Lack Of Progress Report 12/11/25

 He is sleeping when he should be paying attention.

He bullies others.

He does not get along with his peers. 

He has trouble working in groups. 

He calls people mean names. 

He has trouble focusing.

He lies more often than he tells "his version" of the truth.

He spends more time on his phone than he does with his peers.

He claims to have "aced" a simple test, but lacks simple levels of comprehension.

He lacks an understanding of basic math.

He openly mocks those he feels are beneath him.

He destroys public property. 

He is disrespectful. 

He is irresponsible. 

He is unsafe.

He will definitely lose petals from his courtesy daisy. 

You would think someone who is repeating the same grade would be doing better the second time around.

Retention is not recommended in this case. 

I suggest expulsion. 

As soon as possible.  

Holiday Magic

 I would hate to ruin anyone's Christmas, but forgive me if I speak of a certain carefully guarded secret to which so many of us have at one time or another held fast. If you are of a tender age or temperament, it might be best for you to revisit this post when you are sure you can handle the truth. 

I believe in Santa Claus. 

It surprises me every single time I run into someone who vehemently denies his jolly existence. Take a look around. At this time of year you can scarcely unwrap a candy cane without knocking into some bearded fellow in a red suit.

Santa is everywhere. 

This goes a long way toward explaining how he could be so attuned to your sleep habits, and just how naughty you may or may not have been this year. 

I can understand how many of you maintain your skepticism when you can wander from one mall to another and somehow Mister Claus just happens to have set up a photo op for you and yours just a few storefronts away from the last ersatz North Pole. The answer to this one is quite simple: Beyond all the magic that allows him to visit approximately three hundred million homes in one night, there is a much simpler explanation: Helpers. 

Santa has a legion of folks whom he affords the great honor and trust to carry out all of his many and varied duties over the course of the holiday season. I have made no secret of the fact that my father was one of those lucky enough to wear the beard and bells in service to his fellow man. And the child inside of him. Over the course of several winters, he donned the raiment of the owner of eight tiny reindeer, and set about spreading cheer and season's greetings wherever he appeared. I love my father for that. 

Which is why, when I was asked if I would like the chance to help out at my school by dressing up as Santa Claus, I balked. A large part of me felt the call, my father's voice egging me on. There was another equally insistent voice that worried that my appearance, even though I was told by our admin assistant that I "have the belly for it," might set off alarms among some of our more dubious youngsters. Being "made" by a five year old and becoming the reason for the magic to dissipate in any way left me feeling highly ambivalent about taking the gig. 

As luck or simply the way things work around this time of year, it turns out that Santa will be making an appearance at our school just before Winter Break. It won't be me. And you'll forgive me if I suggest that it could be the real deal showing up. Because I still believe. 

Didja Ever Notice...

 The current "president" of the United States doesn't seem to care for football. 

To be clear, I mean "football" in the American sense, the sport that we don't refer to as our national pastime but spend seven months fixated on it and another five anticipating the next iteration. 

Around the time the new NFL was starting up, the convicted felon who apparently had little else to do after having destroyed our economy and unleashing masked goons onto the streets of his own country to kidnap people, let this post fly on social media: "The NFL has to get rid of that ridiculous looking new Kickoff Rule. How can they make such a big and sweeping change so easily and quickly. It's at least as dangerous as the "normal" kickoff, and looks like he'll [sic]. The ball is moving, and the players are not, the exact opposite of what football is all about. "Sissy" football is bad for America, and bad for the NFL! It's like wanting to 'roll back' the golf ball so it doesn't go (nearly!) as far. Fortunately, college football will remain the same, hopefully forever!!" 

Never mind that after years of attempting to make the sport safer for those who risk their limbs and livelihood each week was dismissed out of hand by a guy who can't pronounce Acetaminophen. All the research done by the National Football League was ignored by a guy who cheats at golf. In the meantime, this didn't keep him from showing up at the Commanders game against the Lions. The home crowd gave him the reception that one might expect from the least popular "president" since the invention of percentages. 

