In the meantime, I’m rather bored here at the dentist’s office, so I’ll offer additional enlightenment before scooting off to the world of molar sealants, gritty cleaning paste and voluptuous blond dental assistants scolding me for insufficient flossing.

FOR THE STUDENTS

Meanwhile, Woodrow07/09 and Loco Boy and all other students who read this: I shall offer you a life lesson, one to read, one you need, one to heed, and at least as valuable as anything in the classroom.

Pay attention, because as a fellow Woodrow alumnus, I’m trying to help you. Call it “tough love”. You absolutely, positively *do* need to show writing skills worthy of a job interview, anytime and everywhere. Prospective employers aren’t entirely morons. Reputable, well-paying employers should and sometimes will look up your posts online, for as many years back as they appear, under any alias with which you could be associated. I would, and I have. Why? Easy. I want nothing but top-notch work ethic, highly motivated people who are genuine, creative, smart, undeterred by adversity, driven by a passionate, unbridled ethic of excellence that is extraordinarily rare to find in this world of spoiled slackers.

What you type here and everywhere else online (including the likes of Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, etc.) is available to future employers, is fair game, and will be for as long as these fora exist. Showing a fundamental lack of understanding of basic spelling, punctuation and capitalization makes *you* look like a moron, like it or not. Such inattention to detail will earn you nothing more ambitious than sweeping floors at the local YMCA, or resentfully hacking loogies into the mushroom burgers you’re preparing in your dead-end job at the corner Jack-in-the-Crack. Moreover, failing to compose your thoughts as if it is a “job interview” is a lazy approach. Practice skillful, creative composition in all media, understanding that anything you type can and will be used against you in a job interview.

Think about how you would respond when your desired employer slaps one or three of your online posts onto the desk before you and says, “I looked these up, and they’re yours. I am not impressed. Convince me you’re better than this in the next five minutes, or I’ll have you on the next DART bus back where you came from.”

That’s reality. Welcome to it. And grow a much thicker skin that you’ve displayed here; you’ll need it. Adults like “Observer” (who, by the way, could use a refresher course in English composition) clearly haven’t learned this concept yet, but it’s not too late for you.

FOR TIM ROGERS

Finally, I propose that the writer of the story responsible for this thread, Tim Rogers, should chime in. I’m calling him out. His story was largely ill-informed pap, sloppily written and clearly researched with only superficial effort and selective agenda. I’ll even stand here, flapping my arms and clucking like a chicken if it will goad him into daring discuss his story with me, right here and in public. I bet a beef burger at the Blue Goose that he won’t.

Sure, as it the case in most news fora, the bulk of the material that has been posted here in response to Rogers’ column is mindless boosterism, marginally literate waste and/or tangential rubbish, unworthy of the discussion of the issue at hand. No more. Mr. Rogers, welcome to my neighborhood. I’ll see your deuce and raise you a King. Defend yourself, now.

Have you (not “Citizen Sub, but you, personally) set foot in Woodrow for more than twenty minutes? Did you bother to interview the handful of truly devoted and excellent educators that Woodrow (like any other school) surely employs? Clearly not. For as lame as the commenters have been, your story was almost as useless. Cherry-pick an inexperienced, disgruntled and frustrated sub straight off a single bad day, however representative or unrepresentative her experience of the school at large, and of course Woodrow will come across as a snakepit infested with the hissing vermin of youthful society. Maybe large segments of it are like that. Whither the rest?

Mr. Rogers, you probably would go to the Ouachita Mountains of Arkansas, fail to recognize a flyspeck of the natural beauty in all quadrants, and focus instead on some toothless meth-cooking hillbilly hunting for Bigfoot when not aimlessly adrift in a narco-haze, in a slanted portrayal of a backwoods hellhole.

See, unlike your superficial and lackadaisical effort, and unlike the bulk of respondents who clearly need to cast aside their rose-colored glasses, I’m fair and balanced.

Once again, I’ll offer that Woodrow was, and remains, nothing too special, and nothing horribly bad either. It was and is a quilt of both diligent and horrible students and teachers, the two extremes dichotomously segregated from one another except where forced to intermingle, with a large number of slackers and/or brown-nosers scattered amid the spectrum. This is the average American public school. If Tim Rogers were correct, excellence wouldn’t exist there; yet it does, and has, for decades. It is clear that the Dallas Observer’s employment standard for its writers is disgracefully low. Tim, you fail.

