Christmas blog II

Merry Christmas. Have a safe and joyful holiday.

MNPS picks Register

Metro Nashville Public Schools picked a new director on Satruday and from the reports, it's not a great start. According to reports it took five hours of deliberation and three attempts to scuttle the search all together before the board chose Register.

Contract specifics, including Register's $285,000 salary and benefits request, must be negotiated before the deal is final.

The selection almost didn't happen because of disputes over the candidates and concerns about the search process.
Three attempts to abandon the vote and start a new search were defeated Saturday. Freshman board member Alan Coverstone and veteran board member Ed Kindall were the primary opponents of hiring a new director.
After it became obvious there wasn't enough support to abandon the vote, board members settled on Register, who is a consultant and part-time professor.
The shaky support didn't deter Register, who said he's confident he can win the board's full support.

At one point in the deliberations, one of the school board members expressed concern over Register because he's a white male. Huh? No one had concerns about other candidates because of skin color, they brought up traits that would effect how they would do the job. Ridiculous.

With leadership like that what could go wrong?

Christmas break baby!

Two weeks off and then back at to get ready for testing, yes the true measure of a child's intelligence and abilities is measured by many hours of standardized testing.

More white parents choose public schools

So said the headline in the local paper of an article meant to make people feel good that a few white families are choosing to send their children to public schools. But not just any public schools, but public schools in predominately African-American neighborhoods no less.
Wow, that must make our African-American, Hispanic, Asian, Arabic and African families feel really good about the schools they send their kids to if white parents are sending their kids.

Ignoring the obvious racial overtones of the headline, the article tells the warm and fuzzy story of one set of white parents who are sending their daughter to a magnet school elementary school. The school they send their daughter to is; Lockeland Elementary School. It became a Design Center in 2004 with an emphasis on literature and daily Spanish instruction. The school which was built in 1939, is a lottery school, which draws students from all over Davidson County. It does give priority to its neighborhood residents but is not considered a zoned school. It's 60% white, 35% African-American and 5% Asian and Hispanic, the removal of two pre-K classes, which were 90% African-American, helped drastically change the racial makeup of the school.

Translation, it gets kids whose parents want them to go to the school because they have to apply to attend, the school chooses which kids can attend, it doesn't take whichever kid is supposed to attend. The parents must also provide transportation for their child to attend the school unless they live within walking distance.
Are those the traits of a typical public school or does it sound almost exactly like a private school?

http://www.tennessean.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20081219/NEWS04/812190378&s=d&page=1

Christmas spirit from a moron

The last person kids need to hear that Santa doesn't exist is from a substitite teacher but that's exactly what hapenned at Blackshaw Lane Primary School in Royton, Greater Manchester England. The class of 25 allegedly became rowdy talking about Santa Claus and the teacher blurted out that he did not exist in an effort to calm them down. Merry Christmas...

Calm them down by telling them Santa doesn't exist?!

It's the same as calming pirahanas down by throwing fresh meat into the water, telling people at Wal-Mart that even more sh-- is on sale or that there are only 4000 Hannah Montana tickets available.

The sub has been disciplined according to a letter sent to parents.

Two good things about this story:

1. it didn't happen in the US,

2. it didn't involve a teacher sleeping with students

Why teach...

Our principal sent the following e-mail to all of us today:

Teachers,
Please send me by email or leave it on my desk, the name of address of someone who has had a great influence in your life. Someone who may even have helped you as you made your decision to become a teacher. It might be a parent, grandparent, spouse, sibling, or friend. Please try to have the name of that person and their address to me by Tuesday.
Thanks,

When I first saw this I thought, okay who is one person who influenced me to take this sometimes unbelievably frustrating but often just as unbelieveably inspiring job. I began thinking back to college professors, not much there, I was a history major convinced that I destined to find more info about Civil War battlesites and then to move onto saving them and the countless lost Revolutionary War battle sites. This revelation happened my freshman year when I was one of the lucky few at my small liberal arts college to take a Civil War history course from Shelby Foote. Foote wrote a large three-volume about the war, we got to read his book and ask him questions about his research and his writing for 4 hours every week. As a freshman in college, it's easy to be intimidated in this setting but Foote was a master at making everyone feel important and to assure them that they needed to be part of the discussion because he wasn't going to be the "sage on the stage" it wasn's his style. If you don't know who he is, watch Ken Burns' fabulous Civil War series, he's the older gentleman who Burns uses as his expert. Foote wasn't the only one but he is the only one with the stunning southern accent.

But, as with most people, what I thought I was going to be my life's work got slapped down by the reality of having to get a job and pay bills.

Then I thought about my high school teachers, nothing there. High school was four years of reminding myself how much I wanted to escape my hometown and to never look back.

