Florida

Can we vote her off the island?

by Karen on May 26, 2008

alex_3_t220 Here’s a little gem of a story. A kindergarten teacher in Florida had one of her charges stand up in front of the class and then preceded to have his classmates vote him out of the class. This was after the boy was forced to listen to each of his classmates state why they didn’t like him.

He was then kicked out of class and sent to the office where he spent the rest of the day in the nurses office. Apparently, the school didn’t even bother to call the child’s mother about the incident.

So, I cast my vote to have the teacher kicked out of the class, the school and the entire profession of teaching. Why?

When I was a senior in high school I attended this computer course across the road from the main school. One day I came to class to find that there had been an attempted suicide in the bathroom. A young woman had sliced her wrists open.

Why did she do it? She was picked on without mercy for years. The adults did nothing. Nothing. I know because I had registered my own complaint about the behaviour of her tormenters years before when we attended the same school. I remember to this day being told that the adults just didn’t have the time to punish the jackasses and make sure they didn’t do the things they were doing.

The worst, however, was yet to come. Our teacher decided it would be great fun to mock her in front of us. To my knowledge that hateful merciless sorry excuse for a teacher still works for the school after being suspended for a fucking day after the parents/guardians of some of us submitted their own complaints about her.

And that’s why this one needs to go - permanently. She is unfit to be put in charge of children. We adults are supposed to stop this kind of shit in it’s tracks, not ignore it or worse – actively promote it as this one has done.

UPDATE: Here’s a video of an interview with Alex Barton’s mother about the incident:

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The Rules in Florida & Michigan

by Karen on May 22, 2008

One of the things that’s baffled me this election season is how so many don’t seem to grasp the fact that Hillary Clinton did not break the rules by not removing her name from the ballots in Michigan and Florida.

Thankfully, Zuzu of Shakesville has put up a post explaining this and a few other things that have cropped up in plain ole English that I’d like to recommend to everyone.

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Wizard sacked by Muggles

by Karen on May 7, 2008

Jim Piculas of Florida has been fired as a substitute teacher for practicing wizardry for a toothpick disappear, then reappear.

Substitute teacher Jim Piculas does a 30-second magic trick where a toothpick disappears then reappears.

But after performing it in front of a classroom at Rushe Middle School in Land ‘O Lakes, Piculas said his job did a disappearing act of its own.

“I get a call the middle of the day from the supervisor of substitute teachers. He says, ‘Jim, we have a huge issue. You can’t take any more assignments. You need to come in right away,’” he said.

When Piculas went in, he learned his little magic trick cast a spell that went much farther than he’d hoped.

“I said, ‘Well Pat, can you explain this to me?’ ‘You’ve been accused of wizardry,’ [he said]. Wizardry?” he asked.

Tampa Bay’s 10 talked to the assistant superintendent with the Pasco County School District who said it wasn’t just the wizardry and that Picular had other performance issues, including “not following lesson plans” and allowing students to play on unapproved computers.

Florida’s been a source of amusement for quite some time now as it seems to always be doing something that’s a bit on the nutty side of things, but this does take the cake doesn’t it?

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