More Weeding Quotes

• "The first construction crew would arrive on the moon sometime during the period 2000-2005. By the year 2010, the base would be able to support 30 human beings for months at a time."
• "President-elect George Bush, President Ronald Reagan, and Soviet general secretary Mikhail Gorbachev take a break for sightseeing during the Soviet leader's visit to New York in December 1988. Recent advances between the two superpowers in the reduction of nuclear arms have contributed to a thawing of the Cold War."
• "Political changes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, which have started a movement toward greater personal freedom and the development of market-based economies, could profoundly alter political and economic relationships between the Communist world and the West."
• Referring to National Guard entrance requirements:
  "The good moral character requirement establishes standards to screen out persons likely to become disciplinary problems. Standards cover court convictions, juvenile delinquency, arrests, drug use, homosexuality, deviant behavior, etc."
• "'We'd also like to ban all smoking on short flights.'"
• "The minimum drinking age in most states is now 21."
• Discussing the future of police work:
  "Patrol cars will be equipped wwith computers so that, while remaining behind the wheel, an officer can instantly call up needed data on a suspicious person or vehicle."
• "Another use of computers is networking. By using modems to link computers through telephone lines, people can make their computers "talk" to one another."
• "A letter of introduction is always handed to you unsealed. It is correct for you to seal it at once in the presence of the author...But the obligation of a written introduction is so strong that only illness or absence can excuse the recipient from asking you to her house--either formally or informally."

And a title:

Presidential Power and the Modern Presidents: The Politics of Leadership from Roosevelt to Reagan

Weeding Quote of the Day

"A few years ago, Michael J. Fox starred in a movie entitled Back to the Future..."

For reference, that movie came out 3 years after I was born.

Huh. Suddenly I don't feel so old.

Busy, busy

Yesterday was good, even despite facing it on only 5 hours of sleep. For the curious, I don't recommend spending the weekend doing an 18-hour round trip for a friends wedding, especially not when all the driving takes place between 5 p.m. and 3 a.m. Especially not if you then have to slide back into a routine that requires you to be up at 5 a.m. on Monday. But I didn't snap and kill any kids, nor did I drive off the road from sleep deprivation, so I guess it's all good.

And yeah, yesterday was good. Busy, in the way that makes me feel that I am a useful and productive member of the school. I know a lot of librarians have it rough, but the teachers here are almost pathetically grateful to have someone help them.

The high point was when I explained (to some notable troublemakers) how only half the globe is illuminated so as to demonstrate roughly which half of the world is in daylight at the present time, and how it rotates on its own to keep that illusion. Demonstrating how the axial tilt changes throughout the year, leaving the North and South poles in the dark or light, enthralled them.

It made me feel good. I mean, I'm a nerd, so of course I think the illuminated globe is cool. If these kids, who hate school, can get excited about seeing it too, maybe they have a chance.

Now, armed with sufficient sleep, I'm going to weed like my life depends on it. I've got less than two weeks before I have to start the year-end inventory. God help us all.

Overheard in the library #4

Teacher: "I see a lot of Fs in this class"

Student: "Why you puttin' us down?"

Teacher: "You don't do any work, what do you think you're gonna get? A magical grade?"

Student: "Yeah, I'm gonna get a rainbow"

P.S. The Con Artist is still mad.

Oh, No! He's Mad at Me!

There is a student who I will refer to as The Con Artist. He has not stopped trying to con me since the first time I saw him. He always has a perfectly reasonable explanation for why it was all right for him to be doing whatever it was. If he manages to get an education, I would not be surprised to see him running for public office some day.

My first meeting with The Con Artist was in the morning, when the students go to breakfast before classes. Coming back from breakfast, he was talking with one of his little friends. When I stopped them to take points for talking in line, out came the plausible explanation

Con Artist: "He's my cousin, and our aunt just died, and I was asking him when the funeral was."

Me: "That's very sad, now I need to see your point sheet."

The second time was when I caught him accessing Bebo in the library. This is not only strictly against the district rules, but you have to access a proxy site to even get there, as it is blocked by our filter. Out he goes, referral is written. Later in the day, he comes to see me.

Con Artist: "I just wanted to apologize for getting on Bebo, it won't happen again."

Me: "Look, this is not my rule, this is the district's rule. I don't personally care, I just have to enforce the rule."

CA: "I guess you already wrote the referral, huh?"

Me: "Yes, it's been turned in."

CA: "Since I got taken to the office, can I come in this hour to work on my project?"

Me: "If your teacher says it's okay."

Teacher approves, The Con Artist comes in and gets on a computer. A few minutes later, I look up, and he's accessing Bebo again.

Me: "You need to log off the computer and go back to your class."

CA: "Oh, I thought since you said you didn't care, it was okay if I got on."

