Why Is This Necessary?

Today we had, according an administrator, our "monthly-annual" tornado drill.  I would have laughed harder at this grammatical anomaly, but every month we have a "monthly-annual" fire drill too.  To clarify, we have monthly fire drills, and annual tornado drills, despite what this administrator thinks while making the announcements. 

Apparently, the state requires we have these drills.  Why?  Who really knows?  Fire drills almost make sense, but then again at the high school level, it is doubtful that anybody in the building wouldn't know where or how to proceed during a fire.  But why is a tornado drill required?  The same governing body that compiles a working calender down to the minute, also requires school systems to employ these gross wastes of time.  Elementary school should absolutely have these drills, to teach the kids what to do.  But why in high school?  This brings me to my three points.

Point one:
If a student does not know what to do in the event of inclement weather by the time they get to high school, let's face it, they probably shouldn't be in high school.  Okay okay, what about those student who went to private school or were home-schooled and never learned?  I would assume, and maybe making assumptions is why I struggle with this job, that if the rest of the student body is getting on their hands and knees in hallways, that the student that didn't know the procedure, could probably process what is happening and follow suit.

You may also be wondering why this is such an issue.  Have you have been around high school students?  Let me let you in on a secret.  If you ask hundreds, possibly thousands, of teenagers to go lay on the ground in the hallway for 5 minutes, the maturity level in the building immediately begins to approach zero.  Not only that, but any chance of calm or concentration is now lost for the rest of the day.  It's a huge mess. 

Point two:
Why are we enabling them in such simple activities?  Is it not the goal of providing an education to instill a sense of learning?  That is the problem with our educational system, and the source of all the heat we take.  Enabling!  To give a drunk a drink, right? How on earth can expect a high school student to learn how to graph and solve quadratic functions and actually remember how and why to do so, if we do not even expect them to remember what do in a situation where a tornado is approaching the school?  We do not expect them to retain anything, we enable the entire student body of the United States.  Why do we continue refine our educational systems while also continue to simplify our expectations? That's an inverse relationship, taking 2 steps back for every 1 taken forward.  

Point three:
This one is a little selfish, but I don't care.  If high schools where not required to have 10 "monthly-annual" fire drills and 1 "monthly-annual" tornado drills, we would have approximately 160 minutes of extra time to disperse throughout the calender.  Perhaps more than six minutes for class changes so that even a teacher has time to use the bathroom, or maybe longer than 22 minutes for lunch would be a better use of the time.  I don't know, just a thought.

Learning? No, not today.  Instead we are going practice leaving the school building.  Because high school students really need help learning how to leave school faster!

Here's Your Sign

You have probably heard the stand-up comedy of one Bill Engvall.  If you have not, I strongly recommend you do.  He is one of the few, relatively clean, but actually funny comics left in the world.  His earlier material is better in my opinion, as once he became widely known I feel it lost some of its appeal, but I still like his stuff.

Anyway, his signature is the "Here's your sign..." bit.  Here's your sign is Bill's reply to someone who asks a blatantly obvious (read: incredibly stupid) question.  So the idea is that when this question is asked, he would like to hand you a big sign.  A sign that you have to carry around and hold in front of you for all to see.  A sign that says:  "I'm stupid."  Since that isn't really realistic, he's reserved himself to just tell the person "Here's your sign" so that they know they've just embarrassed themselves.  I remember, I think, an example from his early work.  He's in the bathroom brushing his teeth, his wife walks in and says "You brushin' your teeth?"  He turns and with a mouthful of toothpaste says "Here's your sign."   Pretty funny.

Where is the going you ask?  Well, although everyone is susceptable to needing a sign every now and then, sometimes its such a shocking inquiry that before you have the chance to say "Here's your sign," you first find yourself saying "REALLY!?"  And as you may have guessed, the wonderful youth whose minds I mold are an everyday source of these moments. 

It happens at least twice a week; a student walks past my desk and peers over the framed picture sitting to my left.  Its a picture of my wife and I on our wedding day.  That's right.  Me, in a tuxedo with my arm around my wife, in a wedding dress holding a bouquet of flowers gazing star-struck and lovingly into each others eyes.

"Is that your wife?"

*sigh*

"Here's your sign."