To the Egyptians when they fouled up, He sent plagues. To me, He sent Ariadne Boom. Ariadne Boom was not your ordinary person. We all knew about her. A short, wide, gray-haired grandmother with an undisclosed age and a Ph.D., Ariadne Boom had been in the employ of the state Office of Public Instruction for the last decade. She had made herself famous as the most bandwagon-jumpingest jumper the OPI had ever found. I have no doubt that somewhere there is a Guinness Book of World Records trophy for spending the most tax dollars with the least recoup and Ariadne Boom’s name is on it. Some of her ideas would have been funny if they had not been so expensive. For instance, several years earlier she had become enamored of teaching machines, and one was purchased for every elementary classroom in the state. Not a single teacher I knew had ever used his or hers, partly because by the time they arrived, Ariadne Boom was believing in something else and none of us was ever instructed on how to use the things.
