'Whassup', Teach?

'Whassup' Comes Out for Obama is the title of an article in today's WSJ. In a new video supporting Obama, one of the characters, a black American soldier, calls his buddies from Iraq, and the group exchange their familiar "Whassup" greeting. They quickly descend into why Obama is the man for change and at the end of the video one of the characters asks again: "Whassup?"

"Change. Change, that's whassup" says another character as he watches TV images of Obama and his wife.

This catch-phrase helped sell countless cases of Budweiser debuted in 1999 but was eventually replaced by other equally stupid but effective slogans by the beer company. Now it's been revived and generated more than two million hits between Friday and Tuesday.

Budweiser relinquished it ownership of the slogan when its ownership license expired three years ago. It's unfortunate because I doubt many Anheuser-Busch people support Obama.

Expect teachers already struggling to command respect from their students to be greeted by this slogan so quickly picked up out of the trash bin. Unfortunately, most of the teachers today, will just laugh and ask the same question back. How things have changed. When I went to school, when I taught, kids addressed males as Mr. and females as Mrs. or Ms. Not that we couldn't enjoy some mild jokes and some kidding.

We were told to not try to become "friends" with the students but to seek their respect and and be friendly at arms length. Things got out of hand in the 60's when it was starting to become popular that families were democratic and all had equal rights. When parents became "best buddies" with their kids and teachers followed the practice.

That concept is the major reasons why educators say the parents have lost control of their kids. How does anyone expect us to regain control in the classrooms? Why do we think today that we have so many liberal Democrats supporting Obama?

Most of us have long known the answer but weak school boards, weak administrations and a confused educational system have not in recent years been able to say to kids and parents, "we may do many things differently once you are on school grounds than what you are used to at home. And one of those major things will be "we demand you respect us as being in charge of this school and school ground and we will respect your rights as a parent or student". Then those in charge stand behind how things may and will be done differently. We wouldn't have the chaos we have in our larger inner city public schools that we have today.

And in some of the smaller public schools today.

What should we expect in today's degenerating culture? As an aside, polls show black service people support Obama by 88%. And pundits claim that race is NOT a factor in politics?

Anyway, tomorrow when I go out, my greeting to everybody will be "Whassup, Doc?"