Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Questions Only A Generation Xer Ever Asked

Nothing but love from me if you know what I'm talking about. My money is on Zack or Paul getting this one.

They hit me just as hard as I hit them why don't they die too?

A hint in the labels and the answer in the comments section.

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Monday, April 28, 2008

Napster

I'm not going to rehash, here, what others have said about online music distribution. I'm not going to get into the legalities of file sharing. What I am going to say is if there is truth to online piracy being an indicator for what is popular than bands have got to come up with uniquely search able names. From my perspective Kiss is going to fall into obscurity real soon. There is no way that "New York Groove" is their biggest hit song but that's the first song that I've been able to find.

If my students are any indication and they usually are, the Google generation rarely clicks on anything but the first couple page ranks.

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Thursday, April 24, 2008

1984

I bet you're expecting some rant about how all my wildest conspiracy theories are coming true. Even though canned goods and shotguns are an ever more viable and less wacko portfolio option this is not a post about how "The MAN" is trying to keep us down. Actually, I'm a white male between 35 and 55, a school teacher and a Freemason. I am "The MAN". No the title of this post is not about how RFID chips are in the chemtrails.

For our anniversary and Lisa's not quite 40th birthday we have tickets to this and this. I feel like a kid again only better. Both shows our seats are about 20 feet from the stage. So maybe bending over and paying for the premium seats is actually worth it. At least I'm not renting a limo to see the Grateful Dead or The Rolling Who like my mom does.

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Monday, April 21, 2008

I'm Torn Between Titles For This One

I want to call it "I'll Give Up My Laser When They Pry It From My Cold Dead Hands" but "My Laser Has Killed Fewer People Than Ted Kennedy's Car" is too tempting to pass up. It's a slippery slope between banning toys that the cat loves and trying to stop Scaramanga and Doctor Evil from building a Chinese Death Ray on the moon and ransoming the Earth for One Million Dollars.

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Saturday, April 19, 2008

I Knew It

I knew if I didn't defend the smokers that sooner or later someone would come for my beer.

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Wednesday, April 16, 2008

A Student Of Mine Made A Phone Call Today

No give me the phone. Hello. You mean this really is ______'s father. Yes this really is _____'s teacher. No she's feeling sick. You think it's strep throat. Well usually students ask for a pass to see the nurse and I give them one. Then they don't disrupt my class with a cellphone. Well no she certainly doesn't sound like she normally does. I'll send her down, the number of the main office is ########. They'll dismiss her from there.

Well that was awkward.

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Sunday, April 13, 2008

Etiquette

The rules are that the phone is to be kept off and in the students locker. Otherwise the phone is a constant distraction to the learning process. Either to the student using the phone or the other kid being texted in another class. Every time I take a phone off a kid it's always "a call from my mother." Sorry kid, Mommy needs to learn to call the main office and ask to have you dismissed. It's a system that worked for the 90 years prior to 9/11 and there's no reason it can't work for parents and their kids today.

That being said, if this kid had come to me before class and said he was expecting a possible call from his deployed father. I would let him answer and then take the call quietly out into the hallway.

The story is lacking in details but I'm going to give the school the benefit of the doubt here. The kid probably didn't discuss the possible call before class. The teacher would have no idea why the kid is answering the phone in class and past experience would be that the call is another in a long series of cell phone related disruptions. The teacher, needing to maintain classroom control probably ordered the student to cease their disruptive behavior and relinquish the offending device. The student being a child probably did not reason with the teacher effectively and mearly informed the teacher that they were talking to a parent. The teacher hearing that every time they talk to a child about illegal phone use probably did not assume that the parent was a serviceman and this may have been the last time the (from his own admission) troubled boy may ever hear from his father. Emotions most definitely got out of control. Probably by both the student and teacher. They're probably even more out of control as the kid doesn't sound like an honors student and the teacher probably has had disruptions from the boy before.

You and I know nothing of the past history of discipline issues the school faces with this student and classes in general. You and I don't know anything about the level of student commitment this class has. Today it's the cellphone from this kid. Tomorrow it will be the cellphone from another kid. Next week it will be an iPod.

That this made national news is an indication of how fucked up our priorities as a nation are. Snowflake there isn't going to learn that had he merely cleared the call with the adult in charge of the classroom prior to taking the call that things would have worked out. Instead the lesson is that kids can do whatever they want in the classroom so long as mommy goes to the newspapers to complain. What should have been a lesson in civility is now a public embarrassment for the school. Now every phone call is going to be from someones father in a war zone. Every disruption during instruction time is going to affect every student. The outrage here shouldn't from this one jackass kid and his parents. It should be from the parents of every other kid in the class over the loss of instruction time when these snowflakes lose control.

If the student had answered the call and said to me "This is my dad in Iraq. It's the only time he can call. Can I take this into the hall?" I would say yes even if he hadn't asked for permission before class. I doubt very much that is how the event played out.


(A side note here... If you are accused of disrupting classroom time and go on national TV to defend yourself, clean up. Every judge knows that criminals can borrow a suit but showing up to court in a dirty t-shirt shows either contempt for the seriousness of the charges or a lack of understanding about your end of the social contract. In either case, it's an indication to the judge that you may not belong in polite society. The same case is true here. I'm going to assume trailer trash dumbass and say the kid knows nothing about good manners.)

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Saturday, April 05, 2008

Damn Hippies!

dead bears
But can they stand listening to 'Space' sober?

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Tuesday, April 01, 2008

Beautiful Night

Saw a deer coming home from school tonight. Peeping frogs in the swamp behind the house are peeping away. I'm drinking beer in the back of my truck. That was creepy. The frogs all just stopped peeping like they were on a switch. Now they're back. Coyote must be back there. Pictures of the Coyote in the newspaper taken from around the corner (print not online addition so no linky love.) I'm not the only one who's seen that damn thing. I've been saying it for years and everyone but Lisa who's seen it too say's it's a dog or something.

I gave my kids a test today. They all thought it was an April fools joke. It wasn't. It was a hard spank on the ass for most of them. Now they know I wasn't kidding when I said you need to remember everything in chemistry. What we do in September comes back to haunt you in April. Learning it for the test doesn't cut it. I sent a progress report out to every parent a few weeks ago indicating their kid was doing poorly whether they were actually doing badly or not. It was actually pretty ambigious. It really depended on the relationship the parent had with the kid. Bottom line is that the report cards are always bad 3rd quarter and I didn't want anyone to be surprised. I'm giving several kids their first C ever. I'm also sending one kid back to jail.

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Email me - dean.rules@yahoo.com