Year: 2008

The plans to reopen Johnston H.S. as a new school have been approved.

Today I am turning in the last pieces of my tenure file to be sent to external reviewers. (I am burning *8* CD copies of my file as I write this.)

And, I received a UPS box filled with cookies and a thank you note from one of my best and brightest undergrads from the last two years.

I know who is going to go home and have celebratory homemade cookies and milk!

Update: The cookies are personalized!!!! She’s going to UGA for law school–hence the black and red, but I’m not sure about the shape. Bulldog maybe?

Update2: It’s the head of a gavel. The handle broke off.

I’m scheduled to get a new GT laptop this fall. Given the spyware that OIT installs on machines that log into the domain, I started thinking about getting one of these or these (back when there was a Linux option–WHERE DID IT GO!?!?!?!?!). Since I get lost without a right click and am baffled every time I’m forced to interact with a Mac, I was leaning toward the Linux option (which has now apparently disappeared!).

The only thing keeping me from Linux was the lack of a PDF editor. Perhaps by the time there’s another small PC option that comes with all the drivers preloaded for Linux, there will also be a PDF editor.

Really?

Though you can’t find a link to it on the APSA page, you can find the searchable program here.

It’s official. My alma mater is officially the worst school in Texas and will be the first to be closed for noncompliance with required improvements in educational testing outcomes. It was probably failing when I attended, too, though the liberal arts magnet probably camouflaged the failing test scores. This was my district school–even without the magnet. Now, students from the neighborhood I grew up in attend Akins HS.

While I really disagree with some of this blog’s posts (as discussed here), this one has a good warning for students today. I find that too many students feel they can effectively multi-task, that somehow multi-tasking makes them work better. Instead, I’ve found that students with laptops, especially in my grad methods class, tend to have more problems with the material. Or maybe the effect is spurious–they are on their laptops because they have already disengaged from the material.

In any case, I find that students have very poor poker faces when it comes to recreational surfing during class. The amused faces they make while browsing Facebook, YouTube, or their email are clearly not timed to match my occasional in-class wit.

At GT, apparently more faculty are banning laptops from class. This will be the policy in my methods class this fall, especially since very few (if no) students would be able to really efficiently take stats notes on their laptops, given the need for special characters. And, I give them handouts with the slides every week so they don’t have to copy equations but can take notes around them.

I still haven’t decided about my two summer school classes that start June 16.

According to the NYT, more than half of the undocumented workers at an Iowa meat-packing plant are going to be sent to prison for five months before being deported. Some are being put on probation. Imagine the cost of prosecuting and imprisoning those workers.

Meanwhile,

No charges have been brought against managers or owners at Agriprocessors, but there were indications that prosecutors were also preparing a case against the company. In pleading guilty, immigrants had to agree to cooperate with any investigation.

See also this news of a sweep in California.

According to La Jornada, the federal election authorities finally resolved the complaints about negative campaigning from the 2006 presidential election. Both the PAN and the PRD coalition were fined.

You can find links to some of the offending ads here and here.