts on their pages, to remain there for multiple generations after the one who first thought them had passed away—I too came to love my books the same way: reading them with a sharp pencil in my hand.
Today, all my students do the same.
