“I think, for the most part, high school is designed, it seems, to be the worst possible scenario for the people in it, but frankly, I don’t know really what would be better given the scenario one’s in in adolescence. But certainly, whenever I visit a high school, I think that if there were adults in an office building and every forty minutes a bell rang and they had to run across to the opposite end of the office building and then think very hard about something completely different from the thing they were told to think very hard about in the last forty minutes, no adult would work there. They would say, ‘This is complete madness.’”

 - Daniel Handler describing one problem with the traditional high school model. Taken from a great interview discussing his most recent novel (Why We Broke Up) on the latest episode of Bullseye With Jesse Thorn. (In all honesty, this is a pretty wonderful interview that includes a reading of an incredibly poignant passage from Why We Broke Up that will have your memories of adolescence working overtime for the rest of the evening. I highly recommend a listen.)