"I’m not what people assume that I am. I love the fact that I’m different, and maybe that makes me scary to some, but I don’t know, I’m not this gun-toting, right-wing extremist that they all think I am."

Said Ashley Sova, quoted in "A rural Washington school board race shows how far-right extremists are shifting to local power/The establishment candidate thought she was a shoo-in, but she hadn’t contended with the home-schooling, anti-masking member of the far-right Three Percent movement" (WaPo). 

Sova was reminded that she was, quite literally, toting a gun at that moment, with a pistol strapped to her hip. 

She laughed. “But I’m not waving it around, you know what I mean,” she said. “This is a tool. It is to be an equalizer in any bad situation. I’m not here to intimidate people.”...Two hours before she was to be sworn in at her first school board meeting, Sova was in mud-spattered boots feeding farm animals on her family’s 12-acre compound, which is nestled in the woods behind a tall metal gate with signs warning that trespassers would be shot. Sova said she would change her shoes and try not to cuss, but that otherwise, she intended to be 100 percent herself on the board....

Sova is an accidental politician, recruited as a last-minute replacement when another candidate, a local right-wing activist, realized that his address was just outside the district. She said she never previously sought any public role — “Oh sweet baby Jesus, no!” — and didn’t think she had much of a chance at winning. 

Sova saw running mainly as a way to register conservative discontent on the issues of the moment: mask mandates, diversity and inclusion efforts, sex education lessons. Before filing, Sova said, she had family check-ins with her husband, a Slovakian immigrant whose family’s escape from communist rule influenced her politics, and their three children, ages 16, 15 and 10. The kids have been home-schooled since 2014. 

“It was a big decision for us,” Sova said of entering the race. “I knew right now, in this era, that I was going to get a lot of crap.” And she did, mostly related to her Three Percenter activity, which Sova brushes off as being “in the country doing country things.” 

She said she doesn’t take part in protests at the state capitol. She joined because she shares the group’s “constitutionalist” stances and wanted to learn survival skills like canning and butchering. “We have bonfires over here where the music is loud and the neighbors don’t care. Where we’ve got a big fire going, kids jumping on the trampoline and everybody’s running around and having fun,” Sova said. “That, to us, is Three Percent.” 

Sova’s critics reject that idealized image, especially after seeing Three Percenter flags among the rioters at the U.S. Capitol....

ADDED: I had to go over to Wikipedia to answer my question 3% of what? 

The group's name derives from the erroneous claim that "the active forces in the field against the King's tyranny never amounted to more than 3% of the colonists" during the American Revolution.

Also of interest: 

On February 21, 2021, their leadership dissolved the American national group in response to the 2021 United States Capitol attack, condemning the violence. Other Three Percenters remain as independent local groups.

"Until this fall, the National School Boards Association was a noncontroversial, bipartisan lobby group. Then its leaders wrote President Biden a letter."

"It alleged that the threatening and aggressive acts against school board members across the country might be a form of 'domestic terrorism' and asked for federal law enforcement intervention. Now, the association is at risk of total collapse....  If the school board association’s goal was to tamp down conservative parent protests, it had the exact opposite effect, galvanizing a movement that coalesced last fall around the idea of parental rights.... In one email, an NSBA board member wrote that [its interim director Chip] Slaven had said the letter had been requested by Education Secretary Miguel Cardona for use by the White House. In another, Slaven wrote that the letter included 'additional information on some of the specific threats,' as requested by the White House.... Five days after the NSBA letter, Attorney General Merrick Garland responded. He directed the FBI to work with U.S. attorneys across the country to convene meetings within 30 days with federal, state and local leaders to discuss strategies for addressing threats to school personnel...."

From "National School Boards Association stumbles into politics and is blasted apart/Its leaders compared aggressive school protests to ‘domestic terrorism.’ The backlash was fast and severe" (WaPo).

"I’m well aware of the stereotypes of white parents choosing the private-school option when the going gets tough at public schools."

"I told myself that prioritizing being a 'good leftist' at the expense of my son’s well-being wasn’t good parenting, but as a red-diaper baby myself, the white guilt dies hard... Sending my kid to private school was accompanied by a lot of angst....  The pandemic, and the school-reopening debate in particular, has thrown me into an ideological mid-life crisis, questioning all my prior political assumptions. I’m still attempting to hold onto the progressive label while calling out the policies I see as antithetical to it, but the longer fellow progressives support new school closures and other policies that restrict kids’ lives in order to allay the anxieties of adults, and have been shown to cause far more harm than benefit, the more alienated I feel."

From "How School Closures Made Me Question My Progressive Politics/I’ve never felt more alienated from the liberal Democratic circles I usually call home" by Rebecca Bodenheimer (Politico).

Why are college students ever trusted to run their own lives?

I'm reading "Expecting Students to Play It Safe if Colleges Reopen Is a Fantasy/Safety plans border on delusional and could lead to outbreaks of Covid-19 among students, faculty and staff" by Laurence Steinberg (a psychology professor who wrote a book called "Age of Opportunity: Lessons From the New Science of Adolescence').

