otoh

I wonder if this is making headlines outside of the Central Florida area? A local teacher resigned yesterday. She was suspended without pay last week. This followed the publication in a local Spanish-language newspaper of a letter she apparently wrote addressed to an unnamed Congressman. The letter includes these statements:

“I believe we must close the doors to all foreigners for a while until we get this economy and the schools back on their feet.”

“…foreigners are the largerst users of our taxpayers’ money.”
“Foreigners are taking all of the jobs that poor and little-educated Americans could have.”

“Schools are dealing with too many problems with language differences, and time is lost to our American children who have parents who pay taxes.”

“…jobs that poor blacks and poor whites used to take are filled by Mexicans, who I am told bring in drugs and diseases, such as incurable TB….”

The rhetoric is flying fast and furious from all sides on this one. There are undoubtedly people who share the opinion about the influx of “foreigners” on our economy and schools. (They conveniently ignore the fact that ALL of us are foreigners here, some are just more recent than others.) Some members of the disparaged minority communities called for Ms. Hall’s immediate dismissal. An unscientific opinion poll the the Orlando Sentinel website was running about 70% that she should not be fired.

Florida, like most border states, has a very diverse population. All public school teachers in Florida are required to attend training for strategies in teaching students with limited English proficiency. (That requirement, by the way, is part of a settlement of a class-action lawsuit.) According to the most recent figures on the OCPS website, “Students in Orange County schools come from 230 countries and speak 165 different languages and dialects.” Slightly more than 38% of our students are classified as white.

There is also the question of her right to freedom of speech. Did the school system have the right to suspend her, much less fire her, for writing that letter? And they apparently took action before they even had a copy of the letter. What about due process? By most accounts, she was a good teacher receiving very good evaluations and she does have over 25 years experience. Does the system owe her the benefit of the doubt until after an investigation? And how did this letter become public? No member of Congress has admitted receiving the letter. Did expressing these sentiments in any form violate the state’s professional code of ethics?

None of these questions will be answered quickly or easily except, perhaps, for the people who have already made up their minds.

Technorati tags: blog~personal~otoh

Colors bright and beautiful
Add interest to the day
So vivid and so brilliant
Life’s visions on display

Patterns in the warp and woof
Add texture to the nights
Sometimes what we feel the most
Is hidden from our sight

Stormclouds gather overhead
Blocking out the sun
So dreary and so dull
Colors fade and run

Snags and runs and tiny rips
The edges all are frayed
The fabric of my life unravels
And I am hanging by a thread

Technorati tags: blog~personal~otoh~poetry

It happens every year. People start playing football and soon the temperature drops. Before you know it, the ground is covered in snow. (Well, we rarely get the snow down here in Florida, but the temperature frequently drops to 50F or lower in January and February… Brrrr!) Within a few weeks of the end of football season, the temperatures rise once again. All is sunny and warm until the fall when kids start tossing around the pigskin again and the cycle repeats.

That is an example of The Logical Fallacy of Correlation Implying Causation that I learned many years ago. It’s just absurd enough (and familiar enough in the U.S.A.) that I usually get the point across. I was reminded of that in two articles that I ran across recently. And, of course, now that school has started back up, the kids are playing football again….

Anyway, in Comic Relief written by the legendary comic creator Stan Lee (the Fantastic Four, the Amazing Spider-Man, the Incredible Hulk, and many more) he tells us:

In one of my public debates with comic-industry foe Dr. Frederic Wertham, one of the funny things that he used to say was that he had done a very scientific study revealing that 90 percent or more of all the kids in reform school had read comics. So I said to him that 100 percent of kids in reform school drank milk. It went over really big with the audience.

He had another great quote on different topic that I’ll post some other time, but it’s a very short piece and I encourage you to read it on your own.

And then just today, I saw a link on AlterNet:Blogs:Peek to a post on Boing Boing and to a Wikipedia entry on a parody religion called Flying Spaghetti Monsterism.

Among the beliefs proposed in FSM:

• The Universe was created by an invisible and undetectable Flying Spaghetti Monster. All evidence pointing towards evolution was intentionally planted by this being.
• Global warming, earthquakes, hurricanes, and other natural disasters are a direct consequence of the decline in numbers of pirates since the 1800s. (The logical fallacy tie-in)

The prophet of this religion, Bobby Henderson, sent a letter to the Kansas Board of Education after they decided that Intelligent Design deserves equal time with Evolution by Natural Selection in biology classes. In the letter he formally requested that FSM be given equal time as well. It is, after all, another of the many theories of Intelligent Design. He even has received responses from some of the board members which actually demonstrate that there may be far more intelligence (and humor) in that group than I have seen in anything else reported recently.

