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Weather report

A descendant of Eric The Red, named Rudolf the Red, was arguing with his wife about the weather. His wife thought it was going to be a nice day, and he thought it was going to rain. Finally she asked him, how he was so sure. He smiled at her, and calmly said, "Because Rudolf the Red knows rain, dear."

Future car

This is the new Mercedes Benz SCL600.

This car is really different!

No steering wheel, you drive it with a joystick. No pedals either. Can you drive with a joystick? Your kids and grand kids probably can. The influence of video games in our lives has really arrived, wouldn't you say?

SCARY THOUGHT THAT NOW A 7 YEAR OLD COULD STEAL YOUR CAR AND PROBABLY DRIVE IT BETTER THAN YOU.

Metric

Most XA GT’s had 7,000rpm tachometers.

Multiplication

Teacher: Cindy, why are you doing your math multiplication on the floor?
Cindy: You told me to do it without using tables!

Some homework definitions

ADULT:
A person who has stopped growing at both ends and is now growing in the middle.
BEAUTY PARLOR:
A place where women curl up and dye.
CANNIBAL:
Someone who is fed up with people.
CHICKENS:
The only animals you eat before they are born and after they are dead.
COMMITTEE:
A body that keeps minutes and wastes hours.
DUST:
Mud with the juice squeezed out.
EGOTIST:
Someone who is usually me-deep in conversation.
HANDKERCHIEF:
Cold Storage.
INFLATION:
Cutting money in half without damaging the paper.
MOSQUITO:
An insect that makes you like flies better.
RAISIN:
Grape with a sunburn.
SECRET:
Something you tell to one person at a time.
SKELETON:
A bunch of bones with the person scraped off..
TOOTHACHE:
The pain that drives you to extraction.
TOMORROW:
One of the greatest labor saving devices of today.
YAWN:
An honest opinion openly expressed.
and MY Personal Favorite!
WRINKLES:
Something other people have, similar to my character lines

Metric

But, as below, the gauges were completely different in style and markings on the XW-XY.

A drunk and a preacher

A drunk and a preacher were driving up a mountainside in different vehicles. The drunk was swerving from side to side; the preacher was driving straight and true. All of a sudden, the preacher lost control and drove off the edge of a cliff. The drunk noticed the preacher going off the edge, so he stopped his car and went to see if he was all right. He noticed the preacher was climbing up the hillside.
He yelled down at the preacher, "Are you alright?"
And the preacher replied, "Have no fear my son, I had the Lord riding with me."
The drunk then yelled back, "You had better let him ride with me next time, cuz your gonna get him killed!"

Help or Harm

by Jim Stovall

Anyone who attains a minimal level of success or even a degree of enlightenment understands that there is no true and lasting achievement without helping others and making a difference in the world around you. While most everyone would agree on the fact that they want to help others, the act of helping another person is not as easy to identify as you might think.

Abraham Lincoln said, "The worst thing you can do for anyone you care about is anything that they can do on their own."
People who are given things, opportunities, and solutions without earning or paying for them often are harmed more than they are helped. Wealth without work, position without effort, and remedy without resource is seldom positive in the long run.

The majority of lottery winners are in worse financial condition five years after their winning number is called than they were before playing the lottery. They suffer a much higher divorce rate and instance of drug abuse and alcoholism.

At some point in life, all mature people learn that actions have consequences -- either good or bad. The sooner we can learn this lesson, the more productive and peaceful life we will have. If you shelter a child from all consequences of their decisions, you may protect them temporarily from a few bumps or scrapes.

Unfortunately, you may relegate them to making a poor decision during a life or death situation. We all need to learn that the stove is hot--one time--the hard way. From then on, we are cautious around stoves and begin to consider the consequences of other decisions.

Any study of successful people in our society will reveal a disproportionate number of underprivileged immigrants achieving great success in a relatively short period of time. There is nothing innate about financial struggles, language barriers, and cultural challenges that make people succeed. It is simply that enduring problems and overcoming barriers is a habit that, once learned, carries over into every area of our lives.

That person that turned you down for help may have done you the greatest favor of all. Self-reliance and independence are critical parts of succeeding in life. All of us have received a hand up at one time or another, and hopefully have offered the same to those coming along behind us; but it is important to be sure that we are helping and not harming those that we care about.

As you go through your day today, look for ways to assist others, and eliminate any harm you're doing by trying to help in ways people can perform on their own.

Metric

And, in a carry over from the XW and XY’s, some XA GT’s had 8,000rpm tachometers.

I wish

Mr. and Mrs. Thorne had just reached the airport in the nick of time to catch the plane for their two-week's vacation in Majorca.
"I wish we'd brought the piano with us," said Mr. Thorne.
"What on earth for?" asked his wife.
"I've left the tickets on it."

