Bill Meyer Show Podcast - Sponsored by Clouser Drilling www.ClouserDrilling.com - 06-06-25_FRIDAY_7AM

Episode Date: June 6, 2025

06-06-25_FRIDAY_7AM

The Bill Meyer Show podcast is sponsored by Clouser Drilling. They've been leading the way in southern Oregon well drilling for over 50 years. Find out more about them at www.clouserdrilling.com. Here's Bill Meyer. Ten minutes after seven, open phones here on Find Your Phone Friday. And if Greg Roberts shows up, hey, we'll talk with him too. Greg Roberts from Rogue Weather could be one of those things where maybe something happened and normally we would do the outdoor report.

Greg, you're welcome. Just go ahead and just call in. We'll take care of business, all right? 7705633. Hey, you know, there was something that happened yesterday that the Republicans were doing their best to show some fight when it came to the LGBTQ agenda, especially about having men masquerading as women in women's sports and taking over those kind of things. Like we had those track and field events last week in which the two Oregon actual bio women

ended up turning to the side and did not want to respect the man, the bio man, who ended up winning the event. Second year in a row row that happened last weekend. I don't know if you had heard much about that. But the House Republicans actually did a good thing. And the one thing I must say about this is that they forced a vote and they have put the Democrats on the record on what they're really standing for. And my question for you is if you think it's going to work. Let me tell you the story here and this came from the House Republican caucus. House Republicans forced to vote to protect women's sports, a policy 69% of Oregonians agree with. So almost 7 out of

10 Oregonians are saying no you don't sit there and you don't have the guy, you don't have the dudes in a dress inside the bathrooms or in the women's sports or in the locker rooms, all this kind of stuff. Seven out of ten Oregonians think that way. I wonder how crazy could be the three out of ten Oregonians that don't think that way, but I suppose, Viva La Difference, I don't know about that one. But the House Republicans forced a vote on the House floor to protect women's sports, locker rooms and bathrooms. It was House Bill 2037.

It would ensure that only biological women take part in women's sports in school and are able to enter women's intimate spaces. That's how they're defining it. And you know, on top of that, they know that this is something that is a... this is almost an 80-20% issue, right, in which you have such an overwhelming number of people that agree with this. And yet the vote failed along party lines. In spite of all these young women athletes who were present for the vote, all these women

who were present for the vote, they came out and they voted against it anyway. All sorts of people. I've represented the Boomer Wright from Reedsport, author of The Bill Says, disappointed to see my colleagues vote to preserve Oregon's discriminatory policy against young girls with men in women's sports. What we have now is a men's category and a men's category where women are relegated to lower places on the award platform. It's like what happened last weekend at the state championships. House Republican Leader Christine Drazin, while I'm disappointed to see the vote fail

along party lines, I'll continue to stand up for women's sports and fight for girls' dreams of giving their all in competition and sharing a podium." How do you think we ever got to a situation like this, which we think that a bio-dude masquerading as a woman should be taking women's sports trophies? It just astounds me. But my question for you, do you think that the Oregon Democrats that are in the state legislature, will they pay a political price for this decision for this vote because they voted no on it? Republicans forced the vote and every Democrat voted no on this.

All the Republicans voted yes. And the Republicans voted yes on a, you know, like I said, a 69% to 31% no kind of issue. The people don't want the status quo. And yet the controlling party ends up saying, well, we don't care what you really want, we're going to give you LGBTQ and tranny guys, or tranny women, rather, in the women's bathrooms and things like that, good and hard. And you have nothing to say about that.

Do you think there is a political price to be paid for this? Or are they in such insane areas that they can recover? That might be one question I have for you this morning, okay? 770-5633-770-KMD. By the way, I noticed there are a couple people who are calling this morning that are turning off their caller ID. I just wanted to give you the rules of talk radio here. You cannot block your caller ID and then call the station. It's just not going to work. I don't

keep that information or database you or anything like that, but generally speaking, people who are not willing to share their phone number are usually the type of people who are just trolls and we're not we're big on people conversing whether they agree with me whether you agree with me or not but if you are just calling to troll not gonna work okay anyway 77056337702 KMED another story which is out today, a report finding Oregon weak in elementary math instruction. The National Council on Teacher Quality, rating a course today with school being out or going out in many districts here, rated Oregon weak in math instruction, particularly at the elementary

levels. NCTQ, this according to Willamette Week, evaluating five criteria to determine whether instructional programs were effective. Researchers examined whether teacher prep programs used detailed and specific math standards, if there was a system in place to review the programs, if the state adopted a strong elementary math license test? I just... Here it is, they're talking about the kids being weak in math in Oregon. And arguably they are. You look at the test scores and they're bad. We're talking elementary school. Elementary school, we're not talking calculus, we're not

talking a lot of squares and square roots and cubes and you know we're not talking about this, we're talking about you know 2 plus 2 equals 4, maybe you have you know 256 divided by 12, you know all you know all these kind of things. And Oregon kids are bad at it. And they're talking about licensing in math. We don't have enough... Well, I guess this rating group says that most US states as weak or moderate. So we're not unusual, but Oregon is especially weak, according to their rating.

