CRISIS OF FAITH #5969

What am I even doing with my life.

I don't believe in Education to 18.
I believe in Education Forever, School to 14. Or maybe School to Whenever. Or School Never, Just Parasailing, if that's your thing.

We know teenagers have underdeveloped prefrontal cortexes; it's why they come up with amazing ideas but can't predict the consequences of riding a skateboard off the roof. They lack impulse control; it's why we lock them up during the day under the guise of teaching them stuff.

I was thinking about geometry. Angles seem useful; I am in favour of children learning what a degree is and how to measure angles using a protractor. But we also teach kids a bunch of words like "acute" and "obtuse" and "reflex", which are words whose meanings they have to memorize. But why? Why is it important for a child to know that an angle less than 90 degrees is considered acute? I would argue that it is not.

I was also thinking about kidneys. In the Ontario curriculum, we spend a long time teaching students about the kidney, in a lot of detail. The names of all the pieces of the kidney, the impermeable regions of the loop of Henle, when the solutes move in and out. I don't know why we do this. When I teach the kidney, I relearn it all the night before because the little details always escape me. Fortunately, I have about 12304839 resources at my disposal, most of them digital, that are happy to instruct me in the minutiae of the kidney. I like kidneys; I think they're neat, I think they're elegant, I think it's weird that they are connected to blood pressure and red blood cell manufacturing and hormone release. I think it's important for doctors and nurses and diabetes educators and pharmacists to know how kidneys work. I don't understand why I have to make sure every seventeen-year-old can tell me how a kidney works before he or she leaves high school. Even those who will use that information later are going to relearn it. It's easier every time, sure. But is it worth precious class hours, drawing the nephron over and over, making students memorize words devoid of inherent meaning - glomerulus, Bowman's capsule, efferent arteriole - because 10% are going to need the information again later?

So the question is, what do we need to teach our students? I don't know. Reading. Fractions. How to amortize a mortgage. What it means when the car makes that weird ka-clunk-a-clunk noise. Why tontines are a pretty solid insurance idea on the surface but actually a good way to encourage murder. When do I get to just show Family Guy in class and then have my students figure out what all the literary allusions are? When do I get to smack phones out of kids' hands and tell them to stop texting in class because that is fucking rude, dammit? Not because I am your teacher but because we are all humans in this room, and when we talk, we look each other in the face and give each other the undivided attention and respect we deserve? When does my student come to me and say they want to do a marketing project where they use physics to analyse the claim that Company X's snowboards are better than Company Y's? When do I tell my students that we're making a garden and they can grow whatever they want as long as it's not something that the police would disapprove of? When do they get to build decoding bombes and we play WWII-at-Bletchley-Park? Never, because I am supposed to teach children to be quiet and open their textbooks.

DEFINITELY THE ORIGINAL TEXT FROM THE LOST FOLIO

My favourite part of Othello, shortly after the titular character smothers Desdemona with a pillow (spoiler alert!) and the maid Emilia finds her breathing her last:


             EMILIA
123       Oh no, you're dying, Desdemona! Who did this to you?

             DESDEMONA
124       Nobody. I did it. Peace out.

[she dies]

             OTHELLO
125       Crap, why is she dead?

             EMILIA
126      Dunno.

             OTHELLO
127       Well, like she said, I didn't do it.

             EMILIA
128       She did say that.

             OTHELLO
129       ...She's a big liar, I definitely killed her!

             EMILIA
130       Aw, you're an a-hole!

HUMANS CONTINUE TO DISAPPOINT ME

I read a blog post. I will not link to it here; its author does not deserve the recognition or the free advertising, but it was about the inherent falseness of the idea of female self-esteem. Apparently, women should have absolutely no good feelings about themselves beyond the bare minimum needed to “prevent them committing suicide” (interesting, it’s never been my self-esteem but rather my awareness of reality that makes me want to reach for the pills). He says self-esteem should be earned through accomplishment – a sentiment (the only one in the entire article) with which I can wholeheartedly agree. What is so truly baffling, though, is that he follows this statement with the automatic assumption that women do not or cannot accomplish anything worthy of respect or merit.

The author then delivers an underhanded remark about women “barely squeaking through” colleges with low admission standards and earning their “masters in puppetry”. Hardly. It was at this point that I stopped reading; the gentleman (and I use the term verrrry loosely) was clearly no longer presenting an argument but merely baiting female readers in the hopes that one would reply and he could call her a rabid lesbian or something of that nature. (Hmm, maybe that should be the title of this blog – Rabid Lesbian: I Will Bite You In The Leg. Well, it’s a working title).

Of course he was American; he was possessed of the incredible hubris that only the young white American heterosexual male can really pull off. He encompasses an enormous part of what I find distasteful about Americans (and I generalize, of course; I refer mostly to those who embrace the American ethos, not specifically its geographical inhabitants) and what I find distasteful about men’s rights activitists the world over. The rhetoric is always the same and perpetually ignores the fact that there is no evidence other than mere cultural construction that women are inherently inferior to men. Different, yes, but inferior, not in the slightest. I am not so much angered as I am saddened, to see how “education” and “enlightenment” are shaking out in the global West. Not well, it seems; perhaps the author would have been better off getting his masters of puppetry instead.

A WHALE OF A PROBLEM

My father sent me this. I don't know why.

Basically, there was a dead whale on the beach and nobody knew what to do about it, but it was rotting and started to stink. The whale was too big to push back into the ocean, nobody was willing to cut it up to bury it, and it couldn't be burned (on this last part, I don't know why; the whale certainly would have burned with a little gasoline, but maybe the townspeople didn't want a giant grease fire on the beach). So they hired an engineer, who placed a whole lot of dynamite (20 crates, in fact) on the leeward side of the whale. It was supposed to blow the whale towards the ocean, and break it up into tiny pieces that crabs and birds would eat. Instead, it sprayed large chunks of decaying whale all over the surrounding area, including on passers-by and their vehicles. The next few days were spent repairing damage and using machinery to bury huge pieces of whale. After the fact, everyone sort of shook their collective heads and said, "Wait, we tried to blow up a whale? That was stupid." But the fact is, it wasn't that stupid. The problem wasn't the method - I defy you to find a better solution to dispose of a rotting whale. The real problem? They used too much dynamite.

Dynamite is a high explosive, meaning that the shock wave of the detonating material moves faster than the speed of sound...meaning that it blows stuff up really fast and really hard. The engineer in question decided that the whale should be treated as a "large boulder". Unfortunately, the force a boulder can absorb before cracking is a whole lot more than the force a decomposing whale body can withstand. The blood-red mist appearing high over the blast site is already an indication of a serious miscalculation. Small wonder that, instead of a controlled detonation, bits of whale ended up showering the area in a quarter-mile radius.

The plan was good; the execution was lacking. According to a quick Google search of "How much crap can I blow up with a case of dynamite?" (cue CSIS knocking at my door in 3, 2, 1...) a few sticks, not crates, nestled under the whale would have done the trick without the whale shower.

Also, how is this the first time anyone has dealt with a dead whale?! Whales beach themselves frequently, to my understanding, and not all of them are pushed back to the water in time. Surely, even in 1970, somebody must have already developed a method for handling whale carcasses. Or at least an estimate of how much dynamite it would really take to blow one up.