Routinely Inspirational Academic Forward, Standard, All-American University Level [6/05/2006]:

Este trabajo tiene como intención el desarrollo de el tema tan preocupante en la época actual, ¿Puede lograr felicidad una entonces Analfabeta del Rancho ahora que se ha acabado de cumplir su carrera de 30 años como una Maestra de Primaria?

Porque, para ella, hay mucha que depende sobre lo siguiente, y así --por fin! -- comenzamos.

¿Hay mucho que ver, o muy poco?

¿Entre una pobre analfabeta del rancho, y una maestra de primaria estadounidense, titulada en la Facultad de Educación de la Universidad de Texas en El Paso?


THE TRAGEDY OF LA MAESTRA JULISSA, THE PEDAGOGICALLY CHALLENGED CHIHUAHUENSE, AND FORMER UTEP ELEMENTARY EDUCATION MAJOR!

"Ay! Caray! Morelos, Coahuila, mi tierra: You're looking better and better!"

[Guest Blogatorial from El Pordiosero del Rancho]

First off, I honestly doubt that you will find the psychological condition we're about to describe within the pages of the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: Fourth Edition, Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric Association, 1994, also known simply as DSM-IV.

Now, this new psychological condition is roughly analogous to having your brain fried on legally prescribed psychoactive, psychotropic, or maybe even neurolyptic drugs, and it involves mostly bright young Hispanic women.

Because every year for the past 40 years or more, these young Hispanic women have left high school in droves, only to become trapped in the University of Texas at El Paso's much-ballyhooed 5-year so-called Elementary Education Diploma Program, a program we might as well call the UTEP Homeboy Diploma Program, for the contempt it displays towards its incoming students and their percieved genetic and intellectual inferiority as Hispanics.

These students have had to undergo the numbing experience of taking around 140 to 150 watered-down credit hours, mostly composed of 9-credit hour mini-packages in what appears to amount in the end to "a little bit of absolutely everything."

But!

To add insult to injury, these same Hispanic students who have bravely struggled forward 5 long years, have often found themselves at the end without a a single, solid 30-hour major concentration in anything,

This in turn, is indeed something that is unheard of in credible so-called Whiteboy Degree Plans, a racially-oriented phrase that accurately captures the contempt on the part of many students, who, regardless of their own ethnic or racial backgrounds, readily recognize the implicit racism in any degree program that assumes the teaching profession exists exclusively to get more people off welfare and food stamps.

And while getting more of us off welfare and food stamps is most definitely a worthy goal -- I certainly don't knock it! -- I also fail to see how that automatically solves the urgent need of our nation for an adequate public educational system grounded in the basic mathematical and literary skills.

Because, even here at UTEP itself, we have basically strong degree plans in everything else outside of education, in subject areas ranging from mathematics and chemistry to social studies and communications.

In fact, in any authentic degree plan in universities and four-year colleges all across America, and not just at UTEP, every graduating student will generally have at least one solid 30-hour concentration in her -- or his --major, out of roughly a total of from 132 to 140 hours.

Thus, pity poor, pedagogically challenged Julissa la Chihuahuense, admittedly a somewhat free-wheeling composite character distilled from the collective experiences of many such unhappy persons.

Why?

Because she is basically a strong, good-hearted woman. For thirty years she has faithfully worked her little heart out as an elementary school teacher, and all for what?

By now she is literally unable to focus more than three and a half to five minutes on any one subject or thing, much less is she now capable of carrying on any manner of intelligent conversation in either language for more than one to two minutes at a time, and even that in a random and impulsive manner.

Nor, can she even sit still for any length of time.

So, in answer to the question:

"Who should we blame for the fact that 65% of incoming freshmen students from El Paso area high schools are deficient in at least one or more key content areas?"

There can only be one main answer; and that answer shouldn't be too difficult to find.

Because, unhappily, so far as the El Paso area is concerned, these incoming freshmen students are coming to UTEP and El Paso Community College from the elementary, middle-school and high school classrooms of the likes of that formerly belonging to Julissa la Chihuahuense, by now herself as much a victim as any of her former students in her own elementary school.

And, that, in turn, we can lay at the feet of the University of El Paso's so-called (ha! ha!) "College of Education," at least those departments dedicated to the forcible moronization of formerly bright young Hispanic students, as Julissa la Chihuahuense was once upon a time herself.

But is she still bright now? Nope. No longer!

More than likely she can't even work these days in even a low-stress environment, for more than mere minutes at a time...

And that's sad. Really, really, said.

And all so totally unecessary!