No Child Left Behind

Last week, Friday, I think it is, I'm sitting out on a bench in the middle of campus, and I see a bunch of bastards standing around in the middle of the greens, all wearing the same color shirt, balloons tied to shit, handing out flyers. Now, right off the bat I'm calling these people bastards, without knowing their cause. There's a reason for this. Standing around in matching shirts in the middle of a bunch of balloons handing out flyers is not a good way to support a good cause. Example:

I want to save the manatees. How best to do this? Maybe I could collect money for a manatee-related charity, or get a group of people to do this, or possibly just donate some time or work to save the manatees. Maybe I want to raise awareness of saving the manatees. I could tell my friends and family about it, and since they know me, I might have an impact on them. OOooo No! Wait! I've got it! I'll tie balloons to every god damn thing I can, get matching shirts with the money that I could have used to save the fucking manatees, print out a billion flyers that say "SAVE THE MANATEES" in some kind of fucked up handwriting font, and hand those out, and use more money on that, and litter the fucking campus with god damn little blue flyers, and maybe as complete strangers walk by, they will be hit by a fucking bolt of lightning from above, and realize that my cause is just, and I obviously am the man to take advice and life goals from, and they'll go seek out similar shirts to wear as the ones that I fucking have. Yes, and I'll put a Jesus fish on my car as well, and people will see that and suddenly become christian.

No. Bastards who stand around handing out flyers in tacky shirts with their flair littered around the damn quad have a motive, and generally it's 'Being Stupid'. These bastards were no different. I'll finally get to my title, they were promoting the No Child Left Behind act.

Now, there are a lot of things I don't agree with: Eating people, outlawing all sports except polo, even some less-outlandish things like 'Bothering Me', or 'Acting Like Paper Science Is A Real Major', but you have to be so god damned stupid to support the No Child Left Behind act, that it boggles my mind. I seriously can't imagine a group of students dumb enough to think this thing is a good idea.

If you don't know what this is, go to Wikipedia and read the article on it. I was going to sum-up what a fuck-up the whole thing is here, but they've already got it nailed pretty much. One thing they don't point out is how much extra work it puts on the teachers. Good teachers are already overworked. I'm not talking about your art teacher from junior high who spent class passed out behind his desk, I'm talking about teachers who actually care. This act just gives them a ton more work to do, not only stressing them out (my mother was a teacher...), but also detracting from the amount of useful work they can do.

Anyway, if you're part of this new student group and you happen to read this, please just go walk in front of traffic. Try to time it right so you get hit by an suv or something, I don't want you damaging someone's car.