The general decline in standards today

[rue]

are you talking to me?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkp1CwGg-Kw&feature=related

 

[AtomicEraTom]

Schools shouldn't be like this. Growing up, our schools weren't like this at all! That was mostly a big city thing, but it seems to be moving to smaller and smaller cities. Heck, my high school auto shop teacher lives next door to my parents and recently had a party. We ended up with half of my old teachers up at the house drinking beer with us! I think student-teacher relationships should be more friendly than them being viewed as 'the man' as so many do. I'm still good friends with many of my teachers and they have my cell phone number, so we can keep in touch.

 

[rue]

In some schools, male teachers no longer wear tied ties (only clip ons) for safety reasons. I've known women who don't wear their hair long for some of the same reasons. Really sad, but having seen teachers get punched in the face and loose teeth when trying to break up a fight, I don't blame them trying to stay safe. Parent/teacher night is different- unless it is right after school or they expect the parents to have similar issues. (I know one teacher who was attacked by a parent during a conference with the parent.)

Geez...... You live in a tough area!

 

[jamespowers]

I would tend to agree with everything you said. The school in which this female teacher worked had police on duty, and I believe the parent was charged. I believe the teacher said that the parent was already on probation.

Oh geez!:eusa_doh:

I suppose it was like a former teacher my wife had who often told of an incident where a student threw a cleaver at her from the back of the room. It stuck in the piano at the front of the class---thank goodness. Needless to say, that student was gone.

 

[jamespowers]

Schools shouldn't be like this. Growing up, our schools weren't like this at all! That was mostly a big city thing, but it seems to be moving to smaller and smaller cities. Heck, my high school auto shop teacher lives next door to my parents and recently had a party. We ended up with half of my old teachers up at the house drinking beer with us! I think student-teacher relationships should be more friendly than them being viewed as 'the man' as so many do. I'm still good friends with many of my teachers and they have my cell phone number, so we can keep in touch.

Wow! Now that is unique.

 

[PoohBang]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkp1CwGg-Kw&feature=related

lol

 

[scottyrocks]

What is a "back to school night" - is that what we would call a parent's evening, where parents can go in to be told about their kids' progress?

In my neck of the woods, 'back to school night' is when the parents come in to get a feel for the school and their kids' teacher and classroom. Usually the parents sit at their kids' desks and the teacher talks to them for a while. Parents find out about their kids' individual progress during 'parent/teacher conferences.'

 

[LizzieMaine]

Thanks to you both for answering me. I've asked my mother and others of that era and they have no idea, which is odd to me. I would think everyone would have known [huh]

The thing is, most people of the time had little to no contact with hippies -- they were a phenomenon you saw on television, when Joe Friday lectured some longhair punk with sunglasses about LSD, or you saw in double-page spreads in Look magazine. I never saw a live, in-person hippy until the mid-70s -- they just weren't a presence in small towns or even small cities. And by the time they did filter down to that level, any ideology that drove the movement had long since been leached out, and it was just another marketing driven fad, or an excuse to get high.

 

[HoosierDaddy]

Thanks to you both for answering me. I've asked my mother and others of that era and they have no idea, which is odd to me. I would think everyone would have known [huh]

I don't know exactly where it started...but it did spread like wildfire. The time was right and the music was a big influence. The Viet Nam war brought a hopelessness to many of us..the deep emotional aftermath of what happened to Kennedy. The world seemed in such turmoil. It wasn't so difficult for us youngsters to prefer a land of fantasy. The real one had become a nightmare to deal with.

 

[PoohBang]

I don't know exactly where it started...but it did spread like wildfire. The time was right and the music was a big influence. The Viet Nam war brought a hopelessness to many of us..the deep emotional aftermath of what happened to Kennedy. The world seemed in such turmoil. It wasn't so difficult for us youngsters to prefer a land of fantasy. The real one had become a nightmare to deal with.

Well put Hoosier

 

[Viola]

My parents are sort of hippies. In the '70s my dad had long hair (always showered and always had a job, as he points out) and he and my mom upped and moved to Maine to do the back-to-the-land thing. They lived in a non-working RV converted from a schoolbus, with no running water, no electricity, a woodstove, and 7 cats and 1 dog.

