Just check the web… isn’t that the mantra of us all now?

I mean if I go to Best Buy and see a digital camera or big screen tv and Best Buy is having a SALE!… a huge SALE!! that used to tempt me a lot more than it does nowadays.

Why? Because I don’t trust that Best Buy will really be the “best buy” so even though I get to touch and hold and see and feel the camera/tv in their store, I check the web for the best price.
And then it often turns out that Newegg or Amazon or eBay or someone has the same camera/tv for $75-$150 bucks cheaper… and it’ll be at my door in 2 days. Free shipping.

And no tax! (Which I am, btw, not a fan of. We gotta start charging tax for internet buys… as a school teacher I clearly see where the money folks are not paying on sales tax could – and shoul – go.) So see ya, Best Buy. But thanks for allowing me to check out the goods. If only your prices were better and you didn’t have to charge me that stinky little thing called tax (which, in Southern California is 9.75% (Think about that… I pay virtually 10% extra on every purchase I make near my home. That means the internet is an automatic 10% savings. Uhm… hello!)
Yes, this stinks for Best Buy… and it feels unsustainable for American business/society on the whole… and yet, this is how I shop for “big ticket items”.

Just check the web… that’s my mantra nowadays. Isn’t it yours?

If a kid leaves school without the ability to comprehend Ralph Ellison, well… it pales compared to the consequences of a kid not being able to read their credit card agreement.

Why does that not seem more obvious to people who wield power over the directions of our school curriculum?

Why do we not spend more time teaching “functional literacy” to our kids?

If I was a conspiracy theorist, I’d say it was because this is how we keep the lower socio-economic class in the lower socio-economic rungs of society. Upper socio-economic parents teach their kids the tenets of managing money, the financial rules attendant to cash. (Well, they certainly try but there are rubes to be taken to the cleaners at all levels of society.)

People who do not know this stuff, however, do not have the ability to teach it to their kids. And worse, they [incorrectly] presume that our public schools will show this stuff to their offspring.

But we don’t. Hmm, how many folks with poor literacy skills have been duped into under-buying phone plans so that they end up getting $860 phone bills because they thought txt messages were included with unlimited talk time?

Okay, could happen to anybody.

Hmm, how many folks with poor literacy skills have been duped into signing up for one of those “no payments for six months” promotions then fallen victim to the fact that the rate skyrockets to 28% and they backdate the interest owed to all the way to the date of original purchase?

Okay, could happen to anybody.

Hmm, how many people have been tricked into buying one of those “gift cards” to a superstore in their local supermarket (i.e. Best Buy, Staples, Target, and so on) and not realized that there is a 4% processing fee so that for every dollar you spend on the gift card, the recipient only gets 96 cents worth of goods.

Okay, could happen to anybody.

Hmm, now ask yourself… How many people have fallen victim to all three of the above scenarios?

Uhm waiter, more literary canon please.

Funny but English teachers will go to war to defend the canon. (Just you dare try to remove TKAM or Huck or Gatsby… you’ll have to pry it from my cold dead hands.)

But teach basic day-to-day functional document interpretation. That’s not for English teachers who teach reading, is it? I mean isn’t their some kind of business ed class or home ec book that covers that?

When we teach reading, we teach Reading with a capital R… even when so many of our kids are in desperate need of learning how to read all the lower case r stuff.