Serving Lincoln County for more than a century!
Serving Lincoln County for more than a century!
Sorted by date Results 1326 - 1350 of 1862
The Odessa School District staff committed to having Great Expectations for students and each other during the 2012-2013 school year. This commitment produced amazing results in what students learned, how they behaved, and what they accomplished. As the 2013-2014 school year begins, we are committing ourselves to go Beyond Great Expectations. We are committing ourselves to making sure every student is given every chance to be successful. The teaching staff will spend Monday, August 26, working with Greg Benner to continue...
To the Editor: Reading the August 4, 1988 history, I saw the name Stanley Wrasper and it brought back memories of me playing a gig with him and with Richard Totusek on piano. This was in the summer of 1959 while I was working on the Ott ranch. I was given the oldest set of drums that I had ever seen in my 55 years of playing. The set had to be from the very early 1900s. We played at a place in Wilson Creek. What I remember is Stanley and Richard whistling in harmony all the way from Irby to the gig. Not one song but one...
When our special needs son was in school, he always rode the school bus for handicapped children. God blessed us with great school bus drivers and you have to be very special yourself for this job. In my husband’s church office, he had intercoms that led to his secretary due to the long distance between offices. There were days that Tom would pick up truck drivers speaking on CBs to other truck drivers. Tom would stop his work occasionally and try to catch a few words between drivers. Tom said it never distracted him from h...
In Part 7, we saw Common Core curriculum being used with second-graders in New York. For K-12, the standards, readings, and suggested curriculum remain about the same – developmentally inappropriate for learners, especially in elementary school. How did it come to this? According to the 2010 U.S. Census and the National Center for Education Statistics, 13,604 school districts oversee the more than 100,000 public schools serving about 50 million students. I understand that about 100 high-poverty school districts formed the bas...
What are the odds? That was my thought when I read recent pieces about a very special fossil from the Hell Creek Formation of South Dakota. Here’s some background: if you saw the movie Jurassic Park, you may think that Tyrannosaurus rex was the biggest predator of all time. That’s certainly the way the movie portrays the 40-foot-long dinosaur that could weigh seven tons. But there’s actually been a long debate in scientific circles about whether T. rex was a predator chasing d...
The grain markets have been in a downtrend for the last couple of months, pressured by very favorable weather in the central U.S. and continued selling by speculative funds. Traders were surprised that in the July crop report USDA increased acres and production despite the flooding and planting delays that the cornbelt experienced for most of the spring. Heading into Monday’s report, most traders were looking for a 14 billion bu corn crop and a 2 billion bu carryover for next year. Once again the market got caught leaning the...
I just got back from a short stay in my home town. I’m pretty sure I should have stayed longer, but I ran away. I usually do. My dad fell last week, and the results weren’t particularly pretty. When I arrived at his house Saturday afternoon, he was asleep on his bed. That was enough to alarm me. My dad has always been a pretty good napper (wherever he happens to be – on the porch or at the table) but if he’s in bed in the middle of the day, you know it’s serious. After he...
To the Editor: How lovely to write a little news article about the charm I left in your town. I just found out. Here are the links to the blog posts about Kiama's Charm in Odessa: http://catherinapetitvanhoey. blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/kiamas-charm-no-18-is-found.html http://catherinapetitvanhoey. blogspot. co.uk/2013/08/kiamas-charm-no18-news-coverage.html Catherina Hertfordshire, UK And from the blog: I had a lovely email/comment from two children, Makayla and Charleigh, from Odessa in Washington, who found charm no.18...
To the Editor: I certainly empathize with the people who have been hazed by the Obama I.R.S. I discovered the hard way that they do keep lists of people they don’t like. I sued the I.R.S. in 1974. I won and have been a target ever since. My sibling, who was my father’s executor, died in 1979 and he and his lawyer hadn’t been completely honest. I reluctantly agreed to close dad’s estate and 21 years later it was closed. Even though there was only a very small amount of money involved, the I.R.S. sent a lawyer from Washing...
National standards are nothing new; they have been in place at least since the 1950s. However, what the Common Core standards are doing to curriculum can best be explained by Nancy Carlsson-Paige of New York in an email to Susan Ohanion: “What is so fundamentally wrong with this Engage New York approach . . . is the focus on content and having facts and correct answers, a focus that requires a fact-based, didactic pedagogy for success. One where kids passively sit while teachers direct-teach content that is irrelevant to t...
Recently, someone asked me to address (in this column) the issue of bringing more visitors to Odessa to shop in our retail establishments. Believe me, it’s not a topic foreign to me. Or to anyone else who belongs to the Chamber of Commerce. Or to anyone who owns or works in any of those aforementioned retail establishments. And I'’m including our restaurants in that category. The Chamber of Commerce, love ‘em or hate ‘em, has done a pretty good job of bringing people to town...
The House of Representatives and House Republican leadership recently took a bold step to separate the Farm Bill into farm policy and feeding programs (aka food stamps). When asked for a reaction, the most common answer in my farm community is “it’s about time.” We have allowed Congress to fall into a pattern of mega-bills too large for anyone but full time lobbyists to read and understand. Focusing on issues separately allows for more transparency, better debate, and less opportunity for brokered back scratching. The Suppl...