And yet, and yet… If the rose-colored boosters were correct, Woodrow would be a lovable little neighborhood school gleaming on the hill with hallways of gold and silver-plated water fountains, only the most minuscule of warts or blemishes here or there. Get real. Those warts are, in truth, malignant tumors in the form of thumb-texting slackers, gangbanging blowhards and materialistic Lakewood kids driving shiny four-wheel drive vehicles that never have seen a single off-road trail. The entire lot could use a serious attitude adjustment.

I feel most sorry for the very tiny minority super-smart kids who actually use their big brains, busting the grindstone, refraining from involvement with the petty cliques, pop-cultural garbage and potheads. They, having been educated to the lowest common denominator, yet somehow still being gifted with 3.5-4.0 GPAs by overly generous educators deathly afraid to impart real rigor to their curricula, will leave Woodrow better equipped than their peers, but still ill-prepared in an absolute sense, for the challenges of university and beyond.

Ta ta! Back to your regularly scheduled, grammatically bereft screed…

A respected graduate school educator once told me, “If you write a polemic that didn’t piss off anybody, you’ve failed.” Given the variably articulate and invariably hypocritical nature of the two responses so far, each being rather thin-skinned, incredibly hypersensitive and ignorant of the positives I cited, I’ll treat my success as a shining badge of honor. If my post offended them, I’ve done something right!

Get out that dictionary again; and please, Woodrow07, learn the location of the “SHIFT” key on your keyboard! Oh, I used your handle, silly me. I’m using Loco Boy’s too. Quaking with fear, I await my horrifying floggings. [ROTFLMAO]

A few salient tidbits…

Loco Boy and Observer, get this straight. Nothing and no one ever has “intimidated” me. Without unnecessary and overly tangential elaboration, let’s suffice to say that I was not picked on our “outcast” at Woodrow or any other school. Nor have I been since. I chose my status; it wasn’t chosen for me. I was in full control of my fate then, and remain so today. No one else dictated my terms. In fact, contrary to apparent impressions herein, I got along quite well with classmates. That is, I befriended those who were open-minded, intelligent, strongly motivated, diligent academically, responsible, uncontaminated by pop-cultural mores, and stridently self-disciplined. Sadly, I report that such a combination of attributes described perhaps four kids, at most. Those kids are successful achievers today, despite their meager economic backgrounds.

As for “bitter” or “pompous” or “mean”, hardly. Try “amused” instead. I stand here on the sidelines of the stupidity and ignorance that plagues most forms of media and discourse thereabouts, casually observing the lunacy and irrationality of all manner of society, lords and scum alike, occasionally offering commentary through variegated fora. This is, as always, entirely by my own choice and nobody else’s. It beats the role of a participant, and certainly did in high school. It is why I’ve never done drugs, and never will, nor have I ever consumed alcohol. Contrast this with any given random sample of kids at Woodrow, past or present.

It was, and apparently still is, a good school for some. Such is the case with any given edifice of education among the thousands whose variegated architecture and manicured campuses liberally sprinkle the landscape of this nation, from abject inner cities to towns with names like Knob Noster, Missouri. Woodrow isn’t that special, and little has changed. This apparently applies to the old “Hot for Teacher” concept among some students, too. Loco is right about one thing: It most certainly seems as if Mrs. Vail should hire more authoritarian teachers.

Amuse me some more. Bring it on, members of the “Woodrow as Ninth Wonder of the World” peanut gallery. I’ll check again sometime.