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I know I’m going to wish that I held on to this link for say… around semester exams or those dreaded state assessments that we all have to use now. But I’m still feeling lazy tired today. Take a look at Despair.com for all your Demotivator needs from lithographs (like the two copied below) to mugs marked with a line so you KNOW when it is half-empty. I think I’ll redecorate my whole classroom….

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I’ve been a fan of optical illusions and visual phenomena for as long as I can remember. (It was a rather natural lead-in to my current occupation of teaching drafting, but that story will wait for another day.) So I was already pretty familiar with the collection on this site. But the coolest thing about the Weird World Web (other than all the blogs I read) is that the familiar

can lead you to exciting new places. You have to check out the Surreal Weird Evil Digital Art Pictures Strange Images Gallery by GyP. Take the time to poke around a little and you’ll be treated to

and

and much, much more.

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I don’t recall how I came across the site for Amy’s LEGO Projects, but I do know it was first to her Abston Church of Christ, a model measuring about 7ft by 5-1/2ft by 2-1/2ft. While it is not a model of a real place, it is none-the-less impressive. And she has lots of photos like this one:

I also remember thinking “way too much time” when I saw it. Since school started back up last week, I have very little free time. So I’m sending you other places for a few posts.

I’ve heard, but I don’t have time to verify right now, that the LEGO company hires people full time to make models like these to show off the versatility of their product. What a cool job! I did find this on the official LEGO site though: “There are 915,103,765 different ways of combining six eight-stud bricks of the same colour.” I’ll take their word for it….

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Reflections on the first week of school.

The button I always wear the first day:

Strange Behavior
Weird Costumes
I Must be at Work Again!

Favorite quote of the week:

God told me to buy donuts.

Seen on T-shirts:

Mommy Says I’m Really Special

and

Top Ten Reasons to Procrastinate
1.

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We’ve made it through the first few days of the school year. Except for some scheduling snafus (that I knew wouldn’t be fixed yet) things are going fairly well.

Living in Florida without electricity is an experience I can live without repeating, yet I did just a couple weeks after that when hurricane Frances took a swipe at us. We had to close the schools again. Ivan took a turn away from us, but Jeanne passed almost right over us not long after. It was an unprecedented season of destruction. We’ve had a few hurricanes form already this year, but none of them have trampled us… yet.

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Students return to school in the morning. I’ve been teaching all my adult life, but I still get anxious before the first day. I’m sure everything will be fine once I get there. That doesn’t stop the butterflies from fluttering for days before.

I was talking to one of our new teachers this week and she commented that I must remember my very first day of teaching. But I don’t. I remember lots of things from that first year, but I really have no clear memories of what that first day was like. Except, I’m sure it must have been much like all the first days I’ve had since then.

There will, of course, be all the new names and faces to learn. It always takes me a couple weeks to really remember all of them. I’m very jealous of teachers that can learn student’s names in a day or two.

One of the things that I find really fascinating is how each class has a unnique personality. It is always more than the sum of the personalities of the students in that class. Sometimes “crowd mentality” takes over. Sometimes the loudest students are not really the leaders. Sometimes I never feel like I have control of a particular class.

We’ve been in preplanning all week and I barely had time to make a couple posts and read my favorite blogs. I don’t think I made a comment on anyone’s blog in over a week. The next several days will be just as busy, if not more so. Stay tuned!

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Men are scum.

Some of us are more subtle about it, but pretty much we’re all scum. I’m usually subtle about it. (Not always. I used to have a T-shirt with “Men are Scum” in large, bright letters. And I wore it proudly, but that will have to be a story for another day.) It’s pretty common for men to look at women like… well like women are naked. I sometimes hear this called, “looking them up and down”.

As I recently explained, I was raised to be a gentleman. I have three older sisters. I know they didn’t always appreciate that kind of attention. Overtly looking a woman up and down was generally not considered acceptable behavior around my house. I learned to be subtle because I’m a guy and you know I’m gonna look! It’s not always easy as I explained some time back.

Since I am around teenage girls all day, and it is professional suicide to look them up and down, I get lots of practice at being subtle where I look. (This should not be interpreted to mean that I am checking out the young women.) I hadn’t really noticed that being very subtle has become very easy for me. Until a couple weeks ago when a woman I was visiting told me that she was insulted because I didn’t look her up and down.

WTF?! I know that women expect us to look. But expecting a certain behavior and liking a certain behavior are two completely different things! (I expect some students to act like lttle devils, but I am never insulted if they act like little angels instead.) The crazy thing is, I did look at her. She looked really good! I’m not likely to make that mistake with her again. But I’d like to hear from some of the women that read this blog. How do you feel about the way men look at you?

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