Stupidity (Part V)

 

I have more stupid acts to tell you about that have been committed by stupid people. We all do stupid things once in a while but generally they don’t have serious consequences. The ones I am going to tell you about had consequences that caused these dunces real problems in life.                               

 

Bad demonstration

 

There was a teacher at the Gulf Coast High School in Naples, Florida who decided that it was time to demonstrate to his students safe sex practices. He asked for two volunteers, a boy and a girl. He dimmed the lights and turned on some mood music. Apparently, he only had Christmas carols records so that was the music the kids heard during the demonstration. He gave the boy a banana to hold and gave the girl a condom and then told her to put it over the banana. Some of the kids were amused but others weren’t and neither were their parents. The school officials decided that what he did was inappropriate so they fired him.   

 

The stupidest incident about such a demonstration took place many years ago when the United Nations sent to people over to an African nation to show natives in a native village about how to put condoms over penises. Instead of placing the condoms over the penises of the men, the UN people placed then over the ends of poles which had been struck in the ground. These UN people told them that the condoms will make it possible to reduce the high birth rate in the village. They came back a year later and discovered that the birth rate was still high. They asked the chief if his people used the condoms properly. He replied that they had. He showed them a great many more poles stuck in the ground with condoms covering the top of the poles. The chief said, “We did it just like you showed us but we still had many babies born. I don’t think what you showed us really works.” He got that right.                 

Teaching taxidermy

A teacher who taught carpentry in the North Shore technical School at Middleton, Massachusetts was also a taxidermist and decided that he would add a little extra to his student’s carpentry studies. He would show his students how to prepare dead animals the way taxidermists do. He searched for a dead animal on various roads and found a dead coyote so he brought it to the class and began skinning it. Unfortunately, he got two of the students to remove the dead animal’s head and since the animal had been run over, some of its brains were oozing out of the skull and the two kids had blood and brain material on their hands. Since the coyote’s brains were too far damaged, it was impossible to test the coyote’s brain for rabies. As a result, the two students had to undergo the painful rabies shots which incidentally, are given in the bellies of rabies victims. He may be a good teacher when it comes to carpentry but he is a very bad taxidermist if he has to pick up road kill for specimens and handles the blood and brains of the dead animals with his bare hands.

The essence of decay

Ben Jennings, a teacher at the University of Wisconsin, is an artist and he decided to put up a display that is best described as gross. The so-called art display included a disemboweled raccoon and a dead crow. The smell was overwhelming and had to be taken down. It ended up behind the University’s greenhouse on a compost heap. This twerp’s explanation was that his artistic display really wasn’t disgusting or grotesque. If not, he certainly was.

Reaching for a mark that doesn’t exist

Brian Deleka, a student at the Memphis High School was a pretty smart kid but even smart kids do stupid things. As part of the curriculum, the students had to have some outside working experience so he worked for his mommy’s law firm as a paralegal. His mommy was so pleased with his work so she gave him an A+. The school told her that she could only give her son an A as that was the highest mark that the school would give it’s students. Mommy and son were not happy with the report card which listed an A for his outside work at mommy’s office so they sued the school for $25,000 and an order that the mark be upped to an A+. I think the court was about as pleased with their claim as a dog is when it wanders into a flea convention. 

If the course is too hard—sue

Twelve students who attended the Southern Methodist University Advanced Education Centre in Huston, Texas, decided to take a Microsoft computer course. They were told that it was an easy course to pass in. Well, they all failed. Guess what? They sued the University on the grounds that the administration promised them that the course was easy and it wasn’t. Let me ask you this rhetorical question. If any of those twerps were offered a job and they were told that the work would be easy to do and it wasn’t would they sue? Of course they would. If they want an easy course to attend, why don’t they attend kindergarten?

Priorities

There was a high school text book in the US that devoted six lines to George Washington but six and a half pages to the late Marilyn Monroe. Another school text book gave the students a math problem to solve. The question printed in the book said, “Will is saving his money to buy a pair of Nike running shoes that cost $68.25. H earns $3.25 a week. How many weeks will it take for his to buy the sneakers?” Who in the United States works for $3.25 a week in this current era?

