Tuesday, September 23, 2008

Please Sir...

My title is an allusion to the Charles Dickens novel Oliver Twist, also made into movies, and featuring grovelly (as in subservient) underclass boys and men begging for a wee bit more bread from the nasty authorities.

Cleveland High School isn't like that. The authorities are kind enough and the students are respected. But in terms of infrastructure, one can see Merry Old England under the hood: one jump rope for ten kids, calculators unused because of no budget for batteries, a general sense of going nowhere, a stale environment. This is the world of Major Barbara & Co., still going strong these hundred plus years later.

You'd think we wouldn't leave our pipeline to languish, given our need for skilled, high tech workers in ToonTown. That's where Saturday Academy comes in, other supplemental institutions with a charter for change. It's all about finding alternate routes, in addition to the well trafficked.

Of course a better outcome would be Cleveland attracts new sponsors in the business community anxious to do a more inspiring job of product placement than the vending machine crowd, which boasts of its inappropriate offerings, very "nose picking in public" these soft drink peddlers, but then that's Dickens for ya, full of colorful, twisted characters.

:: product placements ::