A group of Palestinian students who have won scholarships to study abroad should be getting ready for the new experience. Instead, they are stuck at home in Gaza because their government will not let them leave. Al Jazeera’s Stafanie Dekker reports from Gaza.
Apparently, I was wrong. While I stand by my post the other day stating that Jerry Buell should be able to say whatever the hell he wants in the privacy of his own home and facebook page, he’s not actually doing that.
His personal biography preaches the gospel.
First and foremost, I am a man of God. I try to teach and lead my students as if Lake Co. Schools had hired Jesus Christ himself. That doesn’t mean I give a sermon and serve communion each day…what it means is I try my very best to teach and serve and minister to my students as a teacher led by and connected to the Creator of the Universe.
His syllabus, too, preaches the word of god.
His syllabus also offered this warning to students: “I teach God’s truth, I make very few compromises. If you believe you may have a problem with that, get your schedule changed, ’cause I ain’t changing!” On a separate document, he also said the classroom was his “mission field.”
Hop on over to Friendly Atheist and see for yourself.
While I still believe that your personal web page, facebook page, etc. is your personal space and you should be free to put what you want there, you cannot do the same on a public school site, your syllabus or in your classroom. Mr. Buell has overstepped the line and is breaking the law. For that, I cannot support him.
The Tupelo school district is considering the use of fingerprint scanners for breakfast and lunch in what they say will make lines move faster, be more accurate, and give students more time to eat. In hyping up the uses of fingerprint scanners, the same tired arguments are being retread as reasons for the use of scanners. If approved, the machines would replace the current system, which uses identification numbers of students.
Lynne Rogers, the Tupelo Public School District’s director of food services, made a presentation about the new technology to the school board last week. She said the machines would neither take nor store fingerprints of students. Instead, they would scan a student’s finger using several points for identification.
They would be most helpful during breakfast at the elementary schools, Rogers said. Although middle- and high-school students are generally able to remember their identification numbers, Rogers said, elementary students tend to forget them. Sometimes those students also don’t know their formal names, making it more difficult, and timely, to track them in the database in order to charge their accounts for the meal.
The process is a little easier at lunch, when students come by homeroom, Rogers said, but more difficult at breakfast when they arrive in random order.
First, it only takes a week or two to get to know the students who eat breakfast every single day. Second, you only need to learn the new students each year, thus you do not have a lot of students each year to learn the names of if they forget their identification numbers. Not doing this is simple laziness and inattentiveness to your job.
Second, if your students can’t remember a simple ID number and don’t even know their own names, your school has a lot more problems than getting everyone to remember their ID number.
As someone who has used these systems before, it is not difficult to remember names. Students that eat school lunches do so on a regular basis. It doesn’t take long to remember who eats, even if they come in random order. Students who can’t remember their ID number are also the same students day in and day out. It’s not that they can’t. They won’t. And, as long as you continue to look their information up, they aren’t going to be bothered with learning it.
Parents would be able to opt to not have their children use the finger scan but to instead continue to use their ID number.
Unless you plan on putting these children through a completely different line or making them wait until everyone with a fingerprint scan is finished first, the entire purpose of installing fingerprint scanners will be defeated before the program even begins. You are not going to get shorter lines. You will not have more time to eat. You will, however, have the same problems as before. If a parent opts out and the student doesn’t know their information or refuses to learn it, they’re still going to slow down the lines. Fancy fingerprint scanners aren’t going to change this.
The school board will decide a later date whether or not to use the scanners. Hopefully, they’ll do some research and see that they need better employees and not fancy equipment that will cost $12,350 to install without any real benefits.
Twenty Boy Summer by Sarah Ockler and Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut have been banned by the Republic, Missouri school district in a 4-0 vote by the school board. The books will be removed from the curriculum as well as the libraries. Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson was also up for banning, but was spared and will remain in the schools.
Wesley Scroggins, a Republic resident, challenged the use of the books and lesson plans in Republic schools, arguing they teach principles contrary to the Bible.
It doesn’t matter what your religion is or how you, personally, want to think or believe, but objecting to books solely based on your religion and then pushing those religious ideas onto others is wrong.
In making a recommendation to remove the two, Minor explained that “numerous individuals have read the three novels and provided their feedback.” He conceded there wasn’t always consensus about what step to take.
Mr. Minor is the superintendent. It might have been a good idea for him to read the books as well in order to have a better informed decision. Relying solely on others is never a good idea. Instead, a task force was convened to decide what was best for the school district. This amounts to wasted taxpayer money when a decision could have been easily made if the superintendent and school board had simply read the books themselves.
The panel reviewed existing board policy and the public rating systems that already exist for music, TV and video games.
“We very clearly stayed out of discussion about moral issues. Our discussions from the get-go were age-appropriateness,” he said.
The board adopted the standards — which cover language, violence, sexuality and illegal substances — in April and those standards have since been applied to the three books.
The very fact that these books are being censored because of someone else’s morals says that you cannot keep morals out of the situation. You are trying to decide what is moral for other people’s children and what is appropriate for a particular age group.
The school district has said that, if a parent thinks their child can read the book for a school project, then that is permissible, leading one to wonder why the books are banned at all.
Melissa Duvall, the only board member to have read all three books proposed to be banned, said the school board’s vote was more about policy and less a criticism of the books in question.
If you have not read the books in question, then you should not be voting on the appropriateness of the books. This challenge has been going on for over a year. If the members of the school board cannot find the time in a year to read three possibly questionable books, then they should not be on the school board making decisions for thousands of students.
Banning books, but also allowing them if a parent says it’s permissible is one of the dumbest ideas a school board could ever make. If you remember, a single person complained about the books because they violated his religious morality. The outcome of the banning panders to a religious few, while the people in charge of making decisions cannot even bring themselves to read the books before making their decisions. This is not how you make decisions. This is how you cow tow to close-minded people.
Capella University is now offering an online Master’s degree in Homeland Security. If you’re just starting out, you can get a Bachelor’s degree in Homeland Security as well.
Capella’s MS in Homeland Security prepares you to be a leader in this growing field by equipping you with vital skills in homeland security preparedness, mitigation, and management; cross-functional and media communications; infrastructure, cyber, and border security; and threat analysis and resolution. You will learn from faculty who are leaders in the field, with experience working directly for or with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the National Security Agency (NSA), and other federal, state, local, and tribal agencies. To strengthen the collaboration skills important to managing crisis situations, you’ll participate in Capella’s cutting- edge simulation, Riverbend City, where you will step into various public service leadership roles. By the end of the program, you will have a professional portfolio that demonstrates your homeland security skills and proves your understanding of the concepts that qualify you to be a leader in the field. People who earn this degree often pursue leadership positions in homeland security, emergency management, law enforcement, business continuity, information security, and other public and private sector security and crisis management roles.
I think if I were rich, I’d go ahead and get this degree just because it’s so damned funny. It’s just hard to take such a degree seriously when everything about the “university” screams diploma mill.
