What a stupid waste of time
Your assignment - Write 1500 words on one of the following topics:
• The pitfalls of American intervention in foreign democracies
• The difficulties facing the American school system today
• The advantages and disadvantages of purchasing locally-grown produce
On a warm April day last year, 11 year-old Rashard Cedeño Hahn Gilbert Rajonathan Okoye walked to school with a zeal reserved only for youth. He was carrying a freshly built shoebox diorama of ethnically diverse children building a community garden for a presentation he was giving in class that day. His mother had made him a special breakfast of pancakes and orange juice. He had taken a fantastic dump but it hadn’t made him late. He was skipping, like a little Swedish girl - at least that’s how I envision it. That was until an INS van pulled up alongside him on the road, grabbed him off the sidewalk, and brought him to his new school: Peruvian coke jail. But some might argue that he was the lucky one; later that day, in his history class, there was a classroom gang war, and 14 children were fatally stabbed. To death. Rashard was stabbed three months later, in his Peruvian jail cell, also to death. He said, the day before his stabbing, that he had learned more in those three months in a Peruvian jail than he learned in his five years of public education.
Every day in America, millions of children are shepherded out of the warm, caring womb of their parents’ homes and into the icy grip of our public education system, where they are mocked, beaten, shot, pushed around, stabbed, ridiculed, degraded, shot, insulted, violated, raped, shot, and brainwashed by a successive line of adults unable to achieve superior employment than that of a public school teacher. As a result of the literally - and figuratively - insane costs of this system, our government can barely afford to provide its most basic services, like keeping gambling illegal, or providing security for celebrity funerals. And to what end? America’s children are the stupidest in the world, and its schools are just as likely to turn a child into a homosexual as a scientist. I wanted to take a closer look at the problem.
The first person I talked to was Reginald Phelps, a retired schoolteacher and author of the book, “The Wilted Flower: The Failed Promise of the American Education System.” Our conversation went as follows:
Myself: What, in your mind, is the single greatest problem facing the public school system today?
Mr. Phelps: Well, the most obvious problem is that the kids aren’t learning anything, isn’t it?
Myself: They’re not. It is.
Mr. Phelps: Well, they’re learning how to sell drugs.
Myself: Well, sure.
Mr. Phelps: And they’re learning how to give each other handjobs in the lavatory.
Myself: Definitely.
Mr. Phelps: And they’re learning how to build bombs and commit arsons.
Myself: OK.
Mr. Phelps: They’re learning how to throw their bicycles at homeless people.
Myself: < Nod >
Mr. Phelps: They’re learning how to shout at their grandparents, and steal their pills.
Myself: < Grim shaking of head >
Mr. Phelps: But they’re not learning anything of value. They’re not learning Shakespeare.
Myself: How do you fix it? What can you possibly do?
< Bereft of hope, but eager to rediscover it >
Mr. Phelps: Well, you teach them Shakespeare.
“What a smug, smarmy piece of shit,” I thought, but didn’t say. I decided that the real problem with schools is the general recognition by the school-going public of their inadequacy at their primary task: to evaluate, objectively, the caliber of every child, and rank them accordingly. Everyone knows, for instance, that the kids who get the best grades are always nerdy jack-offs who use school as a way of escaping the drab, crippling reality of their pathetic daily lives. The poorest, academically, often go on to become awesome fuck-machines who bone - on the regular - all the hottest sluts. School can tell us who is the best at making chemicals, or write good, but it can’t tell you who’s going to win the lottery, or marry the guy who wrote Made of Honor. Knowing this, why would a moderately reasonable child put any effort into their schooling whatsoever? If you said out of a love of knowledge, you are gay and wrong, and precisely the sort of person who needs to, be beaten up. Sadly, however, you cannot get the beating you deserve.
