Our robotics team cleaned up at the Peachtree Regional FIRST Robotics competition this weekend. That probably means squat to the average reader. Perhaps you should go here or maybe here to figure out what the heck I'm talking about. And if you haven't been, you probably won't understand.
I spent the weekend with split loyalties between the robotics team and the academic bowl team. The latter had a good first year showing at State championships. The previous had a phenomenal showing for their second year. They brought home the Team Spirit award, the Regional Championship for winning the competition, and the Regional Chairman's Award, the highest honor bestowed by FIRST, essentially for having the best overall team. The regional director jokingly stated to me that we were a bunch of "award piggies." I half-jokingly reminded her that this was not a socialist event.
It was a good weekend.
Monday, March 22, 2004
Wednesday, March 17, 2004
Working 7 to 12, What a way to make a living...
That's 7 as in AM, 12 as in AM. God, I must love this job. Either that, or I do way too much crap. Stupid work ethic. Damn you Mom for raising me to be responsible!! I'd much rather be having a beer bought with my government subsidies, but NO!! You had to go and make me all educated and load me up with the idea to take pride in my work. Now here I am in a dark, lonely school building all by myself, typing up lesson plans for my substitute that's taking over while I'm out being a respectable sponsor of both the robotics team and the academic bowl team in the same weekend in two towns at least 2 hours apart. What I wouldn't give to be working on the POS truck and beating up on my wife and kids instead.
Come to think of it... thanks Mom.
Come to think of it... thanks Mom.
Wednesday, March 10, 2004
Return of the Plague
Let me preface this with a little background info. I am an advisor for our school's FIRST robotics team, a national robotics competition for high school students all over the country. This year, we entered two regional events, the first of which occurred last weekend, Mar 4-6, at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, VA. We left Wednesday evening for the Thursday-Saturday event.
Everything was going well. The competition was proceeding better than expected for our team, in 9th of 63 by Friday evening. Had a few good meals courtesy of sponsors and what not, had a good time meeting people from other teams. Then...
Friday night, around 11 pm, we're back in our hotel. The mentor students from GA Tech (god bless her) were along with us. Everyone is hanging out, having a good time. Then I get the first report. One of the Tech kids puked. No big deal, no telling what wacky college kids were up to. Maybe some alcohol. Seemed unlikely. Maybe some bad food? Who knows? Not one of our high schoolers, he can take care of himself. Then, 15 minutes later, it's one of our girls spewing. Did they eat at the same place? Well, we all ate at the sponsor event. Uh oh. 10 minutes later, one of our boys has decided to revisit his earlier meal. Crap, what's going on? Over the course of the evening, probably 10 of the 44 people on our bus were afflicted with some type of stomach bug. Not good.
At the competition site the next day, turns out we're not the only team in this situation. A lot of teams are down 3-15 kids due to this illness, whatever it is. Probably a little less than half the attending people.
Turns out we had an outbreak of some strain of a norovirus, aka the stomach flu. Not surprising considering how many objects exchange hands. Every team has giveaways with their team names and numbers on them, buttons, pens, cool blinky things, etc. And our team was gracious enough to provide a nice contamination zone via an Internet cafe style setup in the lobby.
It was cool, got to clean up some puke on the bus, watch a few others vomit in trashcans. On the return trip home, we quarantined the sick to the back of the bus. They turned green at the mere mention of food or blowing chunks. So, I was gracious enough to provide the others with a top ten list of forbidden words for the ride home.
10. vomit
9. puke
8. upchuck
7. hurl
6. spew
5. blow chunks
4. ralph
3. barf
2. reverse peristalsis
1. uneat
I told them if we go back to VCU next year, one of our giveaways should be those SARS masks with our team logo on it.
Everything was going well. The competition was proceeding better than expected for our team, in 9th of 63 by Friday evening. Had a few good meals courtesy of sponsors and what not, had a good time meeting people from other teams. Then...
Friday night, around 11 pm, we're back in our hotel. The mentor students from GA Tech (god bless her) were along with us. Everyone is hanging out, having a good time. Then I get the first report. One of the Tech kids puked. No big deal, no telling what wacky college kids were up to. Maybe some alcohol. Seemed unlikely. Maybe some bad food? Who knows? Not one of our high schoolers, he can take care of himself. Then, 15 minutes later, it's one of our girls spewing. Did they eat at the same place? Well, we all ate at the sponsor event. Uh oh. 10 minutes later, one of our boys has decided to revisit his earlier meal. Crap, what's going on? Over the course of the evening, probably 10 of the 44 people on our bus were afflicted with some type of stomach bug. Not good.
At the competition site the next day, turns out we're not the only team in this situation. A lot of teams are down 3-15 kids due to this illness, whatever it is. Probably a little less than half the attending people.