Happiness

"Happiness is a warm puppy." - Charles M. Schulz, from his "Peanuts" comic strip

Metric

All well and good, except, there were some other subtle differences. XA GTs featured a 140mph speedometer.

Good for business

A young guy walks into a post office and sees a middle–aged, balding man standing at the counter methodically placing “Love” stamps on bright pink envelopes with hearts all over them. He then takes out a perfume bottle and sprays scent all over them.
His curiosity getting the best of him, the guy goes up to the man and asks him what he is doing.
The man says, “I’m sending out a thousand Valentine cards signed, “Guess who?”
“But why?” Asked the young guy.
“I’m a divorce lawyer,” the bald man replied.

Teacher’s Work: Addicted to Busyness

By Kirsten Olson , Education Week February 26

During a school visit I am conferring with a first-year principal. This individual is a dedicated, deeply thoughtful school leader committed to improving the conditions of teaching and learning in her building, and to intensifying professionalism among her teachers. In this meeting, we have set aside time to talk about her—about her new role as a school leader and the job’s many structural and interpersonal challenges.

Our meeting is cut short by another meeting that runs late, and the principal tells me she must stuff ballot envelopes while we talk, so that students can vote on who is most professionally dressed in an upcoming advisory meeting. She stands up behind her desk, so that she can stuff envelopes faster. She pauses to take a call from the executive director (from a phone she wears at her waist), then says she has to run to the front of the building to speak to a student who is out of dress code. (Could we talk while we walk through the hallway, she asks quickly?)

“Most educators have almost no day-to-day socialization or support for sustained attention to or focus on their own learning.”

The principal wants to discuss test scores, but this will have to be put off until we meet next week. She wants to confer about the professional-development plans she has for later in the day, but we don’t get to that. Her observations about herself in relation to her new leadership role are raised in a variety of ways, but our conversation is jerky, truncated, on the hoof. I need a rope to lasso in all the topics that wander into the sagebrush during our “meeting” time. This principal, it is important to note, is well acquainted with the literature on the quality of attention in the teaching profession—she and I recently discussed how, for teachers, external interruptions in the classroom dramatically reduce what one writer in the field has called “opportunities to engage intellectually with important ideas.”

In another setting, a group of superintendents and school leaders have gathered for an eagerly anticipated workshop on creating professional networks for collaboration in their districts. The meeting begins at 8:30 a.m. By 9:10, perhaps a third of the audience has already been up and out of their seats, checking their Blackberries or talking on their phones in the hallway. Participants are constantly coming and going, talking among themselves, and passing papers. Later in the day, snow threatens. Superintendents spend hours on their phones conferring about the weather.

At a small professional-development meeting, middle school teachers have come together to discuss the reluctant learners in their buildings. These students, say the district leader, are a critical priority. Building administrators, those with the most positional power, sit in the meeting for only a few minutes. Then they get up and move to the sidelines of the room to talk among themselves. The murmur of their voices, as they stand with arms folded across their chests, is a constant background to the day’s proceedings.

Busyness, multitasking, continuous partial attention. The education sector is addicted, and not just because it is experiencing more accountability pressure than at any time in American history. “Occupations shape people,” wrote Dan C. Lortie in his classic study of the teaching profession, and most educators have almost no day-to-day socialization or support for sustained attention to or focus on their own learning. This fracturing of focus is now coupled with intense performance demands based on standardized tests. It is a blunting brew. “I came into the superintendency wanting to bring reflection to every aspect of my job,” a school leader recently told me. “I feel like I’ve lost that right now.”

I became aware of the hostile, undermining quality of busyness and constant multitasking when I attended a very different kind of workshop recently, one devoted to quiet reflection and deep inner work through the practice of silence and listening. In this workshop, a kind of focused, reverent induction to the meeting was practiced. It was understood to be serious time. There were no cellphones, no laptops, no iPods.

“Busyness is the enemy of change, and multitasking is a roadblock to the satisfaction of focused, sustained attention.”

The agenda was not overpacked. As a participant, you could sit on the floor or on a chair, but you didn’t leave—your presence was part of the gift you gave to everyone else. You were instructed about how to listen, how to quiet your body, and how to ask questions to which you did not have the answer. Uncertainty about the process was considered an “invitation,” not a problem to be solved.

There were school leaders in this room, many searching for new ways to work with their staffs, because they felt they had not been successful in the past—not getting at what really needed to be done, as one of them put it. It was one of the most powerful learning experiences I have ever had, a time of going below the surface with others and pondering big questions—a time of reflection and renewal because, in part, each person was paying attention to nothing else.

