There are always excuses for not showing up, or not turning work in. I’ve heard them all. But lives built on excuses generally don’t turn out well. [...]

Few people care whether you succeed or fail. You are not showing up to class for your teachers or even your parents. You’re not doing these assignments for anyone but yourselves. If you cut classes because your teachers bore you, then you should be dropping those classes, not piddling away your GPA.

I went to a community college too. I screwed up in high school, graduating in the bottom third of my class. But I married and became a father not long thereafter. Those responsibilities made me quite serious about the second chance offered by the community college system. It’s difficult to maintain a slacker attitude when you’re up nightly with 2 o’clock feedings of an infant daughter whose vulnerability and dependence on you are impossible to overlook. Had I not shown up regularly and done the work conscientiously, I would have blown that second chance. I would have had a much different life, a much poorer one, not only materially but intellectually and even spiritually. And my children would have had poorer lives too, because what I learned in college was shared with them in ways too numerous to count. I’ve never regretted the portion of my youth that I devoted to study.

Like Woody Allen supposedly said, 80% of success is showing up: Link

“It’s so rare for kids with special needs to have a teacher with special needs — that almost never happens,” he said. “I think it would help a lot for these special need kids to say, ‘Look, Mr. Forbis is a teacher, I can do that, too. He lives by himself, gets around town, goes shopping, I can do that, too.’ A lot of kids don’t know that’s an option. They just depend on the system their whole lives.”

Forbis has participated in swimming, basketball, and track in leagues for disabled people. His professors say he has a talent for talking to children. Link -via Fortean Times

(Image credit: Barcroft/Fame)

The 29 robots, about 1m-high with a TV display panel for a face, wheeled around the classroom while speaking to the students, reading books to them and dancing to music by moving their head and arms.

The robots, which display an avatar face of a Caucasian woman, are controlled remotely by teachers of English in the Philippines – who can see and hear the children via a remote control system.

Cameras detect the Filipino teachers’ facial expressions and instantly reflect them on the avatar’s face, said Sagong Seong-Dae, a senior scientist at KIST.

"Well-educated, experienced Filipino teachers are far cheaper than their counterparts elsewhere, including South Korea," he said.

Link (Photo: AFP)

What did your elementary school teacher do as punishments when you did something bad? Did she make you sit in a corner? Rap your knuckles? Well, whatever it was, it’s probably not the Sexual Harassment Dice.

The 59-year-old teacher at Ogi Elementary School in Iruma, Saitama Prefecture, apparently had three dice, one with sides marked with the words “hug” and ” forgiven,” another marked with “kiss,” “snot” and “forgiven” among others, and the third marked with “snot” and “forgiven.” Students who forgot to bring something to class were forced to roll one of the dice. The teacher has apparently admitted to kissing one boy and acting as if he would put snot on one girl. He nicknamed the dice the “sexual harassment dice.” (source)

Link – via Fark

A German court on Tuesday threw out the case of a schoolteacher against a pupil who allegedly tormented her by scrawling pictures of rabbits on the blackboard to aggravate her rabbit phobia. [...]

Witnesses had told the judge that the teacher ran sobbing out of the classroom when she saw the image of a rabbit on the blackboard. The girl denied making the drawings.

Link – via Deadspin

Her pupils are among the 10 million Indian children who are outside the state education system because their parents are so poor that they need them to work or no schools are nearby. Earlier this month the Indian government pledged £3.6 billion for a “right to education” scheme which aims to provide free schooling for all.

Kumari has decided she wants to be a teacher, even after she grows up. Link -via Arbroath

Cake Wrecks has a roundup of tragic cakes specifically for school events: back to school, the last day of school, graduation, teacher training, or in the case of the cake pictured, a special lesson in history (I think). Did I spell all those words right? I wouldn’t want these cakes to rub off on me! Link

When her son Ahmad, who had been acting up at school, called his teacher a jackass, Cassandra Rollins had had enough – so she decided to teach him a lesson he’d never forget:

"I called my 5th grade teacher a jackass. Sorry Mr. Smith." The student, Ahmad Rollins held the sign on the corner of Truxel and West El Camino, yesterday.

His mom, Cassandra Rollins says, her son had been acting up in school, so this was the final straw. She says there were trying to teach Ahmad a lesson and feels that the public embarrassment would get through to him.

FOX40 has the video clip: Link | Photo from The Natomas Buzz blog

What do you think? A sensible punishment or child abuse?

The subject of the 1988 film “Stand and Deliver,” Escalante died at his son’s home in Roseville, Calif., said actor Edward James Olmos, who portrayed the teacher in the film. Escalante had bladder cancer.

“Jaime didn’t just teach math. Like all great teachers, he changed lives,” Olmos said earlier this month when he organized an appeal for funds to help pay Escalante’s mounting medical bills.

Escalante gained national prominence in the aftermath of a 1982 scandal surrounding 14 of his Garfield High School students who passed the Advanced Placement calculus exam only to be accused later of cheating.

The story of their eventual triumph — and of Escalante’s battle to raise standards at a struggling campus of working-class, largely Mexican American students — became the subject of the movie, which turned the balding, middle-aged Bolivian immigrant into the most famous teacher in America.

Link

Two teachers in Winnipeg, Manitoba were suspended from their jobs after performing a lapdance at a high school pep rally:

WINNIPEG — A pair of teachers engaging in risque business set off a media riot after a video of a simulated lap dance from a school event went viral.

