What do Enron and the four-period day have in common?
Absolutely nothing. One is an international scandal and the other a local conundrum. I have a gut feeling neither will be resolved by year’s end. They’re also two topics I can’t seem to warm up to.
To learn a little bit more about these hot news items, I did an Internet search. Although I’m a died-in-the-net Google Girl (www.google.com), I couldn’t get Google to google on this particular day. Blame it on the winter winds, but I kept getting a disconnect notice whenever I tried to log on.
So I visited www.altavista.com to see what they had on Enron. No big surprise, there were 90,455 results. But when I went to www.dogpile.com to search for “four period day,” I only got 10 results. And four of the 10 were not really about the four-period day (“Echovirus 30 outbreak involving four day-care centres”). Enron wins hands down.
But there was no way I could wade through 90,455 Enron results, so I narrowed my search. This time, I typed in “Understanding Enron.” Voila! I finally found something that made total sense:
UNDERSTANDING ENRON
(author unknown)
FEUDALISM: You have two cows. Your lord takes some of the milk.
FASCISM: You have two cows. The government takes both, hires you to take care of them and sells you the milk.
PURE COMMUNISM: You have two cows. Your neighbors help take care of them and you all share the milk.
APPLIED COMMUNISM: You have two cows. You must take care of them, but the government takes all the milk.
TOTALITARIANISM: You have two cows. The government takes them both and denies they ever existed. Milk is banned.
SOUTH AMERICAN DEMOCRACY: You have two cows. The government takes both and drafts you into the army.
EUROPEAN DEMOCRACY: You have two cows. The EU commission decides which regulations for feeding and milking apply. If there aren’t any, they invent some. They pay you not to milk the cows. They take both cows, shoot one, milk the other and pour the milk down the drain. They then require you to fill out forms accounting for the missing cows.
CAPITALISM: You have two cows. You sell one and buy a bull. Your herd multiplies and the economy grows. You sell them and retire on the income.
ENRON VENTURE CAPITALISM: You have two cows. You sell three of them to your publicly listed company, using letters of credit opened by your brother-in-law at the bank, then execute a debt/equity swap with an associated general offer so you get all four cows back, with a tax exemption for five cows. The milk rights of the six cows are transferred via an intermediary to a Cayman Island company secretly owned by the majority shareholder who sells the rights to all seven cows back to your listed company. The annual report says the company owns eight cows, with an option for more.
Armed with a better understanding of Enron, I next typed in “Understanding the four-period day.” I wasn’t quite so lucky. This search generated “Understanding TAF’s,” “Understanding Directional Forecast,” and “Understanding Coffee, Caffeine and Cardiovascular Disease.” Not a peep about South Whidbey’s ongoing scheduling problem.
The fact is, it’s time to move on from the four–period day issue. And just for the record, I sent an e-mail to our school board members plus the superintendent, voicing my support of the four-period day and questioning how detrimental it is for our kids to sit in a comfortable, climate-controlled classroom for 90 minutes:
“As a member of Arlington High School Class of 1969, I have no idea if my classes were 45 minutes or an hour long. I just know I learned how to read and write fairly well thanks to my intelligent and articulate English teachers, Roberta Sanford and Joyce Wold; appreciate music and the French horn due to my dedicated band teachers, Phil Lowry and Ray Guyll; make a dandy white sauce and never touch the sewing machine again, compliments of colorful home-ec teacher Nelda Ulery; write and speak Latin for future trips to Latin America, thanks to bow-tie-wearing Renaissance man Robert Tschirgi (sorry, I couldn’t resist the Dan Quayle innuendo); and know I’d never work for Price-Waterhouse or run for state treasurer due to my dreaded math teacher Mr. Laxdal (who gave me my only D, but my parents didn’t whine).”
On Fat Tuesday, Feb. 5, South Whidbey voters will be asked to vote on a two-year maintenance and operations excess levy. I’ve already cast my absentee ballot, and I voted YES. Whatever your feelings are about the four-period day, don’t let the controversy color the fact that we owe our kids what we were given so many decades ago: a quality education.
Oh, and vote NO on Enron.
Sue Frause can be reached by e-mail at skfrause@whidbey.com.
