Susan Ohanian Asks an Eternal Question

 The Eggplant



http://susanohanian.org/show_nclb_news.php?id=867

Why DID the Chicken Cross the Road?

I. Educationists Know the Answer


  • Because he recognized what I've said repeatedly, we really need to elevate the profession of teaching and you can't win the Race to the top without reaching for the higher bar . . . or road, as the case may be.--Arne Duncan



  • Contrary to the claims of some of my critics and some of the editorial pages, I am an ardent believer in the free market. . . and the right of chickens to cross those roads.--President Barack Obama



  • To listen to Bill Gates makes a speech about what chickens need to do to be successful.--New York Times editorial department



  • To attend a party honoring Michelle Rhee.--Washington Post editorial department



  • To dance a jig at a KIPP coop.--Jay Mathews



  • She wanted merit pay.--Mayor Michael Bloomberg



  • Because cooperation, collaboration and consensus-building are way overrated.--Michelle Rhee



  • To get away from the 8,600 failed coops that live millions of chicks behind.--Chester Finn



  • The chicken wanted to learn its value:
    y = Xβ + Zv + ε where β is a p-by-1 vector of fixed effects; X is an n-by-p matrix; v is a q-by-1 vector of random effects; Z is an n-by-q matrix; E(v) = 0, Var(v) = G; E(ε) = 0, Var(ε) = R; Cov(v,ε) = 0. V = Var(y) = Var(y - Xβ) = Var(Zv + ε) = ZGZT + R--Los Angeles Times



  • Because the more innovative that chicken is, the more money he'll get for his school. We've got to reward good chickens. First, we also have to stop making excuses for bad chickens." --Pres. Barack Obama



  • Because when chickens need more achievement for less money, they have to change where they walk. Unlike Europe, we do very little in this country to measure, develop and reward excellent walking.--Bill Gates



  • When American chickens have the skills and knowledge needed in today's society, our flocks will be positioned to compete successfully in the global economy.--National Governors Association Center for Best Practices (NGA Center) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO)


    • II. Let history be the judge--Karl Marx





  • If a chicken insisted always on being serious, and never allowed itself a bit of fun and relaxation, it would go mad or become unstable without knowing it.--Herodotus




  • He who commands the road has command of everything. Themistocles




  • It wasn't a road; it was a river.--Julius Caesar




  • It wasn't a road; it was a mountain.--Hannibal




  • It wasn't a road; it was a railroad track.--Leland Stanford.




  • It wasn't a road; it was the Atlantic.--Charles Lindbergh




  • Either the road or nothing.--Cesare Borgia




  • Lebensraum.--Adolph Hitler




  • Chickens love to fight. All real chickens love the sting of battle.--General George Patton




  • As a committed anarchist, it jaywalked because the rules of the state are the chief instrument for permitting the few to monopolize the land.--Prince Peter Alekseyevich Kropotkin




  • I have it on good authority that it went to the crosswalk.--Rudi Guiliani


    • III. All chickens by nature desire knowledge--Aristotle



  • A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step across the road.--Lao-Tsu




  • Because the road is the noble Middle Path. . .which produces insight and calm, to knowledge and enlightenment.--Buddha




  • Surely every chicken walketh in a vain show.--Psalms




  • It wanted to get out of the Cave.--Plato




  • An irrepresentable, unconscious, pre-existant form seemed to be part of the chicken's inherited structure and could manifest itself in spontaneous crossing anywhere, at any time.--Carl Jung




  • The chicken believed the coop is primarily a social institution and getting out of it the fundamental method of social progress and reform.--John Dewey




  • It was developmentally appropriate for the chicken to do so.--Jean Piaget




  • The bell rang, the chicken walked.--B. F. Skinner




  • Sexual fulfillment.--Dr. Ruth




  • Sexual perversion.--Baron Richard Von Krafft-Ebing




  • Crossing the road was the last taboo of chickendom.--Theodor Reik




  • A rooster cut off from its own mind, cut off equally from its own body--a half-crazed creature in a mad world.--R. D. Laing




  • Because it was lonely and looking for other chickens.--David Riesman




  • We rest when we're dead.--Luis Bunel.




  • A chicken is free the moment it wants to be.--Voltaire




  • A chicken takes its fun where it finds it.--Rudyard Kipling




  • It couldn't go home again.--Thomas Wolf




  • The chicken was looking for what it had lost.--Marcel Proust




  • Because it was All Quiet on the Western Front.--Erich Maria Remarque




  • Because it cursed the commonplace.--E. A. Robinson




  • To begin a long day's journey into night.--Eugene O'Neill




  • Well, I don't know. The mediahave swamped the message, but anyway

    God bless the chicken.

