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Texas High School Gets iBooks
bigjnsa500 writes "Starting in December, high school teachers and students in the sleepy south Texas town of Pleasanton will be receiving Apple iBook wireless laptops. The school has installed wireless access points throughout the campus, including classroom buildings, the shop areas, gym, field house and press box at the football stadium. It will be first high school campus in South Texas to go high-tech." Maybe it's just me, but wouldn't that $2.2m over four years be better spent on books and teachers?
I'm on the IT advisory board of the local college here, and the reason they're keen on laptops (with wifi) is all due to classroom resource usage - why lock a room down to a single purpose "computer room" wired up with workstations and monitors when you can just carry in a scutch of laptops and then let any teacher use that room for other purposes?
This isn't a perfect solution in that it doesn't factor in resources such as manuals, books, etc. which would also have to be carted between rooms, or dedicated hardware for that matter, so it doesn't obviate the need for networking/Cisco/hardware labs for instance, but overall laptops are an excellent solution in freeing up classrooms.
Having actually worked in a public school district, I can tell you unequivocally that it is just a mantra. Most of the teachers in the district I worked for start at $23K, and teachers at other districts around the state start at between $21K and $25K. Top-end pay for teachers ranges from $45K to $65K, depending on their degree level (bachelor's vs. masters), and that's after 30+ years of teaching in the same district. Most of the money that our district received to buy things like computers, and build new buildings (not to replace aging buildings, but to build new ones because there were too many students in the school, or to replace aging trailers and temporary buildings because there were too many students for the existing buildings) was funded not by increased taxes, but by bond issues, and was later repaid.
Maybe in your community, teachers are better-paid than police officers (starting pay for a cop here is $37K), but here they are not, and in many places they are not. Maybe in your community, schools raise taxes to build new buildings simply because their existing buildings are too old, not too small. But that is not reality in many places.
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. (Einstein)
In the American suburbs, just about every young child, male or female, plays soccer. The term "soccer mom" became a generic term for suburbanite married women with children, who tend to have slightly more conservative values than the single, urban feminist. The stereotype is a reasonably prosperous middle-class thirtysomething woman who drives a big SUV or Minivan to take her kids to soccer practice.
While most urban women in recent decades have tended to vote as a block for one party (Democrats), the "soccer moms" are considered to be important swing voters, and both parties have been spending a lot of time, money, and energy trying to win their votes in recent years. (Bill Clinton did very well with the soccer moms, much to Bob Dole's surprise and disappointment.)
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.