It says, it's recommended that Oregon define key standards around four math content topics, numbers and operations, algebraic thinking, geometry and measurement, and data analysis and probability. Now we're talking about four elementary kids, like kindergarten, first grade, second grade, third grade, things like that. Has anyone noticed the preponderance of videos in which parents are not able to assist their children with mathematics because of the type of system that they're using now in Oregon schools? They're not even talking about this in this particular story, the

Willamette Week. This whole idea in which you take 256 divided by 2, and you take the 2 and you put it in the 2, and then the 2 into the 5, and into the... All the ways that practically everyone who's listening this morning learned their mathematics. They don't do this anymore. They do this in a way which seems to be like you're having to explain your work along the way and the way they do it is such a gobbledy goop of incomprehensible stuff that we have parents that can't help. Parents who know how to do math are not able to assist on their math, on their children's

math problems. Am I wrong about this? I've watched these videos for years, and there's so little talk about this, but you're just saying, well, Oregon is weak in math instruction and we need more licensed math teachers. How about just going back to the way that we used to teach mathematics? Is it that simple, or am I wrong about that? Is there something that is broken in children's minds today that they can't do addition and multiplication tables? I was pretty good with numbers as a kid. Now maybe I had that natural ability, but I remember a very different classroom growing up,

and it wasn't that long ago. You know, it's two, three generations ago, but you know, still it was... We learned how to divide and multiply, addition, subtraction, learning about numbers and squaring and large numbers and squares and cubes and all the rest. We did this, but it seemed to be a pretty standard, simple way of going about it. And then we also had ways of learning things by rote. And I know that rote is a bad term today. We're supposed to, I guess, explore the whole student or some sort of nonsense, which has

given us a whole word instruction rather than phonics. And now the state of Oregon is now going back towards phonics in which children learn the building blocks of the language rather than you have to learn all these words by sight and then learn how to read this way, which has been a total failure. And my question, I don't have any children in the schools right now, so I'm not saying that I know everything about how it's going in the schools, but are they doing the equivalent of phonics in mathematics classes? Are there any teachers, maybe a former substitute teacher or maybe one who is a current substitute teacher who can tell me how they teach math in schools right now that is so just counterintuitive

and just absolutely full of nonsense that parents put out videos on YouTube and Facebook and Instagram talking about how ridiculous these things look and then we wonder about why organs weaken elementary math instruction. I just can't help but think that there might be a connection here. If anybody knows if you have taught and you can tell me how this is working please let me know. 770-5633-770-KMED. This is the Bill Meyers Show. I really would like to talk to a teacher or two about it.

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7705633, one question in play already. What do you think is going to come out of the big beautiful dust-up between Elon Musk and President Trump? It does appear that there is talk about them getting together and talking. Like I said, it overshadowed a lot of stuff, but I wasn't sure it was going to mean much. What do you think it's going to be long term? We can talk about that, anything else on your mind here too. Something else that I have been wondering about though, I saved a story from yesterday that is indicating that Oregon's math teaching, especially in elementary school, is just atrocious, very, very weak. And for the lack of me, I don't

know how are they teaching math. And I'm hoping that maybe somebody who has experience with current children in school or maybe recent children in school can tell me what is this method that they're using. And when I grew up, and I know it's back in the days when we all walked through the three miles or three feet of snow, both directions, all that kind of stuff in Ohio, uphill both ways. Okay, okay, Grandpa Boomer. But we would pretty much learn our numbers and we had multiplication, addition, subtraction,

division tables, and we learned a lot of this by rote. And I know that rote has been given a bad name, but it worked. You know, you sit there and we would even have mathematics bees. We'd have spelling bees, sure, too. But then we would also have mathematics bees, in which the teacher holds up the flashcards and, okay, square root of 144. Twelve! You know, we get people lined up. I remember it would be me and Jeff Davis usually, you know, winning this in the end. Jeff Davis was my nemesis in third or fourth grade, right? Square root of 144, 12, all right, you know, 169, 13, you know. And the thing is, though, is that

we memorized these things and it worked. We had the building blocks of mathematics and it wasn't this version... All I can do is describe the way math is... I'm seeing it laid out online on videos, and parents can't help their children learn mathematics. When we all learned mathematics before, at least most of us. Now, some of us have more of an ability than others, but what happened? Can anybody explain to me where this changed? These are questions and I'm hoping to hear from people who have kids in school. Chris, you have some grandkids in school in