The video, taken last Wednesday during a well-attended pep rally for Grade 9 through 12 students at Churchill High School, shows students giggling, gasping and screaming as a female teacher receives a strip club-style lap dance from a male teacher.

By Thursday afternoon, students were spreading a minute-long video of the dance among each other on Facebook. On Monday afternoon, clips from the video were aired on CBC television.

Tuesday night, one parent of a Churchill High student groaned after learning that the video had gone national. “They so, so crossed the line,” said the parent, whose daughter showed her the video last week.

Link — Thanks, Jeremy Barker!

We’ve posted about the (purported) obsolescence of cursive handwriting on Neatorama before, but should all forms of handwriting be dead? Yes, according to Anne Trubek. The Oberlin College associate professor argues that handwriting is a technology that’s just too slow modern times (and even for our minds) that we should just do away with it:

Nevertheless, people seem to think that school kids should be spending more time honing their mastery of the capital G. A 2007 U.S. Department of Education study found that 90 percent of teachers spend 10 minutes a day on handwriting. Zaner-Bloser, the most popular handwriting curriculum used today, deems that too little and is encouraging schools to up that amount to at least 15 minutes a day.

But typing in school has a democratizing effect, as did the typewriter. It levels the look of prose to allow expression of ideas, not the rendering of letters, to take center stage.

Trubek went on to explain the evils of handwriting, at least in grade school:

Does having good handwriting signal intelligence? No, not any more than it reveals one’s religiosity. But many teachers make this correlation: It is called the "handwriting effect." Steve Graham, a professor at Vanderbilt University who studies handwriting acquisition, says that "teachers form judgments, positive or negative, about the literary merit of text based on its overall legibility." Graham’s studies show that "[w]hen teachers rate multiple versions of the same paper differing only in terms of legibility, they assign higher grades to neatly written versions of the paper than the same versions with poorer penmanship." This is particularly problematic for boys, whose fine-motor skills develop later than do girls. Yet all children are taught at the same time — usually printing in first grade and cursive in third. If you don’t have cursive down by the end of third grade, you may never become proficient at it.

While we once judged handwriting as religiously tinted, now secular, we transpose our prejudices to intelligence. The new SAT Writing Exam, instituted in 2006, requires test takers to write their essays in No. 2 pencil. Not only will those with messy handwriting be graded lower than ones written more legibly, but those who write in cursive — 15 percent of test takers in 2006 — received higher scores than those who printed.

Link – Thanks Janice Sinclaire!

So, what do you think? Should we just get rid of handwriting altogether?

After winning the Miss Georgia title Saturday night at the RiverCenter’s Bill Heard Theatre, Miss Capital City Kristina Higgins told pageant officials Sunday morning she wanted to relinquish the crown.

“She just didn’t think that she could fulfill the duties,” said Billy Kendall, secretary for the Miss Georgia Board of Trustees. [...]

In a statement, 24-year-old Higgins suggested her duties as a middle school teacher could interfere with the time commitment that comes with being Miss Georgia.

“Due to my current job responsibilities as a middle school teacher and the responsibilities and time commitment as Miss Georgia, I have decided to not fulfill the duties of Miss Georgia 2009. I am grateful for the opportunity to have been chosen as Miss Georgia and fully support the system and wish Emily Cook the best of luck,” Higgins said in the statement.

Link (Photo: Kristina Higgins from her MySpace account)

While most teachers are good, decent people with the thankless jobs of teaching unruly kids with dwindling resources and ever-increasing class sizes, there are a few bad apples that really ruined school for a lot of children. But why is it so difficult to fire them?

Jason Song of the Los Angeles Times investigates:

Joseph Walker, a former principal of Grant High School in Van Nuys, was sued by a special education teacher whom he tried to dismiss for alleged repeated sexual harassment. A civil jury sided with Walker — but the review commission decided the teacher shouldn’t be fired. The case, now in the courts, has dragged on seven years.

Confronting uphill battles like this, Walker said: "You’re not going to fire someone who’s not doing their job. And if you have someone who’s done something really egregious, there’s only a 50-50 chance that you can fire them."

Walker is now principal of Discovery Charter Preparatory Academy in Pacoima, where he said he had fired three teachers so far this year. None were fired during his three years as head of Grant. The difference: His school’s teachers are not unionized and can be fired at will.

Link

(Photo: Joseph Walker. Photo credit: Liz O. Baylen / LA Times)

Mark Champkins of the Quirky design studio Concentrate asked school teachers their most commonly used phrases … and then print them on these "Mugs of Authority"

Teachers have no need to shout themselves hoarse, repeating the same phrases over and over – now they just need to point at their mug!

(The phrases are: Put That Down, Stop Doing That, and Don’t Mess About.)

Genius! Link

The female supply teacher told pupils at Blackshaw Lane Primary in Royton, Oldham, that it was parents, not Santa, who left their gifts on Christmas Day.

Several parents complained to the head teacher, who has since accepted an apology from the teacher concerned.

But head Angela McCormick has since told the agency she does not want the teacher to work there again.

Link
- Thanks Phil!

What could you do with thousands of dixie cups? Here’s a teacher-pranking-teacher moment, photographed for your enjoyment:

Every single one of those 10,000 dixie cups was full of water. It took 10 people 3 hours to painstakingly set those things up and fill them. Every single horizontal surface we could get to was covered. There were even dixie cups in the desk drawers.

Link – via Buzzfeed