Reeno

A graduate of Portland State University, Steve Kloser is the author of “Beginning Band - A Guide to Success” and “Let's Make Music - Classroom Recorder Course”.
He is also an accomplished teacher, conductor and composer, having penned numerous pieces including: La Vida and Fly With Me.
Teacher, web developer, Packers fan and proud American, Reeno's usually slanted outlook often presents an unlikely perspective on issues old and new. Reeno currently lives in Portland, OR.
Read more at www.reeno317.me or follow Reeno on Twitter at https://twitter.com/portlandreeno.

Real News, Fake President

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*Plop, plop, fizz, fizz, oh what a relief it is!  It’s funny how things stay with you.  Vietnamization will end U.S. involvement in the war.  Even if you’re a kid and you don’t really understand, if you hear something often enough it becomes part of who you are.  Never has it been doubted that everything’s better with Blue Bonnet on it, or what kind of kids eat Armour hot dogs or that Jesus died for our sins or that America is the greatest nation on Earth.

Some of these are ingrained in us before we have any chance to understand what they mean, never mind question them.  Whether we hear them on TV, in church, at school or at home, if words are repeated often enough, long enough, they become part of who we are; and we believe them.  How else can you explain prejudice?  Kids get along fine until someone important in their life tells them why they shouldn’t.

BTW: Fat kids, skinny kids, kids that climb on rocks.  Tough kids, sissy kids, even kids with chicken pox love hot dogs.  That old commercial could never run in 2018 because of the words used to describe the kids.  Try calling a child fat, skinny, or a sissy and prepare to deal with an onslaught of anger from whoever happens to be standing near!  The words matter.  Now more than ever before.

Insidious: proceeding in a gradual, subtle way, but with harmful effects.  treacherous; crafty.  

The two most important words in the American lexicon are Fake News. Fake News - Real News, Fake President

The president repeats them more often than beer commercials during a football game.  Keep Reading

DeVos on American Education: Mortgage our Future

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*Aaron Rodgers may be the greatest of all time, Tom Brady may be the greatest of all time.  Mohammed Ali told us that he was the greatest of all time, and who wants to argue with him – even from beyond the grave?  But to lead my team down the field with 85 yards to go and 1:40 on the clock – with all due and considerable respect to Elway, Brees, Rivers and the Mannings –  Joe Cool is my first pick every time.

Watching those 49er teams matriculate the ball down the field was like watching an infantry unit doing drills; methodical, sharp, quick and precise, yet fluid and graceful.  The dynasty of the 80s provided entertainment the likes of which we can never see again.  Once the NFL implemented a salary cap the owner kept on spending on star players, ‘mortgaging the future’ to win today by delaying, deferring and derailing payments.  When the wall tumbled, it fell into rubble as the 9ers of the new century are only now appearing to be in recovery mode.

Mortgaging America’s future is what Betsy DeVos and her geniuses at the Department of Education are doing currently.

As one of the mindless trumpions currently running the show she is once again seeking to cut several discretionary programs, including federal funding for the Special Olympics and a grant program for college students with “exceptional financial need.” Keep Reading

The Alcoholic Next Door

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Alcoholism

*That glorious moment when you get to put your head down and shut your eyes and let it all go away for a few hours. The TV still emitting a faint glow, this side of the pillow still cool, lids barely touching and BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG! Damn! 12:30 at night. This can’t be good.

One of my neighbors. A very nice young lady crying and babbling and reaching for a hug – needing to be not wrong for a moment. Details trickle out as they are withheld, revolving around a drunk husband, a dog beaten to death, a rope being held by its end. Sadly, it is just another story to add to my life’s collection; each heartbreaking, each unique yet identical to all the others.

Prohibition did not work. People like to drink. They have since the first accidentally-fermented grapes were bravely ingested. No matter how many marriages it wrecks, families it demolishes or lives it obliterates, alcohol is not going to go away. Keep Reading

Too Old For Office – Are Age Limits Appropriate?

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Age Limits

*How about some age limits?  I know, I know; you can’t do that – discrimination; ageism; our seniors are our greatest treasure. OK. And as someone that has of late been the recipient of impudent young whippersnapper’s thoughtless comments and assumptions about my age and its affect on my ability to do this or that, I can tell you that being judged based on your appearance sucks; I can only image what my darker-skinned brothers and sisters have had to deal with their entire lives while living in this racist country.

But seriously, how about some age limits?

Donald Trump
Photo Credit; Charisma News

The president is seventy-two and is apparently going to run for reelection, which would make him seventy-eight if could finish a second term without blowing up the world. He could make it, or he could drop dead any day now. More to the point, he has less of an idea about what it is like to live in this country in this century than the ETs floating around above us.

Rounds of golf and hookers costing thousands of dollars each are not within the realm of the average American, yet he takes these things for granted. His antiquated ignorant perspective on people less white than he and the resulting utter lack of connection with people of color is typified in the mess he has created by sticking his nose in the NFL’s anthem controversy – a place his nose has no business being.

