Leggings are Not Pants....and Other Life Lessons from the Ninth Grade Center

As I finish up my time at the BD NGC, I am amazed at how much these kids don't know. I will share with you a few things that I have tried to teach them, aside from algebra.

1. Leggings are not pants. This is an epidemic. At the middle school, we treated leggings like tights, which I feel is appropriate. The school dress code contains a standard fingertip length rule on all skirts or shorts, however apparently at the elementary school, as long as you were wearing leggings you were OK. Now I can see how this would be OK for little girls, but these girls are no longer little. Now they are in high school and have no business walking around with no pants on.

2. You are too young to have a tattoo. I have seen entirely too many 9th graders with tattoos. When I challenged a couple of boys on whether they would still want a paw print on their shoulder in 20 years they could see my point. But how was it legal for somebody to tattoo stars on a 15-year-old's breast? That's borderline pedophilia.

3. Maternity leave from high school is not a real thing. I had to stifle a laugh when the kids told me this girl was on maternity leave. Thanks to MTV's 16 and Pregnant, we know that teenagers are capable of conceiving and bearing children, but the education system has yet to create an official absence policy for student mothers.

4. Apparently being a superintendent is where the money is. This was obviously the water cooler talk of the day. As an employee of Wayne Township (10 more days), I should not say anything bad about the district, but I couldn't resist. What are they gonna do to me? http://www.indystar.com/article/20110128/LOCAL1804/101280341/-1M-payout-ex-superintendent-upsets-Wayne-School-Board?odyssey=tab|topnews|text|News I don't any think elaboration is necessary.

I'll leave it at that. Shondell out.

Way Back Wednesday

I have kept a diary on and off since I was in 7th grade. I'm attempting to try something here. I'd like to post an old diary entry every Wednesday. This is gonna be fun. Trust me. So let's start at very the beginning. It's a very good place to start. This is my very first diary entry. This would have been the end of 7th grade. I was almost 13.

May 4, 1995

Dear Diary,

Today is Thursday. I have been sick since Friday night. I am not allowed to go back to school until Monday. I had to miss my tournament last weekend. I might have to miss my tournament this weekend. I don't want to miss it. I want to go back to school just because I miss my friends. Last weekend at our tournament my team went to my cousin's house in between games. We ended up getting 3rd place overall. I am watching a movie called A Touch of Class. I am really bored. I hope I get better soon. The doctor says I have strep throat. During my rapid culture it said I didn't have strep throat, but after they sent it in they found out I did have strep throat though.

Today me and grandma went to the mall. We got a new skillet. It's just like ours except it's smaller. We also got a set of TV trays for mom for her birthday Shhh!

We also got this book [diary]. Now I am watching Saved by the Bell. I'm still bored. I haven't talked to anyone except for Valeri. There isn't a whole lot of news. Tomorrow I have to go home and stay there instead.

Well, that was even less exciting than I remembered. They do get pretty exciting, but I think I should go in order so we can really see the evolution of my writing. I should also mention that I corrected a few spelling errors. I'm sure 12-year-old me wouldn't mind. I misspelled throat and bored. And wrote 3rd, 3erd, which is kind of funny. I have also decided to leave most names in, but not include any last names. I know I'm not going to publish every entry, but I'm still trying to decide if I should go somewhat in order or if I should skip around so if you have an opinion on that, I'm open to suggestion. And let me know if you think I should include additional background info or not. For example, for this post, I would tell you that I was going to Burris at this time and since I was sick, I was spending the week at my grandparents' house which was in Pendleton at the time. Enjoy.

As a sidenote, I'd like to wish a very happy 30th birthday to my good friend Soups!

The Social Network

I've been fairly annoyed over the last 2 weeks by people posting about The Social Network on the facebook because they think it's clever. It's not that clever. Now blogging about The Social Network, that takes some originality. As you may have guessed, I am currently watching The Social Network. I haven't been paying as close of attention as I probably should have been.

My initial reaction is that I feel a little old because I went to college in a pre-facebook world. (That and because Mark Zuckerberg is 2 years younger than me) From there I started thinking about how different college would have been if we'd had the facebook. Because facebook really did change everything. But it's not just facebook. Facebook was just one of the steps that brought us from a time of white board phone messages to Google Lattitude. You can't hide from people anymore. "Be back later" is no longer acceptable. If you want to talk to somebody, you expect to be able to reach them immediately regardless of where they are.

I was in Lafayette yesterday for my dad's birthday and my brother and his buddy were looking for a place to live next school year. I suggested they check the school paper because when I was in school that was the best place to find the houses that were rented by private landlords, as opposed to apartments that you might be able to find online to which Kyle's friend hilariously replied, "Did they even have the internet when you were in college?" this was his attempt at humor and it actually was a little funny because sometimes when I'm hanging out with my brother I get confused and think I'm 21, when in fact I'm almost almost 30, but after I thought about it the answer was barely. We did have the internet, but we were fresh off the You've Got Mail days of AOL with the brand new T1 lines in the dorms. So yeah, finding a place to live was different. When I went to Ball State, the school paper was still the best place to look to find a place to live. I should have realized that's not the case anymore (especially considering I have lived in and worked at apartment complexes for the last 9 years), but I'd never really thought about it like that before. So apparently that's not the way the kids are doing it these days. It's all on the internet. This shocking revelation led me to think about what else was different. Obviously (well I hope it's obvious), this is not the first time I've realized that things in today's facebook generation are different than they were when I was in college, but I started making a more deliberate mental list.

Going back to the dorms, every room still had a landline phone because people just didn't have cell phones. Freshmen at Ball State today wouldn't even be offended if I yelled 214* at them out the window of my car that I could park at my off-campus apartment while they were stuck walking to the football field in their attempt to get home for the weekend. A lot of things were a lot different than they are now. There was no facebook, no cell phones** which means no texting, I didn't get a DVD player until Christmas sophomore year and remember buying vhs tapes for our 13 in. TV/VCR combo in the dorm. There was also free 20 minute parking outside our dorms and a lot of buildings on campus. That was awesome and a thing of the past now.

And it all happened really fast. I started college in 2000. If you were in college in 1996, you were still leafing through the library writing research papers, but by 2004 every freshman is carrying a laptop to class. And the way it was in 1996 is how it had been for 50 years. I know this is not ground-breaking information, here, but when you really think about it, it's pretty crazy.

So I should probably re-watch the movie because I was way more into writing this and reliving the glory days in my head than in watching it, but my favorite part was when Mark Zuckerberg was being questioned about Facebook and he stopped them and said "It was called The Facebook back then". That's my joke! Except that it's not a joke because it really was The Facebook back then. Here's to the facebook changing the world.

*214 was the prefix of dorm phone numbers. My number was 214-0321. I don't believe that number is still working.

**My grandparents gave Lindsay and I a cell phone for Christmas my senior year of high school that we shared and used extremely sparingly. It was actually for emergencies. When I went to college, Lindsay kept that phone and I didn't have one of my own until sometime sophomore year.