She couldn’t stay quiet for long. Grandma Daisy is back, less than a week after the annual budget talk by so-called Governor Walker.

Fiddle-dee-dee. Tomorrow will be another day.

As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly!

Big Brother is watching.  

All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.

Wilbur didn’t want food, he wanted love.

I have created a monster!

 

Well, grandkids, all of these are lines from classic books. Let’s see how many you or your mother can identify. What? So few? What are they teaching these days — never mind.

Let’s look at the last one. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein,  of course. Truth be told, though, young ones, this particular quote isn’t a direct quote from the novel. It’s kind of like crediting  Buzz Lightyear with “To infinity and beyond!” when he only said it twice in the first Toy Story movie.

The truth is that Shelley’s work inspired the phrase.  An English teacher I knew (they’re always handy when you need a good literature quote) mentioned that there is no exact quote in which Dr. Frankenstein says or another character says that he/you have created a monster–it’s more of a thematic draw from the overall text. Frankenstein warns the man who meets him at the end of his life how “dangerous is the acquisition of knowledge,” as a way of saying, “Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should!” in keeping with the “created a monster” idea.

So, young ones, back to the budget. Governor Talks-a-lot claimed to have innovative changes for our fair state’s education system. His changes consisted of a straining-at-the-seams budget for public schools and a significant increase in a program called Vouchers. Vouchers were grants, money, scholarships paid by the state for students to attend private schools. Private. Not public charters, not home-schooling, but private schools. Governor Walk-on-by ignored the evidence that current voucher schools in Milwaukee were not doing any better then their public counterparts down the road. In fact, if they measured success by the standardized tests of the day, voucher schools did a poorer job of educating their students.

Governor Walk-all-over-you decided that his “innovative education reform” would expand the voucher program into other middling to large-ish cities. Make it bigger. Spread the money around. Around the state, that is. One city, one school district at a time.

The Governor, despite his lack of scientific or educational background, had created a monster. He wanted to open up the private vouchers, damage the state’s education budget, and further gut public schools.

Governor Walkerstein was ready to create his monster. He didn’t have the wisdom of my English teacher friend to tell him that just because he could, didn’t mean he should.

Oh, young ones, it was a tough time to be a teacher. In fact, I could use a cup of coffee. Let’s take a break and talk about classic television. Have you ever seen WKRP in Cincinnati?