Snowflakes?

The other day one of my students was talking about his job at Walmart.  He said customers bring their dogs into Walmart all the time.

"You mean service dogs, right?" I tried to clarify.

"No, just dogs.  I just leave them alone," he answered. 

"Are you serious?" I asked.

"Walmart just lets them, and we leave them alone.  I'm not getting in trouble over someone's dog."

I was flabbergasted.  What are these people thinking?  Why would you think bringing a dog into a grocery store is your right or need?

First, I grew up when dogs, except for what was called "seeing-eye dogs" never went anywhere.  Second, dogs are not all house-trained and might go when they feel the urge.  Yuck.  Who gets to clean that up?  Third, children often walk up to dogs they don't know and get friendly--they shouldn't but they do.  As the owner and daily walker of a pitbull, I am extremely vigilant about children who have not been trained that all dogs are not sweet puppies and they should give strange dogs a wide berth.  Fourth, dogs are still ultimately wide animals; yes, they are thousands of years removed from wolves, but they are still genetically very, very, very close.  They sometimes just do crazy, wild things.

Even more, can these people not live without their dogs for the time it takes to go into Walmart (which, admittedly, can sometimes be long and is never pleasant, for people or dogs?)

But . . . now I have been told that students can bring pets to class not because of a clear disability (I had such a student last year, and her beautiful dog was a joy to behold), but because of a need for comfort. 

Add to this the most bizarre article I've read on Breakpoint in a while: Dog boomers 

I truly am afraid that not just the twenty-somethings but older people are becoming totally unable to cope with life and find alternatives that would have been scoffed at forty years ago.  Self-medicating, not being able to go anywhere without a pet, trigger warnings, seeing offense in everything, microagressions.  Is it going to get worse or are we going to get real?

I read that 28 Coptic Christians were killed today in Egypt.  Yet Americans have to have their puppies with them all the time.  Nowhere have I ever been so confronted with the differences in the West and the rest of the world. 

I'm going to write my Compassion Child in Rwanda now and be reminded of reality.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Reflecting on Reflection in Learning

Reflection is the subject of my next couple of presentations, so here are my recent jottings. Hopefully a reader can make some sense of them;however, the whole point of this post is that reflection can follow a structure but will not necessarily create a structured record. The reflection record will need to be reshaped to be palatable for a "judge" or "critic" or "instructor." Reflection tends to be framed negatively. If we dig too deep we will only find bad stuff; if we reflect on teaching practice, we will focus on what failed rather than succeeded. Why? Assessment focuses on finding the nonlearners and changing to get more learners, but it ignores that most of the students did learn, so why were there successes? Leads to burnout. Boud & Walker’s idea of validation not well developed but relevant. It is most close to critical thinking—testing it against other knowledge, theories, internal consistency, other data (other learner’s data) Ref
Read more

The LAST Word on Learning Styles

That title might be extreme, but this article nails it, plus giving some good links to other research. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-problem-with-learning-styles/ What is mostly important here is that we do know what universally works in learning (time, multiple modalities, application rather than rote, spaced out study) rather than an overfocus on "what makes me special."
Read more

Lessons in Leadership Failure

This is the outline for a presentation I gave at Toastmasters recently. It was to finish a pathway in their curriculum, but it also my life. There is no lack of books, articles, magazines, and speakers about leadership. A quick look on Amazon shows there are X number of books with leadership in the title.  Ive even written one. But I would venture to say all of them have one thing in common: the writer thinks they are a good leaders and have this leadership things figured out. Although my topic today is leadership I don’t think I have it figured out and recently I learned a lot about failure in leaders and in myself as a leader.  I was asked to lead a large part of our accreditation. I’ve spoken on this before that it’s called a Quality Enhancement Plan, whereby the institution has to pick a problem and construct a specific plan to address it.  I’ve had a year not to reflect—or not—on how it went and what I learned about myself.  I could share  lot, but in the time I have
Read more