Bullshit, Education, Athena, Philosophy and Dump Trucks

Howdy fans,

I’ll warn you from the start...this post follows an extremely meandering and occasionally adult path although it is largely the story of a day at work followed by a family outing. Think LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE (R-rated even though it’s about a little girl)

Yeah, I know that’s not a very well constructed sentence grammatically speaking, but it’s a fair enough, and accurate enough and inclusive enough warning. AND I believe it will increase the “hit-ability” of my tired old ‘blog.

I should also mention that while standing in line at Barnes and Noble after an evening of family entertainment, I couldn’t help but notice the cover of THE ATLANTIC Magazine boasting it’s feature article, “When Presidents Lie.” Guess whose picture was on the cover? To be fair, the teaser for the article notes that all presidents do it, then promises to explain how the current Prez is different. Seems like he oughta be able to sue for that. Then again, Clinton got impeached for lying (in a situation roughly equivalent to being pulled over for having a taillight out then being asked, under oath of course, if he’d ever touched himself) so I guess as long as The Atlantic says they all do it, having President Bush’s face on the cover next to that headline isn’t really so out of line.

Hence the “bullshit” connection. During our family night out so the daughters could spend their B&N and Starbucks gift cards and Mr. and Mrs. Horsepoup could peruse the latest self-help, kama sutra, child rearing, inner peace aisle selections, I ran across the cute little copy of Dr. H. G. Frankfurt’s ON BULLSHIT. No really. According to the book, he’s a Princeton professor emeritus of Philosophy who, apparently in a tongue and cheek stab at the old “publish or perish” requirement of his profession, published this 50+-page pocket book that spent more than a few weeks on the NYT’s best-seller list. It sets out to analyze the meaning and prevalence of BS in modern society and starts with the word’s entry in the Oxford English Dictionary (ok, a supplemental volume of the OED). There’s a follow up out now by the famous authors of the _____ & Philosophy series... I think one of their names is Reisch or something, and maybe the other’s is Ubiquitous, but I can’t be bothered to look it up right now. (It’s the dawn of the millennium, Google it yourself, dammit)

Anyway, one of the many interesting facets of bullshit that this essay notes is that bullshit (an art form proven such by the term “bullshit artist”) requires none of the constraints of a lie. It goes on to point out that a liar respects the truth to the point that he at least believes he’s telling the opposite of it whereas a bullshit artist freely gallops outside of that corral.

So that got me thinking about a meeting at work this morning wherein my team members and I participated in a “game” packaged, marketed, and billed as the facilitator of a discussion on where teaching is going and where it used to be. As we looked over the game board and began “playing” per our instructions, read verbatim by the “coach,” we discovered that the teachers who taught us (and, presumably, those who capitalize on the creation of this game and modern society’s swallowing of the bullshit that encouraged its purchase) were ignorant, self-serving egotists who knew nothing about standards, assessment, or even any sort of integrity, let alone educational psychology or any actual method of instruction.

After a few moments, I began to feel a sort of embarrassment for anyone at the table older than me. I’ve been teaching for 9 years now, but obtained my license 15 years ago. I guess I should have been ashamed of myself as well, but I really felt bad for the people in the room who had been teaching for 20, or even 30 years. According to the cards in the game, and the information printed on the board, those teachers and I were some of the most worthless people to have ever stepped into a classroom.

Based on the information in this game, the teachers of anyone reading this (and the teachers of the game’s creators!!) relied strictly on tests as measures of student achievement, dominated the classroom with their voices, taught only what they liked or felt comfortable with, adhered to NO course of study, state or local guidelines or standards, kept track of no scores, spoke with no other teachers, assigned grades purely based on who they liked or didn’t but made sure it fit a perfect bell curve, shunned ALL forms of media or technology, refused to speak to parents, taught all courses to one level not accounting for varied abilities, assumed that any student who didn’t get it just wasn’t trying hard enough and thus never varied anything that they did and basically didn’t give a rat’s behind about anything but their paychecks and their summers “off.”

As I sat there reading along with my fellow players, I began to wonder how we were capable of spelling our own names given that our teachers were so incompetent. How did Bill Gates or Steve Jobs or Dean Kamen or Alfred Nobel ever make it past their first job interview? How did America’s “Greatest Generation” feed and dress themselves, let alone become the Greatest Generation given that their teachers failed them so miserably? How did our parents survive on their own? What’s worse, back then, where were all the high performing voucher-funded private schools or charter schools to bail them out when their public education left them so high and dry? How did they ever leave high school and not murder everyone on the street without being told that evolution is just a theory?

