Discussion Groups / English Usage / October 2007

Also explain follow points

Did Flitwick have a very tiny wife somewhere?
How come there are no female centaurs?

Where did all the teachers go when school wasn't in session?

It is interesting to think about.

For the uninitiated, centaurs are 1/2 human, 1/2 horse who usually get
to have sex with girls from magical school! Although Harry was
"riding" one of them!

She admits that Dumbledore is gay "She replied: "My truthful answer to
you is that I have always thought of Dumbledore as gay.""

Now, re-read Harry Potter Book #7, 5, 3. Infact, Voldemort was a
decent guy until some Dumbledore raped his a.s, turning him into the
vicious dark lord. Go back and re-read and then tell us what "really"
went on in "the chamber of secrets?

the Omrud filted:

The Radio Times is confused...George Takei is gay, and this has been public
knowledge for over a year now...Hikaru Sulu, presumably, is (or was or will be)
heterosexual; at least he fathered a daughter who appeared in "Star Trek:
Generations"....

For another distinction between actor and character, see:

http://groups.google.com/group/alt.folklore.urban/msg/6a8d0dfee558da9a?dmode=source

....r

What I am about to say most of your are not going to believe me. I
have never watch any of the Star Trek episode. In fact  I have never
watch a TV or even a Movies. My parents raised me, my brothers, and a
sister with no TV. Parents like mine are member of turnoff tv society.
Even today I don't have a TV. My girl friend is pretty cool about
that.

Here is why;

American kids, dumber than dirt
Warning: The next generation might just be the biggest pile of idiots
in U.S. history

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist

Wednesday, October 24, 2007

I have this ongoing discussion with a longtime reader who also just so
happens to be a longtime Oakland high school teacher, a wonderful guy
who's seen generations of teens come and generations go and who has a
delightful poetic sensibility and quirky outlook on his life and his
family and his beloved teaching career.

And he often writes to me in response to something I might've written
about the youth of today, anything where I comment on the various
nefarious factors shaping their minds and their perspectives and
whether or not, say, EMFs and junk food and cell phones are melting
their brains and what can be done and just how bad it might all be.

His response: It is not bad at all. It's absolutely horrifying.

My friend often summarizes for me what he sees, firsthand, every day
and every month, year in and year out, in his classroom. He speaks not
merely of the sad decline in overall intellectual acumen among
students over the years, not merely of the astonishing spread of lazy
slackerhood, or the fact that cell phones and iPods and excess TV
exposure are, absolutely and without reservation, short-circuiting the
minds of the upcoming generations. Of this, he says, there is zero
doubt.

Nor does he speak merely of the notion that kids these days are
overprotected and wussified and don't spend enough time outdoors and
don't get any real exercise and therefore can't, say, identify basic
plants, or handle a tool, or build, well, anything at all. Again,
these things are a given. Widely reported, tragically ignored, nothing
new.

No, my friend takes it all a full step - or rather, leap - further. It
is not merely a sad slide. It is not just a general dumbing down. It
is far uglier than that.

We are, as far as urban public education is concerned, essentially at
rock bottom. We are now at a point where we are essentially churning
out ignorant teens who are becoming ignorant adults and society as a
whole will pay dearly, very soon, and if you think the hordes of
easily terrified, mindless fundamentalist evangelical Christian
lemmings have been bad for the soul of this country, just wait.

It's gotten so bad that, as my friend nears retirement, he says he is
very seriously considering moving out of the country so as to escape
what he sees will be the surefire collapse of functioning American
society in the next handful of years due to the absolutely irrefutable
destruction, the shocking - and nearly hopeless - dumb-ification of
the American brain. It is just that bad.

Now, you may think he's merely a curmudgeon, a tired old teacher who
stopped caring long ago. Not true. Teaching is his life. He says he
loves his students, loves education and learning and watching young
minds awaken. Problem is, he is seeing much less of it. It's a bit
like the melting of the polar ice caps. Sure, there's been alarmist
data about it for years, but until you see it for yourself, the deep
visceral dread doesn't really hit home.

