Evil Origins: A Horror & Dark Fantasy Collection (103 page)

The
real problem with calculators, I think, is that many Americans view mathematics
as something painful that youngsters must study because it’s good for them. If
Mom and Dad spent countless hours doing long division problems, then, by God,
Jason and Kimberly can, too. Such attitudes explain why our students perform so
miserably. They have been led to view math moralistically rather than as a
liberating tool for understanding the world. Mathematics is seen as a test not
only of brains but of character, of whether someone has the grit to calculate
problems day after day, year after year. No wonder people hate it.

Technology is not a panacea, as many school systems
have learned with computer-based learning materials and other repeated
innovations. Dedicated teachers and sound pedagogy remain essential. Yet, used
appropriately, calculators can make the job easier, and we should not fear them.
They give students what their parents lacked: time and freedom to become better
problem-solvers and to discover the beauty of mathematics.

Almost twenty
years later, the focal point of the argument has shifted to the use of mobile
computing in the classroom. Opponents of calculators now have bigger fish to
fry.

Many
parents and educators want to make kids suffer. They feel that children must
run a kind of intellectual gauntlet that builds a resilient adult. While
children should be exposed to the real world, they should not be intentionally
forced to take the harder path for the sake of it. The rise in the use of
laptops, tablet PCs, and mobile computing have brought this fundamental
discussion of technology in schools to a new level. The hypocrisy of the
argument makes it difficult for kids to accept. They see adults using
technology to make things easier, more efficient, and yet those same adults
withhold those tools from them. This is very apparent in the teaching of
writing.

***

On a cool
afternoon in October of 1990, I sat down at the dining room table with a yellow
legal pad in hand.

“The French
Revolution, the French Revolution,” I sighed while rubbing my chin and staring
at the dusty ceiling fan spinning over my head.

Nothing.

The only
thoughts that invaded my head were those of joining the “crew” at the park and
hoping I could make it down there before they packed up the sticks and hockey
nets for the day.

The class was a
fucking bore, and so was the professor. Trying to come up with a paper topic
about the French Revolution was as much fun as getting your head chopped off
and eating your cake too (a rare reference mixture of Marie Antoinette’s famous
line about having your cake and eating it. You know, because she lost her head
during the French Revolution? Never mind). New to college and not yet
proficient with a keyboard, my twenty-year-old self thought he was going to
knock out a first draft with chicken scratch on the lined paper.

I hated writing,
and it made my hand hurt. I knew the paper would end up being 50 percent of my
grade for the class, and yet I still could not motivate myself. I think I
scribbled a bunch of bullshit on the paper and paid my mom to type it while
slinging my skates over a shoulder on the way to the pick-up game.

Needless to say,
I stood in line at the registrar’s office the next week with the realization
that an F on the mid-term paper meant that I would need to get an A on the
final just to get a C for the course. Fuck that. My parents were not as
flippant about losing the hundreds of dollars I tossed when dropping the
course, but it did not matter to me at the time.

The daunting
part of writing a paper as a college freshman in 1990 was that the computer was
not as accessible or as easy to use as it is today. You had to tolerate white
text on a black background and know all kinds of keyboard shortcuts to do
mundane things like set a margin. In addition, I had to find a computer lab on
campus to type it. Looking at the proliferation of people hammering on keyboards
in coffee shops today makes me want to shake them and ask an important
question.

“Do you know how
good you have it? Do you? When I was a kid, blah, blah, blah.”

And then I stop
myself because the next statement goes something like this:

“How are kids today
gonna learn how to do X without the blood, sweat, and tears of Y?”

People resent it
when others reach the same goal without struggle or effort. We want kids today
to suffer through the same crap we did because otherwise we feel cheated.

“Why should it
be so much easier for them when I had to suffer through that?” we ask.

Many educators
inherently feel that the technology makes writing “too easy” and for kids to
learn how to do it right, they must suffer. For instance, some teachers believe
a first draft must be handwritten because typing does not employ the same
creative energies. They believe that the brain is wired to respond to the
handwritten text and that typing does not work as well. Not only is this
foolish but it’s sadomasochistic as well.

When is the last
time you manually set margins on a Word document? Never. Even though I was
taught how to do this in typing class (best class ever, and I’m not joking. Hot
chicks and fast fingers, oh yeah) as a junior in high school, the skill is all
but useless today. Once, I had a disagreement with a colleague who insisted his
students manually create a bibliography page for a research project. The
students had to know the indentation rules, punctuation, and more. When I asked
why, he said that they “had to know how to do it.” I remember tilting my head
like a dog smelling a good fart.

“Because?”

“Because they
do,” he replied.

“But what about
EasyBib, or NoodleTools, or the references” tab in Microsoft Word? Are you telling me
they’ll someday do a research paper without a computer or Internet access? Are
they going back in time to write?”

“It’s a skill
they need,” was the best he could come up with.

If you go to
EasyBib and type in the ISBN number of any book, it will automatically populate
the information for your source. When you are done entering all of your
sources, EasyBib will produce your works cited page with one click. Microsoft
Word incorporated a similar concept in Office 2010 that integrates into your
document. Sweet.

Why in the hell
do you still need to know how many spaces to indent the second line of an
entry? The APA style changes so frequently that even they cannot keep up with
the specifics.

***

The technology
debate is nothing new. Socrates thought books would ruin learning. Math purists
in the ‘70s thought calculators would destroy a child’s ability to understand
concepts. Neither happened.

