fossildoc
11-03-2007, 03:13 AM
Many decades ago, when I was a teenager, I used to chide my mom on the practice of her and her friends of maintaining "museum dining rooms" in their homes. That's a dining room with a fancy table so expensive that no one ever eats on it; we all ate in the kitchen. Next to the table was a glass-enclosed dish cabinet with dishes so expensive that one dared not take them out, much less eat off them, and in the fantasy of doing so, one would use the silver set that never came out of the drawers below except once a year to be polished. Even today I have a cousin who maintains a "museum living room", which no one is allowed to go in, except to vacuum. The couch is much too expensive to allow it to be sat on.
We have something like that at my school. It's called a "library", including several cheap computers with wireless Internet, designed to accomodate students whose laptops may be broken at the moment. Being without a pc at this school is a disaster, so the library machines were a blessing.
That is, until rifraff started coming in off the street to steal whatever they could find. They managed to purloin a projector when the library was being redecorated. They never stole any books, because there are no antique book dealers in Aruba.
Fearful that street people will make off with the three-hundred dollar computers, the school has closed the library, which means that not only are the pcs unavailable to the students, but a "quiet zone" for study is gone, too.
The school's proposed solution to this dilemma is to ask some student volunteer each day to be responsible for the library; to open and close it, and to stand guard.
Not hardly. So we have no library, and no computers.
I say lock the computers up in a supply closet and open the library. Having the pcs in a closet is no worse than having them in a locked library, but at least we'll have our quiet study room back.
We have something like that at my school. It's called a "library", including several cheap computers with wireless Internet, designed to accomodate students whose laptops may be broken at the moment. Being without a pc at this school is a disaster, so the library machines were a blessing.
That is, until rifraff started coming in off the street to steal whatever they could find. They managed to purloin a projector when the library was being redecorated. They never stole any books, because there are no antique book dealers in Aruba.
Fearful that street people will make off with the three-hundred dollar computers, the school has closed the library, which means that not only are the pcs unavailable to the students, but a "quiet zone" for study is gone, too.
The school's proposed solution to this dilemma is to ask some student volunteer each day to be responsible for the library; to open and close it, and to stand guard.
Not hardly. So we have no library, and no computers.
I say lock the computers up in a supply closet and open the library. Having the pcs in a closet is no worse than having them in a locked library, but at least we'll have our quiet study room back.