Rogue River. What's happening there? I have two. They're in first and second grade and they don't come home with any math paperwork, and if they do, there's no date on it. There's no date, and the teachers are something else. They're a broker anyway. Well, could you tell me though, is there a different kind of methodology of teaching mathematics than what we were traditionally doing just you know maybe 20-30 years ago you know not that long ago on the grand scheme of things because math they're talking about math specifically in elementary school being

excessively weak and we're not talking about having to do algebraic equations in first grade right you know we're not we're talking about basics in first grade what are what are your grandkids getting can you You know, we're not, we're talking about basics in first grade. What are your grandkids getting, can you tell me? Well, they're not getting anything. I don't know what the school's doing and I've questioned the grandmother to look into this and nothing ever comes home. They never come home with period, no homework at all. So you don't see anything about mathematics at all that ever comes home? No, I got a stack of math books and I know it all and I ask these kids what they learned and they say I forgot. When they get

off the bus and they get in the car they say I forgot. They don't know. It's just babysitting there at school at Rogue River. But you can't give me a specific way that they're actually teaching it or not teaching it as the case might be, but this is what you're... I can't see any method, Bill. No, they don't have the, please excuse my dear Aunt Sally, for later, for exponential, I mean the order of operations. They don't teach them any of that stuff yet. Yeah, well, I know that they're talking about wanting to have... Well, I know, the order of operations, they don't teach them any of that stuff yet. Yeah, well, I know that they're talking about wanting to have... Well, I know that the state is talking about, well, we need to have more licensed math teachers.

It's like, wait a minute. Teaching elementary basics mathematics would not seem to... I mean, this is something that a parent, I would think, would be able to help out with, but maybe that's asking too much but well thanks for sharing your experience there though Chris let me go to another line here hi good morning who's this welcome hi Diana how are you now you've taught before now you've taught haven't you okay I have an associate math I taught math back in the nineties took my schooling in the early nineties

and lately uh... a couple years ago uh... i did a request with the eagle point school district to go ahead and see their whole scope and sequence of their new math program and so they laid out all the books from kindergarten through twelfth grade in the conference room for me and I went in and looked at it. And it was pretty much traditional mathematics in the book.

Then my great granddaughter is in Eagle Point School of History and she's allowed to bring home the workbook for the math but not allowed to bring home the actual hardback cover, which is understandable. So at least the kids can bring home that workbook. So maybe someone could call in and explain there might be a disconnect between what they teach and what the testing is asking for. Oh, now have you viewed some of those videos in which the methodology of teaching math with the weird lines crossing over everything and yada yada yada and then at instant presto here is the answer

and it makes absolutely no sense. I don't know what that method is called. Do you? Okay. Well, when Common Core came in and for some reason it hasn't totally disappeared yet, teachers didn't know how to teach it and students now were expected to learn the process rather than the product. So getting the right answers wasn't that important. There's two major global tests. There's the PISA, the P-I-S-A, which is more in tune with sustainable development type questions and expectations

to get a good grade on. And then you have the T-M-I-S-S. I forgot what all that stands for because it's been 20 years since I've taught. But maybe someone can find out too what the subitive tests look like in Oregon because schools are not even allowed to even reveal any information about the testing. I just don't understand that.

If you don't understand what the testing's about, then you can't judge what the scores are here. Because the teachers can't teach certain methods, and the tests are asking for students to use different methods. I guess what I'm wondering though is that do you need licensed math teachers to teach math to a first grader and if so why is what I'm kind of wondering. It would seem to me that elementary math level should not be incredibly difficult. Am I wrong? No, no it should. I've met people that are adults, these people that have taught school, they did these know-how-to-converting fractions to a decimal.

