If every day in the life of a school could be the last day but one, there would be little fault to find with it.
--Stephen Leacock
Showing posts with label School. Show all posts
Showing posts with label School. Show all posts
Sunday, October 11, 2009
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
WARNING: Political post--proceed at your own risk
One of my son's homework assignments for the weekend was to come up with a controversial solution to an important social issue of the day. The assignment sprung out of recent reading of Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal.
I was surprised to learn that High School students are still reading this piece, and I don't understand why it is discussed as being shocking in this day and age. We are content to allow thousands of babies to be chopped into pieces and incinerated each day here in the US. In parts of Eastern Europe, young women are paid to get pregnant and abort at a certain, optimal number of weeks, when the fetus reaches the perfect stage for use in facial beauty products and treatments. In other parts of Europe it is legal to kill imperfect infants after they are born.
So if all of this is perfectly OK, why should the thought of eating them be so bad? Wouldn't it be less of a waste if all these millions of blobs of flesh were consumed?
I'm shocked that A Modest Proposal remains in the junior-year corpus in this day and age.
Shouldn't we keep English classes out of our bedrooms? Err, kitchens?
Isn't this sort of thing an infringement on a woman's right to menu plan?
I was surprised to learn that High School students are still reading this piece, and I don't understand why it is discussed as being shocking in this day and age. We are content to allow thousands of babies to be chopped into pieces and incinerated each day here in the US. In parts of Eastern Europe, young women are paid to get pregnant and abort at a certain, optimal number of weeks, when the fetus reaches the perfect stage for use in facial beauty products and treatments. In other parts of Europe it is legal to kill imperfect infants after they are born.
So if all of this is perfectly OK, why should the thought of eating them be so bad? Wouldn't it be less of a waste if all these millions of blobs of flesh were consumed?
I'm shocked that A Modest Proposal remains in the junior-year corpus in this day and age.
Shouldn't we keep English classes out of our bedrooms? Err, kitchens?
Isn't this sort of thing an infringement on a woman's right to menu plan?
Tuesday, June 2, 2009
Soul sick
I had a close encounter with man's inhumanity toward man a little while ago, in the form of a skinny white high school senior who had been jumped by 4 big gangsta punks. We just missed the actual beating by a minute or two. I came across him while driving my son and a classmate home. (I drive the other child each afternoon because 2 years ago he had also been jumped walking home in the same area.)
We stopped and I tried to run interference between a teacher at the school who tried to contact the boy's parents, the police, and ambulance personnel.
The boy will probably be fine.
The blood he was spitting was probably from his mouth rather than from an internal injury.
My soul is sick.
I'm not sure who I hurt more for; the boy who was kicked and beaten, or the 4 boys who did it.
We stopped and I tried to run interference between a teacher at the school who tried to contact the boy's parents, the police, and ambulance personnel.
The boy will probably be fine.
The blood he was spitting was probably from his mouth rather than from an internal injury.
My soul is sick.
I'm not sure who I hurt more for; the boy who was kicked and beaten, or the 4 boys who did it.
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