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NJ Monthly rankings for 2016 – Ridgewood Schools are not in top 30

REA Members come out to greet our Board of Ed

August 27,2016

the staff of the Ridgewood blog

Ridgewood NJ, NJ Monthly rankings for 2016 – Ridgewood isn’t in top 30 – Why the hell should we pay these teachers more money?

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Reader says ,” High school teachers are now unaccountably sabotaging their own students’ grades. As in, the grades of every student in the class. This has been plenty nasty for a while now and the upcoming school year promises fresh outrage from teachers and administrators, adults chronologically, behaving like children.”

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A Recommended Reading List – from C.S. Lewis

Bike_Ridgewood_Public_Library_theridgewoodblog

 

August 26,2016

the staff of the Ridgewood blog

Ridgewood NJ, this is a  Recommended Reading List from C.S. Lewis ,looks like it time to hit the Ridgewood library.

Clive Staples Lewis (1898–1963) was one of the intellectual giants of the twentieth century and arguably one of the most influential writers of his day. He was a Fellow and Tutor in English Literature at Oxford University until 1954, when he was unanimously elected to the Chair of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge University, a position he held until his retirement.

Lewis wrote more than thirty books, allowing him to reach a vast audience, and his works continue to attract thousands of new readers every year. C. S. Lewis’s most distinguished and popular accomplishments include Mere Christianity, Out of the Silent Planet, The Great Divorce, The Screwtape Letters, and the universally acknowledged classics in The Chronicles of Narnia. To date, the Narnia books have sold over 100 million copies and been transformed into three major motion pictures.

A Canon List from An Experiment in Criticism

Homer

Iliad (c. 8th BCE)
Odyssey (c. 8th BCE)

Unknown, Book of Jonah (8th-4th BCE)
Pindar

Olympian Odes (early 5th BCE)
Pythian Odes (early 5th BCE)
Fragments (early 5th BCE)

Aeschylus, The Eumenides (5th BCE)
Sophocles, Oedipus Rex (c. 429 BCE)
Aristotle, Poetics (335 BCE)
Virgil

The Georgics (29 BCE)
The Aeneid (29-19 BCE)

Lucian, Vera Historia (2nd)
Apuleius, Metamorphoses/The Golden Ass (late 2nd)
Unknown, Beowulf (8th-11th)
Unknown, The Song of Roland (11th-12th)
Laȝamon, Brut (c. 1190-1215)
Unknown, Huon of Bordeaux (c. 1216-1268)
Snorri Sturluson, The Prose Edda (early 13th)
Dante, Divine Comedy (1308-20)
Geoffrey Chaucer

The Canterbury Tales (late 14th)
Troilus and Criseyde (1380s)

Unknown, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (late 14th)
Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte Darthur (1485)
Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso (c. 1516)
Arthur Brooke, The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet (1562)
Sir Philip Sidney, Arcadia (late 16th)
Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene (1590s)
William Shakespeare

Romeo & Juliet (1591-5)
Twelfth Night (1601-2)
The Winter’s Tale (1611)
A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1590-7)
Henry V (c. 1599)

John Donne, “The Apparition” (early 17th)
Michael Drayton, “The Shepherds Sirena” (1627)
Thomas Browne, Urn Burial (1658)
Jean Racine

Andromaque (1667)
Phèdre (c. 1677)

John Milton

Paradise Lost (1667-74)
Samson Agonistes (1671)

Alexander Pope, The Rape of the Lock (1712-4)
Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (1726, 1735)
Voltaire

“Micromégas” (1752)
Candide (1759)

Samuel Johnson, The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia (1759)
William Beckford, Vathek, an Arabian Tale (1782)
James Boswell, Life of Johnson (1791)
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798)
William Wordsworth

“Michael” (1800)
The Excursion (1814)