That’s because it is now illegal, and has been since the 1970’s, for a student to beat upon the head or face of any other student in order to delay their ability to complete a test or other examination. In the eras of Jesus, and Ptoleme, and every other great thinker of the past, students were encouraged to bash the brains of rival students with and upon rocks in order to assert classroom superiority. In this way, not just intelligence, but raw survivability was measured, and what didn’t emerge ultimately was a nation of pussies too scared to do shit, even when it got called out like it is right now, you pussy faggot, you won’t do shit, because you’re a fucking pussy bitch.
Instead, people were raw badasses who stabbed Germans with knives attached to their guns and stopped the guns at Navarone and invented democracy and worshipped volcanoes. As a result of our communal pussification, today’s boy must stifle his inner bloodthirsty psychopath until, compressed by the insult of his peers and discouraged release through minor physical outburst, his id reaches critical mass and explodes all at once in a rain of small-caliber handgun fire and maybe one or two shotgun shells but that’s it because shotguns have a lot of kick and usually it’s just kids or impotent little computer-nerd Asians chasing the murder-dragon (a cool name invented for school-shootings by firearms corporations that specialize in guns easily stolen by children from their dads.)
Fear of these outbursts is the overwhelming concern of parents of school-aged children. It is constantly coming up on Internet message boards, Oprah, Nightline, Salon.com; “How can I make sure my child isn’t killed in a school rampage?” Or sometimes, “How can I make sure my child doesn’t commit a school rampage?” Or “Help, my child is hanging in the closet with his pants around his ankles?”
The most important lesson you can teach your child is how to identify and isolate probable school shooters. There are several publicly available rubrics for doing so, but I prefer the ease of a rhyming mnemonic: if they are creepy, weepy, or sleepy, they will probably go freaky, like freaky-out one day, and sometimes it will be funny but every once in a while they will bring a gun so it is probably best to avoid them.*
* If your child is one of these freaky-outty children, the best thing you can do for society is slowly poison them and then get lots of attention and pity from everyone and maybe even a free house from Extreme Makeover: Home Edition.
However, if avoiding one of these “freak-jobs” is not possible, there is a suite of techniques your child can employ to protect him or herself from wanton, senseless, random teenage wrath:
• Explain to the loner/misfit that while other children find them weird and scary, your child does not.
• Emphasize in conversation their relative competency in counter-terrorism scenarios as honed by hundreds of hours of relevant video game experience, providing detailed schematics of intrusion and choke points throughout their school building, as well as sniper’s nests and flanking opportunities.
• Watch that movie Elephant, and explain it to me, because I never got around to seeing it and it’s probably pretty insightful and relevant.
• Be the guy driving the getaway car.
Of course, no technique can guarantee your child’s safety - only a gun can do that. But gun or no gun, by the age of 13, 1 out of every 3 boys will have lost consciousness for over 30 seconds to an episode of unmonitored auto-erotic asphyxiation.
That’s because instead of promoting safe methods of self-stimulation, as Dr. Joycelyn Elders dared suggest they do 15 years ago, schools have focused on telling kids scary stories about monsters that hide in each other’s private parts, like germs, crabs, and babies. Now our children engage in risky and foolish masturbehavior, often trusting the advice of strangers on the internet, many of whom are Chinese hackers, who would like nothing more than to make some kid accidentally melt his dick in a microwaved melon fruit, or get it stuck in a shampoo bottle, or stick a screwdriver down his peehole. When it does come time to have sex, today’s children weep. They weep sheets of tears down their snotty, pink faces, their cheeks plump with shame. The shame caused by crippling terror, like a child has of a barking dog, or a particularly vicious kidnapper. That’s why Russians laugh at us and mock us with their foreign policy and lax attitude towards human rights. They do it because we’re afraid of vaginas. And they’re right to laugh. Because you’re all pussies, and one day your girlfriend or the girl you had a crush on in high school or your sister will be getting it from some tan, greasy, virile Russian mobster with a big, sexy gold chain, and you’ll just have to cry and be a little baby about it and find solace fucking a Ziploc bag full of spiders stuck between your mattress and your box-spring because the Internet said that was a good idea.
