December 9, 2005
Zeal
In one of my previous carnations and for lack of anything better to do, I taught something called business math in our town’s two-year technological college. The thirty students who took the course were said to have had and passed high school algebra. I took the registrar’s word that this was so.
Among my credentials to teach this course were my certification in celestial navigation as a naval aviator back in the Great Middle War, a minor in math on my master’s in geology, and the fact that the only course I flunked in high school was algebra. I was prepared.
But I was not prepared for the day a student asked me why we used terms like multiplication and division when we could just as easily use “times it” and “under it” (as verbs, she meant, but only implied, probably not being all that sure what is a verb, let alone a predicate nominative). When I couldn’t think of any reason why not, I realized I was losing whatever zeal of approval I may have had.
I suppose we don’t have to worry yet about there being any pandemic of literacy. I’ve a good friend who’s darn near killing herself serving on our town’s school board trying to do something about this, as thankless a job short of rectoring a parish (which she also does) as one can imagine. Our village is not all that sanguine about raising children, most of its wealthy sending their kids and their money to private schools and complaining about the public school budget all along.
The latest thing the majority of our school board has sanctioned for lack of money is abolishing anything in the curriculum that even looks like the humanities and, as well, throwing out phys-ed. I can’t even imagine that the abolition of high school football — that secondary-school raison d’être — might be just around the corner (and not because of no more Philosophy 101).
Out sourcing is the current vogue, so why not also out source our schools? It would probably be cheaper to fly all these kids to Bangladesh where they at least teach English and math well enough to parse the language, solve the quadratic equation, and help a telepatron get a crashed computer back on the runway. And, of course, where they leave no child behind.