Atomictumor

Oak Ridger:

Allegations against Oak Ridge teacher under investigation

According to the paper, Chief Beams is investigating Montgomery Koons for inappropriate contact with a student at Jefferson Middle from June until this month.

A quick Google search on the guy indicates a 47 year old Montgomery Koons was arrested in November of 2003 for “unspecified capias”, which is legaleeze, evidently, for ’some reason’. I’m sure the Oak Ridger is on top of that, tho.

Lets hope this is another Powell situation, where it’s going to clear up, and hopefully not result in a lawsuit against the school system, because lord knows, they don’t have the money for this kinda crap.

However, if it is a real situation, well, lets wish an ugly fate for people who take advantage of kids.

I woke up this morning to the ‘Tumor being down, and get home to the water being out.

Evidently, Oak Ridge’s finest (utility workers) have successfully dug a big hole.

At 11, on my lunch break, the dude said the outage would be for an hour, but apparently they’ve had problems, because checking now, its still out.  I walked out to casually inquire as to when I may flush (currently in “let it mellow” mode, but with Pigpen around, may quickly escalate to “flush it down” urgency), and all the workers casually rabbited as I approached, fleeing behind the neighbors house, and peeking around the corner cautiously.

They are industrious, but timid.

And thats OK.  We don’t need water, we’ve evolved beyond that.  We have beer.  And while beer can’t flush your toilet, well, we have cat litter.

I bumped across this in my web wanderings today, which appears to be written by one of those weird assed firebrand political types, but brings up a topic that my subconscious has been mulling over recently.

Homework in elementary schools.

Apparently, according to the book reviews cited in Slate, Japanese schools are slowing down on the amount of homework assigned to the kids, while American schools (as I, and about anyone with a kid these days have learned) are assigning more and more.  The thinking appears to be that nobody can find any kind of correlation between doing this homework and learning anything.

This has been a thought that I have long agreed with, in my own slack way.  When MastaG was coming home with homework in the 2nd grade, it was understood that it was essentially homework for me and GAC.  That we were to sit down with him, walk his protesting mind through the reams of mathematics, or the coloring busy work, or whatever, and somehow a benefit would drop in somewhere.

The benefit seems to be that ol’ MastaG shares my dislike for homework, tho I fail to see how useful that is.

We were talking at Willowbrooks recent open house with his language teacher regarding the boy, and she says she doesn’t assign homework for that same reason, that she’s seen all the studies and research, and none of it backs up the idea that a kid in elementary school gets anything but the runaround from doing homework.  She also said that what a kid really needs, in these days of constant motion and stimulation, is some mental downtime, and assigning a kid an hour of homework a night actually takes away from this stuff.

So, rock on, Japan.  On top of robots, and what has been generally considered to be one of the finer education systems in the civilized world, you agree with me on homework.

Man, we had some fun times last night!

Thanks for showing up, everybody!

Now back to business as usual.