kitchen table math, the sequel: you can lead a horse to water

Thursday, February 15, 2007

you can lead a horse to water

from The Gadfly

Yet the report's basic approach to NCLB reform ignores the major lesson of the past five years: While it's hard to force recalcitrant states and districts to do things they don't want to do, it's impossible to force them to do those things well.

Forcing people to do something well is a bit of a contradiction in terms, I think.

I mean, if they knew how to do it well you probably wouldn't need to force them, right?

This reminds me of a friend of a friend, back in L.A.

He'd sold a screenplay for a comedy, and was going to meetings on revisions.

At one meeting the executives told him to make the screenplay funnier.

How much funnier?

30% funnnier.

They wanted a 30% funnier screenplay than the one they currently had, which was the one he'd written.

I don't know how that came out.

Not well, I imagine.

2 comments:

Doug Sundseth said...

Three weeks later:

"So, I went through and rewrote the whole thing to punch it up. Unfortunately, the result was 32.2% funnier, so I took out a joke from scene 12. It turned out that joke wasn't funny though, so now the screenplay was actually 33.6% funnier. I added the bad joke back in and added a lame spit-take in scene 22. After all that, I was at 30.1% funnier.

"I know that's not to spec, but I'm afraid it's the best I can do. Sorry."

Catherine Johnson said...

yeah, well

that was kind of his take on the whole thing