My father, rounds 2,3,4 and 5

[James A.]

These were sent to the county's techie and School Board's potentates...

****, while checking my email, i paused to read the "beliefs" on the county world wide web page. I was chagrined to notice several significant errors in basic language usage. i hope that no one from outside our school distrcit has viewed the page. boy, will they laugh at us if they do! big irony: school district main page exhibits junior high level errors. (should i have hyphenated that? probably not, but i am seldom sure. hyphenation still gives me fits. i'll tell you this, however: if i were going to publish this on the world wide web, i would check carefully.)

i will correct the errors if you want me to. just holler back if you'd like me to. i know that y'all up in the big office are always busier than a pair of jumper cables at a family reunion. i'll bet it took a whole lot of time to get the details right for that recent staff development event. hey, did you know he was going to unzip his pants on stage?
how did you feel about the defecation metaphor? did you find his breast cancer comedy amusing?

oh, please email the guy and tell him to drop from his comedy routine the mocking of the name damian. i have a student named damian, and i did not like it one little bit when your speaker employed it as a metaphor for badness. i work hard daily with kids who are trying to overcome handicapping pasts. my student damian is one of them. he does not need to be humiliated for his name. make sense?

oh, while i am thinking of it, let me mention that some of our young female teachers used to be my students. when your man ordered us to give each other reciprocal massages, i declined. something tells me that not every young female would want to exchange rubs with a 57-year-old bachelor. am i just squeamish? maybe i need to loosen up. ****, would you have felt good about giving me a massage? hey, would ** have felt good watching me rub you?!! see my professional point?

anyway, please get the world wide web page corrected asap. and do holler if i can help. - john

[James A.]

****, wow! that was fast! now there is only one error left in the "beliefs" section of the school system's world wide web page. somebody corrected the other errors as soon as i dutifully reported them.

i am trying to involve my colleagues in this project. professional growth. we'll see if one of them corrects your page before y'all can get around to it. hint: think maybe 6th grade level. isn't this fun? see? professional growth activities CAN be fun!

oh, my email must be broken. i am sure the big office would have sent a warm note of thanks to me for reporting that our world wide web page had glaring, embarrassing errors. that note of thanks has been lost somewhere out in cyberspace. don't spend time sending another, really. my reward is the satisfaction i get from being a team player.

i want to thank y'all for fixing the problem so quickly. after all, it reflects on all us professionals to have junior high level errors on our world wide web page.

okay, let's get that last error fixed. on your mark, get set, GO! - john

ps i know what you are thinking! you are thinking that there IS no other error, that i just want to give you all a test to see if you'll waste time looking for a phantom error. frankly, i would be a little hurt if you thought that I'D do that. (wink!) or maybe you're thinking that this ps is, itself, a trick to confuse you. i would not do that. there is an error. spend as much time as necessary to find it. (smile!)

pps can the first person to find the error get some in-service credit for it?

ppps isn't this a great way to encourage my professional colleagues to study our inspiring set of beliefs? can i get some in-service credit for this?

[CatskillsMom]

I'm lost. Sorry...

[Heather]

I love him too much.

[James A.]

****, hey, it is i again.

my colleagues have responded so enthusiastically to our professional
growth exercise that i am copying this to them, also. your philosophy is
right! approach things with a merry heart, treat everyone as an equal,
and people will actually want to pitch in and participate in a positive,
constructive way.)

okay, get ready for a chuckle!

it appears that when i wrote to you about the errors on the school
district world wide web page, someone took my parenthetical comment about
hyphenation to be a secret clue. can you believe it? hello! whoever it
was therefore thought that one of the errors was the lack of a needed
hyphen. oh, my gosh! they put in a hyphen where THERE OUGHT NOT TO BE
ONE! they hyphenated "decision making"! isn't that funny? they had
"decision-making." i guess i'm not the only one who is
hyphen-usage-challenged! hey, you didn't give the job to **, did you?
****, ** is a science guy! lol! just joking, just joking. **'s letters
to me generally are pretty fair and contain only a few errors. not bad for
a "super"! (hey, do i see you smiling now?)

****, you are very busy, i know. but isn't your background in language?
didn't you used to be an ex-english teacher? i want to respectfully
suggest that you put aside whatever major project you are working on and
turn your own expertise to the school district world wide web page. look
at the "beliefs." you can quickly set them straight. once an english
teacher, always an english teacher; that's what i say. (actually, it
wasn't until today that i learned about your old days as an english
teacher. wow!)

okay, where do we stand? you have fixed almost all the errors that were
there, but some silly wabbit got carried away and over-hyphenated. and
one gosh-darned error still stares out at us and the wide world! whoa,
nellie! i'm having an attack of the "nerves." what if someone from
outside the school district who looked at the page when all the original
errors were still there looks at the page again now and notices the NEW
error?! i will feel like a statue that some little dirty birdy has... oh,
never mind. (AN ALLUSION TO THE MOTIVATIONAL SPEAKER SHE HIRED WHO TOLD
THE TEACHERS THAT WE "POOP" ON OTHER PEOPLE AND THEY DO ON US, LIKE A
PIGEON ON A STATUE. NICE.)