Me: "A: even though I don't personally care what site you get on, it is the district's policy and I am going to enforce it. B: you told me you were going to work on your project."

CA: "I will, I will"

I think, but cannot prove, that he got on Bebo a third time that day. After this day, I decided that I was tired of him trying to con me, and now, when he comes into the library, I let his teachers know that I am not allowing him on the computers. However, he still comes in, with the rest of his class. Yesterday, he left a book in the library; this was the second book I found yesterday that belonged to other school libraries in The District. When he asked me about it this morning, I told him that I had found it, and that he could get it when his class came in to the library today.

However, knowing The Con Artist as I have come to, I decided to do some checking in The District's union catalog (for non-librarians, we can see the books the other schools have, too). Lo and behold, the book had not been checked out from its home library. It must have just walked off the shelf. I phoned the librarian to let her know and put the book in interdepartmental mail to go back to its home.

When I told The Con Artist, he was furious that I had done anything with "his book" which he had been planning to return to the library himself. I enumerated for him the fact that it was not his book, it was the library's book, he had not checked it out, which would give him some small claim on it, and that he was not legally allowed on the campus of his old school while enrolled at The Alternative School (indeed, they could arrest him for doing so).

But logic failed to avert the wrath of The Con Artist. This is the first time I've seen him other than calm. He wandered around the library for the rest of the hour usually as close to me as possible, so I could overhear as he complained to his fellow students of the great injustice I had done to him. During the course of this, he mentioned that he had gotten the book "at his ex-girlfriend's house last weekend." So it might not be him that walked out of the library with the book; of course, this is The Con Artist, so there's really no telling.

So he's mad at me. He's going to tell the principal on me. Somehow, I think I'll survive.

Belated Overheard in the library #3

This happened at some point last week, when middle school students were working on their big, end-of-semester project on human body systems for Science.

Female Middle School Student #1: "Girls have testicles, too!"

Male Middle School Student: "No they don't!"

Female Middle School Student #2: "Yeah, they do!"

Me: "Uh, no, boys have testicles, girls have ovaries. They are both gonads, though...."

Seriously. You can't make this stuff up.

There, but for the grace of God....

When I was first accepted to The Alternative School, I wasn't sure what to expect. My confidence was eroded by the fact that, whenever I told anyone which school I was going to work at, they made The Face. You know, The Face that tries simultaneously to say "You're doing what?" "Do you know what that place is like?" and "I'm sure it can't be as bad as they say."

Although I've heard horror stories about what it was like last year, so far (and I say this with 29 days of school left) the lid has stayed on. Yes, there have been fights, yes, sometimes I'm scared when I tell the students who are two feet taller than me what to do. But overall, the system works.

That being said, I can imagine what it would be like if the principal and assistant principal weren't willing to back up the rules with consequences. Sure, they'll give the kids a second chance (and often a third, fourth, fifth, etc.) but there are some lines that cannot be crossed, and they will, often regretfully, expell a student if the situation calls for it.

I cannot imagine working in a school (or a district) where stuff like this can happen. And it seems that this has been going on for a long time. I feel for the teachers who filed the class-action suit. No one should have to work in conditions like that. I know many do, and for that, I applaud them. Me, if I get beaten up by one of these kids, either the kid goes, or I do. That's it, that's all she wrote. I will not come back to a workplace where someone who assaulted me will be. And yet, they were asking these teachers to do so.

I know we're America's figurative punching bags for a lot of things; let's not make it literal, huh?

Very Minor Updates

All quiet on the western front today. (How much of a nerd am I that I considered my school's geographical location in the city before going with that phrase? Although technically, the library is at the south end of the school...southwestern front? Nah.)

Only one of the classes scheduled in the library has come in so far. Of course, it was during that class that I was called out to the AP's office to explain to the parents/guardians of the second girl in this post that, yes, I did see the offending child sitting in the vicinity of a computer with Bebo open on it. She decided to go the plausible deniability route. The boy who logged her on was the one who went to the proxy site and opened Bebo. She didn't report it because she figured he would get in trouble since it was his login. Gritted my teeth when she claimed that she wasn't actually sitting in front of the computer, just nearby. I would not be quite willing to stake my immortal soul on it, but I'm about 98.6% sure that, not only was she sitting in front of the computer, she was actually doing things on it. But I'm sticking to my ethics and not going to contradict her if I can't remember for sure.

Got to stand in the office for several awkward moments while the guardian-type-people pleaded for another chance for their Darling Offspring, since she's never been in trouble before. (Yeah, she's never been in trouble before. That's what got her suspended/expelled from her actual school and sent to The Alternative School.) The poor AP was looking rather worn. They could pay me enough to be an administrator, but there's not a district in the country that would.

