Please check out this shopping catalogue of toys, fully aligned with the Common Core!
It might easily be confused with the real thing, so I feel impelled to tell you it is a spoof written by two New York City teachers.
My favorite: the plane built in mid-air while it is flying. Watch out below!
By next year, there might really be a catalogue just like this one, and it won’t be a joke.
Two New York City public school teachers have launched a terrific blog.
Jennifer Hogue and Adam Bergstein have a great sense of humor and irony.
Right on the face of it is a countdown clock showing how many weeks (1), days, hours, minutes, and seconds left until King Bloomie departs the office of mayor.
In the latest, written on December 16, Adam confesses:
I just taped a show for CNN with Christine Romans, the chief business correspondent.
I wore red for Ed, as so many teachers recommend.
At Mayor de Blasio’s inauguration, I will wear green at the request of Lace to the Top, an advocacy group of teachers. On the Jon Stewart show, I wore a green plastic bracelet sent to me by Lace to the Top.
Now I learn that on December 9, there will be a national day of action to reclaim the promise of public education. Instructions: wear blue for solidarity.
So there you have it: red, green, and blue.
Anyone want to add some more colors so we can truly be a Rainbow Coalition?
Please read Jersey Jazzman’s hilarious spoof on “The Night Before Christmas.”
He anticipates not the joy of Christmas and Santa, but the much-anticipated release of PISA scores, when Arne Duncan gets to tell the nation once again how terrible American education is and how we are losing the global competition and why we are still a nation at risk.
He will conveniently overlook the fact that he is Secretary of Education and has now been in charge for nearly five years. No accountability for him!
He will surround himself with Beltway insiders who agree that our schools are dreadful despite 11 years of No Child Left Behind and nearly five years of Race to the Top.
How many more years must we wait until we declare these programs failures?
This is how JJ’s poem begins:
“‘Twas the night before PISA Day, when all through the foundations
The wonks were all dreaming about Bill Gates’s donations;
The rankings were crafted for each nation with care,
In hopes that more grants would come from billionaires;
The children were tested and stressed at their desks;
While visions of bubble sheets made them feel quite grotesque;
Suburban moms in their ‘kerchiefs, and dads in their caps,
Hoped on test day their children’s brains wouldn’t collapse,
When out at the DOE there arose such a clatter,
I looked up from Klein’s tablet to see what was the matter.”
Russ Walsh prepared this reform dictionary or field guide with pictures and definitions and source materials.
He calls it “The Seven Blind Mice of Reform.”
There is a word for this sort of antiquarian dictionary but after a Thanksgiving meal, I can’t think of it.
Read and enjoy!
A reader commented, with reference to Arne Duncan’s infamous remark, followed by Frank Bruni’s column on “coddling” our kids:
Really, it’s like a very bad joke: a food critic and a basketball player walk into a bar and insult white suburban mothers and their kids, twice.
Wish I could find the humor in it.
Thanks to the warning issued by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, white suburban moms have been declared a terrorist threat, according to satirist Students Last.
“Citing national security concerns, “white suburban moms” have been classified as a terrorist group.
Time to get a belly laugh from the national madness!
http://studentslast.blogspot.com/2013/11/white-suburban-moms-not-very-bright.html”
Charles Parrish of Wayne State University submitted the following proposal:
Surgeons United who Care for America (SUCA*)
This is to announce the establishment of a new approach to surgery in the United States: Surgeons for America (SUCA). Following in the high-heeled footprints of Michelle Rhee and Wendy Kopp, we will employ the model of Teach for America (TFA). That model involves the recruiting bright young graduates of our best colleges and universities, providing them with 5 or 6 weeks of training, and then sending them out to provide high-value surgical operations for patients at low cost. They will replace older surgeons who have become set in their ways and have lost the ignorant, enthusiastic arrogance of youth. We prefer to recruit young people with bachelor degrees in the sciences or business, but we will consider candidates from the humanities on a case-by-case basis. Our particular concern in the selection process for candidates from the humanities is whether they have, or can quickly develop, a callous sense of indifference to patient pain and outcomes.
Part of both our 5 and 6 week courses in surgery, is a one-week course in the finances of Charter Surgery Urgent Care Clinics. All our trainees learn how to do such things as purchase a building through a newly formed for-profit firm and then to lease it back to the Charter Surgery Urgent Care Clinic, which is of course as 501(c) 3 non-profit organization. The SUCA surgeons should be officers of both the for-profit and non-profit organization in order to maximize their income and get the maximum tax advantages. All materials for use by the clinic (furniture, tables, computer, stirrups for gynecological exams, operating instruments, etc.) can be leased or bought outright from the for-profit firm.
As a small concession to experience (of which we are usually contemptuous), there will be a different between the training in the two tracks. Those who enroll in the 5-week program will be only qualified to perform certain simpler operations (vasectomies, D&Cs, appendix, Gall bladder and similar organ removals, skin and other simple cancer operations, penile and breast implants, etc.). Those who go through the 6-week course will be qualified for all operations, from brain cancer to hangnails. Those in the 5-week course will use the textbook Surgery for Dummies. The 6-week course will use Advanced Surgery for Dummies.
After three years as a Surgeon for America, a SUCA graduate will be encouraged to move on into their life career with warm memories of their youthful experience as a surgeon and with a dandy new citation in their curriculum vitae. We do not want these young surgeons to become stale (as so many of the older, experienced surgeons they are replacing are). Many of these young surgeons will go into hedge fund management or other Wall Street professions. Their experience as a surgeon trained to develop moral ambiguity and indifference to the to the pain they inflict through their novice approach to surgical procedures prepares them particularly for such professions.
SUCA was initiated by a grant from the Gates Foundation from funds freed up when Bill finally grew bored with funding charter schools and getting no results and being excoriated by Diane Ravich.
*Pronounced “Suck-A”, as in: “You are a suckaa.”
Just watch this.
If you have a cat and a dog, you will love this.
Alright, boys and girls, time for a standardized test.
Sharpen your #2 pencils.
There is a time limit. There will be no accommodations for those with disabilities.
If you do well, your teacher gets a bonus.
If you fail, your teacher will be fired and your school will be closed.
Good luck!
Diane Ravitch's blog 