A co-worker informs me that a Santa Ana elementary school teacher has been charged with child endangerment for keeping a gun in her classroom.

“Well, that’s Santa Ana,” I say. “What do you expect from people? Not a day goes by that you can’t pick up an Orange County Register and read about a gang-related slaying in Santa Ana. If I were a teacher in Santa Ana, you best believe I’d be packing heat too. Thank god this kind of thing doesn’t happen in Irvine where I live.”

“There are Asian gangs in Irvine.”

“Asian gangs in Irvine?! What a racist you are. I’ve lived in Irvine for seven years and I’ve never seen or heard of any Asian gang activity. Unless studying for AP exams counts as a gang activity. Blowing their brains out with mathematical formulas . . .”

In more evidence of the growing popularity of USC’s undergraduate programs, the university recently was ranked in the top 10 “dream colleges” based on a Princeton Review survey of college applicants.

— USC News

FIGHT ON!

My son made the honor roll his first semester in high school. I’m very proud of him. He’s in a competitive (translation: high percentage of Asian kids) high school and he’s taking honors classes, where every kid thinks they should get an A but there aren’t enough A’s to go around.

An email went out to parents listing the Honor Roll kids. There are a lot of kids on the Honor Roll at this school.

They should send out a list of the kids who didn’t make the Honor Roll. It wouldn’t be much longer and it would teach the kids a good lesson: Work hard or be humiliated.

Another idea: Only kids taking honors classes would be eligible for the Honor Roll. All other kids would be eligible for the “Honor” (insert finger-quotes here) Roll.

“The boy I started tutoring in algebra a couple weeks ago,” I say, “his mom told me he got a C on his last test.”

“You’re fired,” my son says.

My wife stares at me in disbelief for a few seconds.

Finally she says, “That’s not your fault. You can only do so much in one hour a week.”

“Actually,” I say, “she thought that was great. It all depends on your expectations.”

If . . .

• you are able to get important things done
• you are seen learning things on your own
• you are seen trying to do things even if you aren’t sure how
• you share freely the things that you know
• you don’t hide your ignorance, but also don’t rest on it
• you honor what other people know
• you know more often than not how to find out what you don’t know
• you know how to ask for help
• you offer to help people on their own terms

Then . . .

• no one will care whether you succeed by learning or succeed by already knowing
• no one will care if you mess up occasionally because they assume you learn from it
• no one will mind if you forget (or don’t know) any given fact or method at any given time
• you will be treated as if you’re smart and useful, even though everyone knows you have a lot to learn

— Jonathan Bach, “Playing the Expert Game”

In December 2009 we will suffer a massive nationwide psychological depression. People assume that all of their problems can be blamed on George W. Bush personally. When the hated King Bush II has been back to Texas for a year and the beloved Obama has been in office for a year, people will look around for a quick status check. They will still be stuck in horrific traffic. They will still be paying insane prices for crummy housing in bleak, lonely communities. Their children will be getting a terrible education at the local public school, perhaps developing to about 15 percent of their potential. If in a hip urban area, criminals will still be smashing their car windows and taking their GPS. They will realize that virtually none of the things that are unpleasant about their life have anything to do with the federal government, except for the war in Iraq, which a quick check of the headlines will reveal that we are still losing.

— Philip Greenspun

It’s an old joke but does it ever really happen?

My son’s science homework for last night was to build some Lewis dots using Froot Loops. This morning, the dog ran out and managed to take a couple of bites of a Lewis dot before we were able to fend him off . . .

I’ve got here an email from the Irvine Public Schools Foundation (IPSF), soliciting online donations at the IPSF website.

Also on the website is a page listing the names of the IPSF board members, along with their corporate affiliation. Seven of the board members have no corporate affiliation and instead are given the tagline of “Community Leader.”

Question: What in the world is a Community Leader?!

How does one acquire such a designation, other than not having a real job?

Couldn’t we just identify them as Volunteers or Parents or Parent Volunteers, instead of making them out to be some sort of tribal chieftains?

Based on the one Community Leader that I actually know personally, I’d say a more appropriate label would be Community Nuisance or Gadfly.

And if you want your kid to know what to do when the principal says “Code Blue” over the intercom, move to Cleveland:

Students said they took cover in closets after the school principal announced a “Code Blue” on the intercom.

I just asked my own high school-age son if he knows what “Code Blue” means and he doesn’t know. In a health care setting, it means cardiac arrest, or more generically, imminent loss of life. So the day your kid comes home and tells you he learned what to do when the principal says “Code Blue” over the intercom is a good day to start looking for a new school.

Another gem from the freshman football mailing list . . .

Of the four high schools here in Irvine, only one — Irvine High — has a stadium on campus. There’s a movement afoot, led by local attorney and parent Emmett Raitt, to build a second stadium.

Here’s an excerpt from Emmett’s email suggesting that parents write to the school board about this matter:

The reasons a second stadium are needed include the elimination of Thursday night games, which lowers student attendance at games; it will ease the overcrowding of the Irvine Stadium facility (and particularly the snack bar, a personal favorite of mine); and it will allow all schools to use District facilities for their graduations, which they do not now do.

Hmmm . . . I can’t see how increasing student attendance is going to ease overcrowding, nor do I think the fact that some local fatso thinks there are too many people ahead of him in the snack bar line justifies spending $10 million on a new stadium.

Now here’s the follow-up email that came out from Rick Curtis, the varsity football coach at my son’s school, Northwood High:

I just read where the Huntington Beach district is putting in 2 new stadiums at Huntington Beach HS (8.5 million) and at Westminster (7.5 million). All Capo Valley Unified high schools have stadiums and each have field turf and all weather tracks at their schools.