Oh nice, 1500 words, I’m done.
• The pitfalls of American intervention in foreign democracies
• The difficulties facing the American school system today
• The advantages and disadvantages of purchasing locally-grown produce
On a warm April day last year, 11 year-old Rashard Cedeño Hahn Gilbert Rajonathan Okoye walked to school with a zeal reserved only for youth. He was carrying a freshly built shoebox diorama of ethnically diverse children building a community garden for a presentation he was giving in class that day. His mother had made him a special breakfast of pancakes and orange juice. He had taken a fantastic dump but it hadn’t made him late. He was skipping, like a little Swedish girl - at least that’s how I envision it. That was until an INS van pulled up alongside him on the road, grabbed him off the sidewalk, and brought him to his new school: Peruvian coke jail. But some might argue that he was the lucky one; later that day, in his history class, there was a classroom gang war, and 14 children were fatally stabbed. To death. Rashard was stabbed three months later, in his Peruvian jail cell, also to death. He said, the day before his stabbing, that he had learned more in those three months in a Peruvian jail than he learned in his five years of public education.
Every day in America, millions of children are shepherded out of the warm, caring womb of their parents’ homes and into the icy grip of our public education system, where they are mocked, beaten, shot, pushed around, stabbed, ridiculed, degraded, shot, insulted, violated, raped, shot, and brainwashed by a successive line of adults unable to achieve superior employment than that of a public school teacher. As a result of the literally - and figuratively - insane costs of this system, our government can barely afford to provide its most basic services, like keeping gambling illegal, or providing security for celebrity funerals. And to what end? America’s children are the stupidest in the world, and its schools are just as likely to turn a child into a homosexual as a scientist. I wanted to take a closer look at the problem.
The first person I talked to was Reginald Phelps, a retired schoolteacher and author of the book, “The Wilted Flower: The Failed Promise of the American Education System.” Our conversation went as follows:
Myself: What, in your mind, is the single greatest problem facing the public school system today?
Mr. Phelps: Well, the most obvious problem is that the kids aren’t learning anything, isn’t it?
Myself: They’re not. It is.
Mr. Phelps: Well, they’re learning how to sell drugs.
Myself: Well, sure.
Mr. Phelps: And they’re learning how to give each other handjobs in the lavatory.
Myself: Definitely.
Mr. Phelps: And they’re learning how to build bombs and commit arsons.
Myself: OK.
Mr. Phelps: They’re learning how to throw their bicycles at homeless people.
Myself: < Nod >
Mr. Phelps: They’re learning how to shout at their grandparents, and steal their pills.
Myself: < Grim shaking of head >
Mr. Phelps: But they’re not learning anything of value. They’re not learning Shakespeare.
Myself: How do you fix it? What can you possibly do?
< Bereft of hope, but eager to rediscover it >
Mr. Phelps: Well, you teach them Shakespeare.
“What a smug, smarmy piece of shit,” I thought, but didn’t say. I decided that the real problem with schools is the general recognition by the school-going public of their inadequacy at their primary task: to evaluate, objectively, the caliber of every child, and rank them accordingly. Everyone knows, for instance, that the kids who get the best grades are always nerdy jack-offs who use school as a way of escaping the drab, crippling reality of their pathetic daily lives. The poorest, academically, often go on to become awesome fuck-machines who bone - on the regular - all the hottest sluts. School can tell us who is the best at making chemicals, or write good, but it can’t tell you who’s going to win the lottery, or marry the guy who wrote Made of Honor. Knowing this, why would a moderately reasonable child put any effort into their schooling whatsoever? If you said out of a love of knowledge, you are gay and wrong, and precisely the sort of person who needs to, be beaten up. Sadly, however, you cannot get the beating you deserve.
