TC the Terrible

Turns out that Crainial Rectalitis is the number one killer of hope and motivation in the United States today. The average person can have the disease for years and never know it. More severe cases look something like this:

If Johnny can’t read don’t you think somebody should have figured it out long before high school? No need to get me fired up about how shitty public schools have become in America over the last fifty years. Lord knows that I get on that rant often enough at home.

FDSM is a rising junior and struggles with where nations are on a globe. I’m not talking about all the splinter nations that came out of the Soviet Union’s break up. I’m talking about big, established nations like France and Germany. It was painfull as hell listening to her and THE LOSER reading Trivial Pursuit cards the other night.

SDSM was in tears last year because she had to write a paragraph with a topic sentence and do an outline. She was in the fifth grade at the time. Hell, my fifth grade class was all over doing outlines back in the day. And that was in Arkan-fucking-sas! We were 50^th in the nation in education and could do that shit. My kid struggled with it because the fuck wads in Tennessee thought that outlines were something for junior high kids to learn.

Thank God THE BOY is starting off in a better school system. He’s been sent to a summer reading program this year because he can only ‘sort of’ read going into the first grade. At least there is hope for him.

Sure kids today get more stuff in school than I had to contend with. All the computer graphics classes and cultural awareness crap must be really important for them, because the school system is force feeding those classes 24/7 to the kids.

The nations around the world, like India and Korea, that are turning out the really smart kids are the same nations that are focused on the basics. Teaching kids to read, write, and do math is the basis for everything else.

Maybe as parents we need to quit yelling about the schools and starting forcing our kids to turn off the TV and disconnect from the Internet. That would at least be a good place to start.