And that’s when my thoughts turned to driving a dump truck hauling 4 tons of stone. (sorry ol’ buddy Greg, I didn’t think the loader operator would dump that much in there, but the old girl hauled the load home and dumped her!) Anyhoo, the meeting broke up, a parent who had scheduled an appointment failed to show, a bunch of us unloaded a truck full of band storage equipment, the incompetent members of my team finished up the rough draft of a new inter-disciplinary research project, and it was time for this day off from students to be over. If I didn’t get my butt and Greg’s dump truck to the quarry in 15 minutes, I wouldn’t be able to get back in time to pick up a second, and with luck, final load. So I’m cruising down a county road inhaling the rich (as in: more fuel than air) exhaust, winter rain and manure smell that fortunately overpowered the distinct smell of cat piss that somehow attached itself to this dump truck and I’m trying to figure out how I was able to wire up the lights on the front end after the harness had fallen into the fan the night I picked the truck up in order to begin hauling the stone for my mom’s driveway.

Not only that, but it’s only by the right combination of transmission manipulation, pto engagement and transfer case fidgeting that one is able to dump whatever load one is hauling. Not to mention the weight calculation for the county road bridges one must cross, the conversion from cubic yardage to tonnage in order to figure out how much stone to haul, guesstimating the angles of the dump body in relation to the house so as not to open up a hole for new window where no window was planned... sure, they’re all simple tasks in the hands of a trained professional who attended the best schools, but I’m a reject from one of the worst educational systems in the world! At least that seems to be the premise of the No Child Left Behind Act and the commercial products and public opinion it has spawned.

Having spent enough time in a classroom as a teacher to realize how good I had it as a student, even if I didn’t necessarily enjoy every moment as a student, it’s that public opinion part that really pisses me off. That and the bullshit that created it. I began questioning my desire to remain a teacher all over again as I eased the groaning truck over some railroad tracks and up to a stoplight. I daydreamed about running off with the truck to become a freelance hauler taking cash or hard goods under the table in exchange for hauling and dumping anything anybody could pay for. Cash or goods only... no questions... gas money, food and an occasional beer. How could life get any better.

When the light turned green it snapped me back to reality. As I cleared the intersection and once again had the road to myself, I remembered a question a girl had asked earlier in the week during a mythology slideshow we’d watched to introduce a reading unit on Greek Myths. After watching a couple of slides on Athena/Minerva and hearing that she was the goddess of Just and Righteous Wars, I asked students what that meant. I was afraid that some of the folks dozing off might have heard she was the goddess of just war... as in “and nothing else.” But they got it, in their own ways, giving examples like “she wouldn’t like countries who just started wars all the time for no good reason.” And that’s when one of those model, but grossly cheated students that every teacher dreams of having in class raised her hand. I couldn’t wait to call on her because she was the kind of student whose questions were the ones that lesser students were afraid to ask but that they all had. She said:

“So Athena probably wouldn’t be on our side right now over the War in Iraq?”

There it was, the hanging curveball, waiting to be LAUNCHED over the left field wall into the bright blue horizon.

A lesser me, back before I realized what an underserved student and incompetent teacher I was would have said something like, “well, since you brought it up, yeah, that’s what I’d guess too,” but now that I’d been educated in my failings, I said, “well, some people think that, others would disagree. It’s really not my place as your reading teacher to say, although you are correct in assuming that that’s the kind of question she would face.”

Because, after all, if teachers have opinions that aren’t backed by standards and data analysis and don’t increase students’ proficiency test scores (even though tests are evil) then they mustn’t ever state those opinions even if asked.

I backed the truck into the driveway to dump the last load and heard on the radio that Athena’s patron city had been bombed. As I climbed out of the truck and walked behind it to make sure the sticky tailgate had released before I raised up those 4 tons of stone (a trick I’d learned after watching a loaded dump flip onto its backside when the full bed was raised up with a latched gate – a useful connection I’d made in spite of my poor education) I wondered if the student who had asked that question heard the same story and wondered at the coincidence. Was Greece with us or against us? Could the student possibly connect this obscure and abstract lesson from reading class to a real world event?