Most types of risky behavior — reckless driving, criminal activity, fighting, unsafe sex and binge drinking, to name just a few — peak during the late teens and early 20s.... Under calm conditions, college-age individuals can control their impulses as well as their elders, but when they are emotionally aroused, they evince the poor self-control of teenagers.... But it’s hard to think of an age during which risky behavior is more common and harder to deter than between 18 and 24....

My pessimistic prediction is that the college and university reopening strategies under consideration will work for a few weeks before their effectiveness fizzles out. By then, many students will have become cavalier about wearing masks and sanitizing their hands. They will ignore social distancing guidelines when they want to hug old friends they run into on the way to class. They will venture out of their “families” and begin partying in their hallways with classmates from other clusters, and soon after, with those who live on other floors, in other dorms, or off campus. They will get drunk and hang out and hook up with people they don’t know well. And infections on campus — not only among students, but among the adults who come into contact with them — will begin to increase....

[U]niversities must be informed by what developmental science has taught us about how adolescents and young adults think. As someone who is well-versed in this literature, I will ask to teach remotely for the time being.

We need to keep these little monsters locked up until they're 25. Who knows what they will do with their freedom? They might party in their hallways and become cavalier about wearing masks and sanitizing their hands. There's no end to the dangers of freedom. You really cannot trust people to put safety first, week after week, month after month. At some point, they will hang out and hook up.

"What does all of this mean for colleges suddenly forced to move online because of the coronavirus pandemic?"

"The only thing they can create right now is distance.... They do not have the time or resources necessary to map out the rest of their courses and build online versions on the fly that can accommodate large numbers of students. They will not be able to train their teachers how to teach or their learners how to learn. There will be little personalization.... [I]t’s a mistake to say that colleges will be 'moving to online education.' All they’ll really be doing is conducting traditional education at a distance. That will be hard enough."

From "Everybody Ready for the Big Migration to Online College? Actually, No/One consequence of coronavirus: It will become more apparent that good online education is easier said than done" by Kevin Carey (NYT).

Carey is the author of "The End of College: Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere" (2016). He's for on-line education.

"Singapore, which has been heralded for its response to Covid-19, decided that closing schools would do more harm than good."

"Political leaders and health officials there have addressed concerns about Covid-19 through clear, consistent and transparent communications about their response to the virus. If schools remain open, officials could enact measures to limit any potential spread among children and staff. All students could be checked daily for fever, a possible sign of Covid-19 infection. Even more attention should be given to hand washing and reminding children not to touch their faces. Children should be taught to sneeze into their sleeves. Schools can consider changing seating arrangements to keep children six feet apart.... Nonetheless, government officials may feel pressure to close schools. For true effectiveness... [c]hildren couldn’t gather in other settings, which would be very difficult to enforce. If schools close, child care programs will likely close too and working parents may have to stay home to watch their children. Health care and critical infrastructure workers would not be able to do their jobs for the same reason...."

Writes Jennifer Nuzzo, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, in NYT.

Are classrooms big enough to put all the children 6 feet away from any other child? That strikes me as absurd, but the main message I'm seeing from this column is that schools are better than families at keeping an eye on children and controlling them. And also schools are childcare facilities, and if they shut down, vast numbers of adults won't be able to go to work, and that will have a terrible effect not just on the economy but on the provision of health care services.

Smart kids

 

“The smartest kid in class, by contrast, is not an expensive problem. A boy or girl who finishes an assignment early can be handed a book and told to read quietly while the teacher works on getting other children caught up. What would clearly be neglect if it happened to a special-needs child tends to look different if the child is gifted: Being left alone might even feel like a reward, an acknowledgment of being a fast learner.”

When I came across that in a recent Boston Globe pieceon educating gifted kids, I had to laugh. Having once been the smartest kid in my public school class, I was anything but a cheap problem to fix; in fact, my parents ended up sending me to a private school to finish high school. I’m a great example of high intellect swamped by low expectations.

Fast-forward a generation to my own kids’ educations. You would think it would be better, but it’s not. Gifted and talented programs—all the rage before No Child Left Behind—have (if they still exist at all) become shock troops in the military boarding school approach to education we’ve adopted. More seat work, more homework, no time for things like art and music.

Busy work is the bane of the bright child’s existence. It teaches him to blow off his homework and rely on test-taking skills to get by. Moreover, it ignores developing the synthetic, intuitive parts of his brain, which are developedby studying art and music, and, yes, by daydreaming.

I have a friend who’s a classicist, living in penury as an adjunct professor. I’ve often thought that our school district should send three kids to her and pay her the roughly $65,000 it gets for educating them for a year. After four years, they would know history, music, the arts, Greek and Latin.

And before you tell me that’s not enough, America was built by people with exactly that education.

Message me if you want information about next year’s classes and workshops.