Jane Austen, Pride & Prejudice (1813)
Walter Scott, Guy Mannering (1815)
Benjamin Constant, Adolphe (1816)
John Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (1819)
James Hogg, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824)
Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Witch of Atlas (1824)
Elias Lönnrot, The Kalevala (1835-49)
Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo (1844)
Charles Dickens

The Pickwick Papers (1836)
Great Expectations (1861)

William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair (1848)
Edward Fitzgerald, Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (1859-89)
Anthony Trollope, Barchester Towers (1857)
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace (1869)
George Eliot, Middlemarch, A Study of Provincial Life (1871-2)
Samuel Butler, Erewhon (1872)
Lewis Carroll, “The Hunting of the Snark” (1874-6)
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (1880)
Robert Louis Stevenson

Treasure Island (1883)
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886)

Edwin Abbott, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884)
John Ruskin, Praeterita (1885)
Henry James, The Turn of the Screw (1898)
H.G. Wells

First Men in the Moon (1901)
“The Door in the Wall” (1911)

Beatrix Potter, Tales (1902-1930)
Joseph Conrad, Nostromo (1904)
E.R. Burroughs, Tarzan (1912-1965)
Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows (1908)
Arnold Bennett, The Old Wives’ Tale (1908)
James Stephens, The Crock of Gold (1912)
D.H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers (1913)
Gertrude Stein, “Sacred Emily” (1913)
James Branch Cabell, Jurgen, A Comedy of Justice (1919)
Kafka, The Castle (1926)
Mervyn Peake, Titus Groan (1946)
J.R.R. Tolkien, Lord of the Rings (1954-5)

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Academic freedom means no ‘trigger warnings,’ or creation of intellectual ‘safe spaces’

Graduation 13
August 26,2016
the staff of the Ridgewood blog

Ridgewood NJ, its that time of the year again and that time is back to school . While the new trend in “education” is to limit free speech , “coddle and protect the innocent victims” and create “safe spaces”  . Some schools thankfully will have none of this .

This is Not a Day Care. It’s a University!’

This past week, I actually had a student come forward after a university chapel service and complain because he felt “victimized” by a sermon on the topic of 1 Corinthians 13. It appears that this young scholar felt offended because a homily on love made him feel bad for not showing love. In his mind, the speaker was wrong for making him, and his peers, feel uncomfortable.
 
I’m not making this up. Our culture has actually taught our kids to be this self-absorbed and narcissistic. Any time their feelings are hurt, they are the victims. Anyone who dares challenge them and, thus, makes them “feel bad” about themselves, is a “hater,” a “bigot,” an “oppressor,” and a “victimizer.”
 
I have a message for this young man and all others who care to listen. That feeling of discomfort you have after listening to a sermon is called a conscience. An altar call is supposed to make you feel bad. It is supposed to make you feel guilty. The goal of many a good sermon is to get you to confess your sins—not coddle you in your selfishness. The primary objective of the Church and the Christian faith is your confession, not your self-actualization.
 
So here’s my advice:
 
If you want the chaplain to tell you you’re a victim rather than tell you that you need virtue, this may not be the university you’re looking for. If you want to complain about a sermon that makes you feel less than loving for not showing love, this might be the wrong place.
 
If you’re more interested in playing the “hater” card than you are in confessing your own hate; if you want to arrogantly lecture, rather than humbly learn; if you don’t want to feel guilt in your soul when you are guilty of sin; if you want to be enabled rather than confronted, there are many universities across the land (in Missouri and elsewhere) that will give you exactly what you want, but Oklahoma Wesleyan isn’t one of them.
 
At OKWU, we teach you to be selfless rather than self-centered. We are more interested in you practicing personal forgiveness than political revenge. We want you to model interpersonal reconciliation rather than foment personal conflict. We believe the content of your character is more important than the color of your skin. We don’t believe that you have been victimized every time you feel guilty and we don’t issue “trigger warnings” before altar calls.
 
