In which the pond does it again with a repetitive by rote Donners ...

The pond understands ...

Even if Donners was briefly at the top of the reptile Oz commentariat this day, all things must pass and being top of the commentariat world is no insulation against a deep sense of ennui and boredom

There are many other choices, such as Troy talking Donald treason, and Dame Groan moaning in her usual way ...

It's okay to want to skip class, especially a doddering Donners class ... the pond understands.

Why not head off to the Netherlanders, on YouTube here, English subtitles version, ingratiating themselves with the Donald in a sickening display of pandering ... (oh okay a Dutch friend sent it along, and it's what passes for good-hearted humour in the land of the Bolter's genes).

Why not head off to The New Yorker here to get your prep in order and your bug out in good shape?

There's a lot more juicy stuff if you follow the link - it's outside the paywall for the moment - and there's New Zealand jokes, and it explains why the pond cheerfully forks over hard cash to the magazine.

Still here?

You've been let out of class ... you're supposed to be running wild, singing with Alice Cooper that school's out for ever, or screeching about Another Brick in the Wall ...

Oh well, never mind, the pond is pleased that there are a few studious swots of the Bunter and Molesworth kind that really like to do their homework.

The pond is inclined to the What Katy Did At School theory of study ... (Project Gutenberg here).

One of these was that the school was to dine three times a week on pudding and bread and butter. Mrs. Nipson had a theory,—very convenient and economical for herself, but highly distasteful to her scholars,—that it was injurious for young people to eat meat every day in hot weather. 

The puddings were made of batter, with a sprinkling of blackberries or raisins. Now, rising at six, and studying four hours and a half on a light breakfast, has wonderful effect on the appetite, as all who have tried it will testify. The poor girls would go down to dinner as hungry as wolves, and eye the large, pale slices on their plates with a wrath and dismay which I cannot describe. Very thick the slices were, and there was plenty of thin, sugared sauce to eat with them, and plenty of bread and butter; but, somehow, the whole was unsatisfying, and the hungry girls would go upstairs almost as ravenous as when they came down. The second-table-ites were always hanging over the balusters to receive them, and when to the demand, "What did you have for dinner?" "Pudding!" was answered, a low groan would run from one to another, and a general gloom seemed to drop down and envelop the party.

Still here, with three Katy books to read?

Oh okay, the pond has given every excuse and means by which to wag class. Let the cane fall where it may ...

Now the great thing about this is that the pond doesn't say anything.

Doddering Donners has said it all before, but so deep is he into rote learning and memorisation and repetition, he clearly thinks that the more he says it, the more it will become so ...

And what's the bet the Catholic education system will be mentioned again outsmarting everyone at every turn?

Oh yes,  never mind the source of the data, and the apples and oranges methodology, and now with both doddering Donners and the onion muncher discarded, and the irrelevancy quotient cranked up to 11, readers of the reptile Oz  have to suffer constant waves of hectoring advice...

It's the usual Catholic blather about politically correct, while the doofus never pauses to contemplate or reflect on the notion of politically correct Catholicism and the crazy, culturally weird, transubstantiation curriculum ...

Oh and there's another clue concerning the dead weight of history, and the pettifogging pedantry of the 1950s, with Matthew Arnold dropped into the mix ...

For anyone interested, they can discover Matthew Arnold and his wretched career in schools by Greg Hunting it here - keen sideburns, wot wot, who knew they had hipsters in Queen Victoria's day - but don't take the pond's mockery of Arnold as a tedious old school inspector bore as some kind of personal grudge, a result of having suffered endlessly from forced endless reading of his stuff ...

Take the opinion of that great pontificating pompous Harold Bloom at Arnold's wiki -  expert Greg Hunters can find find Bloom flaying him here ...

"Whatever his achievement as a critic of literature, society or religion, his work as a poet may not merit the reputation it has continued to hold in the twentieth century. Arnold is, at his best, a very good, but highly derivative poet, unlike Tennyson, Browning, Hopkins, Swinburne and Rossetti, all of whom individualized their voices." 

Yes, like a lot of rote learners and dodderers, he was okay at swotting, and replication and regurgitation, but he wasn't the best ...

"Whatever his achievement as a critic of literature, society, or religion, his work as a poet may not merit the reputation it has continued to hold in the twentieth century. Arnold is, at his best, a very good but highly derivative poet.... As with Tennyson, Hopkins, and Rossetti, Arnold's dominant precursor was Keats, but this is an unhappy puzzle, since Arnold (unlike the others) professed not to admire Keats greatly, while writing his own elegiac poems in a diction, meter, imagistic procedure, that are embarrassingly close to Keats."

It might help explain why doddering Donners has dropped rote learning off his list of educational musts  this day...

Now just to confirm what a dull, repetitive boy the Donners is, the pond has aggregated these recent sign-off pars from Donners' recent dashing pieces ... and would like the class to vote on which gobbet they prefer ...

Ah, rote learning and memorisation, which it seems this day has been replaced by a more market-driven model ... is there no end to Donners' subtle set of pedagogical variations?

A good effort, but then there's item B, featuring this classic catch ...

And the formula requires that three gobbets must be given to the class before a choice is made, so here is gobbet C ...

Well it's clear enough - the last gobbet is the winner by a country mile, and no correspondence will be considered ... the pond won't allow any of this free-roaming carry on, the teacher's decision is final ...

The pond only offered the notion of choice, so that finally a Catholic mental rigidity might be rigorously enforced ...

And now, because contemplating the doddering Donners is the slow road to madness, why not take the quick road with the pond?

Thanks to a reader - yes, the pond follows the links supplied - the pond was reminded of the art of George Grosz, and its timeless applicability to current events ...

It's going to be a great year for the Godwin's Law swear jar ... the pond might get a trip to anywhere but the United States out of it ...