Schools out in Fairfax

Last week, school was cancelled on Monday and Friday for all school in the Virginia school district of Fairfax. Apparently the district decided to cancel school because they had two unused snow days remaining. This must have been the teachers union's idea, since their goal is primarily to line the pockets of rich teachers. Faced with the awful prospects of an extra two days of learning, Fairfax did what all great institutions of learning do and shirked its duty to shape the minds of America's youth. I would guess that most of the expenses for a given day of school are overhead - cost of operating buildings, teachers salaries, etc. Fairfax probably saves almost no money by closing school, while also unburdening the minds of several thousands k-12 students from the rigors of compare and contrast essays, the life cycle of a plant, the color wheel and other life-building academic pursuits. Plus, parents has to find something to do with their children, take them to work or get a babysitter.

If this had happened when I was a kid, I would have been encouraged to spend 8 hours of unsupervised play at the nearby railroad tracks. A pair of busy rail lines ran right by my house and my parents frequently encouraged me to spend idle hours on those tracks, rather than indoors. I spent a good deal of my youth throwing rocks at trains and placing various organic matter on the tracks in anticipation of the inevitable mess. Years later, I found out that those rail lines were (and continue to be) used to ship nuclear waste from the Northeast to various points west. My parents were aware but apparently unconcerned.

When it was time to find a pet rock for a fourth grad science project, I naturally turned to my granite and steel beam playground in the hopes of finding the biggest rock that I could get away with bringing to class. Instead I found what appeared to be a small peice of irreglularly-shaped pumice. So I thought it was pumice, although there are no known volcanos in the midwest. Turns out it wasn't pumice - nor any other type of rock that we could identify amongst our rock classification system. I can only guess that this rock was either altered by years of exposure to high levels of radiation or was some sort of nuclear waste material. In any case, I didn't win the pet rock contest. It wasn't really a contest, but had it been, I might have learned something. Actually, probably not, but atleast I would have been in school that day, helping to reduce the per student class day costs of my district. Fairfax could learn a valuable lesson from this story - although the teachers union probably has a clause in their contract that prevents the district from learning from its mistakes.