Teacher of the year

And quotation of the day:

"She's the best," said Chad Meyers, a sophomore at Virginia Tech, who graduated from Wootton in 2007. "Everyone loved her," he said. "She's such a sweetheart."

In my day you needed a parent's note to get aspirin.

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Alternative means of transportation

High fuel costs may force kids to drive their soapbox derby cars to school. Personally, I can think of worse ways to show up in the morning, like in your mother's blue-green 1994 Dodge Caravan.




(found at the Washington Post's Metro page on June 23, 2008)

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Drinking their breakfast

This is truly a two-DUDE story.

Nine students were caught yesterday in the gymnasium of a Montgomery County middle school in possession of a noxious brew, police said: vodka, wine, tequila and rum, mixed with various fruit juices and concealed in water and soft-drink bottles.

Of these nine students, eight of them seventh-graders and one a sixth-grader. So they were what? 11 or 12 years old?

That's the first DUDE.

Now, get this: They were caught drinking this brew the first thing in the morning.

[Carol] Weiss [the principal] said two students alerted her at 7:40 a.m. that they suspected that a group of students were drinking alcohol in the bleachers while waiting for classes to start. She rounded them up and alerted police.

DUDE the second.

That's some pretty serious stuff to be downing before classes start. The principal has recommended suspension or expulsion. I'd throw in a little A.A. for good measure. These kids have some serious issues they'd better deal with right away.

(Note: If you don't know what the "DUDE" thing is all about, you're obviously not reading HotAir often enough.)

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Sunday evening linkfest

Passover has (finally) ended, and now, once again, it's time for a linkfest of links that have been forming plaque on the walls of my intertubes for the past two weeks or so. Some of them are seriously OLD, but I want you to have them, anyway. Please stay with me till the end, because way at the bottom of this post, I have a couple of future classics from the Sunday New York Times that are almost worth the price of the paper.

1. In the past couple of weeks, the biggest issue in politics, in case you're a Japanese World War II fighter who's been holed up in the Pacific until yesterday, has been whether Obama flipped the bird at Hillary while speaking to his supporters following the final debate in Pennsylvania. The Hillarosphere demands to know. And Baseball Crank has another photo that may provide circumstantial evidence.

2. The Democrats' Nightmare Scenario (via Instapundit)

3. More popcorn, please!

4. McCain goes to NOLA, and an African-American participant at a town-hall meeting says this: "I want to inform you that everybody in the camp here is not a Republican." Does he mean (a) literally no one is a Republican, or (b) colloquially, not everyone is a Republican? Who cares, anyway, besides anal-retentive grammar wackos like me?

5. As Warner Wolf might have said, if you studied math in school since about 1961 . . . YOU LOST! On a related topic, Hillary Clinton does some math trolling for delegates and votes from Michigan.

6. Gov. O'Malley calls a special session of the legislature to pass a law declaring the official state dessert of Maryland. (Only kidding about the special session. Beats the hell out of raising our taxes, though.)

7. The man-cave: "Like most stories that end up with a man mowing his friend's lawn in a dress, it started out innocently enough." (via Fark, of course)

8. Sometimes it pays to test your personal machinery before reporting its theft by voodoo to police. As the police chief himself put it: "'I'm tempted to say it's one huge joke,' Oleko said.
'But when you try to tell the victims that their penises are still there, they tell you that it's become tiny or that they've become impotent. To that I tell them, "How do you know if you haven't gone home and tried it",' he said."

9. Public Service Announcement: Be careful when eating in Canadian restaurants.

10. "Le Petit Singly is a farm that specializes in making cheese from women's breast milk." (via Ace)

11. This one's so old, it's already been overtaken by events. You remember the McLean school that banned tag in the schoolyard? Well, tag's back, but not before a week of "reorientation lessons on playground safety." I swear I'm not making that term up.

12. Patch (for women) aims to make you (not you, you) feel sexy. (via Ace)

13. Rick Monday saves the flag. In 1976. But now, there's a video.

14. American expat in Paris whines about the falling dollar. My heart bleeds.

15. False advertising from Moron Pundit: a very non-moronic defense of the tax deduction for child dependents.

16. Doubleplusundead on more misery with McCain. For me, if you want to know why McCain hasn't sealed the deal with conservatives -- I'm going to vote for him, anyway -- read George Will's column this morning. Two words: campaign finance.

