The Grad Standards:
Several of my loyal viewers (actually none of them, but I like to pretend) suggested that I might write a column showing the flaws of Graduation Standards, or at least ridiculing them thoroughly. I can’t promise any kind of facts or rational thought in my article, but I can protest loudly and with many four letter words. I promise to also try and ridicule them a little.
We’ll start off with a little history for those of my readers who have been living in a cave with their fingers stuck in their ears and their eyes shut. The Grad Standards are a new set of hoops for the students of Minnesota, or “trained poodles” as the government refers to them, to jump through. They came into existence recently when a state legislator woke up with a cramp in his back and decided to take it out on every teenager in the state. He plotted deviously and then managed to materialize his ageism into the Grad Standards. He disguised it as a plan to “improve” the education system and then passed it through state legislature tacked on to a bill to raise their salaries by five hundred percent. In a government split by partisanship and held in paralysis by Jesse Ventura’s remarkable idiocy our government can still reliably pass bills raising their own salaries even in the face of adversity. God Bless America!
Grad Standards is based on the theory that our current curriculum was churning out people with entirely too much creativity and independent thought. These poor afflicted people were then forced in to corporate America where there is no room for employees with their own identity. To solve this urgent problem, Minnesota implemented a series of steps to stunt and interfere with personal growth and development. Now that a new set of interns and government employees are being trained at the cruel whip of the Grad Standards the economy can breathe a sigh of relief and go back to receding, the threat of improvement dealt with.
The Grad Standards cures the need for productive and useful activity with a long series of bureaucratic projects that prove you learned what you needed to learn from a class you had no time study because you were working on Grad Standards. Projects include such diverse activities as posters, poster making, poster crafting, poster production, and poster art. High School Students will learn the valuable life skills that will serve them in the poster making job market of tomorrow.
After the students have completed the poster portion of the project, the Grad Standards require a short thirty page essay complete with bibliography on what they learned from the poster making experience. If they express any anti-Grad Standard sentiment in these essays they will fail high school, assuming that anyone reads the results of these projects. The Vegas odds on that actually happening are currently about ninety trillion billion to one.
We here at the Tylerian Underground have hard evidence that Grad Standards are, to use the technical term, dumb as a stump. The man who had the original idea may have been inspired by the voice of Satan, but the actual designers were obviously under the guidance of, and I quote, “tiny pixies that come when I sniff detergent.” This is the sort of person in charge of the public schools.
I felt extremely productive today, so I took an extensive survey of popular opinion on the Grad Standards. Among those surveyed were a large cat, and a significantly less large cat. The overall response was unanimous, an awe-inspiring level of indifference of the sort only a cat could express. Cat owners among my readers will understand this instinctively, but for those of you who don’t understand this I can’t really express this to you clearly. It’s about how you might feel about important global issues like the increasing whale population in the Indian Sea, only they don’t care as much.
All in all the Grad Standards are obviously the sick brainchild of a very twisted and deranged lunatic who got elected by the same people responsible for the success of the Ventura campaign. They will kill the last remaining droplets of non-conformity in you and leave you a quivering mass of insecurities, just waiting to be pressed into a corporate mold. Just remember Minnesota’s political motto, “People who can’t vote don’t matter!”