Back To School

(This started as a comment at Jessica Gottlieb's blog and then I realized that it was a good beginning for a post.)

My kids started school last week and it has been one giant adventure.

My daughter is in kindergarten where she and her friends are busy trying to decide who is going to marry whom. Heavy negotiations are taking place.

Her older brother's response to all this is "girls are weird" and the astute observation, "moms are just bigger girls aren't they."

I smile and tell him that he has no idea, but one day he will.

In between all this my son wants to know why everyone else went to Hawaii or somewhere else and we didn't. I laugh and tell him poverty builds character.

Fortunately he shrugs his shoulder and is content to resume playing with Legos.

Last night I asked him if his class saw the president's speech. He said no so I guess that I don't have to worry about him being brainwashed. But he did say that they are supposed to discuss something about Obama, but he is not sure what.

And then he looks at me and says that I was right, third grade is harder than second but not impossible.

The dark haired beauty started kindergarten last week so she has plenty to add about all of this. In addition to the stories about the boys she has had plenty to tell me. She is ecstatic about having homework and makes a point of showing me her homework folder every day. She is so excited about it she wants to know why she doesn't have homework on the weekend.

I laugh and say that it won't be long before she does. She doesn't know why I am laughing and is a bit miffed by it. I give her a big hug and tell her not to worry. And then I look into those dark eyes and ask if she'll stay five a bit longer.

She agrees and tells me that she will stay five until she turns six and that I'll just have to deal with it. Oy, I love this girl but she is determined to kill me. I know now that the preteen years and beyond are going to be interesting.

Late at night I go online and check out the school's new website. They just rolled this puppy out and I am impressed. They have done a nice job with it and I can see that it is going to make a great resource.

There is a calendar with a list of events and each of their teachers logs homework and school projects on it as well. It makes it really easy to keep up with things and the digital photos that they upload from the classrooms are pretty cool too.

It all feels good and at the moment the private school dilemma is at rest but it won't be long before that particular monster comes out of the closet looking for food again.

In the interim all is well. They are happy and we are happy and sometimes that is all you can ask for.

More on Columbine

Today is the ten year anniversary of the Columbine tragedy. Since many of my readers were on vacation last week I thought that I'd follow up on that post with another.

As I said in my initial post I have always been bothered by the attempt to explain the actions of the perpetrators of this atrocity as somehow having been tied into bullying.

It is understandable that in the face of tragedy people try to understand why things happen. But I cannot accept an explanation that absolves these two monsters of responsibility for their actions.

More importantly if you read some of the stories that have come out about that day you will see that Klebold and Harris were not the victims of bullying. Still, even if they had been there is no excuse for their actions. The majority of the world does not resort to violence in the face of mistreatment.

"(CNN) -- What do you remember about April 20, 1999?

If you recall that two unpopular teenage boys from the Trench Coat Mafia sought revenge against the jocks by shooting up Columbine High School, you're wrong.

But you're not alone.

Ten years after the massacre in Littleton, Colorado, there's still a collective memory of two Goth-obsessed loners, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, who went on a shooting rampage and killed 12 of their classmates and a teacher, injured 23 others and then turned their guns on themselves.

Journalist and author Dave Cullen was one of the first to take on what he calls the myths of Columbine. He kept at it for a decade, challenging what the media and law enforcement officials reported.

"Kids had never been attacked in this kind of way until Columbine," he recently told CNN. "I just had to find out what happened to those kids."

Cullen's book,"Columbine," was released this month -- just in time for today's 10th anniversary of the shooting at the Colorado high school. While tackling popular misconceptions, Cullen also gives a riveting account of what happened that day and how the survivors view the event that marked their lives forever.

Cullen concluded that the killers weren't part of the Trench Coat Mafia, that they weren't bullied by other students and that they didn't target popular jocks, African-Americans or any other group. A school shooting wasn't their initial intent, he said. They wanted to bomb their school in an attack they hoped would make them more infamous than Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh."

If you think about it, that last sentence makes it all the more frightening.

Columbine: Ten Years Later

USA Today has an interesting retrospective about the terrible school shooting at Columbine High School.

In the aftermath I have heard any number of explanations for why these two monsters acted as they did. A number of them suggested that bullying might have been among the primary reasons for their actions.

That has always troubled me. I don't pretend to have a degree in psychology or to be any sort of expert in the field of mental health. I can understand to an extent how if someone was being bullied that they might want to strike back at the person(s) who were doing this. But this goes far beyond that.

Take a look at this excerpt from the article:

What's now beyond dispute — largely from the killers' journals, which have been released over the past few years, is this: Harris and Klebold killed 13 and wounded 24, but they had hoped to kill thousands.