****, for the sake of speed, do you want me to ask my colleagues to all
pitch in and get that page squared away? insane_root has a phd in
english. she'd be glad to help us out, i know. i'm a math guy, but with
a dictionary and an old warriner's, i could help.

idea! ****, as our "tech czar," you have the know-how to make this a
district-wide professional- growth event. send out an email to everyone
and maybe even offer a prize to the first person who can re-write the
"beliefs" section correctly! think of the enthusiastic surge
(word-of-the-day!) of on-going learning it would cause!

this is all just so great. remember what jonathan livingston seagull
said: "every problem holds in its hands an opportunity." and remember
what rod mccuen said: "listen to the warm." ****, did you ever know what
he meant by that? buck owens said, "the biggest fool to ever hit the big
time, and all i gotta do is act naturally." but i guess that is off the
subject.

hey, i found out today that we may be kin! they were talking about you
and someone mentioned a marshall county connection. my people are from
there, too! do you know don *******? his sister, norma jean? what was
your name before you got married? wouldn't it be great if we are cousins!
oh, gosh! would that create a nepotism problem? lol!

okay, you know how chatty i can get. forgot to take my lithium! ha ha!
better go check the chicken.

education can be fun! a good chuckle makes a better teacher. (i learned
that from the guy you hired to instruct us in august, the guy who shook
his fanny at us while he painted that keen, inspiring picture.) let's get
that world wide web page corrected quick as a wink, okay? no more goofs,
okay? if you need help, just holler, okay? - john

ps you know, ****, we need to re-think that "belief" about personal
"decision-making" being the basis of freedom. i understand the
self-discipline angle, but i have to confess that personal
"decision-making" seems to me not to make a whole lot of actual sense.
pardon my naivete, but don't all people (except captives) make their own
decisions, sort of by definition? are we trying to say, "if you have been
captured by terrorists or the poilice and therefore you don't decide what
time you eat; they do," and then to point out that that is not freedom?
why would we want to point that out? isn't that pretty obvious? hey, just
a thought.

[Babaloo]

hehe
dad is tenured?
i must say he seems to be a lovable pain in the ass

[TAPPY]

OMG - I bet they just want to die when they see an email from him !!

[James A.]

****, you will not believe this! according to the american heritage
dictionary of the english language, we need to hyphenate "self-esteem."
our world wide web page says "self esteem."

on the world wide web, some folks don't hyphenate it; i'll give you that.

but on the world wide web, some folks... well, never mind.

hold on. let me go check webster...

funk and wagnalls and webster both hyphenate it. holy toledo, ****, our
"beliefs" are a mess!

my plan: we pay insane_root 1/10 of what we paid the
i-make-jokes-about-people-defecating-on-people guy, we pay insane_root
that amount to re-write our "beliefs" with all the hyphens
in-the-right-place. insane_root, will you do it? speak to us, oh phd!

plan #2: ****, you really need to un-delegate (i was joking when i said
you'd made ** do it. did you make the bus guys do it?) and focus like a
laser-beam on our world wide web page, especially the "beliefs" part. you
have training in this language stuff. you need to fix it.

plan #3: the contest. but we need to hurry. my paranoid fantasy is that
al-qaeda is going to re-produce our world wide web page (world wide!!!)
and thereby humiliate the western world. "luke," their announcer will say
(meaning "look"), and they will put it up on every tv screen from
hal-zibba to ur-istan. "luke at thees decedunt stufe from de west. day
cannot eben write dayr own lankwich."

maybe i am seeing trouble where there is none. but heck, gosh, jee whiz!
let's GIT 'ER DUN!

****, i will send you tomorrow a correct "beliefs" section. i will ask
all the "copy" people to help me. can we get some in-service credit for
it? - john
ps i know i worry too much... but did someone in the big office do this
on purpose to create a hostile work envirnment? ha ha ha! gotcha! just
joking!! lol!!

pps the chicken was good! ppps while we are on the subject: are
you our boss or our colleague? seriously. are you vertically "above" us?
my understanding from the old days was that the supervisors were
horizontal colleagues, folks there to serve us teachers. has that
changed? are you betty's boss? please advise. we have a definite right
to know what the chain-of-command is. thanks! pppps to all the
"copies": let's do a great job teaching tuesday!

[James A.]

Originally Posted by Babaloo

hehe
dad is tenured?
i must say he seems to be a lovable pain in the ass

Probably depends on who you ask.

emphasis added by James A.

BTW, insane_root is my insanely intelligent English PhD cousin.

[James A.]

Originally Posted by CatskillsMom

I'm lost. Sorry...

See http://www.playa.info/playa-del-carm...ghlight=father

Sorry, can't remember how to hyperlink.

[jtm1631]

Thanks for the laughs James.

And I would think your father is lovable to anybody who doesn't have to work with him.

[pamplemoose77]

that's awesome!!!

your dad and my dad would get along famously!!

[DavidB]

Great. Love the references to inservice credits.

[CaroleLB]

"luke at thees decedunt stufe from de west. day
cannot eben write dayr own lankwich."

got to love his sense of irony (am sure admin doesn't )

[emc]

I would love to be a fly on the wall everytime they see his name come up in their inbox. He is a classic.