Black Math

An actual example:

"A math lesson about probability had children reaching into a bag full of coloured beads that represented different races. "What the students ended up finding [is] it's not just blacks who are selling drugs or killing, it's other cultures."

[speechless]...

Jesus: So Hot Right Now

Let me start out by saying that, despite my love for Flannery O'Connor, I know very little about Christianity. Not much more than I've picked up from the occasional Christmas song and the Chronicles of Narnia, and that's about it. In short, I'm not the first person you'd come to if you wanted to learn the fundamentals of the faith, not by a long shot. But that's exactly what I had to teach a couple weeks ago.

I was supposed to tutor this Korean kid in American history, which I know (more or less...). But there was some kinda mix-up, what with his parents not understanding English and me not understanding Korean, and so I found myself teaching him world history instead. And, as it happened, the chapter his class was working on was The Rise of Christianity. I gave it a shot, I figure why not - as Evelyn Waugh put it in equally absurd circumstances, it's amazing what one can teach when one tries.

Dude didn't know a thing about Jesus. Not. A. Thing. Never heard of the crucifixion or resurrection or anything. So I had to teach him. I wish I could show you the scrap paper, with my hastily-scrawled stick figure Messiah (sure, drawing stick figures is easy, you might say - but try drawing a stick figure Jesus on top of a crucifix! No simple feat, let me tell ya), my Jew-Christian diagrams, my Old Testament-New Testament bullet point comparisons, I'm telling you, it was great. Anyway, I enjoyed it, but I don't think it went through.

The best part is what he wore, around his neck, every single day, to each of our lessons: yep, you guessed it, a cross. A shiny silver one. So when I mention Jesus' name for the first time and meet a blank stare, I figure maybe I was speaking too fast, so I slow down and point to his neck and say, "You know, Jesus Christ." No hint of understanding. Rather flummoxed now, I ask, "Why are you wearing a cross if you don't know who Jesus is?" Now it's his turn to look at me like I'm an idiot. His reply? "Oh, this is just for fashion."

UPDATE: Well, at least I'm not the only teacher ignorant about Christianity. What a relief!

I'm out, I'm out, thank the Lord, I'm out

Bigshot Harvard English professor Stephen Greenblatt recently gave an incredibly pompous and self-absorbed speech to undergraduates, extolling his own bravery as a writer (via ALDaily). I'm going to leave aside the arrogant cluelessness of teaching great writing by quoting extensively from your own works, as well as the gushing, schoolgirl account of being able to actually touch the hem of Bill Clinton's garment. Instead, I bring your attention to the very end of the speech, what is clearly meant as the surprising, shocking conclusion. Here is what this renowned Shakespeare scholar, who taught many of my friends, thinks is a daring example of risk, of taking a chance, of bravery. Here is the example through which he exhorts the students of Harvard to rebel against the establishment, to tap into the secret fears of our times, to make the jaded audience squirm guiltily in their seats:

"I go on in this vein for several long, unnerving pages. Only after I have fully mimed a voice of fear and hatred, do I turn in the direction that some of you may have anticipated. For, as you may have noticed, I have already begun to conjure up the situation of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice. I have tried to do so in a way that enables me to suggest the play’s uneasy contemporary relevance, a sense at once fascinating and disagreeable that it is playing with fire. All my life I thought of the combustible material as anti-Semitism—or, to put the matter more carefully, Christianity’s Jewish problem. But the queasiness of Western cities no longer centers on the synagogue. It takes only a small substitution for the word 'synagogue' to tap into current fears: 'Go, Tubal, and meet me at our mosque. Go, good Tubal; at our mosque, Tubal.' "

I can picture the moment as if I were there (I have been, far too many times). Without a doubt, he paused, to let his breathtaking, courageous substitution sink in. Members of the audience gasped, then, composure regained, nodded knowingly - perhaps even applauded. Why, they suddenly realized, Muslims today are *just like* the Jews! And fear of Islam, well, it's the new, perhaps even more vicious anti-Semitism! Yes, I see now, yes! Oh, I hope the Professor doesn't get fired for daring to say it!

As the title says, I wasted a lot of money and a lot of years, but I'm finally out, thank God.

I guess I'm just too repressed, too cowardly, too blind to the truth, man. I guess I just couldn't handle playing with fire.

I have the excuse of jetlag, he's just a moron

Hello from Seoul! Sorry I haven't been posting, I was busy packing and flying and settling in and everything, and am inexcusably behind on my blog-reading. I'm still very jetlagged (I'm writing this post at four in the morning!). I'll write all about Seoul and my job (teaching US History) and all that soon (hopefully after I get paid I'll even be able to buy a digital camera and do my best Althouse impersonation!), for now I just wanted to post this short clip of Dalton McGuinty being a complete moron, because it's been cracking me up all day (or night, whatever):



Silliness, I know. For the more serious example of the guy's cluelessness, see here.

PS: This reminds me of when John Kerry came to my high school during the campaign and spoke to us, an auditorium full of high school kids, about his promise that, as President, he would institute a program of mandatory community service for high school kids. Didn't go over too well, as you might imagine. Then there was the time that Jean Chretien spoke at my (other) high school graduation, and, I kid you not, delivered an entire speech about Star Wars, concluding, in his trademarked unintelligible mumbling, "May da force be witchu." The dominant Canadian leader of my youth, ladies and gentlemen. Is it any wonder I left the hemisphere?

um, what?

