Dec 23, 2007 - At Yarmouth High School, 17-year-old Zach Hynes has been working with other students to persuade the school board to make a course in Chinese available next fall.
Chinese is now offered at 10 secondary schools in Maine, six of which started courses this school year.
Last month, Maine Education Commissioner Susan Gendron signed a memorandum of understanding with a Chinese government educational agency to promote educational collaboration between China and Maine, such as having Chinese teachers come to the state to teach, said Don Reutershan, world languages specialist with the state Department of Education.While 214 Maine high school students now study Chinese, it appears that more would like to do so. The school wants to apply for a grant to help pay for the language teacher from China.
TT - It would be interesting to find out who funds the courses in Chinese. We found out, purely by accident, that Belgium and France have have funded Louisiana’s foreign language program for many years.
The beauty of working in Maine is that teachers there get 15-17 paid sick leave days for a 185 average work year. The Portland Maine school board also wants to hand out contraceptives to 11 to 13 year olds in the middle school as well. (TT LINK and LINK )
Maine, too, was the only state that would not release information about why teachers licenses were revoked to the Associated Press for their November series on teacher discipline. We particularly loved the 21-year-old Brunswick High School graduate with 18 criminal convictions in the past two years who ran for school board in Brunswick, Maine.
But our all-time favorite blog entry is Richard Beebe who told an undercover officer that he got excited from touching his granddaughter's buttocks and sent a picture of a 9-year-old at the school to the undercover officer. He had child pornography pictures of children as young as five years old on his computer. He ended up being sentenced to 60 days of a one-year prison sentence.
The symbol is at the top is cai - wealth, money. Chinese often say money can make a ghost turn a millstone. It is to say money really can do a lot of things.
