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PAGE 8, AUGUST 31, 2009, THE ISLANDER
Dave Barry
What can do
the Math?
By Dave Barry
We have come to the time of year
when we remove the video-game con
trols—by surgery, if necessary-from
the hands of our children, and send
them back to school. And if they com
plain that school is a boring waste
of time, we smack them firmly yet
lovingly with a roofing timber and
remind them of the words of our first
president, Benjamin Franklin, who
said: "There is nothing more valuable
in life than an education, except, of
course, money or a nice car."
Knowledge is our nation's most pre
cious resource, after agriculture and
Ray Charles. Yet study after study
shows that American children are
not learning as well as children from
foreign countries such as Sweden and
Hawaii. On standardized tests, most
American 12th-graders are unable to
correctly answer such basic academic
questions as:
1. When you wear a baseball-style
cap, which part is supposed to go in
the front?
2. What is the difference between
"hip-hop" and "music"?
3. Who is Dick Cheney?
(ANSWERS: 1. The front part. 2.
Plenty. 3. None of your business.)
Why do our children perform so
poorly on standardized tests? Does
the fault lie with our teachers? With
our school administrators? With our
political leaders? Can we, as con
cerned parents, sue somebody about
this and obtain millions of dollars?
Or maybe it's time that we parents
stopped "passing the buck" on educa
tion. Maybe instead of "pointing the
finger" at everybody else, we should
take a hard look at ourselves in the
mirror, and place the blame for our
children's lousy test scores where it
clearly belongs: on our children. They
have a terrible attitude. I have here
a letter, which I am not making up,
from a teacher named Robin Walden,
of Kilgore, Texas, who states:
"I teach math to eighth-grade stu
dents. This is an unnecessary task
because they are all going to be pro
fessional basketball players, profes
sional NASCAR racecar drivers, pro
fessional bass fisher people or marine
biologists who will never need to actu
ally use math."
This is a sad commentary on the
unrealistic expectations of today's stu
dents. Because the harsh statistical
truth is that, in any given group of 10
young people, only a third of them, or
22 percent, will actually succeed as
professional bass fishers. The rest will
wind up in the "real world," where,
like it or not, they will need a practi
cal knowledge of math.
For example, I recently found myself
in a situation at a bank where sud
denly, without warning, I had to add
up four three-digit numbers by hand.
Fortunately, I went to elementary
school in the 1950s, when we were in
the Cold War, and American children
were forced to learn addition, because
the Russians were making THEIR
children learn addition. Thanks to
that training, I knew that, to get the
correct answer, I had to "carry" some
numbers. Unfortunately, I could not
remember how to do this.
For some reason I COULD remem
ber that "pi" is the ratio of circumfer
ence to diameter, but that did not help
me in this case. (To be honest, it has
never helped me.) But addition had
leaked out of my brain, along with
subtraction, multiplication, long divi
sion, the "cosine," the Smoot-Hawley
Tariff, and most of the other things I
learned in school, although, of course,
my brain has carefully preserved the
jingle for Brylcreem hair ointment:
"Brylcreem, a little dab'll do ya/
Brylcreem, you'll look so debonair/
But watch out, the gals'll all pursue
ya/ They'll love to get their fingers in
your hair!" Which is a total lie: Touch
ing Brylcreemed hair is like sticking
your hand into the nostril of a sick
Pig-
But I digress. My point is that I
finally gave up on adding my numbers
and asked the bank teller, who added
them with a calculator, which uses
computer chips, which were invented
during the Cold War, which we won.
I'm not saying this was TOTALLY
because of my mathematics training;
I'm just saying it was a factor. And
that is why we must stress to our
children how important education is.
We must tell them: Study hard! Learn
as much as you can! Because we, your
parents, are getting stupider by the
day. We're experiencing massive brain
leakage. Soon even the commercial
jingles will be gone, and our heads will
actually implode.
Before that happens, we need to
get out of the driver's seat, and turn
the wheel over to you, the younger
generation.
Don't ask us what we did with the
car keys.
This classic DAVE BARRY column
was originally published Aug. 17,2003.
(C) 2009 The Miami Herald. Dist. by
Tribune Media Services. Dave Barry is
a humor columnist for the Miami Her
ald. Write to him do Tropic Magazine,
The Miami Herald, One Herald Plaza,
Miami FL 33132) □
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