The STF has apparently decided to accept my groveling of yesterday and act as if she were never upset with me, and also to tell me that since she is hosting some District-wide forum on school violence, I get to babysit two of her classes next Tuesday. Should be interesting.

Caught in the Middle, or Things That Wouldn't Make Me Cry on Any Other Day

As previously mentioned, we have had issues with students logging in for other students. This is partly because the students are lazy, partly because they don't see anything wrong with it, partly because they don't want to do stuff they're not supposed to do when logged in under their own name, and a little bit because we have had some non-working logins and some new students who didn't have their own logins for a few days. (Wow, my grandmother would kill me for writing that sentence. Good thing she doesn't read this.)

We used to be able to log on to the generic "new teacher" login for the kids, so they could at least do their work, but the generics were canceled because somebody or somebodies (don't know who, it's a generic login) were using the generic to visit sites which did not strictly apply to their job. Which is a big no-no here in The District. So who suffers? Well, technically it's the children, but really it's me, because I get to tell them that they can't login, and then their friends log them in, and I get to tell them that they shouldn't do that, and then decide whether or not to kick them off the computers. I hate to do that when they're really trying to do their work.

So, thinking that I could solve at least the not having logins problem. I think about going to the school tech facilitator about it. Then I recal that the STF and I had previously discussed this problem, and she had said something about wanting some generic student logins for new students, but the tech people had never gotten back to her.

Like the helpful person I am, I fire off an email to my district library supervisor asking if this can happen. No response until after lunch, when all hell breaks loose upon my head.

The STF comes down to the library and lets me have it, both barrels. We don't want generic logins, because then we will not be able to tell what student did a bad thing (not when, but if; because obviously watching the students has gone out of style). I explain to her that I must have misunderstood our previous conversation, and I apologize. But that doesn't stop her from repeating her reasoning on why we don't want generic logins at least four more times, and complaining about getting the email forwarded from my supervisor (which I also apologized for) because once, ONCE, at the beginning of the year when I didn't know she was the STF, I went to my district library supervisor with a question and she got an email from said supervisor asking why she wasn't helping me. She has never let this go. She thought she was helping me. Doesn't she help me? And she wouldn't put up with this noise around the computers that the other teacher allows; she'd kick them all out of the library.

Etc., etc., etc. I apologized until I was blue in the face and started to get mad. I nearly lost it when a short-term student who never got a login got an attitude with me about not being able to log in. I wrote an email to my library supervisor explaining that it was a misunderstanding and retracting my request, but she's already moving forward, and she's going to make generic logins, even though the STF does not want them. Which is just going to piss the STF off more. And guess who gets caught in the middle? Oh, yeah, that's me.

I'm now going to manufacture an excuse to visit the bathroom, let myself cry for a little bit, and tell myself that one annoyed person does not negate the fact that almost everyone else thinks I'm doing a good job.

Names

This is one of my BIG Pet Peeves. I understand wanting a unique name for your child; I went through a brief, brief phase where I wanted to name my first daughter Scheherezade. Fortunately, I got over it, and turned to fantasy role-playing games to indulge my penchant for (some more than others) unique and original names.

Someday I will dust off the draft post with the "I can't believe they named their kid that" list. All I can say is, bonus points for the parents who actually made up something semi-original. Minus points for just adding prefixes or suffixes (or both) to an existing name, extra double super minus points for choosing an existing word and using it as a name (Okay, fine, Chastity has been a traditional name since Puritan times, but where do you get off naming a child Passion? Really!?!).

Anyway, ran across this (long, long list) while reading through the Educat's archives, and it made me snicker. A lot. Go forth, and enjoy.

They caught the Porn Bandit!

Yes, you see, the coaches were mystified as to why they would come in to work in the morning and the printer in their classroom would be out of paper. Until, one day, they plugged in paper, and porn, well, scantily clad pictures, came pouring out. Lots of it.

Today, they finally caught the young perpetrator in the act. Of course, he says he didn't do it. And the coach who caught him said our young Porn Bandit was logged in under the coach's username, which might lead to some dicey times for the coach, as downloading and printing inappropriate materials is a firing offense in The District.

In other news, I have written up not one, but two students today for accessing Bebo instead of doing her project. Not sure what happened to the first student; the second one is being expelled. I feel a little guilty over that, but I'm not the person who chose to expell her (that was the Assistant Principal) and I'm not the one who chose to violate the behavior compact she signed when she came here (that was all her). I suspect, if this hadn't landed on the AP's desk when he was dealing with the porn bandit, she might have gotten a more lenient response...

Oh, wait, what's this? An announcement for the first student to come to the office? Apparently equal punishment is being meted out for equal offenses. Wahoo!

