Taxing all foreign goods, to boost the sales of US products and protect manufacturers from cheap British goods
● Introducing a protective Tariff to enable the nation to raise money from these taxes and at the same time protect the nation's goods from cheaper priced foreign items
kids are distracted and a little on edge these days, says the Tufts psychologist Christopher Willard
Child’s Mind: Mindfulness Practices to Help Our Children Be More Focused, Calm and Relaxed (Parallax Press)
The central idea of mindfulness, he says, is to bring a very focused awareness of the present moment into our everyday lives through things such as breathing exercises and actively listening to and observing the world around us.
Studies have shown that children can learn to regulate their emotions and concentrate better with the aid of mindfulness practices. Even children with attention deficit disorders have learned to concentrate better using these kinds of exercises.
Children as young as four, he says, can be taught to breathe in and out in a conscious way, with a little visual help. To do this, he suggests having the child lie on her back with a stuffed animal or pillow on her belly, which helps her become aware of her breathing as she watches the object go up and down.
Another mindfulness exercise is to ask a child to listen carefully for about a minute and then name five sounds he heard while being quiet.
Very clear imagery. He opens the essay with his personal anecdote to set the scene for this discussion. It also lets the reader know right away that he is a gun owner.
What I was doing was perfectly legal. In North Carolina, long-gun transfers by private sellers require no background checks.
so long as the buyer has a purchase permit or a concealed-carry license.
I felt uneasy
He liked the rifle. I needed the cash. We shook hands, and off we went.
There is rarely a moment when I’m not within reach of a firearm.
We don’t touch the guns or draw them from their holsters. They are unseen and unspoken of, but always there.
Rarely do we mention what we carry
I didn’t know what I was doing, but I knew the rules: Always assume a firearm is loaded. Always keep the gun pointed in a safe direction. Know your target and what’s beyond it.
Guns were often a bridge between father and son.
or my family, guns had always been a means of putting food on the table. My father never owned a handgun. He kept nothing for home defense.
had a gun put to my head
I can remember that
steel
I can remember
In the end, what happened was swept under the rug. My parents said the school was probably trying to keep the story off the news.
surrounded myself with the people I did as a form of protection.
I dropped to the ground as gunfire rang from a car at a bonfire party.
I pushed friends behind the brick foundation of a house as a shootout erupted over pills. There were times when someone could have easily been shot and killed.
his service weapon pushed into the base of my skull.
I stood there trembling while they apologized.
Jackson County
I found a community that reminded me of my grandmother, where folks still kept big gardens and canned the vegetables they grew. They still filled the freezer with meat taken by rod and rifle — trout and turkey, dove and rabbit, deer, bear, anything in season.
hared passion for wilderness and time spent in the field with gun in hand.
Those types of things are rare now, even in places like Appalachia.
A few weeks later, the boy took that .30-30 lever action into the field and killed his first deer with it — the same as his uncle, his grandfather and great-grandfather.
centuries of experience gathered around the campfire each night
the .308 blew apart the morning.
There is a sadness that only hunters know, a moment when lament overshadows any desire for celebration
Life is sustained by death
the killing is not easy, nor should it be.
would feed me for a year
I asked if there was anything I could’ve done differently to make him more comfortable when he first approached the truck.
He smiled and told me: “But this is South Carolina. Most every car I pull over has a gun.”
As I headed toward the mountains, all I could think about was Philando Castile,
situation was re
All I could think about was how things might have been different if the
versed and that young black state trooper with braces had been behind the wheel, a white trooper cautiously approaching the car.
It was impossible not to recognize how gun culture reeks of privilege.
This guy knows his guns. Even though his essay doesn't cite research, you can see his ethos through his personal experience and his use of precise jargon.
There were always guns, but nothing like the assault weapons that line the shelves today.
firearms whose sole purpose would be to take human life if I were left with no other choice.
I’ve witnessed how quickly a moment can turn to a matter of life and death. I live in a region where 911 calls might not bring blue lights for an hour. Whether it’s preparation or paranoia, I plan for worst-case scenarios and trust no one but myself for my survival.
they joke about the minute hand of the doomsday clock inching closer to midnight.
as they wait for the end of the world.
they own them because they’re fun at the range and affordable to shoot. They use the rifles for punching paper, a few for shooting coyotes. E
step as close to Title II of the federal Gun Control Act as legally possible without the red tape and paperwork. They fire bullets into Tannerite targets that blow pumpkins into the sky.
