From ground to clouds

 

Yesterday’s post reported on my April 7th return to the great colonies of wildflowers on the prairie in the southeast quadrant of E. Pflugerville Parkway and N. Railroad Ave. in Pflugerville. Antelope horns milkweed, Asclepias asperula, figured in all three of the post’s pictures, which revealed how that species of milkweed can form a little group or even grow in a ring. Similarly, today’s top photograph shows that milkweed in colorful mixed displays of greenthread (Thelesperma filifolium), Indian paintbrush (Castilleja indivisa), Indian blanket (Gaillardia pulchella), and bluebonnet (Lupinus texensis).

 

 

Antelope horns milkweed plants may rise a few inches off the ground but tend rather to sprawl. Some of the sprawling stalks get long enough that I experimented with lifting one so I could portray it against the morning’s wispy clouds. A picture like the one above, therefore, isn’t something you’d see in nature, but it’s my nature to bring it to you. In contrast, velvet gaura (Oenothera curtiflora) grows erect and therefore needs no human intervention for a configuration like the one in today’s third photograph.

 

 

Every so often I portrayed the worthily wispy and dramatic clouds in their own right.

 

 

 

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Hardly a day goes by now when I don’t find another reason to despair over what’s become of my country. Yesterday an April 16th article in The Washington Examiner did it:

 

Chicago Public Schools teachers are instructing their eighth graders to ignore Western academic tradition, “decolonize learning,” and become political activists, according to the district’s new English curriculum.

Known as Skyline, the brand new, $135 million universal curriculum introduced by CPS in 2021 is rooted in critical race theory and diversity, equity, and inclusion ideology. While the bulk of what teachers are using to instruct children is behind password walls and largely inaccessible to parents on the school district website, a teacher inside CPS shared several of the English units with the Washington Examiner that highlighted the left-wing bent of what students there are learning.

“They want to teach [students] to think ‘correctly.’ They want to set them thinking about things like identity as soon as possible and channel their minds on propaganda,” said the longtime CPS teacher, who requested anonymity for fear of professional retribution. “The idea was that we were, for equity’s sake, going to have this curriculum where every student’s got the same thing, and the same thing was heavily infused with a very far left ideology.”

The extensive curriculums follow major themes such as an anti-Western sentiment focused on “decolonization,” far-left activism, and anti-white messaging.

  

Later in the article we learn that:

 

The focus of the curriculum comes as learning statistics from Chicago schools show unsettling results.

Both elementary and middle school reading proficiency levels in the district are at 16%, and their math proficiency is 12%. High school students in Chicago drop to 15% for reading proficiency while doing slightly better in math at 14%. In the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, CPS eighth graders rank below that of students in most major cities while spending $18,000 per pupil.

“To put it bluntly, 14-year-old children in America’s third-largest city are barely able to read, yet instead of remediating this crisis, CPS chose to spend finite tax dollars to buy new curriculum using politically charged graphic novels,” Nicole Neily, president of Parents Defending Education, told the Washington Examiner. “Students deserve to be inspired by great literature, encouraged to pursue greatness, not to patronizingly cater to the lowest common denominator using childish cartoons.”

 

Like I said, one more reason to despair. You can read Breccan F. Thies’s depressing story in full.

 

© 2024 Steven Schwartzman