Glad we could be here for the therapy session. Seems like some folks never get over being the outcast in high school. (Why do I get the sense you’re still the outcast?) If the Woodrow “elite” intimidated you, you should be grateful you never had to darken the door of a private school. Rumor has it they have some really rich folks there. Even jocks. Of course, had you gone to one of those finer institutions, you might have learned to write even better — something you seem to care a great deal about(by the way, I think these students expressed themselves quite well and I commend them for caring enough to weigh in). Although it is apparent you consider yourself quite the writer (how long did it take you to craft the oh-so-colorful and clever commentary?), it seems there are a few errors in your post. Think dangling modifiers. Subject – verb agreement. Yep, they’re there. But, hey, I don’t want to be judgmental — I’ll leave that up to you. Perhaps you can find your errors — perhaps, even the errors of your attacking, pompous way. Oh, all of this dashing reminds me. In the fourth paragraph up from the bottom of your post, you misused the dash. It should read: “…good — not great — and I made well of it.” It takes two dashes to effect the parenthetical; otherwise, it just looks …embarrassing.

oh and i learned “ad hominem” at woodrow. apparently you weren’t one of the “small but outstanding group of kids” who helped buffer the school’s test scores or you might take a different approach to rhetoric instead of spewing substanceless garbage. thanks mcghee!

I see little different with Woodrow, in many ways, in the 24 years since I graduated. Add MP3 players and cellular telephones to the mix, and it’s pretty much the same. There’s a small cabal of relatively wealthy white elitists — perhaps liberal now, whereas they were conservative before — but self-righteous elitist ignoramuses nonetheless. Heads in sand, they toot endless streams of mindless, rah-rah-Wildcat boosterism while abjectly ignorant of reality. To these sorry clowns, hell hath no place sufficiently toasty for anyone who dares denigrate the tiniest smidgen of Woodrow life, apparently. Get real.

I see the infrastructure still is crumbling. That’s nothing new. [Wonder if the pigeons on the upstairs ledges still carry parrot fever?] Maybe the patchwork in the plumbing still is there after my buddy Fish snuck out to the restroom and flushed a chunk of sodium down the toilet while Mrs. Evans was away. Perhaps that’s the source of the leak about which the sub complained, nearly a quarter century gone by.

There’s a fantastic musical and performing arts program, as there was with Mrs. Bircher. I know minorities are allowed, and flourish, as was the case then, and as I see them in photographs today. Outstanding.

By contrast, gangbangers of both genders abound (back then it was Las Homies, Los Vatos Locos, etc.). A quarter century later, and the place still is segregated by cliques of jocks, Lakewood preps, gangbangers, nerds, and the unclassifiable detritus of leftover misfits (i.e., me).

Jocks get all the hottest chicks. That wasn’t mentioned here but still surely is the case. The football and hoops teams are far better now than then despite not having Tim Brown thereon.

The poor whites and non-banging minorities were a segment of school society all to themselves in a tiny little corner, belonging to no other group except ourselves. Yes, that was a first-person collective. I came from the wrong side of the tracks and was repulsed by both the dripping arrogance of the rich, lily-white Lakewood crowd and the easy-way-out slacking and banging of the motivationally bereft minority-majority, who seemed to pride themselves on their ability to malfunction academically. Looks much the same now, eh?

From the outside, the architecture remains as splendid and classical as ever, a true work of art constructed by people who clearly cared about their job.

A small but outstanding group of kids — really good kids, driven to excel, props up the test scores and participates in the activities, while the rest wallow in the sediment, choosing to fail, yet blaming teachers, parents and society for their own shortcomings. That’s nothing new either.

I got a good education there — good, not great, and I made well of it. I guess it was worth my while. It wasn’t the TAG magnet, for sure, and it hardly ever challenged me, but it sufficed. At least there are more AP offerings these days.

Last but not least, the kids themselves (and many of the alumni, apparently) continue to exhibit absolutely appalling writing skills. Yes, that means you, Woodrow07, Woodrow09, RT. Learn how to compose words and sentences intelligently before embarrassing yourselves in public as you did in these comments. I won’t blame Woodrow for your wretched level of education, because it’s up to *you* to succeed, not your teachers.

In the end, it’s ***just a school*** — not as special as the boosters portray, not as primitive and life-threatening as the detractors claim. It’s simply another inner city school, a mosaic of all that comes with the territory. Don’t make it out to be more or less than it is, or has been since the 80s.

The more things change…

My kids are in Long and will be at Woodrow soon. My cousins went to/ are going to Woodrow and I have two nephews who recently graduated.

It’s a wonderful place that is without peers in Texas. The close feelings and camaraderie shared by those at the school sometimes incites jealousy. I know I am jealous sometimes of the kids my age who went there while I was sequestered in a not-so-great private school.