The New Math

Remember when you were a marginal student occupying the special corner seat in Grammar school and the heavyset woman with the mustache tried to “learn” you addition and subtraction? Well, I do. And how every time you were just about to master a simple mathematical operation they went and changed to a new math with a new textbook and messed you up and sent you careening once again down the path of severe depression and alcoholism? Well, I half remember something like that. So here I am, some thirty years and fifteen renditions of new math later, still drinking, but for entirely different reasons. Fortunately for me, I got swept up in the “Social Promotion” movement and my seat time was enough to get my sorry ass promoted all the way out of High School like shit through a goose.

But I have recently discovered that public schools aren’t just messin’ with math these days. They’ve expanded their antics to just about every other subject. I attended the Intermediate School “Enrichment” event the other night. My precocious (in the bad sense, if you can believe it!) fourth grader was one of 40 or so kids who displayed their year long projects to nauseatingly fawning parents and grandparents. He studied medieval knights and castles and shot a somewhat violent video of a battle siege (no toys were raped or tortured during the making of the video; OK, maybe that’s not entirely accurate; a more truthful statement might be: no “living” toys were raped or tortured during the making of the video).

Three sixth graders were asked by the Enrichment teacher to present a Powerpoint Presentation to the audience to kick off the evening. Here’s what I “learned”:

* Children today need to complete a formal written survey in order to figure out what interests them; apparently a working brain and 5 senses aren’t enough any more;

* Kids are being taught ridiculous catch phrases at the Primary school level; while this may offend my sense of humility, I have to admit it does prepare them well for the world of corporate elitism, where coining silly idiomatic expressions is highly valued; I learned that the “Interest-alyzer” is an infallible instrument for predicting school projects;

* Why infallible?? Because all three sixth graders had the same story to tell – the “Interest-alyzer” selected two topics of interest for each of them: one that they really liked and one that was generated from a pre-programmed list of most excellent enrichment topics as determined by the software engineers who created the “Renzulli” instrument (no doubt three drunk MIT students getting revenge for all of the excruciatingly boring enrichment projects they had to demonstrate to slumber challenged parents at gunpoint by the Enrichment teacher whose contract was up for renewal at the end of the year).

* It’s in the data! Meaning the “Interest-alyzer” will generate a spreadsheet of data based on respondents’ answers and will 100% of the time recommend that the student ditch the topic that they like and use “Renzulli’s” choice (meaning a topic they could give two shits about). How’s that for data integrity??

* Teachers and Technology don’t mix; it is not good form to ask a student to make a presentation to a group of parents and then proceed to step directly between the student and the audience to attempt to adjust the projector and “eclipse” the student with your considerable posterior. Truth be told, this was the most entertaining part of the presentation – entertaining in the way that watching your drunk Uncle Harry trying to flush the bathtub after peeing in it is entertaining. The projector had gone into sleep mode and, by the time our dynamic didactic dunderhead figured it out, so had the audience.

* Watching a sixth grader use hand puppets to act out the killing of dolphins was, surprisingly, at once disturbing and entertaining.

* Some things never change; I saw a cute little girl standing next to her project, an elaborate, handmade cityscape built to scale illustrating the effects of pollution on our community. I complimented her project and asked her how pollution affects our town. She just gave me a blank stare and pointed to the mall like some mime who’d breathed in a little too much second hand smoke. As I departed, I told her to tell her Dad that he does nice work. That must have registered because she gave me a sheepish grin.

* Some parents are sheltered; when my 10 year old was explaining about the Templar Knights and their penchant for sodomy, or the graphic details of drawing and quartering, some parents actually blanched!

* Jocks remain jocks. Did you know that you can explain quantum physics by setting up basketball hoop and shooting baskets? Me neither. And a word of advice: never put the basketball hoop next to the elaborate but fragile cityscape (unless you want to see a fistfight - then, by all means, do it).

The evening concluded in a manner in which I cannot recount, because I snuck out a little early, right after the Principal exhorted the guests to stick around for round two of Powerpoints. Had he asked me why I was leaving, I would have told him that I am severely allergic to academic enrichment (and large women with facial hair).

So believe The Captain when he says: When commenting to a fifth grader on her Henri Matisse display, try not to say things like, “Damn, that dude was on some serious fucking drugs!”

Yours on the Intermediate School’s “Do Not Call” list,

The Captain