I was surfing around on the Education in Texas blog today, and I came across this very interesting post by Mike. According to a post in the Houston Chronicle, a middle school principal in the town of New Braunfels, TX threatened to kill himself AND the science teachers at his school if their students' test scores did not significantly improve on the science TAKS.
Perhaps even more disturbing than the psychoticness of this principal is a common theme running through many of the comments online on the Chronicle story. Even though the story clearly states that the principal did not make his comments in a a joking manner, many of the commenters seem to think that the teachers at the school have blown this all out of proportion.
Just to take a sampling of a few comments:
sounds to me like the teachers are nothing but a bunch of babies who cant be serious when they think he really meant he was actually gonna kill them then himself. he was not joking about the serious nature of the TAKS tests but used the "killing" as a way of getting his point across. some people have no common sense. that is who is teaching our kids! what a disgrace! bunch of whiny babies!
oh yes, and I am sure he was serious, please, we need to get rid of all of these whiney teachers and get some that have some balls.
The only question I have is whether or not the grades improved.
At any rate, it may not matter if this principle was serious or not, if we can believe a story run yesterday in the Dallas Morning News. Just outside of Geneva, Switzerland, the Large Hadron Collider is set to begin smashing protons together later this summer. Many folks are worried that these proton collisions will actually create a black hole that will swallow the earth.
With the help of Google, I came across this site that may allay our fears a bit. In addition to a really cool graphic at the top of the page, this article stated definitively that, "the chance of planetary annihilation by this means 'is totally minuscule.'"
So don't worry about it, folks! It sounds like the chances of you being swallowed up by a black hole are MUCH MUCH smaller than the chances of you being killed by a sociopathic middle school principal.
Sleep tight!
2 comments:
The sad thing is that I am home now during my lunch break reading this blog post. Thanks for the encouragement.
I think we both need to get girlfriends so we can find some better things to do.
Hmm... I haven't gone back to the original story, and I probably won't due to too many other things that need to be done right now; but it occurs to me that many schools are no longer very tolerant of students who make similar comments.
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