Friday, March 12, 2010

What's In A Name?

When I was in the army, a fellow officer once told me that you could always tell when you were being fed some el toro poo-poo--the longer and more exciting the name, (e.g. super high-intensity, reality-based combat warrior training, or some some such silliness), the more crap you were being fed and the more some Pentagon manual-writer was padding his nest. That memory came back to me this morning as I read about these two schools:

Encina Preparatory High School in Sacramento and Highlands Academy of Arts and and Design in North Highlands were added to the state's list of persistently lowest-performing schools Wednesday.


I remember when they used to be just Encina High and Highlands High.

6 comments:

Pomoprophet said...

I dont think this post is necessarily fair. They have those names because people have already come along and tried to change it from a typical high school. The changes haven't worked. Which juts goes to show that some neighborhoods produce students from life situations that are very difficult to educate.

Darren said...

Adding a few words to a name isn't going to change anything but the name. That was the point of this post.

Anonymous said...

When I taught high school I often suggested that any employee with a job title more than 20 characters long should be fired. If you are a "teacher" or a "secretary" you are probably doing useful work. If you are the "Special Assistant to the Cirriculum Development Committee for..." the system would probably be better off without you.

PeggyU said...

Kind of like the socialist countries with long high-sounding names. The name length is inversely proportional to the degree of freedom of the populace.

Ellen K said...

If we applied that rule, we could surely get rid of all kinds of interference from mid level administrators who seem to answer to no one, do no useful work and who make far more than classroom teachers.

MikeAT said...

Ellen K

A proper term for those people is Oxygen Thief….other examples are Diversity Coordinators, Chiefs of Multicultural Affairs and Academy Award winners…