Part of the
reason the Luddites continue to question the role of technology in education is
based on their own reluctance to understand how it works. There could be a
biological explanation for it as well. Maybe our own self-preservation is
threatened by the next generation, which usually learns how to do things better
and faster than we did. Maybe we are jealous of those little shits and how fast
they learn how to use machines that we are still afraid of “crashing.”

Teachers who
fear technology the most are the ones who don’t know how to use it, or see it
as “cheating” the child out of necessary life lessons. Learning how to lose is
an important, hard lesson in life. Learning when to use a semi-colon on a
bibliographic entry for a Chicago-style works cited page is not.

Live Like a Convict

There
are two things that make me want to put a bullet in the head (Rage Against the
Machine style, for those of you who remember 1992) of many of my fellow
educators. Hypocrisy and lack of conviction are threatening the future of
education.

***

I recently ran
sound (it means I’m the weird-looking guy in the corner who says “check” into
the microphones before the band begins) for a group of Iranian nationalists who
celebrate the Persian New Year on the first day of spring. Old grandmothers,
disenchanted teenagers, toddlers, and an occasional MMILF (Muslim MILF) show up
to eat, dance, and celebrate, much like a garden-variety wedding reception. The
Persians are Muslim, and yet they have an open bar and curse openly. None of
the women cover their heads, let alone their entire bodies (which is good for
me, as I have a lot of time to watch the hot chicks practice their
belly-dancing moves). Islamic custom strictly dictates that women should be
covered and that the consumption of alcohol is forbidden. Take that,
Christians. You ain’t the only ones cornering the market on hypocrisy.

However, the
Christians have become Jedi Masters of hypocrisy with an efficiency and
self-delusion that makes me weep.

Because I was
raised Catholic I know their jig, and I am fully qualified to bust it open. I
was baptized, took my first communion, made my confirmation, served as an altar
boy, and played “church” in our basement with my brother. I did everything for
our parish except let a priest diddle me (although I can’t vouch for others.
Seems like the men of the cloth in the Catholic faith take a liking to boy
penis). There are hardcore Catholics who would stab a Jew if the Pope told them
to do it, and I admire that. The Crazy Christians drink the Kool-Aid and they
live it. Some may think their beliefs are arcane, outdated, and medieval, but
they do not care. They are not hypocrites. In the same manner, I have respect
for Islamic warriors of the Jihad. Anyone dedicated enough to blow himself up
for God does not lack conviction. Don’t do it half-assed. If you believe God
hates gays, then be a homophobe. In my book, that’s more admirable than
hypocrisy.

Most of my
interactions are with moderate Catholics. This segment is much more dangerous
than the Jesus Freaks, but they lack the guts to jump in with both feet. They
like their religion
à la carte
.

“I’ll take a
little bit of Sunday mass, a slice of confession, and about a third of the
homily.”

The hypocrisy
rears its ugly head when it comes to abortion. If you are Christian, especially
Catholic, you are ordained by God to blow up clinics and murder doctors
performing the procedure. The Catholic CEO, the Pope, has confirmed the evil
indoctrination of abortion. However, many Catholics put conditions on their
faith.

“I’m against
abortion if the woman is raped or in case of incest.”

Hold the phone,
Mother Mary. The leaders of
your
church have unequivocally stated that
abortion is wrong and you will burn in hell for it. How can you modify God’s
word as delivered through the Holy Pontiff?

Imagine that for
a second there is a gay Pope. Floyd lives somewhere in the Napa Valley and is
the recognized, legitimate leader of the gays. He represents them and sets the
policies for what it means to be gay. He blessed the rainbow flag and rides the
last float in all of the Gay Pride parades. Now imagine that you are a straight
man who has never had gay sex, and you say something like this:

“I’m totally
gay, except I don’t do the cock-sucking thing and I don’t take it up the ass.
Other than that, I’m gay and support the gay lifestyle.”

Or imagine for a
second that you are an addict. You have hit rock bottom and have been attending
Narcotics Anonymous meetings for years. At one point during a meeting, you say
something like this:

“It feels so
good to be sober. Getting off the crack cocaine and only doing prescription
meds has made me proud to be sober. Other than the prescription meds, Jack
Daniels, and an occasional beer, I’m completely sober.”

The hypocrisy of
these two situations is laughable, and yet moderate Catholics do this kind of
thing all the time. They pick and choose what tenets of the faith to follow
even though the institution they belong to dictates the canon.

Thanks to
religion, our world has made hypocrisy acceptable. In the spring of 2010, the
Catholic Church was rocked with yet another child-molestation scandal in
Germany. Over three hundred accusations have been filed in over half of all
German dioceses. Half, motherfucker. We are not talking about a disturbed,
rogue priest. Half! In addition, His Holiness was an archbishop of a German
diocese at the time, and some believe he intentionally covered it up. Catholics
and the rest of the world shake their head and move about their days as if this
is all an unfortunate natural disaster, like an inevitable hurricane best dealt
with by cleaning up the aftermath.

Imagine this
kind of scandal breaking within any other organization. People would be rioting
in the streets. In the 1990s the media made a big stink out of the Boy Scouts
of America’s stance on gay men leading troops. What if half of all troop
leaders in the United States had accusations of child molestation leveled
against them? The Boy Scouts would be ruined faster than a Van Halen reunion
tour.