There are no bad owners, only bad dogs

2005-08-17

Unintelligible Design

Oh, my. Those wacky Kansans are at it again. Book banning! I wonder if any of these self-appointed guardians of �the culture� have even bothered to read any of the books they�re banning from the classroom. �The Giver�? Have I somehow confused the concept of thought-provoking with offensive? Are these people aware of the purpose of literature? It�s not just for making sweet stories about unicorns and flying kittens and magical fairies. Crap. Magic is Satanic, right? So, these would be, like, maybe ordinary fairies with really sparkly wings. What the fuck will be left when they�re done? No more Shakespeare or Chaucer, because those dudes were perverse. No more William Golding (anal rape, murder), Tennessee Williams (incest, rape), Harper Lee (ummm, rape), Homer (eye-poking-out, adultery, rape). What will these children read? Technical manuals? Recipes?

These are, of course, the geniuses that are fighting to have Intelligent Design (sic) included in their science curriculum.

Dear Kansas,

Please secede from the union. You�re embarrassing the rest of us.

Yours,
Everyone Else


A rhetorical question: Has a high school guidance counselor ever done anything useful? I guess it�s like the tree falling or the one hand clapping� But not really, because I can answer my question with an emphatic �NO�!

It took hours to get my monkey registered at his new school, days to get an appointment with a counselor, who did far less than was called for. A tank of sea monkeys would do better than an office full of guidance counselors.

Once the monkey had been placed in all of his required classes (in some cases he was the 35th student in the class), there was a matter of �electives� to deal with. He had two open slots. The boy wants to be a professional skateboarder and have a band. He�s not an academic dynamo. So, she starts fishing around for some class, any class, that can accommodate another student during 3rd or 6th periods. Choir? She twists his arm. Choir is fun! Nope. He�s not taking the bait. She switches over to �something with computers.� That�s her name for the class: Something with computers. She doesn�t know what they do to or with the computers in this class � do they repair them? Learn to network them? Learn CAD with them? Who the fuck knows/cares? All she knows is 1) it has something to do with computers, and 2) it�s full.

So we�re off on another tangent. She asks him if he�s interested in interior design. I snort, he gives her a blank stare. Sewing? No. Business? Maybe. I can see him being interested in the marketing end of things. So she signs him up for accounting. The glamour part of business.

Then she hits some kind of wall, says she just can�t figure it out, and sends us home with the promise that his schedule will be all set the next morning.

In we go the next morning to join the crowd of children who had registered the day before and had not gotten their schedules yet. He did end up in accounting and also in Introduction to Criminal Justice. What the fuck? How is it that this school can�t add 8 more sections of shop or driver�s ed or Something With Computers, but they have a class called Introduction to Criminal Justice? I just know that somehow this child will use the information he gains in this class to get into trouble.

If the process involves simply sticking a child in a classroom that�s not already over-filled, then why have the annoying human involved at all?

If you�re a high school guidance counselor, please move to Kansas and secede with the rest of the idiots.


This morning during our regular walk, the dogs and I encountered something brand new and apparently terrifying. As we rounded a corner, we could hear several voices in cadence. What looked like an ROTC group from the high school was running in formation, about 15 of them in five rows of three, with an instructor leading them. They were in perfect unison with the running, and the instructor was leading them in some sort of military running chant. Why would this possibly be any kind of big deal, one would wonder? I don�t know, because it really seemed pretty harmless to me, but Buster went fucking nuts over this group of chanting runners. He barked and whined and then went silent and stared at them. As they passed, he tried to bolt in the other direction. He was clearly simply horrified by them. He turned around and dragged me back to the house after they had passed out of sight. His tail is his happiness barometer � the curlier it is, the happier he is. It was stick straight until we got back inside.

What goes on inside that walnut? Electricians � good. Plumbers � good. ROTC � bad. Maybe Buster should move to Kansas and become a guidance counselor.

4 comments so far

birth & death