I don’t know about you, but I remember the moment when, as a boy, I fell in love with learning.

It was 1954, in the spring.

My fourth-grade teacher, Sister Mary Joseph, sat down with me in the late afternoon and gently pried from my hands Hardy Boys book No. 42, “The Secret of the Mummy’s Strategically Dynamic New Paradigms.”

“Ronnie,” she said. “I know you’re a good boy with a bright mind. But your ITBS scores don’t point to project-based learning across the curriculum. You need to scaffold texts to other texts, and to that end I’m going to start interfacing with your developmental space.”

“Sister Mary Joseph,” I stammered, “can you disintermediate that for me in a way that unpacks the convergence in assessment-driven terms?”

We talked for hours as the sun sank toward the horizon. I believe both of us wept. My mind opened like a flower.

That night, I chopped my Hardy Boys books into little pieces and fed them to the neighbor’s python. I read Emerson’s “The American Scholar” instead.

Wait...

Maybe it didn’t happen that way, because in 1954, American education was not drowning in incomprehensible crap.”

CAT Tracks Editor's Note:

Bless me, Father, for I have sinned...

...again.

The above dialog was not my own.

I stole it from Colin McEnroe of NPR in Connecticut...

...a brazen exercise in self-indulgent cattiness.

From the Hartford Courant