Just this past week as the twice-impeached pedophile was being presented with a previously unknows honor, The FIFA Peace Prize, he took the opportunity to babble on in his characteristic way about something the happened to pass between the remaining neurons in his skull: “When you look at what has happened to football in the United States, which is soccer in the United States, we seem to never call it (football) because we have a little bit of a conflict with another thing that’s called football. But when you think about it, shouldn’t it really be called … this is football, there’s no question about it. We have to come up with another name for the NFL. It really doesn’t make sense when you think about it.”

This is just another lunatic ramble from a guy whose thoughts tend more often than not to resemble the world's worst Jerry Seinfeld routine. 

From the world's worst "president?"

Makes sense. 

Best Buy

 I have told this story before: Back when I was co-managing a book warehouse, some hippies from the great Northwest came by to tour our warehouse. They were hoping to pick up some tips on how to pack and ship books. At the time, we scoffed at their notion that books could be sold over this newfangled thing called Al Gore's Internet. A few years later, I did not scoff when I received an Amazon shipment shrink-wrapped to a carboard flat, just like we had showed them. At this point, our funky Berkeley-bred employee-owned book distributor had gone out of business. 

Another story I have told here before: In keeping with a tradition of April Fool's pranks on my mother I hacked into her Netflix queue and put a number of odd films in, including a couple in Russian. I waited a month or so before asking how she was enjoying her latest flurry of movies. She responded with a slightly agitated confession that she could not remember putting any of those titles on her list. We laughed at the funny joke I had played on her, or at least that's how I want to remember it. Then I helped her piece together the list she had before I started messing it up. 

All of this dropped me into the Crimson Permanent Assurance featurette at the beginning of Monty Python's Meaning of Life. An executive from the Very Big Corporation of America reminds his minions, "Which brings us once again to the urgent realization of just how much there is still left to own." This was my way of distilling my feelings regarding Netflix engulfing and devouring HBO and Warner Brothers. 

My mother no longer receives envelopes with DVDs in them, whether by her own choosing or through machinations of her troublesome son. Amazon continues to sell books, but their shipping methods have evolved slightly since I gave them the heads-up. A world that once cast off the idea of giant monopolies is fast becoming one enormous corporation run by people ever further removed from the actual product that they provide. The goofy hippies who showed up at our warehouse not so very long ago are certainly now vested in the beast I unwittingly supported, and though I cancelled my Netflix subscription, I still have an account with HBO Max. Or not Max. I can't keep track.  

All I know is that one more hotel on Park Place and I won't be able to afford to watch TV or read a book anymore. 

The Pop Art Of War

 Famously, there was a sign that sat on President Harry Truman's desk. It read: The Buck Stops Here. In his farewell address, Harry addressed this historic decoration, reminding us that,  "The President, whoever he is, has to decide. He can't pass the buck to anybody. No one else can do the deciding for him. That's his job."

This is coming from the man who decided to drop not one but two atomic weapons on Japanese cities to hasten the end of World War II. More than two hundred thousand people died as a result of this action. Most of these were civilians. Many still argue that if the United States had lost the war, Truman and his advisors would have been put on trial as war criminals. Even with the Potsdam Declaration, there was no way for Japan to have anticipated just how overwhelming the power of a nuclear weapon would be. J. Robert Oppenheimer did. Upon witnessing the first detonation of his invention, he quoted the Bhagavad Gita:  "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." Until his death, Harry Truman defended his decision, as the sign on his desk suggested. Oppenheimer became a staunch advocate for the control of weapons calling for international transparency and oversight. 

That didn't happen. 

