School-age kids treating a Monday off in January as “just another holiday”? Unthinkable!
*“They don’t know anything about him”? * Sure, the students aren’t spending their Veteran’s Day observance planting flags on graves, or visiting the VA hospital, but you can’t be so out of touch with reality that you think the student body has no idea who Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is, can you? Fuck, man, if they really don’t know anything about him, who’s damn fault is that? You’re the educator. Do your job. Educate them!
How many outraged phonecalls after your idea to not honor Martin Luther King Day in the SSD did you come up with your weak-ass “Cultural Diverity Day”? It was funny when they did it in the pilot episode of The Office. You, I hope you lose your job. Dumbass.
My proposal for MLK day would be to move it to the date of his death, April 4th. We have too many holidays in fall/winter already, and this would replace the Easter holiday most everybody but the government celebrates anyway.
I’ve never understood most holidays. Other than Independance Day, Christmas, Thanksgiving, Easter and Memorial Day, do the majority of people do anything to celebrate the day at all? When did it become a standard to get a day off for rememberance days in general?
To expand on Mr Moto’s point, make MLK Jr Day a dedicated day for education on black history and more importantly the civil rights movement. President’s Day? Study the Presidents. Etcetera. And by education I don’t mean watching a movie. I can’t beleive that old mainstay bullshit is still around. Teach the kids, don’t pawn it off to blockbuster to educate.
I think this guy (quoted in the OP) has the right idea in principle, but the method is just assholish. There’s little chance he can state it without looking bad, but that’s the nature of the beast these days.
Of course, it would have to pass the teacher’s union, so this is all just (heh) academic.
Every now and then here in Canada someone suggests that we should all get Remembrance Day. Nov. 11, off. It’s a stupid idea. It’s the one day a year we celebrate our war dead. The kids should be in school learning about that.
Kids here don’t get Columbus Day off. In October they get the two Jewish holidays, plus a long weekend (Friday and Monday) for a teacher’s convention. There might be something else, but I can’t remember what it is at the moment. I do know they only do to school four days a week through the whole freaking month of October. :rolleyes:
Anyway, I never got MLK’s birthday off. When they put it in place, I thought to myself, “Now I wonder what MLK himself would think of this? Sure, the honor is nice, but would he really want kids getting the day off of school to play PlayStation and watch MTV all day? Wasn’t he in favor of education? There’s something not quite right here…”
Wouldn’t a better way to honor him to be to spend the whole day learning about him? Take the whole day and devote it to just Martin Luther King, Jr. Talk about his life and works, and what he did. Go ahead and call it “MLK, Jr. Day” and have the teachers come up with lesson plans that are all about him, just for that one day.
For some reason, Scranton had come up in a conversation while some friends of mine were hanging out in college one day. One guys starts insisting that they don’t even have phones in Scranton because he drove through there once and didn’t see a single telephone line. Of course, we all just stared at him and called him an idiot but he kept insisting. It was pretty funny.
I’ve got a better one. (I can’t remember the name of the company or the street it was on, though.) It was, IIRC on the eastern or northeastern part of the city. I remember driving up hills on what seemed to be the main highway intown and through a neighborhood or two to get there.
I picked up, in Scranton, some wheels of telephone and coax lines I took to South Dakota. Anyone know what company that might have been? They manufactured it at the factory.
Anyway, kinda funny considering the “no phone lines” part.
Harvard on the Highway (PSU-Worthington) a/k/a The Up The Valley College O’ Knowledge, Lackaknowledge College (Lackawanna College), and The University of Western New Jersey (The University of Scranton) to name but a few.
He probably didn’t see the phone lines as he was dodging potholes and the college kids crossing the street.
According to the article I linked, each individual district can select 5 days as district-wide school holidays. In some counties, the first Monday after Thanksgiving is selected for the first day of buck season. To each his own.
But to suggest that a holiday that’s been on the school calendar since it became a holiday be removed becauase the kids allegedly “don’t know anything about him” is just ignorant.
If we did it my way, those three and possibly Good Friday would have just the day of the holiday itself off. No other “holidays” and no holidays celebrated on a Friday or Monday just for the sake of a three day weekend.
What you have to understand here is that the kids are legally required to attend 180 days. I am contractually required to work 187 days. These so-called holidays, snowdays and the like aren’t really days off; they are days deferred until later in the school year. I’d prefer to skip all of them and get out at the end of April.
If a parent has religious or political reasons for why a kid shouldn’t be in school on a given day, then the parent should keep him home. Same-same for safety concerns due to snow or other inclement conditions.
Kaylasdad99 was being a smart ass, but if you want me to work 187 days w/o a break, we can probably work something out, but if we renegotiate the calender that drastically, then we’ll also have to renegotiate the salary scale.