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Too Much Forged in Fire

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You might be watching too much Forged in Fire if:

  • Your kids are making a fortune selling snow cones, as there is a constant supply of chopped ice.
  • You can’t watch TV because the satellite dish is in the back yard filled with coal.
  • You walk into the kitchen to see why Sunday dinner is late, to find a $35 roast beef hanging from the ceiling, your wife wielding a knife in each hand, watching a youtube clip of Doug Marcaida.
  • The beater car in your neighbor’s backyard seems to be walking away piece by piece – first the leaf springs, then the axle …

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Bogus Federal Commission on School Safety

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School Safety

*Kids are so much fun to be around. Little bundles of energy, they are overcome with curiosity; constantly information-gathering, testing and discovering new things. It’s hard to imagine a place specifically designed to feed that curiosity and offer information and present new things that some children would fake a tummy ache to avoid.

It’s equally difficult to imagine parents in the most world’s most prosperous nation who expect their children be both educated and tended to during work hours, yet balk at providing the financial support required to get the jobs done well.
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R.E.S.P.E.C.T. Professors & Teachers

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Professor.  Just the word elicits respect, and respect is something we don’t have or show a lot of in 2018 America.  We call physicians ‘doc’, coaches, bosses, aunts and uncles by their first names, and almost everyone else ‘dude’ …  except for politicians and lawyers.  But even the most confident of us wants to impress when dining or conversing with a professor.

Teacher doesn’t have the same shine, does it?

Teachers seem more human, more approachable, and generally speaking are not shown the type of respect college professors enjoy.

Why?
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Just Login to our System

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Login to our system

*“Just login to our system.”  A very common demand these days.  You can’t get a mortgage or buy a toy or receive medical care without creating an account and logging in.  It sounds reasonable, but is it?

Entering your life’s data into any system is risky, as we are repeatedly reminded by the steady stream of news reports about hackings that assurances about the safety and security of your data are mere rhetoric, no matter the company or organization.  Demanding that you to login to a system assumes that you are willing to take a huge leap of faith, and trust that:

  • the system is well-built and supported,
  • the people administering the system are highly skilled, and that
  • state-of-the-art security measures (ineffective as they may be) are in place and the people administering them are highly skilled.

This is like asking you to jump off a cliff based on a stranger’s assurances that “it’ll be OK”.
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Seven Words to Approach With Caution in 2018

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Seven Words - Offensive Language

*“Don’t use that word!” This new, weird battle cry being barked by presidents, governors and protective moms somehow persists in the Land of the Free. Even casual conversation can be a tricky affair these days, with unlikely words laying in wait like landmines set to explode by the slightest touch, often causing unwanted clarification, heated debate or scolding.
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Some Will Go To College – All Will Go Through Life: Part Three – We’ll Be Amazed

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College - Bookbags - We'll be Amazed

*There has never been a good answer to the question, “Why do we have to learn this?”  Asked millions of times by millions of students, it is invariably responded to by teachers with avoidance tactics or gibberish because very often the real answer is: you don’t.

We invest heavily in information from the bell curve, yet ignore much of what it tells us.  We know ahead of time that students like Jane, whose classidemic test scores fall in the center or the left of the standardized test bell curve, will not do well in Algebra or Biology class, yet we are compelled to require that they take those courses.  Why?  In order to give them a well-rounded education??Achievement Ladder - We''ll be Amazed

Because they’ll need it to get into college and we must prepare all students for college no matter what??  Or is it because the idea that we all must strive to get to the top of the achievement ladder – that in its essence education IS striving to get to the top of the achievement ladder –  is so ingrained in us that we can’t even question it?

Some Will Go To College – All Will Go Through Life: Part Two- What About Jane?

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Waitress

*On an autumn day in September of 1962, President John Kennedy challenged a nation to do the impossible and send a man to the moon in just seven short years. Perhaps the thing he his best remembered for other than his unfortunate death, we take his declaration for granted.

What is interesting is that at a time before digital calculators and watches, before microwave ovens and before TV shows were regularly broadcast in color, the audience at Rice University did not greet his proclamation that “We choose to go to the moon” with incredulousness, or appear to wonder how such a monumental goal might be achieved, but instead greeted it with eager applause and giddy enthusiasm.
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Some Will Go To College – All Will Go Through Life – Appendix A

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Appendix A for Part One

A Working List of Skills and Knowledge Covered in Sophomore Life Prep Courses

  • The ability to use a personal computer for basic tasks.
  • The ability to fill out a job application – both online and on paper.
  • The ability to create and balance a household budget.
  • The ability to balance a checkbook – both online and on paper.
  • The ability navigate one’s city, either by driving a car or mastering public transportation.
  • The ability to cook basic meals.
  • An understanding of how pregnancy occurs, STDs are spread, and optional methods to prevent both.
  • The ability to explain how interest ($) works, and how credit cards are different and dangerous.
  • The ability to do laundry & clean the house.
  • Basic communication and relationship skills.
  • An understanding of the two-party political system, and some of the basic differences between the parties.
  • The ability to recount a general timeline of American history, at least including and in order, the American Revolution, the War of 1812, the Civil War, the Industrial Revolution, the world wars, the Technological Revolution
  • A knowledge of alcoholism and other addictions and how they work.
  • A working knowledge of First Aid

Some Will Go To College – All Will Go Through Life: Part One- Curves, Tests and Grades

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College

Teachers, school administrators, school boards and government agencies across America work diligently to educate our youth, yet the U.S. consistently ranks squarely in the middle of worldwide achievement in Science, Math and Reading.  How can this be in what we all like to think of as the greatest nation on earth?