Oklahoma Wesleyan is not a “safe place”, but rather, a place to learn: to learn that life isn’t about you, but about others; that the bad feeling you have while listening to a sermon is called guilt; that the way to address it is to repent of everything that’s wrong with you rather than blame others for everything that’s wrong with them. This is a place where you will quickly learn that you need to grow up.
 
This is not a day care. This is a university!

and the University of Chicago

Dear class of 2020

Welcome and congratulations on your acceptance to the college at the University of Chicago. Earning a place in our community of scholars is no small achievement and we are delighted that you selected Chicago to continue your intellectual journey.

Once here you will discover that one of the University of Chicago’s defining characteristics is our commitment to freedom of inquiry and expression. … Members of our community are encouraged to speak, write, listen, challenge, and learn, without fear of censorship. Civility and mutual respect are vital to all of us, and freedom of expression does not mean the freedom to harass or threaten others. You will find that we expect members of our community to be engaged in rigorous debate, discussion, and even disagreement. At times this may challenge you and even cause discomfort.

And then, the coup de grace:

Our commitment to academic freedom means that we do not support so called ‘trigger warnings,’ we do not cancel invited speakers because their topics might prove controversial, and we do not condone the creation of intellectual ‘safe spaces’ where individuals can retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with their own.

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WHAT Students Read Matters More Than You Think

Bolger_theridgewoodpublic_library_theridgewoodblog

Daniel Lattier | February 9, 2016

In today’s standards-based education system, the main focus is on teaching skills rather than content. There’s a prevalent idea that it matters less what students read just so long as they are reading.

But according to E.D. Hirsch, professor emeritus of education and humanities at the University of Virginia, that’s bull.

Some of you may know Hirsch through his famous advocacy of “cultural literacy”—the idea that some amount of “shared, canonical knowledge is inherently necessary to a literate democracy,” and that students in a particular culture should have common exposure to certain texts and concepts.

https://www.intellectualtakeout.org/blog/what-students-read-matters-more-you-think

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Common Core: The End of Education

Tradition_of_excellence_theridgewoodblog

The End of Education

Joseph Pearce | February 19, 2014

“The one thing that is never taught by any chance in the atmosphere of public schools,” wrote G. K. Chesterton, “is…that there is a whole truth of things, and that in knowing it and speaking it we are happy.”[1] Such words would be greeted with calculated coldness by the architects of the common core curriculum, who would no doubt respond with chilling indifference that there is no whole truth of things and therefore no meaningful happiness to be derived from it. Modernity never gets beyond Pontius Pilate’s famous question, quid est veritas, which is asked not in the spirit of philosophy as a question to be answered, but in the ennui of intellectual philandery as merely a rhetorical question that is intrinsically unanswerable. This intellectual philandery spawns numerous illegitimate children, each of which has its day as the dominant fad of educationists, at least until a new intellectual fad replaces it. It is in the nature of fads to fade but in the brief period in which they find themselves in the fashionable limelight they can cause a great deal of damage, a fact that Chesterton addressed with customary adroitness in 1910, over a century ago:

The trouble in too many of our modern schools is that the State, being controlled so specially by the few, allows cranks[2] and experiments to go straight to the schoolroom when they have never passed through the Parliament, the public house, the private house, the church, or the marketplace.

Obviously it ought to be the oldest things that are taught to the youngest people; the assured and experienced truths that are put first to the baby. But in a school today the baby has to submit to a system that is younger than himself. The flopping infant of four actually has more experience and has weathered the world longer than the dogma to which he is made to submit.

Many a school boasts of having the latest ideas in education, when it has not even the first idea; for the first idea is that even innocence, divine as it is, may learn something from experience.[3]

https://www.intellectualtakeout.org/blog/end-education

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Ridgewood Preps for Back to School

BOE_theridgewoodblog

August 21,2016

the staff of the Ridgewood blog

Ridgewod NJ, Ridgewood schools are prepping for back to school .

