Thanks to school system for not showing speech
To the editor:
The Hagerstown TEA Party thanks Washington County Public Schools Superintendent Elizabeth Morgan and the school system for listening to parents and for providing a common-sense solution regarding Tuesday's speech to students by President Obama.
With this decision, the school system empowered parents to make decisions regarding whether or not their children would view the president's speech. This decision allowed parents to watch the program with their children and have a healthy discussion afterward.
Red flags regarding the speech appeared when the press found out the U.S. Board of Education was asking students to "write letters to themselves about what they can do to help the President." Workbooks and activities have since been modified to remove objectionable content. We are thankful this partisan politicization has been exposed and removed from the U.S. Board of Education's curriculum guidelines.
Locally, the superintendent of schools has made the right decision to not politicize the school system by airing President Obama's speech live. It appears the school system just learned about the speech on Thursday. Morgan has used caution and wisdom rather than bowing to political pressure to air the broadcast.
The school system has appropriately listened to the parents that they serve and said "no" to unfettered access to Washington County's most precious resource, our students. This type of unfettered access to school students would set the nation's school system on a very slippery slope. The temptation for a president to politicize the school system to achieve political goals may prove too great to overcome. We are thankful and proud to know that our school system will not be participating in this activity.
Neil Parrott
Hagerstown TEA Party
Are you kidding me? How can I respect someones opinion on a matter that clearly is already so biased towards one side of the political spectrum that there is no point in even trying to reason with them? Do I need to remind them that George H. W. Bush did exactly the same thing and no one was running around claiming that it was going to corrupt our children. Nope, when the true red Republicans do this stuff they can do no wrong...
Clearly this opinion is not based on the content of the address, but on the politics of the writer. Our children deserve to hear from our national leaders, the deserve to know that the entire country is working for their future and that it is important for them to work hard. The only reason the school board didn't air the speech is because they have a weak stomach for people like Neil who writes into the Herald-Mail to rail against something that he really doesn't have much interest in other than that he is a Republican and the President is a Democrat.
If this country is to the point where people censor the president's speeches at the local level then we truly have entered a era of political upheaval. Personally, you respect the office that the President holds, I trust him to not do something stupid when talking to my kids and I think it is important that they understand he wants them to do well. I am ashamed of the weak willed folks at the school board that shut the access to a speech by our president, the leader of our country, the man or woman who we are all supposed to look up to and respect for who they are and what they represent.
So for dividing by zero — what if there are 10 apples to be distributed, but no one comes to the table? How many apples does each "person" at the table receive? The question itself is meaningless — each "person" can't receive zero, or 10, or an infinite number of apples for that matter, because there are simply no people to receive anything in the first place. So 
, at least in elementary arithmetic, is said to be meaningless, or undefined.
So rumor has it that the Washington County Board of Education is looking to teach our children how to divide by zero. Interesting when you consider that the result is undefined in real number mathematics. As a matter of fact if my sources are correct, they are teaching your kids that if you divide by 10 by 0 then the answer is 10. If you are confused, angry and think the genius who came up with this ought to be fired then I would suggest you begin talking to your childrens' teachers to make sure this is not being taught to your them.
It is important for parents to demand that their kids get a quality education and teaching this kind of false information and plainly absurd notion is going to confuse students when they actually get a teacher that knows better. Start looking at your elementary age childrens' home work and ensure that this is not being taught, if it is find out why and how to stop it.
If you concerned that this is the case please contact the WCBOE at http://www.wcboe.k12.md.us/content/pi_contact.cfm
ANNAPOLIS - After weeks of haggling, state lawmakers chiseled out an agreement Friday that leaves Hagerstown's university campus with nearly full funding next year.
The compromise between the House and Senate guarantees the University System of Maryland at Hagerstown $2 million for fiscal year 2009.
"We won," Sen. Donald F. Munson, R-Washington, said after Friday's session, which capped more than a week of public and private talks. "It was a tough battle. I'm not kidding. It was as tough as cold war."
We pulled through! After weeks of uncertainty and the chance that Hagerstown may lose one of its most valuable assets, the people of Washington county prevailed upon their lawmakers to choose the right path. Hagerstown is growing and it needs institutions of higher learning to continue teaching the next generation more valuable skills. Without this, Washington County will not have a chance at building its economic base by brining in more skilled workers and high-tech businesses.
Thank you to all who wrote their state delegates to make this happen.
The Allegheny College RefIT group, composed of Instructional Technologists from OET and the Learning Commons and Reference Librarians from Pelletier Library, has chosen to conduct the Learning Web 2.0 by Diving In project during the spring and summer of 2007. This project is based on the Learning 2.0 project of the Public Library of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County, which is licensed under the Creative Commons license. Our site includes links to several of the 23 things, or tasks, that they originally created.
Learning Web 2.0 by Diving In
When I cam across this page, I couldn't resist commenting on it because I find it amusing that people need to be taught the concept of "Web 2.0" or "Social Media" when it is common sense to anyone who is actually using it or reading content that others have posted. I guess I just don't understand how you can teach someone Web 2.0, after all, did we need to teach people "Web 1.0?"
I don't think you can learn Web 2.0, it is not something concrete as it is always changing, it is more of a concept than any one hard piece of technology or any one particular website. That is the whole point about the medium is that the reader / viewer / participant is presented with a multitude of options that are community driven which means there is no centralized site that you can go to which is Web 2.0. Technorati is great, but it is no means the only content aggregation site out there and the creative commons licence is awesome but Web 2.0 isn't just about yanking other people's content either.
Now I will say that the Office of Educational Technology has never exactly been my favorite on the Allegheny College campus for the simple fact that they have never impressed me as overly up on a lot of technology. I worked for several organizations on campus during my years there and I was doing more interesting projects with many of them than this group ever came up with. In many ways the group created more burocracy which stopped technology from being adopted quickly, thus my skepticism that they truly will ever understand Web 2.0 and what it means in a larger context.