I doubted it though. After all, her teachers were people who couldn’t do anything else, sought no standards, enforced no discipline, assigned grades arbitrarily, etc. and so on. Those teachers really need to be held accountable. Thank (whomever you thank) for No Child Left Behind and its insight about the evils of testing... and the mandatory but unfunded tests that measure its effectiveness everywhere except Texas. Again my thoughts drifted toward driving the borrowed truck off into the night. But what would Greg think? What of the unspoken contract between us that I’d return his truck when I was done with it? Surely he knew that since I was only a teacher, trained 15 years ago before accountability was federally mandated, I had no integrity. He’d get over it.

Then I remembered that my wife and I agreed to take the girls to the bookstore tonight so they could spend their book and coffee gift cards. So I ran the truck uptown to fuel it up. I came back home and parked it in the driveway, then went in to change while it cooled off a little. Once I’d checked on homework and confirmed the bookstore plans, I went back to air up the leaky tires and top off fluids. The beast had consumed a quart of oil but the coolant hadn’t dropped a bit, which by now cleared up our suspicions about that heater core. The two lazy tires only lost about 5 pounds each so I had completed my inspection and preventive maintenance in just a few minutes. I ran the truck around back and parked it under the big maple tree then went into the house to clean up. That’s when Mrs. Horsepoup called from work and confirmed the bookstore plan and said she’d be home in a half hour.

I checked with the girls and all was still a go. I finished up some soup Mom had made and was suddenly alerted to a distress call that my lower gastro-intestinal tract issued. I didn’t think much of it since the band director had repaid those of us who hauled in his new equipment with pizza and Cokes. I was used to a much healthier lunch so I figured I was just paying the price for giving in to taste buds rather than dietary conscience. What else could be expected from a student of such a failed educational system? After a visit to the WC, I was convinced I was ready to mobilize my squad to recon the bookstore, target the coffee bar, and reassemble back at base rounding out the Friday night mission with a debrief in the mission room.

Mrs. Horsepoup arrived on schedule, the troops loaded up and the mission began as planned. Once on-site, the team leader ran point to the children’s section on the second level. The escalator was cleared and all players hit their positions on cue. But just as I, the tail, took up my position in the religion and Christianity section, I became aware of just how much warmer the second floor of the target location had grown. I got another call from the lower GI tract. I was to rendezvous IMMEDIATELY at the water closet and download all recently acquired intel.

I didn’t have time to alert the other team members, but I did confirm that they were already at about 28% MC (mission complete) having scoped out the children’s section and selected a few possible samples for acquisition.

So there I was, alone, isolated from my team, facing the blank wall of my cell and the embarrassment of having publicly failed my mission. I knew the Geneva Convention required only that I provide name, rank and serial number, but I also knew that those rules didn’t apply in this situation. I would be asked for a lot more. As my defenses kicked in, pushing me further and further into self-preservation mode, I remembered Lao Tzu’s simple advice on perspective. Suddenly it occurred to me that I’d been faced with far worse odds than those that this particular moment provided. I’d been in almost the same position in any number of exotic places with even less to look forward to than what tonight’s mission promised to deliver if successful. If I could, in spite of my substandard education, somehow overcome this immediate crisis, I had a lot to live for.

I quickly focused on some basic instinctive preservation techniques bore down and cleared my mind of the day’s distractions. The next thing I knew, I was reading a passage from Dr. Frankfurt’s philosophical treatise on bullshit up on the second floor again. It was as though the interlude were just a nightmare. My daughter, D2, upon completing her mission, had circled around to offer me any needed support. I signaled to her by holding up the book I was reading. She read the title and signaled back by scrunching up her face as if to say, “you can’t say that word on the cover of a book.”

By then, the other two team members (Mrs. Horsepoup and D1) had acquired and destroyed their targets and we all made for the rendezvous point.

I cracked open a hot brew of the day while Mrs. stirred her cream and sugar. D2 and D1 argued jovially over the merits of molten chocolate bundt vs. decadent chocolate silk cheesecake. We took turns replaying each of our successful target acquisitions, exaggerating the details even though we’d all witnessed each other’s efforts. A local kid, approximately 4 years of age, was arguing with his dad in the checkout line, screaming that he wanted a book, HE WANTED A BOOK. The entire place turned in their direction. Kid’s dad must have been a teacher or some other, equally incompetent adult to have lost control like that on a mission. Either that, or he’d been educated here in the states.

Somehow, in spite of the lack of preparation our horrible educations had provided us, we made it home and rested up for the next impossible mission. So much bullshit, so few shovelers*, and so little time.

*it’s a word, see “decider”