Turns out we had an outbreak of some strain of a norovirus, aka the stomach flu. Not surprising considering how many objects exchange hands. Every team has giveaways with their team names and numbers on them, buttons, pens, cool blinky things, etc. And our team was gracious enough to provide a nice contamination zone via an Internet cafe style setup in the lobby.
It was cool, got to clean up some puke on the bus, watch a few others vomit in trashcans. On the return trip home, we quarantined the sick to the back of the bus. They turned green at the mere mention of food or blowing chunks. So, I was gracious enough to provide the others with a top ten list of forbidden words for the ride home.
10. vomit
9. puke
8. upchuck
7. hurl
6. spew
5. blow chunks
4. ralph
3. barf
2. reverse peristalsis
1. uneat
I told them if we go back to VCU next year, one of our giveaways should be those SARS masks with our team logo on it.
Why I Don't Have Pets
Take this weblog for example. If posts were its food, it'd only weigh around the mass of a few electrons by now, if it were lucky enough to survive this long on other peoples lost posts and its own waste.
I Am A Thrust-ship
 I am a Thrust-ship.I am small and tricky - where you think I am, I probably am not. I can work very fast, but I tend to go about things in a round about way, which often leaves me effectively standing still. I hate rocks. Bloody rocks. What Video Game Character Are You? |
Thursday, December 04, 2003
Looking For an Excuse
How many times do you hear white people complaining about being mistreated or "discriminated against?" I'm sure the answer isn't zero, but I'm sure it isn't anywhere near the number of times you could figure for similar claims from people of other races and/or ethnicities. The latest case here doesn't _really_ involve me, but it disturbs me nonetheless. One of our program coordinators got a call from the parent of a black student essentially calling him and everyone else in our program a racist. Since I am a teacher in the program and she referred to "your staff over there", I assume that it means that her blanket comment applies to me as well. I'm flattered and personally impressed by my skill when I can be involved in such a grand conspiracy to keep the non-whiteys down with as little effort as being employed and consuming oxygen.
Allow be to bore you with the details as I understand it. Part of our program involves a senior research experience where the students are given the opportunity to participate in an internship with local companies and universities that have agreed to mentor students. This is only our second year of developing this program, but it has gained quite a bit of steam indeed. Some of the kids are resourceful and ambitious and seek out mentors themselves with a little guidance while others rely on us to help them out a little, or in some cases, a lot. For perspective, we went from needing to place about 25 students over two semesters last year to having to place about 90 kids over two semesters this year, about half each semester. This should seem monumental to any observer and we have been able to manage with the diligent work of a few of the people in our program.
She placed limitations on her son's opportunities when she said he would not have permission to leave campus for his internship. I know some salaried employees are able to telecommute, but how many interns have you heard about doing the same? I thought part of the point was to experience the work environment during an internship. We still managed to find an internship where he would be developing a web page for some mentor. A suitable task considering the limitations. You don't have to be at a place of business to develop their web page as long as you use other forms of communication to get feedback, right? Besides, how many programmers are people you want to chat with by the water cooler? Ok, I apologize for the stereotype.
The problem is the kid doesn't have the best sense of self-motivation. Without that boss being over his shoulder, he dropped the ball and performed quite poorly, from what I hear at least. The work done for and via the internship is crucial to two courses taken to accommodate the internship, a methods of research class and the actual internship class. In short terms, he ended up putting himself in a double jeopardy situation from a grade perspective. Now that we're only two weeks away from the end of the semester, the mother finally gives a rat's ass about what is going to be showing on his transcript. Now that it's way too late to consider alternatives, the mother expresses her displeasure with the selection of his internship. In almost her exact terms, it was "you have given him a sh!tty internship because he is black." I'm paraphrasing here, but the accusations also included that all of our black students had "sh!tty internships" and that we set them up for failure. Keep in mind that he is the only one I know about having a dire situation from an academic standpoint. Keep in mind that I hear that the other black kids had pretty decent gigs, not that his was bad in the first place. Keep in mind that students are encouraged to seek out their own opportunities first, use us last. The mere fact that her statement implies that we have "given" anything discriminatory supports my personal belief that all people who pull the "race card" are wounded by our overall society's acceptance of the notion of entitlement. Apparently, from her perspective, the students in our program are now entitled to an internship and it had better end up working out in 100% of the cases, regardless of input from the student during the internship attainment or sustainment periods.
Where does the idea of personal responsibility fit in in all of this? Sadly, I don't think it does. One of the major faults with entitlement programs is that they tend to entitle the recipients to relieve themselves of any sense of personal responsibility. Hell, everyone would love to have it all without having to work for it. Unfortunately, not as many of us realize that the free lunch is really more expensive than it's worth.