Annual Re-registration is Underway
The annual online Skyward re-registration is open. Parents and guardians, to update your information, please log on to Skyward Family Access via the district website at www.ridgewood.k12.nj.us. Click here for details.

School Starts on September 6
Students will return to school on Tuesday, September 6 (minimum day schedule). Opening Day for teachers and support staff is Thursday, September 1.

Back-to-School Night Schedule
Click here to view the schedule.

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Ridgewood Police Arrest three adults and one juvenile on Orchard School property

Ridgewood _police_theridgewoodblog

file photo by Boyd Loving

August 19,2016

the staff of the Ridgewood blog

Ridgewood NJ, Ridgewood police report that on 08/09/16 ,Sgt. Finch arrested John A. Dougherty the 4th, age 18 of Ridgewood, N.J., Colin H. Parr, age 19 of Ridgewood, N.J., Kihyun Lee, age 18 of Ridgewood, N.J., and a male juvenile .

Sgt. Finch located the above persons on Orchard School property during the evening hours. The three adults and one juvenile were found to be in possession of C.D.S. and Drug Paraphernalia. All were transported to police headquarters for processing. The juvenile was released to the custody of parent with a pending juvenile complaint. The three adults were processed, served with complaint summonses, advised of the pending court date and released.

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Ridgewood High School Vandalism Captured on Video

RHS_BEST_theridgewoodblog

August 19,2016

the staff of the Ridgewood blog

Ridgewood NJ, According to the Ridgewood police ,on 8/11/16 the staff at Ridgewood High School found a large amount of damage within the High School. Patrol units and the detective bureau responded to investigate the incident. The security video captured juveniles committing burglary by entering the school during the overnight hours and then commit criminal mischief and thefts within the building. The detective bureau is investigating the incident.

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No place for cursive writing in today’s digital world | Editorial

Dunce-cap

By Times of Trenton Editorial Board
on August 17, 2016 at 6:08 AM, updated August 17, 2016 at 10:18 AM

If the words on this page were written in cursive, chances are few people under the age of 18 could read them.

That’s not a lament – just an observation. The dependency on computers, email and texting for communicating has rendered what we used to call “script” all but obsolete.

In the not-too-distant past – say, 2004 or so – New Jersey’s third graders were required to “write legibly in manuscript or cursive to meet district standards.”

That requirement has gone the way of the floppy disc, photographic film and cassette tapes.

But now two state lawmakers are pushing a bill that would force every school district to teach reading and writing in cursive as part of the elementary school curriculum.

https://www.nj.com/opinion/index.ssf/2016/08/theres_no_place_for_fancy_writing_in_todays_digita.html

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Ridgewood Schools : Start is on September 6

RHS_BEST_theridgewoodblog

August 9th 2016

the staff of the Ridgewood blog
Ridgewood NJ, Ridgewood schools will be open and students will return to school on Tuesday, September 6 (minimum day schedule). Opening Day for teachers and support staff is Thursday, September 1.

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Its that time of the year School’s Open so Drive Carefully

ridgewood crossing guards

September 04.2015

the staff of the Ridgewood blog

Ridgewood NJ, Every fall, over 55 million children across the United States head back to school. With 13 percent of those children typically walking or biking to their classes, drivers need to be especially vigilant for pedestrians before and after school hours. The afternoon hours are particularly dangerous – over the last decade, nearly one in four child pedestrian fatalities occurred between 3 p.m. and 7 p.m.

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According to AAA first and foremost drivers need to slow down. Speed limits in school zones are reduced for a reason. A pedestrian is struck by a vehicle traveling at 25 mph is nearly two-thirds less likely to be killed compared to a pedestrian struck by a vehicle traveling just 10 mph faster.
Come to a complete stop. Research shows that more than one-third of drivers roll through stop signs in school zones or neighborhoods. Always come to a complete stop, checking carefully for children on sidewalks and in crosswalks before proceeding.
Eliminate distractions. Research shows that taking your eyes off the road for just two seconds doubles your chances of crashing. And children can be quick, crossing the road unexpectedly or emerging suddenly between two parked cars. Reduce risk by not using your cell phone or eating while driving, for example.
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Reverse responsibly. Every vehicle has blind spots. Check for children on the sidewalk, in the driveway and around your vehicle before slowly backing up. Teach your children to never play in, under or around vehicles.
Watch for bicycles. Children on bikes are often inexperienced, unsteady and unpredictable. Slow down and allow at least three feet of passing distance between your vehicle and a bicyclist. If your child rides a bicycle to school, require that he or she wear a properly fitted bicycle helmet on every ride.
Talk to your teen. Car crashes are the leading cause of death for teens in the United States, and nearly one in four fatal crashes involving teen drivers occur during the after-school hours of 3 p.m. to 7 p.m.
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RIDGEWOOD BOE MEETS SEPTEMBER 21st

BOE_theridgewoodblog

RIDGEWOOD SCHOOL BOARD MEETS ON SEPTEMBER 21, 2015

The  Ridgewood Board of Education will hold a Regular Public Meeting on Monday, September 21, 2015 at 7:30 p.m.

The public is invited to attend the meeting at the Ed Center, 49 Cottage Place, Floor 3. The meeting will be aired live on FiOS channel 33 and Optimum channel 77. Or it may be viewed live via the district website at www.ridgewood.k12.nj.us using the “Link in Live” tab.

Click here to view the agenda and addendum for the August 24, 2015 Regular Public Meeting.

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Ridgewood School Crossing Guards – Applications Available

School Crossing

SCHOOL CROSSING GUARDS

The Ridgewood Police Department is accepting applications for School Crossing Guard Positions. Applications are Available at the Police Desk located at 131 North Maple Avenue Ridgewood NJ. P/T position, 10 hours per week (2 hours per day) starting at $17.49/hr. Send application to Police Chief John Ward, Ridgewood Police Dept, 131 N. Maple Ave., Ridgewood, NJ 07450 or return the application to the Police Records Room. The Village of Ridgewood is an EOE and civil service community.

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ASHBY, TRADITION OF EXCELLENCE AWARDS ARE PRESENTED AT CONVOCATION

ASHBY
August 31,2015

the staff of the Ridtgewood blog

Ridgewood NJ, the 2015 winner of the coveted Ashby Award is Ann Brown, George Washington Middle School Library Media Specialist. Ann, who has been the Library Media Specialist since 2001,holds a Masters Degree in Library and Information Science from the Palmer School of Library and Information Science at Long Island University.

The Ashby Award was established in 1966 to honor former Superintendent Lloyd Ashby and his wife, Lois, for their distinguished service to the community.  The recipient is selected from nominees submitted by staff members and is someone who, in the opinion of his or her peers, has upheld the Ashby tradition of service and contribution.  This is the highest award that can be bestowed upon a Ridgewood staff member.

The 2015 Tradition of Excellence Award for Support Staff was presented to Pat Kowalczyk, Administrative Assistant in the Office of Special Programs.

The Ridgewood Board of Education established the Tradition of Excellence Award in 2014 to honor a member of the support staff, who in the opinion of their peers has made an outstanding contribution to the excellence of the Ridgewood Public Schools

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Back to School: Clinton Avenue residents have it their way, again

clinton ave

August 31,2015

the staff of the Rdgewood

Ridgewood NJ, Yes.  Believe it or not, the crybabies on Clinton Avenue got their way again.

The street was recently repaved, but without the concrete curbs and concrete driveway cuts that were promised.

clinton ave 2

Village Engineer Christopher Rutishauser had told Village Council members concrete curbs and driveway cuts would be including in the repaving project so that the street would be “sidewalk ready.”

Reportedly, residents on the street did not want the concrete and told the Village Manager so.

And so it goes