Education, Math, and More with Mr. Allison

Some may think the (and students) means I consider student needs secondary behind teachers' needs. Not true. I wrote it like that because most students don't really understand what they NEED most, and what they need most isn't necessarily what they want out of school.  The classroom is different today than it was five years ago. When we sent kids home in 2020 and told them to hide under the covers and we'd give them an A...for doing absolutely nothing...for learning absolutely nothing...for nothing...nothing, when that happened, a shift in expectations occurred. And it hasn't shifted back yet, at least not everywhere. Teachers (and students) need that to shift back, and they need it now! Kids got used to having great grades for doing almost no work. Kids got used to having a high GPA without learning. To make things worse, when they came back in the fall of 2020, we sent them home for two weeks at a time when they heard the word Covid in the hallways. Over and over ...

I was self-employed, making good money. Working hard, 7 days a week, but doing well. When I got out of the Marine Corps we bought 80 acres on the top of a long rocky ridge line in Cleburne County, Arkansas. It was rough ground that had lacked attention for a long time. We put a 16x80 trailer on it and I went to driving a truck, first driving for my grandfather and then purchasing the truck and doing everything on my own. Five years of life on the road got old and my wife and I decided to raise chickens.  Over that five years, we'd cleaned the place up quite a bit. We borrowed a bunch of money and built a 650 foot breeder house, bought a bunch of cows, and started my career in agriculture. We adopted our daughters and life was good.  I think God started dropping hints at what he wanted me to do along the way, but I was too hard-headed to heed them. On a homework assignment once, my oldest daughter had to estimate something and she threw out an insane number for whatever the sit...