10:57 – I still can’t find the Polarizing filters that I apparently misplaced. The forensic science kits include a set of two in a coin envelope. My inventory says I’m supposed to have 15 sets and 40 individual slides in stock, for a total of 35 sets worth. I don’t doubt they’re around here somewhere. They’ll turn up, no doubt. It’s not like they have a limited shelf life.
So, at any rate, desperate for Polarizing slides to make up forensic science kits, I ordered another 100 slides a week ago today. I kept waiting for them to show up. Finally, this morning, I checked the USPS tracking number on them and learned they’d been delivered Wednesday. Crap. So I checked the pile of stuff in my office, all of which I thought was Saturnalia gifts. Sure enough, there the slides were. Oh, well.
12:31 – I hadn’t read any details about the Colorado school shooting until this morning. I knew that the shooter was an 18-year old male student and that he’d shot one other student, who was in critical condition. As it turns out, that student was a 17-year-old girl named Claire Davis, who is now fighting for her life.
Having any bystander shot this way is tragic, but it bothers me even more when the victim is a girl. What was this punk thinking? Too bad he didn’t shoot himself first.
The anti-gun folks can’t say much about this one. None of their proposed “solutions” would have had any effect whatsoever. The shooter used a legally-purchased shotgun with a standard magazine capacity. Not even the lunatic-fringe anti-gunners would ban such weapons. There’s no way to stop such outrages. Even if every teacher and administrator had been armed, they could not have prevented what happened, short of shooting the kid simply because he was carrying a firearm.
The solution, if there is one, is to change the entire culture of public schooling to reduce stress on students. Shift the standard school day forward by two hours. The school day should start at 9:00 or 9:30 a.m. and run until 4:30 p.m. or thereabouts. Don’t start schoolbus pickups until 8:00 a.m. Teenagers need at least eight and preferably nine hours of sleep. Reduce homework to at most two hours a night. Most homework is simply busy-work anyway. Let these kids get the sleep they need. Eliminate all standardized testing until the SATs in the senior year. Re-introduce tracking systems, and divide kids early into academic and vocational tracks. Consider re-introducing single-sex classrooms. There are a lot of things that could be done to reduce student stress levels. Something needs to be done. Gun control laws aren’t the solution. In fact, they’re part of the problem.
Maybe you should have the various kit components addressed to Elwood Q. Mugwamp rather than RBT.
RBT can’t call himself a mugwump unless his beard is very long and white.
For what it’s worth, I thought the first Harry Potter book was a perfectly good kid’s story. The series went to crap right after that, with each book sucking more than the sum of suckitude of the preceding books. The only saving grace is that my boys were old enough to read the last two by themselves, so I didn’t need to read them.
My Christmas gift for this year. Should keep me busy for three or four nights. I have already downloaded the build instructions.
http://www.lego.com/en-us/technic/products/construction/42009
Ray, that was my birthday present to myself this year. You’ll enjoy the build!
As a volunteer, I assist my daughter twice a week in her public school classroom. With my impeccable credentials now established, I concur with our hosts pontifications regarding schools.
Bob,
Nice summary of suggestions regarding school daze. I’d never considered catering hours around a kid’s biology, but it makes perfect sense.
This showed up on Netflix today: Island at War . http://movies.netflix.com/WiMovie/70210423
I really enjoyed it and suspect you might like it too if you haven’t already seen it. I don’t think it will stay up very long; in fact it got pulled before I’d finished watching the whole series, so you might want to catch it sonner rather than later.
BTW, I think Edwin Land was only 18 when he came up with the Polaroid filter. The guy was genius in the true sense of the word. If you ever turn your hand to historical fiction, he’d be a good place to start. Another great beginning would be the war between Edison and Westinghouse over AC vs. DC, but that’s been covered to a far greater extent.
Interesting,
I wasn’t aware any high school classes started before 9am. In Southern Ontario in the 70’s my classes started at 9 and now in the 2010’s my daughter’s high school classes start at 9:05am.
When she was bussed a couple year’s ago the earliest time for the first kid on the bus was 8:10am.
As long as I get to work by 8am I never get held up by a school bus, if I’m later I start having to deal with school bus stops so I know they are still this way.
One of the best B.C. strips ever!
http://www.johnhartstudios.com/bc/2013/12/friday-december-13-2013.php
Back when I was in high school, in the early 1980s, classes started at 7:30 AM, and I had to get up at 5:45 AM. (My younger sister got up at 5:30 to accommodate the extra primping necessary for a female.) We never had any trouble doing so, in large part because my parents insisted that I go to bed at an appropriate hour, and get the necessary eight hours of sleep. My classes weren’t challenging, therefore the load of homework was very small, and I tested well enough to never have to ‘worry’ about the various assessments.
“(My younger sister got up at 5:30 to accommodate the extra primping necessary for a female.)”
Only 15 minutes?
And if she got in to the bathroom first how did you ever get any time there? Oh, I get it. She had her own private bathroom… 🙂
Time of day is a funny concept. Why does 5:45 sound early? Why does it matter whether school starts at 9:00 or 07:30?
It *does* matter, no question of that, but somehow it shouldn’t. I suppose it’s a cultural thing. In the US, 8:00 is when the work day starts – anything after that is “late” and anything before is “early”. In the UK, 09:00 has that meaning.
Jas would routinely get up at 5:00 or 5:30 a.m. after not getting to bed until midnight or later. The amount of work they load on these kids is simply ridiculous, especially since a lot of it is busy-work.
Yes, indeed, we did have separate bathrooms. But it was the grooming / makeup / etc that took the extra time, not the actual shower time.
Agree those are the sanest suggestions for schools I have heard. I never have understood these early hours for kids, but I hear (maybe from here?) that the early hours problem has to do with school buses needing to make 2 trips to get all the kids in many school systems.
You think it is bad for the students, my cousin (girl) teaches in a private grade school, and was recently put on the earliest shift. She gets up at 05:30 to be checked in at the school before 07:00 (15 minute commute; they get docked pay if they sign in after 07:00). Due to state education regulations, she must get off by 15:00 based on her clock-in time. Classes at the school do not start until 08:30, but they must have teachers there to babysit the students, as parents are free to dump their kids off anytime after 07:00. Since it is a private school, they only have a couple of small buses that pick up some of the students; most are brought by the parents on their way to work.
Throughout my school life, teachers at my schools got there at 08:00; building opened its doors to students at 08:15; classes started at 08:30; school was out around 14:30. In Germany, for high school, classes started at 08:00 and school was out by 12:00. No food served, and kids’ parents paid for tutoring at various places in the afternoon. Kids had until 16:00 to use their student passes for transportation, then they had to pay for surcharges to use the transit after that. There were kids everywhere until 16:00, when they suddenly disappeared as the commute home for adults began. Out my way, morning commutes in, were hell though, with both adults and kids on the transit, and lots of people standing. Part of the standing was that there were not double-tracks all the way (in the former East) so trains could go both directions simultaneously, and were therefore limited to every 20 minutes, when they should have been at least 10 minutes apart, if not every 7. Scheduled finish for laying the double tracks out to the former East is 2015.