Allow be to bore you with the details as I understand it. Part of our program involves a senior research experience where the students are given the opportunity to participate in an internship with local companies and universities that have agreed to mentor students. This is only our second year of developing this program, but it has gained quite a bit of steam indeed. Some of the kids are resourceful and ambitious and seek out mentors themselves with a little guidance while others rely on us to help them out a little, or in some cases, a lot. For perspective, we went from needing to place about 25 students over two semesters last year to having to place about 90 kids over two semesters this year, about half each semester. This should seem monumental to any observer and we have been able to manage with the diligent work of a few of the people in our program.
She placed limitations on her son's opportunities when she said he would not have permission to leave campus for his internship. I know some salaried employees are able to telecommute, but how many interns have you heard about doing the same? I thought part of the point was to experience the work environment during an internship. We still managed to find an internship where he would be developing a web page for some mentor. A suitable task considering the limitations. You don't have to be at a place of business to develop their web page as long as you use other forms of communication to get feedback, right? Besides, how many programmers are people you want to chat with by the water cooler? Ok, I apologize for the stereotype.
The problem is the kid doesn't have the best sense of self-motivation. Without that boss being over his shoulder, he dropped the ball and performed quite poorly, from what I hear at least. The work done for and via the internship is crucial to two courses taken to accommodate the internship, a methods of research class and the actual internship class. In short terms, he ended up putting himself in a double jeopardy situation from a grade perspective. Now that we're only two weeks away from the end of the semester, the mother finally gives a rat's ass about what is going to be showing on his transcript. Now that it's way too late to consider alternatives, the mother expresses her displeasure with the selection of his internship. In almost her exact terms, it was "you have given him a sh!tty internship because he is black." I'm paraphrasing here, but the accusations also included that all of our black students had "sh!tty internships" and that we set them up for failure. Keep in mind that he is the only one I know about having a dire situation from an academic standpoint. Keep in mind that I hear that the other black kids had pretty decent gigs, not that his was bad in the first place. Keep in mind that students are encouraged to seek out their own opportunities first, use us last. The mere fact that her statement implies that we have "given" anything discriminatory supports my personal belief that all people who pull the "race card" are wounded by our overall society's acceptance of the notion of entitlement. Apparently, from her perspective, the students in our program are now entitled to an internship and it had better end up working out in 100% of the cases, regardless of input from the student during the internship attainment or sustainment periods.
Where does the idea of personal responsibility fit in in all of this? Sadly, I don't think it does. One of the major faults with entitlement programs is that they tend to entitle the recipients to relieve themselves of any sense of personal responsibility. Hell, everyone would love to have it all without having to work for it. Unfortunately, not as many of us realize that the free lunch is really more expensive than it's worth.
Monday, December 01, 2003
Conflict of Interest
The typical student around here seems to know quite a bit. Granted, that bit may not be about anything remotely academic. They know lots about fashion, sex, drugs, celebrities, their favorite music groups. Ask them who the current Vice President of the USA is and you'll hear one of two things: the stereotypical cricket chirping or the marbles in their skull shifting.
Daytime television is brain rotting garbage. Being on holiday last week, there were times when I was at home with the television on. Flipping channels sans cable, there were several options. Trashy talk shows, trashy soap operas with totally implausible plotlines, reruns of Full House on the SuperStation, and Mr. Rogers on PBS. My wife and I chose the latter. I wish more people did as well. We suffered a great loss with his death this year. He had a great quote near the end of the episode. "You can't learn until you want to learn." I think that sums up my high school teaching experience quite well.
And today, Thomas Sowell writes, "Whenever people talk glibly of a need to achieve educational "excellence," I think of what an improvement it would be if our public schools could just achieve mediocrity." Too bad that requires effort, thinking, and an attention to something other than MTV.
Daytime television is brain rotting garbage. Being on holiday last week, there were times when I was at home with the television on. Flipping channels sans cable, there were several options. Trashy talk shows, trashy soap operas with totally implausible plotlines, reruns of Full House on the SuperStation, and Mr. Rogers on PBS. My wife and I chose the latter. I wish more people did as well. We suffered a great loss with his death this year. He had a great quote near the end of the episode. "You can't learn until you want to learn." I think that sums up my high school teaching experience quite well.
And today, Thomas Sowell writes, "Whenever people talk glibly of a need to achieve educational "excellence," I think of what an improvement it would be if our public schools could just achieve mediocrity." Too bad that requires effort, thinking, and an attention to something other than MTV.
Wednesday, November 12, 2003
Logic??
Checking the e-mail, I have a spam e-mail with the subject line "Stop all S pam qudsadkc". Not a direct quote on the letterage, but close enough. I get a sneaky suspicion that I would get more instead of less if I replied.
