I certainly wasn’t a happy camper finding it -11 degrees while leaving for work this morning. Those minuses were supposed to be left in January’s bin, but instead, I believe Mother Nature has forgotten that it’s already the 6th of February. Oh well, it looks like we’re going to have a colder than normal week ahead. I’m hoping that once we reach the 21st of February, the sun will have grown high enough to at least warm our daylight hours above freezing.
I guess I shouldn’t complain after reading this morning how bad the weather was south of us yesterday. That 50+ car pile-up they had near Ames on Interstate 35 must’ve been quite the nightmare for everyone involved. I can’t imagine what sort of mayhem took place after the crashing stopped.
I’ve been reading in the news all the more about how schools are taking pro-active steps against bullying, but I know they’ve only been chipping away at the tip-top of a very large iceberg. And by the way, icebergs are usually much larger below the water line than above, which should remind us there’s far too many abuses that’ve gone un-reported by fearful students along with school administrators who have their heads fearfully buried in the sand.
That nonsense has been going on for over 50 years in our City’s public schools, and still they can’t seem to get a handle on it. I personally thank my lucky stars that I was fortunate enough to be sent to a private school during my formative years. Back in those days at my school, there were strict rules regarding a student’s behavior, even to the point of one student in-appropriately touching another. Back then, truancy was mostly something students only dreamt about due to those daily calls and notes required from parents. I sometimes believed my school thought you had to be approaching a deathbed sickness before given permission to be out of class.
Sassing a teacher would send you to the office, along with being caught smoking, chewing gum, non-approved attire, and the list would go on. I suppose if I’d think about all the restrictions my school had at the time, I’d have quite the long list. But, there’s one thing I’m exceptionally thankful for, and that was there being near absolute order which afforded all those many of us students an opportunity to learn without the near constant distractions that most students have to endure in our classrooms of today. Don’t you think there really is something wrong with our society as well as our school systems? There’s far too much freedom given to students which is usually borne out of the fear teachers and administrators have of our State and Federal regulations that pretty much hold them bound to their in-effective rules and regulations.
Of course, there’s always the wrath coming from parents of their little so-called princes and princesses who do absolutely no wrong, when in fact they’re likely the ones belonging to a given school’s herd of bullies.
Sorry about my ranting, but that woman’s story about her son getting continually picked on at school, really got my blood to boil. As far as I’m concerned, even the “smell” of a student being bullied in a school should be fully investigated, and if discovered to be so, those responsible should be subjected to severe disciplining without exception.
