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.

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....

Pet Peeves, part 1

Why part 1? Because I suspect that this will be an ever-growing list that I will add to many times over the course of my library career.

Things that make me twitchy:

• Teachers who tell their students "just copy and paste from the website into your presentation."
• Teachers who copy workbooks (I'm starting to be of two minds about this. Yes, it's a copyright violation. However, when your school has 10 workbooks for 5 sections of a class, what are teachers supposed to do? Still...makes my little law-abiding soul cringe.)
• Students who claim "I wasn't (insert X forbidden action here)" when they were, I/We saw/heard them do it. Most of the students here are pretty good about just taking their penalty and moving on, but a few will lie right to your face about the thing you just saw them do 2 seconds ago. Usually this is in the vein of "Man, I didn't do nuthin, man, why y'all tryin' to play me, man, this is...."
• Teachers who bring their rowdy middle school class into the library and then wander out to do something unspecified for an unspecified amount of time, leaving me to babysit (usually right around the time I need to go to the office, or the textbook room, or a teacher's classroom, or...)