10/12

whereas Fred Savage released us an hour early, Miyashiro spared us only three minutes. my next ten saturdays: roll out of bed at 6-ish (same as a weekday), coast (or do the nimitz stop-and-go, depending on luck and timing) to Holy Family Academy, sit in a chair for four hours, fight traffic all the way back home.

this class is going to clash or maybe even crash head-on with the other one. Miyashiro is a traditional old-school administrator who actually holds "Education is the Key to Success" as a personal motto. Not that there's anything wrong with that. but then you have Fred Savage, a zealous disciple of John Gatto, who is chiefly interested in deconstructing and harshly criticizing American education as a government conspiracy to make us all extra-stupid, who says less education is the key to success. Gatto, by the way, is the passionately cynical author of "Dumbing Us Down," "The Underground History of American Education," and other books and essays on everything that's wrong with state education systems. He is an expert on bad teachers, bad administrators, bad curriculums, and bad government. Fred Savage and Gatto are bringing more politics than i bargained for to the table, but at least it won't be a four-hour snooze. hopefully it won't be a four-hour migraine either.

So I thought I was overwhelmed by Fred Savage on Wednesday. This morning Miyashiro went over the attendance policy (so you were carjacked on your way to class? Minus four attendance points), syllabus (moan, groan) and almighty research project which will actually be kind of limited in scope because it's such a short course. i already have a tentative topic (related to literacy, my general "platform"), but then I was thinking ... wouldn't it be fun and revolutionary of me to study the effect of extracurricular athlectics on academic performance, or whether physical education matters? haha, this might be fun. or maybe somebody spiked my coffee this morning.

I hope I don't fall behind in Human Development ... it's an "easier" class and it's not hard to fall behind in the reading and stuff. It is the one class I'm totally in love with, though. it's making me rethink elementary and consider Early Childhood. I've talked to a handful of people who have gone through it and we all agree, this professor is the shit of shits. (And such a nice guy, too.)

Maybe this is the point in the semester where all I ever talk/write/complain/rave/dream about is school. Those semesters I took super-seriously, looking back, yupp, all I freaking talked about was school. At least then I was on a campus with soda machines and cute guys so it wasn't all wannabe-intellectual spewing. Now it's brown-bag lunches/dinners and Fred Savage. Lucky me. Lucky you.