Friday, May 28, 2010

More Ponderisms....

Here are a few more thoughts to ponder...

  • If you're driving at the speed of light and turn on your headlights, what happens?
  • How important does a person have to be before they are considered assassinated instead of just murdered?
  • What disease did cured ham actually have?
  • Why is it that people say they "slept like a baby" when babies wake up like every two hours?
  • Why are you 'in' a movie, but you're 'on' television?
Have a joyful day everyone. - Rita
Visit my website at http://www.ritaschiano.com

Monday, May 24, 2010

Ponderisms

Ponder
verb [ trans. ]
think about (something) carefully, esp. before making a decision or reaching a conclusion.

Ponderisms -- Observational humor.

Jerry Seinfeld is renown for this type of humor, as was the late George Carlin.

Here are a few of my favorites....
  • I used to eat a lot of natural foods until I learned that most people die of natural causes.
  • Who was the first person to look at a cow and say, "I think I'll squeeze these dangly things here, and drink whatever comes out?"
  • Why doesn't glue stick to the inside of the bottle?
  • How do you know when you're out of invisible ink?
  • Have you ever imagined a world with no hypothetical situations?
Love ponderisms? Share yours with me!

Have a joyful day everyone. - Rita
Visit my website at http://www.ritaschiano.com

Tuesday, May 18, 2010

Bullying Legislation, At Last…*

A comprehensive anti-bullying legislation is, at last, law in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. It is now, however, up to the schools, the parents, and the kids themselves to take all the necessary steps to eliminate bullying from our schools, our streets, and cyberspace.

I’ve written numerous blogs on this topic, beginning with the 2006 suicide of Megan Meier, who hanged herself three weeks before her fourteenth birthday. It took more than a year of prodding and prompting by Meier’s parents to get an investigation into the matter. Megan’s suicide was attributed to cyber-bullying through the social networking website MySpace. Lori Drew, the mother of a classmate of Meier, was later indicted in 2008. But in 2009, Mrs. Drew was acquitted on the basis that there “are no laws making the cyber-bullying, harassment and abusive actions” of Mrs. Drew a felony.

In 2009, 11-year-old Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover was found by his mother hanging by an extension cord on the second floor of their Springfield, MA home. The boy had been bullied and taunted daily at school, yet despite the pleases of his mother, nothing worthwhile was done to prevent this from continuing to happen to the boy.

The last straw seems to have been the suicide of 15-year-old Phoebe Prince of South Hadley, MA. Her death prompted a vociferous call for action. Four months later, Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick signed the new legislation (one, I might add, with some teeth), includes anti-bullying initiatives in student handbooks, classroom instruction, and strict new rules for reporting incidents of bullying. The law includes:

  • training adults on how to identify, prevent, and manage incidents of bullying
  • new reporting requirements for all school staff to “fully and swiftly detail any instance of bullying or retaliation to the appropriate school official”
  • directs the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education to establish statewide academic standards that include instruction in bullying prevention and requires schools to provide age-appropriate instruction on bullying prevention

Each school district is also required to provide targeted professional development to all teachers, administrators, athletic coaches, bus drivers, and custodians on the prevention, identification, and appropriate response to bullying incidents.

Will all this help? While laws will not stamp out bullying altogether (we need only look at the vast majority of laws continuously broken to know this to be true), laws can reduce drastically the number of incidences and give victims of bullying much needed protections.

Have a joyful day everyone. - Rita
Visit my website at http://www.ritaschiano.com

*Written for KidsTerrain.com. Reprinted with permission.

Saturday, May 15, 2010

Today's Word(s) "Re"-Defined....

The impetus for today's "Re"-defined phrase:

SACRAMENTO — Angered by increases in tuition and cuts in state financing, thousands of students, parents and faculty members protested across California on Thursday at colleges, universities and even elementary schools to plead for help with the state’s education crisis.

No Child Left Behind "Re"-defined = All Children Left Behind

Have a joyful day everyone. - Rita
Visit my website at http://www.ritaschiano.com

Saturday, May 8, 2010

Hypocrisy: Today's Word "Re"-Defined

Hypocrisy "Re"-Defined = Kyl-Roberts

In the wake of the massive BP oil spill, Senate Republicans are disowning the catchphrase “Drill, Baby, Drill,” claiming that Republicans never endorsed it. Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) and Sen. Pat Roberts (R-KS) attempted to distance themselves and their party from the phrase yesterday, pretending not to know who popularized it, and dismissing the slogan as something from “two, three years ago”:

“That was not a Senate Republican phrase,” Kyl said. “I think there was a candidate that used that. I think our phrase was ‘drill here, drill now,’ meaning here in the United States and as quickly as oil and gas leases are going.”

Roberts said Republicans were always uneasy with the catchphrase.

“I don’t know about the slogan. The slogan was what, two, three years ago and basically we had a lot of opposition to it anyway.”

http://thinkprogress.org/2010/05/05/kyl-roberts-drill-baby/


Have a joyful day everyone. - Rita
Visit my website at http://www.ritaschiano.com