Last week I asked lots of questions after the announcement that Lewisville Elementary School science teacher Alan Snow would not be charged with anything after a long investigation. At least one of those questions has been answered according to an article by Dan Galindo in the Winston-Salem Journal:
Alan
Snow, a teacher who had been reassigned from Lewisville Elementary
School during a sheriff’s office investigation, will return to the
classroom this month, Superintendent Don Martin announced today.Snow had been
suspended with pay, then re-assigned to a nonclassroom position with
the school system while deputies investigated an allegation of
misconduct against him.Garry Frank, the
district attorney for Davidson County, announced last week that there
was not sufficient evidence to charge Snow with any crime.Authorities have
never explained what the allegation was, and said last week that it
wasn’t appropriate to do so since no charges would be filed.Snow returns to school on Jan. 23, the first day of the third quarter.
The article doesn’t mention if Mr. Snow is going to return to Lewisville or teach in another school, but he does have his teaching slot back.
On another note I received a worried call from my brother about some of the comments left on my earlier post. The comments were a little heated and at one point one commenter mentions getting a lawyer to go after another commenter for what he was saying about his/her family and my brother was concerned that I might get caught up in it. My wife expressed the same concerns. To address their concerns I gave them a little of my thinking about these specific comments and comments in general which I’ll share here:
Now back to our regular programming.
New series of Bush coins, made of depleted uranium, announced:
An item that blew my mind came across one of my news feeds. It’s an interview with Rick Weddle, the president and CEO of Research Triangle Park, that he gave after a presentation to Detroit’s TechTown
leaders. Here’s the part that grabbed my attention:
mm: RTP is famous for bringing together
government, university and business leaders from across the state. How
did North Carolina’s leaders get so many competing factions on the same
page?Weddle: First, they were really in the tank and
they realized they had to do something differently. They realized the
existing industrial base was failing, was not sustainable and wouldn’t
be creating the kind of jobs they needed going forward……In North Carolina they were able to get the captains of
industry to support and call for support for these research
universities and the collaborative aspects of the park. We were
capitalized in 1959 by private fund drives. More money was raised from Forsyth County near Winston-Salem
than in the Triangle. That is fascinating when you think about it.
Money was raised all across the state and more money was raised outside
of our region to capitalize the RTP. And that was the richest region at
the time. Now it’s the poorest region because they hung onto their
industrialism. Interestingly enough those captains of industry found it
easier to do RTP in another region while they still milked their cash
cow in their home area. (Emphasis mine)
This reminded me of a conversation I had with my Mom when we first moved here from DC. Mom had grown up in Winston-Salem and she said that when she was growing up in the 50s and when she left town after graduating Wake Forest, Winston-Salem and Charlotte were essentially the same size and if you had asked anyone to bet on which city would go on to become the larger city most people would have bet on Winston-Salem. Goes to show what happens when leaders don’t read the tea leaves right.
By the way, Winston-Salem’s current leaders are doing the kinds of things that Weddle recommends. They’re working with Wake Forest to develop a world class bio-tech center and they are trying to cooperate regionally with Greensboro and High Point to build a new industry base to replace the decimated textile and furniture industries. So while this region might have suffered over the last 20-30 years there are good signs that the future will be brighter.
I was reading Mental Floss and they linked to an article in Time magazine (March, 2007) that focuses on pastor’s wives. Here’s the most interesting part:
Eight in 10 pastors’ wives say they feel unappreciated or unaccepted by
their husbands’ congregations, according to surveys by the Global
Pastors Wives Network (GPWN); the same number wish their husbands would
choose another profession. "Wives’ issues" is the No. 1 reason pastors
leave their ministries. The divorce rate among ministers and their
wives is 50%, no better than that of the general public.
Ouch.
It would be interesting to see if female pastors’ husbands feel the same kind of pressure. I seriously doubt it since our society tends to assume that men will/should work, so a female pastor’s husband probably doesn’t have the same set of expectations heaped upon him. According to the article 70% of pastors wives choose to work, but the tone of the article implies that the working doesn’t relieve the expectations of them to support their husbands’ ministries.
I guess what this means is next time you’re in church you need to make sure you take a moment to shake the pastor’s wife’s hand before you shake his and head out the door.
My Congresswoman Virginia Foxx caught a lot of heat for her support of the Teapot Museum in Sparta, NC. Well let me tell you that there are stranger ideas out there and Mental Floss has a few of them. They include:
I doubt anyone would have thought twice about the Teapot Museum if it hadn’t been for the fact that Rep. Foxx was trying to get federal funding for the project and it made a perfect political punching bag for thsoe folks trying to attack pork barrel spending. There’s also no indication that any of these museums received any kind of public funding, but if they did then I’d say by comparison the Teapot idea looks great. And lest we make fun of people who collect and marvel at things like teapots and PEZ dispensers let’s remember that eBay was started as a PEZ trading site. Those PEZ geeks are laughing all the way to the bank.
Xeni Jardin is one of the co-editors of Boing Boing. She posted a piece on Edge.org called Online Communities Rot Without Daily Tending by Human Hands that essentially fleshes out the thinking behind her very descriptive title. (Hat tip to Ed Cone for pointing to it). Among the very smart things she wrote I found this bit to be flat out brilliant:
Finally, this year, we resurrected comments on the blog, with the one thing that did feel natural. Human hands.
We hired a community manager, and equipped our comments system with a secret weapon: the "disemvoweller." If someone’s misbehaving, she can remove all the vowels from their screed with one click. The dialogue stays, but the misanthrope looks ridiculous, and the emotional sting is neutralized.
Now, once again, the balance mostly works. I still believe that there is no fully automated system capable of managing the complexities of online human interaction — no software fix I know of. But I’d underestimated the power of dedicated human attention.
I suspect Ed is hunting for a Typepad version of the disemvoweller as we speak. If I got more than my normal quota of one comment per millennium I probably would.
In the spring of 07 the US played Spain in a Davis Cup quarterfinal tie here in Winston-Salem. The US won and then went on to win the Cup itself in December. It seems the Cup, the actual physical Cup, is on a Victory Tour and today it’s in Winston-Salem. If you hurry you can see it at the Ski & Tennis Station on Stratford Road until 4:30 today. You can also see it at the Joel Coliseum during the BYU-Wake Forest basketball game tonight.
Celeste and I had lunch at Mayberry’s and then toddled on over to see the thing at the Ski & Tennis Station. It’s huge and it’s fun to look at the inscriptions from the ties that were played literally decades ago. I took particular pleasure in looking at the ties from the 60s that featured the great Australian teams with players like Stolle, Emerson, Newcombe and Roach. Of course I was looking for the American teams to, but since it started to get crowded with people wanting to take their picture with the Cup I needed to get out of the way before I found them.
Befuddled 