There are two underlying fundamental problems with the American education system in the 21st century.  The first is that there is not now, nor has there ever been, an American Education System.  From the time of the first New England schoolhouse to today, local education has been paid for by local tax dollars, with local government setting curriculum and standards for hiring teachers in accordance with the bidding of local voters.

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Investing in Education = Investing in our Future

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Never Stop Learning

The bell rings and twenty-nine angelic faces look to her for guidance. In that moment she realizes that while as Governor overseeing the statistical lives of her state’s almost four million citizens is a huge responsibility – one she takes seriously, being entrusted with the actual lives of these twenty-nine cherubs is a grander burden.

Initially an eager participant in the new ‘Leaders in School’ program, the Governor is becoming increasingly dismayed as the reality of spending an entire day working as an educator in the public school system is becoming clear. It was bad enough that she had to make her own coffee and breakfast this morning and then actually drive herself to school, but facing a day without her personal assistants seems like cruel and unusual punishment.

The day is only forty seconds old, and she is already looking for a light at the end of an awfully long tunnel.

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Responsible Right of Way

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Crossing Light

Once upon a time in a land called America, schoolchildren were taught how to cross the street by their parents or their older siblings.  Red light means the cars stop, and green light means the cars go. Pedestrians were not so confused by basic traffic etiquette.

Wait for the red light and make sure the cars have stopped, look both ways, carefully cross the street.  For decades, first graders across the nation successfully crossed the street without tens of thousands of dollars worth of flashing lights and annoying beeping and counting and pictures of a cute little walking man at every stinking intersection.

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Hey Doc – a Little Help? Life In the Era of Opioids.

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Opiates

* I did it. *

I turned down the Vicodin during the pre-op appointment.

When he asked why, I replied, “I like it too much.”

Vicodin

Instead of considering the acknowledgement I’d just made that I am to some degree addicted to opiates, or perhaps even complimenting me on my self-restraint and self-awareness, he pressed the idea that I would need some pain relief over the weekend, and we compromised on a prescription for ten pills of something ‘similar’ to Vicodin.

During interactions with doctors, nurses and support staff in the hours before and after my surgery, I told five other people that I like Vicodin too much. Each time I expected them to make a note in my chart but no one did, although Heaven knows that anything else you tell them gets noted and is then impossible to get deleted, even if it is in error!

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Securing Education – Guns or Metal Detectors?

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Child in Classroom

* Where would we be without teachers?  It’s like asking where we’d be without the sun.

The warmth we need to grow, the illumination we need to see new things and the undying pull to keep us on the right trajectory are things we expect both the sun and our teachers to provide for us.  The sun doesn’t have much choice, and at least theoretically we can count on it to continue to deliver until it inevitably burns itself out.

Teachers do have a choice, and when they burn out society loses a little warmth, a ray of light and a steadiness of direction.

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All You Need is Love…. and Enough Money

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Marriage Money

* Post-Nuptial Money Management

The only time money is an issue is when there isn’t enough money. Nowhere in life is this more true than within the confines of a marriage. As Winter melts into Spring and your June wedding draws near, now is a good time to do some planning; before all the planning begins!

Love is many splendored thing, the old song tells us. What it doesn’t give us a clue about, is that it is also a business.

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Software Abuse – At the Hands of Tech Giants

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Digital

Children that grow up in abusive households assume that everyone gets slapped around when they make a mistake or spill their milk. When it’s all you know, you believe it’s normal. It never occurs to them that their parents are being mean – just loving them in a way that hurts. Like software companies treat us.

Software abuse is rampant and pervasive. It is being perpetrated by every software company – the bigger the company, the more severe the abuse. If you are thinking, “I use software, and I don’t feel abused”; exactly. You are that kid being slapped around, and you think it’s normal.

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A Beautiful Sight – Hope in the Wake of Tragedy

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David Hogg

It’s easy to complain … seems like I’ve been doing it nonstop since November ’16. Determined to write something positive today, I asked myself, “What is the most beautiful thing I have seen lately?”

The answer was there waiting for me before I could finish the question: those students in Florida. The way they marched to Tallahassee determined to make a difference. The way they tempered their anger and pain with their intellect and handled themselves in a manner we can all be proud of. The way they were filled with, and inspired hope; beautiful, human hope.

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