All Saddleback Valley high schools have stadiums, except El Toro High School. Each high school also has field turf and all weather tracks at their schools (including El Toro High School).

We need to get to the school board meetings and we need to get organized. . . . These are the people that we are competing against and we are way behind in providing state of the art facilities for our student athletes.

All the districts that he mentions in the email are good academically, but they’re not in the same class as the Irvine district, which is the crème de la crème.

So here’s a no-cost solution:

• If you want your kid to get a top-notch education, live in Irvine.
• If you want a quick hot dog while your kid runs around on field turf, move to Saddleback Valley.
• If you want a quick hot dog in a brand new stadium, move to Huntington Beach.
• If you want a quick hot dog and corrupt administrators (allegedly), move to Capo Valley.

Problem solved!

My son’s just diagnosed and fixed a problem with my wife’s laptop PC . . .

“I should join the Northwood [his high school] Tech Squad,” he says, “with all the guys who tuck their shirts in.”

“That reminds me,” my wife says to him. “What clubs are you in at school?”

“What clubs am I in?” he says. “How about none?”

“You need to be in a club,” she says.

I say, “He’s in football and roller hockey.”

“He can be in those,” she says, “but he still needs to be in a club so he can get to know people.”

For some reason, this launches the boy into a Rodgers and Hammerstein tune . . .

“Getting to knooooow yooooou . . .”

“Can you look it up,” my wife says, “and see what clubs they have at Northwood?”

“No,” I say. “I’m busy.” Which I am.

“When can you do it?” she says.

“Why can’t you do it?”

“I need it by tomorrow.”

The boy’s now coming to the end of the stanza . . .

“. . . my cup of tea.”

How he knows that song so well, I have no idea, but maybe there’s a musical theater club we can get him into . . .

DemandDebate.com has new t-shirts for sale:

We were at my son Casey’s 8th grade graduation this morning when one of his teachers came up to me, obviously revved up about something, and asked, “Did you hear what happened at the assembly yesterday?”

From the breathless tone of his question, I assumed at the very least that someone had lost a limb.

“No,” I said, “what happened?”

He told me they had a performance by a street percussion group called Street Beat, and as part of the show, they asked for a couple of volunteers from the audience. Casey plays the drums, and a lot of kids were yelling and pointing at him to be selected, so he was.

What they did with the volunteers was, the Street Beat guys would play something and the kids would try to match it. My kid was able to match everything perfectly, the other kid wasn’t, so they sent the second boy back to his seat and invited Casey to sit in and jam with them on the next song.

Keep in mind this is street percussion, where they use found objects as instruments, so his “drum set” consisted of a gas tank, an upside-down bucket and a water-cooler-size water bottle.

According to the teacher, he was awesome! I wish I’d been able to see it. I’ve been to all of his activities and performances since birth. I noticed he got a lot of comments about it from kids who signed his yearbook.

So his junior high career had some ups and downs, but I’m glad he was able to close it out on a high note.

I asked him, “Did everyone go crazy when you finished, like in Napoleon Dynamite?”

“Sort of,” he said.

My son and I are watching a Citibank commercial in which a woman in Japan drops her son off for his first day of school.

As his mom starts to walk away, the boy looks back anxiously . . .

“What’s the Asian kid nervous about?” my son says. “He’s going to get better grades than the rest of the kids anyway. Oh wait, all the other kids are Asian too. Ouch.”

Last weekend, we had dinner at a Chinese place with some of my in-laws. As usual, my son and I were left at one end of the table to entertain ourselves while the rest of the group chatted with each other in Thai.

Near the end of the meal, the boy started reading through the fortune cookies and ad libbing the messages: “‘If you’re reading this, you’re most likely Asian, which means your mom will yell at you a lot.’ ‘This fortune cookie is stale. You’re not going to like it.’ ‘You will fulminate in 10 seconds.’”

“Fulminate?!” I said.

“It was one of my vocabulary words.”

As we’re driving home from a hockey tournament, my son and I see a car with a license plate frame that reads

“Is that the kind of thing they teach you at Dartmouth?” he asks.

“Apparently,” I say.

“Doesn’t seem very useful.”

“No, it doesn’t,” I have to admit.

My son’s having some trouble with 8th grade Algebra. When I work with him on it, I can see that he knows the material and he can do the calculations . . . his biggest problem is a fatalistic, let’s-get-it-over-with, I’m-no-good-at-math attitude, which leads to careless errors, and frustration if his first approach to a problem doesn’t work.

I encourage him to take a more positive attitude, to go into the next test saying positive things to himself, like “I know this material” and “I can handle these questions.”

“But I don’t know it,” he says. “Mrs. Bryant [his math teacher] throws the gyroball every pitch! And sometimes she hits me with it!”

What we have here is a classic self-fulfilling prophecy . . .

Pictures from my son’s 8th grade trip to Washington, DC.

On the heels of my kid’s discovery that his tour group will not be break dancing their way across our nation’s capital, comes another disappointment — his tyrannical math teacher has been added to the list of chaperones.

“She’ll probably say, ‘Oh, Casey, I’m glad you’re here. Why don’t you calculate the volume of the White House?’”

My son’s going to Washington, DC, next week with a group from his junior high school. Once there, they’ll hook up with a group from Martin Luther King High School for a 5 day, 4 night Discover DC educational tour.

Despite the name, MLK High School is not a predominantly black school, a big disappointment to my kid, who was looking forward to his travel companions “breaking out the cardboard mats and spinning on their heads.”

I Have a Dream, indeed!