Teacher Accused Of Wizardry

LAND O' LAKES -- A Florida substitute teacher said his job disappeared after he did a magic trick in front of his students.

Substitute teacher Jim Piculas made a toothpick disappear, then reappear, in front of a classroom at Rushe Middle School in Land O'Lakes.

The Pasco County School District said the trick is just one of the reasons Piculas was let go.

"I get a call the middle of the day from head of supervisor of substitute teachers. He says, 'Jim, we have a huge issue. You can't take any more assignments. You need to come in right away.' I said, 'Well Pat, can you explain this to me?' 'You've been accused of wizardry.' Wizardry?" Piculas said.

Piculas says the parent of a traumatized student complained after he performed the toothpick trick.

The assistant superintendent said Piculas had other issues, such as not following lesson plans and allowing students to play on computers that were not approved....

Reading between the lines, my guess is that what happened is:

1. The substitute teacher was goofing around with the class a bit, either out of laziness or in an attempt to establish a rapport.

2. One of the parents complained about the act of "wizardry" that had "traumatized" (did they actually say that, or is this something that got interjected by the article writer?) their kid.

3. The superintendant took the path of least resistance and let the teacher go.

4. After the story got out and the ridicule started to come in, the superintendant raised point #1 (which normally would have been ignored as nothing ususual) as the real justification for the dismissal.

Swiss experts say plants have rights too

A report by the government-appointed Federal Ethics Committee on Non-Human Biotechnology (ECNH) described interfering with plants without a valid reason as "morally inadmissible".

The committee looked at ethical views held on plants and issues of how their use could be justified.

t said that from a wider perspective, "all action involving plants for the preservation of the human race was morally justified"....

Well, that last part is certainly reassuring.


 

By way of grayhawkfh 's LJ:

Camelot pulls scratchcard amid numerical anarchy

Camelot has withdrawn its short-lived "Cool Cash" scratchcard after it required a higher than absolute zero grasp of how numbers work to understand it.

According to the Manchester Evening News, to qualify for a prize, punters had to "scratch away a window to reveal a temperature lower than the figure displayed on each card". Sadly, as the card had a decidedly wintery theme, this initially-shown figure was often below zero....

Among these was Levenshulme's Tina Farrel, a 23-year-old who admitted "she had left school without a maths GCSE". She explained: "On one of my cards it said I had to find temperatures lower than -8. The numbers I uncovered were -6 and -7 so I thought I had won, and so did the woman in the shop. But when she scanned the card the machine said I hadn't.

"I phoned Camelot and they fobbed me off with some story that -6 is higher, not lower, than -8, but I'm not having it....

From the English-language online Pravda:

Major-general of the reserve of the Russian Federal Custodial Service Boris Ratnikov tells that Russia and other countries work on making special devices that turn humans into zombies....

Through contamination of our precious bodily fluids, no doubt.