Assigning really good mentors to rookie teachers in the Chicago Public School system is a great idea. It'll be interesting to see if this is beneficial -- in teacher retention, quality of teaching and in turnover reduction costs -- in the long run. _____
After any one of these messages, I'd be taken aback. Get all of them at once? I'd be at home with the covers pulled over my head!
_____
No one was harmed here, and the hospital has gone out of it's way to make sure a mix-up like this never happens again. They've gotten every apology in the world. It's time to withdraw the frivolous lawsuit.
Don't these idiots get that it's stupid lawsuits like this that drive up health care costs???
_____
I guess this explains why so many schools in this state absolutely suck. Why should kids have to pass with reasonable grades when their teachers can't???
I saw some pretty cool ideas for "repurposing" (hip-speak for reusing) stuff you already have here. While I'm in no way, shape or form a green nut, I'm enough of a true Yankee cheapskate to hate to see useful things go to waste. _____
Speaking of waste, if this reporter hadn't gone from school to school for this story, how much more good food would have gone straight into the garbage?
On a cool fall morning in a North Side lunchroom, tiny Chicago Public Schools students lined up for breakfast.
Once in their seats, they fiddled with milk cartons, tore open cereal containers and sipped from their juice cups. But most never got to the waxy apples or unpeeled oranges on their trays.
About 10 minutes later, a lunchroom worker commanded them to toss the rest of their food and get to class.
"If you take any food out of this room," she threatened, "they will stop the whole breakfast program."
I gasped and urged a little girl to keep her untouched orange.
"Just put it in your backpack," I whispered. She looked at me like I was nuts.
Dutifully, the children dumped piles of untouched fruit into plastic bins and walked to class.
That's just nuts, and I'm glad the school district did something positive to stop the waste and feed hungry kids. _____
This is a fascinating story, and it will be interesting to see if the Cook County Forest Preserve did indeed have presidential permission to take tribal land. Given that at the time of the taking government frequently played fast and loose with Native American rights, I don't doubt that the family may well be in the legal right here.
I'm telling you, the Gov has no business promising NIU money that rightly should be paying teaching salaries right now. _____
While I'm not interested in going to see Avatar, I would love to see this place, which apparently inspired some of the settings in the film, in person. Stunning indeed! _____
The Daily Douche Bag:
How much do you want to bet that being named Telly Savalas Virgin had something to do with this guy turning out to be a douche bag? (The parents who named him that are douche bags, too. That's just mean.) _____
If you start smoking at a party, I can absolutely guarantee that within five minutes everyone else will be smoking too. And what makes this even worse than being made to stand outside is that they will be smoking yours.
Since the smoking ban, no one has given up the tabs. They’ve just given up buying them, and this is the most annoying thing in all of human history.
Yep.
I would give someone a kidney or a pint of blood. But my last cigarette? No. I’m afraid not.
Last weekend I took a crisp, unopened packet of 20 to a friend’s house, where I’d been invited to spend the day shooting. And over breakfast one of the chaps said: “Ooh, can I nick one of those?”
Naturally this prompted his wife to chime in with a request as well, and that sort of opened the floodgates. So, by the time we’d pulled our boots on and set off, I had only 10 left. Ten wouldn’t be enough. When a smoker has only 10 fags in his pocket and there’s no shop for miles, it’s an all-consuming problem. You do a lot of maths. When can I get to a shop? How many hours till then? And just when you’ve worked out you can have one only every 40 minutes, the hordes descend again: “I say, you haven’t got another fag, have you?” So now you have only five.
I don't know about where you live, but in Chicago cigarettes run somewhere in the neighborhood of $10 per pack, so, on top of the irritation factor, there's the small matter of the not insubstantial cost of funding the damned moochers' habits.
And people -- total strangers and pan handlers, especially -- get really testy if you actually tell them no, even if they offer to pay you for one.
Do yourself a favor: If you want a cigarette, go buy your own pack. If you don't want one badly enough to do that, then don't try to mooch one from anyone else. _____
Just heard about this upcoming Chicago singer, Daphne Willis, and I'll be buying her debut CD when it comes out:
