Plasma Cutting Grant - Scholarships - Silliness

Hypertherm is offering educational grants with the recipients getting one of their plasma cutters and their cutting and gouging curriculum to go with it. I checked out the link and you can get the curriculum free even without going through the grant process. If you're teaching plasma cutting, might be worth your time to scope it out here.

If you're enrolled in a college program and are planning to become a teacher, the Indiana Retired Teacher's Association has scholarships available. Look into it here.

The American Welding Society is offering scholarships to students attending a trade school or two year college program. Info here. They also are promoting the AWS Classroom contest. You can get the info on that one here.

Now that we've covered the scholarships, here comes the silliness. I checked in at the Live Long and Prosper site to see what's going on in education and, as usual, more of the same. I really should just quit looking at these things because, first of all, there's very little I can do about it, and second of all, it just pisses me off. In spite of that, I like staying informed. If you're at all curious about the state of educational affairs here in Indiana, check out the link. If you're like me, this will be the first thing that comes to mind:

From Here

Myself, I need  to figure out how much longer I want to be involved in education. Between the high school career and the college, I've been teaching 40 years. I still enjoy it - in fact the last couple of years at the college have been very pleasant and rewarding. The problem is my tolerance level for all the silly crap that goes along with education is just about nil. For example, I'm signed up to take a class the next eight week session. Since I'm now a student as well as an instructor, someone decided that when I sign in to the college's site, I should now have the student page come up, rather than the instructor page. This means that I no longer have access to my e-mail account but I have a g-mail account instead. Since I'm now one of the cool kids, I've got icons to take me to Twitter and Facebook but I no longer receive all the reminders/instructions needed to take care of all the required monkey business like reporting if the student shows up for the first class session, continued attendance, mid-term grades, correspondence with colleagues, etc. In an attempt to get it straightened out I went into the office and the nice young lady made a phone call on my behalf which didn't yield much but she called me a day later and gave me a number to call. I called the number and got a "If it's not fixed in a week, call back". This isn't that big of a deal, but add it to the rest of the stupid crap of the last 40 years and I'm at a point where I have to ask myself if it's really worth the aggravation. Right now I'm planning on working until the end of the calendar year but I'll have to see after that. I do have an escape plan besides just quitting. Have to wait and see on that one, though.