So I began to wonder: Is the busyness of the adults in the teaching sector a form of resistance, a way of pushing away meaning and focus? Teachers and administrators have never had more demands placed on them in terms of accountability and performance, and a great many meetings are unfocused, time-wasting, and unrelated to the pressing work at hand. Many have “adapted,” however, by aggressively responding to e-mail, looking at phone messages, getting up and down to go out of the room, announcing that they will have to leave early. Those moves, while perhaps reasonable adaptations to real conditions, are rude and fracturing, not only to other participants but to individuals themselves.

Focused leaders in other sectors are moving toward the so-called “law of the vital few,” the idea that constant choice and activity in professional learning do not produce greater gains. The education sector’s addiction to busyness is both a reasonable adaptation and a terrible dysfunction—a hostile and nonempowered way of dealing with the maddening conditions of the work and the disrespect they feel from the larger world.

We won’t solve these problems by getting busier. The most productive meetings in schools I ever observed were in a school district in New York City in the late 1990s. School leaders had drastically pared down agendas—only one or two topics were allowed per meeting, with unrelenting focus on teaching and learning. No announcements, no facilities talk, no discussions of budgets or schedules. Like my recent personal workshop, these meetings were a revelation to me. Yet I’ve almost never seen them replicated, because they require so much focus and discipline.

“Attention is the most powerful tool of the human spirit.” Teachers and administrators dislike and feel disrespected by continuous partial attention from students, yet this is very frequently the attitude brought to their own learning and thinking about their work. “You need time ... to find solutions to the dilemmas that face you. To make real change requires deep, devoted, unconstrained attention.
Busyness is the enemy of change, and multitasking is a roadblock to the satisfaction of focused, sustained attention. Our addiction to “doing” may make us feel engaged, active, and in control, when really, we are spinning ever more out of control and moving farther from the real conditions that can change our work.

Metric

As the metric introduction was August, effective from July, 1974, Ford began building their cars with speedometers that only read in kph.

Atomic discussion

Two atoms were walking down the street.

One atom says to the other one, "I've lost an electron!

The 2nd atom replies, "Are you sure?"

Says the 1st atom, "I'm positive."

Bridging the Character Education Achievement Gap

By Paul Sutton, Education Week February 26, 2009

Throughout his now-famous "Last Lecture," the late Carnegie Mellon University professor of computer science Randy Pausch talked about what he called the "head fake." It is the idea that learning and education work best when they work on the personal and general levels simultaneously. It’s clear what calculus can teach a high school student. But beyond that learning, a character education lesson on the dialogues between Socrates and Crito can teach critical-reading skills and democratic dialogue, while also teaching personal and social justice and integrity. The study of both calculus and Socrates demands intellectual rigor, and yet these subjects are not valued in the same way in our public high schools.

Character education as a discipline is losing the argument that it deserves the same resources as disciplines affirmed by an Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate curriculum. And this is because we have been selling and teaching it wrong. We miss one of the most important aspects of character education, the cognitive head fake, when our obsession with advanced coursework becomes myopic and overshadows the strength both areas could have if working to complement each other in high schools.

As the demands of high-stakes testing grow and ever-expanding achievement gaps continue to ask more of public schools, character education is too often left behind. Money for staffing and programs dry up as budgets shrink. When forced to choose, schools will take academic rigor over team-building, future college success over human interrelatedness. Why? Because all they see in the latter is an intellectual void. Most schools value character education in principle, but choose to cut it first in a crisis because they see more-pressing instructional needs elsewhere.

And when extensive research, such as the "Smart & Good High Schools" study, suggests the need for more, and more-comprehensive, character education programs, most schools and districts will reject the recommendation, seeing it as yet another unnecessary strain on their already stretched school communities. Whole-school initiatives may be noble goals, but in reality, most schools don’t have the resources or the will to go for broke on character education—even if problems such as cheating, bullying, or harassment may be rapidly escalating.

The assumption that a broad-based character education initiative could flow easily from whole-school transformation ignores the reality that change in high schools happens slowly, if at all, and usually in small pockets, not as a whole school.
Educators should start small, allowing a successful "pocket" to expand within the school community. Character education could be taught, for example, through a fully articulated "student leadership" class—a class most schools already fund. Although they are largely underutilized and misused, these classes are dedicated to student activities. They also should have academic goals and expectations, and be open to all kids and valued by the school and the district just as AP or IB classes are—through a rigorous curricular review.

To be taken seriously in public secondary schools, character education must go beyond mission statements and explore ways to connect such goal-setting exercises to concrete learning objectives that challenge students with scholarly content and approaches. To survive, it must compete with advanced courses for full-time-equivalent teachers by embracing high expectations for all kids and proving its worth year in and year out.

