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Music
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Hi, there it is.
Monday morning busted pencils.
Holy, let it education talk.
Educated educators.
Talking education.
Monday morning home room.
Dr. Tim Slecker.
Dr. Johnny Lupinati.
You know, giving him a day.
Jacob, but hey, no need to worry
because we got chairman of the boards.
Jacob with us and Jacob.
I think you and I can handle this today.
I think we can certainly try Tim today.
It's more like educated educator talking education.
Because I know I'm an educator and I'm barely educated.
But it's well, tell me about this though.
You know, maybe before we break into home room.
Right.
So you've been with us now about what three weeks.
With you.
Like a month and a half now.
Month and a half.
Okay.
So really you're not feeling like you have now learned enough to be an educator of people who say.
Jacob.
What's it like working with those two.
You know, educated educators.
You know, what are you learning, man?
What's going on?
It only took me a couple of days to learn the one.
Learn the word rough Tim.
So I can educate people about that.
Yeah, but rough.
I mean, have we thrown any kind of like crazy words at you where you're like,
okay, that those are like doctor words and stop using them.
Tim and Johnny.
Not really Tim.
I'm a veritable the source myself.
So I understand words pretty well.
Pretty good with words.
So when you hear the word pedagogy.
What do you think?
I can't get into the specifics of what words mean to him, but I vaguely understand context clues most of the time.
Well, you know, when I when I use a certain pedagogy, there are students that really dig deep into the learning.
Does it have something to do with feet?
It's a bipedal list.
No pedagogy.
So this is one of those words that a lot of people go, why don't you just say teaching?
Yeah.
You know, and actually it means teaching.
Well, you know, so why don't you just say teaching?
I get exactly right.
Right.
And in fact, you know, Johnny and I sometimes, you know, we we tease a little bit about the fact that, yeah, sometimes we use these words when the reality is is like,
why?
Why would you use that word when you have a word like teaching that could be used instead?
And well, you know, how else though would we justify the thousands of dollars of graduate student loan debt that we took on to be able to call ourselves doctor if we didn't use words that made people go, oh my god, you're one of those idiots.
Is there a Latin phrase you can use for justifying spending out of money?
Because that may be a key phrase to bring into this conversation.
Well, maybe, maybe, maybe.
Well, you know what, though, Jacob, though, I mean, I'm glad that, you know, a month and a half now you're in.
I think you are an educated educator who can talk education now because, you know, the reality of when you just kind of laid it out there and said, yes, Tim, I agree.
You should just use the word teaching.
Then that means that, you know, you're kind of going on this and that's where Johnny and I usually come down because, you know, as you say, at the end of the show, the blue collar scholars, we've tried to hold on to that.
And in fact, you know, kind of like to mock some of our peers that tend to use those those words that that make your neighbor go.
So they're, you know, snooty one of those.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Oh, my God.
Nothing, you know, nothing like that.
But Jacob, you know what?
We are.
Well, you know, 100 plus days into this administration.
And as we continue to talk and share education has, you know, had quite a few developments.
Things happening.
Decisions are being made that daily makes one scratch their head and go.
Really?
That now?
Yeah.
You know, when I'm going to talk about this one, but, you know, this morning I saw, you know,
well, funding for hungry kids has now been cut.
Tim, we need to stop spending money on kids from hungry.
All right.
We need to stop spending money on kids who need that money, Tim.
Exactly.
Like, you know, that being the reason that happened.
It could very well just be that the president thought that's for kids and hungry.
What are we feeding these kids from hungry for?
That doesn't sound like our president.
But yeah, well, I didn't even think of that.
I was more kind of going down the lines of going, well, there's one more active cruelty that maybe we shouldn't have been surprised by.
But yeah, the state of Indiana and again, state by state because education is a state issue.
But they've announced that summer funding for hungry kids that, you know, comes from the federal government.
They're just going to say, we don't need it this year.
So I, you know, or this summer because maybe it's because it's going to be a banner crop year in Indiana and the need to feed the hungry won't exist.
Tim, that, so you're telling me that this is federal money that is available to Indiana.
And they're just capriciously saying, no, thank you.
We don't want any money to feed kids.
Yeah.
You know, it's, it gets, you know, too many.
What do you want to say, red tape?
There's all these things there.
And it's just, it's a hassle.
You know, and the way we're looking at it.
I mean, you know, we're actually helping parents have a little bit of an easier life because then they won't have to figure out, you know, in their taxes next year, how to claim.
I, no, I don't know what it is what that happens like this.
But you see things like where you go, really, it's like, wait, you're turning down something that was already allocated.
Yeah.
You know, so I don't know, maybe, you know, some border states are going, won't take it.
Yeah.
You know, maybe it'll work that way.
I don't know, but Jacob, so let's get the new another set of news.
But I'm going to, I'm going to start by singing.
And then I'm going to ask you to name that tune.
Okay.
Okay.
Yeah.
Ready?
Um, yes.
No, I don't know if you're, I had to work myself up to it, but I'm ready now.
