I've joined the PTSA?

[elfs]

Omaha and I went down to Yamaarashi-chan's school today to attend the PTSA ribbon cutting (now that the school has opened), at which some local political types showed up to actually do the cutting. The school is rather nice, although it has the most inoffensive oatmeal color to the walls, some intersection between institutional color theory and good Washingtonian Earth tones.

Yamaarashi-chan's teacher is the older sort who admits to being computer illiterate and did not know how to email out the weekly homework assignments. I thought (but did not say), "Then what makes you qualified to teach my child?" She seemed the competent sort but definitely out of place in a world filled with iPods and powerbooks. She mentioned that they had cut back to 20 minutes a day of homework and still got complaints because that much time ate into the kids' sporting time. She said that she had heard from the parents that at the third grade soccer, football, and so on were more important than an education. The classroom was clean and well laid-out. It had better be; it's only been in use for three days.

The librarian allowed us to log into one of her workstations and look through the catalog, but the catalog program (written in Visual Basic by Microsoft) crashed badly and would not run. We spoke with the librarian about whether or not there were copies of Of Pandas and People were on the shelves. As far as she knew, there were not and the school was definitely not infected with "intelligent design" folks. Not yet, at any rate. We were also able to test the filtering program: the kids can get to my LJ.

It may be time to take my LJ private. I wonder if there's a way to make my LJ ready for ICRA.

Comments

[kengr]

Just set some filters for your LJ and make sure the kids aren't on them.

Scientology Crime Syndicate's `Education' Fraud Exposed

[kavri.livejournal.com]

You're probably already aware, but Scientology is also on the 'supplemental text' band-wagon. There is a very good article about here: http://www.skeptictank.org/hs/costrash.htm

[antonia-tiger.livejournal.com]

I checked out the ICRA labelling system, and it looks pretty good as a set of definitions. I'll be interested to hear what you end up doing, and why; whether it's a problem of making something work or a question of whether the labels are sane.

[sarekofvulcan.livejournal.com]

As long as we're on the subject of books that shouldn't been in school libraries, have you run into this one?

http://www.isthatlegal.org/archives/2005/04/proselytizing_b.html

[omahas.livejournal.com]

Oh, no...thanks for alerting us. It's one thing to have a Christian perspective on a different religion...at first that's what I thought this was going to be. A chance for the very Christian-oriented American family to experience another religion. If the book didn't pass judgement on it, just pointed out the differences, that would have been fine (after all, we do have a very Christian-oriented viewpoint to American culture). But then they turned around and started doing the proselytizing, and that's where I draw the line. I'll have to keep an eye out for that and other books.

(frozen)

[elfs.livejournal.com]

Omaha pointed out to me that angilong has been violating my posting policy regarding my children's real names. That thread has been deleted.

But I got what I wanted out of it.