Grad school professors? Please, giving us teaching ideas and theories that themselves wouldn't use. I learned more from spending two years counseling at-risk kids.

In the end, it came down to my parents, namely my father. He wanted my brother and I to find jobs that weren't blue collar and had both a future in them and an end. A career where you could retire while still a relatively young man, and could enjoy life.

Although there are parts of the job that are easy to hate, there is more of it to love and it's better than what my folks had.

No school today too much snow

Today is one of the great benefits of teaching; snow days. As you can see by the pictures we are inundated with snow here in NashVegas. Yes, I plan to enjoy the day doing stuff like Christmas shopping, watching tv, drinking hot tea, all the stuff you do when the weather is bad.

The "doghouse" for the holidays

Listen up men, if you give your wife/girlfriend a lousy gift for Christmas they can now tell the entire world about it. The website, http://bewareofthedoghouse.com/Default.aspx, let's people put others in the doghouse for a variety of sins. Some of the reasons include:

"He said I'm just like my mother" Ouch.

"Told his wife she needed to lose some weight off her waistline" Damn, that was just stupid

"Said I just warm the food, I don't really cook anything" Another moron

"Leaving the toilet seat up"

"You let our MacBook go"

"You haven't bought us a fish yet"

"My birthday is next week, but the necklace, get out"

"Because you suck and your an asshole"

"Because you eat too many things"

"Lookin at other women in Dunkin' Donuts"

"Not doing the laundry when told to"

"Because I'm sure there is a reason, I just haven't thought of it yet"

"He doesn't respect his darling mother who loves him more than life itself"

"She gave me Pledge as a gift"

"Thinks dental floss is a great gift"

"Was talking on cell too long and forgot to pick up dinner"

"Dental implants for Christmas gift"

No punishment will be enough for these two

This story was in the our daily paper this morning. I had to read it twice to make sure I had read it right.

According to the police report; Cookeville police arrested a Cookeville woman and her boyfriend in the rape of her three-month-old baby boy. Police said on Nov. 15 the couple reported the baby was not breathing. The baby was transferred to Vanderbilt University Medical Center with injuries and remained there for several weeks.Police said the baby is recovering and has been placed in the custody of his biological father.Amish and Holman were booked into the Putnam County jail, where bond was set at $200,000.

I cannot describe how sick and disgusted this story makes me.

http://www.tennessean.com/

"Age Management: or how to have a great bod after 40

If you want to keep your 30 year-old body well into your 40s, 50s and even 60s, then Dr. Jeffery Life is the man for you. His face is that of a distinguished-looking grandpa; his head is balding, and what hair there is is white. But his 69-year-old body looks like it belongs to a muscle-bound 30-year-old.
The photo regularly runs in ads for the Cenegenics Medical Institute, a Las Vegas-based clinic that specializes in "age management," a growing field in a society obsessed with staying young. Life, who swears that's his real last name, also keeps a framed copy of the photo on his office wall at Cenegenics.

While athletes have been using HGH and steroids for years to improve performance, the drugs are now being used much more by people who want to look younger and healthier and who claim that diet and exercise aren't enough.

Says Ed Detwiler, one of Dr.Life's patients; "He's the man!" Detwiler, 47, has been Life's patient for more than three years. In that time, he has adopted the regimen that his doctor also follows — drastically changing his exercise and eating habits and injecting himself each day with human growth hormone. He also receives weekly testosterone injections.
He does it because it makes him feel better, more energetic, clear-minded.
He does it because he wants to live a long, healthy life.
"If I were stooped over and bedridden, what kind of quality of life is that?" asks Detwiler, a real estate developer in suburban Las Vegas who says he's doing this, in part, for his wife, who is nine years younger. "If I can get out and be active and travel and see the world and be able to make a difference in other people's lives, then yes, I would want to have as long an existence as possible."

Detwiler, Life's patient at Cenegenics, is not looking for the appearance of youth. He's looking to extend his youthfulness, and his life.
He knows about human growth hormone and its controversies in sports. But this, he and his doctor insist, is different. While it is illegal for these kinds of hormones to be dispensed for anti-aging purposes, he takes relatively low doses prescribed for "hormone deficiency." The idea is to bring his levels back up to those of a young man in his 20s.
"My friends say, 'Oh, Ed's on steroids,'" says Detwiler, who has watched as muscle has replaced fat on his belly and elsewhere. "No, I'm not. Look at me. Do I look like I'm on steroids?"
He holds out his arms to indicate that his body is fit-looking, but not monstrous. "I'm not. I'm on hormone therapy," he says of a regimen that costs him more than $1,000 a month.
Besides human growth hormone, testosterone, and an adrenal hormone known as DHEA, his diet now largely consists of things like hard-boiled eggs, fruits, nuts, Greek yogurt, salads and palm-sized pieces of fish, chicken or low-fat beef. He also exercises regularly, alternating between intense cardio workouts and weight-resistance training.
"I can't tell you in words how great I feel," says the man who used to crack open a Pepsi to get him through the day.

