107-2 — Bloomington South girls basketball team beats Arlington — ESPN

They gave up two points?! Who’s coaching the defense, Mike D’Antoni?

According to a new survey, just over 10 percent of Berkeley High ninth and 11th graders reported carrying a weapon onto school property, while about 35 percent of 11th graders reported attending class drunk or high.

If I had a kid at Berkeley High, I’d be moving out of town yesterday, but I’m reading in the Daily Californian that this news has been “met with surprise and joy from administrators,” the reason being that a similar survey two years ago reported about 17 percent of ninth graders and 16 percent of 11th graders carrying weapons onto campus, and 48 percent of 11th graders attending class drunk or high.

Progress!

“We’re very pleased with the survey results all around,” said Director of Student Services Susan Craig, “and at the same time we’re not at all complacent.”

If by “pleased” she means “horrified,” I couldn’t agree more.

In other news, Barack Obama got more than 90 percent of the Berkeley vote in the recent presidential election, while Mitt Romney got 4.6 percent and Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate, got 3.2 percent.

The liberal voter looks to government to solve problems that many people prefer to take on themselves, like raising their children.

[See You in Hell is a feature by our guest blogger, Satan -- PE]

Modesto police are investigating if there’s a criminal case against a former high school teacher who resigned his job to move into an apartment with an 18-year-old girl he met while teaching.

James Hooker, 41, was placed on administrative leave Feb. 3 by Modesto City Schools and resigned less than three weeks later, according to a report at the Modesto Bee.

The newspaper reports that the man, who had taught business and computer classes, left his wife and children, to move in with Jordan Powers, an Enochs High School senior whom he met when she was a freshman at the school. One of Hooker’s children also attends the same high school.

“In making our choice, we’ve hurt a lot of people,” Hooker told the Bee. “We keep asking ourselves, ‘Do we make everyone else happy or do we follow our hearts?’”

— Calif. teacher resigns after leaving family for student

Follow your heart, you magnificent selfish bastard!

Follow it right out the front door of the family home and into a Modesto apartment with a high school girl whose poor single mom, from the looks of the photo, couldn’t afford to buy her a set of braces.

DON’T LOOK BACK!

And make yourselves available for interviews and photo ops. YES! YES! YES!

(Let me add parenthetically that, despite what you may have heard, being raised by a single parent does not screw kids up in the head and more people should be doing it.)

One of your own kids goes to the same high school as your new live-in girlfriend?! Oh, the collateral damage is going to be prodigious!

Wait — I’m now being informed that the two of you appeared on Good Morning America this morning?!

Brilliant move, Romeo! A sane person would have said, “No, I think I’ve done enough damage already,” let things play out as just a local scandal in the backwater of Modesto, and missed out on the opportunity to traumatize everyone involved at a national level.

If this doesn’t result in at least one suicide, then my name is not Satan.

See you in Hell, professor.

Gary Carter (Photo credit: AxsDeny)

Gary Carter obituary: Baseball Hall of Fame catcher dies at 57

— latimes.com

Gary Carter and I went to the same high school — Sunny Hills High School in Fullerton, CA.

My freshman yearbook has a picture of a Carter as a senior. Or another way to look at it is that Gary Carter’s senior yearbook has a picture of me as a freshman.

That’s all I have on this.

RIP Gary Carter.

I keep hearing that there aren’t enough women in technology, like this is a problem. The most obvious explanation is that women don’t want to work in technology. If they want to work in other fields, fine. If they want to raise their kids, even better.

I did some tutoring for a girl taking AP Computer Science. She’s a junior in high school and wants to be a veterinarian. Afterwards, she told her dad, “If I decide not to be a veterinarian, maybe I’ll be a programmer.”

Don’t let it be said that I’m not doing my part to address the shortage of women in technology, even though I think it’s baloney . . .

Thus spoke The Programmer.

Here’s a photo of some of the students who scored 800 on sections or subject tests of the SAT at Wilson High School in Hacienda Heights.

What do they have in common? Does anything jump out at you?

Either Asian kids are just genetically superior with regard to intelligence, or Amy Chua should replace Dr. Spock on the parenting bookshelf . . .

A girl who’s going to be a senior at Northwood came over to the house this morning to borrow my son’s AP U.S. History study guide. He took the class last year.

Last night, he told his mom to wake him up at 8:30.

At 9 this morning, there was a knock on the front door. The boy pulled on a baseball cap, took out his retainer, pasted a big smile on his face and answered it.

He gave the book to the girl and she gave him a doughnut.

When she left, he went back to bed.

“Wake me up at 11:30,” he said to his mom.

“What are you going to do in college when I’m not there to wake you up?” she asked.

“I’ll be fine.”

His mom and I have been waking him up for 18 years.

The past few days, he’s started setting an alarm on his iPhone that sounds like the dive alarm on a submarine. It wakes me up on the opposite side of the house through a closed door, but he’s slept right through it twice. He’s a sound sleeper.

The first time it woke me up, I thought it was a car alarm, then I realized it was coming from inside the house. I walked down to his room and he was sleeping with the alarm going off less than a foot from his face.

