Where have all the writers gone?
Sharp and classy
Where have all the good ones gone?
Long time, no show
Where has punctuation gone?
Send text message or IM
Grammers and speling, spurn
They do not want to learn

Parody's tradition seen:
Allan Sherman
Alfred E.'s "Mad Magazine"
Weird Al Yank-o
Where, today, a witty pun?
SAT scores dive to 201 [1]
You must pay dues to earn
Acclaim for which you yearn

Where has English language gone?
Mangled crassly
"Culture studies": lots more fun
Don't want to know
Where have tense and number gone?
Adverbs? "Quick" and "slow", they run!
Why don't the teachers teach...
...To parse the parts of speech?

Where have all the teachers gone?
Unions, joining
'Stead of grades, they focus on:
High self-esteem
Self-esteem: not gift, but won
Earn esteem by learning, son!
Some midnight candles, burn
Your own taskmaster, stern

Why are modern students stuck?
Barely passing
"Dude, like, you know, WTF?" --
-- Next grade, you go!
Why is U.S. future bleak? --
No one who can write or speak!
I fear; sincere concern:
Soon, someone else's turn



[1] For those outside the US, the SAT (originally, "Scholastic Aptitude Test"), is a common college-entrance criterion. Verbal and mathematical abilities are scored on a scale of 200 to 800, with a median of 500.

Fun fact: SAT scores declined steadily in the latter half of the twentieth century. The solution was not to improve the US educational system (duh!), but to make the SAT easier. In 1994, the SAT was "dumbed down" to re-center the falling average scores back to around 500. So, if you took the SAT post-1994, you should subtract about 70 points from the verbal and about 20 or 30 points from the math to see what your scores would have been if you had taken it when we fossils did. If subtraction is too difficult, there is a free, handy calculator to convert old and new SAT scores here.