I take the title of this blog from a comment just received in response to the galvanic thingie (I have trouble remembering if it is a GSR or a GRS, a galvanic skin response monitor or a galvanic response skin monitor).
The title seemed appropriate for an article sent by another reader. This one describes a decision by a Texas school district to put GPS necklaces on their students so that they can be tracked during school hours. If that sounds far-fetched, note that other districts in Texas and California are already using the GPS devices to improve attendance. A town in Brazil plans to have its students wear uniforms embedded with a GPS device.
Amazing how so many small steps may be taken without much alarm. And one day we will find that government and corporations can watch our every move. Will we be wearing bracelets or necklaces or will we have microchips implanted at birth.
Technies gone wild indeed. At some point, we will recognize those techies as our bosses.
Diane
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Can we distract Bill Gates with some new golf clubs or something. The man needs a new hobby other than meddling with education. It’s discomforting.
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Be sure the set has a tracking device in each club so he can more easily find his ball!
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Is the Bill Gates money discomforting too…???
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Certainly, his vast wealth has given him unprecedented political power. I find it very scary.
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I’ve been using the word scary too. is someone tracking us?
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Man oh man, I need to give up being a teacher and become an educational techie entrepreneur, maybe get a half million or million dollar grant from Gatesy to develop some insidious device that can track the students’ digestion, how that correlates to student learning, sell it for an exorbitant fee, provide a service contract so that when it breaks I can make money on that and will make me rich.
Actually, I think I prefer to be able to sleep at night!!
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“Any device that helps a teacher identify and meet student needs “is a good thing,” said Jacobs, vice president of the National Council on Teacher Quality, an advocacy group that receives funding from the Gates Foundation. “We have to be really open to what technology can bring.””
As a 40 year teacher I often fantasized about firing a pistol over the heads of my class on the first day of school if someone started to misbehave. I know it wasn’t high tech, but since it would have pretty much helped “meet student needs” it would have been a “good thing”.
Keeping on the same theme. I once had a 6th grade girl, a really nice kid, transfer into my class from another school. I asked her how her previous teacher kept the class under control. She said he had a large snake in a big cage and he would threaten to put you into the cage with it if you misbehaved. I said, “Oh, he wouldn’t have done that. You didn’t really think he would do that.?” She responded with a slight grimace on her face, “Well, I am not sure.”
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It is disgusting how public education money is being thrown down the toilet while schools close, jobs get lost and the conflicts and scams continue to dominate the field. We have a crisis all right, but it is where our tax… dollars are going not that there is not enough money for public education- traditonal public education is being starved to death by these scammers!!! Plenty of money for the techies, the charters , the consultants, the lobbyists, Wested, Gates, Broad, Walton, Pearson, Rhee etc etc- — the madness must stop!!!
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