It’s About Making Babies!

Dilbert’s Blog

I enjoy reading Scott Adam’s Dilbert Blog. Really. Sometimes Scott takes an outrageous position, that he doesn’t hold true, for discussion’s sake. Other times he argues that there is no such thing as free will.

Today Scott feels that the reports of the US lagging in student math and science education is either because we suck at teaching these subjects, or that students are so smart they realize they don’t need this nonsense.

Which, I guess, means that the reason that students in other countries score better in math and science, is because they are stupid… Umm.

My answer to Scott.

The lack of math rating is due to a relative disability in concentration, disability in visualization, and mental laziness.

The mental laziness comes from from well-to-do kids that have relatively simple problems to solve all their lives. Focus of the Liberal government on validation, ‘no child left behind’ and worrying about kid’s emotional states instead of letting them fail and be held back *cripples* their ability and motivation to avoid failure. For less well-to-do students, we leave too many in such unsafe environments they expend their energies merely surviving. This isn’t mental laziness, of course, but mental exhaustion – and usually lack of excellent teachers and the best school administrators.

Lack of visualization comes from the glitzy advertising and electronic entertainment. The old verbal traditions of story telling and oral history stimulated many areas of the brain – that watching someone else animate the topic stuns.

Adding commercials in the middle of early programs, when the actor picked up the product and repeated the spiel, as a distraction, More severe distraction was the advent of separate advertising. Today we have the SuperBowl phenomenon – many people interested in the half-time ads don’t care about the game. Breaking up programs with intentionally distracting ads intended to express the advertiser’s message in a memorable form, destroys the ability to build a story in our minds from beginning to end. Thus the current fascination with glitzy scenes and special effects, and relatively little interest in whether the story of the movie rings true, or accomplishes anything.

There is a bias, true, to enjoy well-told stories. But part of the angst is that many movies don’t tell a good story, or don’t tell it well.

We have parents that fritter away time sharing family history, personal values, and exploring feelings and character – by talking on the cell phone. During the limited time they have to actually occupy a room with their kids.

This isn’t new. I grew up in the 1960′s, and recall immense frustration and anger at having favored TV programs, or radio programs, or even a record play, interrupted.

Yet unless you work with your kids – engage in activities they have to learn, to excel at, to perform time after time – you won’t accomplish some of the things parents are required to do. Failure to teach your kid discipline, for example has been held to be felony child abuse in federal court.

Hard work builds character. We know this – no one enjoys the process, but we do know it. Yet we continually deprive our kids of the chance to work hard – next to their parents.

A recent study claimed that people that do work that consists mostly of thinking – accounting, science, math, computers – experience more unsatisfied hungers – they are more prone to overeating than those that work with their hands. Hint, hint – we have an overeating problem with kids in the US. Dating from when, the Nintendo? Late 1980′s? Before that we had arcades, TV in the home, and more ‘activities’ for kids and adults besides pitching horseshoes, stealing watermelons, and skinny dipping at the creek.

And perhaps these electric and electronic entertainments have been stimulating us to think hard – on frivolous stuff. Talk about trigonometry not helping many citizens vote with insight, what about mastering Might & Magic III (the best of the bunch) or rescuing Princess Zelda? Lots of glitz to distract you from visualizing.

I would like a study that tracks math and science scores for kids that read at least the first four Harry Potter books (they got pretty stale by the sixth one). Or students that read Lord of the Rings, *and* The Hobbit.

Adding music education to education requirements could possibly swing the math trend around. Chorus and instrument practice and performance can do wonders for overcoming electronic dissonance. As long as you leave in the longer pieces and many of the proven classics. This subject is intended to train the brain to function over smooth transitions – many rap pieces would just perpetuate the damage of Nintendo.

Possibly more important than keeping drugs and tobacco and firearms out of school, may be keeping casual electronics out.

And telling stories longer than, “Why did the chicken cross the road?” (“To get to the other side.” It doesn’t matter that it is a chicken. Silly.)