OPEN JOKE

Mike Bloomberg demonstrates why he has no business ever being US president.

Bloomberg also made some operational news by saying how he would run his White House. He’d turn the historically guarded East Room into an open office environment — “where I’ll sit side by side with our team.” And he’d use the Oval Office for some official functions — “never for tweeting” — but added: “The rest of the time, I’ll be where a leader should be: With the team.”

 

“In sports, the coach or manager is right there with the players, giving directions, drawing on white boards, huddling during timeouts, motivating and inspiring — and picking someone up when they’ve made a mistake,” he wrote, adding another unsubtle dig at Donald Trump. “Managers in every organization should be performing those same roles. Walls just get in the way, by stifling communication and making collaboration more difficult. Some people like to build walls. I like to tear them down.”

 

When I was a kid going into the sixth grade, the Webster Groves, Missouri School District, where I lived, turned two of its elementary schools, Douglass in the black north end of town and my school, Washington Park, on the whiter-than-snow south side into what they called "demonstration centers" for every dumbass new educational concept that happened to catch someone's eye.

 

Any parent anywhere in the district could send their kids there.  There were VERY few takers.  My mom, who taught in the District at the time, was enthusiastic about the whole idea.  She was considerably less so after a bunch of us sixth-graders were temporarily assigned to read Paradise Lost, for God's sake, after which she sort-of figured out that the District was just kind of making crap up as it went along.

 

One of the new concepts the District was particularly keen on was the idea of the "open classroom."  What they essentially did was to knock down the walls between classrooms essentially making one big room.  I don't know what that was supposed to have accomplished except to make it damned near impossible to read, to concentrate or to do much of anything else necessary and worthwhile for the advancement of my education.

 

My sixth-grade year was a complete waste of time. 

 

But sure, Mike.  That's this country's problem.  Office walls.

 

Go with that.