Let’s say you’re in elementary school and your class has a gold star merit system. Every time you complete your classwork assignments, you get a number of gold stars (0 to 4) based on your performance on each assignment. Your teacher gives you several assignments every day.

You are in one of many classrooms in your elementary school. Remember when your elementary school had some special program for gifted and talented students which promoted super cool learning? Well, in your school there is such a program, the program for Magnificent Leaders in Development, and let’s say a lot of kids in each of these classrooms really wanted to get in this program, and teachers in charge of these programs got to choose which of the elementary school students got to join. Unfortunately, it’s hard to get in :( These teachers look for how many gold stars you got for every assignment you did, which from month to month is a pretty high number of stars. A lot of students give up trying to join this program or don’t have enough gold stars for teachers to select them.

Say you’re a student who had a rough start and don’t have as many gold stars as you wanted from your classwork assignments. Maybe you had a tummy flu and missed a day of work, or you insisted on playing recess with the seventh period kids while your class was still working. Now you realize you want to do these programs, but you don’t have enough stars - what now?

Great news! There is another program that effectively teaches the same thing as the program for Magnificent leaders in Development, named the program for Directly Outstanding Students. Better yet, the program has an added twist for people like you - you can ask your teacher to re-do any of the classwork assignments, and if you do well enough your teacher will give you all of the stars from your second attempt, and that replaces your gold star score from your first attempt! How cool is that?

Unfortunately, the principle in charge of the Directly Outstanding students program, Principal Stephen Shannon, decides, nah, fuck these kids, and decides that the Directly Outstanding Student program no longer allows your second attempt scores to replace your first attempt. Second worse part: there were kids who were realllly sick and spent the last month, or even the last few months, making up their classwork, even staying after school or taking it home for homework to work on all night, and now their hard work won’t be able to replace the fact that they had zero stars from prior assignments. Worst part: Principal Shannon announced this on the 27th day of the month, and the monthly review happens on the first week of each month.