Sticks And Stones...And Other Hard Things

     Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.

     That's a saying I grew up hearing all the time. It's a saying I took to heart and feel I'm a better person for it. I learned to develop a "thick skin" and not let what people might say to me have any real meaning. My parents taught me this. I can remember coming home and telling my mom that someone at school had been calling me names and taunting me. She told me that saying and that was the end of it. My parents didn't fly out to the school in an hysterical rage demanding that children be expelled from school, or that new rules be implemented to "reduce bullying".
     There weren't congressional hearings to determine if bullying is a national problem or not. Classmates who got picked on didn't commit suicide or go home and get a gun and shoot people in the school randomly. If you got teased, you taunted back, you got in a shoving match on the playground, or you just let it go and went on with your life.

     It seems like today kids have just gotten too "thin skinned". Anytime they get teased or bullied it's a horrifying crime that needs to be trumpeted on the evening news. The next time your child comes home and says they've been bullied at school...tell them sticks and stones may break your bones, but words will never hurt you, and if they get beaten with sticks and stones, tell them to fight back for GOD's sake!

Why only for poor children in "other" countries?

You're looking at an image of the XO-2. The second generation of the "one laptop per child" project. You know, where the poorest children of other countries are supposed to be able to get an affordable laptop so that they can learn and keep up with the rest of the world. The new version is a dual screen, touch-screen laptop that will be touted as an e-book reader that can hold up to 500 e-books. But which will also be able to be used as a computer with a virtual keyboard. My question is, why does this have to be targeted as something for children of "other" countries. Why not the children of this country?

Something like this would have been fantastic when my son was in school. He had to carry about 30 pounds of books back and forth to school every day. With something like this, at the beginning of each school year, he could have just downloaded all the books he needed for that year, and had one small, lightweight thing to carry from class to class. He could have taken notes on it, accessed encyclopedias...etc. Everyone knows that the public school systems in this country suck. Think about how much money, resources and time something like this could save our country if all our school-age children had access to something like this!