"NOT Rec. Materials"

My employer, www.dallasisd.org, has a section under "Staff" called "Curriculum Central." The only way you can access this portion of the web site is with some menial form of staff identification, although, considering how fucked up everything else is with DISD, a monkey armed with a mighty Texas Instruments 99-4A could probably hack it in under a grande cafe mocha. I digress.

Curriculum Central has all kinds of turgid reading for the tech-savvy (and not so tech-savvy) staff member. Mostly what it contains is something called the "Scope and Sequence" for each course by discipline. These list what skills are supposed to be taught in each class, and in what order, all on handy pdf files to print or download. There are also some other things such as vendor lists, forms and the like. These are offered off to the side of the main page of Curriculum Central, and it looks like this:

• OIR (Data)
• Dallas Collaborative Model
• GIB (Revised 7-25-06)
• Recommended Materials
• NOT Rec. Materials
• Environmental Education Center
• Inet
• Dallas ISD Home

So you know which one I just HAD to click. The document was one big mundane table: various vendors, what they hawked, why it wasn't appropriate to DISD's needs, etc. Then I came to the following (and I quote verbatim, emphasis mine):

• Company/Address: Madden Football Video Game
• Contact Person/Tel. Number: Submitted by (don't want to be sued)
• Program Purpose: Commercial Video Game
• Intended Audience/Grade Levels: Recommended for use with Grade 6
• Reason: No written curriculum to support TEKS/TAKS skills to be reinforced by game, not researched-based, and excessive cost.
• Submitted: May 2004
• Reviewd: May 2004

As near as I can figure, either the dumbass who submitted it thought Madden '04 would be a good teaching tool for 6th graders, or the person who submitted it was ratting out a coach who was using it rather than teaching. Either way, kudos to someone for recognizing that it was not a legitimate teaching tool.

But wait a minute... I want to know who had the stones to submit a materials request like this, and I want to know whether or not they had a P-card.

And if you are a football coach reading this, fuck you. Fuck you and your brand fucking new stadium, and fuck you with the stack of dry-rotting paperbacks that I have to use in my class room. Of course, if you really are a football coach, odds are you can't read this much in one sitting anyway, especially not without pictures, you fucking fucks.