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Science/Tech See other Science/Tech Articles Title: The Godding of Dullards, the Death of Math and the Fall of America’s Premier High School Justice for Box Turtles! Reparations for Potted Plants! Headline “Fairfax school board eliminates admissions test at Thomas Jefferson High School” probably America’s most demanding school for science and technology. Oh god, Oh god. Who is on the school board? Predictably education majors, the dimmest, lowest SAT-scoring dregs of the professional classes, the horror of smart students subjected to their grade-school mentalities. But not just ed majors. Probably also psychologists, sociologists, bored housewives, and liberal-artsy painfully virtuous men alight with Civic Consciousness. Oh god. TJ, the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, is a jewel in the country’s collapsing system of education, a bright light in the growing darkness. Its kids are scary smart, among the best of young minds, going on to CalTech, MIT, Harvard. This year 132 were National Merit Semi-finalists, putting them in the upper one half of one percent. Entry was, until now, by a demanding test of intelligence, though we must not so describe it as that would be racist, and manifest White Privilege, even though most of the students are Asian. Youngsters at this level need a rich academic diet to avoid boredom, to include among other things serious mathematics. Which, I will bet, not one of the earnest, uplift espousing, self-consciously good, droopy-IQed of the Board has the slightest grasp. How much is three factorial? Hint: It’s a number between five and seven. You may have five guesses. TJ was a haven for the smart. But now Fairfax County is going to drop the intelligence test—though, remember—we must never call it an intelligence test. Why drop the test? Do you even ask? It is because not enough blacks get in. The purpose of a high-end school is to admit blacks. TJ, I can say with confidence, would be happy with any number of black students if they passed the examination. It would be happy with box turtles if they passed the test. But they do not, as neither do blacks, so we must abandon the test and admit the unqualified. Free stuff. Is there nothing we will not degrade, corrupt, or discard to make minorities look good? No. Silly me, even to ask. Strange that a country once at least literate, a country for decades way and gone the world’s font of science and technology, a country that at its apogee put men on the moon and invented the modern world, should intentionally suppress the intelligence that made it what it was and reduce itself to the level of picking wild bananas and digging for roots. Yet this is happening. From the drains of society oozes a sump of envy, of resentment, of bruised incapacity, of rabble seeking revenge against those of a higher order. Chusma, morlocks, school boards, vegetables, everywhere pulling down the bright, raging against the brighter, whom they now want to destroy. An example of what is coming: From The Independent: “A university professor has claimed teaching maths perpetuates “unearned” white privilege…Titled “Building Support for Scholarly Practices in Mathematics Methods”, Ms Gutierrez argues a focus on Pythagorean theorem and pi feed into the idea that math was (sic) developed by the Greeks and Europeans…Seattle is definitely on the forefront with this,” said Robert Q. Berry III, the president of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. “What they’re doing follows the line of work we hope we can move forward as we think about the history of math and who contributes to that, and also about deepening students’ connection with identity and agency.” The faint, agonized shrilling you hear is the English language. These people write like the recently anesthetized, but never mind. Where precisely does this gushing fount of bewilderment think math was developed? Burundi? What were men such as Gauss, Galois, Cantor, Euler, Newton, Archimedes, Hardy, Hamilton, Laplace were—what? Ethiopians, no doubt. Or maybe bushmen. I cannot doubt it. There was Ramanujan, one of the greats, Indian. Further back, other Indians and Arabs who came up with our number system, zero, algebra. But it is not Indians and Arabs calling for the endumbment (I say it is a word) of American math. Counting on their toes in twilit minds, such as Ms. Gutierrez want to pull down mathematics. Those seeking to do this are now called “woke,” but “stupid” would improve clarity. We must get rid, we are told, of AP courses because the cerebrally negligible can’t understand them. Grammar is discrimination because political sensitives find it puzzling. We must ban the SATs because they make obvious what everybody knows, drop algebra requirements’ in universities because they make visible the inescapable. Math courses are are oppression in the view of education majors and other gibbering cretins. Do anything and everything to placate the malignant envy that bubbles up from septic fields of a doomed country. Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/Latest Begin Trace Mode for Comment # 5.
#1. To: Ada (#0)
My reading list for Miss Mary Riordan's World Litt course when I was a senior in 1962. This was a one semester course. No longer offered after the assassination of JFK and Miss Riordan took a job at CCSF. (She actually was a widow. And my school which was the best in the state went way downhill.) Aristotle's Poetics. Plato's dialogue The Symposium, Plato's Allegory of the Cave from the Republic Oedipus Cycle by Sophocles: Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus and Antigone. We went from there to Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. Then to Gustav Flaubert's Madame Bovary. I did a special report on the characters in Madam Bovary who were based on historical French characters. Madam Bovary as Queen Marie Antoinette and her husband the pharmacist as Emperor Louis Napoleon. The latter had the great idea to pick a fight with Prussia because it was a small country and he needed a foreign war to help cure his unpopularity at home. That was not a good idea. Herman Melville's Billy Budd. As an extra assignment I read 200 pages of Ludwig's Life of Napoleon. Then to modern plays, Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller and Mourning Becomes Electra by Eugene O'Neill and Our Town by Thornton Wilder. At the end of the semester, I turned 17 and moved into the Hunter's Point Housing Project. From there I went to City College of San Francisco on a scholarship. I was the poorest 17 year-old entering CCSF who could read and write. It was then that my brother and I worked on our plan to avoid the Vietnam war. We knew it was coming even before JFK stole the election of 1960. We were both declared to be too crazy to go to Vietnam. When I was notified by mail, I read a notice at the bottom telling me of an address in Washington where I could write and appeal their decision so I could go to Vietnam. I said to myself "I might be crazy but I am not stupid." I knew back in the 1950s that we were destined to lose that war. Communism was Jewish so all anti-Communists were anti-Semitic and deserved to die which was why we were in Korea and Vietnam - to get American soldiers killed.
Really? How many of your classmates were illiterate? ;)
I went on a bus for 90 minutes to get to a good school. Don't know what happened to the kids in the projects.
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