Teacher:  "Please raise your hand if you are taking hot lunch today."

First Student:  "What's for lunch?"

Teacher:  "Walking Taco's."

Second Student:  "What's a Walking Taco?"

Teacher:  "I can't believe you don't remember.  We had Walking Taco's the third week of school last year, too!

What got me started on the dialog above is a Florida newspaper article that ASCD ran in its Smart Brief recently.  The state of Florida has mandated that all their schools adopt a particular Math curriculum.  So much for 'the faculty constructing curriculum' and all that stuff about local control of education.

Was I just dreaming all through that part of my career when 'the experts' said that faculties should develop and build their school's curriculum? "Don't 'teach the text'!"  "Are you saying the textbook is your curriculum?  Oh my goodness!"  "My my my..."

"How can our visit team criticize this faculty for not constructing their school's curriculum...and then in the report say they should throw out phonics and exclusively take a whole language approach?  Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't realize most of the team is made up of Florida legislators."

Florida must be employing a different set of experts these days (not surprisingly) because the article went on to say that this new series  was also going to cut benchmarks in 7th grade from 89 to 25.  Hmmmm...  Watch out Michigan - it looks like the new 417 GLCE's for 7th grade Math in Michigan might be...a bit much.

Breaking News:  Michigan's legislature, currently divided over the pronunciation of GLCE's (long 'e' or silent 'e'), promises to have a state-mandated pronunciation by next school year.

Further, Florida's new curriculum will cut back on review.  Their theory goes that teaching a concept in 6th, 7th and 8th grade is ineffective and a poor use of time.  An example from the article:  Instead of teaching Integers in 6th grade (a one day lesson) and then reviewing it in 7th and 8th grades, the new approach will be to teach Integers for five days in 6th grade and then not visit it again in 7th and 8th grades.  Oh yeah, that's going to make a huge difference.

"You really don't remember the Walking Taco's we had for hot lunch a year ago?!?"

And a Walking Taco is fun, something that most kids like...unlike Integers.