Watching the sausage being made each night on TV

It's not healthy, perhaps, but there is along tradition in politics of playing games, so to speak, attempting to gain leverage, meet personal and constituent goals and needs, and curry favor for future laws and initiatives.

That is a large part of why creating laws is compared to watching sausage being made. The weakness in that comparison is that many times the "sausage" our legislators come up with isn't as tasty as we hoped. But it's easy to understand that the process of getting to some final bill can be quite messy.

The machinations around raising the nation's debt ceiling is a classic example of a messy process and likely makes the vast majority of Americans shout some form of "A plague on both your houses!" (Well, they would shout that if they remembered key lines from 'Romeo and Juliet.')

The Republicans are playing their game, with their rules. Democrats are playing their own games, with very different rules. Neither party seems entirely comfortable with the games being played out in public, but in today's media environment the messy process is part of the performance.

I was reminded of some similarities between legislating and teaching. Students often have goals that don't match those of educators, for instance, and there is a sort of dance that goes on, with delays and misdirection and compromise occurring every day. If we could lurk in a classroom corner for one period, we likely would not see the bigger picture of what the teacher was trying to do, and we might end up hopelessly confused about how engaged the students were, and about how they were thinking about the day's lesson.

The hope is that, over time, the educational process produces thoughtful, reasoning, organized American citizens and that teachers don't despair and leave the profession.

Veteran legislators probably feel like teachers who can never quite bring order to the room or the debate, but over time they might be able to point out where something they did produced at least small positive changes.

In the case of the debt ceiling, the legislature simply kicked the can down the road about six weeks, and the drama can begin again.

In a classroom, a teacher might delay a test, sensing that students are not ready and wondering if approaching the topic in a different way might "click."

If we are NOT legislators or classroom teachers, it's all an amusing series of interactions and arguments that we can stand apart from and shake our heads at all the silliness.

A social studies teacher I knew used to say to his government classes: "Democracy is a hot, sweaty business."

So is education.