He cites studies, reports, hard data, from the appalling effects of
television on child brain development (i.e.; any TV exposure before 6
years old and your kid's basic cognitive wiring and spatial
perceptions are pretty much scrambled for life), to the fact that,
because of all the insidious mandatory testing teachers are now forced
to incorporate into the curriculum, of the 182 school days in a year,
there are 110 when such testing is going on somewhere at Oakland High.
As one of his colleagues put it, "It's like weighing a calf twice a
day, but never feeding it."

But most of all, he simply observes his students, year to year, noting
all the obvious evidence of teens' decreasing abilities when
confronted with even the most basic intellectual tasks, from
understanding simple history to working through moderately complex
ideas to even (in a couple recent examples that particularly
distressed him) being able to define the words "agriculture," or even
"democracy." Not a single student could do it.

It gets worse. My friend cites the fact that, of the 6,000 high school
students he estimates he's taught over the span of his career, only a
small fraction now make it to his grade with a functioning
understanding of written English. They do not know how to form a
sentence. They cannot write an intelligible paragraph. Recently, after
giving an assignment that required drawing lines, he realized that not
a single student actually knew how to use a ruler.

It is, in short, nothing less than a tidal wave of dumb, with once-
passionate, increasingly exasperated teachers like my friend nearly
powerless to stop it. The worst part: It's not the kids' fault.
They're merely the victims of a horribly failed educational system.

Then our discussion often turns to the meat of it, the bigger picture,
the ugly and unavoidable truism about the lack of need among the
government and the power elite in this nation to create a truly
effective educational system, one that actually generates intelligent,
thoughtful, articulate citizens.

Hell, why should they? After all, the dumber the populace, the easier
it is to rule and control and launch unwinnable wars and pass laws
telling them that sex is bad and TV is good and God knows all, so just
pipe down and eat your Taco Bell Double-Supremo Burrito and be glad we
don't arrest you for posting dirty pictures on your cute little blog.

This is about when I try to offer counterevidence, a bit of optimism.
For one thing, I've argued generational relativity in this space
before, suggesting maybe kids are no scarier or dumber or more
dangerous than they've ever been, and that maybe some of the problem
is merely the same old awkward generation gap, with every current
generation absolutely convinced the subsequent one is terrifically
stupid and malicious and will be the end of society as a whole. Just
the way it always seems.

I also point out how, despite all the evidence of total public-
education meltdown, I keep being surprised, keep hearing from/about
teens and youth movements and actions that impress the hell out of me.
Damn kids made the Internet what it is today, fer chrissakes.
Revolutionized media. Broke all the rules. Still are.

Hell, some of the best designers, writers, artists, poets, chefs, and
so on that I meet are in their early to mid-20s. And the nation's top
universities are still managing, despite a factory-churning mentality,
to crank out young minds of astonishing ability and acumen. How did
these kids do it? How did they escape the horrible public school
system? How did they avoid the great dumbing down of America? Did they
never see a TV show until they hit puberty? Were they all born and
raised elsewhere, in India and Asia and Russia? Did they all go to
Waldorf or Montessori and eat whole-grain breads and play with
firecrackers and take long walks in wild nature? Are these kids
flukes? Exceptions? Just lucky?

My friend would say, well, yes, that's precisely what most of them
are. Lucky, wealthy, foreign-born, private-schooled ... and
increasingly rare. Most affluent parents in America - and many more
who aren't - now put their kids in private schools from day one, and
the smart ones give their kids no TV and minimal junk food and no
video games. (Of course, this in no way guarantees a smart, attuned
kid, but compared to the odds of success in the public school system,
it sure seems to help). This covers about, what, 3 percent of the
populace?

As for the rest, well, the dystopian evidence seems overwhelming
indeed, to the point where it might be no stretch at all to say the
biggest threat facing America is perhaps not global warming, not
perpetual warmongering, not garbage food or low-level radiation or way
too much Lindsay Lohan, but a populace far too ignorant to know how to
properly manage any of it, much less change it all for the better.

What, too fatalistic? Don't worry. Soon enough, no one will know what
the word even means.

Thoughts about this column? E-mail Mark.
Mark Morford

Mark Morford's Notes & Errata column appears every Wednesday and
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