Occupier Finds Out that Expensive Degree in Puppetry is Really Paying Off

So what does a degree in puppetry cost, anyway? About $35,000. And the genius quit his job to pursue it.

A few years ago, Joe Therrien, a graduate of the NYC Teaching Fellows program, was working as a full-time drama teacher at a public elementary school in New York City. Frustrated by huge class sizes, sparse resources and a disorganized bureaucracy, he set off to the University of Connecticut to get an MFA in his passion—puppetry. Three years and $35,000 in student loans later, he emerged with degree in hand, and because puppeteers aren’t exactly in high demand, he went looking for work at his old school. The intervening years had been brutal to the city’s school budgets—down about 14 percent on average since 2007. A virtual hiring freeze has been in place since 2009 in most subject areas, arts included, and spending on art supplies in elementary schools crashed by 73 percent between 2006 and 2009. So even though Joe’s old principal was excited to have him back, she just couldn’t afford to hire a new full-time teacher. Instead, he’s working at his old school as a full-time “substitute”; he writes his own curriculum, holds regular classes and does everything a normal teacher does. “But sub pay is about 50 percent of a full-time salaried position,” he says, “so I’m working for half as much as I did four years ago, before grad school, and I don’t have health insurance…. It’s the best-paying job I could find.”

Yeah, too bad about all the debt you piled up on the puppetry degree. But I see no reason why I should pay for your stupidity.

OWS being a leftist enclave, guess what Joe has ended up doing. If you guessed that it has something to do with giant puppets, give yourself a ceegar.

At one of Arts and Culture’s meetings—held adjacent to 60 Wall Street, at a quieter public-private indoor park that’s also the atrium of Deutsche Bank—it dawned on Joe: “I have to build as many giant puppets as I can to help this thing out—people love puppets!”

No, Joe, children and left wing protester dopes love puppets. The rest of us put that kid stuff away when we outgrew it.

These idiots really are parodies of a caricature of the infantile left, aren’t they.