As James Traub, a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, has said: "[T]he issue is not whether we will have character education, but instead, what kind we will have and what relationship it will bear to the ongoing campaign to improve children's academic skills." Indeed, character education's very survival depends on its quantifiably improving students' academic skills.

A new character education model should be developed around principles that encourage college-level critical thinking and service to community. It should include the following elements:

1. We should teach dialogue and deliberation through Socratic seminars and consensus-building, so that students learn how to communicate with each other in a democratic setting and the ability to judge ideas on the strength of evidentiary support, not misinformed opinion.

2. We should teach core values and beliefs, so that students identify universal truths they are willing to speak for and work from that will guide the decisions they make as leaders and citizens of their communities.

3. We should teach historical models of leadership, so that students will understand that all great leaders are merely standing on the shoulders of others, and that the values of integrity and compassion don’t come easily. Figures taught could range from Gandhi and Lincoln, to the Bible’s King David, to the explorer Ernest Shackleton.

4. We should provide thoughtful teaching of inequity and inequality as they relate to race, gender, and class, so that students can learn how to speak to one another about diversity in a way that creates progress and does not reinforce stereotypes or systems of power and privilege. Students should be introduced to the writings of authors such as Peggy McIntosh, Cornel West, and James A. Banks.

5. We should teach democratic citizenship and leadership, so that students can learn how to use democratic systems to empower and give voice to all participants in a society to make communities more equal and just. Students should be introduced to scholars such as Walter Parker and historical documents such as the Federalist Papers and Washington’s Newburgh Address.

6. Since moral reasoning is integral to these pursuits, students should be taught to think their way through ethical and moral dilemmas and how to make choices that benefit all and that foster the strength of character to persevere through failures. Lawrence Kohlberg’s “stages of moral development” is a great place to start.

7. We should teach ethical and collaborative decision making and problem-solving, to empower students to change dysfunctional systems and communities. This should teach them that problem-solving is not the sole responsibility of one leader or group, but of a whole community working together.

8. We should give students opportunities for practical application of these precepts and practices, so they can test their new knowledge within the community and attempt to make positive improvements. These opportunities could be through schoolwide community-service projects, school philanthropy projects, and various other school improvement projects that encourage all students to participate.

Whether this kind of learning comes through a student leadership or character education class, schools should encourage students to register and attend. Several levels should be taught, becoming increasingly sophisticated and challenging. To maintain standards of academic achievement, students within such a program should be assessed on their ability to produce a high level of scholarly written work and to add quantifiably and positively to the school’s climate and culture through active leadership.

If we are bold enough to change our thinking and accept that character education must become a part of the academically rigorous landscape of public high schools, students taking these classes will benefit, along with the schools that offer them.

Metric

With the introduction of the XB model, a decision was taken to fit dual scale speedometers with the mph reading still dominant, but with an inside reading in smaller yellow letters showing kph.

CIA test

There's a lot to be said about marital bliss...

A while back there was an opening in the CIA for an assassin. These highly classified positions are extremely difficult to fill, requiring an extensive background check, training, and testing before candidates are even considered for the position. After reviewing several applicants and completing all the checks and training, the field was narrowed to the three most promising candidates. The day came for the final test, which would determine which of equally qualified candidates, would get the job.

The final candidates consisted of two men and one woman. The men administering the test took the first candidate, a man, down a corridor to a closed door and handed him a gun saying, "We must be completely assured that you will complete your assignments and follow instructions regardless of the circumstances. Inside this room you will find your wife, seated in a chair. Take this gun and kill her."

The man, looking completely shocked said, "You can't be serious! I could never kill my wife."

The CIA man said, "Well, then, you're obviously not the man for the job. Take your wife and go home." They brought the next candidate in, the other man, and repeated the instructions. This man took the gun, walked into the room and closed the door.

However, after five minutes of silence, the door opened and the man handed the CIA tester the gun, saying, "I just couldn't do it. I couldn't kill my wife. I tried to pull the trigger but I just couldn't do it."

The CIA man said, "Well, then, you're obviously not the man for the job. Take your wife and go home."

Then they brought the woman down the corridor to the closed door, handed her a gun, and said, "We must be completely assured that you will complete your assignments and follow instructions regardless of the circumstances. Inside this room you will find your husband, seated in a chair. Take this gun and kill him."

The woman took the gun, walked into the room, and before the door closed all the way, the CIA men heard the gun start firing. One shot after another, for thirteen shots, the noise continued. Then all hell broke loose. For the next several minutes, the men heard screaming, cursing, furniture crashing and banging on the walls; then suddenly, silence. The door opened slowly and there stood the woman. She wiped the sweat from her brow and said, "You guys didn't tell me the gun was loaded with blanks! I had to beat him to death with the chair!"