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The Sorry Legend of the Great Bootsock

The Legend of the Great Bootsock is a sorry homily for the rest of us who have talent, but zero gumption to keep fighting the hard fight against time and condition and geography.

The Great Bootsock got his name as the star of his small-town high school football team.  As the true freshman quarterback of his team, he won the first game he ever played by diving over a goal line scrum — even though one of the opposing players had grabbed his sock and was pulling him back from the score.

When the sock pulled away from the aggressor’s grasp, it wrapped around the heel of the great Bootsock’s cleats, sticking there like a flag of immediate infamy and respect, and the Legend of the Great Bootsock was born.

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Queensborough Bloodbath

There’s a bloodbath going on in Bayside and the site of the letting is the campus of CUNY-Queensborough, and the dagger is called “Pathways.”  Pathways, if you haven’t heard, is the new principle of uniting, and unbinding, disparate CUNY satellite campuses into a single, unintelligible — “Borg Cooperative” — where every course and teaching philosophy all land on the same page, and a student can take a class here and have it count for full credit over there and, as a member of the CUNY community, I believe Pathways sounds great in theory, but in current practice and cudgel, Pathways is a gangplank for faculty and the end of being for any idea of a proper, well-rounded, college education on a undergraduate CUNY campus.

Pathways is, of course, all about the bottom line — enrolling more students and graduating them quicker and paying faculty less money — but the end result will be students who are not as educated as their peers and who will be irreparably intellectually maimed, all in the name of convenience and parsimony.

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