The pair planned the attacks for more than a year, building 100 bombs and persuading friends to buy them guns. Just after 11 a.m. on April 20, they lugged a pair of duffel bags containing propane-tank bombs into Columbine's crowded cafeteria and another into the kitchen, then stepped outside and waited.

Had the bombs exploded, they'd have killed virtually everyone eating lunch and brought the school's second-story library down atop the cafeteria, police say. Armed with a pistol, a rifle and two sawed-off shotguns, the pair planned to pick off survivors fleeing the carnage.

As a last terrorist act, a pair of gasoline bombs planted in Harris' Honda and Klebold's BMW had been rigged apparently to kill police, rescue teams, journalists and parents who rushed to the school — long after the pair expected they would be dead.

The pair had parked the cars about 100 yards apart in the student lot. The bombs didn't go off.

Read a bit further on and you see that money limited their ability to murder. A lack of finances helped to save lives.

But if we go back to the subject of bullying what bothers me is that I have a hard time accepting that bullying pushed them so far over the edge that they would be willing to murder so many who had nothing to do with them.

They were sick individuals who took a cowards way out and by that I refer to all of their actions that day, from start to finish.

What Should Children Learn in School?

Sometimes I spend the quiet moments of my life lost in thought about questions that I anticipate being asked by my children. Lying awake in bed I stare at the ceiling and think about what they find important and interesting and try to come up with an appropriate response.

An appropriate response, now there is the trick. I could use the fallback “because I said so” or defer to the “why do you think” trick and leave it at that. In fact, I sometimes think that time before I drift off to sleep might be better suited for dreams about me and her on that deserted beach, but that is a post for a different time. ;)

The truth is that I have come to really enjoy these exercises. Some of these questions deal with topics that I haven’t really considered in years and years. What might have worked for the 15-year-old boy I was doesn’t always work for the guy I am today. And so in the quiet of the night I find myself mulling over all sorts of stuff.

Lately I have been focusing on how to answer questions about school. All sorts of different topics are floating around inside my skull:

1) Why are book reports important?
2) Why should you know the names of the capitals of every state?
3) What purpose is there in knowing how to work with parabolas and hyperbolas?
4) Why should people read Shakespeare or any of the classics?

I wonder how many people can really come up with reasonable answers.

All of this talk begs the question of what sort of curriculum do I want for my children. If I had complete control what would I want included? Are there things that I would exclude? What is my bottom line? What is really important?

I can come up with general list, but just how specific can I get. I think that I might sit down and work it all out.

Caught My Eye- Why Public Schools are In Trouble

Want to Make Your Students Love you. Try this:

During the alleged incident, which police said was videotaped by other students with cellphones, students said Heckstall suddenly "started acting crazy," telling the class to "shut the [expletive] up."

Heckstall allegedly directed his anger toward the male student, telling him he would "rip your eyeballs out," urinate on him and "kill your family," according to the police report. Heckstall then spat on the floor and began to apologize, police said.

Or you could try this

Polk Teacher accused of having sex with four students
LAKELAND, FL -- A Polk County school teacher has been charged with sexually assaulting four students in a series of incidents that have been going on since last summer.

Stambaugh Middle School science teacher Danielle Jones was arrested this morning. Jones has taught at Stambaugh for seven years. The 32-year-old teacher was led to a sheriff's squad car to go to jail shortly before 1:00 this afternoon.

Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd said today, "It's painfully obvious to us that she's a pedophile."

Judd says two of the victims are former students of Jones. The others are a friend and a cousin of the student victims. They ranged in age between 14 and 16 years old at the time of the alleged sexual contact.

More discipline

Teacher taped student to chair

OAKRIDGE, Ore. -- A teacher in the Oakridge School District has been placed on paid administrative leave after allegedly taping a student to a chair because he wouldn't sit down.

Superintendent Don Kordosky declined to identify the teacher Tuesday, but confirmed she was removed from her Oakridge Elementary School classroom last week after the mother of a 9-year-old boy reported the May 28 incident.

The boy's mother, Becky Faile, does not have a listed phone number and could not be reached for comment Tuesday night. In interviews with local television stations, she said the teacher taped her son from his knees to his chest after he refused requests to sit down.

Faile said her son's poor behavior was not a strong enough reason for him to be humiliated in front of his peers. Faile said she has contacted a lawyer.

Under Oregon law, "a teacher may use reasonable physical force upon a student when and to the extent the teacher reasonably believes it is necessary to maintain order in the school or classroom."

It's unclear if masking tape is considered reasonable.