Oh, really? You know, yeah. So are we looking at multi-generational decay and rot? Yeah, well the people you talk to aren't my age, you know, retirement and more. rot. reflection on overall what the general scoring is for that school. How does my child compare to the other students in their class? What are the questions that a parent should ask? All right. Diana, thank you for the take on that and also having been a former school teacher, all right, and not that many years ago in the grand scheme of things, especially in mathematics, but there does appear to be a crisis and they're especially focusing on elementary school.

Hi, good morning. Who's this? Yeah, this is not so crazy. Hi, Gene, what's on your mind? Well, everybody should know this, but the government creates problems so they can bill you to fix the problems. That's just how they work.

Now Diana said that the math books appear to be the same and yet the kids appear to be doing worse now. And I really don't think that all of a sudden over 20 or 30 years that kids just went stupid. There must be something broken in this process. Well, they've got the people, the teachers, who have weren't the same way they're doing it now, then they come in stupid. They can, they're geniuses, they're telling everybody that they are. And yeah, they create the problem no matter what the books say. Well, I don't know though what having more licensed math teachers will necessarily accomplish, unless, well, the problem is we're looking at academia in which, you know, there's such a push for,

I don't know, is it whole math that we're looking at here, just like whole language that screwed up reading, it's terrifying to me if this is true. I don't mean to be... I don't have an answer for it right now. I'm not in the classroom so I can't really answer, so I'm hoping that there might be some teachers willing to say why it's so difficult, it seems, to teach elementary school age children mathematics. It's a mystery that will continue to be unanswered until we hear from the teaching folks. Okay, 7705633. Actually, hold the calls here right now. We are going to talk about schools of different type. This is going to be now on the higher level of Harvard. Trump

administration, of course, has been breaking down and, you know, busting down Harvard's door, wanting to get them in line on antisemitism issues and more. And Greg Rabideau, filmmaker, has an interesting take on it. We'll talk with him about it in a minute. We've heard it all. Apparently those larger tires don't provide more clearance. It was a really big bird. Might've been a pterodactyl.

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that's what we're trying to do. Democrats disagree. They're allowing the bill to die in committee without a public hearing. Republicans want a hearing on the bill. Hot weather's on the way with weekend temperatures expected to hit right around 100 degrees Saturday through Monday, with a slight chance of a thunderstorm Monday. Fire danger in the Oregon Department of Forestry's

Southwest Oregon District is going to rise to moderate tomorrow on 1.8 million acres across Jackson and Josephine counties. If you're headed to the woods, check for restrictions. According to the latest numbers, home sales increased 5.7% in the first quarter and the median price for a new home around the Medford area, $412,000. Bill London, KMED. Great to see you. Come on in. Hi. Thanks for letting me stay in your guest room. London KMED. Great to see you. Come on in. Hi.

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Visit Klauserdrilling.com. So, you're a batteries plus go-to guy. Can you replace the battery in my smartphone? Yes. What about my employee's phones? Yep. Can you power my business day to day? on KMED. stunt, four dimensional chess or not? Do you think that, um, Oregon Democrats in the house and Senate and the state legislature, do you think that they will pay a political price over refusing to protect women's sports and spaces from guys masquerading as women? They refused to vote yesterday for house bill 2037. It would have said, Hey, no more of these bio dudes in the dress going into the girls track and field events, etc., etc.

All the Republicans voted yes. All the Democrats voted no. Will they pay a price? Because even Oregon polling shows seven out of ten in favor of stopping the nonsense. What do you think? We could talk about that. And another one that has been bothering me, Oregon, and according to a latest report here, extremely weak in elementary math instruction. And I'm wondering why. We're

talking elementary school. One plus one equals two. One plus nine equals ten. We have, you know, three buckets. Or I don't know, how do they teach math in the schools? If anybody can tell me how they do this, is it where they're trying to get, we have ten transgender men and then twenty-one transgender women. And how racist were the people opposing them? Is that the kind of math that's being tossed? I know I'm just having fun with you a little bit, but is that the way they're doing it? Is there something deeper going on?

It would seem to me that of all things, elementary school math is something that would be teachable by anyone who has graduated high school, I would think. And yet they're talking we need more licensed math teachers. Well, if they're coming out of the system that's failing right now, is that the problem? Is it the lack of licensed teachers? I don't know. I'm just posing the question right now. Don, you wanted to talk about that in the public school. What do you say? What do you say, brother? Yes, it's something that I care about.

