A Post With Little Social Value

So, here's the thing.  I'm very judgmental.  I know this is not an attractive trait, and believe me when I say I am trying to minimize it.  The minimization always leaves me with questions, though: what if I just don't say it aloud...what if it's figure skating/The Bachelor/my high school reunion...what if the person is sloppy drunk...what if I'm bored at the mall/a restaurant/the grocery store....  As you can see, I'm just not always a really nice person, and sometimes it leaks out a bit...like right now.
Today I added a few rules to my personal toolbox:

• Wearing a wet washcloth on one's head makes one look like a jackass, especially when said washcloth was clearly stolen from one's mother's pink wedding towel set.
• I know it is eight-hundred-bazillionty degrees outside.  Believe me, I know.  Add the humidity, and we're up to a heat index of eighty-five-hundred-bazillionty.  However, this does not excuse grown men from wearing shirts in public.  Especially when riding a bicycle.  Especially when that bicycle seat drags down one's sagging pants and his visible underoos...which reveals one's ass crack to the sun and EVERYONE ELSE (on another note, that's got to be a nasty place for a burn!).
• Even if one still has a flat tummy when one is over 60 (or younger, depending on exactly how unkind the years have been), regardless of gender, one should not expose the area below the belly in the neighborhood of their waistband when one is not at the beach.  Yucky.  Actually, I take the caveat back: not one should wear pants in such a way that this area is visible.
• There is something weird about wearing a halter top when one's hair is grey.  I don't know why, but them's the rules.
• Men should not wear capri pants.

Now I shall breathe out and continue with my day.  As you were.

Not so fully formed

Thanks to Scott McLeod for this metaphor:

Most schools currently expect students to somehow (maybe magically?) be responsible, successful digital citizens upon graduation from high school - able to navigate all of the intricacies of a digital, global world - despite having little to no opportunity to learn or meaningfully practice what that means during their 12+ years of schooling. Continuing my analogy from my previous post, we have to stop pretending that students are like Athena, able to burst forth fully-formed from the head of Zeus (or the cocoon of schools), ready to successfully function in a complex adult world without prior practice or experience.

I think it's easy to fall into this trap, especially at the high school level. We think (and sometimes say), "You should have learned this in junior high," and we're put out about having to re-teach/teach something we feel should have already been been taught to mastery. This isn't what's best for kids, it's not research based, but we get so tied to the idea of staying on schedule (especially on the four period day) that we become blinded to that.