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ABS Academy: Stomach muscles are the medium, and the medium is stomach muscles! Faculty of underwear models. Read while doing “crunches.” Science: Understand how striated muscles develop. Art: Using a six-pack of low-fat V-8 juice as an archetype, students sculpt abstraction of the consummate abs. PE: Sit-ups; Sit-Ups; SIT-UPS! Graduation outfit: a Speedo suit; bare midriff for girls. Electives: push ups, extra sit-ups, leg lifts. Waivers: none—every academic discipline integrated with “ab” augmentation. Grants from: Hanes.
Applied Recycling School: Begin with a metaphor—students enroll twice, using the same form, naturally. Schoolhouse siding is of reconstituted Number 2 pencil stubs and grocery store pallets, its roof shingled with steam-rolled coffee cans. The sheet rock (a.k.a. rerock) is 40 percent reconstituted chalk dust. All subjects invoke recycling. History: the recycling of wars (e.g., World War I & II), the recycling of politicians (e.g., Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton’s perpetual refurbishment). English: Students master use of the Ibid. Literature: Goldielocks, post-modern feminist—the woodsman is saved by Goldielocks; though the woodsman has beer-keg biceps, cobalt eyes, and an affinity for Keats, Goldie falls in love with and rehabilitates (recycles) the wolf. Graduation requirement: Students recycle rotten fence posts and build Shaker-style furniture. Electives: Students may retake any course—no limit. Waivers: new math. Grants from: This Old House, Tire Retreaders of America.
Conservatory of Self-Defense and the Visual Arts: Parent Bill “Big Cat” Jones team-teaches with twelve former Guardian Angels (red berets optional). The curriculum knits artistry of Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and William De Kooning with deft lethalness of Muhammad Ali, Chuck Norris, and Bruce Lee. “Big Cat,” a security guard and paint-by-number virtuoso, dreams: “Why not create art during a perilous encounter? An average kick-boxer should be able to emulate Jackson Pollock’s essence while neutralizing an assailant.” Electives: Tai Kwan Do, glass blowing, poetry, ballet. Waived: math, hard sciences, phonics. Grants from: WBA, WWF, Fred’s House of Paint.
English as a Fourth Language Lab: Students master Chinese, Japanese, and a romance language, then English. Two years steeped in alphabet drill. Two years steeped in phonemes. Two years steeped in linguistics. Four years in each of the countries whose language is studied, living with host families who apply B.F. Skinner’s theories (i.e., recite the Japanese constitution in Japanese or no saki in a box!). To graduate, students must sneeze in a foreign language. (Now that’s immersion!) Job placement in ethnic restaurant, Peace Corps, or as United Nations page guaranteed. Electives: Sanskrit, rap music, algebra. Waived: driver’s and sex ed. Grants from: Berlitz Inc., the International Olympic Committee, Toyota.
The Healthy Living Prep: If you ain’t got your health, you ain’t got nothin’. Spell the following—broccoli, carrot, potassium, rutabaga, St. John’s Wort, echinacea, zinc, supplements—then eat them. Once students use their tongues to articulate a word, using it to ingest a vegetable becomes viable. Vegetable metaphors and similes required. “Her smile was a bowed banana; her hair was like broccoli sprouting from her rutabaga cranium.” Literature overlaps psychology! Students read Peter Rabbit and explore Mr. McGregor’s neuroses, specifically McGregor’s obsessive/compulsive relationship with lettuce. Students chart the effect of organic vegetables on troop movements in 20th-century wars. Also, the role of the rotten tomato in political protest. Electives: Organic Organisms; Healthy Bliss: Marrying Vegan. Waived: metal shop, animal husbandry. Grants from: Seed Council of America, Friends of Cows.
Lawsuits and Litigation Academy: A three-year enterprise designed by the firm Chase, Collect, & Laugh. Indemnification of instructors guaranteed. First year: “Performing in the Courtroom”—Master the grimace, moan, limp, and snivel. Second year: “Maximum Settlement”—Filing a top-dollar claim. Avoiding greedy lawyers. Discerning when to reappear (postsettlement) in public healthy and wealthy. Third year: “Spirituality and Litigation”—Does God punish litigators? Is winning a sin? Turkey Soup for the Plaintiffs’ Soul—short meditations for the devout plaintiff. Electives: drama, mime, voice, anatomy & physiology. Waived: humanities, ethics, PE. Grants from: F. Lee Bailey, other unidentified altruists who promise litigation if their organization’s name ever “sees the light of day.”
Living with Pollution Practicum: Learn from Pragmatic Darwinists who believe adaptation surpasses mitigation. All classrooms chemically adulterated; students taught to accept the ineluctable byproducts (hazards) of human and industrial progress. Courses include: “Co-existing with Combustion”—students study in garage packed with idling cars; “Cooking with Mercury”—how to safely (we hypothesize) detoxify fish by marinating “fresh catch” in battery acid and lemon juice; “Playing with Plutonium”—students are given plutonium pellets and rewarded for ignoring hair loss, blood count drops. Electives: A two-week field study, “Almost Like Jesus: Walking on Lake Erie.” Grants from: the Anti-Any Regulatory Agency, Citizens for an Ulcer-Free World, the Uranium Council. School uniform color navy blue; asbestos/lead blend.