But before that, we need to know that Elon Musk has friended me on Facebook. So, that was... He's friended you? Really? Somehow, I don't see Elon Musk as a Facebook kind of guy, frankly. Well, we have a lot in common. I am African-American, after all. Oh, are you from Africa, too? Yes, I'm African-American after all. Oh, are you from Africa too? Yes, I'm African-American. I did not know that. To be that as it may, I've studied education my whole life. I know that before you can address the problem with math and instruction, the problem with reading and teaching, is you haven't identified the root problem. There is a, it's a diabolical control of control freaks that they're neurotic, they're sociopaths. I would cite the book, N.E.A. Trojan Horse in

Public Education. It was 40 years ago. But you can't teach these children to learn. Before you can teach them math, let's say, they don't know how to learn. And I would show you that it's rooted in language because the children from Europe, for example, Jewish children are all minimum, bilingual, many trilingual. Their brains have learned how to learn because languages are different. They

have different sentence structures, not just different words. The whole inflection of idioms need to be acquired. I can certainly understand that, but what does this have to do with actually the teaching of math though? Can you connect the two? Because the mind of the child, the student, can't learn. And it's designed this way so that still the elite, there is an elite group of educated and educators who are directing our technocratic world right now. Keep everybody focused on the media or know that what they want is music and drugs, which has been since the counterculture of the late 60s.

All right. When we as parents end up sending our children to school then, they're not prepared to learn already. They're not curious about anything or what where do you... because we're trying to identify the problem here. What do you think we're doing wrong? Now, I knew how to, now, my mother taught me to read, so I already had the reading. That was not much of a problem, you know, for me. Right, right, yeah.

I can only talk about my experience, but what is happening with children going into the educational process right now? I don't want to throw teachers under the bus here, but, you know, maybe it's a combination of broken teachers and broken students. The teachers can't help it. They can only do what they've been told in certified school teacher schools. And it's my grandmother taught in an 8th grade one room in the Midwest. And imagine they all stayed in touch with her until she

was 80 years old and they're still writing her letters. So it's curious to me that they've broken the mold of Copernicus or the great mathematicians from ancient Greece, and then the great philosophers of Greece, and later Rome and the writers, and that pattern was set down on how to learn. and then the great philosophers of Greece, later Rome and the writers, and that pattern was set down on how to learn. After all, Alexander the Great learned from Socrates. The thing is, though, don't we all have a natural ability to learn just out of basic rank curiosity? That's not what I'm saying. No. I'm saying the students are not learning how to learn. And if you're given

the standard, look at Jesse Waters and other interviewers, men on the street interviews, and these college students, they go to college campuses and they ask, how long is a quarter of an hour? They say 25 minutes. Yeah, and I can just spit that out immediately, 15, right? A quarter of an hour. Sure. How did you know? You don't know it intuitively. You learned it a lifetime ago, two lifetimes ago. So yeah, because you look at a round clock, try to find a round clock today. And see, people are trying to digitize their brains. And the difference in learning... Well, the brain is not necessarily a digital modem, right? No. See, the difference in teaching also is now boys learn tactfully. That's why in grade school,

boys cannot touch the letters that they're printing on a page, like when you're learning how to print in English, for example. Boys have to touch. The girls are more intuitive, cerebral if you would, in learning those things. Now boys can't touch and it establishes a pattern of regression. Okay, you know that's kind of going back to, maybe you're right about that Ron, or Don rather, pardon me, that I, we know what I was telling you, we used to do mathematics B's, right? Those were things that the boys really excelled at because we were getting tactile, we were up there, we were on our feet and we were, here's the flash card, you know, square root of 144, 12, you know, whoever is able to answer it

first, you're getting this. We got it by rote though. We were taught by rote though on the basic building blocks of mathematics and that seemed to work pretty well. And that should seem to help you then get the basics, but... Intuitive teachers know boys learn tactfully. Boys and girls are different. You mean boys and girls aren't a social construct? No. What an amazing revelation for the National Education Association, okay? So also, I want to thank you for addressing this issue. It is really a black mark on Oregon history. It's not anything you can fix with. You can't just throw money at it. Okay, we'll just take you can fix with. You can't just throw money at it.

Okay, we'll just take that to the bank. We can't throw money at it, that's for sure. 770-5633-77-OK-MED. Let me grab another call here. It's on your phone Friday. Good morning. Hi, who's this? This is Gene. Hi, Gene. Okay. One thing that the guy that was talking earlier today, next year wanting to sue for the guns, what he forgot, evidently, is how they got the guns in the first place. Bomber was shipping a bunch of guns to Mexico and he was going to track the guns so that they could catch them. Well, the guns got close to the border and for some reason nobody was watching them and they were all stoned. Yeah, I remember that story and of course they never really got to the bottom of it. The point that

Mike was making in the mic from Landmark Legal was making there was that really what was going on is that Mexico was looking to make a tidy profit just by plundering Smith & Wesson and the other firearms manufacturers. That's kind of where he was coming from on that and the Supreme Court more or less saw through that. Yeah, but at the same time it should have been brought up that Burmese, the one who shipped the guns to him in the first place. Fair enough. Thank you, Gene.