Drove a Beetle, my mom was more than slightly New Age, and they gave their first born daughter a silly name (though not as silly as some).
I was born in Maine but don't remember it, as they moved back to their hometown when I was six months old.

My mom is very honest she only stopped smoking pot because my dad didn't like it. They got together when they were 16.

They're still happily married and rather love-dovey, still working and still showering, my mom is still into organic gardening and my dad still occasionally grumbles about The Man.

My fashion and decor choices annoy my mom but c'est la vie.

I don't hate hippies.

 

[HoosierDaddy]

The thing is, most people of the time had little to no contact with hippies -- they were a phenomenon you saw on television, when Joe Friday lectured some longhair punk with sunglasses about LSD, or you saw in double-page spreads in Look magazine. I never saw a live, in-person hippy until the mid-70s -- they just weren't a presence in small towns or even small cities. And by the time they did filter down to that level, any ideology that drove the movement had long since been leached out, and it was just another marketing driven fad, or an excuse to get high.

Excellent post again Lizzie...and I agree.
HD

 

[Viola]

What about all the people the hippies admired and emulated? Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, the Nearings, a lot of them were actually pretty Golden Age. I mean, unless the Great Depression doesn't count.

 

[TidiousTed]

I guess it was in America as it was here in Europe that most people the copied the hippie dress code and long hair wasn't hippies at all but just liked the style. I've worn my hair long since 1965 but I've never latched on to the hippie philosophy. I studied first languages, then design and when I was finished at 31 I started my own studio and worked that into a successful business with 32 people employed. When I turned 45 I sold it and started to work free lance because I could afford to slow down and enjoy life and not work myself to death. And all that time I worn my hair in a 30 - 40 cm ponytail and still do, as many people in the European artisan/artist/design community does

 

[LizzieMaine]

I remember the back-to-the-landers well -- we didn't really think of them as "hippies," although many of them seemed to come out of that movement. As long as they were here to work -- and they had to work hard, if they expected to survive very long here -- they were respected. It's sort of the same difference as between a hobo and a bum: a hobo earns his keep and a bum doesn't.

There are still a lot of the BTTLers around up here, but most of them have moved on from living in vans and buses. A lot of them have done quite well in farming, and some -- the Burt's Bees people for example -- have become quite rich.

 

[Travis Lee Johnston]

Smoking weed doesn't make you a hippy, it just makes you hungry. Woody Guthrie was a hippy?

 

[LizzieMaine]

Seeger and Guthrie and that group were yet another influence, sure -- Seeger was leading a folk-singing group called the Almanac Singers in the early forties which did labor-oriented political songs and such, which prefigured the stuff he'd do later on. They were very clean-cut about it though -- they were trying to promote the idea that labor was an integral part of America, and weren't trying to position themselves as any sort of counterculture.

 

[TidiousTed]

Smoking weed doesn't make you a hippy, it just makes you hungry. Woody Guthrie was a hippy?

Or Willie Nelson, or Bill Clinton for that matter

 

[Viola]

Smoking weed doesn't make you a hippy, it just makes you hungry. Woody Guthrie was a hippy?

No, but he was certainly admired and emulated by the hippies. You don't think Dylan et. al. owed him anything? Seeger certainly embraced "those young, earnest kids" and they loved him back. I'm not saying there's no distinction but there's certain Golden Era ties for a lot of that stuff, as much as there is for the young kids today who wear fedoras and listen to Sinatra.

(My parents HATE that I listen to Sinatra but that's a story for another day).

 

[Viola]

I remember the back-to-the-landers well -- we didn't really think of them as "hippies," although many of them seemed to come out of that movement. As long as they were here to work -- and they had to work hard, if they expected to survive very long here -- they were respected. It's sort of the same difference as between a hobo and a bum: a hobo earns his keep and a bum doesn't.

Thank you for explaining that they were seen as different. I wondered, because of your previous post that the hippies were unknown.

My parents actually speak really highly of how well they were treated in Maine. Oh, my folks were oddballs, and they think slightly pitied as goofy kids "from away," but they worked, never turned up drunk and were never late, and it seems that was respected.