You have entirely no clue.

"Tenure" in the vast majority of school systems is pretty much just a requirement that due process be followed before you can fire someone. This usually means a few hearing, some appeals, and an actual cause for firing.

Before tenure, teachers could and did get fired for the horrible offenses such as:
1. Not campaigning for the right school board member
2. Being an unmarried woman who went out on a date
3. Being gay
4. Being older and therefore demanding a higher salary than a new, not very good teacher
5. Daring to question or report wrongdoing of an administrator

If you don't think those things will happen again once tenure is gone, you have no clue. You can still fire someone who is not doing their job well. It happens all the time, even in states with tenure.

I would posit that being locked away in a box with people as bad as me for the rest of my life is not "getting away with it gracefully."

I'm sure if you ever get "mistakenly" classified as toxic waste, you will continue to feel the same way.

11 birds a month. While sad, it's not even a statistical blip when compared to the number of birds we will with cars, skyscrapers and outdoor cats.

I can vouch for the ridge vs. plain thing. In Kerbal Space Program some of my awesome, ridiculously low Munar orbits sometimes fail to take those ridges into consideration. Ouch. Sorry Jeb.

Comments as rude, insulting and assholish as yours are why we are afraid that people like you own guns.

This pretty much sums up what I was thinking too. This guy is a union rep and somebody in charge at the school has butted heads with him.

Plus, you get extra point for not saying "tow the line."

Wait. Did you just admit that he's being targeted improperly because he is the union rep . . . and then say that if we got rid of tenure and let them fire whoever they want for whatever reason it wouldn't be a problem anymore?

Exactly. I bought a high-end desktop five years ago with XP on it because the only alternative was Vista. It's no longer my primary machine, but I use it for occasional gaming and desktop publishing.

If I chose to upgrade to Win7, I would probably need to add RAM to keep it running at the same speed it does now. Add on the cost of 64-bit Win7 and I'm well over $200, just to keep a machine running that is ALREADY running just fine.

Not to mention the headache of making sure everything is backed up and then re-installing software, which requires digging CDs out of boxes that have been through two moves.

I don't see why I should have to bother just to give Microsoft more money.

The main thing this has done is to push me further towards Mac. My work machine is already a Mac. I don't need much of a push when I finally do upgrade.

Have you even been to DC? The vast majority of DC is a pretty cool place to live. When I lived there the only thing that vaguely made me feel threatened was terrorists with airplanes, anthrax and the sniper, who was from out of town.

I work in K12 schools. We've moved from the smaller Samsungs to the 14-inch HP Chromebook. It feels like a much more substantial machine and it's a hell of a lot faster. We've just started with them so I can't vouch for how they are going to do once we let the kids get ahold of them for a while. Of course at no more than $327 a pop, we can afford to replace them a lot easier than a Windows laptop.

You don't do training with end-users much, do ya? ;-)

Which one are you using. Some of the smaller Samsungs are weak sauce. The 4GB HP Chromebook 14s we are using at my school district are pretty smoking machines.

Maybe first Facebook and Google can convince AT&T to actually install the equipment needed for me to get DSL, or convince the cable company to run the 0.4 miles of line down into my subdivision so that I can get real high speed Internet at my house.

Why do they hate our freedom to build somewhere incredibly stupid and dangerous?