7705633. It's open phone zone. Find your phone Friday. A lot of topics in play and anything that's on your mind too. Hi, good morning. Who's this? Hello? Oh, are you?

I am. Are you there? I am here. And so are you. What's your name? My name is Are you there? I am here. And so are you. What's your name? My name is Mary. Hi, Mary.

Hi. So, I have two sets of children. My oldest is 21 and 20, and my younger children are 9 and 6. And my older children went mostly to public school, and my younger children went exclusively to homeschooling with the support of a homeschooling tutoring center. But we have the same teachers. So our math teacher is a gentleman in Grant's past who has been teaching math for nearly 50 years. He taught at Brighton. He had his own homeschooling center. And so from the math perspective, I think one of the things that's always been really important and what's not being explained to children and teacher

and parents and children right now while they're learning math is why. Why do I have to learn math when I can just use a calculator and the math will do it for me? Especially we have AI, right? So now the big question is why do I have to learn math when I can just use a calculator and the math will do it for me? Especially we have AI right so now the big question is why do I have to learn anything? This AI program will do everything for me and in theory it will do it better more efficiently quicker And it'll do it better than I can spend more time on my device. Yeah, you know that's that's you Yes, so you think that's part of it. I remember That's, that's, yeah. So you think that's part of it. I remember, you know, when I was in school,

public school in the 1970s, late 60s and through 1979, that there was a very, very, there was a huge controversy at that time of even allowing calculators into the classroom, right? And that was, that was the big deal. Computers were still relatively crude. I think the Apple came in in the late 70s. It was about it. It was very, very expensive. Yeah, like $3,000, $3,000, $4,000 at the time.

It was huge money. So we didn't have as much of the availability. It was a big deal to get a TI-99 electronic calculator at that point. Oh, yeah, one of those Texas instrument calculators. I remember, I'm 45, if you had one of those, you were really hot stuff, man, in high school. Yeah, but if we were going to learn it, if we were going to do the math and do the test, we had to learn, we had to know the process here. Right, exactly. So people should be explaining, and we run a co-op non-school nonprofit tutoring

center and once you explain to the children why they're doing the math, and the poor reason why we have to learn the process is because the part of our brain that we will use forever, our entire life is developed during the math process, okay? We're going to use that to learn how to tie our shoes, to change a tire on the side of the road. We're going to learn to have a conversation with other people that they can understand and process. We're going to problem solve when we buy our first home. We're going to problem solve every single day. Once you explain it to kids, I get it. I understand you could just do it on the calculator, but this part of your brain is incredibly valuable. And you need to get that part of the brain fired up then.

While developing. You know, it's interesting that you bring up that you have to use that side of your brain to tie your shoes. You're absolutely right, because in essence, your brain is making an incredible amount of on-the-fly calculations about space and where... Every second of the day. Yeah, exactly. Space and time. Absolutely. I'm driving down the road right now. I'm talking to you on my phone and my

brain is clicking at... I can't even do the math on it. It's so fast. But it's such an integral part of my day. I mean, we only have a few involuntary things that we do. We breathe, we blink. That's about it. I mean, there else, we're figuring out how to do. So when you look at, my son just went off to go, he just turned 20, he went off to go be a merchant Marine, okay? In order to get that job, he had to have a clean drug test, which from coming out of the Josephine County area was hard to do at his age. God bless me if he's able to do that. That's great. Well you know what that job starts at? What? $150,000 a year. He's working in the

