Serendipity

I promise you cannot read these and not laugh out loud! These are real notes written from parents in a Mississippi school district. (Spellings have been left intact.) **************************************************************** My son is under a doctor's care and should not take P.E. today. Please execute him. Please excuse Lisa for being absent. She was sick and I had her shot. Dear School: Please ekscuse John Henry being absent on  Jan. 28 , 29, 30, 31, 32, and also 33 Please excuse Gloria Jean from Jim today. She is administrating Please excuse Roland from P.E. for a few days. Yesterday he fell out of a tree and misplaced his hip. John has been absent because he had two teeth taken out of his face. Carlos was absent yesterday because he playing football. He hurt in the growing part. Ethel Pearl could not come to school today because she has been bothered by very close veins. Please xcuse LeRoy from school, he ain't got no rain cot and it was missing rain. ...

Every week we are bombarded in the media with articles about teachers going too far in one way or another. For some time though, they have been mostly about teachers that have done the unthinkable: gotten into some kind of romantic and/or sexual affair with a student.  This morning though, I came across an article about a teacher who is also a coach, that went too far in a different way: making "insensitive and vulgar comments in front of students and players", as well as picking on the students that have come down with the mystery illness at Le Roy school in upstate NY. It seems that his insensativity led him to make up a chant while his basketball team (York) was playing against Le Roy's that went:    “One, Two, three, Tourette’s!” And supposedly this was said in the locker room and not on the basketball court. Falk reportedly qualified his ‘joke,’ telling his players, “I’m just kidding.” Well, his kidding cost him...he was removed from the coach pos...

There are still no answers forthcoming as to what has caused 19 students in LeRoy, NY to develop uncontrollable twitching. In the past week, a new theory was suggested: that social media is to blame. As a form of mass hysteria, experts are now suggesting that the use of Facebook and other various forms of social media are spreading these symptoms through the students like wildfire. According to  Dr. Laszlo Mechtler , chief of neurology at the Dent Neurologic Institute in Buffalo, these students know each other...some are best friends...their bodies are picking up these symptoms and it's going from one student to the next and on to the next. That means that the brain is actually subconsciously mimicking the twitching felt by others. While the exact neurologic pathway is still unclear, researchers believe the common factor is stress and anxiety. Mechtler emphasized that the girls are not faking their twitching. And it all comes back to the original ideas that this is part ...