Robert Ducky, you're the one.
You make taking a bath so much fun.
Robert Ducky, you're the one for me.
Yes.
Do you know, do you know where that song comes from, Jacob?
Sesame Street, right?
You got it.
And do you know the, the singer of that song?
I'm thinking, uh, Ernie.
That was Ernie.
You got it.
Yeah.
You got it.
And, uh, based on the way you sang it, I think we should keep it that way.
From now on, Ernie should be the one doing that.
Let's bring Ernie on.
Yeah.
Sesame Street.
And, um, so did, did you watch Sesame Street, Jacob, when you were, you know, yeah.
I mean, I don't think Sesame Street was my favorite thing when I was four.
I was more into documentaries about World War II, but, um, Sesame Street is good.
I think everybody, since it came out, at least some period in their lives, I mean, generation upon generation of children.
Am I right?
Well, and the reason I did that is because, yeah, you know, you're a different generation than Johnny and I.
And, you know, a lot of people go, well, nobody watches that stuff anymore anyway.
And it's just like, okay, no, actually Sesame Street continues to be one of those programs.
You know, you know, you know, Fred Rogers, right?
You know, Fred Rogers.
What I'm talking about is, well, the next, um, funding cut.
PBS kids content, the public broadcasting service, PBS kids content.
So I kind of drove back into the early days.
So Sesame Street, Mr. Rogers.
There has since those been all kinds of PBS kids content.
And so let's chop off the kids content.
And why are we cutting off PBS kids, Jacob?
Well, what I can, the way I'm reading this is because, you know, for the longest time, Ernie singing about his rubber duckie.
Somehow that pushed a Marxist propaganda that has created a deep hatred of this country by millions of now adults who had to be forced to sit through Ernie singing about his rubber duckie.
That that's my sense of why we need to cut PBS kids content.
Well, it doesn't seem to have worked because I think plenty of mega people watch Sesame Street as a kid.
And now they're, you know, driving F-150s and watching NASCAR and such.
So it doesn't seem to have worked in some aspects to him.
I mean, it is Marxist propaganda.
Most people don't seem to be getting that out of it.
I, I, that's kind of the test I put to all of these claims that such and such.
As all of these things are actually are intended.
Let's just go with intended.
If Ernie in his bathtub enjoying his rubber ducky had the intentions of creating some form of a sense of socialistic group understanding, you know appreciation and some somehow a anti American sentiment.
It doesn't work very well because the evidence is all around us Jacob. In fact, the mega movement to me is pretty strong evidence that actually Ernie wasn't very successful at creating a whole lot of change.
So that's where I always come down on on these issues is to say the claim of you know this causes anti Americanism this causes you know hatred of capitalism this undermines the American way of life is to then look at the evidence for if that's truly occurring.
And yeah, like like you Jacob, I kind of look at the, you know, the American world, the American culture right now. And you know, what do we 50 plus years of PBS broadcasting for kids, you know, so Mr Rogers, yeah, Sesame Street, the electric company, more recently, Molly of Denali, work it out, Wombats, Lila in the loop.
They're just obviously staffed by really bad writers and creators that if they have the intention to create anti Americanism, they're just not so good at it. I would think maybe.
I think you're onto something here Tim and I wonder what programming the mega crowd has been watching that is succeeding in making them so anti American because you know this anti free speech kick there on now, if you say an opinion that's wrong, you should be sent to a detention center in Louisiana, possibly then sent El Salvador.
Anti Christian, you know, not caring about poor people, not caring about the the meekest among us.
So I wonder what children's programming they watched maybe maybe that's a different Sesame Street that I never watch because I watch that and I, I just didn't hit kids at school and was nice to people.
I know so yeah, so let's put that out there. Okay, so if it's not causing that, you know, truly, then the question is is so then why cut funding for kids programming from PBS.
I mean, why do it in a way, Jacob, I'm kind of asking you this morning, what do you think? I mean, what's the motivation then behind cutting funding for PBS.
Tim, I think that there's a long lasting culture war issue around this. It's not just in the United States, if you look at England with the BBC or Canada with the CBC.
Conservatives tend to be against public broadcasting. They see bias in it and I'm sure you can do studies to see maybe there is some bias in one way or the other, but it just seems to be in general in countries that have a public broadcast and corporation conservatives don't like it very much.
That's, that's been going on for a long time, specifically right now, then you have the current administration wants to do a lot of tax cuts. They want a lower the amount of money that the government has to spend.
And so it's become important to find anything they can to cut a little bit of money. As we saw with Doge, it's not always a sensical cut like USAID, it's a drop in the bucket has a lot of impact in the world, but it's not really saving a lot of money to cut it doesn't matter cut it.
So I think what you're going to see Tim is just anything that a conservative politician can make any sort of case about to say, oh, this is woke, this is the I this is anything to cut it because their monetary policies don't make any sense.
Okay, I really appreciate that analysis Jacob because I think that really does put out there truly the reality. I think what happens is though, too, is that it gets the the culture warrior base rolled up.
