“I’ll Blend Your Learning!” Part 4: Choose your Doom!
“Alas, Ultron-13, I knew him well. It’s a shame most of your parts were bought retail, at ridiculously high price.”
Returning to our regularly scheduled content about education…
My co-teacher and I were summoned into school today to “evaluate and approve” the devices that would be purchased for every student, and sent home with them. By “device,” I mean netbooks…for some reason the term thrown around by the Suits in the meeing is “device.” Considering that a spork is a clever device for eating things, it’s pretty vague.
The “devices” are laptops. Netbooks specifically.
Some reps from Acer came, which was puzzling, because the Edumental we were dealing with was pretty clearly not going to buy FROM Acer. That’s not to say that we weren’t buying an Acer product, two thirds of the suggested “devices” were produced by Acer. No…apparently we will be purchasing about three hundred computers from Best Buy, at retail.
Retail. Such an ugly word.
This isn’t because of LAUSD vendor restrictions either. The Edumentals have grant money, serious dollars that they can spend however they please. They are choosing to use Best Buy as a vendor, for reasons that are unclear to all of us. As for the machine, the best one that we had a choice of was technically out of our budget.
Who brings a suggestion of a product to the table, knowing that it is over budget? Is this some sort of tease? When we went through the numbers, and found that we really didn’t need to buy each student a fancy twenty dollar carrying case, and then insure the carrying case against loss or theft…things became more reasonable.
This meeting went on like that, at times in circles, for several hours.
Yesterday, I got a phone call. It went something like this:
I like the “Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters” t-shirt. You wouldn’t just hang around the Fortress wearing your uniform all the time, would you? I’m looking at you with that one, Superman…
So, yeah. I looked at my phone, it said “restricted” which suggested Student Loan Officers.Knowing I’m okay with them right now, I answered it anyway and it was LACOE…the Los Angeles County Office of Education. They were calling to let me know that I was a Semi-Finalist for County Teacher of the Year, and had to get started preparing myself for that interview.
Which is on the 26th. I’m more than a little intimidated.
My Principal asked me if the Superman t-shirt I tend to wear to these things was clean, so she clearly has some kind of confidence.
In honor of today’s infinite meeting, and commemorating last week’s infinite meeting, I present this color version of “I’ll Blend Your Learning! Part 3″:
The Edumentals, in all their suit glory.
Next week has another Infinite Meeting approaching. Perhaps it will be more informative and/or useful…but I doubt it. At least things are going on track, so that we might have the various pieces in place to make Blended Learning happen.
Stay Tuned…!
The reason institutions/tools/suits buy anything retail/namebrand/Apple is as a show of phallic power. Think about it,…who has a bigger penis/penis (him/her), the suit that drinks Folgers or the suit that drinks Starbucks?