Eighty years later, the occupant of what is left of the White House does not have a sign on his desk suggesting that all his decisions are final. This would not allow him to swing and swerve to avoid committing to any one choice or plan. Instead, he has a button, which allows him to summon a Diet Coke whenever he so desires. When it comes to military decisions, he is quick to laud those moments that he feels expand his already inflated self-image. Or, as in the case of the second use of an air strike to finish off the survivors of an initial attack on a suspected drug running boat, he chose along with his Attack Dog to throw the blame on the Admiral who carried out the order. “I didn’t know about the second strike. I didn’t know anything about the people. I wasn’t involved, and I knew they took out a boat, but I would say this, they had a strike," declared the Diet Coke drinker. Initially, Pete the Pit Bull asserted, “I watched it live. We knew exactly who was in that boat, we knew exactly what they were doing, and we knew exactly who they represented.” That account has since been changed to,  “As you can imagine, at the Department of War, we got a lot of things to do, so I didn’t stick around for the hour and two hours, whatever, where all the sensitive site exploitation digitally occurs, so I moved on to my next meeting.” Leaving Navy Adm. Frank M. “Mitch” Bradley squarely in the path of the accountability bus. 

It should be noted that aside from the consumption of Diet Coke there is another stark contrast between these incidents: One occurred during a declared war. The operation that destroyed a suspected drug boat and the follow-up that killed the survivors clinging to the burning wreckage occurred during a distraction created to keep the public from noticing that the Epstein Files remain unreleased. 

Why the Buck is that? 

Wretched Refuse

 How about hydraulics? Maybe animal domestication? Lest we forget the use of cannons in warfare, or perhaps a rich tradition of oral poetry and storytelling. 

Don't tell me the Somalis never contributed anything to civilization. 

Harry Lime reminds us, “In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”

Contrast this from the felon in chief: “And when I said, you know, ‘Why can’t we allow people to come in from nice countries,’ I’m trying to be nice. Nice countries, you know like Denmark, Switzerland? Do we have any people coming in from Denmark? How about Switzerland? How about Norway?”

So just for a moment, let's set aside the relative cultural achievements and focus on the reasons why people immigrate to another country. Chief among these would be oppression. You've heard of such a thing, right? Like when the pilgrims fled England because they felt they were being persecuted because of their religion? We just had a big meaty holiday to celebrate it. This notion was such a big hit that we started telling the world that we had this great big continent that we needed to fill up with, wait for it, Immigrants!

Try not to pay any attention to the genocide of native peoples necessary to achieve this end, since that spoils the image of that first Thanksgiving. 

Meanwhile, the French were so impressed by the way we were taking in huddled masses that they sent us a great big statue to put out on our front porch with a light to show the way. 

Don't get me wrong, I own a cuckoo clock. I really like it. But I also like hydraulics. And living in a melting pot. 

Connected

 A recent study suggested that children under the age of thirteen could face serious health risks if they have a "smart phone." They are at higher risk of lack of sleep, obesity and depression, according to a  study published this past Monday in the journal Pediatrics. 

Nobody asked me. All the kids I teach are under the age of thirteen. Can I say with clinical certainty that those who show up to school sleepy, depressed and have little or no interest in PE are that way because of their cell phones? No, I cannot. I do have plenty of anecdotal evidence, such as the conversations I have had with drowsy kids in my classroom who volunteer tidbits like, "I stayed up late last night on my phone." I have seen more than my share of kids sitting in tight huddles on our playground, staring at their phones, even though they are prohibited from doing so by a school-wide rule. 

And the depression thing? Let's just say that cyberbullying is a real thing. Lines of communication among our pre-teens are made even more confounding by text, TikTok and Instagram. Like their adult counterparts, they don't want to miss out on anything, even if the thing they might miss will bring them fear and sadness. 

How do we teach kids that cell phone use can be harmful? By centering so much of our own waking life around such devices. The staff at our school carry walkie talkies that we use for emergencies and requests for wet cleanups, but more often than not, we send a text. Many of our interactions become distilled into emojis or clever gifs. Rather than walking out to the playground to check on a colleague, I could just as easily send them a smiley face. 

Then there are the lessons we can learn from kids. Watch them play. See them resolve a conflict with rock, paper, scissors. Be amazed when the blood feud that started before the bell rang is over before lunch. That's not something the current occupant of what's left of the White House can do.