http://www.eschoolnews.com/news/showStoryRSS.cfm?ArticleID=5725

This tidbit about electronic yearbooks is from eSchool News, which will require you to register with your e-mail address. (Not that I can condone this kind of behavior, but some people use BugMeNot.com to get into these kinds of resources.)

Reading about how kids are creating electronic yearbooks for their face-to-face schools has got me wondering what kind of role extracurricular activities might play in an online school. Would a yearbook be in order for the LEARN NC classes? Would students be as interested in the communal aspects of their “virtual” high school as they are in their face-to-face school?

It’s an interesting thought– someday, distance learning teachers may organize/facilitate distance learning extracurricular activities, like a chess club, yearbook, or film club. Would parents be as supportive of those activities?

I’ve been itching quite a bit for the last couple weeks. It started with a small spot on my hand, and then my arms had some random bumps, and then my legs. I figured it had to just be bug bites, since I have never been allergic to plants or anything. Why, in fact, several times in my life someone has chastised me for romping right through poison ivy, but I never had any reaction at all.

But these bug bites began to show up in new places every day, sometimes kind of clumped together. They were getting uncomfortable. They were headed towards… a place that I don’t want to be itching, if you know what I’m sayin’. I started wondering what the hell they were. I went to the old WebMD, and the best I could come up with was scabies. Nasty little mites. And they qualify as an STD. I was horrified. You can get an STD by sitting on infected furniture! I could not stand the thought that I might give Ladybug an STD. How do you explain that to your new wife?

She’d seen me scratching away, and stayed pretty convinced that poison ivy was the culprit. “You can build up an allergy, and it will just get worse and worse every time you come in contact with the stuff,” she said.

“Yeah, but I haven’t been in any poison ivy,” I said.

The next day, we were out looking at my stolen trees, and I was regaling her with my plans for the yard– what I was going to grow where, the edges where I was going to let the brush grow out a little and take over, my plans for a compost heap. I reached in to pull an annoying creeping vine off of a tree that’s been nearly choked to death, and she said, “Hey, you’re standing in poison ivy.”

I jumped back. We continued the tour around the edge of the yard, and she pointed out about 1,400 other places where there was poison ivy or poison oak. I came to realize that since it never affected me when I was younger, I had never gotten around to learning what poison ivy looks like. I mean, I knew all that stuff about the three leaves, but come on, all the crap in our back yard has three leaves, and I never…. uh oh.

Yeah, not only had I been all up in the poison ivy, I had even relocated some from the gravel behind the house into a flower pot. I’ve probably been wading through the stuff, and gotten it all over my body. My right ear seems to be the most recurrent problem, though my arms have had small patches of itch. Nothing too major– I haven’t broken out into boils and it usually looks like a not-very-bad bug bite.

Lesson learned.