Slashdot Mirror
Bug Means High School Students' Schedule Errors May Last Days
Hugh Pickens writes "The Washington Post reports that thousands of high school students in Prince George's County missed a third day of classes Wednesday, and school officials said it could take more than a week to sort out the chaos caused by a computerized class-scheduling system as students were placed in gyms, auditoriums, cafeterias, libraries and classes they didn't want or need at high schools across the county and their parents' fury over the logistical nightmare rose. 'The school year comes up the same time every year,' said Carolyn Oliver, the mother of a 16-year-old senior who spent Wednesday in the senior lounge at Bowie High School. 'When I heard they didn't have schedules, I was like, "What have they been doing all summer?"' When school opened Monday, about 8,000 high school students had no class schedules and were sent to wait in holding spaces while administrators tried to sort things out." (More below.)
What does this teenage-Randian rant have to do with the parent comment? The article asks what schools were doing all summer, and the comment is that they were not working, because they weren't employed. Your argument that they shouldn't have ever been employed because omg RON PAUL isn't actually relevant to that point.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
http://xkcd.com/327/ That fuckin' kid. :|
That is some seriously fucked up shit.
If your wife's life is that valuable to you (and I don't doubt that it is), the solution is not to throw firepower into the mess, it's to get her out of it. I fully support the second amendment but brining a gun into any school, not matter how "low-income," is about the dumbest thing I've ever head.
Of course, the scheduling was fine until they replaced the government system they'd been using with a privatized system.
But, hey, don't let mere facts get in the way of your political opinions. I understand you might not have time to read even the summary when you have to be worried about Obama replacing your doctor with someone willing to kill your grandmother.
If the masses can keep you down, you're not the Ubermensch.
"Instruction" isn't in the teacher contract. (I should know - I signed 5 of them before I wised up.) The wording is "student contact days" and "student contact periods".
My school ran into the same thing with snow days. If we had 2/3 of the students in school for more than a half-day, it counted as a "school day", according to the state and the district. If the weather was bad, send the kids to school. If it gets worse, we send them home at noon, and it doesn't count as a snow day, and we don't have to go a day later into the summer.
School is NOT about "instruction". If you think that, you're sorely misled. School is about a few major things:
1) Basic workplace skills. Reading, writing, addition and subtraction, showing up on time, dealing with your boss.
2) Babysitting for parents who at are work.
3) Learning to deal with people.
4) Learning to take tests. (This is the big one!)
One of the things that struck me most, going back into a high school after being out for almost a decade, was that the kids were TOTALLY unable to think. In fact, I went out and a had a few drinks with a woman who was student-teaching in my building. She was working on both a HS and Elementary certification, so was student teaching in both schools. She was told by an Elementary school math teacher that her test was inappropriate, because "The kids aren't used to that. They are used to being told stuff, and the test sees whether or not they remember it. They aren't used to having to think about it and use it." I would have called BS on that, but she had a few drinks in her and was shaking with rage as she recounted that, so I took it as near the truth.
Einstein once said, ""The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education." If it was true then, it's definitely true now.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
But why are many of the people protesting against government run health insurance on Medicare, and express a high level of satisfaction with it? Same with Medicaid. Same with the US Postal Service (Obama's ignorant quip not withstanding), which I've certainly found easier to deal with than Fedex? Not to even delve into how we (in general) trust the government for security, domestic and abroad, collecting taxes without paying the head of the IRS one out of every ~$700 tax dollars every year (actual number for the CEO of United health care of US health care expenditure)?
Off the top of my head, I can't think of a national situation where there's a private company providing a better service than a public equivalent (and this is ignoring the contract asymmetry where Enron is allowed to criminally game the market and the state can't abrogate the contracts, yet the private firm can just say "oops, but our owners have limited liability" and declare bankruptcy.. which abrogates their current contracts). I have a feeling this was different in the 70's and 80s, that government was really a lot less efficient than it is now, or else I doubt Reagan would have had such pull. But I was born just around when Reagen was first elected, and in my adult life the vast majority of the arbitrary, caustic and inefficient bureaucracy that I've encountered has been in the private sector.
While the surest means of preventing excess is a lot of people paying attention to politics, and being vocal... the idea that the current proposals are generating so much vitriol while Bush's Medicare 'reform' that prohibits negotiating drug prices with pharmaceutical companies sure has the appearance of an irrational double standard.