School text books play an important role in schools but are some of them really suitable for students? Here are some really distressing examples of really bad errors in school text books.

Columbus set sail in 1942. (it was in 1492) Sputnik was the Soviet Union’s first intercontinental ballistic missile armed with a nuclear war head. (It was the world’s first artificial satellite) Australia is part of South and Southeast Asia. (Actually it is neither since it is a separate continent) You can’t walk or push your way through a rain forest. (Most parts of a rain forest are easy to walk through. Most of the foliage is high above the floor of the rain forests) Douglas MacArthur led the hunt for subversives. (He was a general who led the American marines and others against Japanese forces. It was  Joe McCarthy, a senator that led the hunt for subversives in the United States) The US ended the Korean War with the atomic bomb. (The Korean War ended through negotiations for peace. It was the war with Japan in which two atomic bombs were used) Napoleon`s greatest victory was at Waterloo. (Actually it was his greatest defeat. It was Lord Nelson’s greatest victory which was at Waterloo) 

How is it that so many American text books are full of inaccurate information and typos? It is because great care has not been undertaken by both the authors and their editors. One of my essays is in a grade eleven text book on English Literature. When it was published, there wasn’t an error in the published essay. Another essay of mine is required reading in a Canadian university and it has no errors or typos in it either. And a third essay of mine is in a business text book and a fourth essay of mine on law is used in a community college as a text to be read. You can be sure that I proof read my essays many times before I submitted them to the publishers and schools.

I have traveled extensively around the United States and I have met and spoken to a great many really bright Americans but alas, there are a great many Americans who are not bright at all. If you doubt that to be a fact, then consider what the results were from a Literacy Survey conducted by National Geographic in 2002.  

The percentage of Americans whose ages were between 18 and 24 who didn’t know where Afghanistan was located on a map of the world was 83%. As many as 85% couldn’t describe Israel. As many as 69% didn’t know where the United Kingdom is. As many as 65% couldn’t say where France was located. As many as 29% didn’t even know what side of the United States the Pacific Ocean is located. 50% of high school seniors said that Germany and Italy were American allies in the Second World War. 25% of students thought that the American Civil War took place in the 18^th Century. 14% thought that it was Abraham Lincoln who wrote the American Bill of Rights. 23% didn’t even know how many justices sit on the US Supreme Court.

Part of the problem is the quality of some of the teachers and also of the school systems that hire them. Only 20% of fourth graders in the US could actually write a story. Only 25% of 12^th graders could write an essay. Approximately 80 percent of New York City high school graduates can’t read well enough for entry into community college. Recent results from the standardized Fluency Test showed that in San Francisco, 99.99% of US high school seniors couldn’t pass the test.  These disturbing statistics show that American students are painfully unprepared for life after graduation.

Part of the problem is that they pass students up to the next grade when they are not ready to take on the challenges of the next grade. The reason for this is that the school systems operate on the principle that no student is to be left behind. I can appreciate the difficulty of students constantly failing in school but in order to correct this problem, the classes have to be smaller and more teachers have to be hired. Until that happens, millions of American students are going to end up uneducated and we all know that uneducated students incur the risk of getting any job and that often leads to criminality.

There's a new requirement for earning a high school diploma at one high school in Connecticut. It's not calculus or biochemistry or learning a foreign language even. It's learning the English language. The city of New London's board of education in that same state has approved a measure stating that, starting with next year's incoming freshman class; students will have to prove they can speak, read and write "American English" - and do it well - in order to earn their diploma. Apparently those are skills many high schoolers in New London lack. Only 16 percent of sophomores at New London High School scored well in English on standardized tests last year, and only 55 percent were deemed as being proficient. 30% of high school graduates never read another book for the rest of their lives. 42% of college graduates never read another book after college.

If the United States wants their students to be a bright as those in China and Japan are, then the school officials in the US had better find better ways to teach their students at least the basics which are—writing, reading and arithmetic. If not, then when you ask a high school graduate a simple question like “Where is Mexico located?” Expect to get an answer that is not unlike, “Mmm. I don’t know? Ask me a simpler question.”