I Love It! This article rocks my English teaching world.

In a classic and shining Onion moment, the bogus press reports, "Underfunded Schools Forced to Cut Past Tense from Language Programs." (The title says it all.)















I've always held to the idea that sarcasm is not just opposites; it is based in truth or, as Shakespeare so eloquently puts it, half-truths. This is the reason I'm not enthused about using sarcasm often when relating to friends. However, I love to revel in the industries that create sarcastic press based on patterns that occur in reality and what would happen if they were taken to a wild extreme.

There are two partial truths in the underpinning of this lovely article.

1. Schools are cutting out valuable programs, leaving things like theater, art and music high and dry. (Forgive the cliche) But school choice advocates would say that not necessarily are they underfunded, but the funds are being distributed to a top-heavy, bureaucratic system that would sacrifice the fine arts over its bloated salaries.
   
   
2. Language skills are apparently so poor in this system (I would vy for that in a heartbeat, as I teach first-year college reading and writing) it wouldn't really matter if the past tense was cut... my students are always writing papers that have inconsistent tenses. [My turn for sarcasm.] We might as well cut down on all the confusions of so many tenses and teach just a few so the students learn to use those properly.