On communication, professional and otherwise.
I remember thinking as the economy cratered last fall that a silver lining may be that the some of the trivia that dominates during good times—gadget talk and other futuristic fiddlesticks—would go away, as we had real problems to worry about.
Like, food and shelter.
Well, has anybody heard much lately about how we're all going to be doing our jobs in Second Life?
Taking Scout to kindergarten this morning. We've gotta be in room 113 at 8:55 to meet Miss Mahoney. (Details changed to indulge the paranoid.) I'm not going to talk here about how I'm feeling. But this passage from an unpublished memoir about my mother and my sister Piper does spring to mind.
It must have been that Jeep
in which Mom famously drove Pie to the first day of kindergarten. For several
weeks ahead of time, she’d been preparing Pie for this traumatic day. She had
developed a simple plan. Here's how it would work: At the entrance to the school, Mom would kiss the palm of Pie's little hand and Pie would close it and the kiss would stay in there, Mom explained, even if she forgot to keep her hand closed during the day.The plan worked perfectly. Pie received her kiss, closed her hand, and trotted happily off to school. Mom got back in the car and headed home.
But she had to pull off the road, she was sobbing so violently.
Scout's starting kindergarten Tuesday, and I got an automated call from the Chicago Public Schools telling me, among other things, that this year's CPS slogan is "Just Go to School and Become …"
This sounded too inane even for educators, assuming I'd misheard, or had hung up too quickly to hear the end of the slogan.
A key message in this year's back-to-school campaign is "Just Go to School and Become …", CPS officials told the interfaith group. The idea behind the message is the key to achieving dreams, [chief education officer Barbara] Eason-Watkins said.
"Education prepares you to become a doctor, a scientist, an entrepreneur, a teacher," she said. "You can become whatever you want to become if you go to school, study, focus and work hard … and become."
Oh, so it actually isn't enough to "Just Go to School." Ya gotta study, focus and work hard too.
As Eddie would say, "I knew it didn't work."
Education may not be the scene of the worst writing in the world. But educators are the softest thinkers, most shameless liars and smilingest bullshitters in all the world.