A bunch of parents and I attended the June 25th board of education meeting to show our support for Mrs. Mehler and dissatisfaction with the way the district has handled the situation, again.
I was happy that so many people showed up to support Carin. It may have been more people specifically for her class, even though it wasn't as crowded overall. (You can watch all the commentary in the video below.)
There are many articles about why kids lie and teaching children to be honest. In Po Bronson's excellent piece Learning to Lie he said "Kids lie early, often, and for all sorts of reasons—to avoid punishment, to bond with friends, to gain a sense of control. But now there’s a singular theory for one way this habit develops: They are just copying their parents." Does that mean parents should never lie?
This is how I roll on Father's Day. It's my favorite day of the year.
I went to my town's school board meeting to discuss the situation with our school's teachers being removed based on allegations that teachers provided improper coaching to a small number of students. It was the first time I had ever attended such a meeting and apparently it was unusually crowded. Many people showed up to demonstrate or speak out to support their teachers. The meeting started with tenure and congratulatory announcements to various faculty, including the retirement of our district's wonderful Youth Advocate, Mrs. Low.
Immediately afterwards the floor was opened for guests to speak at the podium, at which point most of the faculty, along with our school's principal left the premises. Right away some fellow parents asked me to speak, and fortunately I had gathered my thoughts earlier in the evening: (You can watch the video from the meeting below.)
During my five years building and running MMA Ratings I poured a lot of time and energy into it. As time went on, it consumed and ever increasing amount of my time, and even though the site (traffic, audience, profit) was growing, it was not growing at nearly the same rate that the demands were. Ironically my first ever post about MMA was about the UFC's strategy to saturate the market and the potential negative impact it could have. Maybe it was a self fulfilling prophecy for me, though admittedly a lot of the demands on me were based on the type of site I was running.