This past weekend, the GorTs and the Puters got together for dinner, drinks, and conversation. At one point, we landed on the topic of education without recounting the entire conversation, Mrs. P and I agreed that now is the time to do a major overhaul of the American education system. Mrs. P put forward a number of ideas and I’ll list and augment them here with both what we discussed as well as further thoughts:

1. Revamp the academic calendar for K-12: run school year round in “quarters”. Ten weeks each with three weeks off in between each. Alternatively, you could do two week breaks with a week in the middle of the quarter or a smattering of days within a quarter to help cover holidays, etc. One can shift it around but generally you can get time off around the end of the year and the summer break covers around July 4th with two other breaks in the spring and fall. I would begin the school year after the mid-summer break. This provides for more consistent learning and retention of the subject matter. No prolonged break during the summer during which students lose what they’ve learned by not applying it. It opens up other times of the year for teachers and families with students to take vacations.
2. Enable and encourage as best as possible multi-track subjects, particularly in high school. Allow students who are academically talented to pursue and be challenged while continuing to provide a base level education to students who have other gifts. Some of this is done today but is at risk such as the multi-tiered math tracks shown in this diagram:
3. Require a basic Civics class in high school.
4. Teach a “personal management” class in high school that covers: basic personal finance (to include loans, credit, ledgers, budgeting, etc), basic cooking, simple home troubleshooting/repair, and other “life skills”
5. Reorient the science curriculum order in high school: start with basic Newtonian physics, then Chemistry, and Biology. Offer advanced courses in each as needed (i.e. AP/Honors) with more of the Electro-Magnetic, Optical, and other aspects of Physics as optional, advanced courses.
6. Overhaul our reading and writing teaching to teach summary, instructional, creative, and analytical reading and writing.

Now is the time to do it. Right on the heels of the disastrous remote learning that was tried as part of COVID. Yes, it’ll be hard and it will require a lot of changes. New teaching methods and approaches. Families reorienting to the new schedule. But it can be done.

GorT

GorT is an eight-foot-tall robot from the 51ˢᵗ Century who routinely time-travels to steal expensive technology from the future and return it to the past for retroinvention. The profits from this pay all the Gormogons’ bills, including subsidizing this website. Some of the products he has introduced from the future include oven mitts, the Guinness widget, Oxy-Clean, and Dr. Pepper. Due to his immense cybernetic brain, GorT is able to produce a post in 0.023 seconds and research it in even less time. Only ’Puter spends less time on research. GorT speaks entirely in zeros and ones, but occasionally throws in a ڭ to annoy the Volgi. He is a massive proponent of science, technology, and energy development, and enjoys nothing more than taking the Czar’s more interesting scientific theories, going into the past, publishing them as his own, and then returning to take credit for them. He is the only Gormogon who is capable of doing math. Possessed of incredible strength, he understands the awesome responsibility that follows and only uses it to hurt people.