I should just be grateful I have an AP who believes in consequences. And who told me, after bringing him the second referral of the day, while he was still dealing with the Porn Bandit, "Thank you, you're doing your job."

Pet Peeves, elaborated

When I began this job, in September of last year, I began collecting useful online resources for teachers. Since I had no idea how one went about creating an official library web site, I collected links to these sites, with appropriate annotations, on a wiki. I also added an interactive library calendar, where teachers could use a password I gave them to schedule their classes in the library if no one else had scheduled that time. I was rather proud of my little wiki. I put it in the library newsletter so everyone would know about it.

Well, The District doesn't like wikis. They have grudgingly left a few wiki providers unblocked by the All Powerful Filter, but despite the professional development workshop I attended (provided by The District, no less) on how to use blogs and wikis in the classroom, I am apparently not allowed to have a library wiki. They want me to take it down and put up all that stuff on an official library website, on the official school site. I am given the name of the teacher who is in charge of the website. I talk to him about coming down to the library to help me set it up.

Weeks pass. Eventually he makes his way down to the library (I'm not blaming him. He is a busy teacher, and almost certainly has better things to do with his planning hour than walk me through making a website). So we copy and paste my preformatted content into the Official Template. He says he will look it over before publishing it to the web, as he is responsible for everything that goes up. Seems reasonable.

He comes back and says my information on where to go for wikis and blogs has to go. We can't talk about wikis and blogs on an Official School Website. Because then maybe people might know that they exist? Fine. Whatever. We can remove that information. We do so.

Now we're ready to publish it to the web. Publish it! Aaaaandd....nothing. It doesn't show up. It's just not there. Doing the same thing over and over, surprisingly enough, produces the same results.

There are 6 weeks left in our school year (34 days, after today, but who's counting?) and I still don't have a website. Now, I could blame this on technology not working as it should, or the limited knowledge of the teacher who's in charge of the website. However, I choose to place the blame squarely on the shoulders of The District for their paranoia and control-freak-ness when it comes to all things Internet and technology.

You see, I know a little something about websites. The software that The District requires us to use for the Official School Websites is not the most asinine piece of drek I've ever seen created for this purpose, but it may very well come in second. I understand that, with no way to guarantee a level of technology knowledge, you need something that ANYBODY can use, given training. Or, and this is just a thought, maybe take a little money and hire someone who actually knows what they're doing when it comes to websites, whose responsibility would be to create and maintain said websites? Huh? What's that you say? We need that money to pay for the bloated beauracracy that causes you to not get paid for months after you're hired? Oh, okay, then.

Bitter? Me? Nah....

Highs and Lows

This week, the first back after our much-needed Spring Break, has been interesting. I guess I should say these four days, since I was out sick on Monday, not desiring to spread my fever to my colleagues (she said virtuously).

Fun times with a teacher on Wednesday who sent a student with a note saying "I need books on:" and listing five topics, none of which we had books on. In fairness to her, we probably should have books on a couple of them. Note to self for next book order. I wrote a note back offering to find articles on the subjects. Student comes back saying "She wants encyclopedias."

"Which ones?"

Shrug

Based on the list of topics from earlier, I select the A, N/O, and S encyclopedias and check them out to the teacher. Later conversations with the teacher reveal that, yes, she was aware that it was a last-minute request, and that at least one of the encyclopedias were useful. Count that one as a triumph over too little information.

Yesterday and today, Mr. Middle School Science Teacher has had his students in here to work on their Big Deal End-of-Semester project on human body systems. Yesterday, for two of the six class periods his students were in the library, he sent half his class to the library, and kept half of them in the classroom. Did this, in fact, mean that I had the privilege of riding herd on his Middle School Brats From Hell (MSBFH)? Yes, yes it did. Including the special ed student that he didn't send but who came anyway, the student whose name is a byword at the school, the student who, when he said that he wouldn't come to school today, the reaction from the guidance counselor was "Thank you, Jesus"? That student? Yes, yes it did. And did I, in fact, catch one of the MSBFH looking at various pictures of scantily clad females instead of working on his project and have to write him up and print off a list of the sites he visited? Yes, yes I did. Yesterday was a LONG day. There was fast food for dinner, as I felt in need of some comfort carbs.

Today, so far at least, has been better. There are, as always, highs and lows. Lows would be having to persuade the (approximately) 15- or 16-year-old middle school students that the female reproductive system is different from pictures of nekkid women. Highs would be when not one, but two students asking "Do you have any books we could use for this project?" Maybe, just maybe, they'll actually learn something from this project, instead of just copying and pasting the entire Wikipedia article. Maybe.

Overheard at dismissal yesterday #2

(Note: the child saying this was definitely of African-American descent)

"White power! White power!"

No, I don't know why.