(StatePoint) An epidemic is sweeping the nation. Girls are at a disadvantage when it comes to success in math and science, and the future does not look bright if parents don’t act now. In the next ten years, 80 percent of all jobs will require technical skills, according to Labor Department statistics. And jobs in the science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields are expected to grow twice as fast as all jobs. But currently, the ratio of boys to girls enrolled in STEM courses is a staggering six to one, putting g...
I recently pulled some weeds in my yard. Sometimes I’m glad to have a little simple work where I can see progress, even if the effects of my labor are only temporary. I can only do a little bit at a time, having to take it slow due to arthritic knees. But one thing about pulling weeds in August stands out even when taken in small doses; it’s hot work. With the sun beating down on us, warming the whole nation, it’s easy to wonder if solar power will some day replace fossil fuels as our mainstay energy resource. That could...
To the Editor: We have a problem in the U.S. regarding medical care that was partially caused by Obamacare but also caused by the cost of going to medical school. Our government estimate of being 90,000 physicians short in the year 2020 is not very accurate. They are not considering how much the cost of medical school and the cost of malpractice insurance is causing the possible candidates to change their minds. Becoming a physician assistant takes from four to eight years less time and the median salary in 2010 was $86,000....
Ireland enjoys a mild and stable climate. But even in Ireland there are years that stand out as unusual. Recently a team of researchers led by Harvard's Francis Ludlow announced results of a study of Ireland's climate based on the Irish Annals, a body of writings containing more than 40,000 entries. The Annals record events from 431 A.D. to 1649 A.D. During the Medieval period they were written by monks. From the 1200s onwards some entries were written by historians of the...
Zucchini plants growing in Odessa gardens are beginning to produce the annual over abundance of this versatile vegetable. There is no end to the number and variety of recipes devised to use up the abundance of fruit produced by this prolific plant. Cakes, breads, cookies, casseroles and salads, the recipes keep coming. Several years ago Cindi Bell, formerly of Odessa, gave me copies of a stack of zucchini recipes that she had collected and developed to incorporate zucchini...
This past Sunday, I spent much of the day outdoors, trying to reclaim what little there is of a vegetable garden. Which got me to thinking about how much trouble I have managing my time. Which, in turn, got me to thinking about how fast we all seem to think we need to go. Mind you, there was probably not a direct line between those two concepts. It’s just the way my thinking goes. At any rate, by the time I was done spending some quality time with my hoe, I had decided that I...
Wheat markets, along with corn and beans, continued their downtrends last week. Speculative funds hold a record short position in Chicago wheat futures and a sizeable position in the corn futures, and there has been nothing lately to make them want to cover these short positions. The weather in July in the cornbelt has been favorable, with most areas receiving timely rains with moderate temperatures. Forecasts call for more of the same. As a result, there has been active cash movement in the corn market from the farm and...
To the Editor: One thing that was not mentioned [in the article in the July 25, 2013 issue of The Record] is that Eddy [Kern] is the last living member of the Odessa Eagles, Aerie 3069 Fraternal Order of Eagles. We had the opportunity to visit with Eddy many years ago. He was the Aerie secretary for many years until they consolidated with Aerie 2, Spokane Eagles. When we get back from the International Convention in Reno, Nev., I will send a picture of the original charter from October 1, 1950. This will list all the members...
Many teachers are concerned about the Common Core State Standards. Compounding their anxieties, Arne Duncan, U.S. Secretary of Education, has noted that the CCSS establishes national standards for the country, as though they had never existed before. However, we have had national standards for a long time. Since World War 2, textbook publishers have competed with each other for the school textbook market. As a result, many texts from different publishers were barely distinguishable from one another. That is still the case...
I have watched closely how the number of people on various government assistance programs has expanded at an almost unbelievable rate. I have a friend who lost his job and applied for unemployment. Almost immediatley, he started getting applications for food stamps, free cell phone, SNAP, etc. He had not applied for the programs and he was surprised to basically have these things offered again and again when he didn't apply. He had too much pride to accept even one program. I understand that human nature being what it is, mos...
Marianne Iksic and I realized that though the state standards were superior, the new national standards were here to stay. About 90-95% of our English program matched the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). At Common Core English workshops, we both have heard teachers’ concerns, the major one being that the CCSS would dictate the books that teachers were to teach and students to read. When teachers saw, for example, that Alice Walker’s The Color Purple or William Faulkner’s The Sound and Fury were marked at the 4th grade...
We live in a time in which most animals are relatively small. If you think back to your exposure to the Ice Age, perhaps in elementary school, you may remember big mammals like the mastodon and the saber tooth tiger. Less famous but equally big was a deer the size of a modern elk and a beaver the size of a black bear. In sum, our ancestors – the people alive in the Ice Age – were small compared to a number of the animals around them. Dinosaurs are also famously large. How dinosaurs grew to be as large as they did has alw...
I think I’ll poke a little fun at the editor this week. Really, I’m poking fun at myself, but I’m disguising it. Every once in a while, I forget to write my own headline for this column. That’s the first mistake. Then I read what the editor supplied. That’s the second mistake. It’s not the editor’s fault, you know. If I could just remember to go back to the top of the page before that final save and the email to The Record. If I could just figure out what the heck I was wr...
