Late Start Mondays With The Cap'n

Apparently, there is some hubbub about the lack of Late Start Mondays for the 2009 2010 school year. Boys must have their hair cut and not styled above the eyes. Girls have to wear a crew neck t-shirt under everything. Belts must be worn. Final exams are after Christmas vacation this year. Now, no Late Start Mondays? What’s next, no fries for lunch?

Actually, students and parents should thank LHN for expunging LSMs from the calendar. I’m not sure if you noticed but cereal boxes have decreased in size. Costs, however, have remained the same. It’s subtle, Orwellian marketing at its finest. No, the Cap’n has not lost weight on his corn syrup diet: the box is smaller. The price isn’t any higher but there are fewer berries to crunch in your Cap'n Crunch Crunch Berries.

By abolishing LSMs, North is making cereal boxes bigger. Approximately, there are thirty-seven Mondays, multiply those by the additional forty minutes with NSMs and we just added twenty-four hours of instruction time this year. All of this comes at no increased cost to parents. Hello, 36 on the ACT! Hello, MIT. Goodbye, Fallback Plan-MSU.

Other than the decision to place final exams after Christmas vacation, I like all the changes. The economy is tough and we all have to live within our means. Increasing instruction time, while not increasing tuition is like buying one pair of shoes and getting the second free or seeing the Tigers win a game in 18 innings or witnessing the Lions’ first……

Sorry, I surrendered to my giddy emotions.

More is not always better; sometimes it’s just more. Supersizing the trans-fats and calories is not better because it’s more. It’s gluttony. However, in this case, more education is better for a lot of reasons and one just happens to be that you won’t be paying more for more.