Port of Seattle right now. Whoa! 20 years old. He's making $150,000 a year. Good for your son! He has high school education, but it's not just good for my son. It's good for anybody that can show up to work looking in the eyes and problem-solved Right now they were raised with no television and I absolutely believe that the lack of that electronics It absolutely allowed their brains to be able to develop in a way where there are highly functioning adults right now in a world where there Aren't many so now you know we've got this 10-year gap And we've got these little kids now that we're raising, another set of kids that are coming through our home, nine and

six. And they're being raised, again, no TV, or if they're watching TV, they've got the blue light glasses on, very minimal electronic exposure. And you know, we really have to do that because if we're going to let them watch electronics, they have to be so limited because we already know that these TVs are coming over from a country that we're at war with. And they're producing these TVs and we can talk about conspiracy theories all day long, but the reality of the situation is we already know what they did in the opium

den to the British. We already know that they're very intelligent. And we also know that China has great resentment to what was done to them in the opium war. So you're looking then at the tech world and maybe the AI world is China's revenge in some ways? It could be. I think the spectrum in the TV's we're going to find out is totally trashing our kids' brains. They're burning addictive neural pathways in their brains right now from electronics. They're just as strong as crack, as fentanyl. Those

pathways, they're being burnt into three-year-old brains. And then we wonder why they're not grasping mathematics content. Okay, good. Mary, from your experience, thank you for the thought-provoking conversation. All right, I really do appreciate that. 754. If you have a comment on this, anything else that we've been discussing this morning, open phones at 770-5633, the Bill Meyer Show. If you're on hold, I'll be right with you. Hi, this is Bill Meyer and I'm with Cherise from No Wires Now,

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Smart digital tools that actually made sense. Website help, social media, email marketing, no fluff, just results. Get started at KMED.com. Click the Advertise Marketing tab. Welcome to the Bill Meyers Show on 1063 KMED. Give Bill a call at 541-770-5633. I'm not one of these boomers that goes in here and says, you know, back in my day, everything was better. But I can't help but notice the incredible weakness that we continue to see on Oregon

education and report finding that Oregon is incredibly weak in elementary, the simplest, the beginning part of math instruction. And the conversation, well, we need more licensed math teachers, etc., etc. And maybe I'm wrong because I refuse to believe that today's children are stupid and that there's no hope for them, and that they're just broken going into the system. I also refuse to think that all these teachers that are coming out of the teachers' college are also completely broken and or stupid. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I just don't want to be right about it. But, you know, of all things it would seem that elementary math instruction should be something that is just something that even your typical adult

can't. Maybe a typical adult can't do it now. Maybe I'm just that out of touch here. And so, David, I go to you. You're a younger man. You have kids. And maybe you can give me a little take on it. Go ahead. Well I wanted to follow up on what Shelley was saying is that you know I think one thing we need to be aware of is that all of our standards for education are still centered on business, productivity, science, and engineering and things that really are industry centered, right? And the education system, our education system is industry centered and

profession centered. One thing we need to be aware of is, yes, we make our brain work for competency and problem solving, but how much of that problem solving only relates to our business and professional lives. And a lot of us in 2025, I feel like civilizations as well as families have really seen the peak of what we're capable of with business and industry and technology.

I think it's really important to understand that our education system was developed by the British to create a uniform system of merchants around the world. And there's a great documentary about this and Ted Talk. And so when we think about what we wanna teach children, we need to also be aware of, you know, basically our cultural evolution and where we should be. We should not just be focused on creating very efficient, very proficient people. But are we evolving or devolving at the moment?

Well, the fact that we're not making proficient and efficient people out of the school is not a good thing. But I'm just saying if we're going to build back education within our own families or tribes, we need to be focused on not just K through 12, get them competent in business and engineering. That's what school is. You can't argue with that. There is a, if you go to college, there's a side course emphasis on existential humanitarian moral values in a few classes, but essentially all we are about is advancing our practical abilities and our competencies

culturally. That is not an education system that I personally want to invest in. I'd much rather we were going energetically in a totally different direction. I mean, we've really seen, I think the pinnacle of business and technology, I think we need to stop focusing so much on making more merchants. Well, again, I'm looking at what's happening in the AI and the tech world. If anything, they wish to push it further though, David. So you're thinking that's where an issue is in your opinion? Well, Phil, it's a double-edged sword. Everything that you see as a downside, when you're aligned in your purpose, it's all a

great resource. I mean, look how great this cell phone works right now. I hate to fight you. I hate the cell phones. But look at the community involvement it gives me. At my fingertips, I can talk to all my friends, literally, on different continents right now. Okay. Well, I guess that we don't need to learn anything.

We can just sit in our pod and we can just bring on the matrix. I think the matrix is going to serve us if we use it right. Okay, I appreciate the call. Let me go to Minor Dave. Hello Dave, I want to get your take on it too. Go ahead. We're talking mathematics in elementary school and there's a real problem in Oregon and I just can't believe that adults are intentionally breaking this but what do you think? Well what I think is first off you have to know how to count money. Most important thing that takes mathematics. If you want to build a house, it takes mathematics. You got to know trigonometry and geometry.

