I wish I had had the patience to do Seussian rhyme, but I’ve been pretty busy this summer and after my first experiments sucked, I just went for the straight bullet list.

If I were McGrew, the first thing I’d do,
is line up all the zookeepers, two by two.
I’d march them to corners where they hide the zoo’s poo,
and point out the truth of what poo-shovels do.

“Keepers!” I’d say, “the problem with hiding this mess
is that each one, all of us, works under duress,
while perfectly fine shovels never get put to the test,
because you keepers are too busy testing the rest!”

Then the bird-keepers squawked about the state of their cages,
The big-cat-keepers roared out in analogous rages,
The fish-keepers insisted on the priority of tanks,
But all of the keepers kept ignoring the stank.

“Can’t you smell that?” I’d ask, while holding my nose,
“Can’t you feel something squishy between all your toes?
That’s the left-over muck of a thousand missed ways
To solve a thousand old problems, put off a thousand more days!”

Then I’d sigh, like a captain, facing the main,
and I’d wonder what use it is to complain,
when the keepers won’t unite under a banner as plain
As “Pick up your shovels! Lay down your chains!”

“limiting the number of people who go to college”: That’s not the idea, no. Smaller schools and smaller classes means more schools and more teachers to teach the same number of students, that’s all.

“busting up teacher’s unions”: Can’t the grad students join the unions?

“why not business majors and engineers?” Exactly: let’s do business and engineering in high school, too! Or maybe just econ and physics taught by people with applied skills who are looking to go on to a Ph.D. (There’s nothing here arguing that terminal MAs need to conclude with teaching experience, just people looking to teach in higher ed.)

“read Plato in my Latin class” Is this a typo? I think your school was pretty extraordinary, since most don’t even teach Latin, let alone Latin versions of Greek philosophers. I was able to chose between French and Spanish, which was mostly, again, a decision between college-prep and vocational language skills. The way my high school was designed, they were scheduled against each other, creating a fairly formal tracking system.

PS: I took calculus and shop at my public high school, and read Plato in my Latin class (Mrs. Varga was definitely an outlier).

I’m all for student-athletes, but I worry about tuition money and donor-dollars going to athletics when they could be devoted our primary purpose, education.

Consider Joe Paterno and the Classics Department. On the one hand, I have nothing but respect for a man who’s willing to give so much of his personal wealth to support dusty old texts and languages. On the other hand, it troubles me that our priorities are so out of whack that we’d rather pay coaches than Aeneid specialists and the only person who saw the problem there was the coach.

There’s nothing magical about K-12 that couldn’t be accomplished in K-10. My alma mater, Bard College, takes talented 11th and 12th graders and puts them through college-level courses without much trouble, and I think this makes sense. 11th grade is about where my public school started distinguishing college-prep students from vocational training students. You took shop or you took calculus. Why not beef up both the vocational and college-prep stuff?

I think the high school idea is good too.