That’s because it is now illegal, and has been since the 1970’s, for a student to beat upon the head or face of any other student in order to delay their ability to complete a test or other examination. In the eras of Jesus, and Ptoleme, and every other great thinker of the past, students were encouraged to bash the brains of rival students with and upon rocks in order to assert classroom superiority. In this way, not just intelligence, but raw survivability was measured, and what didn’t emerge ultimately was a nation of pussies too scared to do shit, even when it got called out like it is right now, you pussy faggot, you won’t do shit, because you’re a fucking pussy bitch.
Instead, people were raw badasses who stabbed Germans with knives attached to their guns and stopped the guns at Navarone and invented democracy and worshipped volcanoes. As a result of our communal pussification, today’s boy must stifle his inner bloodthirsty psychopath until, compressed by the insult of his peers and discouraged release through minor physical outburst, his id reaches critical mass and explodes all at once in a rain of small-caliber handgun fire and maybe one or two shotgun shells but that’s it because shotguns have a lot of kick and usually it’s just kids or impotent little computer-nerd Asians chasing the murder-dragon (a cool name invented for school-shootings by firearms corporations that specialize in guns easily stolen by children from their dads.)
Fear of these outbursts is the overwhelming concern of parents of school-aged children. It is constantly coming up on Internet message boards, Oprah, Nightline, Salon.com; “How can I make sure my child isn’t killed in a school rampage?” Or sometimes, “How can I make sure my child doesn’t commit a school rampage?” Or “Help, my child is hanging in the closet with his pants around his ankles?”
The most important lesson you can teach your child is how to identify and isolate probable school shooters. There are several publicly available rubrics for doing so, but I prefer the ease of a rhyming mnemonic: if they are creepy, weepy, or sleepy, they will probably go freaky, like freaky-out one day, and sometimes it will be funny but every once in a while they will bring a gun so it is probably best to avoid them.*
* If your child is one of these freaky-outty children, the best thing you can do for society is slowly poison them and then get lots of attention and pity from everyone and maybe even a free house from Extreme Makeover: Home Edition.
However, if avoiding one of these “freak-jobs” is not possible, there is a suite of techniques your child can employ to protect him or herself from wanton, senseless, random teenage wrath:
• Explain to the loner/misfit that while other children find them weird and scary, your child does not.
• Emphasize in conversation their relative competency in counter-terrorism scenarios as honed by hundreds of hours of relevant video game experience, providing detailed schematics of intrusion and choke points throughout their school building, as well as sniper’s nests and flanking opportunities.
• Watch that movie Elephant, and explain it to me, because I never got around to seeing it and it’s probably pretty insightful and relevant.
• Be the guy driving the getaway car.
Of course, no technique can guarantee your child’s safety - only a gun can do that. But gun or no gun, by the age of 13, 1 out of every 3 boys will have lost consciousness for over 30 seconds to an episode of unmonitored auto-erotic asphyxiation.
That’s because instead of promoting safe methods of self-stimulation, as Dr. Joycelyn Elders dared suggest they do 15 years ago, schools have focused on telling kids scary stories about monsters that hide in each other’s private parts, like germs, crabs, and babies. Now our children engage in risky and foolish masturbehavior, often trusting the advice of strangers on the internet, many of whom are Chinese hackers, who would like nothing more than to make some kid accidentally melt his dick in a microwaved melon fruit, or get it stuck in a shampoo bottle, or stick a screwdriver down his peehole. When it does come time to have sex, today’s children weep. They weep sheets of tears down their snotty, pink faces, their cheeks plump with shame. The shame caused by crippling terror, like a child has of a barking dog, or a particularly vicious kidnapper. That’s why Russians laugh at us and mock us with their foreign policy and lax attitude towards human rights. They do it because we’re afraid of vaginas. And they’re right to laugh. Because you’re all pussies, and one day your girlfriend or the girl you had a crush on in high school or your sister will be getting it from some tan, greasy, virile Russian mobster with a big, sexy gold chain, and you’ll just have to cry and be a little baby about it and find solace fucking a Ziploc bag full of spiders stuck between your mattress and your box-spring because the Internet said that was a good idea.
Oh nice, 1500 words, I’m done.