On the Carnival of Education, a Multiple Mentality contributor who’s taught for five years in Orange County,Florida explains why he’s planning to leave teaching in a few years. In addition to NCLB, he’s burned out by mouthy kids and unsupportive parents.

When I was in middle school, we didn’t dare talk back to any teachers. Much less tell them to do so with a stream of obscenities. If anyone did, they immediately were suspended. A colleague of mine was told to “Fuck off”, and the kid was back in class twenty minutes later, with no discipline from Administration! That undermines the authority of the teacher in his own classroom. If I’m not allowed to control my own classroom, how am I supposed to do my job effectively?

. . . I have called home to speak with a parent about a child’s behavior, and the parent refused to do anything about it. Parents refuse to discipline their own children. Then I was verbally assaulted by the parent telling me to keep order in my classroom and that the child’s behavior was somehow my fault because it was at school.

Jenny D will host next week’s carnival.

Why read your teen-ager’s diary when you can read her blog? The East Valley Tribune in Arizona reports that teen-agers are posting personal details online, assuming their parents won’t find their blogs.

Students who used to lock their diaries in their bedrooms now post their daily confessions, rantings and exploits for the world to see on Web logs or blogs.

. . . The technology means Chandler parents can go on the Internet, along with complete strangers, and view pho- tographs of their children carousing early Sunday morning in a hotel suite following Hamilton High School’s prom. One snapshot shows a girl holding a beer with the caption: “Still rockin at 6 in the AM.”

A Scottsdale student reports on her blog that she did not have sex following Chaparral High School’s prom on Saturday . . .

Meanwhile, a student from Tempe’s Corona del Sol High School returned from prom at 2 a.m. Sunday and reported on her blog: “No alcohol was consumed tonight by me, and I’m still a virgin.” But her mother, apparently, was not impressed. A follow-up message Sunday begins, “What I learned from my mom today: I am a horrible excuse for a human being.”

In a Pew survey, 62 percent of parents said they monitored their children’s Internet use; however, only 33 percent of the children said their parents checked on their online activities.

Colleges are “rushing to build high-tech classrooms and plush dormitories for a new breed of students,” the pampered children of the “Baby on Board” generation.

Kimberly Swygert calls it “Coddling the Millenials.”

I thought we were sending kids to college these days so that they could broaden their horizons, and learn something about the outside world, and be in a multicultural environment where they learn how other people think and act and live. But now colleges are spending like crazy to give every incoming freshman a upper-middle-class 90210 environment? What the heck is that?

Kimberly suspects “colleges with mystery meat in the dining hall and plenty of scunge in the hall bathrooms” are more likely to graduate students in four years or less.

Girls are trying steroids to reduce body fat.

An alarming number of American girls, some as young as 9, are using bodybuilding steroids — not necessarily to get an edge on the playing field, but to get the toned, sculpted look of models and movie stars, specialists say.

Perhaps publicizing severe acne as a side effect will discourage abuse.

Crazy as this is, it’s not really a surprise: A black student has confessed to sending racist hate mail to three classmates at her Christian college. She was unhappy, and wanted to imply Trinity International was unsafe so she could go home, said Kevin Tracz, chief of police in Bannockburn, Illinois.

The handwritten notes received last week by two black and one Latino student prompted the school to send about 100 of its 1,000 undergraduate students off campus to hotels or private homes for a night. Students returned to campus the following day.

The student has been charged with disorderly conduct and a hate crime.

To settle a price-fixing lawsuit, five record companies and three retail chains agreed to donate CDs to schools and libraries. Nobody asked librarians what they wanted, reports the San Francisco Chronicle.

California schools and libraries are slated to receive 665,000 free CDs starting this week as part of a $143 million antitrust settlement with music companies.

But some Bay area librarians think they’re getting stuck with moldy tunes the record labels couldn’t sell.

The San Francisco Public Library, for instance, will get 91 copies of a ’60s rock compilation (“Feelin’ Groovy”), 81 copies of an album by reality TV star Jessica Simpson (“Irresistible”) and 73 copies of a “Christmas with Yolanda Adams.” By contrast, it will receive only single copies of hundreds of other selections, like jazz great Louis Armstrong’s “I Love Jazz.”

San Jose Public Library San Jose will receive 106 copies of eight different albums, such as Lenny Kravitz’s “Lenny” and Ricky Martin’s “Sound Loaded.”

The remnants of Southern “redneck” culture are holding back urban blacks, argues Thomas Sowell in his new book, Black Rednecks and White Liberals. In the Wall Street Journal, Sowell writes:

The culture of the people who were called “rednecks” and “crackers” before they ever got on the boats to cross the Atlantic was a culture that produced far lower levels of intellectual and economic achievement, as well as far higher levels of violence and sexual promiscuity.

. . . While a third of the white population of the U.S. lived within the redneck culture, more than 90% of the black population did. Although that culture eroded away over the generations, it did so at different rates in different places and among different people. It eroded away much faster in Britain than in the U.S. and somewhat faster among Southern whites than among Southern blacks, who had fewer opportunities for education or for the rewards that came with escape from that counterproductive culture.

Nevertheless the process took a long time. As late as the First World War, white soldiers from Georgia, Arkansas, Kentucky and Mississippi scored lower on mental tests than black soldiers from Ohio, Illinois, New York and Pennsylvania. Again, neither race nor racism can explain that–and neither can slavery.

The “counterproductive and self-destructive culture” of ghettos isn’t authentic black culture, Sowell argues. It’s redneck culture.

Quiet children aren’t valued in many classrooms, this Christian Science Monitor story says. American culture values outgoing personalities; the studious, thoughtful child may be seen as slow or socially backward.

Gov. Schwarzenegger’s plan for incentive pay for teachers in schools with a lot of low-income students is “an issue that is pro-teacher and, more importantly, pro kid,” writes Dan Weintraub in the Sacramento Bee. “Not only pro-kid but pro-poor-kid.” But the governor doesn’t know how to sell it.

Everyone knows that our poorest kids tend to clump in schools that depend too much on inexperienced teachers, many of whom are still trying to find their way in the profession. We have good, experienced teachers who would teach in these schools if they were rewarded financially for their trouble – just as in every other profession, where the toughest-to-fill jobs normally earn higher pay. So who or what is standing in the way of the students who need better teachers getting those teachers?

The teachers unions.

The unions have blocked higher pay for teachers with hard-to-find skills or teachers who work with hard-to-teach students.

The governor could “expose the terrible bargain the Democrats in the Legislature have made with the teachers unions, to the detriment of the people they claim to represent,” Weintraub writes. But Schwarzenegger hasn’t “connected the dots.”

Celebrate autism with this line of shirts, hats, mugs and bags for those who believe “autism rocks.” (The “anti-ABA” refers to Applied Behavior Analysis, a technique for teaching autistic children.)