Sound’s like a good idea to me. In the Chicago-based Student Lawyer (September), Di Mari Ricker describes a legal-writing professor driven to distraction by ignorance of apostrophes: “Benson gives his students a fifth-grade-level test with 10 sentences that need apostrophes. Students are allowed to take the test as many times as they wish, but if they fail it they don’t pass his legal writing class.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
It’s easy to be amazed when you don’t look behind the curtain. Lorraine Forte in Catalyst (September): “In an Aug. 14 news story, the Chicago Tribune said it was ‘amazing’ that the new [school] executives plugged ‘a hole projected to reach $1.4 billion by 1999 and balance the habitually red-inked budget for four years without new state money.’ But, in fact, the budget hole was plugged only with the help of sweeping new reform legislation adopted in May by the Republican-dominated General Assembly. Without the new law, balancing the budget would have been virtually impossible. The new law let the new School Reform Board of Trustees essentially redo the school system’s budget, using money that had previously been earmarked for specific purposes [such as pension funds and increases in Chapter One funds] to help eliminate the deficit and pay for new initiatives. In addition, the law paved the way for the board to fire some 1,700 employees by removing many of the civil service and union job protections workers enjoyed.”
“There are not many novel ideas. It’s how ideas fit together that makes something new,” according to State Geological Survey chemical engineer Massoud Rostam-Abadi (GeoNews, July). “Some people can only put together ten-piece puzzles. Some get up to 100 pieces. We want people who can handle 10,000 pieces.” What–with no picture on the box?
“Moral principles based on the rule of ‘deliberate, disgusting, revolting conduct’ would not be discriminatory if they were applied equally to all behavior that contributes to costly life-threatening illnesses,” writes Gordon Nary in the Chicago-based Journal of the International Association of Physicians in AIDS Care (July), reflecting on Senator Jesse Helms’s argument against AIDS funding. “For example, a majority of Americans may believe that smoking is ‘deliberate, disgusting, revolting conduct’ by ‘people deliberately engaged in unnatural acts.’ It would therefore follow that there should be equivalent cuts affecting people with smoking-related cancer, circulatory and respiratory diseases.”