Absolutely, and you know, and gets them in that mode of going, yes, cut it, cut it, cut it.
But as we say, the claims of what it does or what it's doing just don't hold up, but that isn't really the issue here, and I'm going to kind of take a leap or maybe not a leap and point out that I think what you said very much, this is about finding money for tax cuts.
This is that I mean, you know, if we're about to what extend $1.5 trillion is the number I heard in tax cuts to be able to continue the, you know, this where's the money going to come from and well, then let's we got to find somewhere to get it.
So let's take away the emotions that go with this and just look at the mathematics and say, you know, we've got a budget of so and so many dollars we're going to portion this amount for tax cuts. Well, if we're going to portion this amount for tax cuts, then the rest of the money goes here, oh crap, there's a misbalance here because if we give PBS the amount of money that we typically give them, then we're going to have to reduce the tax cuts.
So, you know what though, a lot of people, if they think about bird, Ernie, Big Bird, Mr. Rogers, any of those characters, they might get a little up that because I think as you say, most people have a fond memory of PBS kids content.
I think that and so to kind of create that anger in an ability to then support these cuts, we create a story.
Yeah, story of what's happening because of and it doesn't hold up, you know, any type of evidence that says that.
So I look at this and so my thought then is if you're a teacher and this is the other part of bringing PBS coming back to teachers, it was the content and it still is the content, the public school teachers could use without the concern of copyright and all these things, these were educational programs that were created so that teachers could use them.
And this is one of the things, you know, you start to worry about and say, you know, is it quality content, you know, people are always where, you know, we don't want teachers just, you know, downloading stuff and bring it it in without knowing where it came from.
Well, you know, when you had PBS content, you knew where it came from, you knew what it was doing.
Except now though we have a conversation of saying no, no, no, no, what kids programming if PBS is doing is creating an anti-American sentiment and if we can convince my neighbor that anti-Americanism is rampant through kids programming.
And I think they're more likely to go, yeah, we should cut that.
I was going to get.
I think there's a natural impulse for people, especially when you're a parent to worry about what your kids are learning, whether it's in school or from media, not just educational stuff, you know, just the entertainment they watch, are they getting bad lessons.
Right.
That's natural.
And I think what we're seeing here is using that natural fear that people have, stoking it and convincing them to be angry at PBS or what have you to get back to those cuts we were talking about.
And fundamentally, I think the big problem that the current government has is that they want to cut taxes and cut spending and they're finding it's really hard to cut spending, especially when it's pretty bare bones as it is.
Right.
Well, you know, and you say pretty objectively there, you know, we want to cut spending and we want to cut taxes.
And in fact, go to cut taxes, we kind of have to do cut spending.
I'm just going to put this out there, Jacob, is we're kind of coming to the close of home room, just asking, you know, maybe a rhetorical question or a question to you.
What if we didn't cut taxes?
Well, that's impossible, Tim, we always have to cut taxes.
We need to have negative taxes.
I mean, I was just thinking about this and saying, you know, instead of taking earnings, rubber duck and deflating it or maybe like we did in the late 60s, early 70s, you know, around July 4th, attaching, you know, fireworks to rubber duckies and seeing what happens to them.
Maybe we could say that the tax cuts, we just can't afford tax cuts right now.
I think that should be a message that people can can understand from both sides of the political spectrum, because whether you're a Democrat and you're more liberal, you think that social spending is important.
Or if you're a traditional, you know, real conservative, you're worried about the debt and you're worried about the budget being out of whack.
And you should also want to keep taxes at a reasonable rate.
So both sides intellectually should not really want to cut taxes right now at this moment we're at in our in our history and in our government.
Unfortunately, the populist thing going on right now on the right wing, they can't take the time to think of those more well-reasoned proposals.
It just has to be how it is to them.
But that's why we're here and that's why you and I get to do such an awesome home room this morning.
You know, it's kind of put out there a little bit of reasonability from, you know, the education podcast.
Yeah, maybe we can't afford tax cuts right now.
And maybe we should leave Ernie and his rubber ducky alone for a little longer.
And you know, and maybe revisit this, but Jacob, I tell you what, now it's time for your moment of Zen.
It is the citizenry rather than the government.
That is the ultimate source of power and the locomotive that pulls the train of government in the direction of equality justice.
Got pretty bad weather today, Tim.
I understand that. Well, you know, thanks everybody for busting pencils with chairman of the board, Jacob, me, Dr. Tim Slecker.
Hey, make sure on Wednesday you grab classes and session Friday, hurdles and home runs always out there.
And yes, Saturday, one full hour of busted pencils, you know, if you're listening live in the Wisconsin area across every civic media app contraption that's out there, you can listen live.
And of course, you can always download all busted pencils, either through Apple, through Spotify, through the civic media webpage, or also, hey, go to busted pencils dot com, where you can get everything, busted pencils that you want to know.
Make sure you are always following the blue collar scholars, Tim and Johnny and keep busting pencils.
Thanks for watching.