Friday, April 20, 2007
this is how the week ends...
...not with a bang, but a whimper.

And it's a good thing for that because there were essentially no extra precautions taken today despite yesterday's events. Well, I guess that's not exactly true. I did notice that our police liaison was in the halls during passing time a few times today, and since he usually remains holed up in his office during passing time I guess we can call this progress.

But this crap has ruined my last 36 hours, and I absolutely refuse to let it ruin my next 48, so if you don't mind I'm going to put it aside for a bit and move on to something funny. Damn it.

For reasons I can't fully understand my Honors kids have a unshakable love of and a fierce loyalty to wikipedia. Since they've been collecting research all week for their research papers it's been a five-day long battle to get some of them to understand that wikipedia is not a valid research source, that I will not tolerate seeing it listed on their works cited page, and that just because someone puts something on the Internet does not make it credible or accurate. And for this, they think I'm a hopelessly out of touch loser who's just being mean.

So it goes.

But the little nerds are nothing if not perceptive and, sensing that I needed a laugh, they declared a temporary cease-fire in our wiki-battle today and lightened up about themselves long enough to call me over and show me this - a "content free encyclopedia that anyone can edit." (And pardon me if uncyclopedia is old news to you, but I've never been all that hip to new Internet trends so it was new to me.)

I'm a bit ashamed to admit it, but I spent a good 20 minutes with a small group of my favorite wizard-fearing students reading up on Sputnik ("a silver grapefruit that the Soviet Union catapulted into outer space.... the United States was very afraid of silver grapefruit proliferation in space, so they hired Hollywood to land on the moon."), Bea Arthur ("born as man..to a Viking father and Amazonian giantess mother/dyke, both whom lived on the Greek island of Lesbos in the Mediterranean Sea, which they had captured from the Spartans a few years earlier."), and George Bush ("[who] stole the Puritan Party nomination in the 2000 imperial election through extortion and various sexual favors and was appointed Emperor amid much controversy.").

Oh the laughs we had. It was like something straight out of Welcome Back Cotter. Or something. Whatever. It was funny, and if you're out of ways to waste your time, I'd recommend wasting some there.

And have I mentioned recently how much I love my frequently weird, occasionally annoying, usually whiny and often a bit stinky kids? Because I do. Like, a bunch.


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