"You don't really expect kids to memorize a thousand plus planets in science class."
Why should the question of whether kids can can memorize the names of the planets be a deciding factor in the development of a scientific definition of planet? That was one of the justifications used for this malformed, ill-considered, back-door approach back in August of 2006. Should we have stopped calling everything after Io, Callisto, Ganymede, and Europa a moon of Jupiter? My goodness! There's already at least 69 ... "things" going around Jupiter, we certainly can't call them moons!
So as far as Ceres, Eris, and anything else large enough to pull itself into a sphere and orbit a star, absolutely call it a planet. And that means Pluto, too.