The Praxis of Pedagogy Day 32

Today was career day and we had guest speakers in the class. One of the speakers was a union organizer for the carpenter's union. He was cool talking about working to make sure workers got higher pay and medical benefits. I talked to him a bit about the Bay Bridge and what he knew about what was going on with that. He said he just found out that the whole bad welding thing was completely false and now they were suing. He said that the increased costs on the bridge were due to work stoppages and the war. He said that getting a hold of materials was hard now because a lot of material was being used for the war. Plus the high demand leads to a higher costs on stuff. I thought this was pretty interesting and I hadn't even really given it much thought, but it makes perfect sense. I didn't even think about the civilian market costs to the war. He was saying that going to Home Depot you'd get a lot of wood that was wet.

Another speaker was a medical assistant and talked about being a medical assistant. She said a statistic that blew my mind. She said that she was working with HIV patients and in East Oakland 84-92% of the people coming in had AIDS. Really high rate. I question this stat just cause it's so ridiculously high. But if they are going to have a high rate like that it would happen in a poor and vulnerable neighborhood like East Oakland. Government isn't really going to do anything for the poor and vulnerable in East Oakland. I'm reminded of the vice presidential debate between Cheney and Edwards when Gwen asked about the AIDS rate among Black women and both guys knew nothing about it and didn't really have anything to say about it.

One of the office staff came in too and talked about being a musician. A lot of the students in my school want to be musicians or rappers or what, so he told them some of the realities of the business. He says the money is made in publishing and that musicians don't get shit. Interesting dirty biz.

The last speaker was an actor that spoke in my 3rd period class. They were rude and so I handed out a lot of 6s. This class. I know it's Friday and they missed lunch since we went back to the old schedule for today, but damn.

I'm just glad that the day is over and the weekend is coming up.