A closed mouth gathers no flies

Yesterday was Miss Prescott Day in Los Altos and Los Altos Hills.

Parents and former students organized a surprise reception at LAYC to recognize the Egan Junior High language teacher's 40 years of teaching approximately 8,000 students, including all four of Los Wiener. Los Altos Mayor Val Carpenter and Los Altos Hills Vice Mayor Jean Mordo read proclamations honoring her (after which emcee Rick Lanman told them "Thank you mayors.") My favorite story from the reception was about a student whom Miss Prescott (who is blind) caught making spitballs in class -- she made him stay until he had made 1,000. (My eighth-grade history teacher, who earlier told me that I "turned into a stud" and "should have three or four wives," claimed credit for the idea.)

Miss Prescott (soon to be Mrs. Kavinoky) had a regimented style of instruction that gave students a better understanding of English grammar than we ever got from an English class. At her reception, a parade of former students spoke about how she taught them so much that they didn't learn anything new until Spanish IV. I remember when my classmates and I arrived at Los Altos High School as freshman, a large group of us protested that Spanish II Honors was not hard enough. We expected to be learning new tenses and made to conjugate more verbs. We failed to realize that they were none left to learn (until we got to past subjunctive-conditional constructions in the aforementioned Spanish IV).

Miss Prescott also introduced me to the phrase "En boca cerrada no entran moscas," forcing me to write it 50 times after I had mocked a student who was struggling with his oral exam. (In my defense, I was only retaliating against him on behalf of a student that he had mocked). I had no idea what it meant, even after using a Spanish-English to translate it literally. When I finally asked someone to explain it to me, the answer was, "It means you should shut up."

Congratulations to the only teacher to ever get that across to me effectively.

I thought we were the Popular Front

My alma mater may change its name today.



Says kindergarten teacher Pam Loebner:

"For the past 3 years we have had parents go to the wrong schools (both ways) substitutes go to the wrong schools (both ways) and there is concern that in an emergency situation that someone might be confused and go to the wrong school."

Unlikely. We all know nothing bad ever happens in Los Altos. But just in case, I suggest "The Real Bullis" or asking the splitters to change their name to "Bullis Charter School for White Kids." More specificity never hurt.

Hi guys

I don't know if you remember me, but I used to write for this blog.

With finals approaching, I've been spending a lot of time studying recently (and, it turns out, inspiring the creation of other blogs). A few things I've learned:

Everybody in Los Altos Hills is rich, which, as a matter of federal law, means its okay to keep poor people out. Ybarra vs. Los Altos Hills, 503 F.2d 250. (9th Cir. 1974).

I live next to the stupidest bike lane in America. The only one that might be dumber is one I lived near last summer.

Minimum sentencing laws still suck. We can blame them both for the large-scale disasters like the unconstitutionally shameful condition of the health care system in our state prisons as well as for the more personal tragedies like the harsh prison term facing troubled Iraq veteran Sarge Binkley. Binkley may yet catch a break from the District Attorney, but other defendants from different backgrounds are unlikely to get the same treatment.

I've got to get back to studying administrative law, so I can explain why the County Board of Education inexplicably prevailed against the Los Altos School District's case alleging that Bullis Charter School's charter was too racist for the County Board to approve. I know that part of the answer has to do with the chemicals used by downtown Los Altos dry cleaners. Stay tuned.

Are you aware this person taught poor children?

Ahh, Los Altos Parents... tirelessly striving to make sure that the term "Los Altos Parent" still conjures up exactly what you'd imagine.

"They [the parents] still do not understand why Justus chose a principal from a school [Oak Grove High School in south San Jose] with different demographics and lower test scores than Almond."

It's nice to see that the running gag, so often exploited on this blog, about folks from The 'Tos not liking folks that aren't from The 'Tos is alive and well -- and thus the main staple of NOE is safe and sound.

Remembering Los Altos' war on Halloween

With the war on Halloween back in the news, I was reminiscing earlier tonight about the time the Los Altos School District nearly did away with the holiday 12 years ago.

Michael Radwin has, for reasons that I should not criticize, helpfully created a page of links to Mercury news articles about the struggle, from back when the Merc was a good paper. While it may surprise some of you to see religious fundamentalists once exercised influence in Los Altos, it should hardly suprise you to see the city earn scorn from throughout the nation by toying with a hilariously dumb idea.

(As an aside, shame on all of you who gave out Dots tonight.)

Rich people win again

Los Altos School District has succeeded in its effort to redraw its boundaries in a way that least burdens "core" families and keep Bullis white.

Amusingly, the professional journalists at the local papers continually lag behind Amanda Aaronson, who normally dedicates her blog to bragging about her kids (use of graphics, posting source material), the rea.

I don't envy the school board's position, first having to deal with outraged secessionists from the Hills and now needing to reshuffle the neighborhoods that go to each school. They are really part of the same problem. Covington was originally renovated because of similar demographic projections, which turned out to be wrong, leading to the closure of my alma mater.

It's hard to see an easy solution, but catering to "core communities," as Bill Cooper reportedly suggested, is tragicomically misguided. Families who can afford to volunteer more already have plenty of advantages, including their ability to get involved in school board elections. Margot Harrigan was apparently the only board member to point this out.

I sense a "Draft Bruce" campaign in the offing.

Stair-stepping

One difference between good and bad water polo teams is that the good ones know how to stair-step. Stair-stepping is a tactic used when an offensive player manages to get free near the goal. On good teams, defenders leave offensive players they are guarding to cover the next nearest one, requiring everybody to do a little extra work in exchange for covering the open player much more quickly. Bad teams tend to be unable to figure out this concept, and instead force the defender who had been guarding the now-open offensive player to swim after him or her, regardless of the distance in between or the time it takes to cover it.

The Los Altos School District is a bad water polo team.

Despite having given up its plan to punish the secessionists in Los Altos Hills by sending Mountain View kids to Bullis, the school board is still planning to make kids travel past (in some cases right in front of) schools close to them in order to get to their new school. I haven't looked at the demographic data, but the alternative approach -- shifting kids so that a lot of people have to travel a little bit farther, but nobody has to pass by one or more schools in order to get to their own -- seems to make much more sense.

Coincidentally, this will have the greatest impact on kids from Mountain View.