17. The Children of Israel were enslaved in Egypt by a Pharaoh who took great pleasure in persecuting gays, who were brutally forced to arrange flowers for the Egyptians. Hence, the orange on the seder plate. Funny, I had always heard that it was supposed to represent Pharaoh's fear of the vagina.

18. And finally, the moment you've been waiting for -- the two classics from today's New York Times: (a) In the travel section: "In 2007, nude recreation represented a $440 million industry — up from $400 million in 2001 and $200 million in 1992." (b) In Sunday Styles: A family adjusts to the father's sex change -- "Through Sickness, Health and Sex Change."

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Just say yes

Students in high school are sometimes a bunch of twerps, and students who run high-school newspapers are sometimes twerps squared. But this doesn't mean they're always wrong.

This fact is a useful one to keep in mind when you're a high-school administrator who's considering whether to permit an article to be published in the high-school newspaper.

Case in point: Moreno Carrasco, the principal of Richard Montgomery High School, one of the county high schools located in Rockville, has come under scrutiny for possibly running a consulting business on school time (and allegedly plagiarizing promotional materials for his training program). Carrasco is now on medical leave for an unspecified condition. The allegations have been the talk of the town.

So naturally the kids who run the school newspaper wanted to write an article about it. Veronica McCall, the acting principal, told them they couldn't publish the article while the investigation of Carrasco was continuing. The kids took it upstairs to the "Community Superintendent," who allowed the article to be published.

Why would the acting principal try to stop an article on what seems like a perfectly reasonable subject to write about?

McCall said she still disagrees with printing the article and thinks it is a "disruption to the instructional environment" with year-end exams coming up.

"I am not in support of publishing the article in The Tide newspaper," she said. "I want the students and staff to be focused on education."

This explanation makes no sense whatsoever. The matter has been discussed repeatedly in the local press. And why shouldn't students read about it in the school newspaper, assuming they read the school newspaper at all? It hardly seems to be a disruption to the educational environment.

I've actually had the opportunity to meet Ms. McCall in a professional situation, and I was very impressed with her. So I chalk this up to a simple error in judgment based on the uncomfortable position she must feel she's in.

But there's always going to be something uncomfortable for a school administrator, and there will always be a sense that students working for the school newspaper are annoying twerps. It's at precisely those times that a school administrator needs to keep this fact in mind: Sometimes the simplest and most correct answer is Yes.

UPDATE (4/30): The article in the student newspaper has been published. For the record, it contains one allegation involving Ms. McCall similar to the one I edited out of the first comment to this post.

UPDATE (6/12): Carrasco cleared, moved to another job.

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Advocacy the Montgomery County way

Is it just me or is it somewhat odd for a parent to be arrested (second item) when discussing his kid's elementary school work with school officials?

I don't know. I've lived for over 20 years in Montgomery County, where helicopter parenting takes on a whole new meaning, and yet this still seems a little out of line.

Scott Rogers, an outspoken Damascus parent who is well known on parent Internet lists, has been banned from his son's elementary school for a year following an incident that he describes as a protest arrest this month.

And here's the funniest line of the month in the Post. I can't even tell whether it was meant to be funny, because the writing on education matters is so totally dead serious, just the way you'd expect in this county.

School system officials often disagree with parents on whether a gifted child is properly challenged, but such disputes seldom end in arrest.

But school officials apparently didn't see the humor; rather, they went promptly into lockdown mode:

According to Principal Linda Goldberg, Rogers raised his voice, pointed his finger at staff "in a threatening manner" and pursued them loudly into the main office, leading school officials to put the campus on Code Blue, an emergency procedure.

When Rogers refused to leave, police were summoned. According to an arrest document, the 6-foot-4 Rogers "stood up, cupped his hands around his mouth and screamed very loudly, 'I am Rosa Parks. I will not ride on the back of the bus.'"

So Mr. Rogers had to take his cardigan to jail, and while he was there, the next Rosa Parks probably followed Martin Luther King and wrote a letter from the county jail.

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