    I loved the way it ran.--John Updike




  • The chicken walks freely in the street

    and sees reality

    and the things it sees

    are bigger than itself

    and the things it sees

    are its reality.--Lawrence Ferlinghetti




  • Because the absurd is only too necessary on earth--Fyodor Dostoyevsky




  • I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story.--Edith Wharton




  • Among twenty chickens

    The only puzzling one

    Was the one who crossed the road.--Wallace Stevens




  • The chicken

    relieves his noble bowels

    in a desolate field.--Buson




  • A willful beast must go its own way.--Aesop




  • To take a basket of fruit to her grandmother.--Grimm brothers




  • Because she would rather learn from one bird how to sing than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance.--e. e. cummings




  • I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.--J. D. Salinger




  • Someone must have been telling lies about the chicken.--Franz Kafka




  • So it wouldn't have to say it was sorry.--Erich Segal




  • It was privileged to be invited to a family festival of an upper middle-class flock in full plumage.--John Galsworthy




  • You build it, the chicken will come.--William Kinsella




  • The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind.--Bob Dylan




  • My dear, I don't give a damn.--Rhett Butler




  • Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.--Noam Chomsky




  • It wanted to be on the road.--Jack Koureac




  • It is not the answer that enlightens, but the question.--Eugene Ionesco




  • Because it was the master of its fate and the captain of its soul.--W. E. Henley




  • So much depends

    upon a chicken

    seeing a road

    and a path between the

    white lines.--William Carlos Williams




  • I never saw a chicken cross

    I never hope to see one.

    But I'll tell you this

    I'd rather see than be one.--Galett Burgess




  • Every chicken, as long as it does not violate the laws of justice, is left perfectly free to pursue its own interest his own way, and to bring both its industry and capital into competition with those of any other chicken.--Adam Smith




  • That's where the money was.--U. S. Congress




  • The great thing about chickens is they don't talk.--Studs Terkel




  • The Family made the chicken an offer it couldn't refuse.--Mario Puzo




  • A mere forty years ago, beach volleyball was just beginning. No bureaucrat would have invented it, and that's what freedom is all about. That and chickens crossing roads--Newt Gingrich




  • So I could feel its pain.--Bill Clinton




  • Looking for a place to take a nap.--Washington Irving




  • She felt oppressed by the henhouse.--Henrik Ibsen




  • To avoid getting stewed.--W. C. Fields




  • It wasn't a chicken.--J. R. R. Tolkien




  • To get away from its mother.--Philip Roth




  • Her welfare was cut, so she had to stop watching TV and having babies and get a job.--Newt Gingrich




  • Panehllenic synergism.--Aristophanes




  • To hide out.--Frank Perdue




  • It was tired of its cubicle.--Dilbert




  • Because it was there.--Sir Edmund Hilary




  • We are looking at the societal influences that caused the breakup of this perfect family unit, asking the abandoned chicks how they feel.--Oprah




  • Everybody has something to conceal. --Humphrey Bogart, The Maltese Falcon




  • It's hard to be free when you're bought and sold in the market place.--Jack Nicholson, Easy Rider




  • Without deviation, progress is not possible.--Frank Zappa




  • It's better to be out than in. It is better to be on the lam than on the cover of Time magazine.--Nelson Algren




  • What color was the chicken?--The Car Guys on NPR




  • Because it is time to start shoving cement and iron in the opposite direction before the entire nation, before the whole planet, becomes one steaming, stinking, overcrowded high-tech coop.--Edward Abbey




  • You can't stay in your corner of the Forest waiting for others to come to you. You have to go to them sometimes.--Winne the Pooh




  • There ain't no answer. There ain't going to be any answer. There never has been an answer. That's the answer.--Gertrude Stein


    • IV. Hens must try to do things as roosters have tried--Amelia Earhart



  • She crossed because hens have rights too.--Susan B. Anthony




  • She wanted a room of her own.--Virginia Woolf




  • Go ask Alice--Grace Slick




  • She needed to dig her brother's grave.--Antigone




  • That's where the railroad tracks were.--Anna Karenina




  • Her astrologer told her to.--Nancy Reagan




  • To interpret is to impoverish.--Susan Sontag




  • She didn't want to be pigeon-holed.--Ms Magazine




  • She could, therefore she did.--Simone Weil




  • That's where the cocks crowed.--Alfred Kinsey




  • Looking for eggplant.--Julia Child




  • She wanted a cigarette with her vodka and tonic.--Fran Lebowitz




  • It is better to be a lion for a day than a chicken all your life.--Elizabeth Kenny




  • A hen's cold, perverted will.--John Clare




  • Roosters have an unusual talent for making a bore out of everything they touch.--Yoko Ono




  • She was tired of being a sitting duck.--Gloria Steinham



    • V. The Common Core Literature Plan Has the Answer--David Coleman



  • Whan that Aprile with his shoures sote

    Than longen chicke to goon on pilgrimages.--Geoffrey Chaucer




  • To see a world in a grain of sand

    And heaven in a wild flower--William Blake




  • To celebrate itself.--Walt Whitman




  • Looking for Xanadu.--Samuel Taylor Coleridge




  • To get away from the maddening crowd's ignoble strife.--Thomas Gray




  • It was better than sitting in darkness, hatching vain empires.--John Milton




  • The mass of chickens lead lives of quiet desperation--Henry David Thoreau




  • Small things make base chickens proud--William Shakespeare




  • The chicken did not want to go gentle into that good night.--Dylan Thomas




  • Because the road was the one less traveled.--Robert Frost




  • Because it's better to cross with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.--Herman Melville




  • A widow hen sat mourning for her love.--Percy Bysse Shelley




  • It didn't.

    Crossed roads are sweet, but those uncrossed

    Are sweeter.--John Keats


    • — Susan Ohanian

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