Of course, I would love to help some deposed ruler of Djibouti transfer funds through my bank account so maybe I should reply!
Of course, I would love to help some deposed ruler of Djibouti transfer funds through my bank account so maybe I should reply!
Tuesday, November 11, 2003
The Phone
If there's one thing I hate more than anything else, it's calling parents. Actually, I hate calling anyone I don't know. That includes the pizza guy. I get very nervous on the phone when I don't know the person on the other end. Have I ever had a bad experience? Not that I can remember, but for some reason, it causes a great deal of anxiety for me. So, in suit, I hate calling parents.
We have a stupid rule that you can't fail a kid unless you've tried to contact a student's parent/guardian. Never really been a problem for me with the magnet and AP kids. I had a few calls, but not particularly a whole lot. Maybe it was cockiness that got the best of me, but that castle quickly crumbled when I started teaching the "on-level" kids. That's a euphemism for the low achievers. So low in fact, that I have to call 18 sets of parents. That's out of 71 students, so approximately 25% of my students. I'd say my expectations are too high, but when I consider that those 25% probably do about 10% of the work I assign I start to think it's not really my fault. A common response from some of them is "I don't know" when I implore about the whereabouts of their renegade textbooks. Apparently, there must be a black market for high school chemistry textbooks.
As much as I hate the answer, I wonder how they even got to my class. From their attitude, it's obvious that the reports of grade inflation are true. Are some students capable of learning without cracking a textbook or taking a single note? Absolutely. Are these? Absolutely not. They seem to be under the delusion that they can. I don't think they got there by themselves. Is it necessarily the teachers? I thought so until last week. We had a "vertical teaming meeting" with the teachers from the middle school that feeds into us last week. From their reports, the kids move on to high school even if they get failing grades. Social promotion is more important than education anyhow, right? And by the way, a vertical teaming meeting can roughly be defined as a total waste of time. If the kids knew the stuff they claim to have taught, I might think it was worthy of my time to meet with them.
So, back to my main point, I get to call at least 18 phone numbers, not knowing what to expect from the other end. I heard that I might be able to send a sort of postcard or something. That would be a nice alternative. Then, they could contact me if they were actually concerned about the education of their child. Unfortunately, I don't get the feeling that will be the case for a lot of them.
We have a stupid rule that you can't fail a kid unless you've tried to contact a student's parent/guardian. Never really been a problem for me with the magnet and AP kids. I had a few calls, but not particularly a whole lot. Maybe it was cockiness that got the best of me, but that castle quickly crumbled when I started teaching the "on-level" kids. That's a euphemism for the low achievers. So low in fact, that I have to call 18 sets of parents. That's out of 71 students, so approximately 25% of my students. I'd say my expectations are too high, but when I consider that those 25% probably do about 10% of the work I assign I start to think it's not really my fault. A common response from some of them is "I don't know" when I implore about the whereabouts of their renegade textbooks. Apparently, there must be a black market for high school chemistry textbooks.
As much as I hate the answer, I wonder how they even got to my class. From their attitude, it's obvious that the reports of grade inflation are true. Are some students capable of learning without cracking a textbook or taking a single note? Absolutely. Are these? Absolutely not. They seem to be under the delusion that they can. I don't think they got there by themselves. Is it necessarily the teachers? I thought so until last week. We had a "vertical teaming meeting" with the teachers from the middle school that feeds into us last week. From their reports, the kids move on to high school even if they get failing grades. Social promotion is more important than education anyhow, right? And by the way, a vertical teaming meeting can roughly be defined as a total waste of time. If the kids knew the stuff they claim to have taught, I might think it was worthy of my time to meet with them.
So, back to my main point, I get to call at least 18 phone numbers, not knowing what to expect from the other end. I heard that I might be able to send a sort of postcard or something. That would be a nice alternative. Then, they could contact me if they were actually concerned about the education of their child. Unfortunately, I don't get the feeling that will be the case for a lot of them.
Monday, November 03, 2003
Underachievement Gap
For once, I agree with something Cynthia Tucker writes. I would say that a signignificantly higher proportion of my black students qualify for underachiever status. Most of them are the ones that are "too cool for school." And with role models like Kobe Bryant and 50 Cent, why should there be any motivation to actually get an education? Besides, a government education is guaranteed!! If you aren't passing classes, it must be because the teacher isn't accountable or their tests are too hard. It couldn't possibly be because you sit and do nothing day in and day out while still expecting to pass a class.
The other day, a student said that I singled out his poor behavior because he is black. I responded that he was only saying that because I am white.
The other day, a student said that I singled out his poor behavior because he is black. I responded that he was only saying that because I am white.
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