Of course all this isn't cheap,in addition to the $1000 a month Detwiler claims to spend there are up front costs that run in the thousands of dollars. The initial one-day $2,995 evaluation at the Cenegenics, has already attracted a handful of unnamed Britons.

After the initial evaluation, clients spend up to $13,000 on exercise and diet regimes, supplemented by vitamins and, in most cases, hormone replenishment such as testosterone.
Approximately 20 per cent are also prescribed injections of human growth hormones if they are diagnosed as demonstrating adult growth hormone deficiency (AGHD).

Most who get the "treatments do so because they feel societal pressure to look younger than they are. Wow, what a shock it's society's fault that I'm putting this into my body, I'm just a innocent guy or gal who can't make my own decisions, society makes them for me. What a crock...

Quotes from the AP and from Steroid Nation

http://grg51.typepad.com/steroid_nation/

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gtaHtJdjPXQHQiV6JFq2F610uBsAD94TSEMO0

Creativity can still be found in school

One of the things I do with 4th graders is make them read to each other, to me and to Kindergarteners. Every Friday we go to both of the kindergarten ESL or ELL rooms and read a story to them and ask them questions about whatever book we are reading that week. Some weeks the students pick the books they are going to read to them and some weeks everyone reads the same book. As can be expected not every 4th grader likes to read, especially if they have spent the past 3-4 years failing at reading as many ELL students have. To make the job of reading easier for my students we often use art to help express what the theme and or lessons of the story.

The pictures above were relating to The Season's of Arnold's Apple Tree by Gail Gibbons.

It's a story that follows Arnold who's about 10-12 and the changes his apple undergoes during the four seasons.

Each group of four students took one of the seasons, created a picture of the tree from that season adn then wrote a description of the tree during that season.

After doing similar activities on the book for the past three years I am continually surprised and astounded by the artwork and the writing these students produce.

Ya gotta love Willie Nelson

I was one of those lucky kids who grew up listening to great country music; Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Merle Haggard. Among those it was Cash and Nelson who I follow to this day.

I have always had a lot of respect for what Willie has tried to do with his FarmAid concerts and now with his BioDiesel product he's promoting to try to cut our dependance on foreign sources of oil.

Now Nelson is at it again, writing an open letter to Obama asking him to reorganize food and farm policies to help American farmers. Here are some of the highlights:

He wants his his FarmAid Organization as a resource to help the new administration develop a food and farming policy that supports sustainable family farms. He also wants to wants the federal government to provide support for his Good Food Movement that supports local farmers and their efforts to get their products to markets both local and nationwide.

I don't know if president-elect Obama will listen to him, I hope he does. Nelson truly cares about a forgotten part of our country's wealth and incidently, the only ones not in Washington asking for billions to help bail them out. That in itself should be worth Mr. Obama's attention.

The letter and and more can be found here:

http://www.farmaid.org/site/c.qlI5IhNVJsE/b.2723595/k.EE67/Family_Farmers_Good_Food_A_Better_America.htm

No pets in classrooms

Most people had a classroom at some point in their schooling that had an animal in it. It may have been a hamster or gerbil, maybe even a spider or a snake. As a kid seeing animals at school was pretty cool. I have had two gerbils in my classrooms over the years and let them roll around in their ball on the floor during the day, not the entire day, and the kids loved it. If the gerbils got stuck, the kids just moved the ball so it was free and they went back to work. The kids got to feed it and hold it, for many kids it was the only pet they had ever "had". Despite the benefits of having animals in classrooms, many principals don't like them, some because they don't like animals muchin the first place, others because they feel school is a place where only education occurs and if you can't show in writing how the animalis helping educate children, it has to go.

That is the attitude that one principal in Denver has taken to her teachers having pets in their classrooms.

Principal Patty Geffre of Montbello High School in far northeast Denver has told her teachers to get rid fo the animals they have been keeping their classrooms as pets. Geffre has a simple message for her teachers;" We are here to educate children, not to house animals." "If you are doing an educational experience that's going to enhance student learning, they can be there . . . but we're not their home."

She is concerned about students with allergies, the liability of an injury caused by an animal at school and the comfort level of a teacher forced to share a room with another teacher's animals.
"If you have a reason for them that enhances our curriculum, I'll talk about it," she said, noting she's already approved an embryology project where students will watch fish grow in a tank.

No wonder kids look at school as a job, we're determined to take away all the things that made school a place kids wanted to be.

Hooray...