The Time Has Come

He is certainly a bully. We are supposed to be thrilled that he's not a crook like Bruno, but that doesn't make him ethical. It really is time for Shelly to call it quits, preferably before he pulls the whole majority down with him.

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Election Results

Well, my candidate did not win, which isn't unusual. The only other halfway interesting results are that ALL budgets and propositions passed, ALL incumbents won, and the anti-merger candidate lost in Spencer-Van Etten.

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Emily's List Has Spoken

Our local (Dryden!) candidate is one of a handful of first-round "top candidates" on Emily's List. Nice!

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Principles and Principals

"I am not resigning to go to another school, I am resigning from the day-to-day nonsense that is impossible to do without funding, resource and reality."

And with that, the HS principal at Lansing resigns his position, fed up to there with the way things are going in NYS education. Who's next?

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Doward Catches On

Many, many years ago (around 30), when Mark and I were working on the Spanish and English versions of Mathematics Today, some galleys came our way, as they often did, with an unexpected error. In some cases,a misplaced letter would make us laugh: the change of "beads and shells" to "bears and shells" was one example. We kept that one, and the book had a nice illustration of a pattern of tiny teddy bears and shells instead of the original beads and shells that made more sense but were not nearly so cute. In this case, it was a name: Howard had been rendered as Doward.

What, we wondered, if we kept the name as Doward, and in fact went further, placing occasional "Dowards" in every manuscript we worked on from that time forward? How long would it take for Doward to enter the American lexicon as an acceptable first name?

Today I was rereading a manuscript in which Doward appeared, placed there by yours truly just once in 350 pages. And I thought I'd check into Dowards to see whether I could find any existing real-life examples. First I looked on LinkedIn. Sure enough, a trio of Dowards appeared. On Facebook, there were more. And here, in the White Pages, I found that Doward is the 37,989th most popular name in America (in 2011), and that the current 118 Dowards are scattered nicely around the country, with a preponderance in Texas, which happens to be the place where Mathematics Today was most heavily marketed.

The Dowards I found so far are of an age to be first-generation Dowards, conceived sometime after we started adding Dowards to textbooks. Who can say how many Doward Juniors there might be after 30 years? I call this some kind of success.

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Freedom of Speech, Public-School Style

Paul sent me this article from The Buffalo News, which caused me to spew water out my nose. Hamburg's former superintendent is Dryden's former superintendent, Mark Crawford, who once called me into executive session to spank me for talking about the district on this blog. Presumably he is not involved in the current lawsuit, but the Hamburg Educational Ethics blog does mention him by name, and not in a positive light.

Although Concerned Hamburger's style is not terribly subtle, he is certainly committed and passionate, especially about issues of open government and reporting of finances. I'll be watching this one with interest.

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Dryden in Mother Jones

A reporter from Mother Jones came to town to find out what all the fuss was about.

"It has got to be a morale boost to people who have been suffering the adverse affects of this industry," [Earthjustice attorney] Goldberg said, "to see people in a small town stand up to an incredibly powerful and wealthy industry and win."

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Dryden Decision

Dryden won the appeal vs. Norse Energy. The court found, as the lower court had, that towns may decide what industries to allow. One more step, if Norse goes through with it.

Dryden Decision by Assemblywoman Barbara Lifton

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