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A Strip Club, a Liquor Store, and a Bus Stop

A Strip Club, A Liquor Store, And A Bus Stop — it sounds remarkably like the beginning of a joke but it is anything but humor. Consider the role of a bus stop — it is meant to be a place to allow children to congregate and wait for a bus to take them to school and then later drop them off after work. The transition from home to school and back has to be one that involves safety for the children — both in terms of their physical well being and what they see. Having a school bus stop sandwiched between a liquor store and a strip club puts children in danger on both ends.

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What Not to Do When You Are the School Principal

There are certain expectations of you when you become the principal of a school. You are, so to speak, the coach of the entire school — it looks to you for guidance and leadership. You need to have a certain kind of moral fortitude in order to be the school principal because in a way you are also the keystone of the school. It should come to no surprise to anyone, therefore, that when the principal of a school slips up and behaves in a manner that is unbecoming of anyone meant to be taken seriously in a school, let alone the head of the school, said principal must face strong consequences.

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Teachers in France Have The Right Idea: Strike!

The other day, I was watching television and I saw a commercial for a certain credit card company that showed a teacher shopping for their own school supplies. I was reminded how bad our education system currently is — bad enough that it supplies teachers with a certain budget for the year but when that budget is exhausted, as it often quickly is, they have to pony up if they want to give their students crayons or colored paper or project supplies — regardless of how important those supplies may be for their education. I couldn’t imagine a bank teller being told by their employer that they could only have a certain number of pens at their station, and that they would have to pay for any others if they needed them.

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Paying the Rising Cost of Schooling

The absolutely most important thing, my mother used to tell me, is a good education — and this was something that nobody could take away from you. This is why my parents would always pay whatever cost necessary to give my brother and me a good education.

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Healthy Mind in a Healthy Body? Not in the United States!

My mother used to regularly remind me as a child that it was “A healthy mind in a healthy body” as poet and satirist Juvenal is purported to have written — and for this reason encouraged me to not only keep up with my studies but to also participate in activities of the physical fitness variety. When I was at The Peddie School from 1993 to 1996, we were required to take courses in physical fitness or to participate in one of their competitive teams.

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How to Kill Foreign Languages

There’s an easy way to encourage xenophobia — remove fruitful access to the acquisition and temptation of a language.  You kill the meme by removing it from memory.  Another way to discourage the foreign is to poke it with a stick or, more simply, use a budget axe to cleave the learning from the cleansed mind.

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The Jolly Rancher Affair in Your Hair

I remember a time when, as a kid, getting candy OUT of your hair was a major, momentary, catastrophe that was only resolvable with a pair of scissors.  The resultant bald patch was your mark of dishonor for playing so poorly with such sticky candy.  I was, of course, curious to read about the recent Jolly Rancher in Your Hair Affair where a mother purposefully put Jolly Rancher candy in her child’s hair and then sent said child off to school for photo day.  Here’s a random image of what “Your Hair in Jolly Ranchers” looks like:

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