No, slaves and beatings are not appropriate subjects for word problems

What reasonable human being would think that writing about the amount of fruit slaves could pick or beatings they endured would be a reasonable subject for third grade math problems? How did this seem like a good idea?

Not enough facepalm in the world

Sometimes working with teenagers makes me want to weep for humanity, and then drown almost every highschooler in the river of my tears. How does one reach senior year of high school without knowing how to look for something in the index of a book? Is this a generational thing? Because Gruber would not have allowed these sorts of shenanigans to take place. At all.

I’m never going to be able to move and/or have children

I really love living in the New York metro area, but it’s so expensive here. I have lived in much cheaper places and loved it (Montreal, how I miss thee!), but this is always going to be my home. I would love to be able to live somewhere else for a while, not only to give my wallet a bit of a break, but also because I like to experience new people and places. The South seems like a worthwhile region to consider, since it’s cheap and I have a lot of relatives there, but it’s stories like this one that make me believe that maybe I’m better off staying here and paying the Northeast Premium.

Why would a middle school arrange the student elections so that only students of certain races can hold office? What student government positions are available to those children who are neither white nor black? How could anybody think that this would be okay? This is why people still find it okay to make jokes about Mississippi.

As somebody on Gawker pointed out, it’s good to see that the school practices what it preaches (scroll down)…

Yay for Sportsmanship!

Awwww. Maybe it’s an excess of girly hormones or something, but this article definitely made me cry. Not mist, not tear up; just flat out cry. What’s not to love about a well-to-do softball team being willing to forfeit so that they could help a disadvantaged team who’d never play learn the game? Awesomely, every adult featured in the article sounds sane, which isn’t always the case with high school sports. I salute the parenting and teaching skills of the adults in all of these kids’ lives, because they seem to be great people, too.

Jeez

Things I do not understand:

How could this kid have scammed so many prestigious universities and organizations? Why is it that only the Rhodes Scholarship people figured out what a bunch of BS all this was? And why did he keep doing it even after he got caught? (via Metafilter)

Also, if we ever perfect time machines, an early-20s Jake Gyllenhaal would have to be my first choice to play Young Mr. Wheeler.

Cute!

I love everything about this picture and the article that goes with it. Listening to little kids talk amongst themselves is one of the things I love the most; they’re hilarious, and make a surprising amount of sense when they’re being serious.

Please help keep me in books and yarn* – Permanent for now

I know that this isn’t about me at all, but I feel that a little selfishness is allowed, as I will be directly affected if Governor Christie’s proposed budget is passed. As it stands, this budget would cut 74% of New Jersey library funding. By any accounting, that is an insane amount of money, even though the $10 million in library programs cut from the Governor’s budget represents little more than $1 per person in state funds.

What you can do:

• Become a NJ library champion
• Become a BCCLS (Bergen County) library champion
• Contact your legislators online (scroll down)
• Send a letter to your legislators Related: Find out who your legislators are
• Who doesn’t like a good rally? Join the May 6 rally for libraries in sexy Trenton, NJ
• Join the “Save New Jersey Libraries” Facebook Group. This is one of the most visible and least useful ways to support something, so make sure you do at least one or two of the other things, as well.

* Those are my vices, although I will admit that they’re not nearly as exciting as hookers and blow.

I’m old

I’m turning 29 this year, and I feel really old. Not necessarily in a bad way, but it seems amazing to me how fast my 20s went. I feel like my 29 years have gone so fast, and am beginning to understand what genuinely old people (those in their 40s, say) mean when they talk about life going by quickly.

This weekend, I went to Connecticut for my aunt’s 70th birthday party. It was a (gentle) roast, and my cousin, the MC, decided to put the passage of 70 years in perspective. We found a web site that helped us, and she started off her speech to my aunt with the following facts:

What Things Cost in 1940:
Car: $800
Gasoline: 18 cents/gal
House: $6,550
Bread: 8 cents/loaf
Milk: 34 cents/gal
Postage Stamp: 3 cents
Stock Market: 131
Average Annual Salary: $1,900
Minimum Wage: 30 cents per hour

Everybody laughed at the huge difference in price between then and now, and it made think of the changes I’ve seen in many things, just in my own lifetime. A postage stamp cost $.18 when I was born, and I remember watching televised reports of people’s outrage when it went up to $.29 (I just checked, and that happened when I was 9). My undergraduate college now costs about %55 more (!!) per year for tuition, room, and board than it did when I was a student there. I doubt that it’s 55% more awesome than it used to be, but that’s neither here nor there. I remember a forward that the new students sent to each other about knowing that you were a child of the 80s if… It pointed out the differences between the world in which we lived and the one into which we’d been born, and mocked 90s babies for all that they’d missed (I still take this stance, by the way; the 80s > the 90s).

But then I read this piece, and it shocked me. Of course, most American kids today have never used a physical card catalog, unless they’re from a very small library system. That makes sense, but it seems odd that kids today have never experienced something that I enjoyed so much when I was younger. For me, the physical card catalog was interesting because of the “See also” and “See instead” references. I liked it when I thought the way the cataloger had and found what I wanted the the first time. I also liked when I had to look unexpected to find what I wanted. Either way, it was like participating in a scavenger hunt that I always won. Now, people who know what they’re looking for can do the same with an online catalog, search engine, or database in a fraction of the time. The results are the same, although the process is now disappointingly straightforward.

I’m used to people thinking that Google is magically going to spit out the answer to every question they have, and thinking that the Internet is broken if all is not revealed by the first link, but I sometimes forget that there was a time when people regularly had to do more to get information.

Facts change

If you’re in school these days, you learn that there are five oceans and eight planets. When I was in school, back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, there were four oceans and nine planets. Hello, Southern Ocean. See ya, Pluto. This must be why people have such trouble helping their children with their homework.

Ya think??

“We tend to believe Zhang’s death was caused primarily by unknown health problems. But there’s still a possibility that the freezing contributed to his death.“

Wow. To call this sentence an understatement would be doing a disservice to all the mere understatements people have uttered throughout recorded history. I mean, it doesn’t even assume as much responsibility as that classic, passive-voiced cop-out, “Mistakes were made.”

Also, happy Monday!