The following is transcribed verbatim from yesterday's Montreal Gazette. It may be the most wtf item I've ever seen. The short version, from the headline: "bar workers play volleyball to raise funds for sex ed." Bar workers? Volleyball? Sex ed? Um, wtf? My favorite thing about the item is the completely matter-of-fact description, as if the writer found nothing unusual in the slightest about bartenders (again, i'm sorry, but wtf?) playing volleyball to raise dental dam awareness among the youth of the city.

[The Gazette, Montreal, Monday, August 27, 2007; Julian Armstrong]

[the first story is a touching one: "Teen raises $11,000 for cancer patients" Then comes this, as the very next item]

"A beach volleyball tournament between teams of bar and restaurant employees has raised more than $10,000 to finance sex education in Montreal-area high schools.

Sponsored for the second year by the Head and Hands agency, the recent tournament in Jeanne Mance Park had 10 competing teams from bars and restaurants on and off the island. The winning team was Tokyo/Pistol. Blizzarts came in second, Chateau du Lac third.

Funds will be donated to the agency's Sense Project, which aims to provide community-based sex education for secondary school students between the ages of 14 and 17.

The project was designed to fill a gap in the curriculum when sex education was cut by schools. The program is designed to give young people the information and emotional tools needed to make smart choices, thereby reducing the risk of sexually transmitted infections."

Ah, bartenders - never letting anything, not even the chance of sunburn, get in the way of their love for the children. Next week: reformed sex offenders play shuffleboard to raise funds for a kiddie park!

Update: Thanks to Relapsed Catholic for the link!

Awesome

I love this. And I hate those ads. I don't smoke, never have, but nothing makes me want to light up a big fat stogie more than these insufferable secular preachers (who are all stoned half the time, anyway - because you can't get liberal street cred for harrassing 'the reefer industry'). Ditto for the MADD morons who would come to my school to stage idiotic atheist morality plays about the dangers of drinking and then show slides of car accidents. Oh, drunk driving is dangerous? You don't say! Well, hand me a brewskie and get out of the way, I'm hitting the road, you busybody %$^&.

Maybe there is hope for the future, after all! I'm certainly banking on a similar backlash against An Inconvenient Truth, which the average high schooler today is probably forced to watch in practically every class.

Here's to feeling good all the time!

Hey, It Could Be Worse

Relapsed Catholic links to the news that Ontario will be sending free copies of An Inconvenient Truth to all of its public schools. Before anyone starts harping on how cruel and abusive it is to feed this fearmongering, dishonest propaganda to impressionable young kids, an anecdote: my Grade Five French teacher fell ill one week, and the substitute couldn't speak French, so she figured she would just show us a movie for a couple days. The movie? Poltergeist. (I mean, what was she thinking?) I must have had nightmares for a month. So, compared to that, I think it's fair to say Al Gore is child's play. Um, no, not that (though the resemblance is uncanny), you know what I mean.

Besides, if Ontario's required curriculum is anything like Quebec's, trust me that the kids are a lot better off sleeping through Gore's dull slide-show than actually having to pay attention to their teacher's state-mandated p.c. babble. I went to one of the best private schools in the province, but even there they were required to follow the government plan for certain subjects, and boy could you ever tell the difference between the free-thinking classes (World History) and the state-controlled ones (Canadian History). Canadian History, by the way, was actually Quebec History - or, to be precise, Why English People are Stupid and Evil and Have Inferior Sauces (... and yet still managed to oppress us for 200 years). My classmates and I got the last laugh, though. Our teacher never read our homework assignments, he just checked to see if the lines in our workbooks were filled in. So we all got together and wrote incredibly vulgar stories about him and his wife in our workbooks, turned them in, and got full marks. Good times, good times.

Men without chests, but with diplomas

In the past two days of graduation exercises, I have sat through not one, not two, but three whole speeches about the importance of keeping an open mind, embracing complexity, refusing to see the world in black and white, abjuring certainty, etc, etc, etc. In other words, speech after speech after speech putting forth the defining statement of the modern liberal mindset: "who are we to judge?" So now listen up, and listen up good, because I'm only going to say this once (well, not really, I pretty much say it all the time, but I'm on a roll, don't stop me now): if there is a problem with society today (and is there ever), it certainly is not rooted in an excess of judgment.

It's late, I'm tired, and I don't want to start a rant, so I will point you instead to the perfect antidote to commencement's cultural cowardice: C.S. Lewis' "Men Without Chests." An excerpt:

The operation of The Green Book and its kind is to produce what may be called Men without Chests. It is an outrage that they should be commonly spoken of as Intellectuals. This gives them the chance to say that he who attacks them attacks Intelligence. It is not so. They are not distinguished from other men by any unusual skill in finding truth nor any virginal ardour to pursue her. Indeed it would be strange if they were: a persevering devotion to truth, a nice sense of intellectual honour, cannot be long maintained without the aid of a sentiment which Gaius and Titius could debunk as easily as any other. It is not excess of thought but defect of fertile and generous emotion that marks them out. Their heads are no bigger than the ordinary: it is the atrophy of the chest beneath that makes them seem so.

And all the time—such is the tragi-comedy of our situation—we continue to clamour for those very qualities we are rendering impossible. You can hardly open a periodical without coming across the statement that what our civilization needs is more 'drive', or dynamism, or self-sacrifice, or 'creativity'. In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.

The difference between Lewis' time and ours? We no longer even pay lip-service to valor and honor. As demonstrated by so many of the graduation speeches this week, we castrate, and sing the virtues of impotence.

"'Mister,' he said, 'when you read Shakespeare, Shakespeare's not on trial. You are.'"

I really liked that line.