None of them see a connection between the weapons they own and the shootings at Sandy Hook, San Bernardino, Aurora, Orlando, Las Vegas, Parkland. They see mug shots of James Holmes, Omar Mateen, Stephen Paddock, Nikolas Cruz — “crazier than a shithouse rat,” they say. “If it hadn’t been that rifle, he’d have done it with something else.”
Where is the fault in this logic? It just doesn't add up.
They fear that what starts as an assault-weapons ban will snowball into an attack on everything in the safe.
I understand what’s at stake
I think about that boy picking up that AR in Cabela’s, and I’m torn between the culture I grew up with and how that culture has devolved.
changes I know must come, changes to what types of firearms line the shelves and to the background checks and ownership requirements needed to carry one out the door.
an unrelenting fear of what could be lost
a subsistence culture already threatened by the loss of public land, rising costs and a widening rural-urban divide; the right of individuals to protect their own lives and the lives of their families.
He cut a look in my direction as if I’d absolutely lost my mind.
I’d be fine with an assault-weapons ban
question is irrelevant, that the reason doesn’t supersede the right.
Despite everything we have in common, despite the fact that he’s my best friend and we were going squirrel hunting in a few days, the two of us fundamentally disagree
As sad as it is to say, the silence is easier
there were kids on the television in the background, high school survivors who were willing to say what we are not, and I was ashamed.
ne of those pretty, late-winter days with bluebird skies when the trees are still naked on the mountains and you can see every shadow and contour of the landscape.
The muzzle was pointed in our direction. Ashley was terrified.
The truth is, there are guns I feel justified in owning and guns I feel belong on battlefields.
I know that part of what they’re missing or refusing to acknowledge is how fear ushered in this shift in gun culture over the past two decades.
Fear is the factor no one wants to address — fear of criminals, fear of terrorists, fear of the government’s turning tyrannical and, perhaps more than anything else, fear of one another.
I recognize this, because I recognize my own and I recognize that despite all I know and believe I can’t seem to overcome it.
I don’t buy into that only-way-to-stop-a-bad-guy-with-a-gun-is-a-good-guy-with-a-gun bravado.
I have no visions of being a hero. Instead, I find myself looking for where I’d run, asking myself what I would get behind. The gun is the last resort. It’s the final option when all else is exhausted.
we walked, I could feel the pistol holstered on my side, the weight of my gun tugging at my belt. The fear was lessened by knowing that there was a round chambered, that all it would take is the downward push of a safety and the short pull of a trigger for that bullet to breathe. I felt safer knowing that gun was there.
How does fear drive so many of us to distrust and hate our fellow Americans? How does the Gun Lobby and the NRA use this fear to their advantage? What role does fear play in racial prejudice? How do we combat and address this fear?
"Crickets are small programmable devices that can make things spin, light up, and play music. You can plug lights, motors, and sensors into a Cricket, then write computer programs to tell them how to react and behave. With Crickets, you can create musical sculptures, interactive jewelry, dancing creatures, and other artistic inventions -- and learn important math, science, and engineering ideas in the process.
Crickets are based on more than a decade of NSF-funded educational research. Lifelong Kindergarten researchers collaborated with the LEGO company to create the first "programmable bricks," squeezing computational power into LEGO bricks. This research led to the LEGO MindStorms robotics kits, now used by millions of people around the world. While LEGO MindStorms is designed especially for making robots, Crickets are designed especially for making artistic creations. Crickets were refined in collaboration with the Playful Invention and Exploration (PIE) museum network, and are now sold as a product through the Playful Invention Company (PICO)."
In my opinion this is very true, there are few if any directives on how teachers should be facing the changes in the 21st Century, everybody is still focused on hardware rather than cloud computing and web 2.0.
This isn't just about online learning! How many of these roles do you fulfill as a teacher, "facilitator," or admin? How successful have professional development efforts been in getting teachers to try out new roles? How successful have they been in getting kids to try out some of these roles? What other roles are there for students?
A place with teachers can display student artwork for the world to see. Becomes there own online gallery. Secure by parents approving comments. Can order copies of your child's artwork via gift shop and your school will received 15% back. Goal is for students to be able to come back here someday to see their own artwork.
With Artsonia, teachers can build a gallery of their students' art projects. The website lets family and friends log on to see the children's art. Friends and relatives can comment on students' work, which is posted with their first name and an ID number. They can also sign up to get alerts when their students' new masterpieces are uploaded. Anyone can purchase coffee mugs, key chains, and other items featuring the artwork. Items are often given as a holiday, Mother's Day, or Father's Day gift. Schools earn 15 percent when parents purchase custom keepsakes with their child's artwork.