I’m not worried about him waking up for class though. That alarm is going to wake up the entire dorm, so one way or another, he’s going to wake up.

Don’t be fooled by the title into thinking that you’re going to see pictures of the whole team. No, it’s just my kid . . .

Unlike highly recruited athletes, kids who are highly recruited academically don’t get to go on TV and turn over hats so everyone knows what college they’re going to.

Northwood doesn’t have highly recruited athletes, so there’s a Facebook site where they can check in and state their college choice.

Also unlike athletes, who are evaluated on a 5-star scale, Northwood students are evaluated on a 3-star scale, according to the commencement program that I have right here in front of me:

*** = Highest honors (4.3 GPA or above)
 ** = High honors (4.0 or above, but below 4.3)
  * = Honors (Not sure; close to a 4.0 but not quite there)

It looks like Cal got the best recruiting class this year with three 3-star prospects and no one lower than 2 stars. USC and Stanford each got one 3-star recruit, as did Harvard and Yale.

To the kids going to Cal: GO BEARS!

To the kids going to USC: FIGHT ON!

To the kids going to Stanford: CONGRATULATIONS DORKS!

To everyone else: BETTER LUCK NEXT TIME!

And to the girls below: I don’t know you but you made me laugh . . .

Time passes. Listen. Time passes. . . .

— Dylan Thomas, Under Milk Wood

Unlike Paul Cézanne, I didn’t spend hours setting this up. I captured it just the way it looked when I came downstairs this morning.

As one chapter ends, another begins. For the kids — most of them — the next chapter is college; for the parents, old age and death.

Happy Thursday, everybody!

Last day of high school. Can’t believe it’s all over. No more “what’s due tomorrow?”

The boy has a clock radio but he never sets it because he likes to sleep with the radio on. Yes, we probably should have made him get an alarm clock to encourage responsibility and self-reliance, but we didn’t. His mom and I have been waking him up for school for 13 years and this morning was the last time we’ll do that.

My son, a high school senior, says, “Guess what I’m doing in school tomorrow?”

I venture a guess: “Learning things.”

“No. It’s actually a trick question. I’ve got a free period, then another free period, then a movie.”

“I hope I’m getting a tax refund for this nonsense.”

The Irvine high schools — Northwood and University — have prom tonight. Our boy goes to Northwood but he’s attending the Uni prom with a girl from that fine institution.

I met her. She seems nice. She’s going to Stanford in the fall. Our boy is going to Cal. Opposites attract.

Today is also the girl’s birthday, so the boy is paying for dinner.

“Did you see a birth certificate or a drivers license verifying that today is really her birthday?” I ask him. “Not to suggest that women are looking to take advantage of a man if he lets his guard down, but did you see the birth certificate or drivers license?”

Woodbridge and Irvine High — the weak links in the Irvine chain of education — may have prom tonight too, I don’t know. Nobody cares about those schools.

My kid played his last high school concert last night. The last piece was a mambo number that showcased the percussion section. People got a chance to see their musicianship, that they’re not just kids who hit things because they can’t play a real instrument.

There were four Northwood groups performing, followed by an orchestra from Mt. SAC. It was a long program and we decided to leave after the last high school group.

In the parking lot, a bus driver standing next to his vehicle asked us in an Eastern European accent, “Is the concert over?”

“No,” I said. “There’s one more group.”

“The college!” he said.

“Right.”

“I brought them!” he said proudly. “You not going to listen to them? They good!”

He was almost beside himself with disbelief.

“Yeah, no,” I said, “but thanks for making us feel bad about ourselves.”

My kid plays his last high school hockey game(s) tonight — semis at 7, finals (maybe) around 9.

My son comes back from watching African Cats for “field hours” . . .

“How was the movie?” I ask.

“Pretty good. Samuel L. Jackson was narrating it.”

“He was? Did he say ‘Get these motherf-ing cats off this motherf-ing plain’?”

“No.”

“‘Plain’ — get it? A flat expanse of land?”

It has come to my attention that Northwood High kids can get “field hours” for Environmental Science by visiting zoos and watching movies at the Spectrum.

How lame is that? Shouldn’t they have to rescue a seagull or something?

My kid is in San Francisco with a Northwood High musical group. Among the chaperones is the school principal. We don’t like her. More on that later.

“Avoid the temptation to push her in front of a cable car,” I advised the boy.

“Why?” he asked.

“Well . . .” Now I had to think of something. “Because her fat ass would derail the thing, costing innocent people their lives.”

A large group of kids from the music program at Northwood High School are traveling to San Francisco next week. Half are flying up on United and half are flying on Southwest.

As you probably know, Southwest doesn’t charge for checked luggage. United does.

Each kid on the United flight will give his or her suitcase to a “baggage buddy” on the Southwest flight. Each Southwest kid will check two bags while each United kid will check none.

Using this arrangement on both legs of the trip cuts the travel cost by $3,500.

Somewhere in America, a boy — a high school senior, college bound — says to his mom, “You don’t need to renew my magazine subscriptions because I won’t be living here anymore.”

His mom, who already knows this but is momentarily stunned by the clarity of it, starts to say, “When you have a three-day weekend, come and visit us” but can’t get through it without crying . . .