Teacher Resigns After Duct Taping Child To Desk A southeast Missouri teacher resigned last month after duct-taping a misbehaving seventh-grader to his desk and covering his mouth with tape, the district’s superintendent said Wednesday. The parents of 14-year-old Tommy Brindley said the boy nearly suffocated before freeing himself about 15 minutes later. It happened Feb. 19 at the elementary/middle school in Oran, a town of about 1,000 residents 120 miles south of St. Louis. The Oran School District has 370 students and two schools. Tommy was in detention for being late to school three times, his father, Larry Brindley said. […]

“It’s not right to make my son carry the burden of your dissatisfaction of the failed policies of this school”. That’s how my parent/teacher conference went today. Sound like fun? Oh, yea – – just a hoot, let me tell ya. They called a conference today because of some trouble that Ben got into yesterday. Ben is in “ED” because he’s argumentative and has ADD. He’s a relatively bright kid – – sharp as a tack, but feels the need to debate everything into the ground and doesn’t know when to stop kicking a dead horse. Also, he has difficulties […]

Well, I finally had my meeting with John. He’s the Director of Technology at our local school administration office. We met today as a result of an email that I sent to him regarding the set up of the school’s website. To his credit – he contacted me right away to discuss it. Any help he could get, he said. Anytime he can outsource cheaply. After having to reschedule the meeting twice – we finally met this afternoon. He is administering the website with FrontPage – – meaning that the websites given to the teachers to update are done with […]

My meeting with John, our local school district’s head of technology, was put off until today at 2pm. I spoke with him a bit on the phone this week, and it sounds like he is up to his ears with the school’s website. He’s trying to administer user groups for the different teacher’s by using FrontPage on a Unix system. Needless to say – he’s pulling his hair out. I’m going in there today to show him the basics of Moveable Type with the suggestion that he implement it just for the pages within the site that are user-specific (i.e. […]

OK – so I sent a little email to the Superintendent of our local schools. It was just a tiny little concern voiced by a parent who is frustrated with the school system. See, if you went to my local school district’s website – their logo at the top of their site (as well as on any letterhead, memos, newsletters, etc) states “Communication is a #1 priority”. I beg to differ. I can’t get my kids teachers on the phone, much less attempt at any form of decent communication. There are two very small windows of opportunity to get a […]