THE head of one of the nation’s elite private schools has questioned whether English should be compulsory for the senior years, saying the courses being taught are beyond the intellectual ability of most students.
The headmaster of Sydney Church of England Grammar School (Shore) in North Sydney, Tim Wright, told a symposium on a national curriculum in English at the weekend that parents felt alienated from the English syllabus and were deeply cynical about it.
In his speech, Dr Wright said the NSW English course for Years 11 and 12 was a major challenge for many students.
“The intellectual challenge is, in fact, beyond many students,” he said.
“It is seen as arbitrary and from time to time the anguished cry comes: ‘Why can’t we just read the book?’
“I question whether it (English) ought to be compulsory … at senior level. It is not enough to simply say that like cod liver oil, English is good for you.”
MESA, Arizona — Officials at an Arizona school suspended a 13-year-old boy for sketching what looked like a gun, saying the action posed a threat to his classmates.
The boy’s parents said the drawing was a harmless doodle and school officials overreacted.
“The school made him feel like he committed a crime. They are doing more damage than good,” said the boy’s mother, Paula Mosteller.
The drawing did not show blood, bullets, injuries or target any human, the parents said. And the East Valley Tribune reported that the boy said he did not intend for the picture to be a threat.
Administrators of Payne Junior High in nearby Chandler suspended the boy on Monday for five days but later reduced it to three days.
The boy’s father, Ben Mosteller, said that when he went to the school to discuss his son’s punishment, school officials mentioned the seriousness of the issue and talked about the 1999 massacre at Colorado’s Columbine High School, where two teenagers shot and killed 12 students, a teacher and themselves. Mosteller said he was offended by the reference.
Chandler district spokesman Terry Locke said the crude sketch was “absolutely considered a threat,” and that threatening words or pictures are punishable.
A 40-year-old former substitute teacher from Connecticut is facing prison time following her conviction for endangering students by exposing them to pornographic material displayed on a classroom computer.
Local prosecutors charged that the teacher was caught red-handed surfing for porn in the presence of seventh graders. The defense claimed the graphic images were pop-up ads generated by spyware already present on the computer prior to the teacher’s arrival. The jury sided with the prosecution and convicted her of four counts of endangering a child, a crime that brings a punishment of up to 10 years per count. She is due to be sentenced on March 2.
At my school district, we have very tight server security. I can’t even view most personal blogs, message boards, or myspace, let alone porn sites. This event happened three years ago, and even then most schools had severe restrictions on what can be accessed.
This school had none of that. It was still running machines with Windows 98 in 2004, six years after 98 was introduced and three years after Windows XP was introduced. The school was still using Internet Explorer 5, six years after it was introduced and three years after IE 6 was introduced with popup blockers.
Chances are, the popups were due to spyware. The school’s license for firewall software had expired, and it had no spyware detection or protection whatsoever. A scan of the computer’s hard drive encountered two adware programs and at least one Trojan horse program that had been installed weeks prior to the alleged incident. The judge refused to allow the prosecution to show the jury these scans nor technical evidence of how this popup explosion can account for websites appearing to have been visited voluntarily.
This must be the worst kind of nightmare for Julie Amaro. She was a substitute teacher and self-proclaimed luddite.
Stories of chaos and inexplicable stupidity continue to unfold as New York City parents try to make sense of a new school busing plan.
After a lead-in like that, who can resist reading the rest?
In one case – a 7-year-old Queens girl can take the school bus, but her five-year-old sister, who goes to the same school can not.
In another story a ten-year-old girl from Brooklyn might be forced to leave her gifted program because she lost her bus seat and her parents don’t want her riding the subway alone.
In a third story, a Staten Island second-grader is expected to walk along a street without sidewalks and then take three different city buses to get to school.
MESA, Arizona — Officials at an Arizona school suspended a 13-year-old boy for sketching what looked like a gun, saying the action posed a threat to his classmates.