Ahnten

It’s important, no?

I’m about to have another altercation with Little Bit’s teacher. She says that rounding to “the nearest half inch” means that the number should end in 1/2 (e.g. 1 1/2, 4 1/2, 8 1/2) rather than being evenly divisible by 1/2 (e.g. 1.5, 2, 4, 4.5, 9).

Huh?

The fact that this just isn’t the way math works is almost beside the point. The point is that when the error was pointed out, instead of looking critically at the test question, his teacher (I’m just assuming that this is what happened, I don’t actually know) looked at the answer key and made up a reason why it was correct even though it’s not. The point is that my child’s 3rd grade teacher isn’t Smarter Than a 5th Grader.

That’s the bad news (and I’m trying really effing hard to let it go). The good news is that it gave me my first real impetus to talk about critical thinking and why we don’t just automatically accept the things that people in authority tell us are true.

I wouldn’t have thought that was necessary, given 90% of our conversations.

Him: Mom, what those sour green things in the jar?

Me: Those are pickles.

Him: It doesn’t looks <sic> like pickles.

Him: Mom, what color the sky?

Me: It’s blue, or sometimes gray or white, depending on the weather.

Him: It doesn’t looks <sic> like blue or gray or white.

Me: Sigh…

But apparently it’s just me that he thinks is an idiot who doesn’t know the color of the sky. His teacher can do no wrong. While I was still all het up about it, my dad called and was talking to LB on speaker phone. At some point we start talking about the incredible miscarriage of math that was happening in LB’s classroom and I started going off (as I am, admittedly, wont to do) on how she was clearly looking at an answer key and making up a justification instead of actually checking to see if the answer was correct.

That’s when my (uber-conservative-Republican) father made his fatal mistake.

“Well, I know you don’t want to hear this, but that’s just how the government is. That’s why we took you out of public (OMG! govermint!) school.”

Background: From 4th grade on, I went to a very small Christian school where the teachers were hired based on their adherence to religious principles and willingness to work for minimum wage, not their academic approach or bona fides.

I’m not sure that my father (or my child, who was still listening) was ready to hear the torrent that he had unleashed. I guess I’d never told him about the humiliation I suffered in college during my American History 101 class when I realized that Joseph McCarthy was not the hero my high school had portrayed him to be. Or the time in Organic Chemistry 201 when I pronounced anion (the way I, and my high school teachers said it, it rhymes with onion) instead of an-I-on. The fact is that I made it through high school in spite of my education and then went on to college where I learned that Oral Roberts is not the best university in the world (I didn’t go there but I was encouraged to).

I’m not bitter about any of this at all. Where’s that sarcasm font when you need it?

But that’s not the point either.

One of the things that Pops mentioned in talking to LB is that math is either black or white, right or wrong. Lots of other school subjects are open to interpretation. This isn’t one of those.

After I’d regained my rightful blood pressure re: my own education, I started talking about this concept with LB. I made it about one of the recent historical figures we’d discussed: MLK.

Me: If somebody told you that everything Martin Luther King did was right and good what would you say?

LB: Yes, that’s right.

Me: But is anyone perfect? Is what anyone does completely right?

LB: Um, yes?

Me: Well, not really, there isn’t anyone who is perfect. Even though we agree with a lot of the things he said, that doesn’t mean that everything he said or did was the right thing to do.

Me: So is it black or white or gray? (prodding for the ‘right’ response from him and trying to demonstrate that no one is all good or all bad)

Him: Brown

ACCKKKKKK! That answer made me realize that when we are talking about racial issues, I use the terms black and white, since those are the terms that most of America uses when it comes to race/racism. When we are talking about actual skin color, I tend to say beige and brown as simple descriptors. But now I’m stuck. I’ve already gone down the path of black=bad, white=good (in my question of Black/White/Gray). And I couldn’t extricate myself from it. And I really have no idea whether I should have or not. After all, that’s the metaphor that’s used in common parlance. To pretend that it isn’t is to leave him without a good understanding of how English is typically used.

So I continued down the path that informs us that there is precious little black and white but much more (especially much more than is comfortable) gray out there in the world.

And I’m pretty sure that Little Bit didn’t make that connection, and that I’m blowing this out of proportion (again, as I am wont to do), but the fact remains that education is important.

And this shit is hard.