A former Texas public school teacher has sent me some stories from their career there. It's not pretty. The situation is what I also recollect from my long-ago days in a Yankee high school, though, so I don't know that we can just blame Texas, but it's true — the system is often set up to give athletes (including cheerleaders) academic privileges that other students don't get. Student athletes were expected to always pass their classes to maintain eligibility, no matter how poorly they did, and teachers were chastised if they compromised athletic eligibility.

Here's a letter that was sent out to all teachers at a Texas high school, gently reminding them of what they must do — either pass students or give them an incomplete — so that the football team doesn't suffer.

Teachers, please remember that we have over 1500 students involved in extracurricular activities who work very hard to have academic success as well as compete or stay connected to the school through their commitment to their organization or team. These students strive to do the right things and have adult coaches or sponsors who support you by working with any student who is not meeting your standards for conduct or academic success. The eligibility status of these students is very important to them, their parents, and to this campus. Please review six weeks grades of 68 and 69 to ensure that those grades accurately reflect student effort, test/assignment reliability and accuracy, and objectivity that can be explained. Please also remember that any student who you are going to allow to make up work or do additional work should be given an "I" instead of an assigned numerical grade.

From the UIL Side By Side Rules:

Q: Can a student's grade be changed for eligibility?

After a failing grade has been recorded, the situations in which a student's grade may be changed to passing and eligibility status restored are only as follows:
(a) an examination of course graded issued by a classroom teacher is final and may not be changed unless the grade is arbitrary, erroneous, or not consistent with school district grading policy as determined by the board of trustees. The board's decision may not be appealed. (This is also known as teacher or calculation error.)
(b) Extra credit work or work (including re-test) turned in after the grading period or evaluation has ended may not be considered when determining a student's eligibility for extracurricular activities except in the case of an "incomplete" grade.

Thank you for your support.

Why are they telling the teachers that they have students active in sports? We all know this. We shouldn't care. The job of a teacher is to make sure the students understand the material, and if their afternoon head-butting practice interferes with learning, students shouldn't expect special exemptions. Why are they telling the teachers to make sure that "grades accurately reflect student effort, test/assignment reliability and accuracy"? We all do that, too, and not just for the student athletes. An accurate assessment of a student who doesn't do the classwork should be FAIL.

I love how the administration blithely informs teachers that they should give incompletes to students so they can make up the work they should have done during the term later. That is not right. That is expecting teachers to put in extra work beyond the grading period, to help out the boneheads with extra time and instruction…but I suspect there is no talk of extra pay for teachers who do that.

Hey, I have this brilliant, amazing, completely non-intuitive idea: how about if our schools emphasized academics, not sports, and that extra-curricular activities were regarded as an optional side-issue, completely orthogonal to the goals of the school?

(Also on FtB)

It turns out to be true, at least for bustards, that the fast, flashy life leads to earlier burnout. So what's my excuse? I dunno.

(Also on FtB)

Every morning when I get up and get on the computer, the first thing I do is delete the pile of spam from Dennis Markuze, each of which is usually cross-posted to 50 to 100 other people. Every time I fire up Twitter, the first thing I do is clear the garbage Dennis Markuze has left there; yesterday I blocked and reported spam from over 25 Markuze accounts, amounting to several hundred messages.

You know what? This is wrong. I shouldn't have to do this. Over the years — I've been getting these threats from Markuze since 1993 — it's gradually grown from an occasional deranged message on usenet to part of my daily routine, where I'm dealing with hundreds of ranty messages every day from one disturbed individual in Montreal, Canada. And I'm not even his sole target: he has a hate-on for Shermer, Randi, and Dawkins, and this is all he does with his life: he sits in his bedroom in his parent's house and sends out shrill, incoherent messages to the world, all day long.

I have reported him to the police. I have seen these complaints climb the ladder from the local department, to the FBI, to the RCMP, to the Montreal City Police, where they promptly fizzle out. The police don't care. The word I've gotten back is that they aren't going to do a thing until he snaps and starts killing people. A little late, don't you think?

As a target for over almost twenty years, I've been watching this guy escalate — his hate messages have gotten crazier, more vicious, and more frequent. He's a psychological cripple who wastes his life in this "project" to howl stupidly at the world; he's on a clear trajectory of more and more demands for people to recognize him, and he's not going to ever get any respect from anyone.

I am not a psychologist, but anyone who writes those disconnected rambling death threats, and does nothing else all day long, is mentally disturbed. Something is wrong in his head. I'm not the only one to notice.

The only people who don't seem to notice are the Montreal city police.

If you're on Twitter, one thing you can do is, when you receive one of his spam messages, retweet it, but delete all the names on it (because I don't need more!) and add one: @SPVM. Give the Montreal police a sample of the noise coming out of their city that we're drowning in.

There is now a petition demanding that the Montreal city police take his threats seriously. Sign it, please. I want at least ten thousand names from around the world on it.

I don't have any confidence at all in them: they've had this deranged man making death threats on their watch for over a decade, and have done nothing. I don't think the petition will do a thing.

What I want is a public record of the criminal neglect of that police department, so that when Markuze does have his little psychotic break and harms someone, probably some innocent, they won't be able to deny that they were warned, that there was a world-wide outcry, that hordes of people thousands of miles away could see all this coming, and the incompetents in Montreal sat on their hands and did nothing.

(Also on FtB)

I'm glad I've got one, and I'm so proud that my worth is enhanced by my testicles, as this report from Georgetown University's Center on Education and the Workforce shows.

The findings are stark: Women earn less at all degree levels, even when they work as much as men. On average, women who work full-time, full-year earn 25 percent less than men, even at similar education levels. At all levels of educational attainment, African Americans and Latinos earn less than Whites.

I have to thank Carl Zimmer for bringing that to my attention — when he isn't writing about parasites and viruses, he also dabbles in other heartwarming subjects, like this.

(Also on FtB)

Somehow, annoyingly, the DNS for freethoughtblogs got redirected to the bad old server, Bluehost, and all you see when you go there is a dead static page. Ed Brayton is scrambling to figure who screwed up what where and get it fixed as soon as possible.