As finals are drawing near, I find my brainpower horribly focused to the upcoming exams and the multitude of essays I have to complete with only two weeks to do so.
No doubt many of you share my pain. So, I hereby repeat my tactic of picking several issues that I feel are worthy of my notice, but I am unable to devote an entire article to. It worked once at least.
To begin, soon-to-be no-longer Governor Granholm, your amendment to the state is clever. I approve of clever, though that may be a problem during the election.
According to the Free Press, Granholm “called on lawmakers to approve legislation to give the state more power to intervene in academically failing school districts, increase the number of high-quality charter schools, merit pay for teachers and alternative certification for teachers without education degrees.”
In other words, fix the schools, pay the teachers better, and rely less on teachers who have degrees in education. I have always been a fan of merit pay, disliked the thought of teachers’ unions in public schools, and the alternate certifications sounds like a great way to get people that have a deep understanding of a subject from a practical, as well as theoretical sense. Maybe we can break union’s holds on this state from a new angle.
Item number two, school before Labor Day. Relax, its public school. They think moving the time school starts will better their chances at the Race to the Top federal money.
Yeah, let’s tick off all the people who get three-day weekends and not a lot of time off because of their jobs. Well those that do have jobs. The argument against this was stronger when the state had more autoworkers.
Still, it is pretty annoying to start class and then get a day off right away. I remember the days before 2005, which was when they decided to start school after Labor Day. My Dad remembers the days when he was a kid when school started after Labor Day. Obviously having school start after Labor Day is a good idea, or at least a popular one. Having school before Labor Day just sucks the fun out of the end of the month, more so than normal, I mean, with school starting.
Single-serving milk cartons are my final gripe for now. I don’t know when these things became so blasted hard to open, but when I was younger that was not a problem. I blame cheaper cardboard and the steady decrease in the emphasis of quality over cost, like those DVD reader things that melt because there’s plastic and the red LASER reader-thing melts it. Or something like that.
I want to be able to open my milk easily, and not have to resort to scissors. And I don’t want to dirty a cup unless I need to.
