Earlier this week, the Washington Post published an article about Edline, an online site that allows parents to keep tabs on their children’s grades, attendance and other classroom activities. Both Hesperia High School and Sultana High School have Edline sites set up.
At the beginning of this semester, Laura Iriarte Miguel switched anatomy classes.
No big deal. Students at Quince Orchard High School in Gaithersburg can shift courses around at the start of each term. But when Iriarte Miguel remained on the roll in the wrong class for several days, her parents began receiving notices from Edline — an online, up-to-the-sec grade-tracking program used in Montgomery County middle and high schools — about her unexcused absences and zeros on quizzes.
Montgomery County high school senior Laura Iriarte Miguel is no fan of Edline, which records her grades and attendance in every subject.
Finally, one night at dinner, in between bites of spaghetti, her parents grilled her about her truancy and her rotten anatomy grades. She hadn’t told them she had opted into another class.
“They wanted to know why-why-why-why,” Iriarte Miguel says. She set them straight, but the air was still poisoned. The suspicion, she says, “accumulated in the back of their minds during the whole day.”
This could be a simple story of parental expectations and teenage lackadaisicalness. But it’s also a tale of an innovation at the nexus of a morphing world — symbolic of the changing nature of childhood, America’s abiding faith in education and the unforgiving quality of technology
If I wasn’t insanely busy this week — seriously, a week where the paper has to be done early, and where we have a lower-than-average page count is shaping up to be one of my busiest in my entire time here — I’d probably localize this story for Hesperia.
 This Saturday, Peter and I will be going to the local Society of Professional Journalism awards banquet in Riverside. Every time, there’s always a few “huh” awards (including ones I’ve received), but overall, the integrity of the SPJs hasn’t ever been in question. I attribute weird awards to not knowing what else was submitted and maybe the judges burning out on seeing oodles of the same sorts of stories repeatedly (at least, that’s what I tell myself, since my soldier-home-from-Iraq pieces never win).
Well, that’s nothing compared to the scandal surrounding the Texas-area Katies awards:
Elizabeth Albanese, former press club president and winner of 10 Katies in the past four years, may have “rigged” the contest, according to the Dallas Morning News.
Rigged might be the wrong word. It turns out entries were never read and no competition was actually held. Albanese could not produce the names of any judges for the 2006 competition. Or, for that matter, the names of judges from 2005, or, come to think of it, 2004. She was unable to provide them, giving a variety of reasons, including her switch from one laptop to another, club officials said.
Elizabeth Albanese, 37, if that is her real name — court documents show her to be Lisa Albanese, 41 — has a history of psychotic behavior dating back to her adolescence, and has been arrested in Texas, Virginia and Maryland on charges including passing bad checks, fraud, theft and forgery.
Wow.
 
Writer recalls time at Virginia Tech
It’s a piece I wrote for the Daily Press, but which they ended up deciding not to run. I added the name of the now-identified shooter to the piece as edited by Daily Press Managing Editor Keith Jones. (No point in wasting a good edit.)
It’s ironic, but the fact that it’s now the #10 most-read story across Freedom Communications today makes me irrationally angry and frustrated. I’m tired of hearing familiar names like McBride or WUVT or Ambler-Johnston or Norris Hall or the Duck Pond or Smith Mountain Lake in the national media associated with this sort of thing. I don’t want to see Blacksburg in the AP video crawl on the bottom of the Hesperia Star site or hear NPR calling for reports from WUVT (which they never refer to as “woovit,” as those of us who worked there did).
The longest I’ve lived anywhere in a continuous stretch was my six years in Blacksburg, and it feels like a violation to have this be what my school will be known for forever. It must be how Kent State students must feel.
To me, Norris Hall is where my college girlfriend (an industrial engineering student) studied and it was the building across the Drill Field from my original dorm, West Eggleston. It was at Norris Hall that I heard that my friend Aislinn had died, when I was waiting for my girlfriend to get out of class.
Ambler-Johnston is where I went to study and get away from the chaos of the fraternity house, but ended up making good friends. It was the place that I first heard Nirvana, Mother Love Bone and Pearl Jam and where I first logged onto a BBS in those primitive days before the World Wide Web.
This is probably an awful admission, but I’ve never cried for 9/11, although thinking about the passengers on Flight 93 calling their loved ones always brings me to the brink. But I keep crying about what’s happened in Blacksburg and getting angry at everyone and everything, rebuffing my family when they call me on the phone.
I know the real victims are those who have been shot and their families, but this is going to stick with me for a long time to come, I think.
Seven big years, woo woo!
Jenn got this via e-mail, and a quick look at Google shows that it’s all over, so determining its origin would be difficult at this point.
1. The “Wall Street Journal” is read by the people who run the country.
2. The “Washington Post” is read by people who think they run the country.
3. The “New York Times” is read by people who think they should run the country and who are very good at crossword puzzles.
4. “USA Today” is read by people who think they maybe ought to run the country but don’t really understand The New York Times. They do, however, like their statistics shown in pie charts.
5. “The Los Angeles Times” is read by people who wouldn’t mind running the country — if they could find the time — and if they didn’t have to leave Southern California to do it.
6. The “Boston Globe” is read by people whose ancestors used to run the country and did a far superior job of it, thank you very much.
7. The “New York Daily News” is read by people who aren’t too sure who’s running the country and don’t really care as long as they can get a seat on the train.
8. The “New York Post” is read by people who don’t care who’s running the country as long as they do something really scandalous, preferably while intoxicated.
9. The “Miami Herald” is read by people who are running another country but need the baseball scores.
10. The “San Francisco Chronicle” is read by people who aren’t sure anyone runs the country, but if they find out who does, they oppose all them. There are occasional exceptions if the leaders are handicapped, minority, feminist, atheist, and also happen to be illegal aliens from any other country or galaxy provided, of course, that they are not Republicans.
11. The “National Enquirer” is read by people trapped in line at the grocery store.
12. Nothing is read by the guy who is running this country.
Having lived in Washington and having lived in Southern California, it would take a hell of a great incentive for me to ever move back there. (This is your cue, Washington Post.)
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