At least, crucery is a construction worker. If you want to be a radio engineer like you, the math you know is off the charts because of radio frequencies take a lot of math behind them. And remember, math is just another language and you have to learn it. Dave, thank you. That's an interesting way of looking at that. I want to go to Larry. Larry, you've been holding here for a little while too. Welcome. What's on your mind here? Well, as I've been listening to this stuff about education, and I've taught for 33 years, and middle school and elementary school, but it's, you know, there's a lot more to it here. How much time does a kid spend in the classroom? I couldn't really tell you what is it about maybe five to six

hours a day perhaps? Well if you're talking about math you're talking about about an hour a day for math. Okay. And you're talking about an hour or 45 minutes an hour for any of your other subjects depending upon the type of program you're working with. Some programs are are Monday, Wednesday, and Friday the kids are in class with longer time, and Tuesdays and Thursdays. So there's a complex thing here. But I hate to take an idea here that came from the Clintons, because I hate the Clintons. And that is that it takes the community. And we have...

Larry, you're not wrong about that. And just because I may dislike those people, they're not always wrong about something. Okay? So, yeah. You're all right. I get it. So, where are you thinking about that when it comes to the community and just Oregon being incredibly weak and elementary math instruction, which just kind of gobsmacks me, as the Brits would say. Well, it does me too. The political situation's there for us. But it also takes an idea that the kids, if they only spend an hour in class a day, then what do they do in the rest of their time? I know that when I was teaching, I would have, in the 80s is when things really began to change a lot.

Oh, I was wondering about that and talking to a teacher is I was hoping to find where the root of it was and was it just the rise of technology as some have said or the rise of a different kind of culture or the sinking of one? What is your overall take on it? It's a combination of that. As the culture increased, we had more technology come in, and technology is good but not used in the wrong manner. And so we'd have parents that would come in and say, well, you're the one that's supposed to be teaching my kid. I don't want homework at home.

And so you do it here at home. Well, that's all fine. But you've got to buy in and everybody needs to agree about the situation, about what do we do with this kid. At school, there's these things that we do, and at home, there's these things that we do that can complement the things that are done at school. Something that always gets left out too,

there is the administration, the principals. We can hear the teachers, how bad they are, and I know that there's good teachers there, as well as bad ones. And I would homeschool my kids today because of the way the curriculums are. But what part does this principal and the school board play in this here? It's not all focused on the teacher. It should be focused on all of the events that are

around it and to end up with a better program. Now with the math and in the 80s they came in with the so-called new math and with that new math then you had bin diagrams and circle this and circle that. Oh so that's when that started coming in, I didn't get that when I was learning mathematics. OK. Yeah. Yeah. And another thing is that in the 80s, in Justine County, then we started doing competency testing at the middle school.

And that was in the eighth grade. And so in that time, then we came up with a big book of, oh, about a six-inch binder with all of these math tests that we were supposed to give, and the kids were supposed to be competent in it, or they didn't go on to high school. And so the first year, first year we held back, I think, about 45 kids. And then the next year, then then it was fewer and then they only held them back for a half a year and then sent them to the i-school. All that kind of stuff. But we were teaching to the test, not teaching the math program like it needed to be done.

Larry, thank you so much for your experience and sharing some of that. It gave me a little bit of insight. I appreciate that. Holly, you're going to wrap up this segment here this morning. Holly, good to have you here. Go ahead. Good morning. Well, there are a couple of different problems in schools. One of them is that kids are not held accountable. They're not even required to do any of the major testing. So the statistics that they talk about are greatly skewed by the fact that kids can just refuse to test. So only the kids who want to test are being tested. And second, I think teachers' instincts are being undermined by the unions and by the district and all of those things that they can't lay a hand on kids.

In fact, if kids are disrupting a classroom, rather than remove that kid, they have to leave that kid in the classroom and remove all of the other kids to another area. So the disruptors in essence are running the asylum, right? Right. Everybody's paralyzed. The kids are paralyzed from paralyzed. The kids are paralyzed from learning. The teachers are paralyzed from teaching. You know, it's a completely antithetical situation. All right. It was... thank you very much

for your opinion on that, Holly. I really appreciate that. KMED, KMED, HD1, Eagle Point, Medford, KBXG, Grants Pass. We'll check news here in just a moment and we may revisit this one. I don't think this topic is done anytime soon for sure. We will have a palate cleanser too and and look at some of the positive things going on here in southern Oregon in spite of what the legislature is doing in session.