In Summer-y

So yeah. Just a bit of blog neglect there.

I guess I slid into a funk. For a while there, I didn't even log in to my home laptop when I came home from work. Too tired, too bored, too depressed. Just didn't feel like it.

One problem though - I need the diversion. Poking around on the internet is better than flopping on the sofa for an evening of House re-runs.

So let's see.....what's been going on?

We had one of the hottest summers on record. More days over 90 than since... FOREVER. Well, maybe. I don't know - but it was a total stinkfest.

Don’t get me wrong, heat is lovely. In Hawaii.

Here in Pennsylvania, the air becomes a sponge. A thick, sweaty, smelly, damp sponge. And it never ends. Just this past week, we had two more days in the nineties. Last Thursday it hit 93 degrees. I'm sorry, but that's just stupid hot for late September.

Anyway, school started. Yay!

To recap, we decided the local, public school was woefully unqualified to impart a reasonable education. The teaching staff was filled with an inordinate number of inexperienced teachers (owing to the population growth in the area), and way too many liberal educators. No dissenting opinions – even politely presented - would be heard. And yes, they had no qualms penalizing any student who didn't think the same.

The school refuses to separate children that want to learn, from the ones that don't give a shit. So they have classrooms they can't control, and end up teaching to the lowest common denominator.

Instead of book reports, they had collages of crayons and glue, representing the theme of a story. Almost all the required reading for the “advanced” Lit class involved only stories of victims – they're the real heroes! No classic literature whatsoever.

What's worse is, every other day I'd see something in the news about gang violence, or kids getting knifed because someone didn't like the way they looked.

So The Teen is going to a different school. This was preceded by several months of hemming and hawing about what a mistake this was, that the uniforms suck, and what if her old friends forget her, and she doesn’t make new ones? What if there's no cute, swooshie-haired boys? What if the girls are bitchy?

So far, the hope of a more serious education looks promising: they had a required summer reading list. Fahrenheit 451, Animal Farm, To Kill A MockingBird and Pride and Prejudice to start. All must be read by the time school began, and there will be tests. Hooo-boy!

Sure, I would've hated that when I was her age - but hey, as an adult I can see the benefits of having been forced to read the classics. Some kids grow up and “get it”. Others blow it off and never pick up anything other than teen angst novels.

And they're reading Orwell. ORWELL. How awesome is that?

Thankfully, now that we're a month into the new school, my daughter's adjusting, friends have been made, and things are finally settling in nicely. Unfortunately, I am told there are no swooshie-haired, Justin Bieber wanna-bees. Sadness.

In other news, work continues to suck loudly and powerfully. I was moved to a failed project that somebody, somewhere up the food chain is attempting to resurrect. It's horrible, and nothing works right. The IT department decided this doesn’t matter, they intend to cram it in anyway.

It's my job to help fix it, with no documentation or resources. Departmental politics prevent me from actually interacting with the other members of my team, because they're technically still tied to other projects. It's a bit of a spy game communicating with one another on bug fixes.

Which leads me to another thing about fixing other people's crap. I'm burnt out on it. I'm not talking about fixing little oddball scenarios where the user right-clicked a field, on a Wednesday, during a full moon, and the web page failed. I'm speaking of the large, gaping holes where someone overlooked an entire business process. I'm tired of trolling through thousands and thousands of lines of code, Scotch-taped together by at least 200 other people, trying to find the mystery exception. Or, in this case, finding whole sections that were apparently not finished – made obvious by all the “add such-n-such here” notations.

I used to think I wanted to just do development work, creating applications from the ground up. Too boring, and a huge personal sacrifice. Our developers put in an average of 60-80 hours a week. Maybe ten years ago I would've had the patience, interest, and extra time, but now I just want to do the best job I can, go home, and take care of my family.

Spring

I actually saw a rainbow on my way to work yesterday.

A freakin RAINBOW, people!!

So it appears Spring may be on the horizon. Our local wacky weatherman says we'll see up to 50-something degrees this weekend, and the worst might be over.

Here in Pennsylvania, when we go straight from extremely bitter cold and snowy, to warm and sunny, it lasts til the end of April, then we get one last storm that dumps six inches of snow on us. Like Mother Nature throwing us the finger.

