"That's Not How We Do It In India"

[omorka]

Why are all the Hindu and Muslim kids hanging out in my room all of a sudden?

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Had a bit of excitement recently - came to school Tuesday morning to find the art/shop/ROTC building thoroughly tagged with what appeared to be gang territory markings. (It wasn't artistic enough to be a solo tagger, and some of the "stock" phrases were there.) Then there was a fight that may or may not have involved a weapon in the cafeteria just before classes started. The district decided that scouring the graffiti off the building was their high priority for that morning, so the building smelled like the gunk they use as thinner for spray paint all morning and cleaning fluid all afternoon.

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The state of Texas has picked up as one of their "lucky" ones - we're doing a TAKS Exit-level ELA Field Test tomorrow. Yet another instructional day largely lost to standardized testing. *puke*

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Last week, the junior class voted on one of four nominated students to send to some internship thingy in D.C. One of my kids, Choir, was one of the two who made it to the run-off. He was beaten by a football player, and a number of my kids are up in arms about it. Several advisories decided not to vote, or weren't given an opportunity to do so by their advisory teachers, so it was a poorly run election even if the kids are wrong and there was no unfair campaigning going on. It'll be interesting to see what, if anything, comes of this.

Oh, and Science Fair is tomorrow, too.

I shall stop procrastinating and go grade now.

Comments

[krystiegoddess.livejournal.com]

I am so freaking sick of standardized testing. Between the district proficiency testing, the benchmark testing, the field testing, and all the other testing our kids do (Explore, RPTE, who knows WHAT else), it's a wonder any education happens anymore.

[starcat-jewel.livejournal.com]

Re your first question -- my guess would be, because they know it's "safe space" in a way that much of the rest of the school may not be.

Does the football player have any other interests which might qualify him for the internship, or is this pure popularity politics?

I still remember how hurt I was to lose my part in the 6th-grade school play to someone who hadn't even auditioned for it after she failed to get the part she had auditioned for. Apparently her parents applied leverage, and I was deemed the most expendable. Mine, of course, would not back me against any Authority Figure, so I was doubly screwed.

[omorka.livejournal.com]

I don't know the football player personally, so I can't know for sure - but the fact that I don't know him says something about his academics. My kids say that he's not an appropriate candidate to represent the school, and while there's a certain amount of sour-grapes going on (most of my kids know Choir, whether they're friends with him or not), if their descriptions are even mostly correct, he was a strange choice at best. It seems to have been pure name recognition - he's on the team (and a member of the step club, which gets a lot of attention for itself in various ways), so people recognized his name and voted for him.

There were also some minor voting irregularities; some homerooms didn't get to vote because their adviser teachers didn't hand out the ballots on the right day. If homerooms were assigned randomly, this wouldn't bias the results, but they're not - they're alphabetical. So if, say, the J's get to vote, but the N's don't, then the black and Hispanic vote matters more than the Asian vote and that's an issue. It's not clear to me which homerooms didn't vote - that was just an example - but voting irregularity is bad no matter which groups got shut out.