Ken,

Your wonderful kids chaos learning theory is right up there beside Toffler's 
"Future Shock".   I am saving it for a Children's Museum planning 
discussion.

As to radiation, the stuff that came over Ithaca was publicly tracked all 
the way from the ground level tests in Nevada.   Each day the national radio 
news would tell us where the nuclear cloud was that day and which way it was 
heading.    When in your area, you were advised to stay indoors.   The s... 
really hit the fan when the cow's milk in Wisconsin turned out to be too 
radioactive to drink because of the fallout radiation in the grass the cows 
had been eating.    The big news was about all that valuable Wisconsin milk 
that had to be dumped.    The never spoken news was about where they dumped 
it.    I guess, as long as it wasn't in a human gut, it was out there in 
nature, and everyone knew that Man had been given domination over nature, so 
we were now safe.   Funny how that milk dumping story was never completed in 
those days the way it would be chased down by reporters and 
environmentalists today.   I suppose it all went down the Great Lakes sewer.

About then, a guy living just up the road near Ellis Hollow, a really 
intelligent fellow several years ahead of me in school went off to Alaska to 
some college unknown to the Cornellians.   When he returned for the holidays 
and was asked what he was studying, he said an odd word no one had heard 
before, "Ecology".   No one at the gathering knew what that was, and when he 
talked about salmon and habitat, it all seemed very weird and terribly 
esoteric.


cp from Ellis Hollow



----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Gabriel Orgrease" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Friday, December 21, 2007 5:26 AM
Subject: Re: [BP] Rescuing Recess


> Cuyler Page wrote:
>> If some of those kids-become-adults are trying to ban recess as their 
>> strategy to accomplish the same thing, maybe the Belgrade Aphorism Circle 
>> has it right when they ask, "Why shouldn't we be proud of our history, 
>> when every day is worse than the previous one."   Wonder if they have an 
>> aphorism for the status quo.
> Cuyler,
>
> When he was younger we sent our son to a progressive public school in the 
> Village where my wife's two older children had also gone. It was a school 
> that encouraged parents to be involved. So I went to one of the parent 
> sessions and immediately got embroiled in an argument with another parent 
> along the lines that they felt the classroom was too chaotic and that 
> there should be fewer students per room. I countered that I wanted our son 
> to be exposed to as much chaos as possible as it is an inevitable human 
> tendency to make order out of chaos. Better that the kids learn to deal 
> with chaos now in a relatively safe environment than later in life when 
> there is not the support system to bolster them. That argument did not go 
> over so well with the progressive adults. After that I told my wife she 
> had best handle the social side of the schooling. I smile a lot.
>
> I was certainly not happy though when in recess at another school in 
> Brooklyn he got hit in the head with a baseball bat for standing too close 
> to the batter. But he won't do that again.
>
> As to that radiation... I had/have second cousins removed or whatever 
> level of relation that was that were thalidomide babies. The family sold 
> Masey Ferguson tractors. I distinctly remember them having very shortened 
> arms with small hands without all the usual digits and disfigured faces. I 
> always wondered why. As far as I know the US government has never owned up 
> to their experiments in seeding the East Coast atmosphere with radiation. 
> It is the responsibility and potential pay-back if they did own up that is 
> one of the arguments given for why the US government plays down the 
> relevance of Chernobyl to all of us. Face it, when you see the white flash 
> there is no need to count. Though the chances of their being no flash to 
> see with a benign discharge are fairly high.
>
> ][<en
>
> --
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>
> 

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