Temperatures have been warmer this week, and most places are seeing a lot of snow melt. Our backyard is melting, and has maybe four inches of snow left (down from twenty), but the glaciers along the sides of our driveway may be here til May. They're still at least four feet in height.

In other news, I took my daughter to the soccer sign up at the local high school on Tuesday. This is the school she'll attend next year.

I don't go into "that town" much, and I have to admit, I've never been to that school at night before. I knew it was in a crappy section of town, but I was woefully unprepared to see drug deals going down just outside the parking area.

Around the school itself, there were several bombed-out crack houses. Boarded up windows, garbage in the yards, shady types floating around. The works.

This isn't friggin Philly or NY. It's just a small town that's been overloaded with transient people from the city. Back in the 70's and 80's, people moved from NY, NJ and Philly to the Poconos - many looking for a better life and lower taxes, but many others came to sell drugs, real estate scams, and hide from the police.

It's Bronx-lite.

In light of those facts, along with the general lousy reputation and lack of funding for this particular school, we've been forced to look at other schools.

We'll have to cut back and really budget our money, but if it means she'll be better prepared for college and considerably safer - it's worth it.

Mr. Somebody Needs A Slap

Our school district has the organizational skills of a dead squid.

Most send home information about school sports, and tell us important things like when practice starts, where it's held, if equipment is needed, and if a physical is needed.

Not our school district. Instead, they have a fancy-schmancy, new electronic dialer system that calls us at 3:00am with a recorded message anytime there's a school closing. Or it calls during dinner to tell us there's a bake sale on Friday.

Sports tryouts? PTA meetings? Nope. Nada. Nothing.

Instead, we rely on the teenager grapevine approach:

“Mooooom!” whines the teenager living in our household, “I need to get a physical by next week so I can play soccer.”

“I thought you were going to get all the information first, so we could talk about it,” I reminded her.

“But I just found out tryouts are next week!”

“Okay. So what time is soccer practice over?” I asked.

“I don't know,” says child.

“Is there a sports bus that takes the kids home afterwards?”

“I don't know.”

“Who is the coach? I'll just call him.”

“I don't know.”

“How do you know tryouts are next week?”

“My friends told me.”

“Who told them?”

“Somebody.”

“Okay, so Mr. Somebody came to them in a vision and told them of the impending tryouts? Really? You're not seriously telling me that no one knows when and where practice is, who the coach is, and how long it will be?”

Teenager stomps off.

Until recently, I had a very flexible work schedule. During that time, I encouraged my daughter to do sports or other extra curricular activity. She couldn't have been bothered.

Now that I have ZERO job flexibility, and work an hour away, playing school soccer has become a moral imperative.

So.

To sum up: My job stinks like an old gym sock, and now I've got a pissed off teenager too.

I really need to play the lottery more often.

Vajabond

When did English class become “Language Arts”? Why must there be a separate class for “Reading”?

When I was in school (back in the Dark Ages), it was called “English Class”, and included diagramming sentences, identifying dangling participles, as well as reading literature.

I've voiced my concern about the quality of our schools before. It's not going downhill anymore. It has now crashed, broken at the bottom of the hill, headfirst in a snowpile.

My daughter has an assignment to do a book report. The teacher wants the students to draw several scenes from the book, and put it together in picture-book style. She wanted them to do the picture-book as if they were making it for a first grader. Those were her exact instructions. It was on the assignment handout sheet.

This is junior high school. They're using crayons and glue for book reports. Way to prepare them for college!

I'm not alone here either. The Gormogons did a very nice job summing it up here.

Want to hear the best part??? My daughter came home with a list of vocabulary words to study and use in a sentence. One of these words was “vagabond”. You want to know how the teacher was pronouncing it?

VAJ-a-bond.

What is that? Super glue for the hoo-hoo?

So, all you ladies out there, have a Happy Valentine's Day, and don't forget your VAJ-a-bond!!

Open House

My daughter's school had Open House last week. This is where we get to tour the school, meet her teachers, and basically see what she'll be studying this year.

