Lack of exams
Fri Mar 24, 2006 23:28 (UTC -5)October’s Hurricane Wilma really messed things up for the schools around here, since school (and everything else) was shut down for two weeks. What? You don’t remember? Oh yeah, but you remember Hurricane Katrina. Well, Hurricane Katrina affected us all in some way, but Hurricane Wilma ravaged South Florida. Yes, I would use no verb short of “ravage.”
The effects were many. We’ve ended up having to make up a few days of school, but instead of tacking on days at the end of the school calendar, they’ve inserted them throughout the year. Whoever worked on that skillfully managed to axe the early release days and teacher workdays so that we could still get out of school at the same time and partake in all the government holidays that we probably have to observe. Since my school doesn’t have classes on Fridays, we had to go in on three Fridays, the last of which was last week. Luckily, there are no more days that we have to make up.
Normally, mid-March is mid-term exam time. (We have semesters. I’m really tired of explaining these things to everyone. Tell all your friends: “Pompano Beach High School in Pompano Beach, Florida, USA, has classes Monday through Thursday and has four 110-minute classes per day, and the classes change for the second semester so you end up having all eight classes but at different times of the year! Mmkay?”) As a bit of generally-not-as-necessary backstory, our exam days, which come four times in the school year (mid-terms, finals, mid-terms, and finals), are what they call early release days. We take two exams, then go home, go back to school the next day, take two exams, and go home.
In the post-Wilma world, however, it appears that they needed to get in as much class time as possible: so much, in fact, that they changed the exam schedule. I figured that if they were to tamper with the exam days, they might make them full days, as they did with one of last semester’s final exam days. It seems, however, that they decided to do away with this semester’s mid-terms entirely. Actually, teachers were apparently allowed to choose whether to give mid-term exams to their students, and I assume that they all said no. And so the semester trods along as usual. I guess there will be no exam grades on our next report cards.
Tomatoes Are Evil? I’ll admit that I’m not a fan of them, but I’m warming up to the idea of having a slice on a burger.
I’ve written about anagrams before, but here’s a good list. Take this famous line from Hamlet, for example.
If you rearrange the letters, you get this:
