Walmart says that back-to-school sale on rifles was a prank.

"We have definite proof it was a prank," Walmart spokesman Charles Crowson told The Associated Press regarding the following sign caught by a Twitter user:

uhhhh @Walmart we need to talk pic.twitter.com/Fwb4UdXf1D

— sara (@thisbemesara) August 9, 2017

Yet, according to the Chicago Tribune, "[Crowson] wouldn't say where the image had been made — only that the mystery had been solved." The Tribune also notes that Crowson wouldn't divulge what evidence Walmart had that the signage was a prank. In essence, we're to take his word for it, because no major company would ever lie to cover a public relations mishap. Nevvvver.

Listen, where's a grade schooler going to get their affordably priced weaponry for the first day of school if Walmart doesn't step forward? Ever since Target stopped selling nunchucks and billy clubs for the kids, it's been nearly impossible.

Heading back to school? Walmart doesn't want you to forget the important stuff...

Forget the fidget spinners. You can't deny the low-low back to school prices on rifles.

uhhhh @Walmart we need to talk pic.twitter.com/Fwb4UdXf1D

— sara (@thisbemesara) August 9, 2017

Walmart's headquarters says they're looking into which store had the promotion on firearms.

They shouldn't worry, though. This reminds me when Kmart did a Black Friday special on shivs and prison shanks.

Report: Nearly half of London's students have not been to a theater or seen Shakespeare.

Despite living in the same city that William Shakespeare wrote many of his plays and saw them enacted, a new report from London's Social Mobility Commission says that almost half of London's students haven't been to a theater to see a play, never mind The Globe Theater reconstructed to showcase the Bard's work.

In the past decade, The Globe Theater--through donations by Deutsche Bank--has had 150,000 London students see a Shakespeare play free of charge, with 20,000 alone visiting in the past year treated to see The Taming of the Shrew.

The study showed that specifically 44% of students had never seen a theatrical performance. Indeed, Georghia Ellinas, head of learning at Globe Education, told the BBC, "We hear from teachers that some London school students who come to the Globe, living only two or three miles away, have never seen the Thames before."

The reason seems to stem from an income gap, where poorer students and their families can't afford the discretionary income required to see the theater, never mind the cost of traveling public transportation for the six mile round trek.

The Social Mobility Commission looked into various activities and income gap issues, and found it wasn't just the theater, per BBC:


"It found that trips to the theatre, galleries, the cinema or the zoo were all more likely for wealthier families - with the likelihood of such visits rising and falling in a way directly linked to family income."


I'm not sure how Shakespeare would have taken this to know seeing a hyena exhibit or checking out the next Fast and Furious entry are as difficult for many to see than one of his plays.

Does this mean Vin Diesel = Shakespeare?

At least in one sense.

The first public school in America finally named its first minority headmaster.

Boston Latin High School was founded in 1635 as the first high school in the United States. In its nearly 400-years of existence, it has never had someone of any minority race actually be its headmaster. I assume they don't like to rush into things.

This past week, though, the school announced that Rachel Skerrit, a former graduate and African-American, would become the next headmaster. This is great news for a school that in recent years has shown faculty to have developed a culture and create issues with bias against non-white students.

A new headmaster is something. Baby steps to be sure, but a change in the right direction on a long road to walk.

In essence, Chicago and its schools hate their librarians.

The city that hates librarians!

The city of Chicago has many troubling issues on its plate these days. Whether it's a soaring murder rate, budget troubles, corruption accusations being flung with abandon, or trying to survive another Midwestern winter, the city is having a rough time. Now, problems have affected the school system as well.

Budget woes and contract negotiations with the teacher's union has led to one major area of the local school to lose an important staff member: the school librarian.

According to Southside Weekly and DNA Info, things look dire for the 2016/2017 school year:


2016:  157 librarian positions budgeted for the school year, serving 652 elementary and high schools.
2015:  217 librarian positions / 652 schools
2014:  252 librarian positions / 652 schools
2013:  313 librarian positions / 652 schools
2012:  454 librarian positions / 652 schools


Even my keen lack of knowledge in mathematics and statistics suggests we have an ongoing trend.

The dwindling number of librarians isn't a simple issue. Multiple problems are at play. One is that the state of Illinois requires all school librarians to be a certified teacher as well. Likewise, as a way to handle growing class sizes with budget shortfalls, librarians are often being moved to the classroom instead. This leaves libraries closed to the students because no one left is certified to teach and be a librarian, per that Illinois law. Thus, elementary and high school students are denied access to a wealth of information at the very place they're supposed to be educated.

Further compounding the issue is that some schools, like the Pritzker Elementary School, have parents volunteering to staff the library so it can be opened. That pesky Illinois law is one hurdle in the way for the parents, but the teachers union is yet another.

The teachers union fears allowing an all-volunteer library staff means fewer potential jobs for their employees, as well as a bargaining chip for the city and state looking to slash budgets even more than they already have.

Another head-shaking angle to this situation is that the teachers union argues that 75% of schools with an African-American student body majority were lacking a school librarian, and therefore no school library access was available--yet only 16% of schools with a minority of African-American students faced such a crisis.

Last month, Pritzker Elelmentary--found in Chicago's tony Wicker Park area--found itself over budget, and made the decision to cut their school librarian, too.

This hasn't gone over well with parents, who have taken to writing op-eds in the Wall Street Journal, of all places, demanding Pritzker's school library be opened and staffed with such volunteer parents. (Of course, the parent penning the op-ed was a lawyer. "Chicago issue? Probably best to publish that in a New York newspaper!"--said no one ever, except a lawyer.)

What's Chicago's plan to rectify the situation? Sadly, absolutely nothing. When people are being gunned down every day in your streets, or mentally challenged people are being beat on Facebook Live, strangely enough, there are priorities at play for the people of Chicago.

And, right now, that priority isn't whether school libraries should be open.

Born poor, born remote, born long ago, but born with a desire for knowledge.

A two minute video of a Nepalese gentleman who, at 69-years old, went back to school and is in the 10th grade.

The real highlight might not be that he went back to school. It might be the smooth soccer moves this man has for his age. I'm half his age and just felt a hamstring pull.

Plus, it should be noted, that's a world class beard.

Half naked men toss crocodiles into a school office in a town called Humpty Doo.

In what sounds like the plot to a Shel Silverstein poem being written on an LSD bender, five half naked men were caught on surveillance video tossing three crocodiles into a school administration office at 5am in the Australian Northern Territories town of Humpty Doo. In other words, another average day in the Outback.

The men ransacked the office, apparently grabbed nothing at all except a computer screen, and ran off, but not before locking the crocodiles in the office so they would greet employees later that morning.





This happened at Taminmin College, a small secondary school that serves grades 7-12 in the tiny, rural, desert community of 8,700. Their website is currently making no mention of the shenanigans or worldwide fame, as apparently viral marketing isn't taught at the school.

Police have no concrete motivation behind the crime, because sometimes there is no motivation. Sometimes there's just Australia.




In case you're wondering, no one has any solid proof how the town got its name. Some claim its from World War One slang, others from Aboriginal language terms, and yet others say it's based on a colloquialism. No one knows for certain, not even the town officials.

How does that even happen? I assume everyone in the desert oasis town is huffing bath salts or in the throes of heat stroke. At some point you just have to accept crazy happens.

100-year old Massachusetts woman finally becomes a high school graduate.

Clare Picciuto has lived a long life and a good life. One hundred years long, to be exact, which means she was just a teenager when the Great Depression began.

When the Depression started, Picciuto's family told her she had to quit school and get a job to support the family. According to Boston's WCVB, Picciuto's brothers were allowed to go to school, but not her--and that didn't sit well with Clare. "I didn't like it, because women should have education, too," Picciuto told the station.

Lacking formal education while she worked sewing curtains in a factory, Picciuto turned to encyclopedias and the dictionary and became self-taught.

"We'd pick up another big word and we'd find the meaning of it. And I tried to speak well if I could," she said--which, should be noted, she spoke well.

As her 100th birthday approached, Picciuto's daughter, Deborah, sought out the local school district and told them of the circumstance.

North Reading (MA) Public Schools Superintendent Jon Bernard presented Clare with her high school graduation tassels and a diploma while she busied herself with a bingo game.

"I told her that, in my opinion, her life experiences alone had earned her the honor tassel and diploma," Bernard said. "Clare was so articulate, sharp and positive. She is truly representative of all the things we should aspire to be."

When read the decree of being awarded her diploma, Clare mentioned it felt good, sat in joy, beamed and said, "I graduated!"

Nah. She graduated in those factories all those decades ago. The world is just catching up to her now.




Photo: WCVB

British teenage boys are sweaty, fashionable.

There's a 95% chance that wherever you are reading this in the world your body is slowly devolving into a gelatinous puddle from the summer of 2016. Teenage boys in Great Britain feel you. Or they would, that is, if they didn't feel like they were going to keel over from heatstroke first.

Uniforms are required at the Longhill High School in Rottingdean, East Sussex, which led to nearly twenty boys swapping out their long, heavy pants for their school gym shorts after a recent heat wave.

This is England though, where a love of elderly women wearing tiaras is only matched by a national sense of schadenfreude--so the shorts-adorned boys were told to wear pants, sent home, or kept in isolation all day at school.

According to the BBC, the boys were told that they needed to "wear any part of the agreed school uniform." In a genius move, four boys came to school the next day wearing the school approved skirts for girls, which flummoxed Kate Williams, the head teacher. She allowed it. As a result, ten additional boys joined in wearing the school approved skirt the following day in an act of solidarity and/or cooled gams.

The Argus, a local newspaper, quotes Williams' subtle displeasure. "Students have access to water in order to keep themselves hydrated," she said. "We have made reasonable steps to ensure that classrooms are as comfortable as possible."

Hydration = Least enthusiastic air conditioning method ever. Remember that, kids. Don't start asking for ice now or whatnot. This isn't France.

Political plagiarism as a teachable moment.

By now we all know Melania Trump channeled her inner 14-year old high school freshman and played a little verbal Freddy Fast Fingers with her speech at the Republican National Convention the other night.

In it, Trump plagiarized Michelle Obama's Democratic National Convention speech eight years earlier. Words and phrases like hard work, American dream, values--yada, yada, yada--the sort of political speech making where nothing but white noise is said, but it's an easy sell. Americans love a good fairy tale, regardless of political affiliation.

Which leads us to the teachable moment that has American teachers giddy with excitement. They can teach popularized plagiarism! The BBC reached out to various teachers, including Brad Francis, an English teacher at Davis Middle School in Evanston, Wyoming.

"Melania's speech is probably the most blatant example that I have ever seen," Francis told the BBC. "Eighth grade students need very literal examples, and her speech is basically verbatim to Michelle Obama's. It will help them learn absolutely what not to do in their writing."

Admittedly, Francis might need to learn a little bit of nuance. The speech is absolutely a case of plagiarism, but the entire thing isn't "basically verbatim." Francis would get a C+ grade for such hyperbole and exaggeration in his argument.

"I have students who try to copy and paste material from the internet all the time to pass it off as their own," Francis continued telling the BBC. "That speech was Michelle Obama's intellectual property."

The real disappointing angle that's falling through the cracks with all of this is that two different political parties actually wanted to claim that feeble and uninspired speech as either intellectual or property.

Tired of math homework? A new app can read your handwriting and solve equations for you.

According to the company's website, "Mathpix is the world's first technology that can read pictures of your handwritten math. Simply take a photo, crop your equation of interest, and you instantly get solutions and plots." And, as the app's lead developer told the website Motherboard, the app's "algorithms get smarter over time as we get data from users."

This is crippling news to math nerds everywhere who for years have run illicit black market homework "help" in the shady corners of high schools and your lesser known Panera Bread locations. How will the geek shakedown continue if math illiterates can turn to an app now?

Sure, jocks and drama club enthusiasts alike will still fail their math finals when all technology has to be put away. But let's focus on the positive here! The math nerd monopoly has been broken!

Time for that annual story of a person graduating school without ever missing a day.

Hannibal, MO, high school senior Philip Dauma is graduating without ever having missed a day of school. He credits his grandmother for visiting his house and cooking him breakfast--whatever breakfast he wanted--as one reason he never missed school.

"Sure, I went to school with a stuffy nose or a sore throat, but I never went with chicken pox or something that would make somebody else sick," Dauma told CNN.

Sigh.

If anything, at least we know the next flu pandemic that wipes out half the world's population will probably find Missouri as ground zero.

Thirteen Detroit principals charged with bribery in alleged kickback scheme.

A vendor named Arthur Shy allegedly paid bribes to over a dozen principals in the Detroit school system in order to charge the district for school supplies they never received.

According to the charges, Shy paid the principals $900,000. In return, Shy allegedly charged the district over $5 million for supplies, of which over $2.7 million was fraudulent.

Now, you might be thinking, "Isn't Detroit desperately broke? Aren't many of Detroit's schools crumbling and badly in need of repair? Are people really this corrupt to shaft children?"

Yes.

Yes.

And yes.

A fire-breather, standing on an inflated bouncy house ramp, accidentally injures twenty people at high school pep rally.

Even Smokey doesn't know what to say.

Officials at a south Florida high school claim that--

Never mind. Florida. That's all you really need to know.

The only real development here is you expect this sort of behavior from panhandle citizens, not south Florida folk.

New York City's elite public high schools are not a hotbed of racial and ethnic diversity.

There are nine "specialized public high schools" in New York City for either the "academically or artistically gifted" student. Eight of those schools require an admissions test. One, LaGuardia High School, which is more arts-based, requires an audition.

According to a report, those nine public high schools have appallingly horrible rates of racial diversity representing the city of which they are a part.

Of the eight schools that require testing, students identifying as African-American or black made up 3% of accepted students. Those identifying as Latino or Hispanic made up just 5%. When you consider New York City is made up of 70% of people identifying from those racial and ethnic backgrounds, this would seem like a tiny, slight imbalance.

At lower Manhattan’s Stuyvesant High School, considered the city's best public high school, nine African-American/black students were accepted for the next academic year, compared to 178 white students and 682 Asian students.

Time to pause. Those numbers might have blended in a paragraph for you, but this is important. Here it is again.

9 African-American/black students
178 white students
682 Asian students

...all accepted into next year's class at a public school.

If you're not sure whether grimacing, scowling, or awkwardly sighing is the right reaction to such a statistic, all three at once is acceptable!

Until you learn that Stuyvesant High School is a downright racial utopia. Why? At Staten Island Technical High School, another of the testing eight, not a single African-American/black student was accepted. Not one. Zero. Nada. Zilch.

0.

This is New York City we're talking about, not Salt Lake City.

This is a city where over 27,000 students took the specialized admissions test, a test with almost a 20% acceptance rate, better than most Ivy League and "second tier" colleges--and, this can't be noted enough, is still a public institution representing the city these schools exist within--a city that is 70% black or Latino. This is a city where the link to the city's specialized schooling website shows photos of six students on the page and four of the six appear to be either black or Latino. It's bad when stock website photography for a specialized school is more accepting than the actual specialized public school.

It's not just a New York City issue. It happens in every major city at their own "specialized" high schools. Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, and so on. Despite the obvious statistics, the moral outrage (hey!), nothing will be done to solve this. Politicians and school administrators and colleges and universities will pay wonderful lip service to say a change needs to be done. Studies will be commissioned. A movement will begin.

And the cameras and microphones will be put away. And there's another story to cover. And we forget. And we move on.

And, still, barely a single black or Latino kid will be admitted to an elite public school in the city of New York.

23-year old Russian pretends to be high school honors student.

Artur Samarin came to America four years ago and, for reasons unknown, decided to pretend to be a Pennsylvania high school student by the name of Asher Potts, which he did successfully. Very successfully. According to CBS News:


[Samarin was] a member of the National Honor Society. Samarin was actively involved at the school, working with a student advisory group on a food bank, and he was a member of the school's ROTC and Naval Sea Cadet programs.


Samarin was arrested and charged with, among other things, identity theft, even though he didn't steal anyone's identity. He simply created one.

The real crime here is he decided to go with Asher as a name. That's only acceptable if you want to sing bad pop music or be a reality TV star--not if you want to be a stellar high school student.

49 schools are getting free 3D carving machines.

Potentially not a real place.

A company called Inventables manufactures 3D carving machines. Like the much heralded 3D printers that are turning heads, 3D carving machines create various products out of blocks of source material. Wood, metal, plastic, and wax can each be turned into guitars, cabinets, dolls, and a really killer wannabe Yankee Candle.

Zack Kaplan, who founded Inventables, wanted to donate one machine (which costs anywhere from $1,000 to $2,000) to a school in every state in America. 586 schools from 49 states submitted videos or written pleas looking for a machine, of which 49 lucky grade schools or high schools will be chosen.

The one state missing?

Delaware.

No school from Delaware is receiving a machine because no school from Delaware submitted a proposal. This is okay, because the vast majority of you probably have never heard of Delaware anyway. It contributes so little to this country, you might have assumed it was the name to some indie rock band out of northern California or a type of plastic cutlery sold at Target. "Honey, get the Dixie Cups and Delaware for the picnic!"

Delaware is like Nebraska if Nebraska lost weight, added a coastline, and became a pale actuary who drinks rice milk. And, mind you, Nebraska is about as thrilling as Benedictine monks chanting--and yet it is still more exciting than Delaware. Nebraska is the white rice and oyster crackers of states. But Delaware? A Peter, Paul, and Mary concert was a live wire of action in comparison.

Delaware didn't have a single school submit for a 3D printer because there's a good chance every citizen of Delaware is a cardboard cutout of a door-to-door insurance salesperson that can only be made by a 3D carving machine first.

That's right.

Think about it.

Teen boys wear women's clothes to protest school ban.

Teen boys donned dresses and teen girls wore men's clothes in Clovis, CA, in protest of rules upheld by the local school board dictating a dress code.

The Clovis Unified school board voted to maintain a decade-long outline that specifically states dresses are solely worn by women and girls, and forbids boys from having long hair and earrings. The students argue this stance is discriminatory against many, including those who are transgender, and intend to fight the decision by dressing however they please, as this photo shows:

The cast of 'Reality Bites' reunites!

Clovis Unified Trustee Richard Lake is quoted as saying, "a woman's a woman and a man's a man, and there's a difference."

He's right! Men have testes and women have ovaries! I just looked it up! Some people even have both sex organs! Look up endocrinology if you're bored sometime. It's an extensive world regarding the vast complexities of hormones.

But that doesn't explain why clothes--which are simply just sewn pieces of fabric assigned social codes--somehow dictate who's a man and who's a woman. Clothes are only defined by the standards and mores individuals and society levy upon the inanimate objects that woven fabric actually is. It's not a difficult concept.

The silliest thing about all of this?

In order to "swap" genders, all the Clovis students somehow dressed like the cast of an early 1990's romantic comedy. If you squint closely, I swear Ethan Hawke and Janeane Garfalo are in the photo above.

Teachers are banning 'boring' words while tripping up on themselves.

Leilen Shelton, a middle school teacher in Costa Mesa, CA, wrote a manual in 2009 called Banish Boring Words, which has sold 80,000 copies. Shelton--and other English teachers--have taken up the cause of to deter their students from using a wide array of words, chief amongst them being the likes of said, good, nice, fun, and thing.

"There are so many more sophisticated, rich words to use," Shelton told the Wall Street Journal, potentially unaware that nearly every award-winning writer for the past 200 years has used said habitually. "‘Said’ doesn’t have any emotion. You might use barked. Maybe howled. Demanded. Cackled. I have a list," said (aww, man) Shelton.

And she's not alone with having a list. The Journal notes that the Powell River Board of Education in British Columbia has a list of 397 alternatives to said alone. Robert C. March, a high school teacher in Atkins, NC, has a list of 26 specific words he bans, including I, we, you, me, so, it, and why--and if a student uses any of those 26 words in a paper he will deduct 5-points immediately. March also bans all contractions.

I'm getting a headache just trying to keep it all straight, and I have a degree in writing. (Wait--is 'I'm' a 5-point deduction for the contraction, or 10-points because it includes 'I'?)

But it gets better when you look at the specifics.

March writes on his own site regarding his policy, "Any banned word, or contraction, that appears in a work submitted to me will count as -5 (minus five) points off the total grade."

Submitted to me.

So March deducts 5-points from himself, right? Not so easy, is it??

What do writers know? I guess The Beatles get a 565-point deduction for writing this song:








The Rock Band video game version was the only sensible take on the song. Thanks, Youtube!

Japanese teenager is more talented than us, has messy room.

A seventeen-year old Japanese high school student who goes by the name Mozu has released a random collection of photos that, at first glance, look like random slices of Japanese life. A messy bedroom, for instance:

That wannabe Swiffer in the corner probably hasn't been touched in a few years.

Except all this is fake. No, you're not tripping on some e.coli from Chipotle.

It's all a 1/6 scale model of his bedroom.

He has an array of photos showing his absurd skill on his Twitter account, where you, too, can be humbled at your own lack of artistic talent.

At least we all can admit the similarity in that we all lived in a pig sty as a teenager.