Well, I must be getting old, because I was not impressed.

She's taking all advanced placement classes. I figured this would be the year they'd finally start treating the kids like young adults, and focus more on preparing them for college. No more reports in collage or papier mache form. Sadly, this is not the case.

This is junior high school, and the teachers still mark good grades with smiley faces and stickers.

The “advanced” reading teacher gave us an overview of the books they'd be reading. "The Outsiders" is one of the books, and the most recognized from my generation. Pretty much everything from S. E. Hinton was made into a movie during the 80's.

In addition to "The Outsiders", they will read three other books, making it a total of four. FOUR. Over the course of EIGHT months. One is about racism in the 1930's, and the other two are about outcasts in grade school, which, "The Outsiders" kinda qualifies for that category as well.

When she signed up for this class, they sold it as an “intensive reading experience” where the student would be reading “many” books throughout the year. Four books doesn't sound all that "intensive" to me, and it's nowhere near the amount of reading that was dumped on me when I was in junior high school.

In fairness, I have to say they are “studying” the characters in these books, and I'm sure they'll also be tested on them. I've already seen homework assignments where they're using vocabulary words from "The Outsiders" book. So I suppose this is where the all the time will be spent. Two months for each book.

Oh, and there will be book reports. In collage form. Again. Because we need to keep the kids interested!

They'll get out their Crayola 64 pack, some glitter and paint, and decorate each report page with a character from "The Outsiders". For serious. The teacher showed us an example. I couldn't believe my eyes.

So, to review: FOUR books in EIGHT months, three of which are about damaged people and victims. And 8th graders. With Crayolas.

There were a few other highlights to Open House. The presentation by the crunchy granola AP Science teacher was fab. He doesn't believe in text books. Nope, he believes in teaching the kids by inquiry. Telling them stories and getting them to ask questions. Okay, fine, but can't we do that in conjunction with text books? Apparently not. He said that no one ever learned anything by reading the text book and doing the questions at the end of each chapter. YES. HE. ACTUALLY. SAID. THAT.

The History teacher was the only one that impressed me, and is the same one my daughter declared “really tough”. I suspect this is because he actually expects junior high school students to behave like young adults. He started off by saying this was an advanced placement class, and he treats the kids as such. He assigns plenty of homework, more difficult assignments, lots of reading, etc. Which is more in line with the “average” teacher I had in school.

I don't know..... I guess I'm officially old enough to see the benefits of hard work, and want the same for my own child. And I'm tired of the bullshit.

Pants

Something in the back of my brain told me to put on pants this morning.

You see, today is the first day of school, so that means a ride to the bus stop. Since I stay in the car, I usually don't give much thought to what I'm wearing. Often it's whatever mismatched combination of shorts and T-shirt I wore to bed. Today's ensemble would've been the ThinkGeek 42 shirt, and a pair of too-large, hot pink jogging shorts.

I threw on a pair of sweatpants and a hoodie. Gray and maroon, so at least I didn't look colorblind.

Thank God I did, because wouldn't you know, the bus pulls in RIGHT NEXT TO MY CAR, and begins to smoke. Actually, both back tires. And not just a little smoke, but A LOT OF SMOKE. I expected shooting flames from the wheel wells.

I jumped out of the car, and at the same time the driver pops her head out of the bus. She tells me they just put new brakes on the bus, and something must've happened. She gets the kids off the bus and calls in for the backup. Meanwhile, the SMOKE is still pouring from the wheel area, and is beginning to stink up everything in the immediate vicinity. Including me.

Stinky bus brakes on fire.

So anyway. First day of school, bus breaks down, kids will be late going to a new school, and I shouldn't be surprised at this, really. Our school district has the shittiest track record for buses breaking down, and pretty much everything else as well. We have some of the highest school taxes in Pennsylvania, yet they can't seem to keep the buses running. They also can't keep the schools out of The No Child Left Behind probation for crappy test scores, but that's another story.

Really gives you the warm and fuzzies putting your kids on a bus that may, or may not, actually get them to school.

So here's hoping that my daughter's first day of school got better.

Now I'm off to wash the burning brake stench out of my hair. Ewww.