Intercepts
A listening post monitoring public education and teachers’ unions.

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1) If X > Y > Z, Then Y > X?
2) Oregon Staff Union Set to Strike
3) Joel Packer Expropriates It All
4) Whatever Works
5) Scheduling Note
6) Last Week’s Intercepts
7) Quotes of the Week

John Wells and his cohorts at The Spelling Society in Britain feel that spelling rules are restrictive and need “freeing up.” They believe spelling should be modernised (modernized?) so that students don’t have to deal with annoying things like, oh, apostrophes.

“It seems to be a great pity that English-speaking countries are holding back children in this way. There are lots of other things that are neglected in class because so much time is spent on spelling,” Wells told The Times of London.

I’m sure there are plenty of ways to react to this idea, but I’ll defer to Laura Roberts of London, who responded in the comments section:

The correct, successful way to do things doesn’t hold back the individual, their inability to achieve it does.

The question that should be asked is not how to make it all easier for the thick idiots, but how to get them to get it right.

Karen White, head of NEA’s Campaign and Elections Division, on the Palin speech Wednesday night:

As a mom of three kids and wife, I didn’t hear anything that was speaking to my values, and I was listening hard. There were some good jokes, there were some funny lines. But I was really wanting to hear how she was going to get my kids a good public education and how she was going to make the environment better for them.

I was under the impression that “getting my kids a good public education” was the responsibility of parents, teachers and principals, not that of the Vice President of the United States. But I don’t work for NEA.

I thought Mary Ella Holloway had worked out a neat deal in Vegas, but Bruce Ramsdell in Minnesota has her beaten by a mile. Read it all the way through, and ask yourself why you find stuff like this in the Winona Post, but not the Washington Post.

No one can accuse former Clark County Education Association president Mary Ella Holloway of not being forward-thinking. During contract negotiations three years ago, the union and district agreed to create a “Teaching and Learning Conditions Committee.” Now that Holloway no longer heads the Nevada local, she needed work. (Why doesn’t she go back to the classroom, you ask? Bwaaahaaahaaahaaa!)

By happy coincidence the district was looking for a “project facilitator” to “help conduct surveys and look for ways to improve teacher morale.” And guess which of the 19 applicants got the $70,000-a-year job?

Click here to read:

1) NEA, Republicans and Palin
2) Union Power Shift in West Virginia
3) Who Do Unions Think You Are?
4) Michigan Unions Can’t Deduct PAC Contributions from Paychecks
5) Strike and Struck
6) Last Week’s Intercepts
7) Quotes of the Week

An aboriginal group is upset that the Australian version of the Daring Book for Girls has a chapter on “How to Play a Didgeridoo.”

For those of you unfamiliar with the instrument, the didgeridoo is a traditional long wooden wind instrument created by Australian aborigines at least 1,500 years ago. But Dr. Mark Rose, general manager of the Victorian Aboriginal Education Association, said the chapter shows “extreme cultural insensitivity and mammoth ignorance.” Why? Dr. Rose says indigenous people believed there were consequences for women who played a didgeridoo, including infertility.

“I wouldn’t let my daughter touch one,” he said. “I reckon it’s the equivalent of encouraging someone to play with razor blades. I would say pulp it.”

Indigenous author and chair of the Australian Society of Authors Dr. Anita Heiss called the chapter “cultural ignorance and it’s a slap in the face to indigenous people and to indigenous writers who are actually writing in the field.”

Dr. Heiss said she wouldn’t “even pick up a didgeridoo.”

As with most traditions of this sort, whether a taboo is actually mandated is a little murky.

Nevertheless, it illustrates there are many ways for girls to be “daring.”