Opus 2015-252: Welcome Back: The Babysitters Have Returned

Yes, teachers are returning to their Romper Rooms.

As I begin writing I am waiting for the first meeting of the year on our district.  All employees are gathering for a time of inspiration, smoke and mirrors.  I have been “invited” to attend.  Of course they will have sign in sheets and if I don’t show up I will be docked.  I will take my Kindle and hope all the back seats are not taken.

Our superintendent sent a long e-mail and it contained a list of goals for the year.  Not one of the goals was objectively measurable.  They sounded good.  They were inspiring.  They are also not measurable so you have the best of both worlds:  Noble words and no accountability. 

At our first “professional development” session I was reminded of how naive educators are about the world they live in.  In an atmosphere of identity theft and security breaches they not only used my full name in public but included the need for me to publicize my birthday as I access their computers.  It is so much easier to use that for a password than actually generate safe access.  Understand that makes my password eight characters long and all numbers.  At the hackers convention I attended this summer a speaker announced a piece of security hardware that has six digit passwords, all numbers and the hackers fell out of their seats laughing.  It took him about 15 seconds to find out what the password was on the site he was trying to hack.  If it had been eight characters it probably would have take a lot longer, say 20 seconds.

So if you wonder how the government, Target, Home Depot and so many other large organizations have been hacked and given up all your personal information keep one thing in mind:  They all probably went to public school.

Welcome Back.

homo unius libri